In the 1990s, technological progression becomes the next culture war issue in the United States.

[overoceans]

Cartoon genitalia being shown is the worst, don't you know that?

Yeah, when I actually got around to watching it in the early 90s, I was a little underwhelmed by the "hardcore" content I had been hearing about since I was a kid. I wondered if I was actually watching a bowdlerized version.

Though I suppose if the same degree of explicitness were shown in a live-action film, it would be considered pretty out there. In any case, my point was that, relative to The Simpsons, Fritz The Cat would be more likely to provoke a conservative backlash.

 

[overoceans]

I do remember George H.W. Bush in the lead-up to the 1992 election proclaiming "We want families that are more like The Waltons and less like The Simpsons."

(And Republicans wonder why they're losing the youth vote.)

 

[overoceans]

July 3, 1995
except this study mentioned wasn’t all that good.

And you have to wonder about a writer who uses the word "wild" when summarizing the results of a scientific study.

 

[Citrakayah]

Yeah, I don't see this. I don't normally call anything that isn't supernatural ASB, but I'm making an exception in this case. If it were a neo-Luddism limited to certain technology--basically trying to treat certain technologies having a prominent place in American society as important cultural heritage and their replacements as un-American--I could see it, but even then, I'd think you'd get, at most, subsidizing landline companies, providing funding for payphones, mandating that certain public buildings have them, putting high import fees on cell phones, et cetera. You would never get an outright ban.

 

[GeographyDude]

July 3, 1995
except this study mentioned wasn’t all that good. But let’s say this issue isn’t deflected by a lousy study in which you later have to backtrack, etc, etc.

JESUS, that's some nightmare fuel!

Yes, this Time magazine cover is overstated. My point is that there might well be some societal harm and more importantly personal harm to early access to porn.

And realistically, even if they really want to, parents can’t protect their kids on this one.

 

[overoceans]

I think that Time cover is a rather inaccurate representation of how most boys respond when stumbling upon porn.

I won't claim any particular knowledge of how girls respond, though I will say that that facial expression seems more to embody the attitude of PARENTS of the era when they realized that their kids could see hardcore on-line. IOW the artist was kind of overlaying the preoccupations of adults onto children.

 

[Yankeewolf]

tackling this issue from another angle, What if the Unabomber's manifesto really makes an impact amongst Paleoconservatives and the like.

Critiques of unfettered capitalism degregating the environment and of capitalism eroding conservative social norms along with Kaczsynski's criticism of leftism would definitely be appealing. There's a (marginal) segment on the right today that seems him as a righteous figure and jailed martyr. However Joe Schmoe the Blue Collar Republican and Chuck the Country Club Republican aren't really going to take a shine to the words of a terrorist however well his argument is laid out or how 'prescient' his social analysis may be. And you don't exactly have a base by saying the words "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." Electorally it's a non starter. The most radical action I think you could have would be an eventual pardon of the Unabomber as Clinton did with Puerto Rican Terrorists on his last day in office.

 

[Polish Eagle]

The Democrats thank the Republicans for committing seppuku after the triumph of the Reagan Revolution and settle in for a decade of uncontested rule once the Republicans drive living standards into the ground.

Alternatively, Canada, Mexico, and the EU thank the US for committing seppuku and triggering a brain-drain of educated Americans to the nearest places that don't put arbitrary "in my day!" limits on their standard of living.

Also, I really doubt that Newt Gingrich, who was castigated by his own party for openly declaring an ambition to admit the Moon as the 51st state, is going to go luddite instead. Every Neocon and Reagan administration official will come out of the woodwork to condemn this sort of stupidity. The libertarians might actually become relevant from defecting business-type republicans.

 

[overoceans]

@Yankeewolf

re: the Unabomber, yes, I've seen one or two right-wing trolls waving his manifesto in the face of their leftist nemeses, but ONLY the parts that criticize the left. They didn't seem to have much interest in his anti-technology stuff, and I think were just attracted to the manifesto because it was a high-profile document bashing(in part) the left.

 

[Polish Eagle]

@Yankeewolf

re: the Unabomber, yes, I've seen one or two right-wing trolls waving his manifesto in the face of their leftist nemeses, but ONLY the parts that criticize the left. They didn't seem to have much interest in his anti-technology stuff, and I think were just attracted to the manifesto because it was a high-profile document bashing(in part) the left.

I have seen a few do it unironically. William Lind is perhaps the most notorious right-wing luddite, because of the absurd novelization that Vox Day's puppy mill picked up and the Spacebattles thread mocking it. It's also popular among people who like to talk about 'distributism'--right-wingers who complain about capitalism because they realized too late that "not going to college" was not a profitable decision.

 

[Yankeewolf]

I have seen a few do it unironically. William Lind is perhaps the most notorious right-wing luddite, because of the absurd novelization that Vox Day's puppy mill picked up and the Spacebattles thread mocking it. It's also popular among people who like to talk about 'distributism'--right-wingers who complain about capitalism because they realized too late that "not going to college" was not a profitable decision.

That seems quite uncharitable, the mentality that if you don't go to college because you prefer to work with your hands or because you can't stomach the fluff that you deserve to live hand to mouth with no possibility of social mobility is precisely the classist attitude that lies at the root of so many problems in society.

@Yankeewolf

re: the Unabomber, yes, I've seen one or two right-wing trolls waving his manifesto in the face of their leftist nemeses, but ONLY the parts that criticize the left. They didn't seem to have much interest in his anti-technology stuff, and I think were just attracted to the manifesto because it was a high-profile document bashing(in part) the left.

I dunno, I've seen a lot of those who belong to "Pine Tree Twitter" reject the impetus of mass ecological devastation being required for making the GDP line go up even more. This compounds with segments of the New Right that advocates, half jokingly for Megafauna Nationalism with millions of Bison and Mammoths stampeding across the plain. A lot of this dovetails with a admiration for Pentti Linkola, a stern Finnish Environmentalist who was an advocate of Deep Ecology.

In the end though, This will take root in much more moderate forms. You won't have Newt Gingrich proclaiming that Hitler and Stalin were great people and that it was a sad thing that they didn't kill millions more to reduce Human Population, or that in War you should specifically target women and children (real things Linkola said!). What you could have is a Republican party more focused on Conservationism rather than "Drill Baby Drill" and romanticizing in a Tolkienesque fashion the wilderness and rural ways of living without the 'corruption' of industry.

Will be a different thing however given the differing geography between America, a vast continent sized nation and Britain, a small island that is densely populated. This density means that British Conservatives of a certain type (like Tolkien) would naturally romanticize the countryside while American Conservatives would see the countryside as Wilderness ready to be exploited for profit or for human betterment.