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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29526 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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There seems to be an idea around many open discussions forums that the left has captured many cultural institutions. This perception seems so persuasive because certain leftist thinkers coined the idea.

While it’s undoubtedly true that many major institutions lean left, it’s also a convenient dodge from the right wing or conservative side in the culture war allowing them to avoid self criticism. In fact it seems that almost any time folks question why right wing values are not more represented in popular culture, the knee-jerk response by conservatives is that the left has captured institutions, so there’s no hope. When the reasonable point is asked as to why this state of affairs can’t be broken by right wing institutions or a similar capture by the right wing, I haven’t seen a good answer.

How has this state of affairs come to be the default? Why did the right lose institutions, and why is there so little discussion about how they can realistically take them back?

When the reasonable point is asked as to why this state of affairs can’t be broken by right wing institutions or a similar capture by the right wing, I haven’t seen a good answer.

Sure you have. You just reject it because it's too despairing. It can't be broken by right-wing institutions because any right-wing institution capable of doing so has already been captured. A similar capture by the right wing isn't possible because the left, having done it, is wise to it.

You just reject it because it's too despairing

Saying that your argument is good because of my emotions is bad form, and rude besides. I'm perfectly aware you think the left is impossible to beat, I simply disagree. Every regime and ideology fails over a long enough time horizon, whether now or in centuries. Besides the modern left is a new beast in many ways, and vulnerable near it's birth given that the values are still necessarily messy.

It's not so much that the left can be beaten, but it can be made less relevant by occupying a smaller share of the pie of discourse, and also reputational damage. Academic misconduct scandals (such as faked studies), fake news, cancel culture, viral videos of looting and crime and decay, CRT/wokeness in schools and universities erodes the general public's support for the left. People will tolerate some , like gay marriage, but go too far too fast and they will reject it. It was genius sorta how the left made gay marriage normal or acceptable. They are trying with the trans issue but coming up against way more forcefull resistance.

Fundamentally, conservatism and reaction are not really very appealing to intellectual and creative types. People with an inclination towards thinking, ideals, criticism, reform, improvement, progress, solving Big Problems will naturally gravitate towards a movement that embraces those things.

It's come up before here that the Right often struggles to articulate a positive vision for the future. This is, of course, true. Conservatives are not visionaries or imagineers, their goals are articulated in terms of things that actually exist and are possible. Maybe recreating the social and economic conditions of the 50s or 00s wouldn't be ideal, but at least it's something that was actually done before and could actually exist again. And to many conservatives, the lack of Big Crazy Radical ideas is precisely the appeal of the movement, though they might not phrase things in those terms.

I think suggesting that the right doesn’t attract thinkers is wrong. As I said below, I think it does. The difference between liberal and conservative thinking types is where they gravitate to. Conservative thinkers tend to end up in the business world where the ideas are built in various forms. I don’t think anyone would say someone like Elon Musk doesn’t have a Big Crazy Radical idea for the future. The reason he’s not an academic is that he’s too busy building rockets, self-driving cars, and Starlink. Hollywood left has long been criticized for reusing characters and turning famous and popular characters diverse. What they aren’t generally doing is creating new franchises they aren’t making the kind of entertainment that can stand on its own.

Which is more attractive to thinkers? Go to work in academia, make peanuts for decades write reams of journal articles that might maybe be read once or twice, write books that nobody cares about, and teach classes. Go to work for Elon Musk and build a platform that will put a man on Mars within ten years. Build AI that can solve problems, build cars that drive themselves. Build that big bright beautiful future. I just don’t see how a starry eyed thinker who wants a better future for humanity would be content simply dreaming about that future when building it is within reach. I think academia is likely to be more attractive to people who lack self confidence and confidence in their ideas simply because it’s the place where ideas go to die in a sense. It’s perfectly safe to put your dreams in a journal nobody will ever see. It’s perfectly safe to advocate for changes to society or criticize art from the safety of a job you can’t be fired from.

I think the difference is that conservatives tend to attract the doers rather than the idealistic.

As someone who is smarter than the average academic and chose to go into industry, this is how I've always thought of it. A lot of leftists have an ideological hatred of industry, or at least think of it as vulgar. So they just stay in academia forever, if they can, even if they have to accept adjunct wages.

I had the grades and test scores to get into a high-ranked PhD program, but I wanted to go into industry, partly for the money, but partly because industry is awesome. In the years since, I've gained more respect for what academia could have been, while simultaneously losing respect for what it actually is. Sometimes I wish I'd stuck around for a PhD so I could do research, but if I had, I'd be doing research in industry.

This creates a vicious cycle, where the overrepresentation of leftists in academia allows them to make it less attractive to non-leftists, which further increases their overrepresentation, and now it's become so extreme that they've been allowed to enforce ideological tests for hiring.

