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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?

#831

Post by rightbyte »

machina_ex_deus wrote: post #809
rightbyte wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The definition of vaccine (provides immunity), I kinda agree with you except about vaccines. The seasonal flu vaccines are nowhere close to giving immunity and predates COVID-19.

The excuses made for flu vaccines (there are many strains of flu after generations of different strains circulating and diverging), don't apply to COVID. It's pretty obvious they started to redefine what vaccine does right around the time the COVID vaccine failed. The tests used to authorize the vaccines supposedly showed 95% efficiency doing just that. The narrative shift was extremely sharp.

There were so many narrative shifts during COVID-19 I lost count. I dunno where the blame is due. But the most disturbing thing was the stigmatization of countrarians even though "the facts" shifted left and right.

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

#832

Post by actionfromafar »

at-w wrote: post #716
tonfreed wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoken like a true 1960s establishment thinker. 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…

Or more objectively, they see murder rates literally doubling from 1964-1974, a rise never before seen in American history. They see a massive drug epidemic and an entirely unprecedented breakdown in the family unit that results in literally millions of children born to single mothers. They see a collapse of social institutions coinciding with an again unprecedented rise in suicides and antisocial activities. They se…

Didn't the gangs in for instance L.A. start using guns and selling drugs after they got Vietnam veterans in their ranks who had experience with all of that?

(Makes one wonder what chickens will come home to roost in Russia eventually.)

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

#833

Post by projectazorian »

wskinner wrote: post #574
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…

> The hippies were rooted in things that were objectively good: peace, love, self discovery, acceptance, mutual aid, egalitarianism, free thought. Then it’s worth considering why the prevailing culture at the time didn’t see it that way.

No it isn't? We have the benefit of hindsight and don't need to become preoccupied with what a lot of dead people thought about something. Leave that to the historians.

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

#834

Post by flangola7 »

thalassophobia wrote: post #689
flangola7 wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But who determines what is "OK by the Bible?" A plain reading of it shows a number of clear contradictions, so we naturally can't rely on the verbatim text. Not to mention there is more than one version of the Bible itself.

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.

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

#835

Post by bilbo0s »

fedeb95 wrote: post #521
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…

I feel the same. I bet every period of time thought there wasn't a counterculture. Yet it was there, ready to become the new mainstream.

A person could have made billions.

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.

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

#836

Post by jbm »

bglazer wrote: post #750
narrator wrote: post #509

Earlier 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…

Being antisocial is not the same thing as being counterculture. There’s not really a flourishing of new ideas or material culture on 4chan, just a race to the bottom of taboo-breaking.

Not a fan of 4chan, but almost all memes (the foundation of modern culture) seem to start there.

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

#837

Post by Minor49er »

woodruffw wrote: post #763
narrator wrote: post #509

Earlier 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…

This is confusing cause and effect: 4chan was a countercultural force, in the same way that SA was. Countercultural forces always end the same way: they're either co-opted for a purpose, or they fade into irrelevancy (as counterculture becomes culture). 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 masqueradi…

I think this is an important point. 4chan today is largely populated by bot posters, especially on the bigger boards like /b/. Regular users will suffer through captchas mysteriously not working, getting (range) banned for proxy use when the poster is not using a proxy, or even just shadowbanned

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

#838

Post by Apocryphon »

oneplane wrote: post #740
Perceval wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> homophobic, racist, sexist, emotionally and mentally stunted incels 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, grea…

> Counter-culture is supposed to be [... list of stuff...] 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…

> What you describe boils down to being irrationally angry, stunted in various ways, and generally destructive

Like punks? Mods and rockers? Beatniks? Greasers?

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

#839

Post by roncesvalles »

Taywee wrote: post #585
ipaddr wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you grew up and are beyond the childness. Don't take that experience away from others.

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.

It really depends on the board that you're on. /g/ imo is one of the best tech forums that I'm aware of, as long as you don't get fixated on the occasional crudeness and racism. /pol/ is just racists and incoherent rambling. /tv/ is a good forum for critical takes on media but again requires weeding through the bad parts.

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

#840

Post by coding123 »

banannaise wrote: post #733
Perceval wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> homophobic, racist, sexist, emotionally and mentally stunted incels 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, grea…

> LGBTQ was edgy 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.)

We want non-monogamous in society? Isn't that just chaos at best?
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