This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Political discourse as small talk
People approach political discourse the same way people approach small talk. They don't really put a lot of higher order thought into it. And that tends to frustrate both them and the people trying to have a higher level discussion with them. Most people engaging in water-cooler discourse do not have any intention to operate on any deep, thoughtfully-developed principles, but on vibes. That's just how human beings are.
Notably, vibes are not always directionally wrong, and analytical thought is not necessarily correct (else I'd agree with CRT and inequality of opportunity - common sense carveouts justified by added complexity). But the point is, most people don't really apply themselves in unraveling political discourse.
What got me to think about it was this excellent post downthread.
Summary: when our hypothetical character Lauren says, "Oh, I had so much traffic on the way here. I hate it. Man, what are all these idiot drivers doing out there?" There's a couple ways you can respond to that. The general way you would do it is to just go, "Yeah, I hear you. Traffic, man." There is not any kind of intellectual discourse that's being had here. However, when you answer that way, you're basically signaling a level of empathy for that person as an individual, a willingness to hear them, even if you're not that interested in what they have to say.
The second thing you can do is kind of signal disinterest. Maybe you just do not want to hear it, so you give a single-syllable response.
The third way is that you can be autistic about it, and you can say: "Um, actually, you know, nobody likes traffic. Why is that even worth saying? You're part of traffic too, right? You know, you're adding to the problem." Or, you know, you can be the Redditor autist: "If everyone took public transit..."
People don't go into small talk expecting you to start arguing about the intellectual valence of traffic-related frustration.When I was a little 12 year old autistic kid, if I heard another kid complain about rain, I'd be like: "If there was no rain, everyone would die." And that was a mistranslation of my father's attempt at making me a less cynical individual, where his response to my complaints over rain would be to say: "Oh, you should appreciate the good side of things, because rain gives us plants and stuff."
You might technically be right, but that's really just not the kind of conversation that's supposed to be happening here. When people open that kind of small talk line of discussion, they're not asking for a debate full of intellectual rigor. They're just expressing a basic observation, maybe in this case minor frustration. And they want that to be appreciated. They want other people to understand their current emotional state and what's driving them to it and offer sympathy. They're not really looking for any kind of discourse.
When you answer politely, you're signaling a baseline empathy for Lauren, even if you don't actually care about what's being discussed at all, and she probably won't even care if you really are. But what the Laurens of this world do care about is that you care about their feelings. And that's what you're demonstrating when you show interest in small talk. Your true investment is the individual. So the theory goes, that small talk fulfills a basic social function, kind of greasing the wheels, reducing friction between individuals. And that can actually start as a jumping off point for a deeper conversation. They might be less willing to just assume you're "one of those people," regardless of who has what beliefs. People are more willing to assume good faith if you have demonstrated that sort of general niceness, and you can both get a better sense of the vibe before things get too hot.
Back to the main thesis: Small talk is how a lot of people discuss political talking points. When a left-leaning person at work brings up Kyle Rittenhouse, they're not looking for philosophical debate on the merits of self defense. They're not looking for a proper legal assessment to uncover whether he was acting in accordance with the law. They're mad that those people got a murderer off the hook, and they want their fellow coworkers to appreciate how upset they are over such a ridiculous ruling. Obviously, this has the feature, not a bug, of acting as a soft social enforcement mechanism. Being impolite to Lauren would be weird. How about LeftyLauren? To her, hearing your rigorous undertaking in response would come off exactly the same way as me being a smartass to my fellow students about how rain is actually really good. She will not be impressed, maybe bewildered or angry.
Why is LeftyLauren like this? Well, from what I saw with Kyle Rittenhouse but also politics in general, most people who felt inclined to yap about it didn't really feel inclined to look into it. And when people raise any talking points to object to their pithy slogans, they just want to say, "I guess it's legal to murder progressives now." Someone with that mentality is not really looking at the actual facts of the case or anything like that. They're just vibing, and they're making small talk about a minor frustration. That's not to say they don't actually care—quite the contrary, they do. They are genuinely upset when they say these types of things.
And that's a big part of what frustrates people in political debates, because some people will approach these discussions with the mentality of getting to the bottom of it, of digging into the facts, of assessing the truth, acting on moral principles. And other people who have possibly never really given their baseline principles as they relate to such an issue any consideration will be caught unblinking. They will see that person being the weirdo autist, like the redditor ranting about slavery after you said Happy 4th. "Bro, you're hashing the vibe!" These people are generally going to be on completely different wavelengths.
I remember when the Kyle Rittenhouse thing was going down, I was getting in arguments with people about it, and a lot of them sure seemed to have strong opinions on it while also refusing to even watch the video. And I was just completely dumbfounded. I asked: "How can you have an opinion on something like this if you're not even going to do your due diligence as a professional opinion-haver and look at the freaking video and see what actually happened with your own eyeballs?" But, while I definitely think I was right in a technical sense — and this, in no way, excuses their lack of rigor — I had absolutely no awareness that these people were venting and looking for validation. They were being Laurens about it, just hoping for somebody to say, "Man, yeah, it's crazy what you can get away with in America, bro!" And hearing me respond with emphatic, sincere disagreement came off as hostile. They had no interest in an actual discussion.
