Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
You know, sometimes I think this place was doomed from the start, and it's very existence is a fluke stemming from the zeitgeist of a particular time and space (which itself was a fluke). The idea of getting people with fundamentally different values to sit down and talk is nice and theory, and interesting things can come out of it, but it seems sooner or later it runs into an obvious issue of the values being, in fact, fundamentally different. We naively believed that this is just a bump in the road. Some differences make us angry and it's just a question getting past the anger, other things are just a misunderstanding, and it's a question of explaining yourself better. But with fundamental differences we understand each other perfectly, and still think the other side is wrong. Any anger is a result of understanding, rather than misunderstanding, but quite often it doesn't even enter the picture. In fact, to the extent it did, I think it's the fault of the rationalist ethos.
Such is the case here. I think I understand where you're coming from, but I think you're just wrong. It is a small thing to watch a large crowd cheer someone on as he emphasizes he wants nothing to do with me and mine. I get that it's more Impactful for you, but I can't muster up more than "sorry to hear that, bro".
Yes. I think that sort of behavior is out of line. It can stem from a mistake, so it's possible it happened in good faith, but it should be promptly corrected when it comes out.
But this I don't get. It feels like a very luxurious belief to me, and I think it contradicts the very mission of this forum.
Or more than that it might even be literally impossible to avoid. My impression is that you, Chris Pratt, and whole bunch of other progs routinely practice rejecting people for who they are, except you do it in a roundabout way that comes off as insincere to people like me.
I can explain what happened here. I wasn't trying to ascribe any motivation to you, I was just putting myself in your shoes. I am afraid of cancellation, so that's why I would try to hide my associations with this place. I'd probably have no chance to guess your actual motivations, even if I knew / remembered how you feel about this place, because that isn't how I'd react, and I don't know you well enough to guess how you parse the world.
That's great to hear! Though I don't know if I'll ever be appointed the Director of Marketing for this place.
“In your digital hometown” is the key phrase you excluded. I have large crowds yell at me every time I post anything vaguely controversial. Heck, half a dozen people called me a fascist for this. But “cancellation” and online mob dynamics mostly have any impact when it’s people you care about and have longstanding positive relationships with. They’re the ones who have some degree of power over you. The lesson from it was screamingly obvious: build elsewhere.
It’s not the fundamental differences, either, or not just that. It’s that this place takes them so dreadfully seriously. The same dynamic proceeds in a much more lighthearted way at rdrama, where those fundamental differences obviously exist but everyone just yells at each other until they basically get along regardless.
But yeah, that even here you label me as a “prog” is the sort of thing that makes me inclined to say goodbye and good riddance to all of this. I’m being direct because I do think you’re a good representative of the zeitgeist view that was embraced here; you’re pleasant to chat with and you also remind me regularly of what I began to find insufferable here.
You’ve built your culture, now enjoy it. People who have come from here don’t trumpet their associations with you? Not a lot of people you really disagree with stop by to argue quite so much these days?
Whoopsie.
So it goes.
I can edit it in, it doesn't change much for me.
Sure, which is why I understand why the LoTT affair bothered you so much, and why I explicitly mentioned it. But you said FC's post bothered you just as much, this is the part I quoted, and was responding to. There was no cancellation there, and no yelling. Now you're responding like this was about only the LoTT thing all along?
Oh for the love of... If I took offence at everyone calling me a "trad" we wouldn't get very far. If you don't like being called that, I'm sorry, I take it back. But I'd also like a map of this minefield I'm supposed to be navigating.
Re: the FC thing—that was mostly relevant as a reminder that if that sentiment was broadly shared here, then I should not put my energy into building this space. If the zeitgeist of a space is “we don’t even want to live in a country with you,” it sure isn’t the sort of space I want to put my creative energy into.
As for the map—the map is that I spend the overwhelming majority of my politically relevant time online pushing against prog excesses, I have never self-identified as one and continue not to, and at this point I literally work for a law firm that is overtly anti-prog, but due to a few high-level traits, a loud subset of people cannot help but map me into that category regardless. The map is that after years of watching you and yours form overtly and obviously incorrect models of who I am and what I do, then cling to them after you should very well know better, I prefer to spend my time engaging with people who don’t do that. The broader map is that some form of this sentiment, spread over a hundred excellent former regulars here, is why there are a hundred excellent former regulars here, and the problem is not with them.
