Maybe Lots Of People Are Answering "not Sure" Because The Question Seems To Be Written Like A Trick Question?

Even as a jaded adult, every so often I see a gore picture/video that deeply disturbs me. I perfectly understand the urge to protect people (and kids in particular) from beheading videos and cartel members skinning each other alive.

But I have no idea what people mean when they say they find porn traumatizing. I would definitely be disturbed by seeing a video of sexual assault, but that's because of the violence and violation of someone's consent, not the sex itself. I don't think people are consciously lying when they say they're "traumatized" by porn, but I think a better word would be "scandalized". Most Americans have incredibly repressive attitudes towards sex and nudity, and I imagine that stumbling upon large amounts of it unprompted online causes many people to experience narcissistic injury.

im pro children having privacy but if you think parents should give kids unrestricted internet access…its not 1999. in 2022 thats legitimately neglectful. do you know how many kids are out here like. watching gore and porn. its not normal or healthy. its traumatic.

[epistemic status: a bunch of semi-related thoughts I am trying to work out aloud] It has been noted countless times that reactionary politics rely on a feeling of threat: our enemies are strong and we are weak (but we are virtuous and they are not, which is why they’re our enemies!); we must defend ourselves, we must not be afraid of doing what needs to be done; we must not shie away from power generally, and violence specifically.

And there are lots of contexts–like when talking about the appeal of reactionary politics in the US before and at the beginning of Trump’s rise to prominence, or when talking about hard-on-crime policies that are a springboard to police militarization, or (the central example of all this in the 21st century) the post 9/11 PATRIOT-act terrorism paranoia that was a boon to authoritarians everywhere, and spurred a massive expansion of both control and surveillance in everyday life–where critics of reactionary rhetoric are chastised for their failure to appeal to the other side, because they come off as callous towards their concerns and their real fears and anxieties.

And while this might not be strategically correct, frankly, I think there’s a sense in which it is justified to be callous towards those concerns. Because those concerns are lies. They may be lies borne out of a seed of real experience (9/11 did happen, of course), but the way that seed is cultivated by focused paranoia, by contempt toward cultivating any sense of proportionality or any honest comparison of risk, the way it is dragooned into the service of completely orthogonal political goals (”the CIA/NSA/FBI must be able to monitor all private communications everywhere in the world, just in case it might prevent another 9/11″) chokes off any possible sympathy I might otherwise feel. American paranoia about another couple thousand lives being lost in a 9/11 like event resulted in a number of deaths literally multiple orders of magnitude larger in Iraq and Afghanistan. During the former, some years Iraq was suffering the equivalent of six or seven 9/11s a year.

So, any fear-driven policy must not (for example) say “to prevent disaster X happening again, we’re going to make it happen 270 times over to someone else.” That’s not reasonable. And “fear is a bad basis for crafting policy” is not exactly a revolutionary observation. There’s that probably-apocryphal story of a Chinese professor responding to Blackstone’s Ratio–you know, “better that ten guilty persons go free than one innocent person suffer”–with “better for whom?” Which is supposed to be this trenchant and penetrating question that makes you reexamine your assumptions. But it’s always struck me as idiotic. Better for society! For everyone! Because the law only functions well if it is seen as a source of order and justice, not as an authoritarian cudgel; because a society in which anxiety drives policymaking and legal responses to social ills is one that is in the process of actively devouring itself; because flooding the public discourse with language that dehumanizes criminals and makes it easy to separate the individual from universal principles like civil rights is an acid that destroys the social fabric.

Fear as a germ of reactionary politics manifests itself in lots of ways outside of both historical examples, like fascism, or more recent examples, like US foreign policy during the war on terror. Fear and its link to purity-attitudes, with a low level of scientific literacy in general, drives stuff like the organized anti-vaccine movement. In the Hertzsprung-Russel diagram of political tendencies, I’d argue it’s a big factor in the wellness-to-Qanon track. It’s a big part of tough-on-crime rhetoric, which in the American instance in particular also draws on an especially racialized form (cf. the “Willie Horton” ad). Fear and purity and anti-contamination anxieties are even big in opposition to nuclear power, because most of the public just has a really bad sense of what the comparative dangers of nuclear vs fossil fuel are; and because the former has been culturally salient since 1945 in a way the latter hasn’t, nuclear contamination feels much more threatening than fossil fuel waste, despite by any measurable harm the latter causing far worse problems, even before you factor in any risks from climate change.