I, by no means, mean to imply that you are either in Camp Rigor or Camp Vibe at all times. It depends on the individual interest in the topic, I suppose. One person may be the most technically-rigorous autist in a discussion about gun control but an entirely vibes-driven normie on foreign policy. Perhaps vibes vs rigor pretexts is an explanation for Gell-Mann amnesia; consider if you had an astrophysicist rain on your parade by interjecting about how your super cool sci fi concept you brought up in an idle office conversation was just totally off-base. He would then go home and write a post about how dumb office talk is, and you'd write about how much of a dick he was to just not even try to have fun. You get the picture. You're vibing, he's not.
And I'm not going to just bash progressives here. I think I was probably in the vibe camp after the death of Charlie Kirk. I do not know if rigor was on my side - I like to think it was, overall, but it wasn't my primary operating principle. I vented my frustration privately to many progressive friends, was met with abject dismissal, and felt absolutely aghast about it. Then I came here and got "Facts don't care about your feelings" and other such expressions thrown in my face. Do you know how alarming that feels? It's very, very disconcerting to have your vibes spat upon that way, especially when they feel so normal, so unobjectionable. And that is probably not too different from how those poor normies felt about my confrontations over Rittenhouse.
But I do think this vibing is a valuable tool. Whining about traffic is as low-stakes as it gets. But this method of communication, this basic human tendency — I think its exploitation can be one of the ideal end states of propagandistic efforts. Uncritical small talk is, for reasons I discussed at length, kind of unassailable! You look like a lunatic for contesting it. This makes it the perfect tool for spreading an agenda, provided that it's normal enough that invoking doesn't make you weird. This is the perfect weapon for LeftyLauren to enforce norms, and to be honest, I have some doubt that it's intentional in all cases. I think this is a weapon that is often issued to clueless footsoldiers who probably don't even realize they're fighting a war.
I suspect this very detail was the reason "the personal is political" caught on, but I may be giving this too much credit. Either way, if someone says something flagrantly political, about, say, how awful it is that 10,000 unarmed Black men a year are killed by cops... I might be inclined to dispute that fact. But what am I gonna do about it, hash the vibe? All I'd accomplish is to rock the boat and look like a weirdo, at best, ignoring any disciplinary potential.
"What? You think getting rained on is fun?" and "You think it's okay to just shoot protestors?" come from the same fountain of normie autism-repellent. Neither of those are really accurate assessments of the contrary point of view, but you're never going to get an honest autist discussion from these two starting points. And from a propaganda spreading angle, that's actually really beneficial! It's not just about how you look to onlookers, either. You are as likely to convince Lauren to reconsider her vocal disapproval of some political happening, as you are to convince Lauren that her complaints about TRAFFIC are farcical, and that she should know better. It's completely orthogonal. At best, you're missing the point of her discussion.
And LeftyLauren can and will tune that exact same human mentality towards complaining about capitalism uncritically, which I bet is more likely to be a genuine expression of frustration than a deliberate attempt at manipulation. The intent doesn't matter though, either way, this has a profound normalizing effect, drawing people to a cause, making an idea more openly expressable, and forcing anybody who disagrees to adopt a socially weak standing. The Lauren making a flagrantly political argument in the first place will thus make an autist out of her weird political interloper.
You will be about as successful as my 12 year old autistic stuff harping about how rain is good, actually.
I mean I wouldn’t mind so much if the vibes based people weren’t absolutely involved in politics and weren’t absolutely convinced that they are the serious ones. The vibes based political discourse that most people mistake for politics is destroying the country. We’re possibly the first civilization that will blow itself up simply because we’re bored. And it’s happening. We’re seeing political violence that usually only comes to civilizations in actual crisis— high inflation, high unemployment, mass arrests, etc. We have none of that. We have bored people yelling about politics, marching in the streets, and shooting people in an economy that’s probably no worse than the 1980s.
I wish that people would find politics boring so that policy could be made by wanks who actually know what is going on without having to worry about idiots on social media who see sad images on Facebook and decide that the other side is evil. I want it to be safe to disagree without having to think about whether it threatens my job, my family, or will end a relationship. But here we are, trying to turn an artificial cold civil war into an actual hot civil war. I wish the common response to politics was “boring”. And TBH real politics (reading the text of the bills, looking up statistics, reading FRED reports, and so on) is boring.
That's not politics, that's clerkship. Politics is fighting for benefits for your ingroup, which is evidently far from boring for most people. Back in the day, the politics people engaged in was local, family-level squabbling. Now we're atomized and online, so our involvement in politics is mostly in the global context.
It’s also issue and fact based, which 99% of political discourse is not. Arguing about the optics of a political issue and about issues you have no control over not only doesn’t make actual governing better, but prevents it.
Arguing about the budget and the size of government makes sense if you understand tge budget on the table and what it changes as compared to last year’s budget. Arguing the Marist of a program makes sense if you know what the program is, what it’s supposed to do, and if it’s meeting its targets. Just yelling into Twitter isn’t politics.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My quick thought: I don’t think it’s appropriate to have polarizing political views in a work setting, unless the work environment is one with an obvious political agenda. The person who brings up falsehoods about Kyle Rittenhouse was the one who was bringing up an inappropriate topic of conversation here. Saying stuff like that at work is asking for a fight.
Keep in mind that a lot of people, particularly on the right, supported Rittenhouse’s actions, and reading his Wikipedia entry I tend to agree that Rittenhouse was not starting trouble, and was only defending himself.
