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 -
In "holy shit" culture war moments, Kanye has lashed out at (((us))) on Twitter. He came out of the gate swinging by stating that:
Please note that Kanye is using double-spaces instead of periods for some reason.
This comes shortly after he was pictured wearing a White Lives Matter shirt, and shortly before he asked rhetorically
As always, the reaction is worse than the action, and causes the story to explode. In response to accusations that Jews control the media and invented cancel culture, Jewish organizations have loudly declared that such accusations are anti-semitic and inherently untrue, and then demanded Kanye be cancelled. The irony appears lost on them. To the surprise of I'm sure absolutely no one, Kanye was quickly locked out of his twitter account.
Social media reactions have been mixed, to say the least. /pol/ has apparently decided that Kanye is one step removed from goose stepping his way down the isle at the Grammys, and is almost /theirguy/. Of course there's also a substantial faction who just spam n****r so I'm going to stop short of saying that Kanye has struck a blow for unity within the racist community.
/r/Kanye, which is dedicated to exactly what you think, is in full melt-down mode understandably.
I really don't have anything else to add to this monumental pile of flaming garbage. There is no redeeming anything buried here. Only more decay and hatred seeping into public spaces. I leave you with only this thought that has been said by far smarter men than I. Twitter delenda est.
Just say nigger, man. We aren't in reddit any more.
There's really not much to go off on here. Kanye is one step removed from believing in lizard men at this point. People melting down at what he says for the uninterested observer is entertainment.
I'd rather not. Besides my own personal distaste for the word, in the interest of not becoming a community of 10,000 witches I'd rather we kept and enforced some societal norms that serve to keep witches out. Among those is a reluctance to use words that serve no purpose other than to shock the conscience. Nothing is gained by saying nigger, whereas demonstrating a community value towards not saying that or other slurs helps to maintain our desire to optimize for light over heat.
I think it is perverse to suggest that obfuscating language is optimising for light.
What changes if you say "n-word" over nigger? We know what you mean, and anyone who doesn't can be have it explained.
MonkeyWithAMachinegun isn't telling you it's optimizing for light, their point is that it serves to keep out the people who aren't interested in productive debate.
But that's not what it does, it doesn't keep out the people who aren't interested in productive debate, it simply declares this topic as out of bounds for debate. "it's cool you're thinking about it, but we have already decided it's not on." "ps the fact that you disagree with me on this tells me that you don't belong here - we're optimising for light, so you can fuck off!"
Truth is light. There is never ever ever a reason to alter a quote, or published work, and the last decade has proven this is no slippery slope, once we started censoring nigger out of quotes and published works, it wasn't long before we were burning books and rewriting history.
If we want to optimise for light - which was definitely part of monkey's point, if not the crux, we should tell people the truth - words have exactly as much power as you give them.
There's no truth being hidden, the mapping from "n-word" or n****r or whatever variant you want is fairly clear - the person means nigger, but just isn't comfortably saying it.
It would be one thing if Monkey said something like "Of course there's also a substantial faction who just spam racist stuff". This is vague and doesn't tell us what is actually being said. But I'm not sure what truth you think is being hidden by refusing to write the word out. The word continues to exist, people continue to encounter it, and they come to bear the same mapping eventually.
I do agree that Monkey views the refusal to use it as both optimizing for light and keeping out the undesirables. I re-read the comment.
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
More options
Context Copy link