Why are liberals so obsessed with pop culture? Do they derive their ideology from it?

Why are liberals so obsessed with pop culture? Do they derive their ideology from it?

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Because they have no hobbies or interests outside of consumption.

Because their main source of entertainment is pop culture. It is the most easiest to digest form of Entertainment and the easiest to access. They are so pacified into the mainstream that is almost becomes part of their Identity.
I wouldn't be surprised if they did

Because so many of them are uni kids who just watch Netflix and drink when they aren't doing school work.

w-what else is there to do?

Exactly this is pretty much me I am a lazy drunk piece of shit I just have extreme autism and gets a raging hard on for philosophy and politics especially dialectics

cool I study philosophy, what kind of stuff have you read?

Watch anime. Read manga. Play video games. Read Karl Marx.

If we're being honest a large chunk of Holla Forums would be like that if it wasn't for a chance encounter with leftism, or at the very most they'd be Bernie Bros. Except I hope you fags would have better taste.

What came first, the Spectacle or its demand?

I think it's the result of finding a market in the ethos of our past to current decades, in turn introducing new generations (90s to 00s) to it through the market. They don't derive it just from pop culture, but every facet of life. In a way, I find it parallel to reactionary myth-worship: despite that your ideology has no function in reality you turn to fiction for inspiration. The liberals' ideology is one of tolerance, of a "moderate" path, and of absolute and clear good and evil. This is why they recoil at the suggestion of violence, that is, REAL violence that would cause a change in the system, not just punching nationalist pretty boys (which amusingly many still found abhorrent). I don't know about all of those characters (because I don't consume pop culture at all since a certain age), but take for example Dumbledore and The Doctor: they're absolutely good, reasonable characters, they use violence as a last resort; you may never proactively use violence. It's no wonder liberals would love them and take them as role models.

Radicalism is when you become disillusioned with the status quo, but even then you could be prone to the same machinations. Reactionaries find their placeholder in the past and in myths. In order to have the perfect society, all you have to do is get rid of "degenerates" and a 5th column and there you have it, everything will remain stable forever if we just found its natural place.

BOOKS.


Pure cancer to the brain and part of pop culture.

Smoking, cumming, and reading a fucking book.

validation*, not inspiration.

Wew. Liberal ideology is something else.

Reminds me of this movie.
>Balian of Ibelin, the protagonist, changed from a lesser noble to a blacksmith who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps and climbs the feudal hierarchy somehow
>even though the evil religious characters do nasty things fighting the crusades, the liberals also fight in the crusades even though they don't even believe in it, apparently out of a weird respect for authority and procedure. If anything, the religious guys are mostly portrayed as being worse at fighting the crusades because they think strategy is against God for some reason.

It really did get me how most of the "good" liberal characters had no ideological reason to be fighting in the crusades and just sort of did it out of loyalty to procedure and authority.

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holy shit

nothing
EVERYTHING!

this was made as a parody right?

The masses follow the ideology of their masters.
Pop culture is an euphemism for liberal culture.

Pop culture is great tho. It surrounds us, we, the young people, really grew up with huge availability of it, etc. It reflects our collective mind pretty nicely.

All the direct comparisons that liberals do are dumb, of course, but in a more general sense looking at popular culture can give some great insights. Why do we love psychopaths in our media? Why are apocalypses and dystopias such a popular theme in movies? How should we understand the growing presence of "awkwardness" as a notion or character type? Great starting points for leftist critique.

Liberals are the face of the coming indoctrinated masses. They derive their ideology from so-called pop culture because they are raised to believe that nothing else exists, and as a result their cognitive abilities decay to the point that they are no longer capable of the level of thought necessary to comprehend actual politics and philosophy. Modern pop culture (Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Capeshit) is designed to indoctrinate the populace.

… Hmmmm …

Does it? Or does it reflect the artistic sensibilities and anxieties of the class of people that create the bulk of pop cultural content and their financial backers? The middle classes and upper classes are always the most committed to the ruling ideology. By sheer coincidence, they're also the ones who make it through art/film school and end up making all of your movies and tv shows and cartoons and comics and music. 'We' love psychopaths in our media because the psychopath is the perfect expression of the ideal, the New Capitalist Overman: completely self-interested and utterly inhuman. 'We' love dystopias and apocalypses because, aside from feudal throwbacks, these are the only alternative societal formations that capitalism permits in the public imagination - and the apocalyptic dystopia is the highest expression of middle-class anxiety regarding the eventual victory of the filthy, stupid, vile, base, and mean working masses. 'Awkwardness' is a growing character type because neoliberalism has opened up a new market by removing our draining the vitality from our social lives and selling it back to us piecewise at a premium.