I would like to argue in particular that true crime as an entertainment genre, and wellness culture, and fears about child abuse all contribute to reactionary politics–they are in themselves major reactionary political currents–in a way that cuts across the political spectrum because they are not strongly marked for political factionalism. A lot of the rhetoric both from and around true crime entertainment promotes the idea that violent crime exists, or at least can flourish, because of an insufficiently punitive attitude toward crime; one that can only be fixed by centering victims’ desire (or putative desire) for retribution in the legal process, by eroding the civil rights of the accused, and by giving the police and prosecutors more power. Obviously, this is just 80s and 90s tough on crime rhetoric repackaged for millennials; it centers individual experience a bit more and deemphasizes the racial component that made the “Willie Horton” ad so successful, but it posits that there is only one cause for crime, a spontaneous choice by criminals that has no causal relationship with the rest of the world, and only one solution, which is authoritarianism.

Wellness culture leverages purity concerns and scientific illiteracy in ways which are so grifty and so transparently stupid that it’s by far the least interesting thing on this list to me; its most direct harm is in giving an environment for the anti-vaccine movement to flourish, and I’m always incredibly annoyed when people talk about how the medical establishment needs to do more to reassure the public about vaccines’ safety and efficacy. Again, strategically, this may be correct; people dying of preventable disease is really bad. But doctors as a body didn’t promote Andrew Wakefield’s nonsense; doctors as a body didn’t run breathless article after breathless article about vaccines maybe causing autism; doctors as a body didn’t scare the bejezus out of folks in the 90s and then act all surprised when preventable childhood diseases started breaking out all over the place.

Although outside the whole anti-vax thing, I think there are lots of other harms that wellness culture creates. It tends to be fairly antiscientific; in order to sell people nonsense (because as a subculture it exists almost exclusively to sell people things) it has to discredit anything that might point out that it is selling nonsense. Whether the anti-intellectualism that flourishes in these quarters is a result of intentional deceit or just a kind of natural rhetorical evolution probably varies. But it is an important component of wellness culture to be able to play a shell game between “big pharma doesn’t have your best interests at heart,” “you don’t need your anti-depressants,” and “laetrile cures cancer.”

The way in which fears of child abuse are turned into a reactionary political cudgel probably actually annoys me the most; whether it’s Wayfair conspiracy theories, conservatives trying to turn “groomer” into an anti-queer slur, or just antis on tumblr, the portrayal of sadistic sexual threat aimed at children from an outside malevolent force is compelling only because the vast majority of child abuse and CSA comes from within families and within culturally privileged structures of authority like churches, and this fact makes everyone really uncomfortable, and no one wants to talk about it. I remember getting really annoyed during the Obama years when the White House wanted to talk about bullying and anti-LGBT bullying in particular, while studiously avoiding blaming parents and teachers in any way for it, despite the fact that all the coming out horror stories I know are from people’s parents turning on them.

Now, very conservative politics have always opposed dilution of a kind of privilege for the family structure; they envision a family structure which is patriarchal, and so dilution of this privilege is dilution of the status of patriarch. Very insular communities which cannot survive their members having many options or alternative viewpoints available to them, including controlling religions but also just abusive parents who want to retain control over their kids, also bristle at the idea of any kind of general society-wide capacity for people to notice how parents treat their children. But beyond that, I think our society still treats parents as having a right of possession over their children and their children’s identities, especially when they’re young, and bolsters that idea with an idea that the purity of children is constantly under threat from the outside world, and it is the parents’ job to safeguard that purity. The result is the nuclear family as a kind of sacred structure which the rest of society has no right to observe or pry open; and this is a massive engine of enabling the abuse of children. To no other relationship in our society do we apply this idea, that it should be free from “interference” (read: basic accountability) from the rest of society.

Moreover, the idea of childhood as a time of purity and innocence, which not only must be protected from but during which children must be actively lied to about major aspects of how the world works, is one of the last ways remaining to an increasingly secular culture to justify censorious and puritanical Victorian morality. It is hard to advocate for censorship to protect the Morals of the Christian Public, when nobody believes in the Morals of the Christian Public anymore; but “think of the children!” still works as a rallying cry, because of this nagging sense we have that age-appropriate conversations with children about adult topics will cause them to melt or explode.