Well, it all feels a bit out of left field to me. I never asked for putting your creative energy into here, and where you decide to put it doesn't even require justification.
I thought we were talking about the general sense of betrayal you feel with this community, and I thought this was supposed to be an example of what makes you feel this way. If it isn't - my bad. If it is - I have trouble seeing anything hurtful about that statement. It's normal for people to live in a country where there fundamental values are respected. I'm pretty sure you expressed such a sentiment yourself.
You don't think you might be reading just a little bit too much into a single word? I never attributed the excesses of progressivism to you, or dismissed your work against them. It was a shorthand, and it's a relative term, and I distinctly remember you playing it for a joke, that a gay furry is the most conservative person at your law school. Is it really so wild you still look progressive to someone from a different background?
It is a reflection of that sense of betrayal. I'm not sure what's odd about feeling betrayed by a large chunk of your online community rallying behind the idea that they don't want to share a country with you. That you would struggle to understand it is a bit baffling.
Like, c'mon: "I don't even want to live in a group of hundreds of millions of people that includes both me and you. Your ideals disgust me on a fundamental level. But hey, now that you've broken out, where's the promotion for us hometown lads?" Surely you can see why I'd find that a bit rich. You cannot at once reject someone as unworthy to share a polis with you and expect them to treat your companionship as meaningful.
The friend-enemy distinction matters. Put bluntly, I see you personally as wanting to put me on the enemy side of the friend-enemy distinction, repeatedly defend that choice, and then post in resentment about a lack of friendship resulting from that. Choose one.
I don't at all think I'm reading too much into a single word, no. It's obnoxious for people to treat me as a representative of a coalition that rejects me and that I reject, and it is a specific coalition, not simply a relative term. Using it suggests neither understanding nor a wish to understand, and I find it much easier to simply build elsewhere than to bridge a determinedly unbridgeable gap.
Well again, I'm not struggling to understand, I just disagree.
No? I don't know what to tell you... You can find me as disgusting as you want, but If I find some interesting bit of info at your Substack, I'll drop a link to it when sharing it with others. If I forget to do so, and rake in a million views from it, I'll probably feel pretty shitty about it.
I don't really expect anything from how your treatment of my companionship. I'm just trying to figure out what your grievances are, and figure out what I can learn from them, and if I can improve. But this particular one... like I said I'm not sure on what grounds you're expecting anything more than "sorry to hear that, bro". Like I said I consider it 100% normal to want to live in a country that respects your fundamental values, so if you're going to get sufficiently values-diverse group together, you will inevitably end up with people not wanting to share a country with each other. It is again quite strange for me to see you insist on this, since like I said you expressed the same sentiment yourself, or at least I don't know how else to understand "I want to live in a culture where my family and I can live according to our values and build alongside people who share those values". Maybe there's supposed to be a difference between "country" and "culture", but no matter how I slice it, it sounds at most like the same thing with extra steps.
It matters when you're doing political activism. This place is very explicitly not a place for that, so I don't see the issue.
Quite frankly it's not even about friendship. I saw what you did as akin to meme accounts on Twitter reposting some webcomic or another, but diligently removing the artist's signature. The analogy doesn't quite fit since the post in question wasn't written here, but I can't help but parse the situation this way. It's not even that much of a big deal as far as I'm concerned, so I don't get why you insist on portraying me as making unreasonable demands.
If you want to tell me how it came off to you that's fair enough, but you can't tell me how I meant it.
That's a bit ironic, given the above.
Or, if we're looking to 2020:
Sorry, I'm trying to not to take out a bad mood and what I see as a repudiation of Trace's entire ethos on him, and I get the distinction TW's trying to move around ("I'm not going to write off the half of the country who supported him"). But it's hard to read this conversation and not see my (and I guess @drmanhattan16 's?) participation in TheSchism (and TW's twitter sphere) as part of the problem.
Sorry, what? I'm not clear on why I was referenced.
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