The fact is, 'we' don't love any of the things that are popular. They are reflections of the anxieties and ideology of the ruling and middle classes, packaged and commodified for our consumption. We seek temporary relief from our alienation, so we stoop to consume even these meagre portions, as they are the only salve offered.

I'd say Capitalism.. but it's Cultural Marxism

oh shut the fuck up and get out, we hate this more than you do

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I'm not really a TV person but from what I've seen in the rare occasion I watch it, proletarian characters are almost entirely absent. By and large it's all upper and upper middle class types. Movies too. No one is just a working stiff any more it seems.

Netflix seems to be more inclined to having working class characters though. F for Family and Stranger Things come to mind.

This is just anecdotal so maybe I'm missing much of the picture, but that's my impression.

Iirc he defends Jerusalem to protect the inhabitants from being slaughtered by the enemy army. Balian rebukes the priest for wanting to save themselves at the expense of the people.

Nope, you've hit the nail on the head. The vast majority of TV shows, movies, etc follow middle or ruling-class protagonists. Doctors. Lawyers. Academics. Pigs. Military Officers. Politicians.

If anything it's gotten worse over the years. In the 90s/00s you had The Simpsons, Married With Children, Roseanne, and Futurama, all with working class protagonists. Nowadays Al Bundy has sold out and joined the nauseatingly bourgeois cast of Modern Family, Bender's now knocking around the twee post-apocalyptic semi-feudal Adventure Time, all the cast members of Roseanne that nobody cared about have entered academia on The Big Bang Theory and the Simpsons are a mournful shadow of their marginally subversive glory days. Only one of the families followed on Stranger Things was identifiably working class, and the family that takes up the bulk of the airtime (the Wheelers) are quite clearly middle class. While we're at it, let's peruse the origin stories of pretty much any Spider-Man or Batman or Flash villain. Oh, what's that? Most of them were some flavour of working stiff before some horrible science accident/psychological trauma made it OK for a journalist/trust fund kid/scientist-cop to beat them to within an inch of their lives? You don't say.

I really could go on (I am an extensive library of pop culture knowledge) but I think you get the point.

That's not how I remember it.

He quips that he "learned a lot about religion" from him or something to that effect, It seemed to me like he was chastising the priest for being so cowardly and hypocritical.

And converting to Islam would have been a way to save the city. For some reason Balian takes some kind of objection to converting to Islam.

pop culture is the cotton candy of the masses. It makes you feel good but it doesnt change the system.

Go for walks, draw/write, and books.


Good post. Someone cap.

Ah yes, The Doctor, the greatest Pacifist

youtube.com/watch?v=lzmnPs64K74

I love this video.

The best part is is that is missing a lot of shit to, like the time the first Doctor wanted to smash a caveman's skull with a rock so he could get back to the TARDIS, or the 3rd Doctor's venusian aikido, they aren't cherry picking.

youtube.com/watch?v=pMAab89iINM

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…Which are largely imposed on everyone, there's no separate ruling ideology for the consultant, the jobless and the factory worker. I don't think television shows (etc) are really a very middle, let alone upper, class thing. If anything, the higher you go, the less the people spend time watching all that stuff.

Of course there are people left out, and I should have mentioned that yeah, some of those things are exclusive to a certain group of people. But there's major appeal to all that stuff, there has to be. The function of mass culture/entertainment is largely to tell us what to want, and to a degree, offer us a fantasy of something that'd make us "better". Sometimes simply to take us away.
Sometimes to create a false unity: I find stand up comedy is great in this regard. All those jokes about stereotypes and typical behaviours of "the average persons" - it is as if we're all one when we laugh at a stupid joke about being drunk in bar and women "doing typical feminine things". Everyone has their place - well, except the person too poor to experience those things or the person whose very identity and existence conflict with it. But if one does fit, it allows one to embrace that identity.

Literature, especially of the "high culture" kind, is often much worse in this regard: quite many praised authors have little appeal unless your worries are those ~universal~ existential problems of "does my job at the university have any meaning?" No wonder anyone not in a high position usually prefers TV and movies.
Pop culture is more escapist than many other forms of culture, it has more appeal to those who want to escape their situation rather than those who want to wank over it. You don't need to be rich to feel like being like Hannibal or House would help you to get rich. If anything, someone who is already a doctor or whatever would find those representations much less appealing.

