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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28472 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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It sounds like you were the cultural default for a long time, and enjoyed that.

Now people younger than you and different from you are the cultural default, and you're enjoying that less.

I know how you feel, it happened to me too.

You enjoying one thing less than another makes it feel like the other thing is worse. But be reassured, the people it is catering to like it just as much as you liked the things that were catering to you. Things aren't getting worse, they're just moving on.

Of course, you can believe that 'No, it's the children who are wrong' for as long as you want, it's a valid ego defense mechanism. Don't expect your daughter to thank you for trying to shield her from the culture that she is actually living in, though, any more than we thanked our parents for trying to stop us from playing Doom or listening to rap or w/e.

  • -18

This comment makes an excellent point and the poor quality of replies and downvotes are telling of that.

It absolutely does not make an excellent point. Check history: if it's not darwin2500 it's his identical twin. The account alternates between manipulative negging and dogmatic consensus enforcement.

Which is irrelevant to the fact that they made an excellent point here that wasn't properly addressed.

Where do you see the poor quality replies? WhiningCoil's is a bit short but he makes his point with supporting examples, The-WideningGyre is perhaps a bit low effort, but your's seems to be at about the same level.

"Old man yelling at clouds amirite? Afraid of change much?" is neither interesting or novel. Everybody here has heard it, nobody is ever persuaded by it. As somebody else mentioned in response, it's highly likely that tune would change if the OP (or anybody who says something so insipid) felt their ox was getting gored.

Your follow-up post is better than goodguy's.

Persuaded of what? I don't understand this disposition towards the topic.

People complain about the state of media and entertainment. It is pointed out to them that everything they have tacitly or fully supported for the last decades is the cause of their woes. They proceed to stick their head in the sand so their worldview can remain safe and sound whilst everything they held dear gets whisked away in a BIPOC LGBTQI+ friendly reiteration. Where every element of the creative process sees what you cared about as being a symptom of a problem that needs solving.

You can not have what once was because of what now is. The culture you like is dying a demographic death. You will never get it back. The final nail in its coffin being the culture makers themselves. Instead of writing a 'good' story, they write inserts that compliment modern victimary discourse. They do this because that is the dominant culture. It's the dominant culture because of the culture that came before it.

Once you start tracing the thread of the modern moral fabric back to its source you don't find what you are looking for, you find everything that the modern moral fabric has conditioned you to reject. Which is what a lot of people do, which makes their complaints sound extremely hollow.

Your first paragraph is the interesting bit. That many people who are negative on these newly-dominant strains of our culture may have inadvertently paved its way previously - and enjoyed the ride up until they didn't - is a thought I have reflected on a fair bit recently. I myself am torn between renouncing some of my previous sensibilities or arguing for their selective defense in contrast to 'wokeness'.

That's a neat thread to pull on, and also nowhere in goodguy's post, and so I am not sure what compels you to defend it against downvotes. It's like you're reading a superior argument they did not actually make, and then using that as an opportunity to dunk on some ignorant detractors for reasons I don't fully understand.

I think we are all prone to nostalgia bias as we age, and move out of the prime time as it were. But we also want to avoid philosophical relativism, the idea that there can be no privileging of anything because everyone has their own view.

I think there's always been a lot of crap, and pop culture has generic things that appeal to different generations. For youth, it's enough probably that it's their thing, and not their parents. That it's new.

But I still think you can make good arguments that politics and creativity usually don't go together. Because a lot of woke decisioning is political it's probably deteriorating the artistic product. Famous authors have been critiqued for introducing too much of a political slant in this or that novel and there's some consensus that these works are qualitatively 'less-good' as a result.

I think one could easily argue for the objective merits of yesteryear. That did not preclude the new generation from consuming the new stuff more. You can give some objective measure of why that stuff is worse, but it doesn't matter at all to those who consume it more. This repeats all the way back to whatever time you want.

Entertainment always has a form molded by those who make it. You can argue that the form we now see, with regards to 'woke' stuff and politics in media, is worse than something else. It's designed by committee, it's politically motivated, whatever. What people seem to be failing to see is that the point made by @guesswho encompasses all of that.

