u/CrumpledKiltSkin

Nuclear energy is extremely low carbon, and waste storage is essentially a solved problem that isn't really a problem.

Why isn't advocacy for nuclear energy part of the environmentalist playbook?

My view is that identity politics has had a net negative effect on society, politics, and culture and that this is palpable when the comparison is made between 1990 and 2026, I believe this to be true in Europe where I live but I'll limit the view to the United States for simplicity and because that's the clearest case.

By identity politics, I do not simply mean noticing or asserting that the canonical protected identity categories exist, nor that they correlate with outcomes which we may consider meaningful, nor even that in some cases the relationship may be causal and not merely correlative. What I mean is the much broader cultural and institutional shift away from liberal universalism, which I assert characterized the political culture of the 1990s, and towards treating identity as central, morally privileged, politically determinative, and constantly relevant.

The older ideal, at least in mainstream liberal culture, was something like: treat people as individuals, apply common standards, reduce the social importance of inherited characteristics, and aim for equality of opportunity. That ideal was never perfectly achieved, and it often failed in practice, but it was at least an ideal that pointed beyond tribal identity.

Over the last few decades, that ideal has been displaced by a much more identity-conscious worldview. Schools, universities, corporations, media organizations, arts institutions, charities, public bodies, and political parties increasingly teach people to understand themselves and others primarily through identity categories and identity framed power dynamics. People are encouraged to notice identity, foreground identity, interpret interactions through identity, and treat identity-based representation as a major moral and political good.

My view is that this has produced several harmful effects.

1. It has made society more tribal, not less. If people are constantly told that identity is central to power, morality, authenticity, and social meaning, they will start thinking and behaving more as members of identity groups. That does not only activate minority identity consciousness. It also activates majority identity consciousness. You cannot tell everyone that race, sex, ethnicity, or other inherited categories are politically central and then expect only the “approved” groups to organise around them.
2. It has damaged liberal individualism. While I acknowledge that some metrics by which we could assess individualism (self-expression, name uniqueness, self-focus, familial independence) have increased or remained stable over this period, metrics which are more integral to the healthy functioning of a liberal democracy (speech tolerance, civic responsibility, shared universal national identity) have seen sometimes shocking decline.
3. It has harmed democratic norms. If political conflict is framed primarily as conflict between identity groups, compromise becomes harder. Disagreement becomes identity threat. Ordinary policy questions become symbolic struggles over group status. This makes democratic politics uglier, more paranoid, and less capable of resolving material problems and, critically, destroys the original concept of representation as it applies to democracy; that the person I vote for is mandated by my vote to represent me, not that the person in a given office or role represents me or not on the basis of a shared identity characteristic. This redefining of what it means to be represented has been so complete that the word representation is now itself a synonym for identity politics.
4. It has degraded culture. Casting, publishing, awards, advertising, arts funding, and criticism are now often interpreted through identity politics before anything else. This creates obvious tokenism and box-checking. It also produces backlash, because audiences can tell when artistic decisions are being made or marketed as symbolic identity gestures.

My view is not that identity never matters, or that liberal universalism was perfectly practised, or that identity politics is the sole variable responsible for the above changes, I acknowledge the roles of globalization, digital technology, mass migration and demographic shift. My view is that making identity central to institutional life has, on balance, worsened social trust, cultural quality, political stability, and intergroup relations, independent of these other factors.

To change my view, it would not be enough to show that identity-conscious politics has achieved some local, specific goods. I accept that it has. The case to change my view would need to show that those gains outweigh the broader costs which I identify; increased tribalism, erosion of liberal democratic norms, resentment, tokenism, self-censorship, institutional distrust, and cultural balkanisation, or that I have misidentified those costs.

EDIT: Thank you for your responses, nobody has really come close to changing my view and I've been actively responding to your comments for almost four hours now and the quality of my reasoning is degrading significantly. I'll have another look tomorrow.

I want to address a couple of talking points I've seen repeated in the discourse about Nolan's The Odyssey (2026), and give my own opinion.

1. It's foolish to have an opinion on a movie that hasn't been released.

If you took that seriously you'd never watch movies, because wanting to see a movie is, in itself, having an opinion. You develop that opinion based on what you already know from trailers, press release, buzz, cast and crew, attachment to an IP/franchise, all of which are legitimate subjects of discussion and criticism and all of which are known in advance of release.

2. It's a fantasy movie...therefore such and a such thing about the movie doesn't matter.

There are two problems with this, one is that it isn't a fantasy movie and the other is that even if it were that wouldn't mean it is immune to criticism of its creative choices.