Does anybody else here miss the olden days of counter strike source, and the amazing Surf rpg death match servers?

you know I'm talking about the new seasons from the 9th doctor onwards.

which, by the way, was aired in the mid 00', so don't be pedantic Peebles.

I kinda love the cheap looking sets and props from Scifi, but I don't know which series has what. Like this: youtube.com/watch?v=jUCSlb-jhsU

This might surprise some of you, but a lot of people do hard work that leaves little time for leisure, so they are likely to watch pop culture garbage to feel better about things instead of reading about ideology.
Those "lemmings" you're talking about are the people who are basically running this world. You should be grateful that they're against the current admin.

That's a totally wrong way to frame it. Most people that watch or read that stuff have lots of time for leisure, otherwise they wouldn't be able to be so invested in these fandoms.

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They aren't, when you talk to them about exploitation or capitalism, they always respond "it's just like that", "it's the best system", "your alternative would not work", etc.

to board posters' credit, no one actually alludes to fiction in order analyze the current political establishment or LARPs as if he's a movie character. except Holla Forums humans and orcs

There are different groups of people who like those things, of course. "Fandoms" are really more of a youth culture thing than a middle class thing, I think… I know a lot of anarchists and leftists who are kind of invested in those fandoms. But it is because they're kinda left out of the regular life due to mental health or something, not because they're rich. Many of them are jobless or precariat.

Mass Entertainment is cheap, after all. Much cheaper than going out or meeting friends or anything.

But its not like these works owe their popularity to this group of people. There's also that group who doesn't have energy or interest for "higher" forms of culture after a hard day's work.

Even in my personal experience, the time when I watched a shitload of crappy pop culture stuff and anime was when I was depressed as fuck and working too much for my own good, heck I even got to the point of being diagnosed psychotic. I only got back into my leftist reading and shit when I managed to secure disability welfare money and could take it a little bit easier.

oh boy, you don't read too much liberal op-ed's and essays in major publications do you? HP, they think its real.

i legitimately think i've been had and this is ironic, i don't know how you can't have seen/heard shitlibs comparing this election to the Harry potter series

Is that on leftypol or on twitter tho

in the general media sphere, on reddit, no one on Holla Forums but we aren't a liberal board and OP mentioned shitlibs not Leftists although my argument was that Rick and Morty and Anime are Pop Culture and the Left loves that shit. And people do LARP like anime is real on here all the time or that its going to be real

…on image boards, I meant on image boards.

oh well then just anime, no one thinks Rick and Morty are real. But, they do think their waifu is going to be real. So it does spill into board culture, not just Holla Forums who literally thinks LOTR is anthropological history

fucking twitter tho


jesus fuck, as if the comparison matters at all. fix your fucking position instead of your language, fuck

Non-conservatives tend to have brains with a lot of storage space. We don't have to focus on one topic, we can be aware of a lot of different things. "Pop culture" right now is hysterically funny since cringe became mainstream. I'm sorry your brain is autistic and required by itself to focus on a narrow range of topics.

Part of the issue was raised by Mark Fisher, I think. Essentially the social changes in neoliberalism have deprived a lot of working chance people of a practical chance to break into the entertainment industry, or to produce culture, even though large parts of genuine new culture have generally come from the working classes.

For a simple example there was the change to the UK unemployment-welfare system in 1996 - before 1996 it was comparatively trivial to just collect money without much more than promising the guy you were looking for a job - so you could feed yourself while playing in a band or writing or whatever (Hello Rowling!), but in 1996 they moved to JobSeekers Allowance, which has become a system for pestering people more and more and more to look for jobs that simply do not exist (iirc they expect you to do 40 hours jobseeking nowadays.) with the sole aim of signing you off unemployment*, good fucking luck writing a book on top of dealing with all that nonsense.

One thing I'd like to comment on tangentially is the simpsons, for me strangely it would seem like the most realistic portrayal of family life I've seen on TV thusfar. not so much in direct-actions (I mean, my father never strangled me.) but in terms of the dysfunction, the sort of uniting around hating eachother as much as uniting around love or biological ties. the persistent bleak failure, without losing collective spirits in the long term. Golden Age simpsons really was something.

