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deborahdeshoftim5779 · 2 years

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Proof that university is now a waste of money.

Driven by an exhausting fixation with political correctness in order to inflate the grades of ethnic minority university students, British universities are attacking and erasing the canon of Western knowledge and civilisation, rather than encouraging underperforming graduates to improve.

All of this is done in the name of ‘decolonisation’, which is utter nonsense. Historic English writers cannot colonise their own history in their own country.

These initiatives are also heralded under the ubiquitous banners of ‘inclusion’ and ‘diversity’, yet the implicit assumption here is that ethnic minority students in the UK are not as capable of thriving in a curriculum that centres the likes of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare as white English students. As a member of an ethnic minority in Britain who grew up on these writers, I find this grossly insulting.

But even that is not the biggest problem. We live in England. We live in the West. This is the prime reason why our education system is centred on Western knowledge.

That is no different to a Chinese person who goes to school and spends most of their time learning their own national history and their place in the Oriental world. I bet they spend more time learning about Sun Tzu and their dynasties than they do on many of the things we prioritise in our own education system.

The West is not the only part of the world with a colonial history. China has one too. The West is not the only part of the world with ethnic minorities. China has ethnic minorities too. So the argument that ‘decolonisation’ is also good for international students who apparently need a ‘familiar’ education system falls apart.

In fact, I bet that Chinese universities are not implementing this kind of self-hating revisionism. Nor are other universities around the world. This is only possible in a Western world that has lost any pride in its identity and faith in its future.

Every student who lives in England should first know where our language comes from, where our literature comes from, should prioritise our greatest writers, and understandwhere our greatest ideas and contributions to society have come from. That prioritisation has nothing to do with colonialism and everything to do with common sense, basic education, civic duty, and a love of one’s own country.

It should be a source of pride, not something to be airbushed out of history just because the people who produced it were predominantly white. In order to do this, you have to prioritise first what came from this country, and second, what came from the development of Western civilisation.

There’s nothing wrong with learning about contributions from other cultures, but these universities are operating a zero-sum game where you have to denigrate Western knowledge and history in order to promote other people. You have to measure people’s contributions by their skin colour and gender, rather than assessing their impact on world history. You have to pretend that lesser known people from other cultures had a similar impact to well-known people from Western culture, simply to be ‘diverse’-- even though in many cases, the two are simply not comparable.

This ‘decolonisation’ project has nothing to do with education. A real university will teach the history as it was, not rewrite it to suit 21st century sensibilities. It is patronising and the antithesis of education.

I will now start telling everyone I know to skip university. It is not worth it financially. Worse, if you happen to be proud of what universities now attack as WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and get this-- Democratic), then you’d be better off educating yourself, rather than allowing these universities to rewrite history on your behalf.

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realhankmccoy · 30 days

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Thank you, Practical Existentialism, for talking in much more comprehensible terms about what I tried to explain to the uncomprehending puffer known as Babycuck on at least a dozen occasions.

If Babycuck were an existentialist -- which offers the individual almost unlimited options in life -- I wouldn't have any problem with them. Also, I'm not saying they can't run with the crowd, but if they were going to, there would be reasons to laugh at them for acting like they're an alternative or liberating force, and reasons to laugh at them for playing the victim about their status quo status.

If they wish to admit they love captivity and the herd -- moo moo moo moo moo moo -- they have every claim to all the Petersonian Western Individualism they would ever wish for in my book, because at least that way they'd finally be being honest with themselves and others.

#practical existentialism #western culture #western civilisation #individuality #individualist #jordan peterson #existentialism

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 month

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“We are where we are because our culture is special” Konstantin Kisin LIVE in Melbourne

Before I say anything else, it's such a pleasure to be in Australia. It's my first time here. I didn't really know what to expect. I was actually on the flight over. This Australian guy recognized me, he came over, we started chatting, he found out I was doing a few talks and he said, oh mate, watch out we've got a big problem, political correctness in Australia. I didn't know what to think. So, I get to my hotel, I check in, lady gives me the card says, this is your card for your room and if you want to have breakfast tomorrow, go to the two fat Indians. I was like, this is my kind of place. Wouldn't happen in the UK. We don't use the word "fat" anymore, we say "people of girth."

Now, thank you all for coming out. As Scott said it's so lovely to see so many young people here, many of you under 50. So, thank you for coming. All six of you. It's a pleasure to see you. I'm not going to speak for very long, I'm really keen to get to your questions in the Q&A that we're going to do with Glenn in a minute.

