Popular culture is constantly changing. It is not rigid and doesn’t fit into a box. As such, !popularculture@hexbear.net is a place where we can post entertainment/culture events that we are each interested in, but are not necessarily news stories.
Because popular culture changes with time, that means the content of this community will also shift with those changes. Currently, a lot of pop culture today is internet-related.
Examples:
- Ben Cohen (co-founder of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream) is a pro-Palestine activist. He’s been arrested at multiple pro-Palestine protests.
- Roger Water of Pink Floyd is another activist for Palestine.
- Pedro Pascal (actor) wore a t-shirt supporting transgender people. It said “protect the dolls”, with dolls meaning transgender women.
- Ishowspeed (an internet celebrity) did a tour in China, which was promoted by China’s government.
- Ms. Rachel (an internet celebrity who makes children’s shows on YouTube) advocated for Palestinian children. This past week, she did some modeling in fashion magazines.
Not everything happening in pop culture is good. There could be dunk threads.
Examples:
- Jerry Seinfeld being a Zionist and donating money to Zionist students on college campuses.
- Quentin Tarantino lives in Israel and has fully embraced Zionism; his wife is a vocal Zionist.
- Thom Yorke, lead singer of Radiohead, is massively Zionist and regularly crashes out about people’s criticisms of him.
- REM (a 90’s rock band) did a fundraiser supporting US/CIA propaganda.
- More recently, Martin O’Donnell, the producer of the Halo game soundtrack, has been supporting ICE on social media.
- Dr. Phil going on ICE raids.
- Dean Cain (the actor playing Superman on TV in the 90’s) said he would become an ICE agent.
Sometimes in popular culture, the drama between two popular figures isn’t politically or ethically clear, but entertaining or interesting to talk about regardless.
Examples:
- Like the beef between Bill Maher and Larry David. Bill Maher is nonreligious, a Zionist, and very islamophobic. Larry David is Jewish and doesn’t speak much about Zionism, but probably Zionist (?). Larry David wrote an essay where he compared Bill Maher to a Nazi after Bill Maher had dinner with Trump.
- The pope’s brother is a chud and met with Trump and traveled with JD Vance to meet with the new pope. This pope is supposedly not a chud.
- Bill Burr has said things in recent time that seem left leaning, like supporting trans people and lifting the embargo on Cuba, saying that billionaires should be “put down”, but also last year he defended land lords. He very recently went on a comedy tour in Saudi Arabia, where he was required to tailor his act per the Saudi Prince’s demands while getting paid handsomely for it. He doubled down, saying he was doing it for “the people” but historically has mocked and cursed Beyonce for doing the same thing, saying she was taking “blood money”. As a result, he has recently started losing numerous podcast listeners.
Other Examples:
- Elon’s transgender daughter, Vivian Wilson, is kind of a radical liberal. She said something about hating tankies. Also, it’s funny because she talks shit about Elon. She was also on Hasan’s live stream. Etc.
- Luigi Mangione recently said that he’s listening to music by Taylor Swift and Charli XCX (the musician who made the Brat album, which was very popular) in prison.
- Destiny Orbiters have been trying to smear and slander popular streamer Hasana Piker for all kinds of things, including recently, fabricating claims that he shocks his dog based on a very uneventful clip of his dog yelping, to the point where JD Vance refrenced this event in a recent interview.
- Streamer culture and drama broadly.
These are some examples of events and happenings that are culturally relevant but also do not fall into a specific category of entertainment.
We all have our interests; we’re all fans of some brand or figure who might do or say cool or stupid shit or get into beef or drama with other figures. There is no one topic from popular culture that this community is about. I don’t understand what “girlypop” is, but that doesn’t preclude you from posting about it, especially if it’s something you’re interested in.
This extends out to things like “hobby drama” as well. You’re probably very invested in that drama if you’re aware of it, and someone might be truly interested in reading about it. Just because your niche hobby isn’t living in the same stratosphere as Talyor Swift doesn’t mean it isn’t jucy and full of good drama.
Someone (maybe even you) might be reading this and think, “Isn’t pop culture vapid and a waste of time?”. Some of it, yes. However, each user should try to post things they are interested in. Even something they are invested in. Something they might even be able to info dump about.