*even with this figure-screwing, unemployment is 1.5 million and has never dropped to pre-1971 levels.

but for the most part they unironically think in terms of death-eaters and wizards and no one corrects them. and Assad isn't right wing he's a centrist turd-positionist totalitarian

t. Cucklet

At least include greentext so I know which of my 37 disjointed points you're getting at.

Could you give some examples?

The point where you fail to mention anything regarding Eastern animation, and it's superiority to a capitalist cartoon about a wagecuck who abuses his children, surrounded by freakish classcucks with yellow skin.

Anime post-1990s = Hypercapitalism.

lots of music and art? I don't even know what to point at, new art, music etc is rarely created by the rich. the original rappers? most authors of books (it doesn't pay very well, but I guess you can make up something about them being culturally middle class) (but you know, there are plenty of places where the working class kind of is the middle class) (and the people who are below middle class are the people who can't even get a steady exploitation for themselves)

if we get really nitpicky with some odd notion of the cultural middle class, maybe nothing new is actually created by the proles

I mean, can't we say that the moment you dedicate yourself to writing or whatever creative pursuit, get good at it and so on, you join the "middle class intelligentsia" or something

So Brad, where those Tumblr posts good enough to get us into your anti-fascist Facebook group?

yes, thanks for helping the cause

What does "pop culture" even mean? Like, is scorsese pop culture? is akira kurosawa pop culture? Is Slayer pop culture? I never really understood it tbh

it isn't that easy to make a clear distinction

the things you mentioned are not pop culture, except for Slayer I guess?

Is it really a thing?

You know what, if Ayncraps actually punched Fascists, I'd have some level of respect for them.

I mean.. with burgers.. ANYTHING is possible!


You mean, if they punched their future selves?

I always hated that movie and other anachronistic historical depictions where modern day values seem to have always been normal.

Don't forget how the Muslims are shown as noble savages with much to teach us no less I'd imagine.

I named slayer mainly because I dont think they are really taht popular you know just the most prominent band in a somewhat obscure subculture that is not really "pop" in my mind as a lot of other stuff is. But I don't know really, my idea is that "pop culture" is really some type of something-that-means-nothing ideology created by liberals to make an umbrella term that covers what they like in mainstream colture, regardless of the meaning of the art piece itself, useful to just make a culture status quo that they think all people will comply to.

back in the late 90s early 00s the vast majority of internet content was created by working people or the children of. i remember when newgrounds was almost entirely amateur content and animutations were a thing. there's webcomics, youtube before google bought it, and innumerable instances of fan fiction, fan art, fan films, etc. there was a whole internet full of strange and bizarre content cooked up by freaks in their moms' basements, and it was great

well yeah, "pop culture" is, at best, meaningful in describing the popularity and the meaning given to a piece of art or entertainment

When comes to Ancaps has anyone really been far even as decided to even want to do look more like?

Predistination lol

Because he was chastising him for being cowardly and hypocritical.

It would have saved the nobility and clergy, but the regular people would be fucked.
They mention at some point how the crusaders slaughtered all the jews and muslims when they took the city and its expected that the same is going to happen, because that's typically what armies did while looting and pillaging conquered cities.

Fuck, I hate cop shows. They normalize cop worship and all the abusive shit that RL cops do.


More like there has been a noticeable shift away from protagonists with proletarian backgrounds in popular culture. I mean, just take Bon Jovi's Livin' On A Prayer for example:
youtube.com/watch?v=lDK9QqIzhwk
I don't know about you, but I can't remember the last time I heard anything about working people or their problems in pop music. Maybe it's just the shithole I work in, but I have to listen to shit like Megan Trainor all fucking day. Come to think of it, even in the early Simpsons they had episodes dealing with unions and the dichotomy between the workers and the boss. Then there's stuff like Roseanne:
youtube.com/watch?v=0hmfBtk0WaE
The last show that I comes to mind that really showed anything like the sort of thing working people experience was, what, Malcolm in the Middle? Now it seems like instead you have shit like "Modern Family" which takes place in rich honky fantasy land.

I'm not very exposed to American pop music, but 'round here we do have work worship. Particularly in mainstream rap music.

But the rappers are extremely stupid about it: its all "oohh I worked so much ahh now I deserve to earn more in a month than you do in a year work every day yeah no excuses you gotta earn your place me daddy taught me that"
or "such a hard week yo, time to party like crazy and spend all the money yeah"

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Now that I think about it, mainstream music often feels like it was written normally and then translated with some sort of a ideology-to-language machine, to generate something resembling what the guy in They Live saw with the glasses on.

