Do we live in a society without a counterculture?(xmodtwo.com) |
Do we live in a society without a counterculture?(xmodtwo.com) |
I also worked in physics most of that time, which is probably a subculture there as well (some overlap I suppose with a broader subculture of non-profits workers).
I also lived in Utah (Salt Lake City), where you are effective a subculture (counter culture) almost by virtue of living there and not being LDS.
None of those are homogenous, but all are counter to the prevailing culture - which is the much harder thing to define.
Which is my point - we don’t even have a prevailing culture, and we never really did, not a universal one anyway.
That said, it’s likely that white/christian/suburban/nuclear family was considered the prevailing culture though. That’s a subculture today - albeit an unusually powerful one.
Yes, because there is no longer a central, shared culture.
Note that what isn’t different is its dependence on telecommunications. I tried to think of legitimate countercultures before the late 1880s US populism but couldn’t. Regency fops didn’t count, nor did know-nothings.
Maybe the counterculture today is the few people left who practice critical thinking and make up their own minds about things. Who congregate at places like here on HN?
I'm not sharp on the definition of counter culture, but just by the feeling of "counter", I'd argue that the pickup artist community has some aspects of it. I think about game obsessively for both genders, though mostly my own (male). The following that I'm writing is true for both, but in the pickup artist community it seems that almost exclusively men are practicing it (but women could too).
A few things that feel counter:
1. You can take pro-active charge of your dating life by consciously/intentionally approaching people: on the street, in a book store, on the train, in a club, in a night club, in a bar, more or less anywhere. Especially the first 10 seconds to 2 minutes need to be scripted as you're basically talking to the autopilot of a person and not the actual person (my opinion). In normal culture, you just "naturally" meet people through friends or "it just happens". When I'm on the street and approach someone, it doesn't just happen. When I'm on Tinder even, it's optimized. The way I approach people is pre-meditated, the improv side comes out after 10 seconds to 2 minutes (there are also schools of seduction that use a fully scripted approach, I've never done that, can't talk about that. I started out with improv all the way and came to the sad conclusion that you can't do that for the first seconds to few minutes).
2. Sex with tens to hundreds to thousands of people is fine. There are a few other cultures that do this, but not the mainstream one. Note, it's not fully counter cultural here as having a GF as a goal is almost as admirable (I say almost because everyone says it is just as admirable, but the high lay count seduction guys don't care about what you have to say if your lay count isn't high because they believe you lack experience).
3. A fairly strong belief [1] that men should be dominant, leading, winning and powerful. Women are inherently submissive, caring, supporting and seen as weaker. This "seen as weaker" is even true when it comes to cognitive abilities. I don't think anyone would say it that way, but I can see it in the behavior. Such as the phrase a "girl is shit testing you." I've thought deeply about it and realized that men test as well and some tests by women are actually quite good (and others indeed utter nonsense, but that goes for both genders IMO). The thing is, I've met quite a few very appealing looking women in the US that come across as dumb, I can't put it any other way. I'm from Europe and it makes the dumb women from Europe look sophisticated (for example, they are aware of other European countries so know more about language than their US counter parts). But I personally find this whole view nonsense as my strategy is focused on finding intelligent women that are amazingly attractive as well (discussing the Bhagavad Gita on minute 3 in Florida? Yep, been there, done that :) Or what about Austrian politics and geopolitics on minute 1 in Vienna? Definitely). People exist on a distribution, but the strong polar image that the seduction community tries to create, it feels counter.
I'm a hardcore fan of 1. I'm a fan of 2, no one should be slut shamed but slut celebrated. I disagree with 3, but I'm one of the few or so it seems. With that said, all these 3 things feel "counter" to the current culture (with perhaps not 2, in a sense because when you think about it, any form of sexual expression that doesn't harm others is worthy of celebration according to feminism).
[1] Not by all, not by me anyway but I'm a complicated cookie in general for many cultures :) Careful with mapping the seduction community to me 1 to 1, it doesn't work.
The answer is obviously no.
It's hard to promote a fringe issue in a wide content channel and there's a lack of everything in between fringe and mainstream.
This is the problem. As soon as a counter-culture gets any amount of steam going a million marketers swoop in to sell it as an identity to anyone with a credit card. Marketers are constantly searching for the undiscovered cool or subversive thing. They have undercover agents infiltrate hobbies, movements, and cliques. They collect endless amounts of data so that they can fine tune their pitch to every individual person's most obscure interests. Whatever you identify as or stand for, there's a marketer willing to sell you something so that you can signal who you are to those around you. Marketers then slowly start to manipulate and change the counter-culture so that it sells better too.
There is no counter-culture because everyone is busy being a part of their preferred culture-bubbles only all of it is mainstream now. It's all so easily accessible that everything esoteric has become exoteric. No matter what it is, you can buy your starter pack right off the rack. Eventually it all gets watered down to capture as many dollars as possible and we're left with all these options, but still wondering where the counter-culture went.
Tattoos, leather jackets and motorcycles used to be cool counterculture. Now they’re trendy.
It does feel like we’ve descended into monoculture.
Though, maybe that’s because those in the counterculture aren’t showing off and are hard to spot, unlike hippies and bikers.
Counterculture is still alive and well I’m sure. Just hidden amongst the noise of our hyper signal to noise ratio reality.
Just one of a number of things wrong with the overuse of this word. I can’t be the only one who gags everytime someone mentions “content” or worse, the phrase “consuming content” which is just gross and stupid
Now it seems that we have a mainstream "culture", which doesnt actually exist, atleast noone identifies by it, then we have a mainstream "counterculture", which considers themselves as "alternative", but (atleast with younger people) is a majority, which occupies themselves by issues such as racism, sexism, trans-, and other -isms and more recently ecology.
It has gone so far, that you have "protests" for equal rights for some of those groups, or other 'mainstrea' issues where people actually in charge of laws are parading next to the "protesters"/"paraders" (in our, slovenian case, our prime minister at a protest for a healthcare reform).
And the rest? Those are invisible. Hippies and anti-war people? Nope.. now we have everyone cheering for more weapons and a longer war in ukraine. People complaining about housing prices... sure, a lot of them... people actually wanting more housing to be built.. a minority. Preppers? Just weirdos... even after quite a few events where prepping actually helped people.
Ok, i might be exaggerating a bit, but there really seems to be a lot of overlap between the current "counterculture" and what is being served from the people/groups/organizations that historically would have been seen as the "bad guys" by those counterculture groups. But again.. stuff like this is talked in "conspiracy circles", and again, shunned by the mainstream counterculture - eg https://i.redd.it/yj3vs93bi7691.jpg
I think it's happened a few times already, I'd say it's mostly a PR move & nothing more. Meanwhile I think there have happened a few protests at the very same place (Trg republike) yet the "mainstream" media didn't cover it.
The protests, activism, and other stuff, that was once a sign of counter culture has become so mainstream that even the politicians do it... go out, wave some flags, take some photos, pat themselves on their backs, and go home and change nothing.
I miss the old times, when the establishment was actually afraid of countercultures, of people going against the mainstream... the current state, where the mainstream is acting as if it's against itself is bad for society, because it never changes anything.
It's a question I've been interested in for a while but never explored. How common is it, historically, to have significant cultural shifts from one generation to the next?
Case in point, it's time to log back out of HN and ignore it for another few months.
I wonder what the logic is for this 'flamewar bait' being unmoderated (is there anything more primed for a 'flamewar' than arguing about which cultures are mainstream and which are not?)
I'm an older (60) programmer. Have over 35 years' experience in software.
As a result, my approach tends to be fairly ... heterogenous ...
In today's tech scene, that makes me "counterculture." Judging from some of the reactions that I get, you'd think I was a punker at a royal wedding.
This leaves us in a state of utter confusion about what is important, what isn't and what it all means.
So the networks systematically demote controversial content.
And political and cultural biases, that's something not really mentioned enough when talking about algorithmic goals.
Edit: after reading another comment I think digital disconnection is the new counter culture
too many misnaming of subculture as counterculture
I know it's kind of tipping the debate on the head to suggest that the counterculture is not the "future left" but the "3rd way right" but there is nothing in the mechanics of mainstream to counterculture that suggest that the challenge to the mainstream have to come from the traditional left.
And like the Hippies of the(mostly post civil rights movement) counterculture the maga trumpets are only tangentially linked to any concrete actionable goals as it's about a return to the past that never was without any real clear idea of what that's supposed to look like only that they personally will be bigshots once it happens.
What is however increasingly clear is that the traditional left have been hunted into extinction by both the radical centrist mainstream and the right-wing counterculture as neither of those movement's have any real appetite for the old optimistic "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité" values of the enlightenment, but prefers stability through authority as a response to an world they mostly don't understand.
But then, if a counterculture falls in a forest and nobody was around to hear it, did the counterculture really exist? Could be a valid argument too. Maybe
Contemporary society is distinct for having a global mainstream monoculture propagated by a universal media enterprise, which gives the impression of a uniform global culture. Former bastions of counter culture like universities, museums , art galleries, local theaters now parrot the mainstream cultural zeitgeist. Moreover, mainstream adherents denigrate any counter cultural movement as "extremism".
In the past we cultivated a diffused & distributed society with localized communities that were capable of sustaining & highlighting distinct cultural trends. Often
I think the counter culture can be sought out, but too many people find it convenient to tap into the mainstream culture and believe counterculture has been snuffed out.
Give it a shot.
>against gay marriage
>against illegal immigration, supported erecting physical barriers
>pro wars in Middle East
You surely do not need to go back two generations to get shrieked out of a room. Just dip back ~10 - 15 years into mainstream Democrat positioning.
Technology has made us a lot better at that, and therefore the process of incorporating and destroying counterculture has accelerated. It's like trawlers finding smaller and smaller fish every year - which they take anyway, even if they're not mature, because they want to meet quota. Even if this further destroys the stock.
Over the past couple of years lockdowns must have done damage to offline-only cultural spaces. This is difficult to quantify.
Another observation hinted elsethread is that of "dark" spaces. One way to protect your culture against commoditization is to make it spiky or poisonous, like an animal that doesn't want to be eaten. Culture that contains elements that are both toxic to the mainstream and hard to separate out can exist as a subculture.
It seems to me that there are (at least) two such "left" and "right" subcultures. One left one is too queer-NSFW to be mainstream; another is too tankie-communist to be mainstream. Similarly there's a "right" culture that exists between the "banned from Twitter, had to use Gab" and "arrested on Jan 6" zones.
I'd also add a "gentrification" angle. For subcultures to have a physical presence, it needs to be really cheap. The stock of cheap-central-but-nasty (dilapidated, crime infested) property in cool cities has largely been re-absorbed.
this feels accurate to me, it's definitely part of the appeal of music so deliberately unlistenable that it will never become corporate trash
https://paradiserecordshtml.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-7-j... https://chezmonplaisir.bandcamp.com/album/cellphone
On the other hand they are a very small group relative to, say, the hippies, and aren't really framed a being in direct opposition of the status quo. But I don't think the status quo has much support in popular culture. Our current state of affairs is the result of a stalemated tug of war between many different groups who all oppose the status quo.
The slow centralisation of the reins of culture into a handful of institutions goes beyond counterculture. You don't need to have a big countercultural movement to have culturally relevant movies from companies that aren't Disney, or popular songs that aren't by Ed Sheeran. It's a bigger problem than just "we don't have a 21st century hippy equivalent".
Today's counter-culture won't be identified somewhere on the left-right spectrum, or be found in the struggle for mass media attention. Which was basically the hippies.
The truly dominating force today is the weight of our technological environment. The actual physical things. The actual algorithms of the bureaucracies. The world doesn't "feel" the same. It actual "is" the same. To our senses.
The counter cultural movements are the ones that reject submission to technology. Cyclists stand up to the car (the actual thing). Homeschoolers threaten the processes of the school district (the actual bureaucracy). In the mainstream, the driver submits to the car, the redshirter submits to the bureaucracy.
All the rest; music you listen to, political opinions you hold, movies you see, books you read, sexual disposition. It is completely irrelevant because they do not challenge technological foundations. For the hippies, those were anchors since culture still attached much value to say e.g. artistic expression. But today, culture is not defined by those.
That is also why much of this discussion is actually about the premise, we can't even recognize counterculture. We're looking in the wrong places. A boomer certainly won't recognize it. Music is more diverse than ever, and the big networks don't define culture.
But to be sure: death metal is not counterculture. That just gets co-opted in a headphone ad or whatever. Instead, those cyclists who are now doing critical mass events, they are laying the foundations of a future in which the past will be unrecognizable. Death metal hobbyist lay the foundation for nothing but more niche consumption.
I'm somewhat joking with that last example, but even so. Look at dominant technology (physical or procedural), as concrete and specific as you can make it. What is in opposition of _that_, that is counter culture.
Private trackers Special interest forums Not using Mc-Social Media Off-grid.
What's dwindled - due to media consumption habits is the "appearance" of a counterculture. When huge popstars appropriate every square inch of wierdness - what's wierd/different now? Nothing really...
In the 90s, Reznor and Manson sold "edge by the pound"...that was a commonly consumed form of counter culture.
Life getting too expensive is killing real counterculture - specialised stores, quirky cafes which attract fringe dwellers and so on. Depending on where you live - this is either less or more sad.
Anecdotes aside, at least for independent artists it may be economical effects that constrain passion and make projects feel so for-profit. Which have always been a thing, unfortunately. Given technology, maybe there is so much art to consume that making art requires forgoing distraction and the general worry that the art will be bad (which is nonsense, because some art simply has a limited audience).
In today's era, stuff like EU art grants [0] can do some good, although I have the feeling that patronage-per-capita is considerably lower than it was in the past; it would be an interesting metric to look at and try best to increase.
[0]: https://culture.ec.europa.eu/funding/cultureu-funding-guide
I'm not saying I agree with or subscribe to the tenets of conservatism (I don't). But it's a natural process for the pendulum to swing as society advances. Liberal counterculture "won" and went completely mainstream. Which is great! Gay marriage is legal, we care about sustainability, and so on. But every system has gaps and blind spots, and movements which oppose the incumbent mainstream are, by definition, not liberal counterculture.
Some touchpoints - President Obama's failure to penalize banks in the Great Recession. One percenters and the new cathedral. Joe Rogan. The intellectual dark web (Jordan Peterson et al). The red pill. The alt right.
I feel many of the above are often stupid, but in the same way that there were a lot of stupid 60s counterculture movements. It doesn't invalidate the fact that valid ideas exist within both. Also, they aren't using your signaling channels. For example, music doesn't seem to be a relevant cultural rallying point any more.
Also, Trump represented many things to many people, as opposed to just this emerging alt-right counterculture idea cloud. And by the numbers, most voters soundly rejected him in 2020.
Web2 and Web3 have been captured by the profit motive. Web2 with professional VCs and Web3 with everyone playing VC. Web1 was very much a countercultural movement.
I've been part of the IndieWeb, DecentralizedWeb, OfflineFirst movements, met with Tim Berners-Lee, just finished an interview with Noam Chomsky and David Harvey (raw video here: https://vimeo.com/795006182/31cdfcf335). I've written about what needs to happen on the Web for it to change (https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c...)
It's hard to have a counterculture when the dominant tools are all owned by huge corporations and governments. Here is some open source software to get you started if you're interested:
Web2: https://qbix.com
Yes, that is one of the problems (it is not only things that can be problems, though).
> Well, it seems that hacker culture and open source software would be the antidote to all these.
I think it will not cure everything, but I think that it will help. However, in addition to the software being FOSS, it also needs to be good. (Fortunately, FOSS can help a bit since it makes it possible to make improvements, but that doesn't automatically make it good.)
See, the issue here may simply be that the author isn't aware of the central limit theorem. It is not at all strange that as you increase the number of independent estimates of what culture is (using content creation as a proxy) you see less "counterculture" (proportionally) because there's a smoothish variation between the two extremes with a peak near "mainstream" simply because that's how statistics work. A few scores of people on TV will invariably have more obviously different (and known) opinions.
But I'm also staring at this essay in quite a bit of confusion generally. There's all sorts of stuff that's counterculture being pushed into law by the extremist right, the extremist right is also a "counterculture", that's not slang for "the left". Outlawing teaching kids about LGBT people's existence and banning books is counterculture.
>The Yippies planned to hold a Black Panther breakfast at Aunt Jemima's Pancake House, followed by a feminist liberation of Minnie Mouse, a barbecue of Porky Pig and the capture of Tom Sawyer Island in order to protest the American war in Vietnam.
The Yippies seem a bit like the ANTIFA and autonomous zone folks, but with a better sense of humor and optics.
[1] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_International_Party
[2] = https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/the-yippie-invasion-of-di...
The real counterculture is on the edges and in the shadows, as it always has been, but it's cultural form does not take the form you'd expect if you're looking for it that way. It's not wearing all black, it doesn't have nose rings, it doesnt listen to edgy music, there is no consumerist element to it being exploited by corporations yet, that's actually a cultural cornerstone of it. It looks a lot like business as usual from the outside, but it isn't.
Please supply some context! You (We) all live in bubbles and you have to be clear about where you are coming from before you spout off your observations and thoughts.
ChatGPT can never wander past its training data. If anything, chatGPT encourages a convergent monoculture. It has no creativity or problem solving skills.
Vs back in the good old days of movies where hollywood cast all types of actors and not just young hot ones /s
I feel this is mostly just glamourizing the past. Kids these days, etc. The defining feature of counter culture is that it is not mainstream.
If you only consume mainstream media you won't consume non-mainstream media is as tautologically true now as it was in the past.
One example: People who deliberately avoid social media, tape over webcams, use non-android, non-ios phones, who value their privacy. These people scrub the internet of their info, make aggressive use of GDPR/CCPA deletion requests. They do not want to be part of mainstream society for whatever reason. They are routinely marginalized by people around them, labelled as "weird", unjustly suspected (and accused) of all sorts of criminal activity under the premise that "privacy is for people with something to hide" - a train of thought that is concerningly common among younger generations.
Another example is anticonsumerism. People who do not use any streaming services nor purchase media. They don't blow money like there's no tomorrow on fast fashion, pointless trinkets from Amazon, exorbitant vacations that will be forgotten as quickly as they happened, or routinely eating out. These are the people with high 6 and low 7 figure net worths in their 30's driving cars that they paid $5k cash for that look like trash. These people avoid conspicuous consumption like the plague - why throw away so much money while painting a target on your back for criminals just for the approval of others, most of whom you don't even know? Screw a gym membership, exercise is free. These people are relentlessly mocked as cheapskates in spite of the fact that it's more about values than financial concerns.
Look for the hated, the despised, the mocked, and the belittled in mainstream culture to find counterculture. The counterculture movements of the 1960s went with those labels like peanut butter goes with jelly when described by the prevailing culture of the time.
You give two good examples of counterculture. Both of those go against the values of most people these days, especially most young people.
When it comes to avoiding social media or excessive use of "smart" technology for example, many people still seem to associate this with some crazy religious people who think that the TV was invented by satan himself. While in reality, some people have entirely different and even rational reasons for it.
However, as the recognition of that unpleasant latter tendency has become mainstream and everybody and her grandma now knows what "woke" means, I can see a new counter, hopefully genuinely less partisan and not tipped the other (ie right wing) way as the old guard is kicked out (as we have seen with Twitter etc).
