Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Can you give a few examples? The 30 under 30 sure doesn't look like what you suggest, and I'm not sure where else you'd look for a list of examples
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Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
621–630 of 1001 posts
Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
#622Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in the rural south and went to a private Christian university. They painted the statue of the school mascot a rainbow on pride month. My biblical ethics classes taught the opposite of what the Bible teaches. The students couldn't care less about the traditional aspects of Christianity. My friends at other Christian private universities had similar experiences. You don't have to be in NY, SF, or wherever to exp…
> You don't have to be in NY, SF, or wherever to experience the trendy culture. It is pervasive everywhere. 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…
Not sure why that would be surprising. Most get all their info from the internet where reactions to speech about traditional values ranges from mass disapproval to outright censorship.
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.
Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
#623Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been wondering lately if it's down to the lack of agency on the part of average people. 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?
You realize that "America is in decline" has been alive and well since the 60s. Not sure anything right now points to it being any different back then. If anything militarily and intelligence wise the US proved the dominance globally by tipping off Ukraine and stopping a full Russian incursion.
The main problems America has are internal. I agree that nobody could realistically invade us or wage war against us, but that doesn't mean we can't have civil conflicts or a period like the Troubles. In those cases, our overwhelming military superiority might be a drawback since everybody and their cousin is armed.
Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
#624If you only consume mainstream media then you may personally live in a society which lacks a counterculture. 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 yo…
4chan is obnoxiously and brainlessly countercultural to the point of contrarianism, though. It used to be a fun place where people didn't care so much about social conventions and focused mostly on having a good time and poking fun at each other, but it's degraded into just hating anything and everything that they can attribute to anybody they don't like. I've seen tons of cases where they were on-board for something…
Any counter-culture requires there to be a culture.
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.
Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
#625Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are unsure of what he meant, try and explicitly advocate for "majority white, straight, Christian(ish)" people in the same way every other group gets to do in america and see how it goes. And if your knee jerk reaction is to say "well only a racist white nationalist would do that", you have proved my point, and you are using the same fallacious reasoning that leads to people thinking that all gay rights advoca…
Advocating for those in power doesn't carry the same reasoning as advocating for those who are not in power so it is not the same type of fallacious reasoning you claim. Edit: I removed my second sentence since it appears to be confusing others of my tone and intention.
>Advocating for those in power doesn't carry the same reasoning as advocating for those who are not in power
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.
Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
#626Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> But get them in private or anonymously (e.g. a fellow train passenger) and a wide variety of views emerge. 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…
>but pretty much all of them agree with the idea that everyone should be entitled to basic decency.
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.
Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
#627Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you’re observing isn’t a lack of counter-culture, it’s a lack of monolithic culture , though. In different parts of the country, or even different parts of the same city, the dominant culture is different. Living a “glorified lifestyle,” as you put it, in NY of SF? Sure, no one bats an eye. In the rural south? Different story. On the other hand — white man with “radically traditional values“, whatever that means…
But would you really assert that 1950s in the US was a complete monolith? I think the reason we might intuitively see it that way is because, ironically, we're outsiders. But of course I'm sure you'd agree that there were countless little cultures going on at the time there as well, even within the same cities. So it seems clear that "mainstream" culture is not monolithic, merely dominant. You can always find bubbles…
[Caveat: I'm not an expert here, so ignore all this.]
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?
Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
#628Earlier quoted context omitted.
Context: Am LGBTQ person who also has traditional religious views. 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 comi…
Yeah it seems you can have wildly different experiences depending on where you live in the US. Probably why we are so politically divided, at this point we're living in different societies. 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.
>Anywhere in California you would not experience any of that
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.
Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
#629Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not childish anymore. It's just angry and cynical. It looks less like the shit-talking edgy teenagers having fun being idiots like it was in 2007, and more like unhinged, hateful, contrarian paranoid schizophrenia. I wish the people on 4chan had the stupid childish fun that I did 15 years ago.
>and more like unhinged, hateful, contrarian paranoid schizophrenia. 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 hatef…
I was a teenager, so it's possible to a degree, but the things you're listing in my memory were there in significantly smaller degrees, and have since completely taken over the site. Back in the day, there was a hell of a lot more "Yellow van", "epic for the win" and the like. Now it's 'america is a far left cultureless “nation” and its tranny enabling (((mutts))) will never be white no matter how much they inbreed with other “whites” in their shithole trailer park'.
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.
Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
#630Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way you know 4chan is the counterculture is every time someone releases a new generative art tool, 4chan figures out a way to do stuff with it that makes the creators have to restrict and/or shut it down. 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 hav…
The hippies were shit on during the sixties because of politics and the Vietnam war. The hippies were a big part of the anti war movement. The simplest and quickest way to shutting the movement down was to criminalize its constituents, like hippies, or civil rights activists, through tactics like draconian drug laws and a drug war. The hippies were rooted in things that were objectively good: peace, love, self discov…
If you're interested in a more nuanced view of hippies, read "Jester: Memoirs of a Retired Hippie"
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.