Conservative thought and art is rich, deep, and tragic. Any tradition that includes things as disparate as the Scottish Enlightment, the Classics, American Founding, the first fantasy novels, etc. is robust.

So it should appeal to the intellectual type. But perhaps the problem is that while there is a lot to learn there is perhaps little to say (the field is robust). So in publish or perish perhaps The incentives are against re trodding well trodded areas?

it seems like conservativism in the context of the arts is either really deep or absent, whereas liberalism in the arts is a wider spectrum of high, low and middle-brow tastes.

Fundamentally, conservatism and reaction are not really very appealing to intellectual and creative types. People with an inclination towards thinking, ideals, criticism, reform, improvement, progress, solving Big Problems will naturally gravitate towards a movement that embraces those things.

This didn't seem to be true until the modern era. I don't think it's a fundamental human trait, more that the fact that our modern mythos is one of Science and Progress, and so our stories and myths (i.e. media) attract that type of person. Stories that contradict the holy march of Progress are not as popular or accepted.

It's come up before here that the Right often struggles to articulate a positive vision for the future. This is, of course, true. Conservatives are not visionaries or imagineers, their goals are articulated in terms of things that actually exist and are possible. Maybe recreating the social and economic conditions of the 50s or 00s wouldn't be ideal, but at least it's something that was actually done before and could actually exist again. And to many conservatives, the lack of Big Crazy Radical ideas is precisely the appeal of the movement, though they might not phrase things in those terms.

I think conservatives do have a vision of the 'future', but we've come to conflate the idea of 'future' with increased technological progress. Without more and better tech, there can be no future. It's baked into the core memeplex of modernity.

This didn't seem to be true until the modern era.

Before the modern era, Westerners had a utopian vision provided to them by their religion, and most of their intellectual life centered around that. Today’s leftism has a utopian vision that’s even better because it requires less suspension of disbelief, whereas conservatism has nothing. Maybe if the right fully embraced something like National Socialism, they would be more competitive.

Striving after a sublime ideal may not be a fundamental human trait, but it may be an upper-crust European trait. I shouldn’t need to explain the concept of different selection pressures here.

Today’s leftism has a utopian vision that’s even better because it requires less suspension of disbelief, whereas conservatism has nothing.

No, it does not. Left wing utopianism is more appealing to intellectuals than right wing religious utopianism in large part because it promises a utopia without restrictions on their behavior through it's-best-not-to-ask-too-hard. Part of the appeal of blaming systemic whatever is simply that it doesn't demand a change in personal behavior. You can do drugs, have casual sex, seek pleasure, and only tip your waiter what you want to tip- it doesn't affect the systemic problem because systemic level problems require systemic level solutions.

By contrast right wing religious utopianism demands strong restrictions on personal behavior. Puritan New England is famous for its harsh and micromanagerial rule of law- yet it came much closer to being a shining city on a hill than the USSR ever did to being a worker's paradise. Religious right wingers are correct that casual sex has lots of negative and no positive externalities, but realistically it can't be stopped by getting people to decide to abstain voluntarily. And the decision to voluntarily avoid engaging in anti-social behavior is frequently hitting 'cooperate' when everyone else hits 'defect'. And notably intellectuals are almost by definition smart enough to figure that out.

Systemic this and systemic that doesn't actually demand changes to personal behavior. You might be guilty of systemic racism, but your personal obligation to fix it is to pressure someone else, which is a lot less of an ask than having to go personally do things.

It helps that the liberal intelligentsia utopia is also conceived by those very intelligentsia in which they are the self-anointed rulers of their utopia. Right-wing religious utopia always puts god on top.

I think you underestimate the degree of hypocrisy religion involved traditionally. Not that there aren’t exceptions, there are always cults and monasteries for people with extreme propensity to self-sacrifice, but generally, wholeheartedly believing something is wrong and then doing it anyway it very easy and natural. Christianity even explicitly accounts for this with its concept of universal sin. The Christian utopia is not the shining city on a hill but the kingdom of heaven. And since the kingdom of heaven is supernatural and salvation is a gift of God, it’s even possible to be a complete antinomian without compromising on any of the metaphysical beliefs.

Moreover, is modern society less restrictive because it’s less supernaturalist or is it the other way around, or are the two developments unrelated? Seemingly anyone’s guess.

Institutions are the home of the elite. If the right wants to hold the institutions, it needs to self-consciously build a culture of elitism. Right now it's doing the opposite.