I'd probably agree the bulk of indier-than-thou creations are produced by people on the left (not all of whom demand we also bow to their political interpretation of the world); some of the work excellent, most of it perhaps not.
In Germany they had the Green party, once upon a time that was a gathering point of those who were against 'the establishment'. Now the Green party is a major political party, and pretty much part of that same establishment.
I guess that something similar happened with the techies. Some of those weird nerds became very rich - and that's quite popular with the general public.
And then came twitter, that one killed both the radio star and the TV presenter. And than came Elon - the king of the nerds - and he is killing twitter :-)
The only true counterculture would be about changing the circumstances enabling the neo-colonial system, and this is the fear of the neo-colonialists and their enablers who benefit from status-quo. Everything else is window-dressing, distraction, and detours, made up to look like change.
People have said it in the thread, but counter-culture is really defined retrospectively. You look at the movements that existed on the periphery but later inspired the mainstream. Velvet Underground wasn't selling millions of records, but everyone who started a band listened to them. Lou Reed is pretty indier than thou.
Yeah, but Youtube is mainstream now; it comes installed on almost every single consumer TV available for sale right now. You don't get more mainstream than that.
If you wanted to see counterculture, you'd have to use the youtube alternatives.
You strike up a conversation with the girl picking mushrooms in the middle of nowhere or you go to an underground death metal concert or spend a bit of time on 4chan and you'll find countercultures alive and well that you're just not part of.
If you think a sense of sameness pervades the creative world then you must be looking at a woefully tiny portion of the creative world. It has never been easier to be weird nor easier to find weirdness.
Like in the 1960s how the mainstream culture would whisper under their breath and point in shock and horror at hippies and try to get them banned from various public venues, and send mobs to beat them up, we have that same situation now, but instead 4chan is treated like that.
BTW, just because it's not your counterculture, doesn't mean it's not counterculture. You guys are looking at this all 60 years after the fact and saying that hippies were awesome. That's not what people thought at the time. 4chan is generally anti-ukraine war and anti-vax. 60 years from now they might look like the good guys.
4chan is a case of being co-opted: there hasn't been meaningful countercultural activity on 4chan in over a decade, but there is ample reactionary activity masquerading as counterculture. Muddying the distinction between the two is the reactionary's objective.
What is hilarious is that by your definition it is concevable that the increasingly old men who continue to use 4chan could infact be the counterculture you seek... so in 60 years they will all be dead anyway (vax or no vax)
Forgive my ignorance, but do you mean 4Chan is against the war in Ukraine in principle (anti-war), sides with Russia in that conflict (anti-Ukraine) or against US/West involvement in that war (anti-war but with a catch).
most people are against the war in ukraine. I have a feeling the motivations are different though.
A culture is information collectively held across many minds. A counter culture is a culture with contradictory information to the dominant culture.
It's clear both the hippies and 4chan meet the criteria. I found your analysis cogent.
The hippies were rooted in things that were objectively good: peace, love, self discovery, acceptance, mutual aid, egalitarianism, free thought.
That contrasts sharply with 4chan’s demographics and motivations. I don’t think that anyone will look back with fondness or positivity toward a bunch of closeted homophobic, racist, sexist, emotionally and mentally stunted incels circle jerking themselves into a froth over who’s the edgiest edge lord.
You have to be a coddled kid to believe that 4chan and their racism, misogyny and xenophobia are not mainstream or challenge the status quo. I mean, yes liberalism tries to stick a smiley face on the grimm reality, but it’s stupid to think you’re challenging anything just because you draw a frown and a hitler mustache on said smiley face.
If they're anti Ukraine war, they already are.
There is "alive and well" counterculture, but 4chan is "automatic, boring, annoying, kneejerk" counterculture. It's like a sad shell of what it was, with all the fun sucked out of it.
It would be a mistake to think that counterculture is inherently a good thing, or that countercultures of the past did not have their own pockets of “obnoxious and brainless contrarianism.”
We have no counter-culture, because there is no longer a strong, central culture.
4chan is one of many siloed cultures, not a counter-culture.
Edit: downvoters should ask a punk or metalhead what he thinks about certain bands that went mainstream.
> But somewhere between your 38th Marvel movie and the millionth Heard-Depp trial rehash video, you might start to believe it. Even if it isn’t new, even if it’s easy to escape, and even if it’s not that bad, a cloying sameness occupies the cultural mainstream. It seems impenetrable, same as ever. But it’s especially surprising given how much creative work today exists outside the mainstream.
> It is a jarring contrast. At no point in history have people created so much with so few channels for consuming their work. Most consumers get their content through a narrow straw — TikTok’s “For You” page, the first page of Google’s search results, Instagram’s explore tab, miscellaneous streaming sites, and so on. Many lifetimes worth of creation get aggressively filtered down into a (very optimized) stream of content.
Completely agree. It has also never been easier to discover sameness, broadcast sameness, or replicate sameness. The Instagrammification of the world is why the hip local coffee shop in Thailand looks like it could be in Brooklyn or Amsterdam.
Even countercultures replicate sameness.
Find someone from any counterculture and everything from his/her ideas, to their music, to the perfume they stink from are probably all exactly the same. There's really nothing new that 99.99999999% of humans come up with. I mean a 4chan user in Poland spouts the same tired nonsense as a 4chan user from Argentina or the US. Same styles of dress. Same haircuts. Even uses the same wording in their posts. Try it for yourself, you'll find yourself reading the exact same comments and posts over, and over, and over again. There's literally nothing new there. Or, as another example, when was the last time you heard a genuinely new idea from a conservative? Or from a liberal? If we're being honest, I mean, we'd have to admit that we haven't heard any new ideas out there.
So you end up with 4chan users all having the exact same crap in their rooms, and political parties all having the exact same formats, colors, and even overall look to their "conventions". You only noticed the "sameness" with coffee shops. The reality is that cultures, and even counter cultures, thrive on sameness. Without sameness they don't exist.
Covered in the 14:
"Alternative voices exist-in fact, they are everywhere--but are rarely heard, and their cultural impact is negligible."
Yeah, these things are still smaller and less impactful than the mainstream culture, but that's what it means to be a counterculture.
If only that person could have known which of the umpteen million counter cultures was going to be successful! /s
Identifying counter cultures is trivial. Knowing which one will become mainstream in the always uncertain future is unimaginably difficult. Empires have fallen because people bet on the wrong counter culture.
There are some similarities of successful counter cultures through history. Loose organization. Ease of understanding. Low financial cost of participation. And extreme inclusiveness.
Fortunately for empires, princes, and presidents, counter cultures and movements with all those attributes don't come along all that often.
A big part of what has happened is a huge rise in basic bills (rent, health insurance, tuition) and that has forced the counterculture people to make more money. It's an economic transformation and it has narrowed our culture in many ways. Smell the desperation.
Part of that, in turn, is the slow death of the American working class. This is a much harsher society economically. That is why you step over bodies in San Francisco's Tenderloin. It wasn't like that when I moved here (early 80's).
Maybe people mean something else by counter-culture, but here are examples from my life:
- Freelancing/contracting, and actively living substantially below my means. This has given me free time in a way that really changed my view on the world and allowed me to be around other people who were not in the 9-5 working world.
- Sexuality & ENM, plus living in a large city. There is a huge non-obvious culture of LQBTQIA people in this culture which often have very different outlooks on life to the mainstream.
- Communal living. Living in a warehouse with people from very different walks of life. I was exposed to so many fascinating ideas and people this way. It was a truly magical time of my life in which I also played a part in supporting the queer/ENM sub-culture of my city.
- Buying land and living off grid. There is a whole sub-culture of people doing this, both online and (more importantly) physically around me.
So I think counter-culture is available but – having written the above – I'm not sure if I am agreeing and disagreeing with the OP. On one hand it exists, but on the other hand I'm saying that it is very hard to access without making material changes to one's life.
We have traditional catholics in america who are going against the pope's relatively progressive positions on gay people.
We have aggressive de-institutionalize-the-cops people.
We have had (for a while now!) anti-prison people (this is far longer than "defund the police" and has roots in anti-racism) and I think they're pretty countercultural. (This is not "we should make better prisons" people, I mean "we should have no prisons".)
We have had monarchists, people who believe we should do away with democracy and go back to monarchist rule. IDK about them but I know they exist.
I think all counterculture is going against some aspect of a culture, not all aspects of all culture. But since we're aware of so much more cultures than before, the relative counter movements all seem small in comparison individually. I'm sure hippies were never that big, nor punks.
The "criteria" mentioned in that post assumes the importance of cinema, radio and television is static, but in fact all of traditional content mediums are just a small detail in the peripheral vision of a younger audience, and they are pushing their values and ideas harder than it was ever possible before. There's culture and counterculture online. It's just not taking place in the same space as before, leaving the old mediums to corporations trying to maximize profits.
Kids and teens don't dream about changing the world through cinema anymore, but rather Twitch, YouTube or TikTok, or if they're really ambitious, a game.
Edit: forgot to mention Discord.
In his great book "the myth of digital democracy", Matthew Hindman pointed out what most people don't get: The web is becoming more centralized AND more spread out at the same time. Popularity is a scale-free distribution that gets more extreme over time.
So we have counterculture, it's just not the large homogenous blobs that we were used to.
It's not that it doesn't exist. There is no "dark corner of the room" dynamic like you had between punk and the nuclear family; more like, it's a different room altogether, and the other cultures don't get to see what's in that room. It's a society where the culture and the counter-culture don't share the "town square" together like they used to as much.
Alternatively, like you mention, it's existing in a different digital sphere to the mainstream. This can be intentional; using alternative forums like Mastodon instead of Twitter, Discord instead of Facebook, or whatever alternative it might be. IRC chats and email threads are still going to this day. It could also be unintentional; two people can be using YouTube but have completely and utterly different feeds and comments that they interact with due to an algorithm.
These alternate realities never really existed to the degree they do today. Previous cultures had the ruling and working classes, or ruling, working, and slave if you go back far enough. Stricter class boundaries, but within those classes things were more homogenous culturally. Less people, that meet in the same forum, pub, feast hall, or religious center. Now, the lines between classes are blurred and the classes themselves less homogenous. More people, more meeting places. More things to build an identity and culture around. That dilutes the predominant counter-culture enough for people to ask whether it exists at all.
But then it defines "counter-culture" has having a significant impact. This is a bit of a paradox to me: either you are mainstrean, either you are counter-culture. You can’t be both at the same time. Only history made us realize that a counter-culture movement had a strong impact when it became… mainstream! (and is not counter-culture anymore)
Yet, on the individual level, it would be nice if people could realize: "hey, I’m mainly consuming mainstream stuff. I should try to diversify."
You use Gopher, use an "alternative" OS, get your news from longform nuanced podcasts? Great, but 99% of people don't.
Contrast that with the counter culture of the 60s, or even 90s, where people were at least _aware_ that something else existed, even if they were violently against it.
Culture is broad, it is cohesive, and it extends and influences across many domains. There are absolutely countercultures out there, but most people aren't aware of them given how dominant the dominant culture is, which is generally the case but especially true today.
Today, YouTube and TikTok are channels which multiply and amplify this kind of culture worldwide.
“Trads”. Young people with super traditional values doing exactly the opposite of most of what you just listed.
No one would seriously suggest the trendiest most mainstream supported or glorified lifestyles (van life, queerness, gig work) are counter culture…that IS the culture; there’s very little cultural risk in living those glorified identities.
But say you’re an 18 year old with radically traditional values…that’s counter cultural now.
Not supporting either direction. Just observing.
Every person's TikTok feed is different, the first page of search results for every query is different, etc. Never have there been so many channels for consuming content.
In fact, the complaint I hear more often from people is that society has too many countercultures. Of course they don't call them that -- they call them "filter bubbles," "extremist groups," or more derogatory terms, but aren't they the same thing?
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-ar...
I've watched the trend accelerate in my life and I wonder if we're reaching some sort of point (because of social media?) where there is very nearly no culture (counter or otherwise) unless it is commodified. Everything has been reproduced and divorced from it's meaning so we have this neutered insipid idea of culture that inspires nothing.
This process is called recuperation in sociology : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_%28politics%29?wp...
We are all princes of our own kingdoms.
Our gripes today are so minor previous generations would have largely found them laughable. It’s why so much of our decent media depicts the past. It’s hard to make a compelling story about social media addiction. It’s been done, but it’s difficult.
We’re approaching Brave New World much more quickly than I’d ever anticipated reading it in the 90s.
I don't understand this and by extension the entire article. Counterculture is by definition outside of mainstream. It would just be culture and not anti otherwise. This sounds like semantics but then that is what I think the entire article is, and imho it is wrong.
From Gioia's OC:
> A sense of sameness pervades the creative world ...
aka "Kids these days..."
I've been hearing this exact same criticism for as long as I remember.
One observation (McLuhan? Warhol?), using the example of da Vinci's Mona Lisa, which made some sense to me:
Modern tech makes reproduction trivial. So any original content quickly becomes ubiquitous. Separating content from original creator. Thereby mooting any of original intention or meaning or esthetic or whatever.
In other words, everything popular becomes banal.
My example, from the 90s era new age fads, I always thought of the yin-yang symbol showing up every where. Especially as tattoos. Oh so original.
Further, I think this also helps explain the disappointment about "selling out". It's a rare thing for a creator to become popular, not wear out their welcome, and retain their original fan base.
> I don't understand this and by extension the entire article. Counterculture is by definition outside of mainstream.
Yes, that's what they said. The danger they are going on about is how heavily it is buried so that it never seeps into mainstream.
Your not understanding is confusing to me, especially since you quoted the bit "we have a counterculture", and then replied as if they said "we have no counterculture".
There are differing opinions, but those need to be kept private for fear of retaliation.
Basically, if someone says they support gun control, it's a very safe bet they're in the center-right political band that the Democrats cater to. If someone opposes gun control, while there's a chance they're a " “Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary” -Marx "--type socialist, by sheer numbers it's far more likely they're supportive of the conservative regime.
Wait what? You adopt some right wing ideas and some leftist ideas? You are "modernist"?, you are just a right/left winger!!!(depending on their enemy)/s
Artists are clowns hired by a small elite that has the disposable income to spend. Ofcourse we live in a society that idolises the arts for some reason but most people never go to ballet or buy a sculpture. In Europe the government has subsidized theatre productions for a hundred years and it hasn't made a dent.
Just because a lot of acts have been turned mainstream and whitewashed doesn't mean they don't represent a radical departure from the status quo. And this isn't just in the US, in latin america you have reggaeton, in UK you have Grime and the rest of EU also have their own underground street culture marked by Violence, Crime, Drugs, Sex, and social issues which is very similar to Rock and Punk from back in the day.
Just like previous movements they are born from a sense of resentment and ostracism from "normal" society and a lot of the music tell tales that are often ignored had they not been made into a catchy tune that kids around the world listen to.
The highest grossing tour of 2022 was Bad Bunny's world tour [1] beating out well established acts and pretty much all his songs are in Spanish which is very surprising considering you see a lot of bilingual artists on the list.
[1]https://news.pollstar.com/2022/12/12/2022-year-end-biz-analy...
Rap han't become "whitewashed," just mainstream. And that does make it non-counterculture. The truth is that counterculture died after 1960, to the extent monoculture ever even existed in the first place (in the US). The 60's eepresent the death of monoculture, and we never moved back to one (in the US). What you are reffering to is more like hipsterism.
The playbook of "criminalize any counterculture that threatens the status quo" is arguably in continuous use now, preventing any countercultural movement from gaining that kind of scale through a combination of negative press and prosecution threats.
Sure, the hippie movement was branded countercultural. But to what purpose? Note that during the period, the US government was engaged in a large scale remaking of America both domestically and internationally. Domestically, we saw the remaking of immigration policies to no longer bias towards those of European descent, and instead towards what favored macro capitalism (the import of cheaper and low skilled labor). Internationally the US was scaling up engagement in hot and cold wars and no longer considering itself bound to the constitutional provisions for war. Lo and behold, during this period, a "counterculture" arises which glorifies drug use, the dissolution of the nuclear family and pushes forward the vapid strain of hyper individualism that we see today. Suddenly the anti-war movement is associated with drug use and degeneracy, whilst the nation's racial consciousness is broken in time to welcome a new wave of immigrants to help improve the margins of big business. Note that the current "woke" counterculture follows the same pattern. Increased individualism, sublimated racial awareness, dissolution of family, and rampant degeneracy. Meanwhile the state continues its hegemonic march of constant international agitation.
that’s the point that sticks out to me. optimize aggressively for revenue, everywhere, and we get what you describe. the counter culture can’t always be productive in a way that the mainstream can capture. the counter cultures that try for that today are things like darknet/drug markets or just cryptocurrency broadly. the latter, for the time being, seems pretty widely viewed as a dishonest, selfish, destructive thing. the former seems much more in-line with existing systems of commerce than with a social movement: full of distrust, no interactions other than buy & click.
i feel that the counter-culture at this point has to be fighting for some alternative to that optimization process. was Occupy counter-cultural? were WTO protests counter-cultural? communist/anarchist ideals — presented as an alternative to that optimization — do seem more popular with the newer generations than the older ones, but almost entirely in dialogue form than in actual, physical ways of living. perhaps the counter-cultural streak is still here but the barrier for it to progress from a flare up to a sustained thing has risen.
The difference is that there is, and intentionally so, little legibility to how crypto "does" anything. Increasingly so as you go down the rabbit hole into less prominent projects that are untethered to traditional finance or venture capital. And if we're seeing like a state, that makes it a useless technology, ties it only to crime and the underground, because it can't be seen and controlled using men with guns or tattling gossips. And from a counter-cultural perspective, that should make one go, "hmm, that's interesting." Someone who is able to access state resources while being insulated fron state coercion could be seen as "useless parasite" or "bold counter-culturalist".
Right now it is highly inconvenient to adhere to a "crypto lifestyle", even more so than it was to be a hippie. As you say, buying drugs with it is a common entry point, and it's hard to use a crypto wallet for any kind of consumer activity. And everywhere you go, the discussion is unhinged speculation with an "exit strategy". The actual believers are quite a bit fewer in number, and are more likely to be along the lines of a Vitalik than an SBF - living relatively simply and focused primarily on intellectual concerns, vs a grand-scale dishonest charlatan.
And protest movements, while visually impactful, don't seem to terrify the mainstream like crypto. In many respects they have become co-opted, part of the show.
But why are you surprised? The hippies pushed free love and drug use. The inevitable end result was more children without stable families and drug addiction. When you step over those bodies you are stepping over the fruits of the hippy ideal.
1. Hippies were ~1960s. Children of hippies would then be adults in the ~1980s, and would be grandparents now. Tenderloin's median age[1] is 38, or 20 years too young
2a. Hippies pushed marijuana and psychedelics. Weed has a 10% addiction rate. LSD and psilocybin have no addiction rate.
2b. Drugs that are addictive (heroin) had complex, controversial and conspiratorial factors [2] (and that's aside from the complexity of "addiction" itself)
2c. Alcohol and alcoholism had (and has) way more impact.
3a. Family instability (re: divorce rates) occurs in far, far more places than the hippy movement.
3b. Just because a family is stable doesn't mean it produces healthy adults
[1] https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/CA/San-Francisco... [2] https://www.vera.org/reimagining-prison-webumentary/the-past...
In the hippies case, as the movement became more mainstream the establishment funded efforts to emphasize those aspects over the other, more socialist and anti-war aspects that were the basis of the earlier counter-culture.
