Where does the culture war come from?

[padraig (u.s.)]

Yeah sometimes all you can do is recognize the trap and still take it on, hoping that being forewarned will aid you on terms of being forearmed.

Now remember, the first step in avoiding a trap...

Dune (1984) clip with quote Now remember, the first step in avoiding a trap... Yarn is the best search for video clips by quote. Find the exact moment in a TV show, movie, or music video you want to share. Easily move forward or backward to get to the perfect clip.

getyarn.io

is knowing of its existence.

Dune (1984) clip with quote is knowing of its existence. Yarn is the best search for video clips by quote. Find the exact moment in a TV show, movie, or music video you want to share. Easily move forward or backward to get to the perfect clip.

getyarn.io

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

the war rooms would be interesting to look inside of. the little ive seen of politics looks like its run by fucking idiots but i dunno

it's a pretty good documentary

I'd say they're both very smart and fucking idiots

clearly very smart, well-educated, ambitious people

but at the same time completely divorced from reality outside of their little bubble of electoral politics

everyone working in politics is de facto a yuppie, or wealthier, and their worldview is correspondingly an affluent worldview

 

[Mr. Tea]

clearly very smart, well-educated, ambitious people

but at the same time completely divorced from reality outside of their little bubble of electoral politics

The diametric opposite of Trump, then - who is a complete moron by any conventional standard of intelligence, but has a gift for connecting with people* that's unmatched in modern American history.

 

[Mr. Tea]

(*Or for making people feel like they have a connection with him, even while he holds them in total contempt - but it's how they feel about him, not how he feels about them, that's important here.)

 

[wg-]

Ron DeSantis’ Secret Twitter Army of Far-Right Influencers

Ron DeSantis’ political operation has been recruiting conservative influencers. But the personalities DeSantis is attracting have plenty of problems.

www.thedailybeast.com

Stuff like this, i want some twitter bots tbh

 

[Leo]

Musk complained about bots when negotiating the sale, has he done anything about them? Knowing him, he's probably fine with them as long as they're supporting his interests or beliefs.

 

[version]

Something's shifting. I wouldn't be surprised to see more of these articles going after formerly untouchable targets.

With Hannah Gadsby’s ‘It’s Pablo-matic,’ the Joke’s on the Brooklyn Museum

The Australian comedian turns curator in a show about Picasso’s complicated legacy. But it’s women artists the exhibition really shortchanges.

www.nytimes.com

The DEI Industry Needs to Check Its Privilege

The worst of the industry is expensive and runs from useless to counterproductive.

www.theatlantic.com

 

[...]

The culture war, in my opinion, started in the 90s when a certain kind of intellectual closely aligned with analytic philosophy started making these bad arguments about postmodernism. The idea was that postmodernists were relativists who thought anything goes, that you can literally say anything and get away with it. Much of contemporary identity politics presupposes a kind of postmodern embrace of the Other, thus these anti-postmodernists argued that identity politics was just a big power play a way for leftist intellectuals to get what they want. After all, if postmodernists don't believe in the truth, then why not lie and say people you don't like are bigots? Of course the conversatives even today do say that identity politickers lie like this. From these ideas, these conservative intellectuals argued that postmodernism dominates academia, a conclusion I've found, from my own experience, to hold false. It was even claimed that postmodernism erodes the very foundation of knowledge so much that postmodern academics weren't even teaching their students any knowledge at all! All of this is quite wrong of course, and if anyone wants to know why, I'll tell them. But the point is, these anti-postmodernist arguments still appear in the works of Jordan Peterson for example.

 

[Leo]

Is it possible for a Male Lesbian to mansplain?

 

[...]

Is it possible for a Male Lesbian to mansplain?

Yes, we're all fallible.

 

[shakahislop]

it's not unusual for people in one society or other to have big differences in values. the 'culture wars' are the name that we've decided to give this in the last five years or so in the anglo west. it has particular contours of course and each side has a particular social base, but probably the defining feature of the culture wars is the way in which it's structured by online discourse.