The people who mold media today are doing so because of the conditions they find themselves in today, just like the people who molded media back in the day were. And that's the funny thing about this whole thing. You could not be were you are today if the people you are complaining about were not excellent at what they were doing. You are the product of the exact same political media you complain about. You are being left behind just like every other cultural conservative got left behind. You support every single step of that process up until the point where you find yourself replaced.

Another response to the op in case you're interested-https://www.themotte.org/post/667/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/138982?context=8#context

Yes, I largely agree with you. I know I am a tiny agent in a hugely complex network that periodically consolidates into swarms. I would say that because I can stand outside with perspective taking, I am not entirely the product of political media, though as you say that may make no difference as I'm replaced.

I've also sometimes fashioned an argument that media is qualitatively different in the level at which PR operates. I'm no scholar of it but my understanding of the 70s, 80s say was that foreign affairs/state Dept issues was entirely the realm of govt propaganda, distributed through the major media networks. But that there was still a mainstream concept, and application of, mainstream investigative journalism and a framing that understood the concept of balanced reporting. Obviously that may have been cynically applied at outlets for various political reasons. And the political things didn't extend as much into the personal domain as they do now. While it was perpetuating other myths, US exceptionalism etc, it also had a recognisable civic function. I'm not a US citizen so don't have as much a handle on it.

The problem that you allude to initially that culture is shaped as the zeitgeist of the times, is that it is question begging, or ambivalent about the problem of agency. I mean it's also manifest in the way that you say, but the question of whether we can influence it as individuals is high-stakes.

I may have misunderstood you though so just take it as a rant...

I agree with some of this and disagree with other parts.

But we also want to avoid philosophical relativism,

Certainly we should never decide that we are just too out of touch to understand modern culture and can't meaningfully critique it any more; I don't mean to give that impression.

But when someone says 'I won't let my kid watch anything made after the 90s because it's all corrupted by socjust lunacy' or w/e, that's a pretty strong signal to me that they're not carefully considering each piece of media on its own merits and forming a reasoned critique. It looks like just being mad about the culture in general moving on from what was familiar and comfortable to you, which is what I was calling out.

Honest critical analysis is always important, but it's also always in danger of being biased by other influences, and you always have to be on guard against that bias. I'm trying to point out what I think is a pretty likely bias affecting this particular judgement that everything after the 90s is dangerous or bad.

But I still think you can make good arguments that politics and creativity usually don't go together.

I think the word 'politics' is ambiguous in a way that makes this point hard to talk about.

Certainly the two-party campaign-focused culture-war version of 'politics' is such a powerful influence that it can corrupt or derail any other messages that it is paired with. Note that I don't think that means you can't make good art motivated by that type of politics - I like West Wing, I like Rambo - but when you are trying to make art that's about something else but still let that type of politics influence it, it's easy for the politics to overwhelm your actual message.

But there's also the much broader understanding of politics form the phrase 'the personal is political' and so forth.

Whether the women in a piece of art are actual characters or sexy lamps is very much a core part of the artistic message, but it's also influenced by cultural and political trends that made one type of media more likely to get made or more appealing to audiences. An artist might legitimately be interested or uninterested in depicting non-heteronormative relationships or exploring minority cultures in their work, but politics and culture will influence how the audience reacts to those depictions.

This is my real objection to and point about OP"s post. It seems to come from a common perspective that, any time there's a gay character or more than one minority character in something aimed at wide audiences, any time something aimed at younger audiences acknowledges non-heteronormative relationships or flaws in the American justice system, any time a woman character exhibits the same power fantasies that male characters normally get or rescue themselves instead of waiting helplessly, this is obviously only due to the influence of political activists corrupting the culture and ruining the media.

And I think that's just wrong. Certain specific cases of it are that, for sure, but you can't paint with such a broad brush. More often, it's simply that the culture had 'straight white guy protagonist and the world reacting to him' movies and shows and games for a lot of decades (or centuries), and has simply gotten bored with that, realized that the actual world is more complex and interesting than that, and decided to move on to exploring more topics.