Just look at the evolution in the music of the movement: protest songs of the early to mid 60s (Dylan, Sam Cooke, Simon & Garfunkle...) gave way to the commercially produced, glitzy psychedelic music in the late 60s. From Surrealistic Pillows in 1967 to American Beauty in 1970 and beyond it was basically about sex, partying, navel gazing and spacing out.
The message clearly became much safer and, as it happens, more profitable.
I've even heard one conspiracy theorist say that the change in attitude for many bands was orchestrated by 3-letter agencies to influence the anti-war movement, though I don't know how much evidence there is of that.
In essence, the message in the book is the only way to win is to not play. To live as far under the radar as possible. To just not participate. That you won’t change it because it will just co-opt you making it bigger and a more dangerous war machine where you’re a complicit participant.
Kill yourself.
Seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good.
Seriously.
No this is not a joke. You’re [going], “There’s going to be a joke coming.” There’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It’s the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself
Planting seeds.
I know all the marketing people are going, “He’s doing a joke…” There’s no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend – I don’t care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations. (Machi…) Whatever, you know what I mean.
I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too: “Oh, you know what Bill’s doing? He’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market. He’s very smart.”
Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking, evil scumbags!
“Ooh, you know what Bill’s doing now? He’s going for the righteous indignation dollar. That’s a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We’ve done research – huge market. He’s doing a good thing.”
Godammit, I’m not doing that, you scum-bags! Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet.
“Ooh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market. Bill’s very bright to do that.”
God, I’m just caught in a fucking web.
“Ooh, the trapped dollar, big dollar, huge dollar. Good market – look at our research. We see that many people feel trapped. If we play to that and then separate them into the trapped dollar…”
How do you live like that? And I bet you sleep like fucking babies at night, don’t you?
>It’s hard to listen to Rage Against the Machine without laughing.
People like music for all kinds of reasons...and I see what you're getting at, but this example is a little cheesy. "I think you're all sheep for thinking your not sheep and it makes me laugh." is essentially what I'm reading.
While counter culture does get co-opted, it's not like RATM was gonna actually do anything to help us socially since music had already been commodified for a long time. Counter Culture can even START co-opted e.g. Label Music/Industry Plants.
Where this book misses is the failure to ask the question: What is the purpose of viewing yourself or acting in favor of counter culture. To look cool? To feel powerful? If those things work in your life model who cares if it's not the most "punk" thing ever. Some people live their whole lives happy being "posers" and I would consider that successful for them.
Look at the "counter-culture archetype" and how well it fits. - Dress the same to express your individuality" paradox. - Don't follow the rules but follow the rigidly defined rules about what is real "foo". - Say that you want people to think for themselves and be themselves yet get steaming mad at "posers" for not matching up with your vision or becoming adopted. - Complain about it dying out after complaining about it being popular.
It becomes like any other bigot's ever greased high velocity goalposts for what it takes to be considered acceptable.
When I was young I thought I was missing something. As I get older I get the feeling that no I didn't, it really was that incoherent and unpleasable.
I think you may be right. Counter culture today may simply be being offline.
You definitely do not carry a smartphone. You might be excused a flip phone, if only because you’re not likely to b super-connected with it, but honestly that’s pushing it; even the most primitive cellphone has sms.
Federation, onion sites, unindexed sites, something new entirely that runs on TCP/IP
Because, there was a time when being online was the counterculture. If you habituated newsgroups, IRC, BBSes, etc, you were on the fringe. Now, all of that is commonplace in some fashion. Newsgroups are basically places like this, reddit, even Facebook to some extent. IRC has its analogs in Discord, Slack, etc. BBSes are any online game community.
That brought back grad school memories. The Internet is an excellent example of this. We're watching -- in real-time -- the medium challenge society (at all levels and across boundaries).
The Internet is still an infant; yet look at its impact.
https://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programm...
I suspect like folks going back to dumb phones, magazine subscriptions - the embrace of the analog world again to some degree. This is where the rejection of the mainstream will probably hit the road.
This extends readily also to the media spheres in which people immerse themselves. The consensus on cable news, for instance, hardly represents a good-faith analysis.
𝄞 "you will not be able to stay home, brother... you will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out"
as u/neonnoodle said " At this point in history, what will qualify a true counterculture is NOT BEING ONLINE. "
I've been lucky enough to spend long periods in such hehe (forest monasteries)
The key here is the counter culture starts and ends in your heart. Get out and break out of the matrix.
Your examples do show that we are (thankfully) not a monoculture. But they place themselves outside of our culture, instead trying to influence.
A good example of counter culture is BLM, Extinction Rebellion or Occupy Wallstreet.
Only thing: those are movements, not cultures. And they are, IMHO, generally ephemeral.
The AP even has it on tests for college credit
I think some of my examples do try to change wider society, but it is just more subtle and less overt/wholesale. I think there will be activists/evangelicals in any sub-culture.
>LGBT
>counter culture
Endlessly supported by literally every news outlet, major tech company, big 5 sports league, F1000, university, and at least half of the political class. You’re not counter to any major institution, lmao. You’re not the resistance
Colour-blind antiracism, preparing for global warming instead of pushing green deal & capitalism are countercultures now.
Your examples of counter culture are alternative lifestyles.
The author (Kirk Thaker) and his cited author (Ted Gioia) were talking about media and entertainment content. Basically, the "long-tail" of obscure/experimental content not being widely exposed and whatever content they do see all looks the same to them.
Those are orthogonal areas of counter culture. E.g. You have a digital nomad living 100% in a camping RV ... but watches the same popular Netflix shows as everybody else. Or, you have the person that ignores popular sports and tv shows and only reads obscure Japanese comics... but works at a conventional 9-to-5 office job.
Take a look at Twitter on pride month, even Raytheon changes their logo to a rainbow version. That stuff is so mainstream it hurts. It's a counterculture in Saudi Arabia where the logos don't change and they throw gay people off of buildings, but in the US/Europe it's part of the dominant culture.
Primary culture loves to pull from counterculture after the morsel has been thoroughly sanitized and monetized.
And you think weapon manufacturers are sincerely concerned about discrimination and human rights in general?
Mainstream culture has been co-opting countercultures since decades. There are even words like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkwashing_(LGBT) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing.
Music genres like punk, rock, rap etc have been watered down in the same way. And many other things.
That's the opposite of going mainstream.
You make it sound like a bad thing. I'm happy we don't throw people off buildings as often.
A rainbow flag is not techno/house/zines/novels, advertising is not culture. Advertising is by definition the antithesis of culture, adopting cultural norms. Ultimately it will be hollow and opportunistic because that’s its mission. An ad showing a leatherbear is not culture, and I don’t think you will ever see a leather show on prime time, if at all. Yet a culture it is (and possibly a lifestyle, but one doesn’t imply the other).
It's possible that maybe the reality is that there's some aspect of abiltity-to-be commercialized that has always limited counter cultures reach? Or maybe that's an alternate way of valuing culture - can it produce concepts that can be adopted by the majority.
Ironically, given the replies, it seems that Christian communities (i.e., Hudderites or Mennonites) had discovered what you discovered a century ago, but the very nature of the counterculture they express limits their impact on the mainstream?
A counterculture is a set of social norms that clash with the establishment to the point of generating a credible threat of replacing it and creating a new cultural reality. LGBTQIA people living in warehouses and doing orgies is not a common way of living for sure, but it sounds more like a bout of isolated risky behaviour than a new cultural norm.
The other clear thing to me, is that enough people find the dominant culture so objectionable that they are inclined to form other cultures, even when there are massive social barriers to doing so.
I think that one positive change, and this seems to be what TFA was really trying to say, is that it has become somewhat less punitive to seek out these other cultures and join them, largely because of our digital connections.
One thing I have found valuable in thinking about our culture, is living outside of it for a while. Experiencing another dominant culture and trying to gel with it gave me a lot of perspective on both how systems we take for granted can be different and work just fine, and on how hard it is for foreigners in our country to just exist here.
So yeah, I think counter-culture is alive and well, perhaps a bit too easy to access, but that's for the most part a good thing.
Rainbow capitalism isn't LGBT culture. It's attempts at getting our money.
The large majority of queer culture cannot be commercially re-packaged and will never be part of the dominant culture.
I'd say today's counter culture is people eschewing corporate life, sort of like it was before corporate culture took over.
Does the second Q stand for something else than the first? Or is it a typo?
When surfing around, it becomes clear there are several narratives (or competing narratives on some topics) that are present throughout our culture. The truth is that most of the media consumed is either owned by one of a few corporations, or is heavily inspired by their work. Now we are dealing with a many head hydra.
I would posit that in the current time, we have a wide variety of well established subcultures whereas for most of the 1900s we didn't. Today our subcultures can exist easily due to mass media, whereas for most of the 1900s they couldn't - the subcultures were more "underground" - underground in the sense that you really needed to be part of a community in person to be part of the subculture. The "counter culture" was a push back on the smotheringness of the monoculture. Now that the monoculture is not so smothering and the subcultures can breath, there's less pushback - there's less "counter".
As an example, other people have mentioned furries. They do have a pretty easily distinguishable aesthetics which you’ll spot immediately when you look at their art or their fashion. They might all share a pro LGBTQI+ agenda, but that is as far as their politics will agree, and besides most people have the same political view about LGBTQI+ anyway.
Even in the anglosphere this isn't true. Those with differing views mostly keep silent. But get them in private or anonymously (e.g. a fellow train passenger) and a wide variety of views emerge.
They definitely do not. The majority do, but there are plenty of weirdly conservative and almost traditionalist furry sects.
> besides most people have the same political view about LGBTQI+ anyway.
Most people do not. Even among people who openly say the same thing, their internal private views can vary a whole lot. I know plenty of people who are openly pro LGBTQI+, but have more ambivalent feelings about popular narratives that they don't publicize for fear of public shaming and ostricization. They aren't internally against it, but their opinions are more nuanced than they feel people will tolerate.
These people are not counterculture, even if they are a minority, because they control the culture industry.
I disagree. Can you expand on your claim?
YouTube and TikTok are not countercultural, even if some users are using those platforms for genuine countercultural creative acts. By definition, a social media "influencer" with millions of followers is not countercultural.
> a social media "influencer" with millions of followers is not countercultural.
A social media "influencer" could be more important to a younger audience than other mediums, meaning this is the "culture" they will try to counter.
Edit: narrowed it down a little.
My mom has no idea who PewDiePie is.
Now you can read and listen to the Beat poets anywhere, but that would have been challenging in the early '50s. You had to go to the right coffee shop on the right night and if you went and saw what was going on you might question if these were geniuses pushing the frontiers of expression or a bunch of degenerates exploiting impressionable young people.
You can still have that experience today, probably easier than ever.
To be fair, a lot of people still have this question about the Beat Generation.
1. "techies" are some uniform block of people.
2. "techies" as a whole were at any point an anti-mainstream counterculture.
Many/most techies throughout history have been employed by the rich and powerful - individuals, private corporations, government institutions, religious institutions (if we go back far enough). So, the extent to which they are part of a counter-culture is through a critical evaluation of their own roles. There are also "independent" techies, of course - but those too often from well-off social strata and do not have much of a mind to subvert dominant culture on the social level (as opposed to in their personal habits).
... and I personally can't read the article since the corporate firewall I'm behind is blocking it, so that's kind of ironic :-(
Many people who openly identify as “tech” people asking for new features, more or less complaining about the resistance to such new features and arguing that the cultural resistance doesn’t make sense.
Now these tech people tend to also be new to mastodon. But they also seem pretty oblivious to the fact that they are the mainstream which many on the platform tried to avoid or establish a counter culture from. They don’t seem to realise that leaving Twitter in 2022 was a comparatively mainstream thing to do, and that the resistance they meet often has a point or perspective that they haven’t even thought of and is coming from people who are just as technically inclined and informed but just don’t tie that to their identity so tightly or openly.
Broad generalisations, but I think it’s definitely playing out to some extent.
Its made on purpose to stop nontechnical people from joining
Unlike the US of the 1950s, there is no apparent single pervasive monolithic culture — and thus there is no real “counterculture” that can exist in universal opposition to that dominant culture across the US.
But rest assured that to the people living lives incongruent with their communities — including perhaps any “trads” in SF, NYC, etc. — their lives will feel pretty countercultural.
You don't have to be in NY, SF, or wherever to experience the trendy culture. It is pervasive everywhere.
So it seems clear that "mainstream" culture is not monolithic, merely dominant. You can always find bubbles everywhere, but if outside of those bubbles you find one concept being preached endlessly - it's pretty safe to say that that concept is the "mainstream" culture, and those that run contrary to such would inherently be counter-culture.
Another point on trads being a counter culture: You can tell a counterculture is real by the presence of posers and wannabes. Trad culture has this too. Ex: men who hide behind marble statue pfps and are actually single dudes living in a big city.
Tradcath: traditional lifestyle Catholics
Trad homeschoolers: arguably some of the most steadfast and longest holding countercultures. They literally have children and raise them opposite or tangential to the current culture norms.
Trad Christian theonomist: complimentarian views on marriage, anti secular government, often homesteaders.
Trad chads: men pursuing lives of purity at any social cost. Staunchly opposed to todays hookup culture and LGBT influences.
Several US states are trying to make it illegal to be trans or even dress in a gender nonconfirming way. Queerness still carries a certain amount of real, physical risk; Norway Pride 2022 was cancelled because somebody shot up a gay bar and murdered two people.
An astonishing SIX Supreme Court justices are Catholic. Was there ever a time a countercultural group had that kind of representation in government? Were there ever six justices who were hippies, or beatniks, or hobos? If you sincerely believe that
> Trads are definitely the counter culture now.
may I invite you to name another counter culture that comprised a majority of the US Supreme Court?
The problem is that people conflate feeling aggrieved with being marginalized. The reality is that "trads" have plenty of representation and power, up to the governor or multiple states (like Desantis) and a former president. Self-identified trads may feel like they're exploited, or something. But the reality is they are a huge part of the population with ample political power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_in_the_United_...
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/391649/relig...
Wearing rosary beads sounds like a counter culture move against the church if you ask me. Rosaries are almost sacred.
Maybe I just need to stop taking public transportation and walking the city. Perhaps suburbs feel further from the precipice.
Like I see that America is in decline and has a decent chance of falling apart in my lifetime (I'm 34), but what exactly am I going to do about it? Nobody in charge cares, they're too busy fiddling. If you can't stop the decline and have to live it, why not try to enjoy what you have while you have it?
Warren Buffet can't have a side gig running scrap in an unregistered truck with a Newport hanging out of his mouth.
Long hn thread about it from some months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31886687
I want to be charitable but it's hard to interpret this attitude as anything other than willful ignorance of very obvious facts.
I nominate being an unapologetic white male as the counter culture of our current time. Just watch how many downvotes you'll get on any social media platform for having this position.
So if you get downvotes, it may be because you made a bad argument, not just because you come off as having an axe to grind.
I think there's a valid point lurking there, but you botched it. Surely you appreciate that multiple things can be true at the same time, and there are numerous ways that white men have advantages still.
Oh come on, that is not their main goal. Its all a scam to cover up things like unchecked military spending/war, unchecked government corruption at the corporate level among many other things.
There is a reason why this meme continues to float around the web.
The thing is despite the media focus, it still is the actual case that such minorities do not have actual power in society in terms of actual statistics, but the media is just a mirage, the reality is that certain disparities still exist, despite media representation. This might be the slightly different aspect of modern culture, that it does not amplify the already existing power group explicitly.
All evidence points towards LGBTQ always existing but just becoming more open.
Trads being Counter Culture? That's the same double speak that gets us Citizens United and Right to Work. Where did these trads get their radically traditional values? From the majority.
Nope. The number of letters keeps increasing as more people are brought in. In schools these days it's trendy to be anything but straight.
I mean yes, physically they are a minority. Culturally, they are incredibly mainstream. There are examples everywhere.
There are tons of big movies and TV shows featuring gay people coming out.
_Every_ company changes their logo during pride month.
Look at the Apple Watch or iPhone, they come preloaded with Pride wallpapers and watch faces, they produce pride bands for the watch, which sell very well.
Disneyland has Gay Days.
Defcon has a massive attached event called Queercon that dwarfs all other subcons.
Googlers who are gay are called Gayglers.
So many famous actors and politicians are openly gay.
Biden literally just did a major interview in the Whitehouse with a TikToker who's only claim to fame was making videos about becoming trans.
I could list SO many more examples of this everywhere in our culture, and these are random things I could think of off the top of my head, but they are decent examples of culture I think.
I don't have a problem with any of this, I think it's great. But there is absolutely no way you can claim that this is not the mainstream now.
It sounds like you consider talking about trads that way to be dangerous, like it might bring them back or something.
The idea that LGBTQ is a minority in the population is true, but they are a plurality of contemporary expressed culture
> I think this is ridiculous, LGBTQ is a minority.
Odd, I don't get that impression when I watch Netflix. Or consume any mainstream media for that matter.Specifically I think the counter-cultural part in terms of the rise of like...young trad Catholics/religious people is the idea of not partaking in the world. Our current attention economy spends a lot of time trying to get people (including adolescents) to spend their time watching/consuming/interacting, be constantly available, etc. The idea that you don't have to participate is the counter-cultural part.
Letting the trads speak a bit more might shock us just as much as the past minorities shocked our forefathers, but look where are: we evolved have't we ? Maybe we can ditch some dictat we imposed on ourselves in our chase for ever deeper reactionary counter-traditionalism.
Consider the 'culture'. Whose side is the balance of power really behind? There are massive influences and money behind traditional christian and conservative values - they have a practical stranglehold on the politics of roughly half of America (by landmass). Is it really 'counter' the culture to embody those values in areas where they are the norm?
I think we don't have 'a' counterculture because we don't have 'a' culture, a unified one, in this country. Trad is as counterculture in California as radical queer/left ideology is in Alabama, and it gets muddier when you look at individual pockets of the opposite in rural areas or cities respectively.
If anything, this cultural split over core values would make anything else - 'radical centrism' for instance - a counterculture in and of itself; except, that tends to be the tack taken by a lot of media (NPR, Meet the Press, etc.). Can that be counterculture?
Alternatively, consider outside of mainstream politics. Co-op organizations, hacker/DIY circles, and protest movements are all certainly 'counter' the norm, but do they all have their own 'culture?' At best they have shared memes, no real ideological unity or even goddang clothing preferences.
Overall it's been more of an ideological bar brawl than a hive mind aligned in any particular direction.
Like everyone says I like to form my own opinions, but sometimes life is just simpler when I don’t voice those opinions publicly. Most of the time whatever shit storm was brewing is already forgotten by lunchtime anyway.
The people who brought in the mainstream culture are now older; they are now the fuddy-duddies. Time to move over for the next generation; it's either complimentary or contradictory and sometimes both.
Also, some aspects of the counterculture like the Manson family, Various Sex Cults, or Jim Jones Cult, massive drug use, the huge increases in crime were not good. However, now all the ugly parts have been ignored and idealized by the people who took the hippie culture mainstream.
Look at how whitewashed hippies are now.
If you trust a nine-year-old boy to tell us they're actually a girl, and you trust an eleven-year-old child who wants to inject puberty blockers, and you oblige a thirteen-year-old girl who wants to inject testosterone and cut off her breasts at fifteen, where is the logical barrier to other forms of sexual consent?
