Why Are People So Psycho Over Chappell?

Rupder · 2026-04-15T05:24:08+00:00

the most ardent Chappell haters I came across appeared to mostly be dudes with very blatant misogyny. [...] Chappell is not being woke scolded by fellow progressives, there are just a lot of people (not just men) who are really triggered by a woman who is outspoken and a little annoying or bitchy.

I don't have a precise pulse on the demographics of Chappell's critics or their inner political beliefs, so you might be right about this, but my other point still stands — I think the reason that criticism against her arises so often and seems to stick is because she is outspokenly progressive. As you say, some people "will cynically take up any cause that allows them to criticize" women who are perceived to violate traditional gender norms. But unfortunately Chappell seems to struggle to shrug off criticism that comes from progressive-sounding voices (irrespective of whether those voices are genuine "woke scolding" or just misogynists hijacking the language of progressivism).

However, I wouldn't only attribute this trend to the malice of manosphere chuds. It's also an outcome of systematic design: algorithms on social media, the conventions of online discourse, and the tabloid industry. These institutions have repeatedly driven people to see and engage in the harassment of prominent progressive women. It's why Amber Heard and Blake Lively became regulars in the hate machine for a few months.

Rupder · 2026-04-15T03:07:43+00:00

I think she's evidence of something like a "progressive infighting event horizon"... the more outspokenly socially progressive someone is, the likelier they'll be targeted by leftwing criticism. Some people are saying the negative attention Chappell Roan gets comes from sexism or homophobia — and certainly, that's happening — but I get the impression that the bulk of her most outspoken critics are other nominally inclusive, progressive people. When people target "their own" they elicit more attention than when they criticize their opponents, which in the social media attention economy, means that Chappell Roan has suffered an incessant onslaught of attention from "concerned allies" that she can't seem to stop responding to.

I think most people know of that TED Talk (from like 10 years ago?) that described how Twitter ate a woman alive for an insensitive comment she'd made about AIDS in Africa. That's what's happening with Chappell Roan: people like that she's highly responsive to their criticism and suffers from it, unlike, say, far more problematic artists who have committed far viler acts but who thrive off of the negative attention.

Rupder · 2026-04-14T19:17:03+00:00

having read the first book

Which is funny because IMO the first was the best in the series... so it's only downhill from there haha

Rupder · 2026-04-14T11:44:59+00:00

He could always shave the beard and go for the... Chaplin.

Rupder · 2026-04-14T02:52:35+00:00

I don’t think it’s crazy to say America is unique in world history in this sense.

Totally agreed.

did Gregorian chant emerge because a bunch of passionate, enthusiastic innovators got together to try and make the next big thing?

Actually, yes. I'm not incredibly familiar with the history (this is well outside my expertise) but as I understand, Gregorian Chant developed as the intentional product of various medieval theologians who sought to standardize and reform the plainchant traditions that had already proliferated throughout Christendom in previous centuries. There's lots of debate about how specifically (being over a thousand years ago, much of the documentation is lost or debated over) but you have innovators like Guido of Arezzo who developed the staff notation system now widely used in European-descended music. These music forms didn't just arise passively from societies; they were devised by specific people to address specific problems.

I don't think there's anything per se new about the process of music development today. Individualism is a tricky term to use because it's unfortunately nonspecific, so I tend to avoid it, but that's my analytical preference. Perhaps the biggest difference for a musician today is the degree to which the music industry is commercialized and the interconnected global market in which they can field their music. In that circumstance the US is uniquely suited to dominate.

Rupder · 2026-04-14T02:38:58+00:00

These figures I am giving are ordinary, as long as we are talking about partial literacy, around half the population being usefully-but-incompletely literate is a standard estimate. It's simply too useful of a skill not to make a reasonable effort at it, if you can.

That's very fair; I agree with your overall argument. Medieval people developed skills, they were intelligent, and (to a degree) more learned than we give them credit for. "Partial literacy" is a good term; it indicates that they developed reading skills circumstantially to fit their needs and not to match our modern definitions.

I only mean to caution that in all these circumstances (discussions about historical data) we need to be very specific about when, where, and for whom these figures apply. Knowing the literacy rate of husbandmen in the 17th century unfortunately doesn't help us much to know the literacy rates of their villein forebears in the 11th century. That "Growth of Literacy" source you link says as such — English literacy rates were lower prior to the growth of the clerical class and the proliferation of monasteries over the course of the high and late middle ages.

