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.

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

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.

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.

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".

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.

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

Web3: https://intercoin.org/applications

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wish the people on 4chan had the stupid childish fun that I did 15 years ago.

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.

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.

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.

Why is it taking till the 2020's for it to be so obvious though?

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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."

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.

> 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."

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.)

It's literally in the name: involuntary celibate

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...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_synagogue_shooting

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.

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...

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.

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-...

Democracy does work. People do make a difference every day. Don’t let the internet get you down.

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.

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.

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

I think your ability to tolerate shit to get to the lulz has changed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Edit: I removed my second sentence since it appears to be confusing others of my tone and intention.

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 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.

[1] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10195b.htm

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.

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.

Which (snarkily) I guess is fair.

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.

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.

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!"

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...

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.

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.

> 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.