Hope moral people will never not be completely weirded out by the amount of tech oriented folk who look up to him or aspire to be like him.
It may 'terrify' some ordinary folks and mainstream journalists, but that's more about the massive amounts of fraud and the enablement of crime than it is about it taking over in any significant way.
I don't know where you get the idea of "increased individualism" from "woke culture". Racial justice advocates and queer leaders often talk about community and the importance of banding together - so much so that opponents have taken to branding that as things like "communism" or "black supremacy".
As for "dissolution of family", that's an anti-queer talking point; the nuclear family is not the only form of family. "Rampant degeneracy" is just a values disagreement but framed in terms of good and evil.
There are similar conspiratorial views that the mainstreaming of Woke has been an elite push to distract/disrupt the class consciousness Occupy movement.
“ the producer of mass culture has no use for experience, his own or another’s, which cannot be immediately shared. What is endured by one human being alone seems to him unreal, or even an effect of madness.”
Harold Rosenberg, 1948
https://www.commentary.org/articles/harold-rosenberg-2/the-h...
Credit to Frank, he managed to walk the fine line of being in pop culture but never fully embraced by it.
And yet the one protest that looks to have a chance of actually making any significant change is the once that starves the very systems itself. Doing less instead of more actively works. It is a fascinating thing to see in action.
The class you describe is just as attuned to texting and collaborating with others using smartphones.
Sexual acts are definitely culture. "Giving head" used to not be a part of mainstream culture and now it is. It is a part of our language, or media, and most people's private lives.
Separately, the word "kink" is better than fetish in this context. Kink means not mainstream. Fetish means primarily psychological rather than primarily physical. I think that all kinky non-fetish things are bound to inevitably enter mainstream culture, it's just slow because of censorship.
We're now lacking both, mostly due to the transformations of the information age and how that has split many homogeneous cultures into numerous segregated identity clusters. For what it is worth (which is nothing) in 1992 I predicted what we see now; it has unfolded exactly as I expected.
The term did take on a wider meaning in political philosophy and critical theory since, however.
Now that I think about it, Embrace Extend Extinguish can be understood as the explicit application of the process recuperation to the free software counterculture.
You've basically described cultural art and music since at least the 1950s. Elvis dared to play black music and gyrate his hips. Madonna rolled around in a wedding dress talking about virgins. RAP broke a whole bunch of them. Cardi B sang about WAP. If a band just sings about relationship troubles and drugs like everyone else, their music / art probably isn't very remarkable.
The thing is the statistics still speak for themselves. Despite the media, the PR campaigns, for example, software development still skews largely male. The spoken culture extols DEI, but the actual reality is still what is it by statistics.
On some level, this might just be recuperation in action, but the point is that it still is ironically the culture of the majority. It isn't being "pushed" by the minority because the minority is by definition, the minority. It is being adopted (even recuperated) by the majority, often into a form that is acceptable for it. The difference is that the majority isn't really centering itself in that media. Except that on some level, if you listen to Slavoj Zizek, it actually is.
Anyway, whether media or external culture really makes a difference materially (like minority representation in workplaces of high paying careers matching that of the population) it at least clear at this point that it either would take a lot of time to take effect, or possibly (probably even likely at this point) it has no real effect on actual power relations in society.
[0] putting this in quotes because progressive encompasses more than what is accepted by the mainstream culture.
> By raw statistics, white men still wield most power in American society (and thus the world), and so the progressive culture that is dominant in media is the culture being written and put into vogue by people who are white men if you merely draw on the statistics.
Those would primarily be "progressive" white men though, which still gets to the in-group/out-group dynamic where they will more closely associate with a racial or sexual minority then they would to a conservative white male (a value match vs a skin color match). So the effect is the same, is it not?Wearing a rosary around the neck is common and accepted in some Catholic cultures and frowned upon in others. There is no general Catholic religious objection to it, it is just a matter of local cultural practice. (Publicly flaunting it while engaging in scandalous behavior is more generally frowned upon, of course, as heaping hypocrisy on top of the already-bad behavior.)
Wearing a 15-decade rosary on the hip, in the same place a soldier would wear a sword, is traditional for the Dominican order.
[1] For a cousin-in-law's son's christening in an extremely old Church. Super cool.
Society has mostly just discovered it exists.
And while the internet changed societies, it did not "change societies", as in the western world democracies function pretty much as they did in the 80s, but with digital tools instead of analog. We did not see huge changes like when printing was invented: The world map is still the same
With the except of publicly funded libraries, it might be notable to suggest that, in many/most communities, everything else on this list is struggling to exist.
We’ve replaced a once diverse and diffused economy with a “all or nothing” labor workplace. Either you are “in the system” working full time or multiple part-time gigs, on assistance, or on the streets. There’s no real room for transients, hippies, hobos and the like to sustain themselves as they had.
Just like ad-hoc work has been outlawed to "protect the workers", minimalist shelter has been outlawed to "protect the tenants".
Both of these endeavors provide some benefit to a certain vulnerable groups, but they absolutely cut the legs out from under other even more vulnerable groups.
I can build a decent shack for less $1,000, or a crappy one for $200. To be clear, I wouldnt want to live in it, but it would be a hell of a lot better than living on the sidewalk. Meanwhile, low income housing projects tag in at more than a million per unit, so few get built.
People say it is inhumane to let people live in a shack, small rooms, or flop houses so it should be illegal. However, they balk at the cost of the alternatives and people are simply left out in the street.
A free person can't voluntarily choose to live in a 8x8' shack, but the state can lock you in a 8x8' cell for disobeying.
Until then, if police forces are upholding a mainstream concept of law and order resulting in said disproportionality, BLM is countercultural.
Otherwise, if acknowledging the aims of basically what's a human rights movement via flags and spots on AP tests constitutes inclusion into mainstream culture, then the mainstream culture is absurd and perverse.
Just because something occurs does not mean there is no mainstream opposition.
I would go further and say that the most basic elements of the BLM were never countercultural.
opposition to excessive police force has been mainstream since the 70s-80s.
The only part of BLM that is actually controversial and countercultural is the idea of abolishing the police. As a result, the majority of BLM supporters reject this aspect.
There are a great many subcultures that would like legal boundaries shifted, and when they care enough they become interest groups participating in the democratic process.
Even the blandest bland blandy that ever blanded is not going to agree with all the laws and societal boundaries being set exactly the way they are. Either that means there's no such thing as a mainstream culture, or we have to understand noisy clashes between subcultures don't make one or the other a counter culture.
I think the way we're discussing that something obviously SUBculture is being confused for a COUNTERculture is an argument in OPs favor that we don't have much (highly visible) counterculture right now.
A counterculture is in the face of the mainstream culture, trying to change the cult. It is countering the mainstream. It is activist or, at the least, unabashed with the intention of normalization.
I wish the people on 4chan had the stupid childish fun that I did 15 years ago.
You and I did not use the same 4chan in 2007...
I learned new slurs there, ways to insult people that I could have never imagined.
I read posts from a schizoid that claimed to have evidence that the government was influencing his life through the ratings of popular animes on My Anime List.
I saw child porn get posted regularly.
I saw extremely hateful posts about women, extremely hateful posts about people that aren't white, extremely hateful posts about literally anyone.
I believe you're looking back with rose tinted glasses.
Yeah, the disgusting stuff today always was there, but it was a relatively small part of the site, and now it's the vast majority of it. I'm not going to pretend that it was ever "good", but you can't pretend that it hasn't changed at all.
This was called trolling for the lulz, you fell for it, & seem to have not realized even 15 years later.
Schizoposting as a fun pasttime has been a thing for users of 4chan/online forums forever. Go watch some South Park episodes centered on Gerald Broflovski trolling. Can’t remember which season off the top of my head. It may help you to understand if things don’t click.
Anecdotally, actual schizophrenics tend to post endlessly into their own little void on traditional social media, often not slightly being aware of or caring that they have either absolutely zero engagement or anybody seeing their profiles at all.
You realize you've just confessed you've grown old (and likely cranky)?
I also don't think there's a "getting out of touch" aspect of holding the opinion that silly stupidity is not the same thing as angry paranoia.
I see this becoming the norm in the future. Hook up culture is simply too dangerous (for both men and women) to be sustainable long term. It's a cultural hangover from the days of "free love" that simply does not map to the modern world anymore.
TC would be different in that the premise is opposite, that they're pursuing heterosexual monogamy and are voluntarily foregoing a life of sexual promiscuity in light of that pursuit. This group highly values the person they're pursuing and places a high degree of respect on the opposite gender.
If you say you support traditional values, you immediately get insulted as an “incel” or similar.
Why is it okay for one side to be angry, but not the other? This is such a commonly used accusation to deflate someone else's point. Making them seem emotional, and therefore illogical.
FWIW, I don't think the person you're replying to looks even a little bit angry in that post. The point of view seems well considered.
If you think he sounds neutral, unaffected, rational, I wonder if it's just that you already agree with him.
2a. Recreational drug use cannot be so neatly compartmentalised as you might think. The only reason I tried marijuana and psychedelics but refused speed was because I was a nerd who researched things on erowid. I don't know if you've met young working class party-goers, but most are not so discerning.
2b. The quote you provided doesn't support what you said.
2c. It has a significant impact, but you're delusional if you think it has more of an impact than amphetamines and heroin. I'm certainly not here to defend alcoholism.
3a. Free Love is going to result in more accidental pregnancies and more children being born in unstable situations. I surely don't need to explain this.
3b. No, but it damn sure helps.
How many TV shows, movies, or songs have come out in the last 10 years that featured Catholics in any way or catholic imagery, or even just general traditional values? Like maybe 1?
How many TV shows, movies, and songs have come out featuring gay people or gay culture? A huge number.
Compare this state to the 60's when the hippies were the counterculture, how many mainstream movies and shows came out featuring them? Were they the cultural mainstream? The answer is obviously no. Movies of that day were being made by the then-mainstream trads.
We were never talking about representation in government. If you want to have an honest conversation about religious representation in government you will very quickly be labeled an anti-semite.
That you are 35 (hi, 36) and raised by people who came of age during the hippy time (also, hi, same!), I would presume, explicitly means you were not a result of hippy free love attitudes, and were a planned child, since those were ~60s and we're both 80s babies.
PS - Props to you for researching on Erowid!
Aside from any differences in observations about "working class party goers" (which, boy howdy do I have), if your theory is that "hippy attitudes towards their drugs cause addictive drug use today", that's going to run into a host of problems starting with the differences in which drugs.
I don't understand how direct testimony that significant power (political, governmental, social, etc etc) at the time was directed to destabilizing the community you're talking about doesn't support my assertion that any conversation around addiction in those communities is going to be complicated.
I'd bet $100 (probably more) that alcoholism has a larger overall impact than (illegal) drug addiction, if only because of there are far more people with an addiction to alcohol than there are people with addictions to illegal drugs; ie total case count. I can't speak to statistic regarding relative harm on a per-person basis; ie - yeah I wouldn't be surprised if the average heroin addict experiences more harm from their addiction than the average alcoholic.
Similarly, bet you $100 that abstinence-only education results in more accidental pregnancies and more children being born into unstable situations than "Free Love" ever did then or "sex-positivity" does today. If only because (IME) free love attitudes largely also come with pro-birth-control attitudes.
Re: Bets - I'm serious. We'd OFC have to formalize the question and answer-methodology ala prediction marketplaces, which might functionally prevent an actual bet, but regardless, I'm serious.
Why is it taking till the 2020's for it to be so obvious though?
A counterculture isn't defined by whether or not it's considered cool, but by whether or not it is actively participated in and shared among the majority of people. Queer identities may have a lot of public support (and even that's debatable), but queerness is not part of most people's lives. Western societies are still cis- and heteronormative. Queer culture is an other, not the mainstream.
Counterculture may or may not be explicitly political. It typically involves criticism or rejection of currently powerful institutions, with accompanying hope for a better life or a new society.
But if I'm completely besides the mark, apologies
This might sound quaint to some critical ears of the US, but that is the basis of the law and US systems. The US citizens only need to be reminded of this fact and decide whether they want to reinforce that fact with their personal choices - nonviolent protest, voting, etc.
Edit-That might not seem related to the definition of counterculture, but it absolutely is. The US has a culture of multiculturalism. It has the Amish and lets them largely have their culture within the larger culture. There are many such examples with gradients all over and within the US. Sure, sometimes some of those subcultures get political and exert themselves. But they do it within the peaceful political system as a strong trend.
And where exactly can I find them?
Trough the corporate algorithm, that doesn't even let me rewind a video?
Counterculture exists and sone of those expose their lifestyle and projects on these plattforms for fame and money, but that culture surely does not "live" on those plattforms.
It's worse than that. You used to have to "sell out" to corporate interests before your countercultural cache evaporated. Most YouTube creators "sell out" to advertisers the second they start their channel because getting any revenue on YouTube requires following YouTube's rules. And these rules are getting increasingly draconian with swearing now being sort-of banned. Also forget remixing existing cultural artifacts like older countercultural movements because that's just asking for an automated DMCA strike.
The real counterculture is showing up to work and feeding your kids
You show up to the owner, negotiate on the spot and start working.
the gig economy requires a credit card, bank account, background check , smartphone, app install etc – and all the tracking and hassle that goes with it.
The gig economy is a set of relationships between the state of problems and pay. It pressures workers with the fewest skills to successively solve the same problem.
The opposite is also true. How may TV shows, movies, or songs have come out in the last 10 years that featured a guy working in a cubicle making Excel spreadsheets all day? Were they the cultural mainstream? The answer is obviously no.
> We were never talking about representation in government
Who wasn't? Culture isn't just what's streaming on Netflix. It's what people live every day of their lives. Hippies in the 60s weren't counterculture because they were making memes. They were counterculture because they were creating communities that were counter to the mainstream culture of the rest of the country -- communal rather than individualistic, based on chosen family rather than biological family, in pursuit of enlightenment rather than material success, etc.
>If you want to have an honest conversation about religious representation in government you will very quickly be labeled an anti-semite.
There it is! The anti-semitic dog whistle that is the foundation of so much "trad" identity. Literally 100% of US presidents are Christian but somehow it's the Jews who are in control of everything. And if everything is degenerate and wrong, then Jews are the ones promoting a conspiracy to undermine and destroy America.
This is literally the same underpinnings as Nazi Germany. No wonder there is so much overlap between "Trads" and white supremacy.
I love Jewish people, I have many friends who are Jewish, I have no problem with their representation anywhere. In fact, I have seriously considered joining the Jewish faith.
I am just saying if you go down the path of comparing religious representation in government, you are literally not allowed to have an honest conversation without doing exactly what you just did. All you have to say is "I found the dog whistle, this conversation is over".
> It's what people live every day of their lives. I see Pride stickers and representation in all forms of media every single day for the LGBT community. How is that not what we are all living every day of our lives?
At this point we're just trying to define what culture actually is.
The last one I can think of was "Touched By an Angel" and that is over 20 years old now.
(edited to add an omitted word)
The norm these days is for people to fall away from their religion, not to join one. I think this is obvious for anyone to see, but Pew has done lots of surveys on the decline of Christianity in America: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/modeling-the...
Otherwise, I flat do not exist online.
People are ASTOUNDED when I ask them to crop me out, or to ask my permission before posting with me in it. I'm always polite, but people act like I asked them to lick the bottom of my foot.
It's very strange.
Most people are happy to have photos with themselves in it. Like it or not, you're the strange one in this situation.
The hippies who were burning their draft cards, dropping out of school, and living as mendicants were a counterculture that could not truly coexist with the mainstream.
These dramatic characters inspired a youth culture that adopted more moderate signifiers (long hair, folk/rock music, nonviolent protest, maybe vegetarianism/meditation/yoga) that could coexist with the mainstream.
Naziism was counterculture in 1920's Germany, Mainstream in the 30s and 40's, and back to counterculture now.
It just means that some parts of their platform have become mainstreamed. A simple and non-controversial example is that the Nazis were extremely Progressive on animal rights. Just because modern political parties also endorse animal rights, that does not make them Nazis
Another example is that Nazi rhetoric relied heavily on utilitarian analysis of the greater good. I don't think it's reasonable to say that any party that promotes the greater good over individual freedoms is a Nazi party.
If you look at the cultural artifacts of royalists you’ll find they enjoy and attend events around, for example royal weddings, they gather in forums where they share gossip around, e.g. the Romanovs. It doesn’t matter if they like to keep Putin as president, or if they would like to re-inaugurate the Romanovs as tsars, as political believes are orthogonal to the culture (although I do admit it would be kind of weird to find an anarchist royalist). To that extent I think of royalists more like Eurovision fans.
Likewise if you look at the quintessential prison abolitionist Angela Davis. Now describe her speech, her hairstyle, her public events, etc. You’ll find many prison abolitionists that don’t share any of it, however if you’ll look for people that share these cultural artifacts, you’ll find a bunch of radicals. Radicals is exactly the cultural group which I would ascribe Angela Davis as belonging to.
Then greenwhashing is real ecology?
You don’t, which is why I said:
> or even different parts of the same city
But while it is present almost everywhere, it is not pervasive everywhere. Surely at your private Christian university there are many who hold traditional views — just as there are some at Berkeley, near me — and I’d be pretty surprised to learn that the kids painting your school’s mascot represent a majority perspective there.
In our culture, almost any values from prior generations are treated as suspect. We live in an extremely progressive time when compared against historical periods.
My particular gripe with this is how religion is viewed in popular culture. Despite our supposed multicultural values, much of the discussion on religion remains focused on Western/Abrahamic religions. Psychology/psychiatry is the new religion which is supposed to be able to guide our mental/spiritual health journey, but I'm of the opinion that it is failing miserably in this area, and we should be doing more to integrate ideas that have survived for thousands of years for a reason.
"Present almost everywhere" is in fact what pervasive means :)
The thesaurus lists these words as some synonyms of pervasive:
Widespread, prevalent, common, present, popular, majority, predominant.[0]
Just because the culture isn't accepted by every single person on planet earth doesn't mean it's not pervasive. There were plenty of pockets of communities in the early 20th century and late 19th century that didn't follow the traditional norms of Christianity that existed in the west. But I think we would both agree that Christianity/catholicism was pervasive in the west in those time periods.
After all, Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Darwin, Marx, Bertrand Russell and more were popular with different communities at the time, even though they were definitely counter to the pervasive culture of Christianity/catholicism then.
And I agree with you about how it's surprising that even at a Christian university, the traditional values of Christianity aren't taught! The example I gave was just one of the things I thought of off the top of my head. There were several other examples that gave me the feeling that the majority of the students weren't interested in traditional values. Chapel was a running joke among the students, nobody really cared and just went since the credit was required. People in positions of leadership that didn't align with the trendy culture slowly got replaced throughout my time there. We routinely got lectured on diversity and equity and how the university was devoted to it. I have friends who are gay that let me know how widespread the lgbt+ community at the university was (among professors and students).
I could go on, but my point was that even in the rural south, plenty of people are afraid to go against the trendy culture. My experience was simply some anecdata to your presumption that the rural South does not have a significant majority of people also following the trends of liberal cities. It's definitely less pronounced, but it's also definitely pervasive.
College kids on a university campus being fearful of speaking out against "trendy culture" is not evidence of "a significant majority of people also following the trends of liberal cities" -- not least because that is a very small population in the rural south. Even merely attending college is something only half of 18-22 year olds do.
