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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Many discords I'm on for hobbies have a "no politics" rule, to keep things friendly and inclusive. In practice this means no bringing up conservative politics. Everyone is free to root for Biden, and complain about Republican politicians, talk about how enthusiastic they are for liberal or progressive policies, etc. It only becomes "politics" when someone disagrees, and then they get banned.

To bolster this point, I'd add that I've been on the receiving end of this in a Discord server I was a big part of. The topic of the server was not related to politics, in fact they had a no-politics rule and yet woke politics ran rampant in the server every day - I remember reading so many endorsements of woke talking points in the server, to the point where some of their members were basically endorsing sentiments like "I hate men" and calling it helpful and "consciousness-raising".

I was the only one who repeatedly called for all political discussion to be halted. Eventually I got tired of trying to enforce a rule that just got ignored and laid out my disagreements with their points during one of these discussions (very politely, I might add). What happened then is that after I had a user respond to me, a mod ended up halting the discussion and stated that it was getting too political despite their complete willingness to let every political discussion in line with their beliefs stand. Then later on I was banned because I'd supposedly expressed "harmful things", and after I was banned and couldn't defend myself someone else still on that server told me that many of the users decided to shit-talk me in there. Including somebody I had considered a friend.

The idea that leftist communities exude anything akin to "positivity" is in my opinion ridiculous.