(not that we've even stopped featuring that story in tons of media, we're just adding additional elements and looking at new things too)

I agree with a lot of what you say. There's obviously a range of material from good to bad put out in any particular generation, a lot of it I'd suggest is pretty shit. But also gems.

Agreed also that most forms of art are molded by the societal norms of the time, as they act on the film makers/ producers and audience at large, and as those individuals interact/ react against those norms, while also being more or less aware of them.

These norms will include the politics of the time (the negotiation of norms), whether that be issues politics along tribal lines or political in the manner of 'the personal is political', which is a truism in the sense that a political act has to be done by an individual, who always acts 'personally'.

For example, an author may put specific political polemic into the mouth of their interlocutor, or they may seed their version of the norms in a more subtle but equally intentional way, therefore acting politically-- in addition to their other creative acts. Nothing precludes subconscious molding by social norms either, this is the sea we all swim in, but I'd argue this isn't the case for political acts, which seem to me to have a conscious intention by definition, operating at the level of polemical belief, in that politics involves a certain forcefulness, or righteousness.

I think it's this intentionality that gets at the root of why, beyond a certain threshold, it deteriorates the quality of the work down an exponential decay into the zone of 'forced', 'contrived', 'preachy' etc. While we can be a mindless milieu, we can also have a fine ear for being told what to do or think. This is most evidenced by the general reaction to most advice, which has an element of actual resentfulness.

This element of 'too much', or 'against the grain' will vary with each individual, so there does have to be a defense of why this should be more than just taste, pitching reactionary responses against early adopters of the political message or culture shift.

Or to frame it as another commenter, isn't this just the culturally new coming into being? With the usual railing against the wind kind of response?

This feels to me like a familiar relativistic slight of hand, along the lines of 'global warming is a hoax', temperature has always been changing. To find out if things are qualitatively different in the creative merit of a particular artistic work, or a trend in the production of them, we need to do some kind of analysis against some objective marker. An individual can have a sense of it, I would argue, but to prove it's not just taste, they have to demonstrate it somehow, with reference to the works themselves and a rubric.

But in this task we will quickly be flung into dealing with philosophical assumptions. If we were to adopt a relativistic stance, it would be quite hard to measure any differences over time, because there is no measure sufficiently privileged over its material, or it's own substrate, for it to be able to do the job. In contrast, if we adopt an aesthetic stance, we may be able to get somewhere, though it doesn't seem easy to bridge to the definitive answer on the matter.

I think, at the level of metaphysics, we come up against something like Judith Butler's problem. In her case, What is the space--that is Us--that allows for us to perform against the norms, despite being subject to them? Where does it come from and how does it resolve existentially?

If the performance is 'naturally adopted', then where then really was the subjection, or what is the extra element that allows for it? And if subjection rules, how is the reaction able to pass up and out and reconcile the existential split of being the subject and the performer against subjection? This is all just wank at this point- but I think it's something analogous to the current question of how we are molded by culture, which also arises from us as a collective, in this case problematizing the conception of 'right adopted' v 'wrong reactionary', or 'inevitable adoption' v 'railing against the wind', because there's some extra ingredient needed beyond just being washed over by culture, or reacting against? Is there the possibility we can definitely privilege a stance or are we stuck in an arbitrariness?

It sounds like you were the cultural default for a long time, and enjoyed that.

I do not believe this is the attitude you adopt when culture goes against you; it seems much more likely that it is a script you apply to other peoples' concerns, not your own. That is not a charitable or productive way to approach discussing these issues.

Of course, you can believe that 'No, it's the children who are wrong' for as long as you want, it's a valid ego defense mechanism.

Alternatively, some things actually are bad, and demand action to limit the harm they cause.

Don't expect your daughter to thank you for trying to shield her from the culture that she is actually living in, though, any more than we thanked our parents for trying to stop us from playing Doom or listening to rap or w/e.

I thank my parents for attempting to protect me from malign cultural influences, and believe that my life would have been significantly improved if they'd done a better job. Maybe my child will not feel this way. On the other hand, maybe my child will decide to be a junkie. I cannot control their decisions, but their ability to make meaningful decisions evolves slowly over time. All I can do is to try to raise them well and teach them to be wise.