In many ways, these anxieties on behalf of theoretical children are the ones I am most contemptuous of. Not because child abuse isn’t a serious problem–it is–but because the vector imagined for it is almost entirely opposite the one it actually tends to occur along. People who pretend that the primary danger to children is from strangers are usually woefully misinformed; people who pretend it is from media are either idiots or liars seeking a cover for their craving for censorship.

In conclusion: while it’s not possible to exorcise all our neuroses from our politics, anymore than we will ever exercise all our neuroses from our aesthetics, there are some we should be especially on guard against. A sense of threat, and anxieties which tie into concerns about purity and fears of contamination, are two big ones. These produce policies that are not only badly correlated with the outcomes they ostensibly want, but actually and severely destructive to them, in the same way that invading Iraq was actively destructive to any notion of preventing terrorism, saving American or Iraqi lives, or promoting political stability in the Middle East. And we should hold in healthy suspicion anybody whose politics seem to be driven by similar neuroses. Some merely believe very harmful things. Some are actually actively deceptive. None will achieve any of the higher aims they claim as justification for their beliefs.

R.I.P. The 2976 American people that lost their lives on 9/11 and R.I.P. the 48,644 Afghan and 1,690,903 Iraqi and 35000 Pakistani people that paid the ultimate price for a crime they did not commit

I had always assumed the opposite- that the "hot take" industry/phenomenon would continue for a much longer period, as we found new things to argue about and occupy "The Discourse". But maybe the stagnation is due to the fact that despite our having discussed certain topics to death (immigration, race, etc) they still persist and we can't do anything about them? Thus, talking about them over and over is a form of collective anxiety management, or less charitably, emotional masturbation, where we pretend that endless discussion is an acceptable substitue for action because we want to believe that words and discussion alone can have material consequences.

The homogeneity of the takes themselves can probably be attributed to groupthink, but also a fear of creativity and the associated fear that our ideas will be bad and will result in a loss of social status.

Singing from the same hymnal

I’m not one of those “don’t talk about politics, entertain me!” people, but it seems like so much of the media I consume - podcasts especially - have collapsed in subject matter and mostly give the same takes on the same circumscribed set of topics.

Yes, it’s good to be “relevent” whatever that means, but it’s a big world out there. It’s callous to say that the 542nd nearly identical immigration/asylum story with the same cast of stock sympathetic characters doesn’t add much to the debate, but, well, it doesn’t. Even for a pro-DREAMer and anti-wall guy like me. If your heartstrings weren’t tugged by 1-541, one more ain’t gonna help, assuming you’re listening to respectable establishment media like NPR at all. For example, regulations of all types are being rolled back at both the federal and state levels, with wildly diverse stakeholders and all manner of potential outcomes to discuss. Sure, you can pick out some discussion of these things if you are hellbent on proving me wrong, but they’re relatively few and far between.

Media will come out the other side, that I’m sure of, but my guess is that the archives will be a little embarrassing, with the 2016-2018 era (at least) carrying an “if you’ve heard one, you’ve heard them all” reputation. Perhaps history does this anyway; the late ‘60s lives in the popular memory as a series of protests against the Vietnam War, retconned as both popular and inevitable, which certainly wasn’t true at the time. Perhaps the history books will collapse this era into immigrants, sexual consent of relatively plugged-in white women and maybe some dead black men, though that wave may have crested by now. But doing so will inevitably miss dozens of silent revolutions going on all around us.

The humanities are too important to be left to the humanities majors.

without humanities you will fall for the first lie somebody tells you that punches in the gut because you never learned how those gut-punches work

"people who didn't go to university are easily fooled morons. I am not classist."

As someone working at a university my two cents is that the primary goal of a university is to get lots of state and federal grants and build lots of labs and hire lots of brilliant researchers and make lots of money and intellectual property so they can hire more researchers and get more grants and build more labs.

Education of the general populace is a desirable but more or less secondary byproduct. There's a reason the lectures are free online but the research papers (also funded by your taxes) are locked behind a paywall.

how am i seeing communists earnestly argue that the function of the university (in capitalist society!) is to educate people

Is it overconfidence, or performed enthusiasm? So much of liberal activism is based around not just the support of/opposition against the correct issues and worldviews, but also increasingly forceful displays of devotion. You win social capital for being the loudest but also risk losing it by challenging your betters.