 

[shakahislop]

as usual the thing i compare it to is the afghan social world. which has its own very forceful culture wars going on, within the context of an actual war. one central component of the rural pashtun taliban vs NATO conflict was a conflict of values. some of the contours of that are very familiar, in that they were about the patriarchy, the relative position of different ethic / racial groups, conservatism vs radical change, which found flashpoints in media phenomena such as how women are represented on television. the additional factor interestingly enough being that as western governments and to some extent publics were so heavily involved, the liberal side of that culture war sprung from the same source and had very similar features to the liberal side of our own culture war.

i don't want to over-egg the parallels but they are there. i guess as well as that just being interesting, it draws out the fact that this shit is nothing unique or new in itself. the inability of the current political and media setup to resolve or at least dampen down these conflicts of values feels like it might be a new experience for the anglo west though. as is blindingly obvious to everyone, the current way the internet works generates a very splintered, individual and original set of beliefs, whereas radio and TV were well suited to manufacturing consensus.

 

[shakahislop]

I'd say you're definitely accurate about the change of information delivery. access to non-conventional media will undoubtedly mean a massive proliferation of extraneous material, some people will sail through it and others will find themselves embroiled or convinced

But i think it goes back further than Qanon, really; pizzagate was before Q, the clinton dossier early 90s, the left-led conspiracies about Bush & 9/11 being used as justification for the surveillance state.

I guess the difference now is, as you say, there are more successful delivery models that allow them to weaponise specific attack angles on whatever the chosen cause is

& as said earlier in the thread, right-wing manouvering vastly overtook the left in that regard. But around the time of 9/11 the conspiracy realm was definitely in the left, not the right. What has changed now is that the right has learned to embrace it and recast the "elite" as a neo-liberal grouping as opposed to the neo-con gang as it previously was

i remember some dude at the occupy wall street campsite walking around handing out CD-ROMs of that 9/11 truther documentary, whatever that was called. probably we've talked about it before on here but the other thing that was a big deal around that time in the less formal, vague left-wing world was zeitgeist. again maybe it's old news but the swing of the hottest and most magnetic subcultures going from being on the left to on the right is still kind of fascinating to me. what counts for the left now doesn't feel counter-cultural to me, it feels like a dominant culture (while losing every time electorally). very subjective of course.

 

[sufi]

i remember some dude at the occupy wall street campsite walking around handing out CD-ROMs of that 9/11 truther documentary, whatever that was called. probably we've talked about it before on here but the other thing that was a big deal around that time in the less formal, vague left-wing world was zeitgeist. again maybe it's old news but the swing of the hottest and most magnetic subcultures going from being on the left to on the right is still kind of fascinating to me. what counts for the left now doesn't feel counter-cultural to me, it feels like a dominant culture (while losing every time electorally). very subjective of course.

The culture war is very asymmetrical, its like a scorched earth retreat by the occupying right

 

[version]

what counts for the left now doesn't feel counter-cultural to me,

I'm not sure anything does. It all feels as though it serves a function within a larger structure.

 

[vimothy]

the culture war is a rear-guard action by the right. culture is the dimension across which it's continuously losing. there's also a parallel war for political and economic control across which the left continuously loses, to the extent that it's not even on the radar any more. if you take both together you get the overall trajectory of society.

 

[vimothy]

what's the overall determinate? its technology, both in the materialist and philosophical senses. everything is lined up, pulling us deeper into the mire.

 

[Mr. Tea]

the culture war is a rear-guard action by the right. culture is the dimension across which it's continuously losing. there's also a parallel war for political and economic control across which the left continuously loses, to the extent that it's not even on the radar any more. if you take both together you get the overall trajectory of society.

In sum: the triumph of the right is that your employer can fire you for virtually nothing, and the triumph of the left is that that 'virtually nothing' could be looking at someone in a way they didn't like.

 

[vimothy]

it turns out that left and right are complimentary rather than antagonistic

 

[version]

Synthesis.