I will admit, it's certainly amusing to see someone break out the dusty old "all media is totally fine, stop being a square" argument. Because of course media has no effect on our beliefs and actions, right? Anyone who cares about representation or diversity on the positive end, or racism or sexism or or heteronormativity or any of the million other problematic issues raised against media over the last decade was just a lame-o stick in the mud, right?

FWIW this comes across as quite condescending. You're so sure you're right you don't to actually provide any evidence of it, or even an argument.

Nobody was advertising Doom or rap to children, or if they did it was with the faintest of plausible deniabiltiy. Whenever there was some media firestorm over kids consuming 'inappropriate' content, the creators would perfunctorily gesture towards the ESRB rating system or parental advisory labels. The culture of days old was hidden from your parents, not championed as good medicine by media and its authority figures (official or otherwise). You hid the M-rated game from your Mom, and you didn't pop Eminem into your parents' car stereo on the way home from your school. If the opposite was the case, other families thought it was strange if they found out. There was - for lack of a better word - shame, feigned or otherwise, around letting your kids wildly consume subject matter above their intended age range.

I'm not sure what youth culture is into these days, partly because times do change, partly because it's hard to separate a clear signal from all the 'modern audience' astroturfing. But I find it hard to believe that the current environment - laid on thick by a PMC class of 30-somethings and older, still steeped in yesteryear's cultural battles - is a genuine, undistorted expression of the real thing. You had to overcome some barriers to reach the naturally-alluring experience of shotgunning demons to bloody ribbons in your favorite heavy metal album cover. Who today has to seek out or hide away woke content, as opposed to having it dumptrucked into their mouth by Disney or similar?

I think there's a big distinction between the actual culture of today's youth and the one being pushed by over-correcting revanchist millenials. The super woke media is not the DOOM or rap music of this era, it's its complete opposite. It's what today's kids' parents would prefer they like instead of what they actually like. I'm not fully understanding what the majority of kids actually like these days, they're quite secretive and tend to share around in small groups online instead of in the public square, but sometimes I get glimpses of it and it's very much not what the OP is complaining about. They don't like it either.

Don't expect your daughter to thank you for trying to shield her from the culture that she is actually living in

One day she'll discover her country hates her. But hopefully she can develop a stable sense of self that isn't totally self-loathing and demoralized by propaganda before that day comes. Because the kids around me I see immersed in "the culture" are not all right.

She will probably not 'discover' that unless her parents guide her into culture war foxhole where believing that is part of the price of admission. That is not in fact the conclusion that the majority of people come to when they are just allowed to explore their culture naturally.

Teen mental health certainly is at a bad point, pandemic is a pretty obvious recent factor and social media plus never going outside seems to account for a lot of it. That's not at all the same thing as the culture war argument being leveled here.

I think your first sentence is mostly true but entirely contingent on the word "she" as opposed to "he". I think that if you took a top-10 of movies and TV from each year you would definitely find at least a few "men suck lol" speeches in each of those lists, in a way that I don't think I've even seen for "whites suck lol" (though of course social media has quite a bit of the latter).

I mean yeah everyone is going to encounter some number of cultural artifacts saying that men suck, that women suck, that white people suck, that black people suck, etc. With varying levels of directness and specificity.

That's one artist showing one perspective in one piece of art, not evidence that 'your country hates you'.

That's one artist showing one perspective in one piece of art, not evidence that 'your country hates you'.

You've landed quite a large number of borderline comments into the mod queue lately, and I think the pattern I would describe them as following is "low effort. In this case, the "low effort" approach is "contradicting people without bringing anything valuable to the conversation." Essentially, a slightly more eloquent "nuh uh!" This is a way of making low-effort points (even when you put effort into the word count).

On one hand, there's probably some value in interrogating the idea that a large number of people are "out to get you," individually. But "this is just one instance" is an especially frustrating form of low-effort objection, since every concrete example anyone can give is always just "one instance." But concrete examples are every bit as important a form of evidence as aggregated statistics (at least arguably, concrete examples may often be better evidence, despite what anyone rhetorically says about "anecdata").

You've also made some good posts in your brief time here so I don't want to discourage those! But being offhandedly or insultingly dismissive of the claims others make is not really something we allow here.