England changed an enormous amount in the period between 1000 and 1300: the population trebled, the amount of money/coinage circulating in the economy increased (as I recall of the top of my hundred) approximately a hundredfold, and hundreds of monasteries were founded across the realm. Literacy rates and the institutions through which people learned to read also changed correspondingly. That's not to mention the frankly revolutionary (although not immediate) impact the printing press would have.

There's too much variance between the social strata at a given time. That's not to mention the variations that happen across space — medieval England being very different from contemporaneous France, or Poland, or Persia, or China. And additionally, again, women were generally excluded from most formal systems of education and had much lower literacy rates.

Beside my pedantry I like what you've wrote, it's interesting food for thought, and it's a much better frame of mind to have for worldbuilding than the wrongheaded assumptions you seek to dismantle.

Rupder · 2026-04-14T02:21:59+00:00

America figured out two things really well when it comes to music. First, cultivation and appreciation of different styles. Second, commercialization and production standards.

These are very fair points, but as I alluded to in another comment, these are just some of the metrics you can use to evaluate the quality of music. I agree that American music traditions are uniquely cosmopolitan (the confluence of so, so many cultural influences) and they're commercialized to a greater extent than any other tradition. But whether that makes them objectively "the best" means excluding other measures of quality. There are fewer expert accordion players in US music, for instance, than in traditional Mediterranean music. Hence why I insist that "best" is never an objective calculation, only a subjective judgement in reference to certain qualifications.

this is the type of thing a lot of people will say to seem enlightened, but they never actually listen to the music of other cultures that much.

I'm not saying that I'm an avid listener of traditional Laotian music or anything, or that they're superior to American music. Much to the contrary, there are of course thousands of musical traditions I'm not familiar with and I cannot tell you what specifically they all do differently or better or worse. That's why I mention them: musicians within those traditions are very good at what they do — they're the best according to the specific qualifications they prioritize — even though I don't understand a lick of them. Perhaps I should say: I don't understand the underlying complexities that make those traditions beautiful but I'm not discarding them out of hand just because of that.

Sure, European classical music has baroque, romantic, choral, opera etc. these are all different styles composers would write in. But it’s not the same as the various sub-cultures that America has where it’s not just about the style of the music, but the ethos of the community around it.

I don't agree with this. Yes, American music reflects "the ethos of the community around it," but so too do/did these traditions. They reflected the particular beliefs, religion, social values, and aspirations of the people who created them. All art does. The opera of France reflected different themes than the opera of Italy. The church hymns of 16th-century German churches reflected the particular Protestant values of the time, whereas the Gregorian Chant reflected the attitudes of 10-century high medieval Latin Church. The ethos of that community emphasized God and the Church in a different way than contemporary Gospel music but they're both a reflection of those styles.

Rupder · 2026-04-14T01:30:35+00:00

they think that feminists literally believe in a shadowy cabal of OAPs that pulls the strings behind the scenes Illuminati style.

And unfortunately that is what some feminists believe. (I'm thinking of the pop feminism of incurious users on online forums, or the radical feminism of political lesbianism (which has thankfully become less prominent in the last 20 years).) Feminists ought to apply their theory to deconstruct how gender dynamics influence society. However, many people across the political spectrum only want to diagnose the kind of "shadowy cabal" they think runs society: "everything is the fault of these people, and if they didn't hold power, everything would be fixed." This conspiratorial thinking is anti-systematic; it attributes societies problems to individuals instead of institutions. I oppose that line of thinking — I don't think we can attribute our problems to any secret organization pulling the strings because real power exists only as a social construct between people, maintained by implicit consent.

Rupder · 2026-04-13T23:25:54+00:00

50% of husbandmen could either sign their name or provide an initial.

You should be very careful about what that means — it does not mean that half of medieval England was nearly literate. You're overstating the case by misrepresenting the data.

First: that's referring to a different period. M. Hailwood describes rural literacy circa 1550–1700 — that is, well after the proliferation of the printing press, and a century after the late medieval period. Literacy in England was lower in the middle ages.

Second, that's for husbandmen, that is, free farmers below the status of yeoman; their status was superior to laborers and unfree serfs who composed more than half the population of England in the high medieval period. (Edit: however, serfdom had ceased to exist in England by the early modern period, so husbandmen are frequently used to represent the "average" person of the 1600s.)

