site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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.

13
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

It's hard to find information for the more recent stories, but this seems to cover up to 2008. Of the three named accounts, only "Jesus" has pieces listed. Of those two, "Orchiectomy: Is It Right for You?" could be arguably just academic and medical discussion, if somewhat overly optimistic about its frameworks, but "Making of the Modern World" is the sort of 'world-building' that makes the gay stories with 'and all the women went on a vacation/died of irrelevance' seem like high art. And it does include some material focused on young people :

"During the transition to the new system, while all boys from eight to fourteen were being reexamined for suitability for genetic reproduction, all boys were required to report to their neighborhood clinic on their fourteenth birthdays. School records and existing health reports were used to select ninety percent of these boys for immediate sterilization. Of course all boys who had been selected to become drones at their eighth birthday examination were castrated, but so were a majority of those boys who had thought that they were to become breeders."

The piece starts with a foreward openly inviting other authors to write about:

"Erik and I would both like to encourage readers to create additional stories for the Archive set in this future world. Erik would like first person accounts of boys becoming drones--what happened to YOU on and around your fourteenth birthday (or to your brother for women writers). I would appreciate gentler stories of the domestic life of drones, wives, and their children, church services, classroom discussions, etc. "

This is not porn in the poles-and-holes sense, and I don't think it's the sort of thing that should get someone fired, but I've seen less fetishistic vore stories. On the other hand, I do think it dramatically reduces my confidence that this paper is meaningfully useful: there are people who can describe a fetish community from the inside, but there's remarkably few who can do so in a sphere with policy ramifications hitting their interests without putting a thumb on the scales. Worse, having the same persons also involved immediately with the SoC8 draft allows and encourages a lot of citation massaging: that paper is summarized at one point to "As such, eunuch individuals are gender nonconforming individuals who have needs requiring medically necessary gender-affirming care."

"Eunuchunique" and "Kristoff" do not seem to have published stories under those names, at least as of copies of the story archive I can find, and the forums a) seem to have been nuked a few times and b) don't seem to be publicly available, so it's a little hard to talk on that side.

Thanks! That was a wild ride.

This is not porn in the poles-and-holes sense, and I don't think it's the sort of thing that should get someone fired, but I've seen less fetishistic vore stories.

It's hard to say, no? The eugenics angle from the second story alone is probably enough in today's climate if he weren't already emeritus. The passage about castrating children certainly seems like some kind of disquieting fantasy, to @arjin_ferman 's point. I think it might be different if it were more personal in nature, but these weird, bigger-picture fantasies about redesigning society that don't seem particularly sexual in nature? It's all utterly bizarre. Mr. Johnson certainly seems to have some kind of castration fetish, and I'm skeptical of his opinions on the treatment of trans children.

As an aside, many moons ago, a group of my friends discovered and passed around the pain olympics for shock value. Funny how these things come around. At least (to my knowledge) none of the youth of Athens were sufficiently corrupted to castrate themselves.