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 -
[Apologies in advance for bringing up an old story, but I couldn't find any record of discussion of it]
Deep downthread in the election megathread @Folamh3 linked to a wonderful article you might all enjoy, but that's really beside the point. I want to talk about something mentioned within the article, namely a commercial. I'll copy the article's description here:
Here is the commercial in question that seems to have been almost entirely scrubbed from Youtube.. This kicked off a series of only vaguely connected thoughts I lack the ability to synthesize, but perhaps you all can put it together more successfully than me.
Burgers?
Of course there's a certain element of "Burgers?" to a commercial about suicide for an upscale department store. But I feel a few other elements of the commercial are curious to me. Take this screenshot from the ad, does this not look like a scene from Midsommar? Why are all the participants women? Why are they all White? This seems to frame the euthanasia as some sort of White feminist religious ritual, possibly connected with nature worship.
Suicide Girls
I'll note that the euthanized woman was described as having Ehlers Danlos. Anyone that has casually explored "SickTok" in the past few years will have surely heard of this condition. While I'm sure it's a real disease in some cases, there is undeniably a trend among young women sharing this concept with each other. I actually first encountered this disease when exploring the twitter of a porn model (so sue me) at least a dozen or more years ago. It struck me at the time as an obviously invented attention-seeking condition that allowed her to post hospital selfies every few weeks and be continually weak and bedridden with no obvious externally visible symptoms.
My second encounter with this disease was my cousin. My cousin is a few years younger than me and fifteen years ago was a sufferer of gluten sensitivity of one form or another (when it was popular for everyone to be suffering from it). About three years ago I heard she was now suffering from Ehlers Danlos.
It strikes me as telling I first encountered this in a porn model as I now consider them to be sort of canaries-in-the-coalmine for female neuroses and social messaging, obviously being more susceptible than most to these things.
Appropriately I just saw this going viral on twitter yesterday with the infamous Taylor Lorenz catastrophizing about her long COVID
Antinatalism, Environmentalism, Suicidality and Leftism
Here I'm just going to wave my hands in the general direction of The Socialist Phenomenon with its lengthy sections relating the running theme of suicide pervading socialist movements (Christian and otherwise) throughout human history. If you ever visit the /r/antinatalism subreddit you'll notice the distinctly leftist and often environmentalist concerns of its posts. In contrast, as pessimistic and addicted-to-doomposting as the far right can be I've never detected a major suicidal or antinatalist current on /pol/ for example. As an aside, see the movie First Reformed, it's horrible.
So what to make of this? I don't know exactly how to piece it together but there is some common through-line that connects feminism, White people, desire to be ill, environmentalism and suicide. Just wanted to hear whatever thoughts this commercial might spark in you all, as I don't really know how to connect the dots myself in a satisfactory way. Apologies if this is not coherent or focused enough for a top-level post.
My thoughts are that this stems directly from their view of the world. To them America and the West are a dystopian nightmare.
White Guilt, and present militarism
In Liberal circles, white people, and particularly white Americans, are racist, militaristic, and colonial. They also perceive that none of it is changing even a little bit. We support Israel which is racist and genocidal, we hold down minorities, and enrich ourselves at the expense of the non-whites of the world. And they see it as nobody aside from them actually caring.
Environment
Liberals believe that Earth will be literally uninhabitable within their lifetime. The air will be choked with pollution, the rivers poisoned, global warming creating deserts and rain forests and making things too hot. Nobody wants to do enough to fix it, and quite often want to go in the other direction. They see that nobody aside from them cares.
Capitalism
The rich run the world for the rich and everyone else suffers. Poverty is common, and all the things that should be free are instead not free. College costs too much. Health care costs too much. And again, none of this is noticed by anyone else, so nothing will change.
Trump
You might not notice, but we elected Literally Hitler in November. He’s going to build work camps. He’s going to round people up and either imprison them or deport them. The Handmaid’s Tale is going to happen. Again, nobody notices or cares and worse, half the country likes it. Which proves that white people are evil.
All of this is a profoundly negative world view. Dystopian even. Everything is terrible, and at best going to stay terrible forever, and very likely to get worse. If this is how you really see the world, obviously that’s going to give you anxiety and depression, especially if you’re hanging around others who share this view, and have few or no outside interests.
Are they really anti militarism? They have fanatically cheered on WWIII in Ukraine with maximalist war aims and a black and white view of the war. Obama, Clinton and Biden have been long term enthusiasts of pretty much every neocolonial project. I would say their worldview is a crusader mentality in which the world can be divided up into believers and heathens and the believers have a duty to crusade against the believers. Their worldview seems to be that there will be heaven on Earth once the entire planet has been converted. Since the heathens are fighting against heaven on Earth they are fundamentally evil and have no legitimacy.
Spending 2 trillion on a crusade for feminism in Afghanistan was hardly western civilization, it was a crusade for an ideology deeply opposed to western values. The left was opposed to militarism when they saw the Soviet union as a better representative of woke than the US. Today Russia is an Orthodox christian fascist state stopping the values of Netflix from being the global religion.
The left-liberals in the West are surely not pacifist, but those in charge like Biden have not "fanatically cheered on WWIII" and have, if anything, been criticized a fair bit recently for taking a long time to do things like allowing long-range missile strikes and other similar decisions by the actual war fanatics.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link