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Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

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Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#681

Post by everdrive »

Taywee wrote: post #526
jjk166 wrote: post #484

If 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…

> 4chan is obnoxiously and brainlessly countercultural to the point of contrarianism, though.

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.”

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#682

Post by jjulius »

sjducb wrote: post #675
koprulusector wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can easily make the same case about 4 Chan. 4 Chan is rooted in things that are objectively good: free thought, satire and not taking anything too seriously.

Respectfully disagree. I'd argue that those are just fronts 4Chan hopes to hide behind so that it can remain a cesspool.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#683

Post by chinchilla2020 »

> It’s possible that ChatGPT is the beginning of artificial general intelligence or that it will upend Google’s search business despite Google’s considerable moats.

ChatGPT can never wander past its training data. If anything, chatGPT encourages a convergent monoculture. It has no creativity or problem solving skills.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#684

Post by MockObject »

standardUser wrote: post #297
alldayeveryday wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another hard agree. I always get a good laugh when people in queer culture claim to be living a counter culture lifestyle. Meanwhile the US state department is flying the queer flag at its embassies around the world and using it to agitate foreign conservative cultures. 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…

It's not that it's an unpopular position, it's that the argument is flawed and the point you're trying to make falls flat. First, you lump all of queer culture into one group, a false categorization without which your augment fails. 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…

> 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.

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.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#686

Post by RangerScience »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #605
cleandreams wrote: post #553

I am old enough to remember the hippies and related counterculture(s). (I was very young.) This is something to keep in mind: the counterculture then was a place where people made a living. And the cost of living was cheap. You could raise kids on an organic farm, sell in the local alternative stores, have a live show on pirate radio. And pay your modest bills. Health insurance and college tuition was cheap. Jeez --…

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). 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 bodi…

That's a deeply flawed statement on a number of levels, here's a few:

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...

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#687

Post by teachrdan »

ticviking wrote: post #524
selimthegrim wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize there’s an entire TV network based out of Birmingham Alabama for all that stuff

Can you think of a major network show where the focus was on Christian themes in a way like queer eye is about LGBT+ themes? 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)

Even this is wrong. The Hallmark channel makes 40 Christmas movies a year, all of them with Christian families, obviously. (Some allow for a character who is Jewish.) These movies attract millions of viewers.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonifitzgerald/2021/12/24/the-e...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanberr/2019/01/11/widely-...

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#688

Post by PuppyTailWags »

farmaway wrote: post #671
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Disagreement over what "basic decency" means is the heart of the LGBTIAP+ debate, 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 […] debat…

The President of the United States of America: 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://we…

Small question: In the name of preventing children from transitioning, there are laws in place in some states to investigate supportive parents for child abuse and separate children from their parents should their parents support their child's transition. How does this correspond with parental autonomy?

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?

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#689

Post by thalassophobia »

flangola7 wrote: post #670
User23 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Catholic teaching is that men cannot become women and women cannot become men. Catholic teaching is that lying is sinful. 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.

I know several Catholics who have no problem using a transgender person's pronouns. Trying to use a religion as a cover for bigotry is disrespectful to both the transgender person and other members of the religion.

I know many Christians who do not fast, but that doesn't make not fasting OK by the Bible. This isn't using religion as a cover but obeying its rules.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#690

Post by Shared404 »

savryn wrote: post #642
Shared404 wrote: post #356

Earlier 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…

the people beating up anyone are the cultural underclass/proles, be it rural whites or ghetto blacks -- by definition these are not cultural elites. 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 'powe…

Wow uhh... that sure is a post.

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?

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