Universities are also one of the specific geographic concentrations I was alluding to in my earlier post, that can exist within an area that is otherwise culturally distinct. A culture being dominant on a university campus does not necessarily make it dominant elsewhere in town -- and it does not mean that folks holding traditional values constitute a counterculture. But do they on a college campus? Sure.
Nothing more biblical than that, since the bible is polyvocal and therefore contains positions that are in tension and even on occasion outright opposition with one another.
> The students couldn't care less about the traditional aspects of Christianity.
Which/whose tradition?
And the youths are sometimes less invested in tradition you say?
> trendy culture
"Trendy" isn't an insight, it's a dismissal, and it's one that misses the insight that the parent tried to offer you.
Well, yes and no. The mainstream culture was far more dominant in the 50s than even 20 years later. And of course there were countless little (and often not-at-all-little!) cultures going on at the time -- and still going on.
But "counterculture" is not merely "alternative culture" -- and no one would write a post describing America today as lacking "alternative culture" because it's both false and also meaningless.
In the 1950s, regular church attendance was over 50%, union membership was at 35% of private sector workers, there were 3 channels on TV, and they predominantly espoused a particular leave-it-to-beaver culture that typified what was perceived as mainstream culture. The fact that it was not actually mainstream in the sense that fewer than half of Americans actually lived that way, is mostly irrelevant.
The '60s counterculture was not merely an "alternative culture"; it was powerful because it made it appear that the progeny of mainstream culture were condemning it; they questioned the power structure of that mainstream culture, despite being its plausible beneficiaries, and they were much more threatening to it than any other alternative cultures at the time (or, maybe, since) exactly because they were perceived as products of that monolithic mainstream culture.
In the US, there is currently no single monolithic culture being preached endlessly in the same way 1950s culture commanded media attention, it's not clear there ever will be one again without a dramatic turn towards the authoritarian, and so it's not at all clear what a national-level counterculture would even look like anymore?
Nothing has that level of control today. There are more major organizations, and they have much more divergent positions. As a result, the culture has fragmented, becoming multiple cultures. There is no "mainstream" any more. There are multiple major streams, but no one mainstream.
Of course people in a movement about freedom, finding yourself, and spirituality would generally respond one way if asked, "Hey should we go get involved in a war on the other side of the world, to try to imperil the reach and influence of a geopolitical competitor?" but the core philosophy was not only apolitical, but largely anti-political: "Do what you want... man." Everything was largely based on a loose interpretation of Eastern philosophy which is similarly much more about the pursuit (and search) for the betterment of one's inner self.
The culture you're describing sounds much more like the Yippie [3] culture, which is something extremely different than hippy. As for authoritarianism - I'd argue that the lack of authoritarianism is precisely what enables counter-cultures. You're not going to see a counter-culture movement in places like Saudi Arabia. And I think something similar is happening in the US. Had the Occupy Movement been treated similarly to the hippies, I think there's a strong argument to be made that it would still exist.
[1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=were+hippies+political&sou...
[2] - https://www.history.com/news/vietnam-war-hippies-counter-cul...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_International_Party
Beyond that, I was not claiming the mainstream culture as authoritarian, only that reconsolidating media control could perhaps be a result of a resurgence of authoritarianism.
I think we mostly agree, btw.
Half of Americans don't have that in their account.
Counterculture has nothing to do with either.
It's also pretty absurd on its face to believe the straight white male is persecuted. I don't believe you need me to refute it.
People lie about anything they can get away with.
When only one side of the story is being heard, people claiming victimhood because of a singular external issue are almost always grossly misrepresenting the situation.
See also: "I got fired because my boss / my car / my dog / etc."
> It's still legal in some states to claim panic when killing a gay or trans person, just because they're gay/trans and it shocked you into killing them.
The idea that deceiving someone into having sex with you is considered "shocking" and not "rape" astounds me. You can't induce arousal in someone, lure them into a position of vulnerability and spring surprises on them in the dark-- unless you're trying to become a martyr and add to the body count.
We already had to outlaw "pozzing" since the gays couldn't be bothered to disclose minor things like positive HIV status to unsuspecting partners. Now we're supposed to be cool with "stealthing"/"surprise sex" from the trans? It seems there is a pathological dishonesty at play here.
The laws should be changed-- LGBTs should be held more accountable for deceiving others. Murder has never been an acceptable response to fraud, so that needs to change too. This is not an example of sympathetic behavior on either side. I don't understand why you even brought it up.
I don't think how widespread a piece of media is has a strong correlation with its impact. Yes, several billion people probably know who Grumpy Cat is. But it doesn't matter. Our awareness of Grumpy Cat doesn't change how we think about the world, how we live, how we relate to others. It's just a shared but otherwise mostly meaningless experience, like seeing a rainbow.
The Beat Generation was a relatively tiny subculture whose work at the time was consumed by a small number of people. But we remember them because the work they created mattered. It said something meaningful about the culture it was a reaction to and by doing that, it forced that culture to change.
Beats, hippies, punks, maybe early hackers were all countercultures because they in some way bent the arrow of history. There are no shortage of subcultures today, and they are great for finding people you share interests. But they don't have the same impact as a real counterculture.
The impact of various past countercultures is only evident in hindsight. As you said, movements like the Beat generation were at the time tiny subcultures, of the exact same sort we have loads of today. To say that 80s hackers were a counterculture but modern biohackers are just a subculture is simply temporal chauvinism.
But that dislike has thus far had zero apparent effect on the complete domination of capitalism and corporatism over the public sphere.
Instead, what we largely see is huge capitalistic corporations draping themselves in an anti-capitalist aesthetic which consumers seem perfectly happy to accept. Every time you go to the store and buy a jar of "homestyle" marinara sauce or order a bo-ho wall hippie-esque wall decoration off Amazon that was made in a factory in China, you are demonstrating anti-capitalist style but profoundly capitalistic values.
> Compare that to say a punk band in the 80s that may have only had a few thousand people ever see it perform
Or the Velvet Underground that sold only a few thousand records but "everyone who bought one went out and started a band."
There are certainly creators today who are as influential to their groups as the Velvet Underground was to theirs, but just like plenty of people had never heard of them in the 60s, you're probably not going to know about them for another 20 years.
I think if you didn't know what a legal thing was, you could've googled it, instead of making up some crazy hypothetical. Sorry, I'm dipping from this convo.
A truly stunning diversity of views and opinions… but pretty much all of them agree with the idea that everyone should be entitled to basic decency. Most of the differences I've observed are attributable to differences in personal experience (e.g. subject-matter knowledge, perception of the consensus of others) and language use, rather than anything that'd get you kicked out of a fur con.
There are people who claim to agree with famous bigots, but when you actually get them talking, they just think the sky is blue (and that others insist it's orange with bright pink spots). I've never talked to anyone who actually agrees with newspaper vitriol surrounding LGBTQIA+ stuff (which I find surprising, considering how many people seem to agree with newspaper nationalist vitriol).
I do mourn a little, that people feel they can't be open about their views. If we talked to each other more, I think we'd find we agree about more than we disagree. (Then again, the things we do openly talk about seem to be highly polarising topics; I know not what causes what.)
I agree, and have often said the same thing. As the old saying goes, people tend to judge others by their actions, and themselves by their intentions. What the vast majority of us really want is happiness and health for ourselves, our families, and our communities. It's easy to have a civil disagreement with somebody when you keep in mind that they really do mean the best, but cynicism has taken over a lot of peoples' mental images of each other.
The people physically close to you probably want what's best for themselves and those around them. They're good people. You could probably trust them with your life, provided your emergency is happening right in front of them (and they know what to do about it). The people you talk to online, the people who produce mass media, and the people who write your school textbooks? Never. Drop. Your. Guard. The average person doesn't want to hurt you, but these aren't the average person.
Heck, the mass-media people don't even need to want to hurt you to hurt you, as Michael Crichton once said:
> Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. […] You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
> That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say.
I guess I have a distorted view of what would get you kicked out.
I would have thought that things like saying that "people should be free to use the pronouns they feel apply to the person they are talking about, they shouldnt be forced to lie", "most kids who think they are trans, aren't and will grow out of it" and "transwomen should not be allowed to compete in women's sports or be in women's shelters or prisons, even if they're on hormones" would get you kicked out. And all three are very common, particularly amongst older people but also often with the early 20s crowd.
Let alone views on things like consent (e.g. "being very drunk does not mean sex is rape" or the jaw dropping "if you keep teasing a man you shouldn't be surprised if he decides to take matters into his own hands" said by a women in her 90s) or race ("there could be/probably are intelligence differences between races" are fairly common, as is "be careful around the [insert ethnic group here]s around here, they're dangerous/thieves") or abortion (everything from "life begins at conception" to "infanticide should be legal", in the UK!).
This is begging the question. Disagreement over what "basic decency" means is the heart of the LGBTIAP+ debate, just like disagreement over when life begins and what that means is at the heart of the abortion issue.
Some think "basic decency" means transitioning schoolchildren behind their parents' backs, providing them with hormone blockers and cross-sex hormones without parental knowledge or consent, and removing kids from their homes if the parents object. Others see all that as an attack on parental rights and children's well-being driven by authoritarian pseudoscience. The first group holds power in public education, HR departments, academia, and the federal government (at least in the USA), making that second group the counterculture.
Okay, let's put it another way. Pretty much all of them agreed with me about the entitlement to basic decency. From this, I conclude that my views about basic decency probably aren't all that controversial, after all.
This disagreement exists online, and in the press. I haven't seen it in the real world. If "the heart of the […] debate" is fictional, maybe the debate itself is artificial.
> Some think
Literally who? I will share with you two anecdotes:
• I know some parents whose children, questioning their gender, thought they were trans for a few months. The worried parents advised caution, while doing their best to educate themselves about trans people: the kids (as everyone suspected) turned out not to be trans.¹
• Those parents of trans friends of mine who object to their transition? Also shitty (bordering on abusive) parents in other ways. (When you're holding something else at a much higher priority than your kids, you're probably a shit parent,² and I've yet to see a counterexample.)
So, yeah, I'm somebody who would agree with the letter of your first "basic decency" example. I would likely³ punch somebody who actually supported it in spirit. I mean, seriously. Who the actual [minced oath] is that arrogant, that they know what's right for some kid they've never met, based on a checklist? Arrogant enough to kidnap them from their (presumably loving) family? That's Oliver Twist-style child-rearing morality.
> Others see all that as an attack on parental rights and children's well-being driven by authoritarian pseudoscience.
They're right to.⁴ Except, that "authoritarian pseudoscience" they're fighting against doesn't exist, and nobody in the world (with any power) is actually a proponent of it. The closest thing we've got is overworked and understaffed medical gatekeepers (one clinic for an entire country, in some cases) who make bad calls because they can't make good ones – to the point that only the law really listens to them any more. The solution to that problem is obvious.
> The first group holds power
Please show me an actual example of a member of this group.
---
¹: And yes, professionals usually can tell the difference. Not that a few months of blockers would actually have caused any real issues. (I currently lean towards the "radical autonomy" end of the spectrum, in case you haven't picked up on that; my reasons are many, and probably out of scope of this comment.)
²: Or your kid is in danger of significantly harming somebody else, or something like that. Children are people, after all: some are capable of evil. In these cases, though? Shitty parents.
³: Don't know for sure, though. I've never been in a position to punch one. (I'd like to think I'd try talking, first.)
⁴: In the jurisdictions I'm aware of, there's no such thing as "parental rights". There's children's rights – and in the vast majority of cases, a child's interests are best served by being with their parents. For example, in divorce cases, it's the child's right to have time with their parents, not the parent's right to have time with their child. That distinction can be significant, but only in edge-cases.
It's literally in the name: involuntary celibate
I've always taken issue with that term. Any guy who bathes, doesn't say mean things, tries to make himself more attractive, doesn't consider a woman unattractive because she isn't an 8+, and learns to strike up a conversation with the opposite sex will find someone sooner or later.
I don't know much about them, but people presented as incels generally seem unwilling to put much effort into any of that. If I had sat at home all day, played video games and really let myself go, does that make it involuntary or just lazy?
Originally it was a label they chose for themselves because they couldn't figure out why they kept getting rejected. It was only later outsiders caught on, then turned it into an insult. Beyond that I also don't know very much.
And if he doesn't, clearly it must be because he isn't trying hard enough amirite?
There are plenty of guys out there who listen to what they're being told (which is hard, because there's a lot of contradictions), try as hard as they can, and yet can't find anyone.
You literally said that you can't talk about how Jews (allegedly) have too much power in government. This is a classic anti-semitic trope. To say so and then respond with
> idk I never said anything about Jews, but calling people a Nazi is a great way to shut down conversation.
is dishonest and cowardly.
> I see Pride stickers and representation in all forms of media every single day for the LGBT community. How is that not what we are all living every day of our lives?
What is your conclusion? That pride stickers give people power of some sort? If that were true, transgender people wouldn't be 4x more likely to be victims of violent crimes.
Representation in pop culture is not power. Power is the ability to create and enforce laws, or the ability to not be shot and killed for your religious beliefs, as happened when 11 Jews were killed in a Pittsburgh synagogue -- killed by a man who followed neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Their killer would no doubt agree with you that "traditional" values were under attack, and that you couldn't even talk about it without being labeled an anti-semite.
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/ncvs-trans-pres...
I really don't believe that we can have any kind of productive outcome here. As I said, I don't hate anyone, I don't even have a problem with any of the representation that I'm talking about.
I was simply pointing out that the fact that I see these symbols plastered everywhere, including at Target, means that this is no longer an underground counterculture kind of thing. It's very mainstream.
If you want to insist on projecting your ideas that the world is filled with secret Nazis do it with someone else.
In fact, I do lump them onto one group. Many subgroups inside a group. You know who I am referring to when I say queer culture. The group exists, it isn't false. Colors keep getting added to the flag. Rather than engage with reality you prefer to have useless rhetorical debates. Let's move past that.
>Second, you assert that being in the overwhelmingly dominant racial group, the overwhelmingly dominant sexual orientation and the undeniably dominant gender should somehow be interpreted at "counterculture" even though the group that fits that definition is numerically larger, wealthier, and politically empowered than any other group.
Culture is often not aligned with majority opinions, majority positions or majority orientations. The culture of the 60s was hippies. Most people were not hippies. Your premise is false here that culture is the same as majority, or political empowerment.
I welcome a more honest response.
The (US) culture of the 60s was nuclear families, medium haircuts, fitted suits, and the Space Race.
The counterculture was hippies, mop-topped youngsters, and civil rights activists.
Your closing line is laughable.
There is no "mainstream" culture anymore to counter. Everyone is living in their own little cultural bubble that they believe to be a counterculture to a non-existent mainstream culture.
The hysterical thing is the OP said what they said exactly because everyone knows someone would respond with your exact rhetorical devices like an automaton or a bot.
And yet, it's remarkably unpopular to announce the simple truism that "white lives matter", or that "it's ok to be white", and our top universities interrogate "whiteness" as problematic, so evidently much further nuance is required between numerical size and cultural sway.
In certain circles, but (assuming America) certainly not approaching a majority[1].
> Instead, what we largely see is huge capitalistic corporations draping themselves in an anti-capitalist aesthetic which consumers seem perfectly happy to accept.
I think it's too difficult to avoid this stuff as a consumer. Hell, even farmer's markets are mostly run by big corps now. But from the labor side, I think it's making a difference. Almost no one in their twenties is trying to climb the corporate ladder or put in effort at their big corp jobs. As soon as generations that were bought in to careerism retire, I think things will shift.
[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/268766/socialism-popular-capita...
Obviously cultural norms change over time, and many ideas that were once fringe are now mainstream. But that doesn't mean that the majority white, straight, Christian(ish) majority in America doesn't still wield most of the power.
The WASPy power structure is still dominant in the corporate landscape and disproportionately high in the political one. But it has been losing ground on the cultural front for a while now.
There's a reason WASPy individuals complain about "the culture war" - it's the one they are losing. The slogan, "get woke, go broke" suggests they have started losing ground on the corporate front as well.
Because there is no one majority group. The only way you get a majority group is by drawing dumb lines around non-adjacent cultural groups because they happen to be of the same economic means or vote the same way.
yeah, except for finance, media, academia and politics. I do agree that straight white christian(ish) males do wield the most power in the other intuitions that matter (thought I'm drawing a blank on which those might be).
To people even know that the US ethnic group with highest average income is Indian Americans?
Whites are nowhere close to being the wealthiest group in the US.
Pretty sure one of the canonized characteristics of post-modernity (or the post-cold war era if you dont like pretentious art terms) is pluralism.
This spicy thread seems to reinforce the feeling that the dominant culture has (and maybe always was) some horrifying unknowable ever-changing organic mass of competing counter-cultures.
Paraphrasing some dead social philosopher, history and cultures aren't bedtime stories or cartoon characters and we create dangerous false narratives, policies and hierarchies when we indulge the impulse to reduce them into these.
All of these things you listed merely acknowledge that non-cis gendered people exist, that's it. There is no massive shift in the mainstream culture. In fact, there are legions of reactionaries incredibly aggrieved by having this existence "shoved in their faces" such that they will push for laws banning discussion of sexuality in schools, call bomb threats in to hospitals, or lose their shit when gay people kiss in a movie.
Criticize it in even the most mild way at most companies and expect to be fired from your job.
The dominance goes even further. Direct criticism isn't necessary. Try to promote straight culture and you'll also get dogpiled and fired. (Brandon Eich)
So 0.
Have a kid and the walls move in fast. Used to live in alternative shelters, backpacking in the outdoors for months on end? Yeah child services says that's substandard housing and abuse. Hell there were child abuse investigation just for a family backpacking the Appalachian trail, and that's a boring ass well planned thing that even old square fuckers can relate to.
Used to psychedelics or other drugs? Yeah the kid is trained at a very young age by police officers at the school to snitch you out, and they get them young enough they won't have a filter. DCS and/or criminal charges incoming.
Used to go overseas and do super dangerous stuff? Suddenly any family or friends that tolerated that say you're a piece of shit for risking your when a kid relies on you and the judge is gonna say even if you earn enough doing that to support the kid it's still not enough because the kid needs 20% of the imputed income you could make as a conservative working stiff no matter if they were fine before during the times you were making less, don't agree well then off to jail.
Your life is surrounded now by mandatory reporters. The doctor, the teacher, the therapist. Yeah, all mandatory reporters. Say something they don't like as a child-free and nobody gives a shit. Have a kid, fuck nah their alternative views are signs of abuse. Send in the investigators and let them sort it out.
And the people making these judgement calls are judges, lawyers, DCS workers. People plugged into the system. Not necessarily politically conservative but conditioned to fall within the norms of the system. Hell even SBF (the guy that never wears a suit even for billion dollar investment meetings) wears a suit in front of a judge, that's how conservative that system is.
You learn to keep your mouth shut. You learn to living in the boring ass house that has occupancy certification. You espouse the most boring views that will not anger a mandatory reporter. You diligently pay the taxes the government uses to drone strike brown people ovrseas. You refrain from drugs. You don't take risks that will result in not being able to make 20% of the imputed income you need to stay out of jail. Wait 18 years and you can be old young again.
As a 47 year old, I'm glad to know I will be forever young.
However, my daily commutes through seattle runs me right into the Pioneer square station and I swear it’s like something from “the Wire”. It feels like hamsterdam, a hell on earth. So while I generally resolve to do whats best for myself I still run into the effects of the society I live in everyday and it’s depressing/demoralizing. This city is diseased with an aggressive malignancy.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonifitzgerald/2021/12/24/the-e...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanberr/2019/01/11/widely-...