The Odyssey is not Harry Potter and the Item of Inconsequence. The Homeric poems were the foundational religious, poetic, mythic, ethical, linguistic, and educational texts of the ancients Greeks and, through Athens and Rome have come down to us today with as much cultural force as the Judeo-Christian tradition (I would argue more).

The poems were themselves anachronistic and fantastical even to their 7th Century BCE audiences, but that doesn't mean they were understood in anything like the way we understand modern disposable entertainment fantasy.

If I were to say Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was antisemitic do you think "it's a fantasy movie" would be a comprehensive or persuasive rebuttal? If not, you should question why you feel like it is with regards to criticism of the known creative choices in Nolan's Odyssey.

You don't have to take The Odyssey as seriously as I do. And I don't have to take you at all seriously when you say "It's a fantasy movie". If you're interested in being persuasive, find better arguments.

My take.

I won't be watching Nolan's The Odyssey. I don't like the cinematography in the trailers, I strongly dislike the choice to use modern vernacular English, I don't like the casting much, and Nolan has made enough bad movies that he doesn't get an automatic pass from me.

Additionally, I have limited mental real-estate for new interpretations of the Homerics, I've read them in multiple translations and while I'm open to new interpretations I'm not open to any and all new interpretations. There are multiple opportunity costs in watching this movie and on balance it doesn't look worth it to me. To you it may be, and that's fine.

I want to focus on the main reason for my decision though, because I don't believe this is well known;

Nolan used Emily Wilson's 2017 translation of The Odyssey.

The primary intention of Wilson's translation was not to translate The Odyssey into English, it was to torture the Greek into producing a version of the story that conforms as closely as possible to modern (in particular critical theory/3rd wave feminist) cultural sensibilities in service of propagandizing those sensibilities. Not in the passive way in which all art is informed by its creator's perception, but in a highly didactic and conscious way.

Here's some evidence for this;

The first line of The Odyssey.

Samuel Butler (1900) "Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero"

Richard Lattimore (1965) "Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways"

Robert Fagles (1996) "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns..."

Stanley Lombardo (2000) "Speak, Memory, of the cunning hero"

Peter Green (2018) "The man, Muse, tell me about that resourceful man"

Emily Wilson (2017) "Tell me about a complicated man..."

One of these is not like the others.

But wait, you ask, couldn't it be that the men who translated Homer were the ones torturing the Greek, and Wilson is the unbiased one? Well, let's look at the original Greek and see how they all got to where they got to.

Greek: νδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον

Transliteration: Ándra moi énnepe, Moûsa, polútropon
plánchthē

Literal: Tell me, Muse, of the man of many turns

Polytropos literally means many-turning. It's the only adjective in Homer's proem. The choice to render into the modern vernacular "complicated" in the first line of the poem sets us up for the struggle session that is Wilson's translation in which she repeatedly butchers not only the original Greek but any serious attempt to understand the register and mode in which the Homerics are operating, reducing The Odyssey to an extended DEI training session in which Odysseus is recast as morally questionable in a way that the original text simply doesn't justify when taken either word for word, or holistically.

Now that's all well and good and fine, and reasonable people can disagree about the extent to which Wilson's project of feminist cultural re-appropriation is warranted, defensible, necessary, obnoxious, boring etc etc. But when it comes to the question of sitting down to watch a 3 hour movie, knowing well in advance that I'm going to be served another soulless mouthing of contemporary platitudes but this time dressed up in (incredibly ugly and anachronistic) Bronze Aged armour, I know as much as I need to know to pass, thank you.

And if you want to watch it, you should watch it. We've both made a decision based on what we know, and if we were going to Pepsi/Cola challenge it, I'm confident I know more and have thought about it more than "bro it hasn't been released" or "it's just a fantasy movie" folks.

Hello all,

I'm currently learning to the play the Great Highland Bagpipes which involves starting on a manually blown, relatively simple 'practice chanter' before ever even touching the real instrument. Playing any kind of real pipe music, certainly joining the band I study under or playing to an audience, are things that are at least 6 months away, could be a year or more.

So, as it's a lot of learning without any ability to play music as the music should be heard, I decided to pick up a secondary instrument that I can hopefully start playing actual tunes for the listenin' on, in weeks rather than months, and the traditional Irish flute and Native American flutes were the options that seemed to fit.

So, my main question for you folks is what kind of Native American flute should I buy, what key should it be in, how much should I expect to spend, is there a trusted seller in the EU (I live in Luxembourg) and what's the best way to get started learning the instrument once I do have one in my hands? Is it strongly recommended to buy through a bricks and mortar store?

I couldn't see an FAQ or anything so please forgive me if these beginner questions belong somewhere else

Ta