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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Today I got a response to an old comment in which I'd argued

I'd credit [the positivity of leftist hobby spaces] not to an evangelist reward cycle, but to evaporative cooling. Leftist spaces are less likely to make people feel uncomfortable enough to leave.

...

A subset of the right wing has staked out "being allowed to use slurs" as their Gadsden flag. That circle is near-completely contained within the circle of users who value "owning the libs." As long as this is true, sane moderation is going to have a left-wing bias. To some degree, this must go out the window in extremist left spaces. I'm not going to claim ChapoTrapHouse was a bastion of reasoned debate. It's the hobbyist Discords and niche interests that live and breathe on niceness, community and civilization.

@desolation objected, noting that leftist activism is fully willing to make people uncomfortable:

Have we forgotten the whole phenomenon of "you can't be racist/sexist/whatever against [disfavoured group]" and every mainstream outlet defending using doxing and slurs against targets so long as they're in a disfavoured group?

In the interest of further discussion, I'm moving my response to the main thread.


I'll stand by the first statement, and emphasize that it refers to hobby-spaces-leaning-left, not extremists. I'm not sure what led you to this month-old post, but it was in response to a theory that "Leftists (especially LGBT-focused) congregate in highly socialized communities where every small action toward The Cause is socially reinforced." The OP had constructed a rather elaborate model of left-affiliated communities which portrayed them as hugboxing evangelists. In addition to being rather uncharitable, this overlooks an alternate theory: if a space is reasonably nice, will it end up full of leftists?

As for the second, yes and no. Yes, quoting Kendi or otherwise engaging in that flavor of anti-*ism is more socially acceptable than just being *ist. That's exactly why it drives away fewer users. It's both harder to deploy (and thus more rare) and less likely to offend leftists, centrists, or even most right-wingers.

If a community bans slurs, they will exclude some free speech absolutists. So long as there are more of those on the right, that will select for leftists. Banning slurs is a much more popular mod policy than banning "you can't be racist against X," probably because slurs are cheap and easy to deploy anywhere. Case study: Xbox Live. Would banning any discussion of critical race theory have had any impact on the population of 13yo gamers? What about banning the word "retard"? Apply the same conclusion to Discord, and we have a mechanism by which a neutral community adopts some "left-wing" norms merely by picking the rules with the most relevance. Repeat over months or years, banning the few who get really upset about censorship, and we end up with a left-leaning community which gets along smoothly.

Maybe every once in a while someone in that community gets away with...I'm actually struggling to think of anti-racist slurs? "Colonizer?" Maybe someone says that and right-wingers feel unwanted, or doxxing threats make them feel unsafe. It's also possible that the community enters a purity spiral and implodes. But this is rare, because we're talking about boring hobby groups, not activists.

Honestly, I don't see where mainstream publications come into this at all. The comments section for NYT op-eds is by no means a tight-knit hobbyist community. And while the media's stance on doxxing ranges from sympathetic to enthusiastic, I'm skeptical that such outlets have endorsed using slurs.

An analysis of a social phenomena can’t quite be charitable or uncharitable, only accurate or inaccurate. “Charitable” refers to the interpretation of another’s argument or beliefs. Eg, Moldbug’s stuff is pretty out there, but calling his analysis “uncharitable” doesn’t make much sense.

In my opinion, the OP was dripping with condescension. It was taken for granted that leftist spaces sucked on all aspects except ideological cohesion.

Anything from an uncreative tweet, a poorly conceived thought, an unlikely empowering experience, whatever is usually met with pats on the back snaps (sensory issues!) and good boys persons.

Analyzing a social phenomenon is one thing. Analyzing a strawman...that’s what I consider uncharitable.

A strawman? That passage was describing half of one of the most common abusive tactics in existence. You pump someone up with over the top displays of love and affection, and then you make them feel worthless for minor errors. This way you can convince them that they are worthless and only redeemed by your love. It is stock in trade for some leftist communities and organisations, because those leftist communities and organisations have been taken over by abusers. There have been several examples already in this thread, and if I remember correctly there were more in the original thread. This is no strawman, and it's not that leftist spaces just suck - they weren't always like this! But they have been co-opted by bad actors relying on the concept of no enemies to the left.

Personally I think it is a natural consequence of the leftist claim that domestic violence is a woman centric problem requiring a feminist lens to resolve, excusing abusers if they don't fit the patriarchal model, which allows them to flourish and inspires others to assume their tactics to get ahead.

Now that you can call a strawman, because I can't prove it, I don't think anyone will be able to for at least another decade - anyone who even breathes in that direction in the past decade gets run out of the industry like they were caught fucking chickens. But if you get an advocate drunk and ask them about it, you'll hear horror stories that will make Miranda Priestly look like Leslie Knope.

Yeah, I’m calling that passage a strawman. The whole OP was theorizing how leftist communities—not just extremist ones—were “quasi-lovebombing.” That’s a call to view seemingly positive interactions as the sort of abusive tactics you describe. It was also paired with lamentations about how right-wingers were too good at facing reality:

In contrast, Right-oriented spaces are less keen on compliments and engage in more stressful catastrophization. They consume too much news and complain too much about the news.

The corollary is left unstated.

I think that broad brush demands better evidence than “one time I watched a contrapoints video and it felt parasocial,” which was all the OP offered.

For what it’s worth, your interpretation of feminist frameworks as exploitable doesn’t scan as a strawman at all. It might be taboo, but that’s not because it’s implausible.