Not Everything is Political

Can online wierdos just shut up for once?

A few weeks back in our This Week In Discourse roundup, we talked about how the culture war is swallowing everything - even mundane stuff like dog training. You can’t just train your dog now to fetch now. There are influencers who want you to use woke or anti-woke dog training methods.

This has been sitting in the back of my mind for a while, and it’s worth expanding on because this sort of thing is happening more and more often. Something mundane or silly gets pulled into the Culture War, against all notions of common sense, decency or rationality. And my plea to the political culture warriors: can you all just shut the fuck up for once? Please?

Not everything should be political.

The Culture War Is Swallowing Everything

The quotes above are from the NYTimes story on how the wokeness vs anti-wokeness fight has taken over the dog training world. The entire story is surreal and kind of funny if you don’t have any stake in it. The problem is that it’s happening everywhere now.

I’m going to do the ‘both sides’ thing everyone hates now, because it’s true and useful to point out.

In December, social media was gripped by an extremely stupid wave of conversation about whether or not the classic TV show 30 Rock was problematic. There were Vanity Fair articles decrying the show’s problematic race elements. There were worse, stupider versions of the same article parroted by content farms. We had endless rounds of stupid social media discourse fighting about whether 30 Rock was cancelled or not, leading to a counter-surge of appreciation for the show.

30 Rock, during its heyday, was understood as an extremely progressive show that exemplified urbane liberal values and mocked conservatives and bigots relentlessly. The show frequently made jokes about race, gender, but in the context of being socially aware of those issues. The show is startlingly self-aware of the intersection of race and gender. It’s absurd to look back at the show as a racist institution, but that didn’t stop idiots on Twitter from doing exactly that.

Alternatively, consider the curious case of anti-woke cartoon ‘Chip Chilla’.