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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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a country with a fundamentalist religious tradition experiences a mass movement around a figure

fear of immigrants and immigration

contempt for journalists and journalism

violence

but when the people said: this is fascism

there were always those who said, no it isn't!

if it were fascism, he would be glorifying war!

he's the anti-war candidate!

now

he's been elected to deploy the military domestically

and he indicates he will expand the borders using the military

this is fascism

... duh.

  • -76

@FCfromSSC already warned you downthread, but you're still filling up the mod queue with reports on your posts, so consider this me underlining what FC said and highlighting a few more things.

Your username is suggestive and seems calculated to provoke, but that's fine - if someone was genuinely a member of the "antifa" movement or sympathetic to them, they would be as welcome to post here as anyone else (and it would be interesting to have their perspective). I don't know if you are sincere or trolling, but either way, you need to understand a couple of things: first, you're going to encounter a lot of hostility. We (mods) factor that in, so when you're being reported just for posting leftist opinions, we aren't generally swayed by that. However, you are following into an unfortunately familiar pattern that many hardcore lefties do when "arriving" here. (I put "arriving" in quotes because you created this account today, and you're clearly not new here, and I have a pretty good suspicion about who you are.) And that is being preemptively rude, condescending, and belligerent, with an attitude of "I am here to set you fascists straight."

Not only is that not going to be received well (or generate any decent discussion), it's against the rules requiring everyone to interact with charity and good faith. No matter how much you don't want to because you think of yourself as doing battle against the forces of evil fascism wokeism Jews the mods.

this is fascism

... duh.

you're afraid, aren't you? you're afraid that you missed the fascism

so your correction is that because some leftists were total psychopaths that makes it better that you failed to notice the fascism and were rude to leftists? wow

This is all condescending, belligerent, and just reads as bad faith.

I see no reason to let you continue to participate with a newly rolled alt if you are going to do so in bad faith. So if you continue in this manner, I'm going to move to go straight to permaban rather than letting you progress through the usual tedious cycle of increasingly longer bans just so you can come back every few weeks to play again.

I wish that you would recognize the reason “leftists” come in hot “arriving” here is because, I believe, you allow a hilarious amount of boo-outgrouping from “the other side” on here without the same vigor. One of the “quality contributions” literally goes on about how leftists don’t care about raped children, and somewhere down that line someone declares proudly that prep is a drug for gay people to attend orgies. Exactly where is the charity and good faith in declaring such things? Would I really be received with such neutral attention if I said such things about other outgroups? I think the answer is no. Therefore, I hazard most leftists look at your “be charitable” rule and laugh at it because they think you seem to define “chartiable” as “don’t say bad things about conservatives at all but feel free to dunk leftists” and therefore disregard the etiquette since to them you are disregarding it as well.

I don't find either of your examples to be anywhere near the level of dunking or the vitriol that's displayed by antifa here. Wording meaningful claims about truth in a way that's meant to sound controversial isn't good, but it's a whole other world away from content-less naked loosely connected declarations that amount to booing the outgroup. Like, the question of whether or not leftists care about child rape isn't pleasant, nor is it nice, but it's a real question that can be honestly, in good faith, answered as No given the political issue being discussed (as a leftist myself, I'm perfectly okay with saying that when I was a younger, more naive leftist, I genuinely didn't care about child rape or other potential negative consequences of unmitigated immigration, such as lower wages or suicide bombings; such things were the cost I would gladly have me and my fellow citizens pay for giving more poor people the opportunity to thrive in a first world nation like the USA. My opinion on that has changed since; I think I've gained greater empathy than I used to have for certain groups of people). And characterizing a drug as for aiding gay men in going to orgies isn't nice, but IIRC that was just one off-hand line in a comment that otherwise had some meaningful thing to say about different ways different drugs are covered by insurance. There's actually meat to the bones, along with all that shit.

The comment here by antifa, and IME the occasional leftists who come in "hot" here, are basically pure shit with perhaps some bones and ligaments there. That difference matters to people who care about the meat on the bones, i.e. the actual content of the arguments, but that difference matters little to people who care primarily about getting their views lauded and their outgroup's views booed. This is one reason why, even as a leftist, I find the quality of conversation and discussion here, where it's predominantly populated by people well to the right of the most right-leaning person I might meet IRL. Who cares if they'll drop in little - or big - digs at me and my ingroup here and there or all the time? Their actual substantive criticisms are actually interesting and valuable and the wording and the digs don't affect the level of charity or quality of arguments.

Okay see this is what I am trying to illustrate as bad debating. The question of “whether or not leftists care about child rape” isn't a real question that can be honestly, in good faith, answered as “No.” solely because of your anecdotal experience of not caring about certain potential negative consequences of unmitigated immigration when you identified as a liberal. Anecdotal evidence isn’t enough to make declarations like that, because, uh, I’m so liberal I sat under the Democrat tent on election day and advertised Harris yardsigns and I care about child rape lmao. Does my experience trump yours? Does yours trump mine? Like how am I supposed to argue with that? That’s why I believe in the spirit of debate anecdotal evidence holds little weight compared to objective evidence and I would like to see if you have other data pools to prove that “leftists don’t care about child rape” otherwise…I dunno what to tell you other than we’re not debating anymore lol.

No one who says "[x] do/don't care about [y]" mean that "literally every individual within the group [x] do/don't care about [y]." This is common sense and shouldn't need to be explicitly stated in a discussion like this. In this situation, the question is relating to how "policies that leftists prioritize/champion have predictable outcomes on child rape such that their level of caring about it is necessarily below others and below some meaningful threshold in order to prioritize such policies." And, again, as a leftist who used to champion such policies, I was by no means unusual as someone who openly said that, if allowing in poor people that Republicans dislike into our country also means that some of those poor people will do things like rape more children in the USA, then so be it. But more common were people who would outright deny that such policies would lead to bad outcomes without doing the very very hard work of actually checking with multiple adversarial sources that disagree heavily with oneself, which is the ultimate form of not caring about those bad outcomes, i.e. child rape in this case. I am perfectly comfortable saying that those leftists would absolutely, 100%, honestly, in good faith believe they care about it, but their lack of curiosity in actually checking if their beliefs about reality are correct shows that their belief about what they care about is incorrect.

No one who says "[x] do/don't care about [y]" mean that "literally every individual within the group [x] do/don't care about [y]." This is common sense and shouldn't need to be explicitly stated in a discussion like this.

Especially on the Internet, "common sense" isn't so common that relying on it to avoid conflict is wise.

I will quote the literal text of the rules here:

Sometimes this means that you'll feel very silly by adding a bunch of qualifiers (popular ones include "I think", "I believe", and "in my experience") and couching everything in unnecessarily elaborate language. That's OK! Remember, the goal is for people with differing opinions to discuss things; if padding a statement with words helps someone not take it personally, then that's what you should do!