No one is hiding any of this, and it’s trivial to read a memoir from many musicians and see a story about how they wanted to feel more included in the increasingly secularized holidays so they wrote music that was about the stuff that included in them.
The thing that's interesting about this is that human beings in acute distress are less adept at planning ahead and being creative. Which means that people in the doom cycle can't start building new institutions to challenge the old ones that are decaying and pillaging. The perverse incentives that got us to this point are also disincentivizing fixing the problems.
I don't even want to think about what Pioneer Square is like now. It was sketchy when I lived in Seattle and that was 10 years ago. I agree that even with some healthy distance/putting on your own oxygen mask first, it's very demoralizing. My trust in people is much lower than it used to be.
I'm not sure rural or suburban areas are much better. Most of the malignancy just happens in private.
The area around Pioneer square is all boarded up now, even the court house! During the summer/fall it was much worse with indigent drug use and florid psychotics but now that it's cold and wet there's less. The station is still used as a toilet though.
Funny enough the stairs at exit A in Pioneer Square have inscribed on them as you walk up "Why are you not afraid?". And I always say to myself, "I fuckin am!"
Seattle needs some chemotherapy but that would require its citizens to recognize they have a disease and actually seek treatment. Instead they put on their airpods and stare at their phones and completely live in a parallel reality.
I was part of this so-called doomerism group when I worked in a more traditional 9-5 job in IT about 8-10 years ago. Now I'm solidly in the homesteader/freelancer/homeschooler counterculture.
Maybe there's a natural progression where you begin to question your life/the system/who you're serving and then you do something about it. I'm sure many people get stuck and never make that transition because of the perceived risk in doing so.
Democracy does work. People do make a difference every day. Don’t let the internet get you down.
Public policy discussions that start with the assumption that the only possible solution is for the federal/state/county/local government to dictate policies from above are almost always non-starters for me. The higher up in the hierarchy the more evidence I need to support a solution at that level.
I'm not absolutist on this matter, there are concerns that are best addressed at all those various levels but I prefer to get there through bottom-up policy experimentation and iteration rather than top-down diktats. There are also ample lessons from history about the dangers of expansive government powers.
It says more about how we view the past than how the present is: we remember only the glorious good times, and forget nobody could read 200 years ago, or nobody could eat 400 years ago. They all said they were in decline, the values of their grandfathers diluted by a constant change.
But while I sit on my toilets, on the 44th floor of my hyper tower, writing to americans in a language nobody in my ascending family can speak, before tucking my trilingual kid to bed, well, I think the decline isn't so bad, if you zoom out a few decades.
Here’s a random example:
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/nj3z7ieVrCcgyQkq6myNZ.jpg
Doesn’t look like decline to me. I could cite dozens more examples and not just around technology.
Russia is a good example of a nation in decline: hemorrhaging young people, horrible corruption, cynicism, delusional leaders, and the use of imperial war and dramatic ideology to try to paper over it all.
We do have a lot of dumb problems like a homelessness epidemic that are due more to lack of political will than inability to fix them.
Some are also due to the high priority we place on individual freedom. We’d rather have freedom from detention and to move about than round up the homeless and force them into institutions. We’d rather have shootings than remove the individual right to bear arms. We’d rather have strong property rights than eminent domain people to build infrastructure. Etc.
Hardly "random".
> hemorrhaging young people, horrible corruption, cynicism, delusional leaders, and the use of imperial war and dramatic ideology to try to paper over it all.
So which of those is missing from the US? I see fewer and fewer young people, the corruption may not be at the level of handing over banknotes but the distrust is just as real, and everything else on your list is much th esame.
I can only speak to the American (and somewhat the Canadian) situation. I don't know what on the ground sentiment looks like in France or Hong Kong.
My wife and I are fairly traditional in that I work full time and she's a housewife/mother. Most people are mildly surprised that she doesn't work, and there's definitely been the occasional awkward social interaction where she was clearly being judged by other women (notably non-parents) for that decision. This is in an extremely blue city, I imagine if we moved out even into the suburbs things would shift.
Counter-culture is location-dependent.
If not, then this is pointlessly hyperbolic.
Yes in very progressive environments you will get more support for announcing the later but that's because being in the later group is actually a challenge while religion has built up a reputation for maligning groups of people for things out of their control and for generally anti-scientific beliefs. Being part of a group that largely denies evolution and climate change is obviously not going to grant you any favors in groups with an academic (especially STEM) background.
Where do you live?
This is only because Catholics and Christians often don’t mention when workplace behaviors make them uncomfortable. I’ve been in multiple situations where coworkers have used names of God as expletives or made jokes about things I consider holy.
And if you’re a Catholic and “trad” and planning lunch with colleagues, things like “is it Friday” or “is it a Friday in Lent” would affect others (except that, today, there’s a lot of vegetarian options for independent reasons).
The other fun one is if you actually try and pray the hours and ask the same accommodations your Muslim colleagues receive so you can pray the office.
You are not made unsafe because I said the fuck word...
People (including Catholics) supporting trans rights agree with that.
Of course, most of the Catholic heirarchy and supporters of trans rights disagree on who are men and who are women to start with, but, I mean, the former at least should be familiar with the idea of an entity having the observable physical characteistics of one thing but being something radically different because of its innate essence.
> Catholic teaching is that lying is sinful.
Catholic teaching is that lying consists of objectively false statements told with intent to deceive. (CCC 2482)
> Practicing the Catholic faith by saying "I'm sorry, but I can't 'use your pronouns' because that would be a lie by falsely saying you're a woman when you can't be" will get you reprimanded or fired at most any major US company.
But this is not something that the Catholic faith teaches is lying, even if some Catholics may see it as lying or some other offense against truth. Why?
(1) As Catholic traditionalists and trans rights activists agree, “gender identity” is not the same thing that Catholics see as binary sex. Acknowledging that a persons gender identity is this or that is not a fact claim about the construct of sex, but also
(2) Preferred pronouns are a distinct (though sometimes correlated) issue to gender identity (people with different gender identity can have the same oreferred pronouns, and vice versa), so even if acknowledging the validity of gender identity waa making a claim about sex, and even if such a claim would be false, respecting preferred pronouns isn’t acknowledging gender identity, its just respecting preferred pronouns.
(3) On top of all of the above, the purpose of use of a person's preferred pronouns by a Catholic in a work environment would, presumably, not be convince anyone of some false claim about the subject's sex, and without intent to deceive, it would not be a lie even if its content were an objectively false claim. (Which, for the reasons discussed previously, it is not.)
If you wanted to make an argument against respecting preferred pronouns that was grounded in Catholic doctrine, you would do better to argue that it is adulation (CCC 2480) from the view that transgenderism is inherently wrongful and doing so, lacking the intent to deceive required for lying, is a form of encouragement; OTOH, you could equally argue that failure to do so, in many circumstances, is detraction (CCC 2477) on the same assumption and calumny (also CCC 2477) without it.
Across every single metric, trans people, especially trans POC face disproportionate adversity. i.e. income, murder rate, housing insecurity, education etc...
Someone changing their gender identity is pretty surprising and asks that you change how you interact with them.
And I think the traditional people are doing so in much more subversive ways now - plenty of our friends are going private and Catholic school to get their kids out of the public schools, which are getting pretty wild in the indoctrination.
In fact, many queer people force themselves out of the community by living within the norm to feel more acceptance from the majority (counter-counter culture).
Your perception is also very obviously specific to where you live on this planet.
The same thing goes for anything that could be described as "queer culture". Plenty of queer people have, and want, nothing to do with the groups and spaces that present themselves as "the community".
Sure, the hippie movement was branded countercultural. But to what purpose? Note that during the period, the US government was engaged in a large scale remaking of America both domestically and internationally. Domestically, we saw the remaking of immigration policies to no longer bias towards those of European descent, and instead towards what favored macro capitalism (the import of cheaper and low skilled labor). Internationally the US was scaling up engagement in hot and cold wars and no longer considering itself bound to the constitutional provisions for war. Low and behold, during this period, a "counterculture" arises which glorifies drug use, the dissolution of the nuclear family and pushes forward the vapid strain of hyper individualism that we see today. Suddenly the anti-war movement is associated with drug use and degeneracy, whilst the nation's racial consciousness is broken in time to welcome a new wave of immigrants to help improve the margins of big business.
Note that the current "woke" counterculture follows the same pattern. Increased individualism, sublimated racial awareness, dissolution of family, and rampant degeneracy. Meanwhile the state continues its hegemonic march of constant international agitation.
Mozilla doesn't say he was fired. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/faq-on-ceo-resignation/
I get why you might not want to participate in the those things but the point that Trads as a counterculture phenomenon are new and distinct from the previous mainline Protestant or evangelical Christian cultural movements.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20221128150706/https://www.mondo...
[1] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/memes-4chan-...
[2] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/meme-life-cycle-charts NB the presence of _digg_ in the lifecycle; 4chan has been accepted as the spawning-pool of memery for a long time
And other lies 4chan users tell themselves to feel important.
It wasn't even true back in the day, a lot of stuff came from SomethingAwful and Newgrounds... Then came Twitter!
I think your ability to tolerate shit to get to the lulz has changed.
I'm downloading it now to look. I have a strong feeling that 2007 /v/ will look strikingly different from modern /v/.
I don't think that it would be any less hateful, though. It's just that most of the hate was ironic early on...
There's just this weird thing about how if you perform a ritual ironically, you're still performing the ritual.
Big disagree. You carry a pride flag in the wrong parts of town where I am, you'll get beat up.
Walk around preaching hellfire and damnation and at most you'll get a lot of annoyed looks and at best you'll get people cheering you on.
> In schools these days it's trendy to be anything but straight.
In high schools in my town people get beat up for coming out. A friend who went to college out of state was mocked because people thought he was gay, despite him being straight.
Also, you appear to have a misconception of what the LGBTQ acronym includes.
LGBA - these are related to attraction. TI - These are for Trans/Intersex individuals and have nothing to do with attraction. Q - Questioning/Queer. Can be used by those who don't feel as though they are properly described by the above descriptions, or who are opposed to them for some reason.
There are other letters, but for the most part they are subsets/synonyms of the above labels, at least as far as the use case here is concerned.
> Of course, most of the Catholic heirarchy and supporters of trans rights disagree on who are men and who are women to start with, but, I mean, the former at least should be familiar with the idea of an entity having the observable physical characteistics of one thing but being something radically different because of its innate essence.
I'd love to know where you found the teaching that God miraculously transubstantiates people into a body of the wrong sex.
> Catholic teaching is that lying consists of objectively false statements told with intent to deceive. (CCC 2482).
My conscience tells me that it's objectively false and if I say it isn't I'm intentionally deceiving. (CCC 1778)
> (1) As Catholic traditionalists and trans rights activists agree, “gender identity” is not the same thing that Catholics see as binary sex. Acknowledging that a persons gender identity is this or that is not a fact claim about the construct of sex, but also
Motte and bailey.
As an aside what Doctor of the Church has anything to say about "gender identity?" Presumably if this is part of tradition one of them must have had something to say on the subject. In fact, where are you finding any Catholic traditionalist who is leaning on 1970s era radical feminist linguistic novelties?[1]
> (2) Preferred pronouns are a distinct (though sometimes correlated) issue to gender identity (people with different gender identity can have the same oreferred pronouns, and vice versa), so even if acknowledging the validity of gender identity waa making a claim about sex, and even if such a claim would be false, respecting preferred pronouns isn’t acknowledging gender identity, its just respecting preferred pronouns.
More equivocating. Everyone knows the confusion is intentional.
> (3) On top of all of the above, the purpose of use of a person's preferred pronouns by a Catholic in a work environment would, presumably, not be convince anyone of some false claim about the subject's sex, and without intent to deceive, it would not be a lie even if its content were an objectively false claim. (Which, for the reasons discussed previously, it is not.)
Then why would he care when I use pronouns appropriate to his sex?
[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gender+identit... https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gender+roles&y...
Two thirds of black families in my county are investigated. My family have coworkers that explicitly state they will mandatory report things like a parent seeking health care to reduce their substance use.
So, in fact, some people will have to do something different to include me in some of their activities.
Oh the Bible isn't the end-all-be-all and you need someone to make an executive decision sometimes? Who's that?
The Pope? Oh you're not of that kind of denomination? What about the President of the Mormon Church?
That leaves it up to personal interpretation and opinion. Considering that the overall message of Christianity is supposedly something about "love and grace" the not transphobic opinions are a lot more compelling.
Anywhere in California you would not experience any of that. In fact it really is as OP describes. Look at polls of kids in elementary schools where 50%+ of young kids are identifying as non-binary because it is trendy.
https://www.fox19.com/2022/04/19/gay-couple-says-man-screame...
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/peoples-park-uc-be...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/13/proud-boy-d...
Hello, I have a close friend that was jumped by a small group of people for holding hands with his boyfriend. He was hospitalized.
This was in Oakland in 2015.
But even then, there's a lot more to California than the Bay Area and LA.
I don't feel very safe being trans and living in Lake County, but I can't afford the Bay Area anymore. So I just don't go outside anymore.
Physical violence (and any indicator of physical needs- shelter, food, safety) basically signals 'cheap animal unit', and animals are useful tools to be managed by the machinery (of capital, patriarchy, globalism, blah blah etc whatever left or right wing flavor of 'power structure' you mentally choose to sketch it out, it's there churning, by whatever name you like)
you seem to confuse elite signaling and countersignaling with personal sufferings when in reality, both are exactly how it's supposed to go
The cultural machinery works thru contradiction and desperate elite mimicry, people trying to aspirationally sound like the class right above them, leading to tragedy of the commons, for example:
Rich women support bail reform/ islamic immigration/ transgender craze/ porn-culture that gets poorer women raped/ scared/ fired / cheapened, and that's the new feminism
Pragmatic feminists/terfs/lesbians/mom groups/anti-vaccers are the new witches to be burned as the purity test for desperate psuedo-middle-class aspirational women, supplying the cultural fodder content mill, while Republican women/Christian evangelicals make popcorn...
Abortion rights are a cheap voting lever, the more passionate you are the more the machine knows how to use you, people are putting their carrots and sticks in their bios, announcing the best ways to control them with a smile lol
Women in Iran and Afghanistan not allowed to go to school, that is defacto no longer a feminist issue but something something 'why not both' meme-mumbles by nonbinary mental illness connoisseurs.
Gays getting beat up by rural whites so they move to metropolis and work for the rainbow utopia of corporate America is exactly how the machine eats :)
Let's try to disentagle this gish gallop shall we :) ?
> the people beating up anyone are the underclass/proles, be it rural whites or ghetto blacks -- by definition these are not cultural elites.
But they do make up the culture of the parts of society people actually live in.
> Physical violence (and physical needs, shelter, food, safety) basically signals 'cheap animal unit', and animals are useful tools to be managed by the machinery (of capital, patriarchy, globalism, blah blah etc whatever left or right wing flavor of 'power structure' you mentally choose to sketch it out, it's there churning, by whatever name you like)
"People who have needs are manipulated by people who have money". Shocking.
> Rich women support bail reform/ islamic immigration/ transgender craze/ porn-culture that gets poorer women raped/ scared/ fired / cheapened, and that's the new feminism
> (Pragmatic feminists/terfs/lesbians/mom groups/anti-vaccers are the new witches to be burned as the purity test for desperate psuedo-middle-class aspirational women, supplying the cultural fodder content mill, while Republican women/Christian evangelicals make popcorn...)
You uh... might want to back of the OAN/Fox
> Abortion rights are a cheap voting lever, the more passionate you are the more the machine knows how to use you, people are putting their carrots and sticks in their bios, announcing the best ways to control them with a smile lol
No machine cares enough about an individual to look through their bio.
> Women in Iran and Afghanistan not allowed to go to school, that is defacto no longer a feminist issue but something something 'why not both' meme-mumbles by nonbinary mental illness connoisseurs.
"People put the most focus on issues directly impacting themselves". What a shocking discovery you've made.
In my church, there's a frequent saying "you can't help others until you've helped yourself". You have to have yourself on a stable base before you can lift others. In addition, there's a conversation to be had about interventionism in there, it's bit off topic but clearly didn't go so well last time.
> Gays getting beat up by rural whites so they move to metropolis and work for the rainbow utopia of corporate America is exactly how the machine eats :)
I'll admit this part confuses me. You go drop all the right wing talking points up above, and then go "All the right wing people are being manipulated to make educated lgbt people go to cities and work"... and instead of the solution being to help educate more people, it's to make things worse for LGBT people everywhere?
Indeed, I now hear acquaintances on the right referring to them derisively as the 'alphabet mafia.' I wonder if maybe it's gotten meaningless when there are so many letters. Sometimes I see "+" used instead, after the first few letters. In that case, do the members of the groups that come after feel marginalized compared to the big ones that make up the first few letters?
And what about the people who self-identify as one of the groups but don't want to advertise it as their defining characteristic? What do they do? That's a hard one, I think there are quite a lot of people that are in that situation.
I suppose the holy grail will be if/when we just decide that such labels don't matter.
Outside of those spaces, I generally prefer LGBTQ or LGBTQ+ for that reason.
That holy grail would be nice to reach some day.
For those looking on and saying "well, you're doing it to yourselves":
The answer is that currently we _have_ to do it because any many parts of the USA/world people who fall under that umbrella aren't able to live in a way that brings them joy.
As such, they need a banner to organize under and belong with. Once that need passes eventually so will the labels.
Is Christianity also meaningless then? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denomination...
I am still on the fence whether or not this is a left-handedness situation. (The number of people who are left-handed sharply increased within 1-2 generations once we stopped beating children for primarily using their left hands. But this was generally not considered a social contagion or some grooming behavior from left-handed teachers or something.) If it is, then we should see identification level out within a generation or two.
Is that possibly because of the Traditional dominant culture?
I am very interested to see how it plays out with my kids as they mature, and as their cohort matures into adulthood. It's fascinating, a little overwhelming perhaps, but not particularly threatening. They aren't at all militant, and I don't know if that's an age thing, or if the culture is evolving away from it.
Because it's icky?
https://nypost.com/2022/10/24/biden-calls-curbs-on-treatment...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/biden-transgender-youth-state...
I have family and friends in K-12 education. If you question LGBTQIAP+ or fail to affirm a kids' gender self-identification, you are out of a job. Wesley Yang has covered this topic extensively, and is a good one to follow on Twitter:
https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/i-needed-love-i-needed-sup...
https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/i-felt-like-she-was-settin...
https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/the-dangerous-overreach-of...
>I currently lean towards the "radical autonomy" end of the spectrum, in case you haven't picked up on that
I believe you. That approach endangers children, has no scientific basis, and will be stopped in the courts. Kids do not have the capacity to make permanent, life-altering decisions about fertility or sexuality. They do not and cannot understand the implications and consequences of their actions. Responsible adults must safeguard them into adulthood.
There are other laws in place in some states that force that a teacher is not allowed to mention gender identity at all in the classroom, and must report any gender nonconforming behavior to authorities. How does this correspond with teachers having control?
Edit to your additional edit: How do you match that there's no scientific basis for transitioning when the American Association of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association both oppose preventing access to transitioning?
