This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Is this just possibly the mid wit phenomena where they understand enough to know the art is “prestigious” so they trick themselves into liking it whilst looking down on bourgeois taste?
I experienced transcendence the other day watching SM64’s Invisible Walls Explained Once and for All
The meticulousness, the detail of the tooling, the sheer effort put into breaking down every type of wall into something imminently understandable, the ineffable beauty of a person who watches a man die to an inviswall at world record pace and then decides to spend 10 months bring such trivial suffering to an end "Once and for all." And the feeling of seeing those invisible lines, now, even when they are no longer shown, the simple bliss of knowing. Of this world never feeling the same again.
The epic journey through each piece, culminating in the final victory lap- a reimagining of the SM64 ending cutscene, but here playing that welling music over each and every conquered inviswall.
Alternatively. This is a 3 hour video about polygons. What you take out depends on what you bring in.
The sheer effort, technical skills, and dedication required to make that video are admirable and beautiful things (even if they're largely dedicated to something mundane and mostly worthless). I can't say the same for modern art, where literal trash piles left behind by accident by the janitorial staff are mistakenly assumed to be part of the exhibit (or the other way around, where art exhibits wre mistakenly assumed to be trash by the janitor).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I get that that's a thing but I'm generally skeptical. Until there is good evidence otherwise I take it for granted that people are honest about their aesthetic preferences.
Surely these things aren't mutually exclusive, but rather in concordance with each other, right? Which is to say,
is the mechanism by which they arrive at their genuine, honestly held aesthetic preferences such that
I mean, you see this talk about manipulating, say, straight men into genuinely, honestly believing that fat women and transwomen are beautiful and sexy by putting them on magazine covers or pushing them to watch porn featuring such people. If one believes that such manipulation of one's genuine, honestly held aesthetic preferences are possible, it's not unexpected that they themselves have undergone such intentional transformations of their own genuine, honestly held aesthetic preferences in order to better conform to what they believe is socially just or whatever.
Fat women can be charming, within a certain threshhold. They have a certain gravitas about them (pun not intended, believe it or not).
More options
Context Copy link
Social Construction radicals have to attribute all thought to social construction. They can't admit to any inbuilt preferences, only social constructs. So when they find someone's who has 'converted' they can't attribute it to helping someone who was already inclined to like X realize who they are. Instead it has to be that they finally broke through their socially constructed preferences into liberated ones.
In my personal experience with these types of people there is a strong case of "my expansive preferences are natural, which is proof that your narrow preferences are socially constructed." Similar to the 'well obviously we'd all fuck dudes if we could, but society would collapse so we need social pressure to keep men straight' phenomena. Just a total inability to model other minds. Very similar to polyamory people. Their end of bell curve genetic inability to feel jealousy is obviously perfectly normal. Your jealousy meanwhile is a patriarchal social construct you can be liberated you from.
For people on the tail end of the bell curve the typical mind fallacy is a hell of a drug.
I do think Tumblr took these people's pre-existing preferences and intensified their conviction of their moral superiority. AO3 is not Pornhub and everyone used to understand why they attracted different sexes. It took tumblr to convince people that the only reason men don't rely on AO3 is because they've been socially constructed not to. For the average person of this 'if we just push body type X enough people will change!' mindset I think it's more likely that they went to tumblr because they had a predisposition to like the art there and then got socially radicalized. Not that they were a straight guy who got converted and now wants to spread the good news.
Perhaps this is true of the most extreme radicals. I've never seen one, and would disagree with them.
But as a substantially less extreme radical- I'd like to highlight that though inbuilt preferences are largely genetically constructed, the pressures that drive genetics are in part socially constructed. Even things like trees have genetic structures that are derived from a sort of negotiation between different forms of life, the trees and their pollinators, via the process of sexual selection. And then the appearances they settled upon drove our aesthetics.
Which is all to say that even these things aren't just one way. There's a negotiation between the genetic and the social going on here. Sexual selection means that the aesthetic really can drive the genetic in the tail end.
If these "radicals," as you call them, stuck to Bene Gesserit-style multi-millennia plans involving eugenics in order to manipulate the genetic causes of the individual/cultural preferences, I think this aspect of the culture wars would be significantly less contentious.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link