I agree. I think it should be basically a faux pas to bring up politics and for that matter religion in the workplace simply because it introduces friction into that workplace to no benefit.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Weirdly I essentially never encounter even the most mildly political comments at work. I work in tech, mostly with asians, and for the most part they seem apolitical. Occasionally there will be a tentative “topical” Trump joke, but I don’t sense any seething anger behind it. Generally asians seem to value seeming composed and professional. I encounter political comments most from white boomers I know through my hobby. The typical tech companies I’ve worked at seem to be good at upholding an unspoken “no politics” norm, even based in SF with a 90% anti-Trump workforce. I haven’t socialized with a person under 40 outside of work in many years though
You definitely mean east asians (culturally) when you state the above as asians. The personal is gauche and embarrassing to asians, and consequently the personal is simply unimportant to others. Me communicating the unimportance of my life to you is an expectation that you'll reciprocate and not try to impose the supposed importance of your life onto me. Sinic small talk of any import will be on topics of casual depth, like food or gaming strat or makeup tips or workout tips. No sinic ever wants to hear anything about your dating mishaps or family drama.
To a lesser extent this means that emotionally in-tune East Asians are inevitably westernized to some degree and are insufferably narcissistic to normie sinic eyes. Saying you have trauma doesn't make you more sympathetic to me, it makes you an uncomfortable oversharer trying to get mental expenditure from me that I simply cannot provide.
This changes when doors are closed and alcohol is involved. What happens in the ktv stays in the ktv.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I love this way of framing it. It's like typical mind fallacy, right? You assume your coworker at the water cooler has the same intentions as you for engaging in conversation, but really you could be miles apart. It's one reason it took me so long to get small talk. Why are we saying a thing that's obvious to both of us?
I have a coworker who drives me up the wall sometimes. She's pretty low information and if you tried to tell her about media bubbles, she'd just look at you blankly. But boy does she have opinions based on whatever her media feeds have shown her that day. She once started going on about something that happened three years ago, and for some reason it was trending in her media feeds and I guess it appeared to be a new story. Luckily I do find that she's open to correction and changing her mind if you go about it carefully.
I find it's best not to correct everything she says, because that just paints me as argumentative. So I let 90% of it go. But when there's something that's really egregious, something that's really easy to falsify, something that's one of my pet issues, I'll just gently say something like, "but have you considered that" or "I see it differently because" or "did you know that-". I like that last one a lot because I find people like this do enjoy those listicles of "interesting facts" because it makes them feel smart.
I like what the other commenter said too about gentle pushback and taking political out of the realm of small talk a bit. People use small talk to make what they think are uncontroversial remarks, accepted by everyone. A gentle "I don't see it that way" just lets them know hey, other people have opinions too, and maybe think next time before you assume I will just blandly agree with you.
But going back to the typical mind thing, as others have noted, it is deeply weird that we have this community. Astonishingly rare. But when I see people like my coworker, I understand why. And like I said, she's open to changing her views. What dismays me is around here with people who have spent time deeply considering and analyzing a topic and have come to a different conclusion than I have, and they're sticking to their guns. Just a reminder that we are all in information bubbles too, all of us. We all start with our own priors, our own sacred cows, and the conclusions we're hoping to reach.
Isn't this just status games? In the workplace continued status communication by polite engagement is necessary for subsequent cooperative potential. Its just not worth it to change an existing dynamic. Ideal solution is to flag oneself as unimportantly heterodox in advance. You know Im not the same as you but I dont care enough to change your mind so dont bother trying to change mine, so lets talk normie shit like baseball or weather where fundamental value flash isn't axiomatic to our functional dynamic.
Let it rip for nonrepeated games though. At house parties I have great fun openly stating my maximalist positions when interrogated because I don't care about my reputation among oneoffs. They can bitch to the host later about the evil nazi that somehow entered the party but thats the hosts fault for inviting me in the first place if he knew I'd accept leaving my cave for a meatspace rando sorting hat ceremony.
More options
Context Copy link
Trying to find the political common ground that’s appropriate for discussion often leaves people uninterested. Suppose you’re a person that has what would pass for radical opinions in the current climate. Would you really want to risk discussing that with someone you aren’t sure you’re on that level with, at work?
There’s a great level of comfort and ease I still have with my childhood friends that I just don’t have with professional colleagues. Even among those who’d I’d describe as friends. With the former we can discuss very morbid topics or perhaps even share unpleasant opinions without forgetting that we confidently know that’s not who the other person is because we’ve known them all their lives and have seen every dimension of their personality growing up.
There’s more than just the axes of personal/professional and small/serious. There’s also boring and interesting and that varies widely with people. You can often tell by the level of engagement and whether they’re more reactive or proactive in the discussion as to whether they have an active interest in the topic or it’s just because it’s a “you” thing. General topics are more accessible at the water cooler or lunch table at break but they’re far less interesting than the ones that would get you the side eye from the booth or table next to you that causes that group to get up from the table and relocate elsewhere because you brought up the Khmer Rogue and Cambodian genocide and how it compares to what’s happening in Gaza.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I agree with the broad Manosphere / Red Pill interpretation of the feminist slogan "the personal is political", namely that it’s the expression of the simple concept that women, as opposed to men, have an interest in pursuing political solutions to remedy or alleviate their personal problems. These include: no-fault divorce, rape shield laws, punitive child support and alimony laws, affirmative action, the Duluth Model etc. For men, the reverse is true: the political is personal. Namely: political developments have a potential effect on their personal lives, and their only resort are personal options, not political countermeasures. I know this is completely off-topic, my bad.