Is not really a real person.¹ But if you think he's an example, he'll suffice for this. Please, state his position, and explain why you disagree with it.
> If you question LGBTQIAP+ or fail to affirm a kids' gender self-identification, you are out of a job.
I mean, yeah. That kind of power over children comes with a responsibility to keep your politics out of school – or, out of your position as authority figure, anyway. (A few, very few, teachers at my school managed the latter – and they only used this talent to rant a little about budget cuts to education, during times where we weren't obliged to listen.)
If a kid thinks she's a prophet of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it is not for a teacher to tell her otherwise. If a kid thinks he fancies his best friend, it is not for a teacher to tell him that's wrong. If a kid says they're a fairy princess from Mars? To insist otherwise² is not the role or purpose of a schoolteacher.
> That approach
I didn't describe an approach, there: just a vague philosophy. I think you're reading too much into my words. What do you think the problems with my position are?
---
¹: At least, not while he's acting in his position as head of state. I elaborated on this in a sibling post: real-life people will tell you what they believe, but public figures (especially politicians) often tell you what they think will make you believe something. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34616318
²: A teacher could mention that no life, nor evidence of civilisation, has been found on Mars. Using this as a rebuttal of the child's claim to Martian fairy royalty would be overstepping.
Edit: I removed my second sentence since it appears to be confusing others of my tone and intention.
Anybody could be in power at any given time. If your argument for why your group should be in power depends on who is currently in power then it isn’t valid because it stops being true as soon as you win. No idea what you are saying about stupid people.
> my argument [“Advocating for those in power”] has nothing to do with who should be in power
Saying what kinds of arguments are acceptable in support of the group in power has a lot to do with who should be in power.
Great explanation. Very proper. Much explanation. Thanks for the example /s
Arguments you cant argue against are not a “dishonest script” what does that even mean? Just give an example of what you say Republicans do a good job of.
But those are dominated by straight white men. A simple demographic survey of Congress and org executives will show that. What are you talking about?
Parent comment was stating that people who support the minority are using the same fallacious reasoning those who support the majority do and that is not true.
In the event the power changes, the people who supported the previous majority class might be the same or use the same reasoning but that has nothing to do with how both groups reason separately.
As an example, imagine it's The Great Depression, The Majority would say something like "Wow I really wish we had more food, I'm going to vote for this candidate who says that we'll get more food". In this instance the Majority is not tied to the ruling class, do you see how implying everyone is knee-jerk reacting is misleading?
why not just get stuck on 'what IS culture even', 'what is a trend Really??', and other forms of useless filler-think that magically only crop up when a middle class smart-and-friendly-smile type person is made uncomfortable by working class people actually 'noticing things' with their eyes and ears...
Policy-wonks aren't gonna be in the family rooms where people say things that matter to them, where populism and/or prejudice brews.
Get to know some immigrant communities, they don't understand english to watch fox or cnn. Black folks didn't make vaccine decisions based on what channel you think they should watch. Wealthy white people buying property or voting with their feet/dollars aren't going to tell all the friends they went to college with exactly why, revealed preferences and all that.
I'm a radical feminist, if american conservatives/rep have common cause then all the better
Imagine understanding capitalism, the state, warfare, or the history of any nation at all.... and still having party loyalties??? sad :)
"I can explain away anything you say, because in my worldview internal consistency doesn't matter"
> I'm a radical feminist, if american conservatives/rep have common cause then all the better
And then all became clear.
The only people who I've met who describe themselves as radical feminists are described by everyone else as TERF's.
I can name a number of people in my family who are openly gay but not politically active. If you asked them if they identified as LGBTQ+ they would probably say "sure" but they don't wave flags, have stickers, clothes, or anything else proclaiming their sexuality. They're not trying to hide it (as if that were possible, they're all married to partners of the same sex), but it isn't a fundamental part of how they interact with the world.
And I know people in my family who are quietly bisexual or gay, too. Plenty of folks would accuse them of being in the closet, as if that were bad (because they should want to advertise it, right?). It must be fear of bigotry that keeps them in the closet, right? In my experience, no, they aren't actively hiding anything, not using subterfuge to make people think they are straight, they just keep their sexuality to themselves.
These are all reasonable questions. I'll answer as best as I can, but please understand that I'm not any kind of formal authority.
> If you cannot use requested pronouns, does your religion also ban you from using nicknames? Is it okay for you to be called User23?
I don't know of any Catholic doctrine that says people can't use pseudonyms, nicknames, or even change their name altogether.
> Is it okay to say someone's cat is cute even if you don't really care for cats? What do you do if your partner asks if they look good or bad in something?
Is it a lie, which is to say a falsehood told with the intent to deceive? Then yes it's wrong. Wouldn't you want to be told the truth if you in fact looked bad? Wouldn't you want to know that when you're told that you look good that you really do?
Personally, supposing I didn't think the cat was cute, I wouldn't say I thought it was. I would most likely treat it as a good opportunity to say nothing on the subject. Some theologians put forth a doctrine of "mental reservation"[1] which somehow makes lying OK, but I have to admit I'm not capable of the necessary mental gymnastics in any but the most clear cut cases.
You know you can do this with trans people too. Or do they not have names?
As another Catholic commenter said, we owe Christian charity to all other human beings, including those affected by gender dysphoria. However, charity doesn't mean being "nice" or "accommodating," but it does require respecting the dignity of the human person. One way to respect that dignity is by not encouraging or condoning disordered behaviors or beliefs. I wouldn't offer a recovering alcoholic a drink, even if it was really great stuff.
That leads to another pragmatic matter. No matter what disordered beliefs or behaviors a person has (and I have my own share), we should want to help that person come to a rightly ordered place. There's really no one size fits all approach to that.
To your first point, pronouns and nicknames are not the same thing. Pronouns indicate that a man can become a woman or vise versa which is not what the Catechism teaches. Additionally, calling a cat cute if you don't care for them is lying which is a venial sin (meaning you probably won't be damned to Hell for it but one should confess if they sin regardless).
Catholics are called to Love (God is Love) and to love all sinners but hate the sins. We know that Church is a place for imperfect humans and thus we do seek to purify our souls with prayer, works of mercy and the Sacraments.
So with all the above in mind, we usually tend to avoid pronouns and refer to transgenders by their name instead. However, out of basic respect and good manners we can all call them what they want if they insist.
Jesus commands us that we must be known as his disciples by our love. Christian love begins with basic respect and good manners. Selfless love does not begin with requiring others to conform to our doctrine.
St. Paul said that he became all things for all people so that he may save some. We should do the same.
1 Peter 3:15-16 be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope, but do it with gentleness and reverence,
Same as you would have been discriminated against for being trans, gay, or black 30 years ago.
What's worse? Not getting a job or getting murdered?
Not trying to minimize the discrimination of the religious but can't you see why most would try to minimize discrimination against a class who has a history of discriminating? Additionally, the severity is not comparable. Maybe if we were in the Crusades things would be different...do you see what I'm saying?
Having worked in the Bay for ~9 years I never met anyone that cared what religion a fellow employee was. So if we're just running off anecdotes and impressions, there's mine.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/silicon-valley-episode-christ...
That doesn't mean anything. Discrimination is a matter of degree. Everyone gets discriminated against pretty often to lesser degrees. If you tell me about your horoscope I'll roll my eyes and probably not want to hang out with you very much because of your spiritual beliefs.
Are people refusing to sell you good and services? Calling you names? Throwing bricks through your windows?
Is it putting more of a damper on you living a happy life than the occasional moment of discomfort because someone thinks something you think is dumb? People think lots of my beliefs are dumb, and that's fine, as long as I can go about my day.
> Announcing that your are LGBTQ is the quickest way to advance in the company and receive accolades.
First, I doubt a gay new hire can reach C suite with nothing but a couple of rainbows and dildos for qualifications.
Second, office politics are crappy, but you either cope or move on, with maybe a lawsuit if you have a legal leg to stand on.
The Tyre Nichols incident response shows some improvements, but those responsible have not yet been charged, and because US police are so fragmented it will be a very long time before standards are raised nationally.
And FWIW, lots of big companies have DEI departments that preach this stuff internally and market it externally (my wife is a marketing consultant with these big companies and they eat this shit up so much that their contracts are dependent on proving their commitment to DEI by centering their “diverse” employees, holding internal and external DEI ceremonies, etc). I’m sure there’s still a profit motive, but there’s quite a lot more than an annual profile photo update.
Of course it did not. The flower children, the back-to-the-landers, the bikers, the free love communers all remained a tiny slice of the population (and a shrinking one by that time).
What the late 60s/early 70s US counterculture had going for it was a kind of credibility as "the new thing". It was not "the culture" (and it never really became it without mutating heavily), but it was interesting to many people who did not participate in it. It remained a counter-culture until it had changed so radically (and this was years after Coco-Cola first tried to ride the hippy chic train), and then, indeed, it was no longer subversive in any meaningful way.
As actor Peter Coyote noted of that era, that particular counterculture won the culture war in the long term - you can find yoga classes and wholewheat bread in almost every small town in the USA now, our attitudes towards sexuality and the environment and women and racism have been fundamentally altered - but it lost almost every political battle that it was concerned with. Wars continued, economic inequality, corporate control, the military-industrial complex ... all continued unabated.
This is an important element of "cool", which is essentially the ebb-and-flow of ideas between counterculture and mainstream culture.
I can’t think of a way that BLM was ever counter-cultural.
Meh. "really supporting it" or "poseur supporting it" is irrelevant, what's relevant is that it's mainstream, not counter[1] to mainstream.
[1] That's what the "counter" in counterculture means, dammit.
On the other hand every Christmas/Easter thing happening at your local supermarket - it's not support, just seasonal reason to get more money.
Which (snarkily) I guess is fair.
It’s on flags at schools, supported by government, roads are named after it, they have an enormous foundation with staff, and it’s even in college course curriculum
We've had pictures of MLK in schools, Civil Rights has been "supported by government", roads were named after people, there were and are enormous foundations with staff, and it's definitely in college curriculums - and it's been that way for an entire human lifetime...
...and yet the same fight is being fought again.
I'd figure if something achieved "mainstream", it wouldn't have to happen again and again.
(edit: In my head, I'm compare/contrasting with suffragette and other aspects of women's rights)
Capitalists have co-opted the least disruptive demands of advocates in an attempt to draw attention away from the actual point. They think if they focus on saying words and not doing deeds, people will move on and forget.
Black people are still being murdered by police every day in America.
[0] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-embassies-authorized-hang...
The very opposite.
They do. One of the most successful directors of all time built his career telling stories about faking low cultural status.
Perhaps that’s too abstract. But if people don’t fake low culture, then what is Hillbilly Elegy?
It seems hard to argue that there haven’t been disruptive changes considering violent crime levels (esp homicides), but I fully agree that “capitalists” (or maybe corporatists?) embraced BLM and other identity stuff because it’s a convenient distraction from substantial policy issues. A lot of folks made themselves into “useful idiots” over the last decade.
[citation needed]
> consequentially violent crime is way, way up.
You're claiming that the US, unlike the rest of the civilized world, can't address crime without having death squads summarily execute people for trivial or imagined offences every other week?
I'd also contest whether activists really got much of what they were asking for. They generally weren't asking for simply no-police. Rather they were asking for issues like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness to be addressed rather than just being policed.
Protesters wanted to re-allocate resources away from the police towards other services, so that cops are not the first responders to every situation, they often wanted fewer police with more training.
Crime goes up as a result of the material conditions of people. The more unequal society is, the more poor and desperate people get, the higher crime is going to be. Acting like it's merely a function of enforcement is silly.
Sure thing: "An event study design finds census places with early BLM protests experienced a 10% to 15% decrease in police homicides from 2014 through 2019, around 200 fewer deaths." - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3767097
> You're claiming that the US, unlike the rest of the civilized world, can't address crime without having death squads summarily execute people for trivial or imagined offences every other week?
The US obviously doesn't have "death squads" who "summarily execute people every other week". Lol I can't imagine asking for a citation about police killings and then tossing this claim out there.
"However, Cheatham said she doesn’t think this means Christians ― particularly conservative Christians ― are being persecuted for their beliefs."
That is a poor basis for believing widespread, asymmetrical, discrimination is happening. I would honestly take an anecdote over that.
Oh, sorry if I gave you the wrong impression. The point I was trying to make was not that it doesn't exist, but that it's not widespread and not significant enough to worry about. It exists, but I don't believe being Christian today is like being gay or black in 1990. You're more likely to be discriminated against for your height than your religion at this point.
As Coyote's observations note, this can work for "culture" issues, which do indeed tend to be the result of individual choices about consumption, but it rarely works for issues rooted in the distribution of political and economic power. These require political movements demanding change from the mainstream.
Were Gramsci alive in the 80s, he would be like "See? See? This is EXACTLY what I was talking about!"
It's just like the way that the 90s mainstream culture in the UK was not based on punks ... not because absolutely no punks "crossed over", but because, as a percentage of the population, there were hardly any punks to start with (just a lot of media noise).
Surely you understand that Coca-Cola wasn't "the entire establishment"?
Counterculture is a like a good stock tip - if you're hearing about it, that ship has already sailed.
It was the polished, highly educated, upper-middle class version of the activists that sprang up around the Ferguson protests. BLM was the mainstream corporate replacement of a street level movement, whose leaders acquired a habit of being found executed in the trunks of burned cars. A rehearsal for #TimesUp.
Fighting the police is about as counter as you can get.
For the benefit of other readers though, I'll bite.
For instance, former congressman for Iowa Steve King tweeting about slavery [0] is pretty explicit. How about the slightly more abstruse but still pretty glaring white supremacist dog whistle [1] in response to a random Dutch guy complaining about muslims. He was in congress 2003-2021.
Of course Great Replacement rhetoric is also pushed pretty openly to rally white voters, with Tucker Carlson saying things like "demographic change is the key to the Democratic Party’s political ambitions", and congresswoman for New York Elise Stefanik running ads saying "[Democrats'] plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington".
Do you accept these examples or do you need the GOP leadership to issue a letter signed by all party members stating they like white people?
[0] https://twitter.com/SteveKingIA/status/1612505990305308672?s... [1] https://twitter.com/SteveKingIA/status/1614259933469462528?s...
Because why do they have to dog whistle about it? Why do they have to resort to subtlety at all?
It's forbidden from public discourse to such an extent that can only be found between the lines, hidden in vague allusions, or more likely, asserted as baseless accusations slandering conservative politicians, while the GOP explicitly tries everything it can to promote their non-white figures.
They try to promote their non-white figures because their agenda and campaigning for the most part is so overwhelmingly targeted toward white voters that they have horrible reach into other demographics.
This is like the Black Lives Matter vs All Lives Matter debacle. Minorities are brought into the spotlight because there are systems and large groups of people actively working against them. Meanwhile, you don't need to "promote" whiteness, because that's seen as the default in America.
Edit: Not needing to do something is not a reason for not doing it. Do you have a hypothesis for why they wouldn't explicitly pander? It seems you adamantly refuse to address this monumental question.
> Rather they were asking for issues like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness to be addressed rather than just being policed.
I’m sure some were asking for those things, but mostly this was a media retcon when it was becoming apparent that “abolish the police” was jeopardizing Biden’s election campaign (“when protesters say ‘abolish the police’ and ‘all cops are bastards’, surely they’re really advocating for more spending on social services, right?”).
Richard Rosenfeld speaking to The Guardian: “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson Effect”
Vox reporting on Travis Campbell’s research: “Campbell’s research indicates that these protests correlate with a 10% increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests”.
Harvard’s Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi found that prominent BLM protests were associated with 900 excess homicides in the 5 cities they examined and 34k excess felonies. They report that the leading hypothesis is a change in policing activity, and the cities they studied had precipitous drops in the quantity of police-civilian interactions following the protests.
These are professional criminologists and economists—I doubt they’re being “silly” as you suggest.
edit: You are cherry picking your data points. I spent literally 30 seconds looking up your first quote it's not even congruent with what you're saying.
The solution is obvious. Start rolling heads of Police Chiefs until they get their hierarchies of people in line. If it ends with the entire police union fired so be it, insubordinate lawless police are worse than useless.
But why? If this is really the majority sentiment, why on earth leave any room for plausible deniability?
> their agenda and campaigning for the most part is so overwhelmingly targeted toward white voters that they have horrible reach into other demographics.
Not really, though. Voting levels are low enough that they could conceivably focus their energies simply on getting more non-voting whites to vote.
If you read the comment you're replying to, it answers that question immediately.
> Not really, though. Voting levels are low enough that they could conceivably focus their energies simply on getting more non-voting whites to vote.
They could, but their agenda fits white people better, for reasons that are evident to anyone with critical thinking skills. Hint: think about the dog-whistling some more.
Culture is what's uncontroversially and fearlessly blasted on front pages, and on mainstream TV.
> They could, but their agenda fits white people better, for reasons that are evident to anyone with critical thinking skills.
Evidently the millions of non-white Republicans, and the millions of white Democrats, all lack these critical thinking skills, then.
> Culture is what's uncontroversially and fearlessly blasted on front pages, and on mainstream TV.
My comments on dog-whistling were specifically targeted toward the one commenter talking about how politicians don't seem to care about white people.
If you want to go back to the broader discussion, on culture, then yes I agree. And what is blasted on front pages and mainstream TV is overwhelmingly white, with tiny pockets dedicated to other groups. To say that "whiteness" is a counterculture is absurd.
As an aside:
> the millions of white Democrats
The Democrat agenda also fits white people better than non-white people, though they make more effort than Republicans to acknowledge minorities.
As for why non-white Republicans vote that way, maybe they miss the dog-whistles, or maybe they think the racism of the party isn't directed at them (e.g., since they're "one of the good ones") or that it's outweighed by other factors (i.e., they hate taxes), or maybe they think the Republicans are the better of two evils. Not really relevant, since they aren't in this discussion. Do you have the critical thinking skills?
This is the counter-culture. The dominant culture opposes all of these things and makes obligatory the celebration of the opposite values. 4chan being one of the few lightly-restricted free speech zones allows for culture generation that would be censored anywhere else. Counter-culture is supposed to be edgy, just like jazz and rock were edgy, greasers/rockabilly were edgy, beatniks were edgy, hippies were edgy, disco was edgy, punks were edgy, LGBTQ was edgy, and so on. Every one of them were described by dismissive epithets just like the string you put together about how awful and contrary to decency they were.
No, it's not. The words explain themselves perfectly fine: an opposing culture.
What you describe boils down to being irrationally angry, stunted in various ways, and generally destructive... It's not a counter-culture but just counter-productive and essentially a defect. If anything, it is devoid of culture.
And just in case someone takes "counter-productive" and tries to argue that being against trying to make everything productive is counter-culture: that's not what I mean and you know it. If you were to find yourself not aligning with anything out in the world and you wish to alter that, there are a whole lot of things you could be doing to get there, but what people do on 4chan gets nobody anywhere, unless the digital version of sniffing glue is considered an alteration of the status-quo.
I don't like 4-chan but isn't that what they said about hippies? That they are stunted (e.g. they spend all their time smoking pot instead of cutting their hair, getting a job and being productive members of society. They are irrationally angry at society and refuse to recognize the grim realities of the real world. They are destructively brain washing our youths. Etc.)