That is, it's not merely that the left has successfully expelled the right, it's that the right is messaging to ambitious young elite-to-bes that "we don't want you". E.g. both the left and the right embrace their fair share of unscientific nonsense - but the left proclaims "trust the science" while the right says "do your own research". The message from one side is elites are good, on the other it's that they can't be trusted. So if you're a status seeking institutional sort of person, which side feels the most welcoming?

It doesn't have to be this way of course. It used to be that the "old boys club" would look out for each other, turn up their noses at the unwashed masses, go to the opera, etc. Think Sir Humphrey Appleby - "This is a British democracy! Some things are too important to be left to the hands of the barbarians. Like the universities - Both of them."

Yeah I agree, the right in the US has no high culture. People can mock effete David French types (and to some extent they should), but when even patrician, well educated WASPs like Tucker Carlson are playing with some kind of folksy midwestern hunting lodge aesthetic it’s a little embarrassing.

In truth, any classical orchestral concert (except maybe video game music), any opera (even Wagner), any classical ballet or theater, almost all the audience are urban liberals. Any gallery exhibit, even the most staid, uncontroversial classical landscapes, say Constable, most attendees (certainly under the age of 65) will be urban progressives. Obviously some of that is because of the location of major galleries, concert halls etc. But also, young DR types will retweet long threads about classical art and architecture and music and theater but then not engage with the spaces that are actually keeping those traditions alive. Cons don’t become classical violinists or shakespearean actors or art historians, they don’t even recreationally see these things in many cases. How much money that the NY Phil raises in a year (from tickets or donations) is coming from conservatives? Is it any wonder these institutions are progressive as a result?

That’s the sad reality, it’s the right’s enemies that are keeping much of the heritage of western high culture alive while cons watch Nascar and Yellowstone.

any opera (even Wagner)

I went to see Das Rheingold when it was playing a few weeks ago at the Royal Opera House and yep, pretty much everyone there coded as a westernized urban progressive to me (tbf, my looks/dress probably code me as a westernized urban progressive as well so this doesn't mean they were so). It was all modern this and modern that, pretty much nobody dressed up in the ways you'd expect a conservative to do so, even though there was no strict dress code (people came in wearing jeans and t shirts, but styled in ways that strongly hinted urban liberal).

my looks/dress probably code me as a westernized urban progressive as well so this doesn't mean they were so

Can you unpack what this dichotomy between your “looks/dress” and what you actually are? Like are too a BAP/DR chud type with blue hair or something?

Don’t mean to interrogate you or anything, I’m just genuinely curious.

Oh no, not at all. My hair is natural and everything. It's more that I'm relatively slim and wear expensive completely westernized clothing (not the tacky sort where you're a walking advertisement for multiple brands, but the tasteful sort where those who know, know and everyone else just thinks you're wearing well fitting normal stuff) while being visibly non-white (the ethnicity). Also the way I speak (mannerisms, speed) is an instant giveaway too. There's just a certain aura that westernized urban progressives have about them and I would say I have it too.

My opinions I'll leave you to decide on based on my post history, but you'd be hard pressed to say they are progressive or even pro modern western beliefs.

Just imagine Gandalf the White.

Yeah I think dress codes have died in London outside of those few very old school Pall Mall members clubs that (partially) cling on. In NYC even that’s gone, the Harvard and Yale now have some vague smart casual codes but they’re not taken seriously by either of them. Crazy to think that as recently as the 50s, nice restaurants would enforce not merely a suit but black tie!

I agree with this observation, but do you have any idea why this state of affairs came to be?

I'd idly hypothesize it's something about cities attracting more liberals, and conservatives generally being poorer over the last few decades while much of this 'high art' is expensive. That and the fact that high art has become increasingly decoupled from religion.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts though?

I am a very weird person so my feelings probably don't generalize, but for as long as I've remembered I've had the feeling of getting the implicit signal that "high" art is not for me.

Specifically, I've felt that one's supposed to interact with high art with preconceived notions of what's good and what's not, with the actual act of viewing/reading/listening to something being a bit of an afterthought. You're supposed to like the things that have been declared Good and Worthy, with little room for discussion. I'll take people slinging their personal flaming uninformed opinions about the latest vidya with great fervor over that consensus-driven stagnation every day.

Incidentally, there were attempt to bring that top-down consensus "its Art and it's Good" enforcement to the world of video games, but they failed miserably. Remember The Path, Graveyard, and Bientot l'ete? The auteurs that made them eventually quit game development after having a meltdown about the uncultured gamers. Meanwhile, people like Daniel Mullins prove that you can be high-concept without ghettoizing yourself.

I don't really know why. I think the right's trend towards a low-class working man vibe and away from a distinguished-man-of-society vibe has been going on since well before I was born, so it's a little difficult to see how it started.

