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 -
I'm curious about the potential for social contagion emanating from the recent wave of lone wolf terror attacks in Europe, especially Germany. I specifically don't mean male muslim asylum seekers/immigrants observing a terror attack and deciding to emulate it - they already have extremely powerful religious and ethnocultural dispositions towards such behaviour (and the deterrents are extremely weak - if you grew up in rural Syria or Afghanistan, German prison is comparatively nice, just commit your attack, then turn yourself in to police and you'll be rewarded with 10+ years of free room and board). I'm referring to otherwise non-jihad minded individuals, often people with psychiatric issues, shifting towards previously unheard of forms of randomized violence that conspicuously copy the exact methods pioneered by lone wolf jihadis.
Take the doctor who drove into a crowd of people at a Christmas market in Magdeburg - the right-wing in Germany was quick to point out he was an asylum claimant from a Middle Eastern country. But his extensive social media presence and past activist work point to an ex-muslim who fled Saudi Arabia on grounds of religious persecution, became a doctor in Germany and focused his political efforts on limiting Islamist power in Germany, going as far as expressing sympathy for the AfD. When this background information emerged, it was the German left-wing's turn to gloat and call him a far-right terrorist, which definitely matches his ideological profile better than jihadist. But why the fuck would an ex-muslim right-winger, obsessively terrified of an Islamised Europe, choose to drive a truck into a crowd of white Germans visiting a Christmas market, an obvious symbol of European christian heritage? If it was some kind of 4-d chess move to turn German opinion against refugees, it seems like a ludicrous goal for someone who has a record of constantly begging the German state to accept more secular Arab refugees persecuted by their home countries. If it was just a case of severe mental illness, why did his madness know to perfectly emulate a jihadi attack, right down to the method and target (cherished symbols of Western Christian culture and life)?
Equally perplexing is the recent car attack in Mannheim - the perpetrator is an ethnic German. Details are emerging that he was present at some far-right demonstrations in 2018, which for the political left in Germany makes this an open-and-shut case of right-wing terrorism. The police, however, is calling an ideological motive unlikely and highlight the attacker's psychiatric issues as the probable cause. Again, the same situation : why is a far-right terrorist (if he indeed is one) driving a car into a crowd of random Germans? There's virtually hundreds of more obvious targets he could choose that would conform to his ideology. And if he did it because of his severe mental health issues - why is this happening now? We now have centuries of documented experience of clinically insane people's behaviour and the risks thereof, and driving cars into crowds seems completely unheard of in the larger scale of things. Generally, randomised sprees of violence in which the victim's profile is irrelevant to the perpetrator are a historically extremely rare phenomenon - the recent stabbing spree in Villach in the Austrian region of Carinthia was apparently the first time EVER that such an attack took place in the entire region's history - not the first time in 50 years, not the first time since WW2, the first time ever. In a region that keeps documented chronicles of events since the Middle Ages. (This attack was committed by the usual suspect though, so it's less relevant to my argument.)
Does anyone have any ideas on what's going on here? Are we experiencing a jihadification of psychiatric issues and radical politics at large? Is there a growing sense among the extreme fringes of politics that lone wolf jihadism as a modus operandi has the highest ROI for influencing public life and political discourse, so one might as well emulate the methods and see where it goes? If you can't beat them, join them? Are mentally ill people who already harbour delusions of paranoia and grandeur enraptured by the vast amount of national attention and infamy these attacks receive, turning it into the method of choice for a kind of extreme attention-seeking/lashing out? Is social media somehow to blame?
I'm reminded of something Zizek stated about a decade ago in a discussion about lone wolf terror attacks - he said he could envision a future in which these events are sufficiently normalised to the point where they will happen without clear origin or purpose, almost as a new form of reactive behaviour your brain will simply intuitively tend towards due to it becoming a habitual social phenomenon rather than the progressive result of a precise form of Islamist theories around militant action. This seems increasingly possible - and absolutely terrifying.
Killing a bunch of random people is not really a good way to achieve any goal, unless your goal is just that: to hurt and kill others. The reason to want to do that is typically anger and resentment.
The reason for the anger and resentment of the Magdeburg attacker is fairly clear. He was in contact with numerous people from his region of origin and felt that they were, in some specific cases, not treated fairly by German society. In the case of Alexander S., I'm not sure what to think. He appears to have simply been a loser.
As far as the nature of the attacks, there is clearly a copycat element. As I said, this is not really purposeful, goal-directed behavior. It's likely the perpetrators simply copy whatever they see on the news. Using a car is also, to some extent, a rational method in a society where firearms are harder to obtain.
Apart from that, modern Germany is, like the rest of the West, a fairly atomized and unideological society. In the past, people who simply wanted to hurt and kill others could join a group like the Revolutionäre Zellen. Nowadays, that seems to be harder. There's little real appetite for groups like that, so resentful and mentally ill people act out on their own instead.
What does that mean he was simply a loser? That seems enormously disrespectful to the victims - imagine how much of a worthless failure you would have to be to be killed by a guy whose only notable feature is his inability to do anything right? And is 'fucks up a terrorist attack' on the list of typical loser behaviours? 1. Bad at sports 2. No friends 3. Never kissed a girl 4. Can't even slaughter a crowd effectively?
