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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   30584 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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In lieu of the normal SCOTUS Mottezins... wake up, honey, the Culture War went to court again. Arguments for Mahmoud v. Taylor just dropped (PDF). A less oppressive SCOTUSblog write up here.

Obligatory disclaimer that I do not know anything. The gist of the case:

  • In 2022 Montgomery County, a suburb of DC, approved a number of LGBTQ books for the curriculum. They include these books and other materials from ages as early as 3-4 and up.
  • A bunch of parents cite religious reasons to opt-out of this part of the curriculum. This is in line with Montgomery's historical policy and the policy of neighboring counties. Opt-outs for religious reasons are normal for things like sex education and health classes that include it around the country.
  • Depending who you believe, so many parents chose to opt-out that the district had no choice but to change policy, or the district was so ideologically wedded to the material that they changed the policy. Either way, the county says no more opt-outs. Lawsuit commences. It goes up the chain and here we are.

I know we have some skeptics of "woke" curriculum, so for a probably not unbiased overview of the material, BECKET, the religious freedom legal advocacy non-profit backing the plaintiffs, provides examples in an X thread. They also provide a dropbox link to some of the material in question. In one tweet they claim:

For example, one book tasks three- and four-year-olds to search for images from a word list that includes “intersex flag,” “drag queen,” “underwear,” “leather,” and the name of a celebrated LGBTQ activist and sex worker.

Another book advocates a child-knows-best approach to gender transitioning, telling students that a decision to transition doesn’t have to “make sense.”

Teachers are instructed to say doctors only “guess” when identifying a newborn’s sex anyway

The Justices had read the books in question. Kavanaugh acknowledged Schoenfeld, representing Montgomery County, had "a tough case to argue".

The county asserted that mandatory exposure to material, like a teacher reading a book out loud, is not coercion (or a burden?) that violates a free exercise of religion. Sotomayor seemed to support this position. Schoenfeld, arguing for Montgomery County, said these books that are part of a curriculum that preach uncontroversial values like civility and inclusivity. Alito, skeptical, said Uncle Bobby's Wedding had a clear moral message beyond civility or inclusivity.

The liberal justices were interested in clarification on what Baxter, arguing for the parents, thought the limits were to. What limits are placed on parents with regards to religious opt-outs? Kagan was worried about the opening of the floodgates. Sotomayor drew a line to parental objection to 'biographical material about women who have been recognized for achievements outside of their home' and asked if the opt-out should extend to material on stuff like inter-faith marriage. Baxter didn't give well-defined lines, but said nah, we figured this out.

Sincerity of belief is one requirement for compelled opt-outs. The belief can't be "philosophical" or "political" it has to a sincere religious belief. Age was discussed as another consideration. Material that may offend religious belief to (the parents of?) a 16 year old does not apply the same sort of burden as it does to a 5 year old, because a 16 year old is more capable of being "merely exposed" rather than "indoctrinated". A word Eric Baxter, arguing for the parents, used several times and Justice Barrett used twice.

Eric Baxter also stabbed at the district's position that there was ever an administrative issue at all. Chief Justice Roberts agreed and seemed to question whether the school's actions were pretext. Baxter had one exchange (pg. 40-42 pdf) with Kavanaugh who, "mystified as a life-long resident of the county [as to] how it came to this", asked for background.

Baxter: That's right. Hundreds of parents complained. These were mostly according to news articles mostly families from Muslim faith and Ethiopian Orthodox who were objecting.

B: When they-- when they spoke to the Board, the Board accused them of using their religious beliefs as another reason to hate, accused a young Muslim girl of parroting her parents' dogma, and then accused the parents of aligning with racist xenophobes and white supremacists.

B: And so, again, there's no question in this case that there is a burden, that it was imposed with animosity, and that it's discriminating against our clients because of their religious beliefs.

Baxter also pointed at ongoing opt-out polices in neighboring counties and different ones in Montgomery itself. He clarified the relevance of Wisconsin v. Yoder where it was found strict scrutiny should be applied to protect religious freedom. One example of an ongoing opt-out policy in Montgomery allowed parents to opt their children out of material that showed the prophet Mohammed.