I think you would in fact have a much harder time finding "blacks suck" and "women suck" speeches; the rate's not zero, but in big-budget productions you will find those exclusively portrayed negatively (either in the mouth of a villain, or explicitly retracted by end of episode).

The two live-action Western 2022 things I've seen are Wednesday and The Batman. Wednesday has at least one time when the eponymous heroine accuses someone of "mansplaining" (despite how weird that word sounds coming out of the generally-old-fashioned Wednesday's mouth) and this is presented as correct (IIRC there are other examples of "men suck" in there, but it's been 9 months and I don't think I watched the whole thing); The Batman has Catwoman lay into Batman for his "privilege", although I forget exactly which attributes she picked on out of rich/white/male (Catwoman is black in that film), and we're clearly supposed to agree with her.

Now, technically I did watch one other 2022 Western thing in the form of one episode of Rick & Morty. But 2/3 chosen at complete random is enough for me to start seeing a pattern.

Don't expect your daughter to thank you for trying to shield her from the culture that she is actually living in, though, any more than we thanked our parents for trying to stop us from playing Doom or listening to rap or w/e.

Some people grow up to be adults and do thank their parents for the limitations they had as children. My wife is one of them. Her parents stopped her from watching "vulgar" shows like the Simposons, and she still doesn't like those shows.

I had basically no limitations. I had access to the internet, and my parents mostly had no idea what I could get to on there. I don't think I would have appreciated any kinds of limitations.

I do have a sense of self that is separate from the culture I inhabit. I got that by exploring a bunch of culture and realizing that it was not me. My wife got that sense of self by having walls and barriers placed in front of the "bad" parts of culture.

Different approaches work for different personalities. I'd suggest seeing the personalities of your kids and not taking a blanket approach. But things that worked for the parents are probably more likely to work for their kids.

Sure, I won't argue that different people have different personalities and will benefit from different parenting styles.

And if you start from an in-depth examination of your child and their personality and consideration about what is best for them as an individual, maybe you can sometimes correctly find that things I find weird are teh best thing for your kid.

But if your starting point is 'I am on the opposite side of a culture war from the people that make almost all modern culture, so everything they produce must be harmful and I will forbid all of it' then the odds that your decisions will coincidentally coincide with what is actually best for your specific child are very low.

I had basically no limitations. I had access to the internet, and my parents mostly had no idea what I could get to on there. I don't think I would have appreciated any kinds of limitations.

Yep I grew up with the same 'parenting' approach. I regret it every day, and truly wish I had more discipline and was forced to do something other than spend 12-14 hours a day gaming during my youth. It has caused me no end of problems and issues to work around.

I'm glad a lack of limitations worked for you - I'd argue that it's a total abdication of parental responsibility, and while every now and then we get a gem like you cjet, the majority of kids that grow up with no guidance or limitations have an extremely difficult road to climb to become mature adults. @guesswho, I would caution you that it is possible to live in a sick culture. If a culture will teach your child to be weak, to never develop, to stew in anger and blame others constantly for their problems, it is absolutely better in every conceivable way to shield them and instill good values in them.

To be fair to my parents I think they just didn't know. They protected me from the dangers and bad decisions that they knew about. They saw me on the computer all the time and thought "well at least he isn't out doing drugs and drinking like we were at his age, or having sex and risking pregnancy".

I suspect we had similar exposures to the internet, and parents with similar caution towards it. Because my parents were also glad I wasn't out drinking, doing drugs, or getting girls pregnant. Although I'm sure my dad thought it wouldn't hurt if I showed at least a little more interest in girls, as opposed to being so intimidated by them.

On the one hand, the internet in the 90's wasn't as bad as it was now. The social networks you were exposed to were far more fractured, numerous, and heterogenous. I hung around a StarCraft forum, the Battle.net chatroom for it, and an enthusiast forum for Riva 128 users. Because back then a lot of video cards needed some aftermarket attention companies really didn't provide.

The pornography you could find sure was a lot different. It would take 5 nervous minutes of hoping nobody came home and saw me on the family computer slowly downloading a single grainy picture of boobs. It would have taken too many terrifying minutes to print it off to risk getting caught, so the best you could do was commit it to memory for later. If it even finished downloading, because it often froze somewhere between the neck and the row of pixels right above the nipple.