If I had to guess though, I would blame communism. The era when we had a conservative wealthy elite was also the era when the left wing unwashed masses were attracted to ideas about eating the rich and so forth. To fight the popular appeal of communism, the right started to emphasize the value of individualism and entrepreneurialism - embracing the values of "new money" over "old money". Efforts were made to cultivate ambition and to get people to strive for upward social mobility instead of gatekeeping the rabble out.

By the time you get to the 80s you have full blown Thatcherism dominating the right, proclaiming "there is no such thing as society". It's a formula built to appeal to small business owners and others with an image of making their own way in the world, rather than fitting into the august institutions of the past.

Is this true? I dunno. But it's the story I tell myself.

Cons will spend $600 on their family trip to an NFL game or $750 for a family of four to go to a high attendance NASCAR race lmao, by contrast (as Hoff says) ‘high culture’ stuff is cheap unless you’re in the best seats in the house (which also cost many thousands at the above) or want to join the donor class, which is unnecessary. Many galleries and museums are literally free, and orchestras, opera and ballet (almost all nonprofit) are heavily subsidized by governments (in Europe) and wealthy donors (in the US). This means most attendees will pay much less than their share of the cost.

Opera tickets in the UK are significantly cheaper than Premier League football tickets, plus you get treated a lot better at the venue too. The national gallery etc. are all free to visit too.

while much of this 'high art' is expensive

Back-section tickets for the San Diego Symphony Orchestra cost like $25 apiece. This is not some ultra-expensive, exclusive experience. If anything, I could speculate that what’s really keeping a lot of conservatives away is that these are not kid-friendly experiences. When people bring their young kids to the symphony or to the theatre, almost inevitably the kids act up out of boredom at some point and need to be taken home. Unless you can get a babysitter, these are not places you can (or should) bring young families.

You can look into the works of Heterodox Academy, which shows that there indeed is institutional capture of education by the left. The why is an exercise for the reader.

I think the right cant conpete by capturing things of their own is because the right inherently lacks creativity. They are stuck on ye good old days while the future leaves them behind. Is anyone on the right wing even doing anything about/with LLMs? The foremost technology of our times?

the right inherently lacks creativity.

This is incredibly false. The meme economy alone disproves this. Leftist memes are meandering walls of text, or straight up transcriptions from video essays. Right wing memes are much funnier and more concise. Leftist versions of, say, Stonetoss, for example, just aren't anywhere near as good.

Btw, what is the left wing version of Stonetoss anyways?

Breadpanes, which is extremely cringe. And also coincidentally and humorously also suffers from walls-o-text.

xkcd and SMBC comics.

I really wouldn't call SMBC left wing. xkcd I agree is left wing, but even he does a lot of tech/nerd stuff rather than political zingers all the time which is Stonetoss's mainstay.

SMBC increases presence women and non-whites relative to real life. What is not left-wing about SMBC?

I agree about latter point: mainly nerd/tech stuff with little politics.

SMBC leans leftwards, but not exclusively. For example, I couldn't see XKCD (or another true left cartoon) make something like determined, that lampooned a leftwing talking point.

See also: heretic (anti-progressive), look-2 (pro-small town), buds (poking fun at LGBT++), pig (anti-sustainability), metrics (anti social science). etc.

EDIT: this one is too perfect to leave out, even if a comic from 2009 is too old to be relevant to the conversation. Radical is pretty perfect too.

It's extremely preoccupied with "REPRESENTATION" and general left leaning things. But I'd grant you its not infected with brainworms level of political toxoplasmosis.

Mostly just edits of Stonetoss.

I guess the blobfish comics count.

99% of memes are apolitical things like this. RW memes are funny, but RW memes are also almost all variations on one core theme (ie the smuggie). Also, plenty of RW memes (ie famous green texts; some collages) are literally walls of text and/or image.

I mean this comment rather proves his point. The vast majority of historians, sociologists, political scientists, musicians, writers, artists etc. etc. are all at least on the centre-left, but that's balanced out because the right demonstrates its sparkling creativity with... memes.

Memes are a much, much more effective way of disseminating your ideas into the population than stuffy academic papers or news articles.

You can expose people to a lot through memes sure, but when push comes to shove most people will place a lot more weight on the words of an authority figure than an anonymous internet poster.

They're good at disseminating ideas into the population, but not into the halls of power.

Memes are evidently not left. But I am not entirely sure if the right can lay claim to them, even if the left can't. Memes seem to be mostly, apolitical or reactionary (4chan), which isn't the boomer dinosaur right wing that most of the right-wing pundits are.