But the thing I wanted to talk to you about tonight, just to set the tone of our discussion really, is something that I'm constantly talking about now, and Scott mentioned the title of my book "An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West," is the West.

What is the West? How do we define it, how do we think about it? And the reason I think about it is, as he mentioned, I was born in the Soviet Union and grew up in that country, in that society, and then in early '90s - mid 90s - I moved to England. And by the way, those of you who've seen my ARC speech, you'll remember I mentioned Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. And somebody later claimed online that I was comparing myself to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. This is ridiculous, of course, there's no comparison. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent most of his life in a prison camp where he endured terrible conditions, punishments and brutal beatings and a starvation diet. I went to an English boarding school. That's where the similarities end.

But what is the West? I think it's very important to think about this and particularly here in Australia, because you're a Western country in the middle of Asia. And it strikes me that if you were to conduct an experiment to prove that Western civilization is special in some way, you would do what the British did here. You'd find a barren continent on the other side of the world full of venomous creatures. You'd collect a few thousand of your least law-abiding citizens, let's put it diplomatically, right. You'd ship them over, you'd leave them there for a couple of centuries, you let them crack on with it, and then you'd come back and have a look. Right? And what would you see? What would you see? Well, you'd see a society that, broadly speaking, is thriving.

What do I mean by thriving? Well, there's different ways to look at it. We could talk about GDP per capita or some kind of boring poll numbers. When I think about it, I think about the fact that, how many Australians are taking their children, climbing into rickety boats and braving shark infested waters in search of a better life? And yet, thousands of people are doing the exact opposite to come here. That's what I mean by thriving. Nowm it seems to me that that West experiment requires some kind of explanation. We know that it's not random. Millions of people are streaming through the southern border of the United States, dealing with Mexican cartels and putting themselves and their children in danger to go to the United States. Tens of thousands of people are getting onto boats and crossing the English Channel, which again is a perilous journey. And so on? Why is this happening? It seems to me that this requires some kind of explanation. This is not an accident. This is not an accident at all. But we seem to not really understand that anymore.

And I think about it like this. If I was to wake you up in the middle of the night and put a gun to your head and ask you why is this happening? Why is the West attracting people to come here? And we've got to a point in our culture where quite a lot of people would rather die in that situation than admit the truth. Which is our societies are better. I don't mean superior. I just mean they're better at producing in the things that human beings seem to want. Right?

Now, what are they? What are the things? Well, if you watch too many Hollywood movies, you say, freedom and democracy! Okay, well, why are they good? Why is freedom good? Why is democracy good?

That's the silence I'm talking about. It's the silence in all of our heads because we no longer are able to articulate the reason that our civilization is successful as it is. And I think this is a big problem. A big, big problem. The West has become -- I talked about this in my book -- it's a little bit like a cargo cult. Most of you probably in this neck of the woods know what one is, but I'll explain anyway.

During World War II, the Americans and the Japanese used many small islands in the Pacific to station troops to have munitions dumps, to station their supplies, etc. And what happened was the local tribes that lived there were fairly primitive technologically. They benefited massively from the fact that they were able to get access to Western medicine, Western food, Western supplies, clothing, etc. And their quality of life improved dramatically. And then the war ended, and the Americans and the Japanese packed up and went home. And the western food and the western supplies and the western clothes ended or started running out. So, what did the native tribes that lived on these islands do? Well, they saw what the Americans had been doing and the Japanese, so they started imitating. They made headphones out of coconuts. They made radio towers out of bamboo. They created fake landing strips and marched up and down with fake rifles made out of bamboo.

And this is increasingly what we do in the West with our own values. We say these words, freedom, democracy, but we have no idea what they mean anymore. We can't explain to our children why they should value those things, because we don't think about them, because we've been trained not to.

So, what do I mean, exactly? Let me try and articulate it in a simple way. People don't come to our countries and risk their lives for freedom and democracy. Very, very few people do. The reason people come is our society is very, very good at creating the things that all human beings want: safety, prosperity and the ability to choose your gender.

Now, why are our societies so good at creating safety and prosperity? I asked Jordan Peterson this once at dinner. I said to him, what is Western civilization? And Jordan did what Jordan always does, he launched into a 20-minute monologue where you have no idea what he's talking about... for the first 18 minutes, right. And then at about the 19-minute mark, it all makes sense. And this is what he said. He said, there are chimp troops, and in a chimp troop there two primary strategies for how an alpha male can control that troop.