Things today couldn't be more different. Activist run most communities, and love bomb vulnerable people to groom them into deviant lifestyles. Porn seems dominated by bizarre fetishes that I'm unsure even existed back when I was a kid. And parasocial relationships between content creators (adult or otherwise) have horribly stunted the socialization of the people trapped in their orbit. The sort of guy who participates in live camshows used to be universally derided, not necessarily because of the pornographic nature of it, but because of how creepy the unnatural parasocial relationship is. Now everything is a sort of camshow in that creepy way. From the earliest age kids are watching twitch streamers, tipping them to get a rote shoutout.

I just don't think the internet was as habit forming, or interfered with socialization, to the degree it does both now. Nor were the infohazards on it as potent. We tricked each other into going to goatse. We didn't lovebomb the lonely autistic kid into becoming goatse.

I was growing up with the internet in the early 2000's. And I did some objectively sketchy things.

I was in chatrooms sharing pictures with girls my age when we were both underage. Or I was sharing pictures with random old men who just happened to send me pictures of girls back. I don't know, I don't like to think about it too hard.

I joined a political movement that I found and learned about entirely online (libertarianism). I then went and met some of those people in person. That turned out well, but it could have gone worse depending on what movement I found.

I had access to (crappy) video pornography. I'm a little confused why everyone else seems to get into weirder and weirder stuff when they watch porn. I've gone the opposite direction, I mostly just like regular couples having sex. If they are laughing and having fun I enjoy it more. I dodged a bullet there I suppose, but I'm unsure how I dodged it.

I had facebook and myspace in highschool and college. It was prime time for posting things that would later get you fired. I did go back and scrub my facebook at one point, there was one embarrassing picture of a tasteless joke, and an embarrassing post I made about not liking a movie. I scrubbed it almost a decade ago though, and since then I have treated all my online stuff as semi-permanent. Or as semi-possibly something that could be linked to me.

Back before the internet I get the sense that these things just happened offline. Cults have been around a long time, charismatic sociopaths are as old as human society, and sexual degeneracy has a reputation for being one of the oldest professions.

I dodged a bullet there I suppose, but I'm unsure how I dodged it.

Proliferation of porn is probably one of the most underrated social changes... since the invention of the printing press? Repeating firearms? Who knows?

It seems to me that there's a serious disconnect between the popular narrative and the evident reality about porn and its mental impact on the individual. Sexuality seems a whole lot more malleable than people want to admit, with the "weirder and weirder stuff" slippery slope being only one aspect. from the inside, it seems pretty clear that brains have different hooks, specific things snag the hooks and pull the brain toward them. Porn's pure reward stimulus, but the brain's reward demand is so high that even when a piece is actively trying to max out all the sliders, gradients still appear in chaotic and unpredictable ways, and the brain is smart enough to latch on to these and then chase them endlessly. How much is innate propensity and how much is acculturated is probably unknowable, but you can in fact be altered, and even consciously steer the process.

Looks like I predate you a bit more than I thought then. What a difference a few years makes. When I was a kid, it would have been manifestly impossible to send pictures over the internet. I'm not sure widespread consumer digital cameras were even a thing in the 90's. I know my family, and no family I knew, had one in the 90's.

When I was a kid, it would have been manifestly impossible to send pictures over the internet.

In the 90s? GIF came out in 1987, and it wasn't the first graphics format. Consumer digital cameras were a bit later, but scanners were around. Slow and low-res and often not in color, but they existed. There were even high-res color images as far back as the 70s, though you couldn't reasonably create them at home.

I thought it was clear from context, I'm talking about photographs I took. I, nor any family I knew, had a digital camera or a scanner at home in the 90's. I'm struggling to remember if our school library had any sort of digital scanner. I feel like I have a super vague memory of a loud, slow, bulky scanner hooked up to an Apple computer of some sort in another school's gifted program?

Bottom line, children in my region, in my economic class, had no access to digitizing photos of themselves to send to perverts online in the 90's.

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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