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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29623 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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Excellent comment, can't agree more. It's a shame that right-wing and conservative values often disparage art as useless or impractical.

Part of the issue to my mind is that historically conservatives have highly valued oration. Older cultures were entirely oral, and most grand Western stories that conservatives love have classically been told orally and repeated generation after generation. There's something about the format of the spoken word that lends itself to these repetitive stories that slowly change the shallow pieces, but keep the deep structure the same.

I see this tendency cropping up even now. I discussed with @ArjinFerman earlier this week about how the majority of right wing discussion that is shared or held up as quality tends to be videos and podcasts. While I'm sure that many of these pieces and discussions are excellent, the information is far slower to absorb, and harder to spread. When you have simple images or the written word, these forms can be consumed and spread much more quickly than spoken alternatives.

Unfortunately, the right wing 'base' seems to denigrate the written word more than ever. Even one of the leading lights of the intellectual right, Richard Hanania, has outright said books are a waste of time. It's a tragic state of affairs, and I appreciate you putting forth the argument so eloquently.

It feels like you're working your ways backwards from an already conclusion on this, and I'm not sure what am I supposed to say to change your mind on this.

It would be difficult to change my mind, this is an implicit perception I've built up over years of trying to find forums and discussions by that outline right wing or conservative values. You have sent me some good Substacks, but I still haven't found a solid argument against why the vast majority of text driven sites like Reddit, or the majority of political best sellers are all left wing.

Because redddit bans rightwing subreddits, and the publishing industry leans left?

You have sent me some good Substacks, but I still haven't found a solid argument against why the vast majority of text driven sites like Reddit, or the majority of political best sellers are all left wing.

In a word, censorship. Not always government censorship (but sometimes, as the Twitter Files demonstrated, though because of that same censorship they had all the impact of a fart in the wind), but the fact that the gatekeepers and (in the Internet's case) even the infrastructure is manned by political idealogues.

Fair point, the left is horribly censorious, I don’t deny it. As I’ve said to you many times though - why is that the case? Did the left just magically take over these institutions, or was their political worldview more suited towards art and writing?

They've taken over pretty much every institution, not just art and writing. It's been over a century-long project by now, but it has been quite successful.

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