I think there’s an issue that the right tends to have other priorities. They don’t want to go and become a lecturer at a university simply because there are other, more practical uses of their time and talent. Especially in the humanities, there’s just nothing practical about joining an institution to study things nobody cares about to produce articles and books that will never be read. In the arts, I suppose it’s a bit different as you can make movies or something, but the time between trying to get in and being able to do something of your own is often large and the competition is stiff.

Liberals tend to not be as practical minded and might be content to take a position with no chance of a reward (phd lecturers essentially make the same wage as fast food workers with little hope of tenure, where going into the private sector can net you 100K a year for the right fields).

produce articles and books that will never be read

ok, some books are never read, but say, wikipedia articles, are read a lot and the right already lost this years ago.

My point if that if you told a conservative kid that he could make 100K a year doing computer stuff that millions of people would use and do things with, or they could stay in college, live off scholarship money and spend a decade researching stuff no one cares about and writing a book that no one will ever know exists, this isn’t something that would be appealing to people with the talent and ambition to get things done in the real world. Even the Wikipedia, I think would run down that line. Liberals don’t tend to be ambitious and therefore marching through institutions or editing Wikipedia all the time or publishing critiques of pop culture because they aren’t necessarily doing things other then politics.

It's pretty well documented that university leftists will aggressively block hires and promotions for purely ideological reasons. They gang up on the farthest right person, get rid of them, then move on to the next farthest right.

Also many on the left, even the more moderate, have a "no enemies to the left" frame of view where they see anyone farther to the left as a harmless idealist who won't be dangerous if you don't aggravate them.

Most leftists - ie. people who would generally share Rudi Dutschke's principles - would consider the "long march of the institutions" a failure; ie. socialists went to the universities and then institutions, but then the institutions considered them, leading to them implicitly or explicitly renouncing their socialist principles.

Also, one of the reasons why the left appeals to cultural producers, university workers, media types etc. is simply that the (conservative) right has been intent on turbo-shitting on these institutions for a long time. I personally know moderate or somewhat right-aligned university types who have grown to despise the right for automatically going "Oh, you're a university lecturer and thus automatically a commie, that explains it" when they disagree with the right-wingers even mildly, and journalists who got continuously flamed by antivaxx right-wing conspiracists whenever they wrote anything about Covid, even if it was neutral or lock-down critical but not in the "correct" way.

Sure, right-wingers usually reply to this by saying that the left-wingers in those institutions started first and they're just responding, but it's still always a two-way street.

Most leftists - ie. people who would generally share Rudi Dutschke's principles - would consider the "long march of the institutions" a failure; ie. socialists went to the universities and then institutions, but then the institutions considered them, leading to them implicitly or explicitly renouncing their socialist principles.

The problem with this idea is that economics is no longer the defining characteristic of being a leftist. You could be a literal Stalinist, but if you don't update your cultural ideas to the latest package, you're "far right". Sure, the left wingers that primarily cared about their economic ideas got shafted hard, and their march through the institutions failed, but the march of the cultural left has been a clear and overwhelming success.

Sure, right-wingers usually reply to this by saying that the left-wingers in those institutions started first and they're just responding, but it's still always a two-way street.

Your logic seems circular here. In order to argue that the left appeals to cultural producers, you cite cultural producers trying to appeal to the left, as they are supposedly representing the right. This might be the right way to do it, but it's predictable that it will generate a backlash, even Moldbug got shat on when he did that with his "Hobbits vs Dark Elves" thing.

The second problem is that it's not even about "they started it". If your theory was true, there'd be a symmetrical backlash of cultural producers against the left, because they also get turbo-shitted-on, whenever they mildly disagree with the leftwing zeitgeist (see: Angela Nagle, Freddie deBoer, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibi, the entirety of TERFdom).

Your logic seems circular here.

It describes a circular tendency. The cultural producers/media types and right-wingers attack each other and grow further apart from each other in a circular motion. The right-wingers just seem to almost automatically ignore their own role in this development, just pretending that their comments are harmless screaming into the void and change nothing.

(see: Angela Nagle, Freddie deBoer, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibi, the entirety of TERFdom).

All of these, expect arguably DeBoer, have moved rightwards, in large part due to attacks on them by the leftists.

It describes a circular tendency. The cultural producers/media types and right-wingers attack each other and grow further apart from each other in a circular motion. The right-wingers just seem to almost automatically ignore their own role in this development, just pretending that their comments are harmless screaming into the void and change nothing.

So let's imagine an alternative world where the right wing base smiles an nods when someone like Moldbug tells them they are just hobbits who need to be ruled over, and they need to forget about fighting for hobbit things like abortion bans. The only way this results in the views of the right wing base being better represented among cultural producers, is that the entirety of the right wing base has been moved leftward. Therefore, you cannot use this to explain why right wing views aren't represented in our cultural institutions.

