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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29585 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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The fundamental premise in Idiocracy is not going against the grain of lib/left/progressives directly since it doesn't note race or group differences. It's the typical sort of 'dirtbag left bernie bro' nihilism: 'The world is getting dumber bro'. You're just expected to not think about it too hard or derive any logical conclusions from it. But I agree that if you do that, you do end up with some problematic conclusions.

As for Team America, if I remember correctly the message of the movie was the typical centrist libertarianism from Matt and Trey. Where they don't have much to say other than pointing out the political dialectic in the US and celebrating it. As in, there are good jews on both sides. So lets laugh together as we destroy a common enemy in the middle east.

As in, there are good jews on both sides. So lets laugh together as we destroy a common enemy in the middle east.

But... the big enemy in Team America was North Korea, and did they even mention Jews at any part of the movie?

I'd say that Team America was, in the end, a right-wing movie about how Bush Did Nothing Wrong (sure, some right-wingers have created a mostly after-the-fact narrative about how Bush wasn't really a right-winger and War in Iraq was a liberal war or something - that's certainly not how it appeared at the time, with almost the entire American right in lockstep with the administration, or so it certainly seemed on Internet forums). Team America's carnage at the start of the movie was portrayed mostly as comedic (ha-ha, look at the French getting their just desserts for not going along in Bush's grand adventure!), the mocked actual celebrities were liberals who were literally and repeatedly called fags, and the most memorable actual statement was the "Pussies, dicks and assholes" speech about how you sometimes just have to be an asshole to stop the bad guys.

speech about how you sometimes just have to be an asshole to stop the bad guys.

Close, but it was actually about how pussies needs dicks to fuck assholes or else asshole will shit all over the pussies.

Yes, I didn't bother googling the exact formulation of the pussies/dicks/assholes speech. However, the general interpretation of the message was as I described.

The big enemy is a North Korean piñata. If you hit it enough times with a stick a bunch of justifications for the war on terror fall out.

sure, some right-wingers have created a mostly after-the-fact narrative about how Bush wasn't really a right-winger and War in Iraq was a liberal war or something - that's certainly not how it appeared at the time, with almost the entire American right in lockstep with the administration, or so it certainly seemed on Internet forums

Sure, but they're not entirely wrong either. Left wingers did go on to endorse practically everything they protested about Bush, from foreign wars to mass surveillance. People opposed to it are basically extinct.

The thing about Idiocracy is that almost everyone is white or Hispanic, because they are almost all descendants of that one dude and his bitches.

Isn’t their president black?

President Camacho codes as both black and Hispanic to me, but I am not American so I would defer to someone who is.

It's the typical sort of 'dirtbag left bernie bro' nihilism

Aren't Bernie bro people even dirtbag ones being much further to the left than film, more likely to point out classicism of the movie and its eugenics endorsement(like they already did many times on YouTube)? Specifically labeling poor whites as breeding morons is much more general liberal democrat or "shitlib" thing to say.

As for Team America, if I remember correctly the message of the movie was the typical centrist libertarianism from Matt and Trey

Did we watch the same movie?

Maybe? https://youtube.com/watch?v=_4l5J4V733E

The ending seems pretty clear to me: 'Sure, the US has blundered a fair bit. But there are real baddies out there and if the US won't do what needs to be done no one will.'

It all depends on the framing. Like I said, you can derive some problematic conclusions from recognizing general intelligence, but what if you just don't ever recognize those? To quote Eric Turkheimer:

Why don’t we accept racial stereotypes as reasonable hypotheses, okay to consider until they have been scientifically proven false? They are offensive precisely because they violate our intuition about the balance between innateness and self-determination of the moral and cultural qualities of human beings. No reasonable person would be offended by the observation that African people have curlier hair than the Chinese, notwithstanding the possibility of some future environment in which it is no longer true. But we can recognize a contention that Chinese people are genetically predisposed to be better table tennis players than Africans as silly, and the contention that they are smarter than Africans as ugly, because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.

A universal truth like 'we are all getting dumber' is not ugly. Though it's not far from it depending on how you look at it.

On the other hand I don't disagree that lib/left/progressives tie themselves to a whole host of nonsense and woo to get closer to universal truths they find beautiful. Like, as you point out, Howard Gardner and his theory of multiple intelligences. And that they flatly deny IQ research and otherwise slander IQ researchers as being dogmatic racists. But you won't find these same people balking away from the idea of complimenting someone on how smart they are.

Telling someone they are smart is beautiful, telling someone they are dumb is ugly. Just live in the emotional moment and float from one to another and don't think about any uncomfortable conclusions you could possibly derive from anything. Cognitive dissonance is hard, after all.

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