Ultimately i think counter cultures can be good or bad and that is separate from if they are counter culture
Just because something isn't PC doesn't mean it isn't counter-culture. Hip-hop for example is riddled with extremely homophobic, violent, and sexist content but has become by far the biggest music genre in the world. That doesn't mean it isn't culture and it definitely was counter-culture (at least in the 80's and 90's).
Angry to be sure, but Irrationally? Take a closer look.
>stunted in various ways
To be sure. C’est la vie. But also undeniably brilliant on occasion.
>generally destructive
Not unlike the hippies then.
>If anything, it is devoid of culture.
Simply ignorant.
Like punks? Mods and rockers? Beatniks? Greasers?
I think what you are really referring to is a social movement, which often aligns with a particular counter culture that has decided to organize. But there can be many counter cultures and not all of them the deliberate goal of social change.
It appears to me that you are so angry at 4-chan for its perceived ideas that you cannot see things from their perspective.
IOW, reactionary
This is literally what was said about the hippies.
If you're betting that 4chan is the one that's going to stand out of "ahead of its time" you aren't doing it because "counterculture is always ahead" you're doing it because it's the one you personally focus on. Otherwise you'd have to be evaluating it against all the other counterculture things. And many of them are much less derivative and backwards-looking.
This list implies that "homophobic, racist, sexist, emotionally and mentally stunted incels" is destined to be normal and acceptable in the future. That sounds awful.
This may be unpopular topic, but I actually think having a non-traditional sexuality/gender is the new 'edgy'. I know that implies it's just a trend/fad and not a reality for some individuals. It seems to have increased in such a massive relative basis that I can't help but think it actually is a trend versus following some natural occurrence. Or perhaps, given significant hindsight I could see that the definitions around these things is just undergoing an accelerating foundational shift. We know ancient societies had massively different ideas for what was and wasn't normal. Hell, very recently ago our own society had very different norms for age of consent and age of "child".
Sorry if any of this is or sounds offensive, I look at it from a statistical mindset and what baseline seems to have existed. It's totally possible that societies around the world have used religion and such to suppress the baseline and it's starting to naturally come back - I wouldn't be able to observe things like that.
I'm not so sure about "emotionally and mentally stunted incels," but homophobia, racism, and sexism were all acceptable in the past, and given enough time will most likely be acceptable in the future.
Progress is a lie; change can go in all directions. It's a mistake to draw a line across living memory or the recent historical era and extrapolate whatever trend you find very far into the future.
Being LGBTQ is a lot more accepted today than it was 20 years ago. Fuck I could set my pronouns on my linkedin profile of all places.
If a man has long hair, it is looked as a style and is completely acceptable unless you are in the military.
Mom: We have a counter-culture at home.
The counter-culture at home: 4chan incels
Racism is core to nearly every country in the world. It may seem bad in the US, but it's worse elsewhere. And while people won't admit they're racist in the US, racism itself is pervasive.
Sexism might be the most prominent and long lasting parts of the culture across the world for millenia. Just look up the rape stats, and then keep in mind that most rapes are not reported.
Homophobia, racism, and sexism are deeply ingrained in nearly every culture on the planet today.
Aside from monogamous gay people, queerness is very much still edgy and not particularly accepted by the dominant/mainstream culture.
(This is not a positive thing, but it is reality.)
Being supported by advertising, movies, tv shows, signaled by major corporations and workplaces, and supported top-down by the government means its edgy and counterculture? We live in completely different realities I guess.
Something that people advertise about themselves on their linkedin profiles in order to get better job offers is the opposite of edgy.
This is a vile take. It is sickening to compare liking a genre of music or wearing a certain style of dress or being queer to hating people because they're queer, not white, not male, or because they're a woman who won't have sex with you.
The other half is a mix of the hateful or unstable.
But who knows, it's the internet, and it's completely anonymous over there.
Jazz and Rock was the music of african americans that became mainstream in white america just like rap did later. Punk was a reaction to rock becoming boring and stale. Disco came out from the african-american AND LGBTQ community, and the eventual "disco sucks" mainstream backlash was at least somewhat motivated by racism/homophobia, not anything inherent with disco.
None of these creative outlets were a result of anyone overtly TRYING to offend anyone. That they offended was a side effect of them changing the world, and the mainstream reaction to it, not the core motivation.
Now, I don't want to paint 4chan with one brush. I actually think a significant amount of internet creativity and beautiful creation occurs on it, and they never get enough credit for it. Most legendary memes - offensive or not - originate on 4chan. Internet memes are some of the most unique artistic creations of our generation.
But the parts that people get mad at 4chan for (the homophobic/racist/misogynistic parts) are not that. Those are creations intentionally made to get a reaction: "You tell me I can't say <blank>? Watch me!!"
There is a charitable interpretation of this that they are bucking against censorship and fighting for self-expression on principle. And some may draw comparisons to what they're doing to times in history when "blasphemers" criticized religious dogma. That making a homophobic or racist meme is the modern equivalent of proclaiming "There is no God" 200 years ago.
The difference comes down to the Paradox of Intolerance. Religion and the dominant culture associated with it, actively repressed everyone who didn't match their worldview. People were told you have to believe this in faith and act as if you do, or you will be punished. The modern "dogma" of LGBTQ/race acceptance is instead saying "You CANNOT tell others how to believe and act, and punish them accordingly. You cannot discriminate against those different from you by birth race/gender/sexuality."
It is highly childish to associate all "you cannot do <blank>" guidances as repressive and similar. And I meant that literally. Children can't tell the difference between "No, we can't have desert because i told you so" and "You can't touch the hot stove because it will hurt you".
So, no, THAT side of 4chan is not counterculture. It's at best children trolling on the internet (I know, I was one), and at worst hateful bigots angry that their acceptance is diminishing in the world and lashing out.
Rock'n'roll, punk, etc were definitely trying to overtly offend. Many rockers claimed to worship Satan, mocking the older generation was widespread ('hope I die before I get old'). Look up the Sex Pistols.
Those counter-cultures were for something, for their identities at least. What is 4chan for?
...
>None of these creative outlets were a result of anyone overtly TRYING to offend anyone.
So when Sid Vicious (and other punks) wore a swastika, he wasn't trying to offend people?
The problem is, young idiots were ordinary young idiots in the past. They didn't do much more than maybe snatch a car for a joyride or kick off someone of IRC by sending them a direct message with "DCC SEND" or whatever that caused middleboxes to drop the connection. Annoying, sometimes causing a bit of damage, but nothing too serious.
Nowadays? They radicalize each other into a spiral that often enough ends in real-world violence - or in bullying people to suicide, which is just as bad. And unfortunately, the importance of hateful bigots is not diminishing. Not at all. The Tea Party and, following it, the Trumpets are recently risen developments - and they're still rising.
Honestly, I think you're making the mistake of confusing your subjective view with "objectivity." Like saying your opinions and preferences are "objectively" the right ones.
Also, you appear to be describing your side in the most charitable way you can, those you oppose in the least charitable way, and unsurprisingly finding those you oppose wanting.
Then it’s worth considering why the prevailing culture at the time didn’t see it that way.
(I'd listen to a station that did that kind of thing, but that's not how it works presently.)
Even as someone who favours liberal drug laws at this point, the social upheaval of the late '60s had objectively horrific consequences for the poor in particular. The massive drug epidemic that to this day kills more Americans than the entire Vietnam War every year, the unprecedented doubling of murder rates overall in nearly every Western country from 1965-1975, and collapse of the family unit seem like more tangible downsides than a small number of what you describe as edgelords jerking themselves into a froth on a forum read by other edgelords.
Nearly every major social issue of the late 20th century exploded as a direct result of hippie culture bringing drugs and hostility towards the family and social institutions into the mainstream. People often think of rising crime as the result of the 1980s crack "epidemic," but the explosion in murder rates occurred almost entirely from 1966-1975 and actually grew at a slower pace up to 1990 (outside the UK): https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/uRI8Y/1/ The US murder rate in 1974 was exactly the same as it was at the peak of the "Crack epidemic" in 1990, and more than double the rate it was in 1964.
You can still argue the benefits outweighed the costs, but it's simply ignorant to pretend 1960s counterculture was some uniformly benevolent movement for peace and love, any more than the movement you identify with 4chan is merely a benevolent movement for "national pride" or "family values."
How 4chan specifically got designated the "counterculture" in this thread is questionable, but so is the inability to look beyond the status-quo, contemporary perspective of major media, academia and corporations.
Put yourself in the shoes of a WW2 veteran in the 60s. He sees his children get sucked into drug culture and protesting against the military that just 20 years ago saved the Pacific from tyranny. You turn on the news and see them making a nuisance of themselves in the streets. They're ungroomed, ugly, and do weird sex stuff.
You ask yourself where you went wrong raising them and lament the collapse of society and death of American values.
It is either incredibly ignorant or intentionally dishonest to pretend that the 1960s counterculture was some uniformly benevolent force for peace and love, and says a lot about the person claiming so's lack of ability to see anything outside their contemporary/status-quo perspective.
(Makes one wonder what chickens will come home to roost in Russia eventually.)
Makin’ your way if you can
Temporary layoffs
Good Times
Easy credit ripoffs
Good Times
Ain’t we lucky we got ‘em?
Good Times!
You could argue that it was attack on US values, but that was about it. Half around the effin world. In society where US was not welcomed in any way even in South Vietnam by almost nobody local (and for good reasons). Some continuous and serious mental gymnastics were required to keep feeling righteous in that war.
I know after-perspective is easy, but this is how history judges actions long term. Emotions of given heated moment are irrelevant and ignored.
4chan is another place you mischaracterize due to the mainstream media. Social rejects go there. Of every kind. You probably ignored the fact that there's been an LGBT board for more than a decade since you don't go there.
4 Chan is rooted in things that are objectively good: free thought, satire and not taking anything too seriously.
That's not to make any judgement on the societal value of 4Chan vs. the 1960s counterculture. It's just that neither is/was a uniform group that can be defined as "rooted in X, Y, or Z," and people who claim they can are typically blind to the bias of their cultural perspective.
If that's your view of 4chan then the whole point of 4chan went over your head. 4chan is about irreverence of and rebellion against the current mainstream culture that if you're non-conformist in any way or hold a view that may be construed as offensive to anyone, your opinion (and person) has no value. It's a reaction to upvote/downvote culture on the Internet that rewards conformity. 4chan, famously, has a highly contemptuous opinion of Reddit.
What 4chan says, self-deprecatingly, is "I will offend all your sensibilities. Oh you're still here? Ok, here's what I have to say."
In my opinion (it's impossible to know for sure) most of it is pretense. There aren't actually as many racists, homophobes, sexists etc. It's satirically amplified as a form of gatekeeping.
It's a great example of how irony often doesn't really exist.
Oh you were only playing at being a total arsehole ironically? That's not actually a good thing, and you've helped give cover to actual arseholes, spread their message and hatred, and now people have died. And all because you think it's fun to be edgy. Congrats.
History is written by the winners.
No one is objectively good because they are human after all. Hippies had good values, but also bad ones such as: uncleanliness, irresponsible drug use, parasitism, thoughtlessness, and sometimes even vanity.
So in addition to them being homophobes, they are also closeted homosexuals?
Why is it that this is such a popular insult among people here on HN? It's like this strange and incoherent insult from lefties where they think they're being supportive of gay people by calling out homophobia as bad, but also calling the homophobe gay to hurt them in some manner, which would imply that being gay is an insult. I suppose your defense might be that being gay is an insult to the homophobe, but why specifically would you call a homophobe gay, without further information? It erodes any assumption I'd have that you genuinely respect gay people if you're willing to just toss around some claims that this person or that group is gay.
And if I thought someone was a gay homophobe, putting aside any argument with them I have otherwise, I'd probably feel somewhat bad for them to be in that position.
Anyway, we both know that you're an edgelord. That's why you wrote that sentence. So quit hating on people who are just like you. You're like a closeted homophobe, but for 4chan edgelords.
That's an interesting point I haven't heard of before, thanks :)
https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
> “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
not to defend 4chan, but this kind of categorical and imprecise summarization of a group of people is strongly similar to the things that my (very) hippy parents were told by their (very) straight-laced parents.
People in this thread are reducing all of 4chan to a board meant not to be taken seriously (/b/) and a containment board intended to keep far-right conservative discussions off of other boards (/pol/). Then they're somehow contorting the offensiveness of what goes on at those two boards as evidence that they can't be counter-cultural because "true" counter-culture apparently can't be offensive?
> The hippies are rooted in things like naiveté, lust, drugs, immorality, communism, apathy, and atheism.
There is a sense in the more liberal communities that cultures are good-by-definition. They do mental gymnastics to ensure that any harmful cultural artifacts (e.g. slavery) are explained away as "not really culture, but a product of external forces" (e.g. imperialism).
I have never felt the need to do this: some cultures are on-the-whole bad, and that does not disqualify them from being cultures.
>The hippies were rooted in things that were objectively good: peace, [...]
>That contrasts sharply with 4chan’s demographics and motivations.
I know I shouldn't criticize the Current War lest I be accused of supporting the Current Enemy, but I just can't help but point out the irony here.
>bunch of closeted homophobic, racist, sexist, emotionally and mentally stunted
[italics mine]
Surely you must see the problem with this clause.
Not every single user, quiet majority still goes there for (some of the) content and discussions are ignored. But once you open them its the same mess. It wasn't dominant so much before but it is like that now. Sparks of sanity drowning in pitiful empty statements. I don't know user details but it feels like bunch of frustrated teenagers who are racing to show who is more depraved and depressed, mixed with adults who are failures in real life and ventilate their anger and hate on such places (I don't believe it works for more than few seconds but its probably as addictive as cigarettes mentally).
“ At 75 I am in the baby boom and I was in the counter culture. Lets just say from 1965 to 1985. The counter culture was driven by the Vietnam war. Reciprocal to the war was the peace witness inspired by the Quakers. During this same period, instances of cheap real estate and low cost apartments and free places to live existed. Also developing the skills needed for living a counter culture life were helped along by, unemployment insurance. Unemployment irregularly functioned as a cost of living help when I went back to junior college to study film and sewing.”
I tend to disagree that these are objectively good.
One argument against is that any society that holds these as ideals will quickly be over run by societies that don't.
Being disagreeable can have adaptive advantages.
Counterculture is when most of your beliefs align with what the Raytheon PR pushes out. That's how you punk in 2020s.
This is quite reductive and ignores the role of dysfunction emerging from within families and institutional structures, including, but not limited to:
>The psychological and public health effects of widespread lead poisoning
>The psychological effects of family patriachs often being psychologically-scarred veterans, for whom drug use was sometimes prescribed by the military
>The artificial and contentious "community" of planned suburbs, which warped the character of family life while saddling local and state governments with debt traps which diverted funds from social services
>The intentional breakup of existing urban communities through "renewal", starting in the 50s
>The "benign neglect" of the remains of these communities following the King riots
Much like Reconstruction and TARP, the problem isn't that we did it, it's that we didn't do it hard enough.
Sources? Wasn’t the crack epidemic more related to Contra and the breaking of the family unit due to disproportionate incarceration of black males by the government in attempt to break their political power via the selective targeting of specific drugs by the govt, i.e marijuana and crack over cocaine?
The overwhelming majority of the rise in crime occurred between 1964 and 1974, in which time the murder rate in the US more than doubled and reached its all-time high in 1974.
Crack cocaine itself wasn't found in the US until the mid-1980s, i.e. well after the overwhelming majority of the rise in crime had already occurred. With no crack present in the US, it's clearly ridiculous to attribute the rise in crime to a drug-or laws targeting a drug-that didn't exist in the US until a decade later.
The crack vs. cocaine sentencing law you mention didn't exist until 1986, when it was pushed for primarily by black and progressive political leaders (notably the bill's author, then-senator Joe Biden) who believed it would address the rampant violence they associated with crack in their communities (https://www.npr.org/2017/07/17/537715793/how-black-leaders-u..., https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-an-early-biden-c...).
In other words, neither crack laws nor significant crack use itself existed until the vast majority of the rise in crime had already occurred. Even the most outlandish theories of Contra involvement in drug trafficking (which they were involved to some extent like many South American guerrilla groups) would attribute a literal drop in the bucket of the cocaine trafficked to the US to the Contras. Again, this is only even relevant if you think crack caused the rise in violent crime that occurred decades before it was introduced to the US.
To address your third point, the incarceration rates you mention didn't actually start rising until 1973 and remained much lower than in the 1950s until the mid-70s (https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/18613/chapter/4#35). Moreover, they didn't begin their rapid climb until 1980, at which point crime had begun declining. For reference, about 5 times as many people are in jail/prison today as in 1975: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/18613/chapter/4#35 When incarceration rates truly began skyrocketing in the late '80s-2000s, violent crimes were rapidly dropping.
For example, in the current year vegetarianism is a sub-culture of mainstream lifestyle dieting while carnivorism is a counter-culture.
Punk Rock the MUSIC genre changed rock n roll forever and made it better.
Punk Rock the Swastika Wearers didn't need to exist.
It's the same today with 4chan the Meme Factory vs 4chan the Swastika Wearers.
The fact that my views align much closer than theirs with many mainstream political parties, almost all of academia, most major media outlets and most major corporation’s stated values is because they all are also part of the counter culture now.
There’s literally no way that an awesome, too cool rebel like myself somehow became part of the mainstream instead of the hip and trendy counter culture movement.
Reagan got his notepad out, and wrote "If you are the future, I'm selling all my stocks!" on a sheet of paper, and held it up to the window for them to read.
Where are all these ads, movies, and TV shows depicting non-monogamous queer relationships? How is the government providing this "top-down" support? Are there now tax breaks for people in poly relationships?
Are you kidding me?
https://www.hbomax.com/collections/lgbtq-voices
https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/100010
>How is the government providing this "top-down" support? https://joebiden.com/lgbtq-policy/#
This is not "edgy counterculture"Pathos, Logos, and Ethos
It is an interesting thought.
It could also be their outdated picture of "mainstream" culture is a fossil embedded in the self-justifications of the current mainstream culture.
Some people will forever pretend current-year is the 1950s, because, not because they want to live in the 50s, but because they see themselves as the people who are abolishing it.
Despite the fact these current cultural trends and related ideologies are very much dominant on every major western social media platform and even more so among dominant traditional media platforms (and their executives and journalists). Yet they still pretend it's not the default culture in the west.
The existence of pushback from significant/influential parts of the population != you're not the dominant mainstream culture.
My aunt went from burning American flags and marching in support of interracial marriage and civil rights to clutching her pearls about Marilyn Manson ripping up bibles and gay marriage becoming legal, but even as she supports censorship and state mandated injustice, she will always view herself as the protestor that fought against censorship and state mandated injustice.
Even I find myself occasionally saying things about zoomers that sounds just like stuff my dad used to say about me and it’s a lot easier to rationalize it as “no, TikTok is actually hurting kid’s attention spans, it’s different this time” than admit that I might be acting just as silly as he was when he said exactly the same thing about my Game Boy.
There isnt really a default culture across america the way you are insisting. The place is fucking huge.
Our national institutions are very accepting of LGBTQ as well as the federal government. Looking at LGBTQ equality by state, https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps the majority of the country, 29 states are fair or pro LGBTQ vs 21 that have negative policy or low equality.
Additionally, 71% of people support same-sexy marriages https://news.gallup.com/poll/393197/same-sex-marriage-suppor...
Is it still counterculture when it is accepted and embraced by the overwhelming majority of citizens, education and cultural institutions, and protected by laws in the majority of the country?