It’s surprisingly hard to accurately parody wokeness. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an attempt that passed the ideological Turing test. Most of them focus on all the wrong things – it’s 2018, otherkin discourse has been dead for years – and miss subtleties in such a way that you can tell no one writing these things has actually interacted with Extremely Online types. Which implies that they’re not really parodying wokeness qua wokeness, but rather the version that trickles down to them via shitty right-wing outrage bait.

Kids are dumb and will say weird shit; of they hear this from their parents, what's the context? Is this a case of genuine conviction or edgy lower-class humor? For all the fervor over Muslims, I've yet to see any investigative journalism over how Muslims in Europe actually raise their kids to interact with society at large, and whether they use homeschooling, etc to their advantage like fundamentalists in the US. There also seems to be no concerted effort from even the right-wingers to attack Islam as an ideology/belief system anymore, which is a shame.

Even preschoolers are radicalizing in Belgium “They threaten to murder ‘infidels’, slice their necks, call classmates pigs”

A recently started initiative “Network Islam-experts” records issues of radicalized students. Since 2016 there have been 481 cases of schools who encountered ‘problems’. Today for the first time a case-file was made public involving toddlers.

An East-Flemishs school network made an internal report named “indoctrination among toddlers”, it details problematic behavior:

“Citing Arabic verses during playtime, refusing to come to class because it doesn’t fit their beliefs, not coming to school on Friday for ‘religious reasons’. A girl refuses to give a boy a hand or to stand in line near boys.”

Sadly these are the least frightening cases:

A preschooler already has a ‘friend’ in Morocco she will be married to later. A child threatens to murder ‘infidels’. Calling non-Muslim students ‘pigs’. Making the motion of slicing someones neck.”

After conversation with parents it was concluded they support these actions and found them funny.

1, 2, 3

I pity them and am perfectly willing to forgive them of their sins, but I also want to democratize their property with every fiber of my being so they can stop this system before we all die from it.

tfw you don’t know whether to be envious of the upper classes for having a bunch of utilities provided for free-or-below-market by venture capitalists trying to boost growth before they find a profit model, or to pity them for relying on platforms that are doomed to ineffably disappear because they have no sustainable model.

Perhaps it's time to resurrect the tradition of Soviet jokes, but retooled for modern cyber-capitalism.

"We pretend to pay them and they pretend to make us happy."

People make bones about the USSR’s project of creating a “new Soviet man” - how quaint! - without appreciating that the American-led development of the 20th century “demand economy,” culminating in (but by no means limited to) the creation of the “postwar middle class,” represented a human-engineering project of no less ambition and infinitely greater sophistication than the Soviet one. The new Soviet man is a joke, a failure; we are the new capitalist man. And we don’t even realise it!

What is the new capitalist man? It is a person that desires infinite houses quantities of things they cannot use. It’s a person constitutionally incapable of stopping to say “I have enough, I’m happy.” Can you imagine how threatening a contented mindset is to ever-expanding commodity circulation (in other words, to national GDP growth)? Can you conceive of the vast resources, private and public, that were and are being poured into permanently eliminating every hint of that mindset from the American psyche?

This is the essence of the advertising industry, the raison d'etre of Madison Avenue and its (historically overlooked) collaboration with the U.S. government: the manufacturing of demand to meet supply, and the manufacturing of an indefinitely increasing demand to meet a supply of comparable dimensions. It is, as a necessary stepping stone to the manufacturing of this demand, the wholesale reshaping of what it means to be a human being: not into a selfless, musclebound Superman, as the Soviets would have had it (and say of that what you will), but into a spiritually impoverished and pathetic wretch, a meat-vehicle for a ceaseless material appetite.

It’s not that it’s not commented on. Many people have observed the way that interfaces like YouTube and Facebook keep us trapped in miserable little cycles of consuming, clicking, consuming, clicking (and to what end, financially? Serving us advertisements! Yet more psychological conditioning!). But too often this is understood as something sui generis, a unique malady of Internet capitalism, rather than as an elaboration of and refinement upon a single, vast project that has been in the works for longer than Mark Zuckerberg has been alive. The “loops” and tiny dopamine spurts of social media and video games are in fact just one more chisel in the hand of those sculptors attempting to fashion, from the soft stone of the human psyche, the type of person that can sustain global capitalism.

Is it cybernetic? Automatic and self-perpetuating? Certainly, to a degree. But it was planned, once. And for every clearly pathological and immiserating behavioral pattern that is discovered through new technology, there is a person whose job is to find out how to get more people to behave that way and use it to move product.