Virtually all political structures seem like an attempt to engage group dynamics and/or abstract logic to remedy personal grievances. What does gender have to do with it, or what are the male-coded political structures that you see as somehow pure of personal considerations?
Are you sure it's not just that areas of greater practical concern for women (family, children, sexual morality, domestic violence, etc.) seem inappropriately "personal" to you because you don't share the concern, whereas you naturally perceive male-coded personal issues as just objectively Important?
Edit: for instance, there's a discussion lower down about Stand Your Ground laws, which seem clearly like an attempt (on both sides) to use the law to work out a set of very personal, very male-coded feelings about physical aggression and dominance, regulating a set of interactions that are overwhelmingly between men. One might argue "oh no, that's actually a question of objective safety/ public welfare/ individual rights," or "plenty of people of the opposite gender also take sides in this debate," but after all the exact same thing could be said about family law or rape legislation, right?
More options
Context Copy link
I don’t actually know how I feel surrounding this. When I was growing up it felt like there was much greater decentralization and separation between culture and politics in the strict sense of the word. Politics and religion were the 2 standard notions that families rarely brought up apart from church attendance, and you certainly didn’t bring them up with your friends and neighbors either. Not because you were afraid to. It just wasn’t important to why we associated with each other. Unless things naturally turned in that direction it was just considered in poor taste to broach the topic. We liked one another on a closer and personal level.
I couldn’t tell you who my parents voted for and they voted at every state, federal and local election. But that’s not because I’m apprehensive about telling others. It’s because nobody in our family knew who voted for who and we didn’t discuss it. Politics never got in the way of our family importance.
Thomas Sowell once said “if you have a lot of social control you don’t need a whole lot of government control.” I see that as the counterpoint to the intermix of the personal and the political. We resolved issues on our own. I don’t remember seeing a single instance of teenage pregnancy until gangs swept through our neighborhood and it didn’t impact us personally. Child support and alimony existed politically but weren’t a thing in our community. Marriages were mostly stable and of those that weren’t the husband and wife generally separated but never divorced.
The simple fact is you can’t substitute politics for community and there is no substitute for good judgment. Politics comes in to address these wherever there’s a disintegration and tear in the cultural fabric.
I wonder to what extent this is simply because cultures were more effectively separated at the time. It's easy for culture and politics to be separated when everyone that you're talking politics with is either the same culture or a known, geographically adjacent culture. A huge problem with the internet is that there's no easy way to discern the culture of the person you're talking to. Talking gun control with a backwoods Alabaman man is a fundamentally different exercise than with a Canadian woman from Ontario. On the internet, you don't get to know which one you're talking with. More importantly, even if you do, you're likely to experience culturally-mediated political opinions that are fundamentally contrary to your way of life, which is much less likely in person.
If I live in Xtopia, a city where the only mode of travel is bicycles, and I see some tax supportive discussion about taxing and registering bicycles online, I might look at the discussion as anti-Xtopian. They hate bicycles! They hate the way I live! They care nothing for me, my family or my friends! This may or may not be true (it often is, such is the nature of cultural differences) but either way it's very different than talking to my Xtopian neighbor. If he supports the tax, surely there must be a more rational reason for him doing so. He likely enjoys bikes, or he wouldn't live here. I can at least hear him out, maybe learn something. It's just a totally different activity, and frankly it's a shame the same English words are used for both. If I hear someone from Y-ville (city where bicycles are banned) talk about the bike tax, I can be certain that they hate bikes and probably my bike-centric existence, but it really doesn't matter that much. I already knew that, it was priced in. If I'm talking to them in the first place I've already decided they have enough other qualities that outweigh their opinion on bikes.
When I was growing up you couldn’t really help it. Culture moved slower then than it does today and even slower the further in time you go back. I’m younger than the typical cohort here and grew up at the intersection of new changes that were rapidly developing but I was still very beholden to my upbringing of the previous generation fortunately, so trendy new influences never pushed me around in the storm of things very much. I was always a very strong willed kid who was proud to have remained stable in a sea of chaos. People tend to look down on others who haven’t changed throughout in their lives. I haven’t changed one bit since I was 16 years old. Very few people would be able to distinguish the me of then and the me of 2025, but for me, refusing to change has been one of the proudest achievements of my life. A handful of good people I knew growing up and today all the worse because they left their good sense behind them to go down roads they shouldn’t have travelled. My foundational roots had already been solidified for good.
The experience of the world back then was also far more local and felt much smaller than it does today. When I was extremely young, if we went 2-3 hours out of our way for a family event, it felt like I was living at the edge of the known world without much to explore beyond it. Today the whole world can be knocking on your doorstep, demanding and competing for your attention which leaves a lot of people feeling burnt out on life. I can play the whole social media game if I want but it has no appeal to me and I have little desire for it. I have an enormous love for technology, just none of its popular uses. What’s popular is almost guaranteed to be wrong, per Heinlein’s maxim:
“Does history record any case in which the majority was right?”
Or if you like, the quote often misattributed to Henry Ford:
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
People carry around a lot of standard knowledge for the time in which they live but very few have any truly useful insight to impart with others. Coupled with Sturgeon’s Law, nobody has me convinced that I’m missing out on anything here. Not being a narcissist driving everywhere with a selfie stick in the back of my car is more than enough of a win for me. I hope future anthropologists one day can cite that item as the defining characteristic that marked the downfall of American civilization. It’s pathological.