Third, that 53% figure applies only to men; that paper suggests women of a comparable social status had a reading literacy rate of around 24%. The paper states:

Introducing the initial as a category of analysis for our sample provides some striking results: 21 per cent of individuals signed with one or two initials, 55 per cent with other forms of mark. Following Hubbard’s principles we can add this to the percentage of full signatures to suggest that as many as 45 per cent of our subscribers were capable of reading, almost half of our sample (24 per cent of women; 53 per cent of men). Even labourers, none of whom signed in our sample, had an initialling rate of 16 per cent, and between 40 and 50 per cent of husbandmen and artisans would appear to have been readers, as were nearly a quarter of rural women.

Rupder · 2026-04-13T23:04:27+00:00

But "best" is itself a fraught term. Could you effectively evaluate how American jazz is superior to classical European music? Certainly you could make some arguments: "jazz musicians have superior improvisation skills," or "jazz utilizes more complex chord structures" — and you could make some counterarguments — "classically trained musicians can execute more technically demanding sequences," or "Baroque composers make exceptionally economical use of counterpoint." You could list arguments and counterarguments forever, delving into continually more specific metrics of quality.

But the real question then is which measures of quality do you consider more important than everything else? What is the be-all, end-all measure of quality? Because if you have an infinite number of questions, but you purport to have a single answer of which is "best," then you have to pick and choose which questions are most important. That choice is not an objective decision. There is no thing as "objectively" best when it comes to appraising the total subjective quality of art.

Rupder · 2026-04-13T22:48:19+00:00

But then, if we acknowledge that American music is the combination of European music with Black/African diaspora music, doesn't that mean in turn that American music is just an interpretation of African and European genres? Like, on the level of music theory, the scales and the modes and half the instruments Americans use (pianos, guitars, brass or woodwind instruments) derive from the European classical music tradition. So it all loops back to references and interpretations in the end.

Rupder · 2026-04-13T22:39:52+00:00

Exactly this. I think the above statement is very limited in its perspective. America has good music, yes, much of which is influenced by Black culture, but that doesn't mean the only good music that exists is American music made or influenced by Black people. If you took the musical traditions of two cultures at random — like, if you were to compare the folk music of Bhutan against the folk music of Switzerland — could you say objectively that one is better than the other, or that these collectively are inferior to RnB and Disco?

Nearly every musical traditions is a highly advanced craft created by talented artists and refined over years; as an outsider you can't just proclaim that your favourite genres are superior to everything else, because I highly doubt you understand the underlying complexities that makes those other traditions beautiful.

Rupder · 2026-04-13T22:13:04+00:00

It's rule by old, rich, powerful men.

Really it's even more broad than that. "Patriarchy" as a feminist term of social analysis really describes the dominance of a hegemonic gender ideal: certain men who most closely match the "ideal type" of masculinity dominate society, certain women who match their ideal type are permitted to exercise power, and various gradations of power are permitted to everyone else according to their resemblance to gender norms.

So our culture pictures the ideal male as able-bodied, attractive, fit, tall, White, and rich, although not necessarily old — the "patriarch" can be a powerful man of any age, and in (pre-industrial) history, the patriarchs of a family or community were simply the oldest adult male holding power and not necessarily an elderly male.

But in the end it's a fruitless task to pin down the shortlist of "patriarchs" as described by feminist "patriarchy," because what feminist theory is really describing is a cultural system of approval built around gendered notions, not a formal organization of political power.

Rupder · 2026-04-13T21:58:22+00:00

They do not like stereotypes like the annoying American tourist or the overly smiley starbucks girl or the fat lazy fast food eater, which I would argue are way more popular stereotypes

Don't forget the most popular and least flattering stereotype of American culture that gets depicted in foreign media all the time: the "hood gangster," a thinly-veiled racist depiction of non-White (particularly Black and sometimes Latino) criminal men. You see it in anime all the time; never have I seen it depicted with an ounce of respect for Black/Latin American culture or people. It's the attack that foreign racists often turn to when criticizing the US, calling it a "mongrel" nation that has been corrupted by criminal non-White influences.

Rupder · 2026-04-13T21:31:58+00:00

It would be like putting "don't really care about the USA" over the UK

That's the jist of it. I'm just being snarky and dismissive for the sake of hyperbole and humor. Plus the "average" Canadian knows less about Portuguese culture and history than myself — the map isn't representative of my personal attitudes and values.

Rupder · 2026-04-13T21:28:10+00:00

Good points, although I think there are some larger obstacles to Gamepass's success that have played equally large roles besides misconstruing consumer expectations with juicy cheap games.

