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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   Edited 3yr ago   36272 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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A bit of a tangent, but in 2015 Ben Croshaw (of Zero Punctuation fame) noted that cancellation efforts by woke mobs tend to be targeted at perceived heretics, rather than heathens:

For you see, the shouty fringe harassment squad only go after soft targets. Their pattern is to go after people nominally on their own side who got too comfortable and made a tiny slip-up. The hope is that an apology and retraction can be extracted, at which point the harassment intensifies, because that’s what happens when you show weakness to the pack. They swiftly get bored and move on when they realize they are having no effect. No effort against [intentionally shocking 2015 video game] Hatred could be sustained because Hatred just waved its middle fingers and blew raspberries until its attackers used up all their energy. E3 came around so they all moved on, to compete in the now-annual Offended Olympics that goes hand-in-hand with the show, trying to concoct the best way to be offended about Doom being violent without seeming like a clueless bellend. Mostly unsuccessfully.

Croshaw was by no means the first to note this, but it was the first example to come to mind. The mob went after Aaronson in large part because he self-identified as a feminist: they hate someone who is 99% onboard with their worldview but has some tiny reservations (i.e. a heretic) far more than they hate someone who openly scorns their worldview (a heathen).

On the one hand this seems a bit misguided: if you're going to send death threats to someone, shouldn't it be a literal neo-Nazi, rather than someone who generally supports trans rights but still thinks female-only spaces are important in a few limited contexts? But I can understand how an evolutionary urge to punish heretics more than heathens might have arisen. A heathen was never a member of the in-group, whereas a heretic was until they started mouthing off: it's not hard to see how someone you trusted who then turned traitor/defector stings more than "heathen does heathen things, story at 11".

I think there's also a perception of how best to spend one's energy.

Attacking a social conservative or anyone to their right gets you nowhere if you're a social progressive. They'll just say YESCHAD.jpg and move on. You accuse them of hating gays and they'll shrug because ultimately, they don't care and find homosexuality evil. There was never any hope in a progressive's heart that these people would change their tune.

A liberal? A liberal cares about the same things a progressive does, meaning it's much easier to scold them for failing to live up to shared ideals. Engaging in purity spirals with a liberal might them towards progressivism in a way impossible with the conservative.

On the one hand this seems a bit misguided: if you're going to send death threats to someone, shouldn't it be a literal neo-Nazi,

Those are pretty hard to find. And once you actually do it, you're mostly just punching a homeless guy who can't do anything without an FBI informant holding his hand through the process.

On the one hand this seems a bit misguided: if you're going to send death threats to someone, shouldn't it be a literal neo-Nazi, rather than someone who generally supports trans rights but still thinks female-only spaces are important in a few limited contexts?

Isn't that what "Punch a Nazi" is for? You send death threats to people which they will work on, and act violent towards people you think won't be persuaded by anything else.

Agreed. We also see this dynamic with the Kiwifarms/stormfront/etc stuff. They don't threaten the site itself because the owners just tell them to fuck off. Instead they threaten sympathetic people upstream to destroy the site.

I think this is definitely the same thing Aaronson was getting at, and to some extent it's true (although there's certainly plenty of efforts to purge heathens).

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