So much of it is just stupid work and gym anthems, with some drinking songs thrown in. The kind of stuff that "motivates" one to work their ass off to "earn their place". It is all there: drink, work, fuck, go to the gym so you'll stay a healthy worker bee longer.

Has anyone even watched 80's action movies after going left?


Beautiful, is it not?

Man, it ain't even gotta be worship. I'm just talking about the absence of a working class element from popular culture in general.


I unironically love 80s action movies.

tbh I can stop watching dystopian fiction maybe but rock music has become an integrant part of my life, also I think it has become a genuinely form of popular west music

No, I miss the olden days of 1.6 and late-90s/early-2000s fps in general.

Why are dystopian fiction not leftist?

To me the only ones I could maybe watch are Brazil and a few others. Oddly enough I can enjoy 'inaccurate' ones like Equilibrium, especially since their so clean and have nice aesthetics, while being hilariously bad, both in the fact it's poorly written, and that it seems to be a rightwinger's dystopia.

I'm going to guess because it re-enforces the whole "easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" thing.

Well, if your leftist, typically what is looked for to find anything in entertainment with leftist sympathies is tricky, but not impossible. Usually you look for any kind of working class solidarity, or at least being critical of consumerism. The closest thing I can see to a leftist dystopia are the aforementioned Brazil, which even then is more of a critique of bureaucracy even if one could make the case that it's one of the byproducts of capitalism, where bureaucracy is something that has to mass produced for it's own sake.

The other ones might be Mad Max, and maybe Blade Runner, the latter having the replicants being treated with horrible working conditions and crumbling infrastructure of the city.


Also this.

Movies about the end of the world are apocalyptic, not dystopian, dystopianism is the opposite of utopianism.


This guy got it.

mainly because neolibs have won the culture wars IMHO I am and I agree with >>1610724: Brazil and a feew others are not are not pro capitalism: dystopyas are usually badly written pro neolib shit.. I have seen a film that is somewhat leftist /non-capitalist: I would upload it here if anyone is intersted. It is somewhat similar to videodrom but it is more interesting. I am really drunk now if anyone is interested I will post the italian link to the film

mein gott

I am very intereted for a leftist dystopian movies list.

Actually, another point I could make about Brazil, is that it could be a parody of a late stage capitalism, where the law of value is beginning to break down. We don't get much if any information on if the state has gone to war, or if there's being propaganda from the state itself declaring the society to be one of a worker's paradise. It's just people working for the sake of working. The private sector has run out of ways to provide employment, and so the state has picked up the slack, and in doing so, has created more pointless busywork, and has made society worse as a result. Though it's been a while, since I've seen it, so I'm unsure if automation has some play in it.

Brazil to the uneducated seems like a critique of 'communism' but to someone like me, it becomes a parody of late stage capitalism and social democracy, without the democracy of course.

There's also A Brave New World (I know it's a book who had an adaptation) that looks pretty leftist for me.

I would not upload necessareily dystopian fiction but what it hat it would be where I upload stuff without being COINTELPROE'd? I'd upload all myt DVD tbh

I just want the name of the movie.

Le's wat tmorrow wen I am not too drunk anywhaty I wolud revommend "i Rec U" as he last non politics infected film; the real last punk rock film. I am reall drunk now so smh if you trust this aalll

Liberalism is the ideology of the consumer. Capitalists naturally make all their movies, books, songs, art, and video games push liberal ideology and much off the masses will eat it up, to which point a liberal may revel in their company, but also in the media that surrounds them, as evidence perhaps that they are somehow "right".

basically just reading, sex, and discussion

I think most people haven't been really aware of the "depth" of art and pop culture, in general, until recently. All the notions of analyzing, deconstructing, finding references to mythology, etc… were mostly familiar to people who studied in these fields, writing, media, literature and whatnot, but not to the majority. Most people, still today, just receive media and either vaguely enjoy it or not, they don't really know how to "analyze" something. I think the whole thing really exploded in recent years with the internet, movie reviewers and stuff. It definitely was the case for me. I only heard about Joseph Campbell on the internet, when I discovered Todd In The Shadows I had never seen something like this. Now videos about that kind of thing can go viral and get millions of views. People are getting into the idea that there's something "more", something "deeper" in some of what they like, and sometimes grew up with, and they're trying to push that idea. But like with all trends, sometimes it can be taken too far, and so you get pictures like this.