The first is, you're the biggest and the most powerful and the strongest and you will dominate through force and power and brutality anyone who challenges your authority. And this is an effective strategy, but only in the short term. Only as long as you are the strongest, only as long as you are the most powerful. The moment you take your eye off the ball, you get injured, you're a little bit weaker, you're a little bit older, you meet with a very brutal end because another chimp or another couple of chimps will come in and they will tear your head off, right?

There's another strategy, and it's the reason that actually most alpha male chimps are often the smallest in the troop. And the reason is, that they are able to build coalitions by grooming the other members -- in a good way. And exchanging things, they build coalitions. And the first principle of Western civilization that has made us as successful as we are, what we call democracy, what we really mean is government by consent. The idea that the individual matters enough that when he's governed by others, It Is by consent. And this is very different, as you're probably well aware, to many other societies around the world.

Now this doesn't just apply to government. I'm not just talking about politics. This matters at every level of our societies. Our armies fight better because the soldier on the ground is able to feed information up the chain of command. In almost every aspect of our society, that freedom of the individual and the fact that the individual matters, creates better results and better outcomes,

Think about this. I mean, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine because no one can tell him the truth anymore. He was told that Ukraine would fold in three days, the Ukrainians would welcome them with bread and salt. That's not what happened, and while the war is not necessarily going that well for Ukraine, probably not going that well for either side, Vladimir Putin did not expect it to go like this. And the casualties and losses he's taken are completely unexpected. Why is that? Because in our system, our leaders are kept firmly on the ground. Their egos are kept in check and we do not create these power vacuums where one person controls everything. And we're not able to speak truth to power at all.

This ideal of consensual leadership matters in everything. It's the reason there's never been a Chernobyl-level nuclear disaster in the West. Because the kinds of human errors that were made in that disaster could never -- not never -- but they're much, much less likely in our societies because of the fact that the voice of the individual matters.

Which is where we come to the second pillar of our civilization, which is freedom of thought, freedom of expression and freedom of research. You know, it's so funny that people call me right-wing because I said freedom of speech matters. I kind of thought that was a universal position in the West, but I've discovered that that is now how it's coded. And the reason I think freedom of speech matters is that you cannot think without speaking. You have to speak to think. And when you speak, you will very often find out that what you think is utter crap. Because other people will tell you. This is Twitter in a nutshell, right? And it's this sharpening of idea against idea that is the reason that the Western societies have produced scientists and researchers and thinkers who've been able to ask and answer questions that you could not even raise in other societies. This is the bedrock of our success. The technological superiority that our societies have enjoyed through the ages are impossible to explain in any other way.

Think about this, and please understand I'm saying this in a morally neutral manner, it's just an example of that gap. Hernán Cortés arrived in Central America with a few hundred conquistadors, and because of his technological advantage, he was able to conquer an empire of five to six million Aztecs in a matter of years. That is the kind of superiority that we enjoy because of the way that we think freely, comparatively freely, because we are comparatively free from the dogma of religious control, authoritarian control, government control and social restriction, too, and cultural restriction.

So, these things have a very real and practical consequences. Did you see, by the way, how many of you have seen the Oppenheimer movie? Quite a lot of you. If you haven't seen it, it's a movie about the Manhattan Project, the way that the nuclear bomb was made. And if you weren't paying too much attention, you wouldn't have noticed that it being a Hollywood movie they sort of talk about, oh you know, reds under the bed, red scare, McCarthyism getting out of hand, and everybody was getting hounded for being communist. And right at the end, they just slip in the fact that actually it was Communists in America that gave Stalin the nuclear bomb, right.

And why is that interesting to me? Well, the first Russian nuclear bomb was called RDS1, and RDS stands for "Rossija dellajet sama," "Russia does it by itself." Which is ironic, given that it was almost entirely stolen from the Americans. The second greatest superpower in the world at that time could not produce it by itself. It had to steal it. That is the level of technological and scientific superiority that we in the West enjoy.

Now, please understand I'm not even remotely suggesting that the West has some kind of monopoly on genius and Innovation and creativity. It's not the case, of course. People have great ideas everywhere. The Chinese invented gunpowder. But every single development in the history of firearms since, pretty much, from the musket to the cruise missile, has been made here in the West. Now, why is that? The reason is that we have an incentive structure in the West that encourages people to pursue innovation in a way that is completely impossible anywhere else.

