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 --…
People need to give more attention to the collapse in ad-hoc labor. We've made life far too regimented and regulated for many people. I don't think we give enough attention to this gap in the economy.
Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
851–860 of 1001 posts
Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
#852Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because no one needs to change the way they act around you. Christianity and Catholicism are strongly majority groups in the US. You were already treated as a Christian because that's what the majority of our society is based on.
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.
People (including Catholics) supporting trans rights agree with that.
Of course, most of the Catholic heirarchy and supporters of trans rights disagree on who are men and who are women to start with, but, I mean, the former at least should be familiar with the idea of an entity having the observable physical characteistics of one thing but being something radically different because of its innate essence.
> Catholic teaching is that lying is sinful.
Catholic teaching is that lying consists of objectively false statements told with intent to deceive. (CCC 2482)
> Practicing the Catholic faith by saying "I'm sorry, but I can't 'use your pronouns' because that would be a lie by falsely saying you're a woman when you can't be" will get you reprimanded or fired at most any major US company.
But this is not something that the Catholic faith teaches is lying, even if some Catholics may see it as lying or some other offense against truth. Why?
(1) As Catholic traditionalists and trans rights activists agree, “gender identity” is not the same thing that Catholics see as binary sex. Acknowledging that a persons gender identity is this or that is not a fact claim about the construct of sex, but also
(2) Preferred pronouns are a distinct (though sometimes correlated) issue to gender identity (people with different gender identity can have the same oreferred pronouns, and vice versa), so even if acknowledging the validity of gender identity waa making a claim about sex, and even if such a claim would be false, respecting preferred pronouns isn’t acknowledging gender identity, its just respecting preferred pronouns.
(3) On top of all of the above, the purpose of use of a person's preferred pronouns by a Catholic in a work environment would, presumably, not be convince anyone of some false claim about the subject's sex, and without intent to deceive, it would not be a lie even if its content were an objectively false claim. (Which, for the reasons discussed previously, it is not.)
If you wanted to make an argument against respecting preferred pronouns that was grounded in Catholic doctrine, you would do better to argue that it is adulation (CCC 2480) from the view that transgenderism is inherently wrongful and doing so, lacking the intent to deceive required for lying, is a form of encouragement; OTOH, you could equally argue that failure to do so, in many circumstances, is detraction (CCC 2477) on the same assumption and calumny (also CCC 2477) without it.
Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
#853I'm pretty sure I've been existing in a number of counter-cultures for the last decade or two. These have been either linked to my identity or physical location, I couldn't have properly experienced them through consuming media on the subject. Certainly all required an active choice and/or lifestyle change on my part. Maybe people mean something else by counter-culture, but here are examples from my life: - Freelanci…
If you think LGBT is the counterculture, Raytheon advertising wants a word with you.
Rainbow capitalism isn't LGBT culture. It's attempts at getting our money.
The large majority of queer culture cannot be commercially re-packaged and will never be part of the dominant culture.
Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
#854The medium is the message dudes. At this point in history, what will qualify a true counterculture is NOT BEING ONLINE. Whatever the true counterculture will be, it won’t be subject to the Internet and its all-seeing eye. It won’t be made out of memes and flame wars. No matter what the political bent, we’re all very much a captive audience online. “Master’s house/master’s tools” and all that.
Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
#855Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> But while it is present almost everywhere, it is not pervasive everywhere. "Present almost everywhere" is in fact what pervasive means :) The thesaurus lists these words as some synonyms of pervasive: Widespread, prevalent, common, present , popular, majority, predominant.[0] Just because the culture isn't accepted by every single person on planet earth doesn't mean it's not pervasive. There were plenty of pockets…
College kids on a university campus being fearful of speaking out against "trendy culture" is not evidence of "a significant majority of people also following the trends of liberal cities" -- not least because that is a very small population in the rural south. Even merely attending college is something only half of 18-22 year olds do.
Universities are also one of the specific geographic concentrations I was alluding to in my earlier post, that can exist within an area that is otherwise culturally distinct. A culture being dominant on a university campus does not necessarily make it dominant elsewhere in town -- and it does not mean that folks holding traditional values constitute a counterculture. But do they on a college campus? Sure.
Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
#856Earlier quoted context omitted.
Enter the Ronald Reagan presidential campaign, stage right
I can't find the citation, but legend has it that as CA governor, Reagan was in his limo, and was surrounded by protestors in Berkeley. They were chanting "We are the future!" while pounding on the windows of the car. Reagan got his notepad out, and wrote "If you are the future, I'm selling all my stocks!" on a sheet of paper, and held it up to the window for them to read.
Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
#857Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Weird, that's what they said about prior counter-cultures, too.
Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
#858Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you think LGBT is the counterculture, Raytheon advertising wants a word with you.
Raytheon's advertising employed "rainbow capitalism" on twitter, like most other American companies, is just following in the footsteps of Subaru and RJ Reynolds who realised gays have money in the 90s. Rainbow capitalism isn't LGBT culture. It's attempts at getting our money. The large majority of queer culture cannot be commercially re-packaged and will never be part of the dominant culture.
Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
#859Earlier 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…
not to defend 4chan, but this kind of categorical and imprecise summarization of a group of people is strongly similar to the things that my (very) hippy parents were told by their (very) straight-laced parents.
Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
#860The moment in which techies realize that they became the mainstream, and counterculture is elsewhere.