The Internet in its infancy was a kind of refuge for misfits who could connect and talk to each other and do funny things over BBS boards, among other stuff. Cyberspace then was a form of digital dumpster diving for the curious. Nowadays it’s just another form of crass commercialism. Another marked out district for the display of wealth without culture. Just mindless consumerism.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What are the personal problems that no-fault divorce is a political solution to? In the absence of such laws it is the state compelling you to stay in a relationship you'd rather end. Is thinking a legal arrangement is unjust a "personal" problem? Same for rape shield laws, which concern the admissibility of evidence in criminal proceedings.
If you consider your husband icky and feel stuck in a marriage, and would prefer to simply get divorced on "grounds" you just don't want to be married anymore, but you can't legally do so because no-fault divorce isn't on the books and your husband has technically not done anything that is grounds for divorce, than yes, I suppose it does feel like a personal problem. It violates your feelings, just like the lack of rape shield laws do. You feel wronged.
This is exactly what’s wrong with today’s social landscape. People I knew just fundamentally had a much more realistic sense of people than those who pass for “adults” in the year 2025.
If you described yourself as being “stuck” in a marriage 25-30 years ago, we ‘all’ knew what that meant. It meant you were in a physically abusive marriage and you needed a way out. Today being “stuck” in a marriage means your husband wanted to have sex with you last week and you don’t feel as attracted to him as you once were. One of these 2 things doesn’t belong.
Adults have this attitude today that life doesn’t involve hardship and making sacrifices. Anything that represents even the slightest inconvenience to you is at liberty to be disregarded because you should just “do what makes you happy.” Well I’m sorry, but that’s ‘life’. Life is about doing 100 things every single day that you don’t want to do. And while your personal happiness is important, it’s far from the highest value to aspire to and is the least enduring and meaningful when you’re on your deathbed and wondering what you’ve left behind.
More options
Context Copy link
Maybe I'm confused. In your comment you referred to no-fault divorce as a political solution to a personal problem. My contention is that it is a political solution to a political problem. The circumstances under which one can exit marriage, and the details of marriage as a matter of law, being themselves political creations. Similarly rape shield laws. The rules of evidence for courts being political creations.
I'd argue that marriage was a religious creation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A big part of it is ignoring structural incentives created by political changes. "I can get divorced if I want to get divorced" souds great. But it also creates the incentive structures that causes men to pump and dump women on tinder. "I can sue my ex for tonnes of child support"- sounds great, but my boyfriend of seven years doesn't want to get engaged, doesn't. The thinking is only in one step, government gives me stuff, I want stuff. Not what are the actual consequences of this.
Women can dress however they like sounds lovely. Women are dressing in hyper sexualized ways and compete by having translucent leggings as pants and thong bikinis doesn't sound great. You can't have women competing, no rules regarding dress and not expect women to outbid the competition by showing skin.
I once got into a conversation with a guy who essentially now treats women along the pattern you described. His argument came down to not having a great deal of pity for them because following their demand for emancipation and independence, if women get burned as a consequence of refusing to adhere to men’s hesitation to grant them their rights then that’s ultimately women’s fault because “they did this to themselves.” They quite literally asked for it, according to him. It’s not exactly an easy point to challenge and I’ve essentially made the argument in another context that if women think it’s men’s job to police the behavior of other men so it’s safe for them to walk the streets at night, then they’re obligated to follow men’s rules at the end of the day and do what they’re told. Otherwise, you’re independent. Fend for yourself. If you want to live independently of the group then you in turn are entitled to no benefit from the group. Hang on tightly to the political ticket in your purse because it’s going to be all you have after you’ve spurned everyone in your community with your attitude. I’m not a fool. I’ll stick with the group and my family and friends. Most women have sadly been duped into abandoning those who actually care for them to hitch their wagon to temporary government giveaways by politicians who don’t have a care in the world for them beyond using them for a vote at the ballot box during the next election. That’s why all politicians that aren’t ideologues with an actual vision are philosophical prostitutes who view their constituents as tools for furthering their own career goals only to in turn sell them down the river at a later time. And I will never trust the principles or supposed “ethics” of a prostitute’s embrace. And the fact that they wear a suit and give speeches makes no difference to the point. You can keep your blank ballot.
As oppressive as feminism is to men in it’s political influence, it’s twice as oppressive to women and unfortunately millions of young women out there have absolutely no idea and won’t even see it coming, despite all the indicators being there. It was a bad idea when it was first conceived and it’s been a bad idea since then. Sure some good came out of it but then again the link between smoking and lung cancer was first discovered in Nazi Germany. Along with world ice theory, racist gravity, racial hygiene and other dogshit, but so what. Many men were already on their side when it came to the right to vote, allowing them to open up bank accounts, full access to educational opportunities and the right to pursue a career. No man who wasn’t a piece of shit then (for which there were many) wanted to stomach the idea of his daughter/sister/wife/mother being oppressed and abused. They were already fully on their side. Thinking women were fully equal in dignity and respect was a no brainer. Thinking men and women were biologically and by norm the same with each other was where they walked right off a cliff. To treat a lady the way we treated men in our community would’ve absolutely made you a misogynist. Men and women are complimentary to each other and should not aggressively compete against one another. This was basic to what we were taught. But the later feminist movement was predicated on a wholly incorrect view women have about what they think being a man is like. Terrible regimes and social movements sometimes produce good things too among a host of bad ideas. Best of luck to them. The Bolshevik’s brought a level of independence to women in the Soviet Union far greater than anything you could’ve imagined that happened in 1st and 2nd wave feminism in the US. And it also brought along Lysenkoism, socialist trees, sexist glaciers and NATO backed mutant space potatoes along with it. They had more than just equality of opportunity but a near complete equity and parity with men when it came to social, political and economic participation. Marriage and divorce was something you could register with the local politburo in a single day and the amount of sexual freedom eclipses what the US had post 1960. After the USSR fell in 91’, millions to women were desperate to rush back to the traditional paradigm prior to the revolution, only now with greater technological assistance in the domestic sphere. They realized it was one of the dumbest things they ever asked for. You’ll see a similar pendulum effect in the US eventually. This stuff has already been tried before.