All of these, expect arguably DeBoer, have moved rightwards, in large part due to attacks on them by the leftists.

If moving rightwards refers to who they're friends with, sure, if it refers to their views, I'm not sure I'm buying that. But even if you're right notice how any movement here is limited to specific individuals, while you're explaining the same mechanism being responsible for a shift of entire institutions when it's done by the right.

Therefore, you cannot use this to explain why right wing views aren't represented in our cultural institutions.

I'm not trying to say it's some sort of a complete explanation. It's just one of the things affecting the representation. I mean, it should be an obvious, uncontested point that this sort of a two-way street exists - right-wing actions also lead to a counter-reaction.

But even if you're right notice how any movement here is limited to specific individuals, while you're explaining the same mechanism being responsible for a shift of entire institutions when it's done by the right.

It was you, yourself, who chose to mention specific individuals.

Institutions consist of individuals. If enough individuals within some specific institution are pushed to some direction, that will at least put pressure on the institution to do likewise.

I'm not trying to say it's some sort of a complete explanation. It's just one of the things affecting the representation. I mean, it should be an obvious, uncontested point that this sort of a two-way street exists - right-wing actions also lead to a counter-reaction.

What's the point of posting an explanation that is so incomplete, that you can observe the same phenomenon on the left with opposite results?

It was you, yourself, who chose to mention specific individuals.

But you tried using them to make a point which is unsupportable.

Institutions consist of individuals. If enough individuals within some specific institution are pushed to some direction, that will at least put pressure on the institution to do likewise.

There's a few problems with this. One is that left wing attacks on people seem to have the effect if moving an institution even more to the left, see Evergreen. Then, even if the reaction - counterreaction mechanic had the same effect for the left and the right, not every individual has the same influence in an institution. If the people attacked by the left and move rightwards, but the people making hiring / firing decisions remain hard left, the institution will go even further left.

I mean, it should be an obvious, uncontested point that this sort of a two-way street exists - right-wing actions also lead to a counter-reaction.

It should be, but it isn't. There's little counter-reaction against the left, and nothing significant or lasting. The "counter-reaction" theory is mostly an excuse to advocate the right do nothing.

Institutions consist of individuals. If enough individuals within some specific institution are pushed to some direction, that will at least put pressure on the institution to do likewise.

Or to cut those individuals out (as indeed often happens) or force them back into the fold.

Everything has been getting so much better, for so long now, that asking ‘wait guys why are we all just getting more completely miserable?’ has the magnetic force of a skunk’s ass

Everything has been getting so much better, for so long now, that asking ‘wait guys why are we all just getting more completely miserable?’ has the magnetic force of a skunk’s ass

Everything has been getting better?

Are you sure about that? What are family formation rates looking like? Local manufacturing? Levels of societal trust? The military, media and political institutions are all hopelessly corrupt and you don't even have to be particularly smart to see that the economic strategy of the last few decades has largely consisted of kicking a can down an increasingly short length of road. The geopolitical scene is a complete disaster and has been hopelessly mismanaged to boot. Don't forget a variety of other problems lurking in the wings - climate change is already starting to have an impact, and I don't think we've even started dealing with the sheer quantities of pollution that the modern world has generated either.

Some things have gotten better - but a lot of the things which are really essential to human flourishing and living the kind of life that a lot of people want have gotten far more difficult. Ever looked at the collective measurements of women's happiness over time? There's absolutely a reason that "why are we all just getting more completely miserable" is gaining traction, and those reasons were strong enough to let Donald Trump of all people get into the presidency.

"had" I'd say -- it's hard to avoid the feeling that the walls are closing in on various interests (firearms, vaping, lightbulbs, driving cars, freedom of speech -- take your pick) these days.

While any one of these is probably not worth going to war over, every camel has his breaking point.

The economy seems perilous as well. It just sorta feels like the dam is about to break. I don’t have proof. Just a gut feeling that I think many share.

I can agree with this take, at least anecdotally. It increasingly seems like the economy is only perceived as good because of number shuffling by fancy finance grads with creative statistics. Whereas the reality on the ground for poor folks is getting worse and worse in actuality.

It would track with the increasing amount of rage coming from the right as well, which I think is generally made up of poorer people than the left.

I do well for myself. So it isn’t being poor. But my wage should go further than it does and makes me wonder how the vast majority of people who make less than me get by.

That’s what makes me think it’s a house of cards. I think people are in more hawk and once the consumer spending stops Because credit limits are hit the fall could be sudden and extreme.

It's only hard to avoid feeling that way if you are in a filter bubble that is pushing those narratives and subconsciously motivated to accept them.