As readers, try to upvote and post on things that you also think are interesting. Then the vapid things will fall out of the algorithm if posted at all. Obviously, if you are not interested in this kind of content, feel free to block the comm from your feed.
PS: I have to give credit to @dead@hexbear.net for most of this write-up; I simply cleaned it up and expanded on it some.
You should look into reading the book Health Communism, I’m currently working through it, but the argument in so many words presented by the authors is, “Yes”, but likely not for the reasons you think.
The “welfare” state is something that arises through the contradiction between capitalism and health itself. Health under capitalism acts as capitalism’s host, but because of that fact, health takes on the important characteristic as capitalism’s key vulnerability. In order for there to be productivity, capitalism needs to identify and maintain productive bodies, and in the same breath, claims that doing so is in no way a requirement under capitalism. This contradiction explains why health systems both new and yet-to-be implemented under capitalism are so desperately attacked.
Health, according to the authors, has no fixed meaning; it is fluid. They describe it as a “race/class-stratified matrix” defined by artificial scarcity and negation; non-cancerous, non-disabled, etc. The capitalist definition of health ultimately is one where a person must be productive, normative, and able to buy health. They draw on the works of the Socialist Patient’s Collective (SPK), who described “Health” to be a purely ideological ideal, a “biological, fascist fantasy” that conceals the social conditions of illness. The goal of the book is to reclaim the notion of Health from this fantasy, under the concept they call Health Communism.
They argue that Health under capitalism is used to divide populations. Capitalism separates people into deserving and undeserving lots. Separate workers from the “surplus” (those who have been biologically certified unfit to work). This surplus population then becomes marked for “extractive abandonment”, then framed as eugenic or debt burdens to gut and block reforms. They argue that to abolish capitalism, we must shatter the worker/surplus binary, and center the surplus population in our struggle. Health Communism then becomes a goal where people are not simply provided the care they need (since, “need” is often decided by the welfare state), to all care for all people. It must go beyond equitable redistribution or state-provided “socialized medicine” inside of capitalism. They argue for an internationalist, anti-austerity, anti-border, approach that demands a radical abundance of care.
As others have pointed out, socialized medicine within capitalism is insufficient. The NHS, Canadian Medicare, etc. remain capitalist and imperialist systems. They do not exist as “islands of socialism” within capitalism. For this reason, they state that Medicare for All is not enough by itself and that health insurance companies are not in the business of providing care but instead simply financial risk-management institutions with no place in society.
They go on to define health as broader than simply healthcare. Housing, clean air, water, sanitation, social supports, in-home aid, and a livable planet are all healthcare, alongside traditional care. These European-style social democracies are the shining example of the limitations of healthcare under capitalism. They support themselves through imperialism, gatekeep care through the debt/waste frame, divide the proletariate into “productive” and “unproductive” masses, and use these tools of clasification as means of labor discipline. The threat of becoming “unproductive” looms over us all.
There have been countless stories in the past few years that highlight these points. In the UK, Jodey Whiting was housebound with chronic pain when the DWP judged her “fit to work” and stopped her benefits; she took her life two weeks later, and a coroner ruled the wrongful withdrawal was “the trigger.” Errol Graham starved to death eight months after his disability benefits were stopped. Philippa Day was found dead with a letter beside her refusing her a home assessment visit. Laura Winham lay dead in her flat for three years after her benefits were cut off. Academic research has linked the work capability assessment to 590 suicides in a single three-year period. These are not anomalies. They are the predictable output of a system that recertifies the surplus as “capable” to make good on its promise to eliminate “waste” and cut down on “debt”. The “waste” that they eliminate, quite literally, are people.
The current incarnation of healthcare under capitalism is obviously insufficient. We should not be championing its destruction, by following the lead of rightists hellbent on subsuming the entire system into private hands. However, I also cannot say that the system that should replace it would look anything like the systems that exist today. We’re talking about a system where people simply get cared for; no questions asked, no qualifications necessary, no need to be certified as needing that care. We need a more radical demand, one where “we are not basing the value of human life on one’s willingness or ability to be productive within the current political economy.”