More options
Context Copy link
One tenet that was getting repeated on those sites is that women don't understand cause and effect well because it's unnecessary for childrearing.
Golly these people are sexist. Women do do better with male supervision but only if those men don't hate them for being women.
Let’s be honest though. Most men don’t faire very well either in their youth when the hormones first kick in and all they can think about is love and sex. It’s all consuming on a level that is maddening to get ahold of and they shouldn’t be entrusted with too much independent decision making either. It’s practically as intoxicating as trying to rear every young man off cocaine because those changes are essentially are a cocktail of drugs. When the testosterone first hit my body and mind were brimming with a level of energy that was uncontrollable and I felt like I could conquer the world. I was a raging hell storm for others to deal with at times. And while I perform quite well in all spheres today, 16-18 year old me could absolutely run circles around me in 2025; I would be no match for myself then.
No, sixteen year old boys shouldn't be emancipated either.
Patriarchy is elders the managung incompetent and emotive youngins and the greatest trick of women was to have men take the label when mothers are the ones who exert control over their daughters and other inferiors far more viciously than men do.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, I guess they'd say that they hate women not for being women per se, but for being irrational, cowardly, idiotic, etc etc you get it. The chuddiest among them might draw parallels to 13/52 and whatnot.
Honestly, they have a point. The moral inferiority of womankind is an obvious conclusion of most redpill/traditionalist thought, but proponents of such always either handwave it away or dutifully ignore the implications.
But hating them for these things does not help to lead them. The bible's first instruction for husbands is 'love your wives' presented as being as important as wives submitting to their husbands.
Well, just like when a wife stops submitting when a husband demonstrates over the long term that he doesn’t love her, when women as a class have demonstrated over the long term that they are not interested in anything that even smells like submitting, they shouldn’t anticipate much love from men as a class.
The Bible also has plenty of examples of God allowing his loved children to get the fruits of their bad decisions good and hard while saying some extremely harsh things about them/us, and that’s sometimes part of actually loving someone.
I don't think this works as a parallel. It seems to me that submissiveness is not desirable in of itself, but as a proxy for a cooperative demeanor. Trivially, a wife who is capable of exercising sound judgement within her domain and contributing effectively to collective decisions seems superior to a more "submissive" wife who never exercises her agency to the benefit of the couple. I suppose that most men would prefer to be the generally senior partner in the relationship, but that's a much looser paradigm than 1 Timothy 2:12 would have it. If I may also get a little Freudian, surveys consistently find that men prefer to be the dominant partner only by a relatively small margin. By contrast, women are much more insistent that they be the submissive party and are far more averse to dominating than men are to submitting.
Now, insofar as one believes that women are intrinsically poor agents, then female submission is approximately equivalent to effective cooperation. I know @hydroacetylene is insistent on women's lesser capacity for agency, and I presume you are too. However, this view would naturally seem to lead to a recognition that women are lower creatures than men, in accordance with the pre-Christian understanding; a donkey may not be a defective horse, but it is still an ass. Maybe I'm just not familiar enough with Christian philosophy and there's some galaxy-brained epicycle around this implication, but everything else within the redpill/traditionalist consensus on women seems to implicitly corroborate this outlook. This, fundamentally, is the core concern of feminism, or at least the most defensible steelman of feminism, and so long as the Right neither has a satisfying answer for them nor reinstates complete patriarchal control, its spectre shall continue to haunt them.
More options
Context Copy link
Gender Marxism, man, it’s toxic in every respect. Individual women are not part of a class, I mean, obviously they have interests as a class, but they prefer their interests as part of a family. Corporatism, you know, not Marxism. Women aren’t defective men and men arent defective women, either.
Red pill bullshit makes me worry for my daughters more than feminism does. Granted lots of that is just exposure bias. But there are still good women out there. They don’t deserve to be treated like radical feminists. Women respond to love and care and consideration, even if they’re in a defensive mode.
I don’t know which sex, on average, defected first. The whole question seems entirely irrelevant. What matters is what an individual should do, how to build virtue, and treating people in accordance with their god given gender roles. No, that’s not exactly the same, but it’s also not in revenge for what some other person who happens to have the same chromosomal configuration did. Listen to the Bible instead of coming up with excuses, I’d tell the same thing to the gays, drug users, etc. Don’t come at me about anarcho-tyranny or whatever the latest ‘Christian moral rules are for cucks’ framing is. Women should submit to their husbands and men should love their wives, but neither of these things is preconditioned. It’s a requirement, not a contractual arrangement. That’s for Mohammedans.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, yes, it's sexist. Then again, society is also sexist, as are most women.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Isn't it? Surely punishing a child is just reinforcement learning.
The punishing was normally done by the father though, wasn't it?