Most people feel fine about those things, if they ever think about them at all. Or, more to the point, picking a few narrow interests where there have been some new regulations is a form of cherrypicking; it says little about the state of the world overall, you could find similar contemporary examples at any point in history.

If by "filter bubble" you mean "enjoyer of things some government flak wants to ban/fuck up" and by "subconsciously motivated" you mean "doesn't want things he enjoys banned/fucked up" then sure, I guess -- the point of the comment is that this tendency is spreading from niche issues (vaping lets say) to things that are less so (guns) and now seems to be at things that are decidedly non-niche. (cars, fucking up the economy)

it says little about the state of the world overall, you could find similar contemporary examples at any point in history.

Like, uh -- Prohibition, I guess? That went well.

I'm struggling to find a historical example similar to 'let's ban IC cars in five years' -- what did you have in mind?

Internal combustion cars are not going to be banned in five years. I don't where you're getting that from.

But think about McCarthyism or the Comics Code Authority, warning labels on music and stores refusing to stock albums after government investigations, etc. The government is always having a panic and going after something or other.

The point being that now they are panicing about many things at once -- which feels like walls closing in.

(Seems as though many governments are waver somewhat on their timelines, but 2030 was originally a popular date for banning sales of IC vehicles; looks like 2035 is the new 'real soon now', which is still absolutely insane and will be very unpopular to the extent that it's actually implemented. You think some Hollywood people being investigated for communism is equivalent to Greater London enforcing crippling taxes on vehicles they don't like?)

Ok, so by 'IC cars will be banned in 5 years' you meant 'several environmental agencies have suggested phasing out new sales of IC cars to consumers within the next 12 years'.

That is indeed much closer to what I expected, and pretty much demonstrates my point about filter bubbles distorting your perception of the world.

It is interesting that discovering this huge gap between what you thought was happening, and what is actually happening, does not seem to have changed your position or argument at all. I propose that it should have, and I would be interested to hear your thought process on how you reacted to learning this.

Anyway, if we're moving from 'actual laws on the book' to 'proposals by agencies for things they think we should do a decade from now', then yes, we've always had lots of crazy shit like that, and we can't remember most of it because most of it never actually happens.

No, I mean governments have committed to this and informed auto manufacturers that it will be the case. Read the fucking link man.

The UK originally said 2030; they've since slid it back to 2035 -- it's still uncomfortably close.

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No, I think that Hollywood people being investigated by the US Congress for their political beliefs and losing their jobs is worse than London taxing vehicles that are harmful to the both the local and global environments.

OK, and the Holodomor was worse than the Armenian genocide -- the Armenians were still correct to be concerned.

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The London system exempts almost every vehicle made after 2006. That’s hardly crippling, almost nobody will pay.

If almost nobody will pay, then why waste all the money putting up cameras and whatnot?

Obviously they think they stand to make a profit on the enterprise, or they wouldn't.

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The London system exempts almost every vehicle made after 2006

The average vehicle age is 9 years (making the average vehicle on the road there a 2014 model), so the people who are still driving cars made in 2006 and earlier are also obviously poorer than average, since the 200,000+ km cars that are 20 years old are currently the only thing they can even afford (not that the shutdowns over the last 2 weeks weren't hardest on the poor to begin with, through the combination of banning the businesses they work at and directly causing consumer good prices to inflate through various means).

So it's a highly regressive tax by design, levied specifically against the people who can't pay it, for the explicit purpose of taxing their private transport away (and heavily enshittifying what they even can afford in the first place).

After all, nobody needs a high-capacity assault vehicle that can travel over 500km and recharges in 5 minutes. God forbid anyone ever want to spend the extra cash not to have to wait the extra time it takes for transit to get them anywhere, that's a privilege only environmentalists and bureaucrats should be able to afford.

For now it does -- do you think that this will be a static thing?

Already a fair number of people feel strongly enough about it to go after the cameras -- so some people are expecting to pay I guess? Both of my vehicles are pre-2006, and I'm making 6 figures -- are there no working poors in the LMA?

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Ideas so unattractive we must ensure they are demonetized, deplatformed, and delisted from searches, lest someone bumps into them accidentally.

Yeah that's the great irony - it's Schrodinger's right wing. We're in furious agreement that like you're suggesting 'normal' ideas are tautologically popular. But, only 'weirdos' rock the boat. Given a choice between being unfulfilled and having to do laundry by hand...

You'd take doing laundry by hand, right? I get you are presenting a way of thinking, but presented with that choice which would you go for?

Sure, I'm laundry by hand all the way. For example, I've genuinely come around to thinking that penicillin was a mistake (because its' widespread adoption inadvertently launched a never-ending biological arms race).