Now what do I mean by that? Well, again, it's a word that we no longer understand the meaning of: capitalism. But what capitalism really means is, private property and the rule of law. And it's amazing to me, the extent to which people do not understand in the West how rare these things are. There is no private property in Russia. Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the richest man in Russia. And then he gave some money to an opposition party, and he was no longer the richest man in Russia. He spent 10 years in a penal camp instead. In the penal, prison system, right. Because he gave money to the opposition party.

I don't know who the richest man in Australia is, but I don't imagine if he gave money to the opposition party that would be the case with him. It's the same in China. Or, someone thinks maybe will happen, I don't know, things are getting out of hand here. The same thing is true in China. Jack Ma makes some comments about banking regulation, of all controversial things, and disappears the next day and all sorts of trouble. Bao Fan, this is a billionaire in China again, no one quite knows what he did but disappeared for a year, turned up a few weeks ago after a year of being completely unheard of, and miraculously resigned from all his positions.

Private property and the rule of law are rare and unique. Now, why does this matter? Well, if you don't get to keep the things that you create then the incentive is not to innovate, the incentive is to comply. The reason we innovate in the West as much as we do is we get to keep the benefits of our creations. And it's an incentive structure that means that we are of service to our fellow citizens. In the Soviet Union, where I grew up, or in Russia today the way you get ahead is not by providing or creating things that are of value to other people, it's by doing things that -- and it's not just, by the way, Communist societies or Russia today, it's corrupt regimes everywhere -- the way you get ahead is not by looking after the needs of your fellow citizens, creating things that they want to buy or they want to consume. You get ahead by pandering to the corrupt regime that's in charge. Or to the clique of people that service the corrupt regime that is in charge.

Capitalism is a way of aligning our incentives to create things that are of real value to our fellow citizens. And that is why we have the innovation that we have. This system drives our prosperity, and prosperity drives our strength and the stability that we've had.

Now, government by consent, freedom of expression and freedom more generally and capitalism, I put it to you ladies and gentlemen, that all three of these pillars of our civilization are under threat today. Not only from the outside, but also from the inside. We'll talk more with Glenn about it in the Q&A, but we've got a real problem with democracy for reasons that we can get into later.

Our young people are not being brought up to understand why capitalism is the system that has produced the amazing things that we have. And freedom of expression, I think we all know is being eroded. Why is this happening? Well, my view is, and I think this is well documented at this point, that we have two or three generations of people in our societies now who have not been taught the things that we've just discussed. Instead, they've been taught to hate their own societies. They've been taught to hate the values of their own civilization. Iit is no surprise, therefore, that we're heading in the direction that we're heading.

This is what Orwell talked about when he said that, he who controls the past controls the future. If we do not understand our past and where we come from, we will not get to a bright future that we want. And when you dare to bring this up, you know, people keep saying, oh you're so brave. I'm not brave, I'm just saying some very, very obvious things that everybody knows, that's it, right.

But when you bring this up, I think what people mean is, people say, oh that these are culture war talking points. As if a society's culture doesn't matter. We are where we are because our culture is special. We are where we are because our culture is unique. And so, the real message that I have for you tonight, and I hope that we get to talk more about this is, our culture is very, very important, and if people are going to call me a culture warrior ,well that's fine. Because I think it's worth fighting for.

Thank you very much.

The people who want to "destroy capitalism" also Tweet from their current-generation smartphone that they want free stuff produced by the same system they want to destroy, and don't think they sound like morons. The people who call the West evil and corrupt with the confidence of a Gender Studies bozo have never lived anywhere else, have no idea, and don't think everyone can tell. The people who claim to want to tear down their comfortable, safe, Western country are the same ones who object to immigration restrictions and can't see how braindead they are.

This self-hatred isn't humility, it's performative sadomasochism.

#Konstantin Kisin #western civilization #western civilisation #western culture #innovation #capitalism #freedom #security #prosperity #war on the west #freedom of speech #free speech #authoritarianism #religion is a mental illness

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illustratus · 8 months

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Charles Martel at the Battle of Poitiers (732)

by Henri Grobet

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soryualeksi · 2 months

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Explain to me why we have to read the name "The Flour Bag Massacre" and can STILL not call for a cessation of Israel's idea of a "just and moral war" without being labelled """Terrorists""".

fyi starved civilians gathered to receive food in Gaza and the IDF opened fire on them, killing at least 150 as counted by now.

The Flour Bag Massacre.

Read this again and again and let it truly sink in.