No? My grandfather recalls his cousins that were still subsistence farmers at the time(Acadiana in the early 20th century was not a developed country) living in terror of their mothers, who would immediately beat them with whatever was at hand at the slightest sign of wrongdoing. The chancla is female coded even today.
I suppose there's a gender norm of serious corporal punishment being administered by men, but the average spanking was probably done by a woman.
More options
Context Copy link
On a farm, yes. By the mid-20th century, no - Dad didn't reliably get home before bedtime, and in any case Mum knew that immediate punishment was dramatically more effective than delayed punishment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
@ArjinFerman has the right idea: if Lauren uses political small talk to feel validated, she is either totally oblivious herself or is deliberately doing this as a form of consensus building. What you have to do it to push back not on the topic itself, but on the use of this topic so close to the water cooler.
"I don't know, Lauren, I trust the jury and their final decision. You and I haven't seen all the evidence they have seen." Now it's Lauren who's guilty of "doing her own research".
"I don't know, Lauren, I don't feel comfortable discussing the circumstances of other people's personal tragedies, especially people I don't know personally."
And then you immediately pivot to a FORD topic to show Lauren that you enjoy talking to her in principle.
More options
Context Copy link
Sorry, but you still need to work on your autism a bit, because there's a lot you're missing in that hypothetical conversation.
There's a reason small talk is called small talk - it's not supposed to touch on "big" subjects that people are invested in. There were even sayings like "never talk about religion or politics at work" that were attempting to crystalize that wisdom in people's heads.
When Lauren brings the Rittenhouse affair to the water cooler she is at best saying that she can't possibly imagine any moral and reasonable person disagreeing with her, or, at worst, is an utter sociopath that is perfecrly aware such people work in her office, and she's daring them to show themselves so she can ratfuck them later.
When people push back against her talking points, they're not being autistic, they're saying "be careful how you talk about 'those people' some of them might be here with you right now", hoping Lauren is just a tad egocentric, but well meaning. What many people did not take into account in the last decade or so, was how many Laurens are sociopaths.
Or alternatively, how many of them really believe their talking points are so obvious to reasonable people that they just can't be disagreed with if explicitly stated. HVAC techs will do the same thing in the opposite direction.
How is that an alternative?
Please, shower me with stories of people getting fired from their dream HVAC technician job for being insufficiently chud. Note: quitting because you don't like the chuds or they don't like you, doesn't count.
HVAC techs do not get fired for things like political statements, use of racial slurs, or workplace sexual harassment.
More options
Context Copy link
The organizational structure of a pro-chud HVAC contractor is different enough from corpo HR nonsense that the enforcement of social norms is way different.
What i mean, if you are working in a labor intensive trade and the team you are working with really doesn't like you, they will try to convince the boss that you suck at the job (if you are new on the team this will be easy). If that doesn't work the most roided guys will threaten to beat your ass while the rats plot against you.
The chuds can make quitting because you don't like eachother a very appealing option on their home turf, in the event that they decide someone really doesn't fit in.
I've heard of this type of thing happening a few times, and surprisingly none of the aspiring electricians and house framers had much of a twitter presence to complain about it to.
HVAC techs generally work alone, being woke on an install crew will probably result in not making it into a career- and that is exactly how it happens.
More options
Context Copy link
If the dude that got knocked for cracking his knuckles while driving a van somehow managed to become known, discriminated upon HVAC technicians should manage to bubble up as well. "It's totally happening in a completely symmetrical way, it's just that one side's cancellations are somehow cmpletely invisible" is not very compelling.
I can actually confirm this is the case, and I hope I've established my "not an establishment liberal running-dog" bona fides on this forum. My roommate had an HVAC job and the other guys talked his boss into firing him in less than a month because he awkwardly dodged or didn't join in the raunchy chud humor. I get it, I'd have a siege mentality too, these days.
More options
Context Copy link
There's no twitter mob to go after random HVAC techs and electricians for being liberal. Outside of the union or commercial refrigeration specialist HVAC techs get labeled 'not team players' for being open democrats(and even in those two it's still probably Trump+80). This is a 97% male field where most people work independently- we don't do the teenaged girl cancellation thing- open democrats/liberals get badmouthed, are more likely to have random drug tests, get worse performance reviews from all the complaining about them, but there's no ganging up to get them fired.
What counts as "open democrat / liberal"? Having a "vote for Biden" baseball cap? Or is it simply enough to mention that you voted for a democrat in the state elections?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Of course it isn't symmetrical, why would it be. Imagining that rednecks don't have their own ways to socially police rhetoric they disapprove of is just as foolish as attempting to be the squeaky wheel in any other workplace where there is a clear politically correct position to have.
And fwiw, if a guy takes naps in his truck he should and will get fired. I'm thinking more along the lines of "yeah that new guys a flaming faggot, i dont want that mf around me all day". I've had jobs where that could be a pretty persuasive argument to the crew in general. I kindof imagine being strongly conservative as a college professor is similar. The old guard can smell that you are different, they don't like it, they concoct some bullshit offense for you to have unknowingly committed.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Correct. In fact, the whole "you're an autistic jerk if you push back against woke talking points" idea is and was a tactic used to prevent pushback so the small talk could be used to enforce consensus.
More options
Context Copy link
When Laurens defect from this unwritten norm, it means they are convinced that their side won the culture war.
Or alternatively, they're staking out a territorial claim. "In This Office We Believe..."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This sounds a lot like what Scott described as 'phatic' speech.