But that won't stop a good chunk of people from saying they hate doing laundry already and 'fulfillment' is lame and for tryhards

Is the biological arms race not overstated? There are strains of a few diseases resistant to some common antibiotics, but there’s backup antibiotics, and backup to the backup antibiotics, and etc, and those strains are generally not dominant, anyways- they’re mostly found in hospitals(where they are indeed a problem) and the general public doesn’t have to worry about them much at all.

(because its' widespread adoption inadvertently launched a never-ending biological arms race).

I think this is in large part due to human mismanagement. If we used antibiotics sensibly and judiciously the superbug problem would not be an issue at all - but instead we decided to just dump them into all of our animal feed and hand them out like candy for incredibly trivial problems.

In an arms race, your enemy's tactics change to something more deadly, because you've left whatever Schelling point had let two sentient competitors settle on less-deadly weapons. The end state is some new equilibrium where war is more deadly to both sides.

In the evolution of antibiotic resistance, our enemies' tactics change to something equally or potentially less deadly, because optimal virulence decreases for a disease that risks eradication as soon as it's noticed and because constraining an optimization problem (especially with a constraint as extreme as "evade custom-targeted poisons and the human immune system at the same time) never makes the optimum higher. The end state is one where the very best most evolved "superbug" bacteria, the ones immune to any known antibiotic ... are thereby back to the "no antibiotics" status quo at most, not deadlier.

We call them "superbugs" only because the status quo where every germ was that dangerous was just that awful, not because it would somehow be even more awful for only a fraction to again be that dangerous.

For example, I've genuinely come around to thinking that penicillin was a mistake (because its' widespread adoption inadvertently launched a never-ending biological arms race).

never-ending biological arms race was already happening, penicillin give humans powerful weapon that gets less powerful but is still really powerful and unlocked entire piles of things that can be used

both me and my brother would be dead without antibiotics and thousands (millions?) of other people as well

...a similar capture by the right wing, I haven’t seen a good answer.

That's just not who they are.

You might as well ask "why doesn't the Right train union reps, journalists, and teachers to rebalance the Culture War?" The right-wing leadership would love if that happened, but the candidates are too busy being truckers, miners, and chemists to bother.

Despite the name, the right and left aren't perfect mirror images of each other. Something that works for one side doesn't necessarily work for the other even in a level playing field.

Honestly, I feel like the Right staked a claim on anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism long ago. Which is great for populist rallying of the masses, but pretty bad for running institutions where the top layers of management will pretty much always be elites and intellectuals.

I've genuinely come to believe that our society emphasizes 'reason' and 'science' or rational ways of understanding the world far too much. While it's not well articulated, I'd argue people on the right inherently value things like intuition and emotion more, they just don't have the words to explain it because, well, that's kind of the point.

I mean I think they call it things like 'faith' or 'common sense'.

Fair point!

How has this state of affairs come to be the default? Why did the right lose institutions, and why is there so little discussion about how they can realistically take them back?

It's hard to tell how exactly it happened. One of my pet ideas is we haven't really been creating history after World War II, so you're left with half-remembered culture war anecdotes. Maybe someone autistic enough will dig out an article excerpt for you. And even if history was still being written, it would have been written by the victors.

In any case my best guess as to how it happened was a combination of entryism, and conservatives being quokkas (or in my darker moments, that their establiahment is knowingly playing on the same team as progressives, but has to put on a show or their base would rebel). It stands to reason that the side using entryism would pull up the ladder behind them.

And regarding the discussion on how to take them back... Man, when someone has literally done just that, outlining essentially Ghandi tactics, maybe combined with building parallel institutions, you claimed it's calling for a civil war.

Seems like basic thrive/survive dynamics.

Conservatives are in favor when times are tough.

Liberals rule the day when the summer days are long, and people forget the cold dark winter.

The post WWII period has been 75 years of unprecedented peace, prosperity, population increase, and technological improvement. Is it any wonder that liberals are ascendant? Personally, I think too much of the seed corn is being spent, but I'm not confident in this assertion. Every foolhardy excess in the last 75 years has worked out. The current regulatory and fiscal environment seems doomed to collapse, but maybe AI will bail us out this time.

Personally, I think too much of the seed corn is being spent, but I'm not confident in this assertion.

I believe mostly the same thing - except I think the seed corn isn't being spent but rather has already been eaten, and I'm much more confident. That said I view the seed corn in this case mostly as a combination of fossil fuel energy reserves and social capital.

I'm skeptical of mundane demand-driven explanations, when I see how much effort goes into preventing non-Liberal viewpoints from ever being seen. Your explanation would make sense if you could clearly see non-leftwing communities participating on the exact same rules ase the leftwing ones, but just failing to get much attention, rather than routinely getting banned.

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