Culture

Against History

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Culture

Related to the below post, much of the left believes that all humans are basically interchangeable widgets with no important differences between them. It’s a very neoliberalized view of human diversity and individuality.

And, like what most of the left believes, of course it is wrong.

Humans are not in fact interchangeable widgets. Culture is extremely strong and not something that just alters with the direction of the wind. People are not all the same. Neither are sociocultural practices or their results. Why the left believes that — or at least pretends to — makes no sense as all the evidence of human history is against this conclusion.

But, somehow, they do.

Delu

Chill Culture

Why does relationship in the U.S. feel so harsh compared to back home?

The US has the worst relationship culture and by far the most abysmal gender relations of any Western country. Also, the worst, most entitled women and nearly the worst men1 overall.

Dating will be hell for anyone who is not accustomed to gender relations being outright unrestricted warfare.

  1. A few Western countries have worse.

Open

Chill Culture

(1) wanye (@xwanyex) / X

NYC and other places used to have tons more open 24/7 or very late before the pandemic, even more in the 1980s and 1990s, and absolutely boatlods of stuff open (particularly in NYC) 24/7 from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Not sure what caused the continual decline of this, but was also true for other large cities to a lesser extent. And I wish it’d all come back; I’d strongly prefer most things to be open most of the time.

1995

Chill Culture, Music

This line from Molly Nilsson’s “1995” is probably the single best encapsulation of what it felt like to live then: “Back in ’95, we thought we were standing on the threshold to the end of time.”

Nailed it in one line. I wish I had Molly’s succinctness, but that is as close as one can get in words to the feeling of living in the era after the Berlin Wall fell and before the Oklahoma City Bombing, before 9/11, before the world turned.

Yes, we were wrong and in retrospect delusional that it was the end of history. That there was a brighter future in store. That we’d solve racism and hatred and blood feuds and war. But it sure as fuck felt like that. That optimism perfused everything. Those who claim it did not were too young to remember or are just lying. Most of them have some agenda, as well.

But I was there. I know what happened and what it was like.

S-VHS

Chill Culture

What’s your white whale – something you’ve been looking for for years but never found?

Not quite what the OP is asking, but I had a lot of music videos recorded on Super-VHS from MTV and other sources, some of which are not available on YouTube or any other service. I had a couple dozen of these tapes back in the 1990s, all two hours long.

Those tapes were thrown away or sold for drugs, not sure which.

Some of those videos will probably never be seen by anyone again. I doubt there are any master copies extant at the studios, and if no one can unearth a copy on VHS, they are gone forever.

Strict Forward

Chill Culture

Overall, the world would have been better off if only a few dozen million people ever used the internet outside of corporate work/connectivity, smartphones required expensive licensing and mental health testing to acquire, and social media just did not exist at all.

There’s no going back. But that would have been a far superior timeline.

State of It

Chill Culture

No matter what some people claim, culture has been remarkably static. As someone who lived through the very tail end of the 1970s, all of the 1980s, and the 1990s, culture used to change like a damn tornado had swept everything away before it.

Now it’s stuck, other than a few new slang terms and such. Someone who dressed, behaved and spoke like someone from 2005 would not be out of place at all now. Someone who dressed, spoke and acted like someone from 1975 in 1995…well, let’s just say they would’ve seemed like a hilarious and utterly-anachronistic dinosaur.

And don’t deny it. I was fucking there.

Anomie and Apathy

Chill Culture

It seems things got roundly worse everywhere after the pandemic. And no, clownish Covidians, Long Covid is not the cause.

My theory is fairly simple: The world was already in a slow transition period from the Westphalian bargain, Pax Americana and into resurgent authoritarianism. Covid kicked us ahead 15-20 years into that future by being a societal break that force-reset a lot of assumptions and arrangements.

We all got teleported societally to where we should have been in 2040. And like anyone unstuck in time, we’re not dealing with it well at all.

Covid was a time machine.

Backwaters and Frontwaters

Chill Culture, Prediction

I basically agree with this. Europe will be Islamicized. It’ll be a backwater for 500 years, much as it used to be. The USA will go Christian dominionist and will resemble the pre-US 1730s and 1740s again, but for 300-500 years too. Also a horrible oppressive also-ran.

China is in decline, but probably will at least avoid being turned into a theocracy or theocracy-lite.

The future probably lies with Latin America and non-China Asian states (not India).