#the flour bag massacre #and the so called Civilised Western Democracies shrug and send more weapons to be fired upon a starved population #crimes against humanity #war crimes #palestine genocide #gaza genocide

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queerstudiesnatural · 11 months

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i think it's time to take a page from the james flint gay agenda manifesto; stop trying to convince people that the queers are not a danger to society, and become a menace to civilisation instead. the real queer agenda should be to overthrow any and all social systems. work in tandem with other marginalised groups and set heteropatriarchy on fire. become ungovernable, ignore social norms, uplift new voices. assimilation should not have ever been the goal. queer people are different. difference is good. the real enemy is conformity. conformity is responsible for every man made horror in history. war, poverty, hate crimes, slavery, genocide, they are all made possible by the existence and desirability of a status quo. remove the desirability of normalcy and you remove the foundation for all systems of suffering. systems work because a majority of people have decided it was in their best interest to uphold them. but is it really? remove the desirability of normalcy and you have no grounds for competition. keep quiet out of fear that the system will decide you are abnormal next, and you are making sure it will. fuck civilisation, fuck normalcy, fuck the status quo.

#rain posts #sorry watching black sails has enraged me #seeing gay people and women become outwardly transphobic #because they've convinced themselves that trans people are the problem #because they're so scared of society turning on them/relieved that the heat is off them for once #that they'll do anything to keep their spot on the normal people hall of fame #is so fucking heartbreaking #you fucking idiots are only succeeding in making sure that people remain categorised #that a hierarchy perseveres between normal and abnormal people #that inequality remains the foundation for civilisation #if you are anything other than a cis gendered heterosexual wealthy abled white western man #then society is not and will never be your friend #it's so fucking baffling that such a small group of people has managed to create an atmosphere of fear worldwide #where instead of saying fuck that we've all decided that we needed to find any resemblance we have to that tiny group of people #(being white or cis or male or straight etc)#and beg to be included based on that one similarity #i'm so fucking tired of normalcy i'm so fucking tired of quiet acceptance #be fucking weird. be appreciative of other people's weirdness. refuse to put anyone into categories #categories lead to classification and hierarchy #the most powerful weapon we have is non conformity #we all possess it. so fucking use it.#and at the very least (if you're scared for yourself) make sure other people's right to non conformity is protected and uplifted

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blackswaneuroparedux · 1 year

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Je pense que la langue latine ferait bien de redevenir une langue vivante pour une renaissance de l’Europe. Je suis pour la reconnaissance du latin, voire du grec d’ailleurs, comme une des langues de l’Union européenne.

- Renaud Camus

As a Europhile I concur. Time to bring Latin and Greek as the language of Europe. American-English is the barbarian at the gate. If you guard your language, you protect your culture. American cultural colonialism - from the divisive politics of seeing the world through its own domestic lens to its fetish obssession with the identity politics of race and gender - has meant other races and cultures in the world, not just uniquely European, are increasingly eroded to become more Americanised.

Unlike England, France has been relatively well insulated because French is the gate-keeper to its culture and has an in-built hostility towards anything American or English. That’s a good thing. Language is not neutral. Language is the unique custodian of history and heritage, a way of thinking and a way of being. This is what real diversity looks like.

It’s wishful thinking of course but it sure does tickle my reactionary bones.

#camus #renaud camus #quote #french #culture #society #civilisation #language #greek #latin #europe #western civilisation #western europe

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waldires · 7 months

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Allegory of Astronomia, early 16th c. by german painter, found in Wittenberg

#art #tile #german art #16th century #decorative art #ceramic #western civilisation #allegory

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chthonickore · 5 months

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hi guys I think America should die actually

#seph talks #palestine #gaza #usa news #censoring the one (1) Palestinian politician is not the great thing you think it is #western civilisation was a mistake

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realhankmccoy · 5 months

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i decided there's a main theme to western culture: upward mobility but also a sub theme which is being Top Bunny (Yeah but secretly the real theme is unshakable immovable caste system)

agreed that's the whole structure and architecture behind the walls of it all

#western culture #western civilisation #mommie queerest

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disappointingyet · 9 months

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The Decline Of Western Civilisation

Director Penelope Spheeris Stars Claude Bessy, Exene, Darby Crash, Ron Reyes, Nicole USA 1981 Language English 1hr 40mins Colour/Black & white

The classic LA punk doc

I feel it’s rare to have a (theatrically released) documentary that is much less well-known than its sequel. But The Decline Of Western Civilisation II: The Metal Years had famous people in it, some much-quoted funny moments and set up director Penelope Spheeris up to make the massive hit comedy Wayne’s World. The first Decline, on the other hand, is bleaker, occasionally funny in a very dark way and put Spheeris on the way to directing the grim (and fairly obscure) squatland drama Suburbia. And at the time none of these people were celebrities and even subsequently, the only person here who has nudged fame is Pat Smear, the guitar player from Germs, who was a touring member of Nirvana in their last days and is currently a Foo Fighter.