If you don't know his motive, just say that. Or at least go with mental illness, that doesn't throw the victims under the bus.
I think a loser who manages to kill a few people just graduates to extra pathetic loser through his murders. I have sympathy for losers, but not for killer losers. Humans are squishy and easily killed if you don't care about social consequences. Real life is not some MMORPG where A killing B proves anything relevant about the relative merits of A and B: the guys who shot celebrities such as Dutschke, MLK, Lennon might have had an impact on world history, but that does not mean that they the respectability of their victims should somehow be transferred to them. World history should not care for these murderers more than it should care to name the lightning strikes which kill a person.
If I am ever killed by some fuckwit, please don't elevate him to some level of respectability out of respect for me. I am totally with Brecht when he asks us to destroy any respect for killers and their acts of killing. Don't mention my killer by name, instead invent some demeaning nickname for him. Killing people (absent a very good reason) should get more ridicule than most other ridiculous behaviors. By all means, let late night TV speculate about the killer's penis size instead of turning my murder into a grimdark real crime drama with gloomy music.
More options
Context Copy link
I believe his motive was anger and resentment, because, as I said, there is really no other reason to carry out a random killing of this sort. And the most common reason for anger and resentment is simply being a loser; i.e., not having achieved the status you want or feel entitled to within your particular social circle. You could call that "mental illness" if you like. Of course, maybe he had some other reason. The news articles I read didn't give much useful information.
To the rest of your comment, I find it bizarre to suggest that being killed randomly by a mentally ill loser makes you a "worthless failure". Sometimes good people die for stupid reasons. Here is a story about someone who was killed by a bed falling on her. Does that make her a "worthless failure"? Obviously not. Things like this happen every day.
You can be randomly crushed by a bed, a murder is targeted. Maybe not directly targeted, but targeted nonetheless. And what kind of person gets targeted by a loser and loses the altercation? A bigger loser by definition.
Beyond that I object because by painting the second guy as a simple loser you seem to be implying the other guy was either justified or not a loser.
No what I call mental illness is whatever compelled him to kill random people. Losers, as I have known them, are generally far too passive and cowardly to kill anyone. If simply being a loser was enough to cause people to go on murder sprees they'd happen constantly.
If that's how you define losers then I'd expect your loser hierarchy to get circular quick (and paint most people as losers) since most people would lose if targeted in a situation where mortal danger is not expected and there is little time to react, such as getting rammed with a car at a fair or getting shot in the back in school. Made of Iron Georg, who got knocked out, then stabbed by a katana and still managed to shoot down a few of his Zizian assailants upon waking up (and then lived), is an outlier.
Out of curiosity, why do you refer to him that way? His name was Curtis Lind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiders_Georg
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
While it is the case that terrorism is ineffective, the modal European government response of utilizing the threat of terrorism to create the appearance of acquiescing to political positions they wanted to take anyway on e.g. Blasphemy can easily create the wrong impression. Their terrorism is effective because they're on the right side, not because it's terrorism.
More options
Context Copy link
I will never understand this thought process - he wanted the German state to expedite refugee claims for secular Saudi Arabians and to take a more anti-Saudi stance geopolitically, which would never happen due to the balance of power in the Middle East and energy/economic interests - so his solution is to select a Christmas market and kill random people shopping there? Why not stab someone walking out the Saudi embassy, attack a Wahhabist, Saudi-funded mosque or, heck, even travel to Saudi Arabia and attempt to do maximum damage there since it's the supposed main focus of his ire? Even attacking organs of the German state makes marginally more sense. Instead, he selected for a group of people that probably largely agreed with him and his cause.
It all seems somewhat convenient that after doing the deed, he allowed himself to be arrested without a struggle (maybe I'm wrong but I can't find a german-language article saying the opposite), will now face a fair trial in which he can argue for insanity and will most certainly be able to finish whatever sentence he gets before he dies of old age - and without fear of being targeted by muslims within the prison system, as might have been the case had he chosen Islam as his target. Maybe murdering Europeans has just become the most low-risk of political extremism with the least relative consequences?
Why do people get angry at some people and at not at others? I don't know, I'm not a psychologist. Anger is a natural and universal human emotion. I believe it has some adaptive purpose, like all other emotions. The logic is presumably that the threat of anger induces others to treat you better. Accordingly, it makes little sense to get angry at others when you cannot possibly influence their behavior. I think this fits the pattern of how people actually behave. Few people get angry at wild animals or natural disasters.
Obviously, that doesn't mean that his anger was, in this case, actually useful or sensible. He was simply executing an adaption.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think there has to be a reasonable and coherent thought process. It's tempting to think something like "Islam bad and crazy, so anti-Islam ought to be good and sane", but the reality seems to be that being a sufficiently dedicated dissident against a well-entrenched ethno-religious memeplex is rather positively correlated with psychological issues. The n=3 most actively anti-CCP overseas Chinese I knew were so obviously schizophrenic that in one case even the generic soy-enjoying progressive mutual friend warned me about this before introducing them, and in the ideologically more integrated 1970s West one of the main streams of dissidents were people who took the Illuminatus! trilogy seriously.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link