Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

Objectifying military entertainment reinforces the culture behind troop violence against locals.

Properties2
tagsja-picks, contrarian_or_surprising, singleton, xref, category/causal-relationships
aliases@vine_base_2015, loc. 338

3 min read

Objectifying military entertainment reinforces the culture behind troop violence against locals.

Evidence

What is so clear to me, going through my hundreds of pages of notes from various declassified documents, is how wars introduce a red shift in human cruelty. It happens in battle, but also among civilians. — Nicholson Baker, Baseless- My Search for Secrets in the…, 338 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

So I settle for a third definition of “popular,” though it is a rather uneasy one. This looks, in any particular period, at those forms and activities which have their roots in the social and material conditions of particular classes; which have been embodied in popular traditions and practices. In this sense, it retains what is valuable in the descriptive definition. But it goes on to insist that what is essential to the definition of popular culture is the relations which define “popular culture” in a continuing tension (relationship, influence, and antagonism) to the dominant culture. It is a conception of culture which is polarized around this cultural dialectic. It treats the domain of cultural forms and activities as a constantly changing field. Then it looks at the relations which constantly structure this field into dominant and subordinate formations. It looks at the process by which these relations of dominance and subordination are articulated. It treats them as a process: the process by means of which some things are actively preferred so that others can be dethroned. It has at its center the changing and uneven relations of force which define the field of culture—that is, the question of cultural struggle and its many forms. Its main focus of attention is the relation between culture and questions of hegemony. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1011 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Sexually objectifying base entertainment links to epidemic of military sexual assault; Wars increase human cruelty, altering perceptions of normal behavior. — Nicholson Baker, Baseless- My Search for Secrets in the…, 338; Popular culture is defined by its tension with dominant culture — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1011

Broader Connections

✉️

Backlinks