But make no mistake, The Decline Of Western Civilisation is an extraordinary music documentary. Filmed in late 1979 and early 1980, it drops us right into the middle of punk in Los Angeles. There’s no voiceover – although we do occasionally hear Spheeris asking questions – so the description and analysis comes from bands, fans, managers, club owners, bouncers and the staff of Slash magazine.*

In what I think was an accident of timing, Spheeris caught a pivotal moment. The early punk scene in Los Angeles had been open-minded and stylistically diverse. Here we see the codifying of hardcore punk and the amped-up aggression of bands like Black Flag, Circle Jerks and Fear and their audiences. Fear, in particular, incite their gobbing crowd with a steady stream of homophobic derision.

The contrast is with Catholic Discipline, led by Slash editor Claude Bessy (aka Kickboy Face), whose guitar player Phranc was a trilby-sporting lesbian. (And Catholic Discipline are shown playing at venue we learn had banned the hardcore bands by this point.) Their crowd looks like a relatively sophisticated bunch who have put a lot of time into their outfits. But they also, it should be said, seem a lot less into the occasion than the kids at the Circle Jerks show.

There wasn’t (it seems) even the language to describe what was going on those crowds. Everyone refers to pogoing, but these kids aren’t jumping up and down on the spot, they are smashing into each other and creating a vortex of bodies, and clambering up onto stage and getting shoved off. It seems the terms slam dancing (moshing was an even later coinage as I remember it) and stage diving were not yet in common use.

So how does Spheeris put us in this world? We get a lot of footage of the bands on stage, which might be hard work for some viewers. But because Spheeris and her camera crew are interested in the scene as a whole, there’s always something anthropologically interesting to note**, even if you can’t tell where one Fear song begins and the next one ends.

And then there are the interviews. This the opposite of the uniform talking-head approach, although the great access Spheeris had helps. Interviews with kids from the scene are face-on in a stark room with a bare light bulb hanging down, shot in black & white and tinted blue. Venue owner Brendan Mullen is filmed on a cliff high above Los Angeles. Nicole, the long-suffering manager of Germs, talks in close-up with her clothes merging into the black background.

Germs lead singer Darby Crash, by contrast, is filmed cooking eggs and bacon in a grubby kitchen – this is probably the film’s most notorious segment, as his mate blithely recounts stumbling across the body of a workman at her parents’ house. Spheeris [unseen]: “Didn’t you feel bad that the guy was dead?” Michelle: “No, not at all. Because I hate painters." During the X interview, singer John Doe is tattooing LA music scene character Top Jimmy's arm while the band’s other singer, Exene, talks through her collection of fundamentalist Christian pamphlets that she’s collected on the streets of LA.

All of which is to say that faced with my key question about movie docs – is this actually a movie? (rather than TV or – these days – YouTube content) – the answer is about as emphatic a ‘yes’ as is possible. This is a visually fascinating bit of film-making, regardless of what’s being said. But the what’s being said is interesting, too. Both the letters from readers to Slash magazine and some of the things the kids filmed under the light bulb say are (to a 2023 viewer) evidence that it wasn’t the internet that created all manner of unpleasantness – it was always there, and (in the case of the readers’ letters), people used to bother to actually write and post trolling nonsense (I was going to say and pay for postage, but I’m guessing a lot of these were kids using stamps from their mom’s desk.)

This is one of those movies I’ve known about for decades, but only finally now got a chance to see. And yet somehow it went way past my expectations – this is one of the great rock documentaries.

(In the UK, all three TDOWC movies are currently available to stream for free – legally! – on Plex.)

*OK, so maybe worth saying I know a certain amount about this stuff – for instance, I’ve read We’ve Got The Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story Of LA Punk so I had a lot of context that the more casual viewer wouldn’t. But I still think it would be an absorbing watch if you don’t know anything (you don’t have to have read a book to realise that Darby Crash was very bad news).

**For instance, at this point at least, both in terms of the bands and their audience, this was less all-white than you might imagine/despite the bile spewed by a couple of the interviewees. (Not as far as I know shown in this film, but definitely already a key figure was Spot, RIP.) This is part of my 'Every girl should be given an electric guitar on her 16th birthday' series of reviews

#punk movies #the decline of western civilisation

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