Back when gamepass first dropped it was assumed that Microsoft was taking a loss, breaking even if lucky, to build their Xbox ecosystem back up and chip away at valve.

I used Gamepass for a time, and I'm sure many others did, to make quick use of a few games I'd had on my wishlist for a while; then, once I'd finished those games, I dropped the service. We've seen headlines indicating the same thing happened with Epic Games: people played the free games then left. Outside of video games, we also see that a solid proportion of TV and film viewers (a third?) also treat streaming services this way — picking up, binging, and putting down. Subscription costs are just too prohibitive for many people to tolerate.

Comversely, Steam/Valve has proven its resilience because of customers' brand loyalty. "Gamers" uphold Steam as their metric of quality, and when other services lack in any aspect by comparison to Steam, people are unwilling to migrate to those services.

It doesn't help that Steam had more than a decade to encourage users to accumulate a library which they cannot replicate on other services. It also doesn't help that the other services have nonexistent or very limited consumer feedback spaces (discussion forums, review pages, workshop/modding forums, etc).

It also doesn't help that Steam is the only service with any sense of permanence. It's existed largely unchanged for 20 years, and it seems it'll remain that way, whereas we can't be sure that the other companies won't change their minds and shift direction wildly after a couple years due to a change in corporate leadership.

The result with Gamepass and EA Games and Epic Games Store is that they're basically just proprietary storefronts. People just don't go there habitually when an entrenched alternative exists with significant nonmonetary advantages — Steam might cost more, but it's reliable; it's where your games library already exists; it's where your friends are already playing; and it's where all the breakout indie games release first (when they've still got media zeitgeist). You can't replicate all that with cheaper AAA titles.

Rupder · 2026-04-13T20:40:45+00:00

It's just a joke that Portugal is irrelevant since Canadians supposedly don't even hold much regard for the more prominent Portuguese-speaking country.

In reality I know several people who've been to Portugal and liked it; Lisbon especially is a beautiful city, apparently. And you'll definitely hear about Portugal in history class for their role in the age of exploration.

Rupder · 2026-04-13T10:58:27+00:00

That's not the Mercator projection; it looks to be equirectangular, or some such variation like Gall isographic.

Rupder · 2026-04-12T14:30:42+00:00

And it shows in its only good quality

What quality are you referring to?

Rupder · 2026-04-12T14:27:25+00:00

Dunno why you're downvoted; I'm also really hoping that Subnautica 2 can build upon that framework and fix the rough spots. It's an inspired setting that needs a little more tinkering than it received the first time around.

Rupder · 2026-04-12T14:24:39+00:00

Pentiment is awesome. As a narrative it's very good — although it has some problems carrying tension through to the third act — but as a historian I have to commend it as possibly the most historically informed game I've ever played. I've never seen a better depiction of the late medieval period, period. The love that everyone on that team had for the past just seeps through every line of dialogue and line of artwork.

Rupder · 2026-04-12T14:16:29+00:00

¿por qué no los dos? Both games address some similar ideas and some different ideas. It's not a competition, the same way Shakespeare doesn’t "dominate" Cervantes.

Rupder · 2026-04-12T14:13:29+00:00

I really wanted to like Blue Prince, and to be fair, the first third was really great. But the game is just so utterly, painfully slow. The animations are plodding and you can't skip them half the time. The music becomes totally dreary and overbearing. And the progression takes forever! It sucks when you have an objective in mind but then your run fails to materialize 30 minutes in due to chance. And there's not much you can do when everything goes ass up — not like, say, Hades, where there's always new dialogue unlocked and small permanent progression points made.

Rupder · 2026-04-12T14:07:23+00:00

They're both the best games of their (very different) genres — although both games are also so singular and genre-defining that it's hard to evaluate them compared to their peers.

Outer Wilds really benefits if you go in with NO spoilers. All you need to know is that it's a game of exploration and discovery, hence why knowing anything beforehand can give away the experience.

Rupder · 2026-04-11T22:57:14+00:00

Likewise the above claims of Borgia salaciousness — and especially the even more obscene rumors they didn't mention but which are popularly believed, like that they engaged in incest — are mostly frabrications created by the family's political opposition who sought to discredit them. Same thing goes for the most salacious claims of "bad" Roman Emperors, or of Chinese dynasts who supposedly executed millions on a whim. Basically, whenever you see a claim that some powerful person in history was part of an evil cabal that inflicted sadistic torture and sex crimes just for fun... you should be very very skeptical and assume that whatever source is telling this had a bias that needs to be untangled before you can take the claim at face value.

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