I mentioned recently that I work in a caring profession and spend most of my time talking to people. One of my lessons from that work is that while occasionally you meet someone who wants to have an in-depth, substantive conversation of a particular issue, by far the majority of all social encounters are phatic. The goal of the conversation is not to arrive at insight, but rather to make a person feel heard, appreciated, and validated. Even if I am going to forget everything we talked about by lunchtime - and I confess that I usually am - my purpose in the space is not to learn or assimilate facts, or engage in some kind of analysis, but rather to convey to the person I am caring for, "You are important, and I care about you".
This goes especially for when people want to talk about politics. Smile, nod, show sympathy, but don't get into an argument or even an analysis. Sometimes people will say things I disagree with strongly and I'll just file away that disagreement and ask an open question. If someone rants about this or that politician, there are a lot of ways to politely engage in and redirect that conversation without either lying or making it a contest. Gaza is one that comes up sometimes, and I have gotten pretty good at noncommittal ways to move that one along.
People are usually not trying to share facts, and if you treat every conversation as an exercise in collaborative truth-seeking, you are the creepy weirdo, not them. Sometimes the correct response is to just nod, smile, say "yeah, I know where you're coming from", and then say something else. If someone says to me, "ugh, my job was awful today, I hate capitalism", I don't jump in with facts and arguments about how 'capitalism' however defined is not the reason why work is tedious and boring. I say, "oh gosh, sounds like you had a hard day, can I get you a cup of tea?", and then we move on.
Now you are correct that this kind of conversation is politically productive, and the kinds of complaints you can make are reflective of overall shifts. To use the above example, I pretty much never hear "ugh, I hate capitalism" from older people, but younger generations are much more likely to use that phrase as a generic statement of unhappiness. That does reflect a shift in values and political priorities. This goes for politicians as well - whether, in a particular local context, someone uses "ugh, Trump sucks" or "thanks Obama" or "let's go Brandon" as a casual complaint is genuinely reflective of something, and your phatic response to that serves to normalise that complaint. The same goes for praise as well; I have noncommittally nodded along to a lot of praise of Jacinda Ardern. But I tend to think these conversational changes are downstream of larger changes, and that the direction of the stream cannot be reversed by arguing or quibbling on this casual level. From an activist perspective, the way you should respond to or change the view of the "I hate capitalism" girl is not to argue with her on the spot, but to change the affect she associates with the word or concept of capitalism. You can't change the direction of the ocean currents by pushing the froth on the surface in the opposite direction; and we're mostly talking about conversational froth here.
I think this is remarkably wrong. A big part of the reason these yutes complaining about capitalism, or sexism/racism, or the ‚destruction of the planet‘ are unhappy, is because those are deeply incorrect, anxiety-and-depression inducing beliefs! You could actually solve most of their long-term problems by convincing them they are false (which isn‘t easy, I grant), instead of patronizing them every day by making them feel good for 5 minutes. They could have talked about the weather if they wanted to wallow in their misery, but no, they‘re practically begging you to save them, and you say „no thanks you‘re just being phatic kiddo“, tap them on the head and go on your way.
I think I'd be more sympathetic to that if, well, I hadn't tried that. It usually goes badly.
Yes, there is probably a useful conversation to be had around capitalism and climate and hope for the future somewhere down the line, and I've had those as well, but it is almost never helpful to respond to a person expressing irritation or exhaustion with, "actually, you're wrong, here's why".
I think it's worth it. If an expert debater and religious authority with a knack for youth online culture like yourself isn't going to dispel their harmful illusions, who is?
Clearly you rate me higher than I myself do.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And this is why the yeschad.jpg is so powerful, or at least variations on it. "Damn, it's legal to shoot protestors now? That's crazy. Do I need a tag, or a permit, or what? Can I get started this weekend? What's the bag limit?"
Granted, it works best if following rules 1 and 2, but putting them on the back foot of having to be the humorless scold who says "umm actually that's not funny" is way better than going turbo autist on the topic.
Had a bit of fun at work asking people where I go to sign up for a Handmaid after the election. The DMV people looked at me like I was crazy!
More options
Context Copy link
Uh, you might or might not win that round of banter, but you would for sure win an immediate meeting with HR, "RoyGBivensAction was joking about shooting me/my whole family/half of our office" and what-not.
When you're
a starhandsome, they let you do it.More options
Context Copy link
Y'all too paranoid about HR. They're bored functionaries who think 'allahu akhbar!' is a hilarious answer to mass shooting concerns and need to get their paperwork in a row.
Oh, you mean like this woman?
Seriously, go watch that video, (look at those crazy eyes), and listen to an "HR professional" go totally mask off about how she and her coworkers throughout the field actively collude to fire, and “blacklist” from any employment anywhere, anybody with the “wrong” political views.
They're all like this. No matter where in the country you work, no matter what company you work for, if it has an HR department, the people there are all exactly the same as this woman. Every. Single. Last. One. Of. Them.
More options
Context Copy link
Can we please stop the endless repetition of "it's just a couple of crazy kids on the internet" meme? What would have to happen at this point for you to admit you're wrong?
It varies wildly depending on where you are and what the company does. I would never claim it's a couple crazy kids on the internet or that HR fears are overblown. After some time at an employer, though, it's possible to read the temperature and see how HR truly reacts to things.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There's a word for people on the right who believe this. That word is "fired".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link