ACB: .....What is your take on that and how we think about this, whether this really is just about exposure and civility and learning to function in a multi-cultural and diverse society and how much of it is about influence or as Petitioners would say indoctrination?

Schoenfeld: .....The school the express directive from the school is you don't need to understand your peers, you don't need to agree with them, you don't need to affirm with them, but you do need to treat them with respect.

Thots and Q's:

  • Is it necessary to introduce concepts that include queer and gender ideology to children in public school? Why, why not? At what age would the introduction be appropriate or inappropriate?

The eternal fight over what the state uses to fill children's minds in a land of compulsory attendance is main conflict, even if this legal question is one of what a compromise should look given religious freedoms.

  • A competent school district should account for the addition of new, potentially controversial or sensitive material.

It can do so in a few different ways and avoid a trip to SCOTUS. I support preaching civility and inclusivity to children. There are thousands children's books that preach these things without drag queens or bondage. In an ideal world, knowledge of and tolerance for queer people can also be taught without, what I would call, the excess. Schools can also program curriculum to account for opt-outs when it comes to touchy subjects.

Sex education can be crammed into 1 hour classes for a week of the year. This allows parents to opt-out without placing an unmanageable burden on the administration. A curriculum that requires teachers to read a number of controversial book at least 5 times each a year is a curriculum designed to, intentionally or not, make opt-outs onerous. In this case it was so onerous and so controversial that Montgomery was compelled to change the policy. Which is an administrative failure even if one doesn't believe it to be ideologically motivated.

  • It may be worth pointing out that coverage from outlets like NPR didn't include the name of the case or a description of the plaintiffs that brought it.

I've seen it argued both ways. That outlets notoriously don't link cases or share case names, but in this case the plaintiffs -- a mixture of Muslim, Christian, Jewish parents -- the absence is notable. Were this an evangelical push we could expect some evangelical bashing.

It's a curious problem I think. I am against most of that stuff being taught in school but the whole "teach the controversy" thing must have some limits. What would my enemies do with this veto? I'm not so sure the opt out is the correct thing to demand, the battlefield should surely be the curriculum itself.

Yes, an opt-out liter just cedes the territory to the attackers, and you know they won't honour it the second they get the power. That's why my response was ignoring the sophistry at court and asking "how did we get to this point, and how do we stop it happening again?"

how do we stop it happening again?"

The only answers to that question, at this point, involve literal bullets.

Well, now that I'm off ban, to clarify: I mean less "2nd amendment solutions," more Suharto.

How we stop it happening again is we get a Caesar Augustus or a Bonaparte, with the loyalty of the warriors, and the willingness to use them to purge the enemy. It's "tanks in Harvard yard" as part of going Henry VIII (or Qin Shi Huangdi) on academia.

  • -12

That's not actually a solution either. Putting bullets in people is downstream from doing politics. The left understands that better than the right, which is why the left keeps getting away with boiling the frog while the right polishes their gun collection muttering "one of these days, for sure..."

I mean, obviously any real solution to this involves eliminating a lot of evildoers, but that's literally the last step of the solution, not the first. The conservative frog in the pot uselessly fantasizing about killing the cook is just as doomed as the liberal one croaking "fact-checkers deboonk claims without evidence that the pot is starting to boil!"

while the right polishes their gun collection muttering "one of these days, for sure..."

Yes, which is why I'm not calling for rebellion, but a Caesar sending soldiers as "right-wing death squads" to purge the domestic enemy.

Do you remember the last time you were warned for toeing this particular line?

Yeah, you’re crossing it.

Unlike your extensive history of high-effort, high-quality comments on political polarization, there’s nothing here. Nothing to engage with, nothing to discuss. It’s snarling at best and a call to action at worst.

I’m going to go with a one-day ban pending discussion with the team.

Calls for violence can be engaged with. There's the violence is never a solution, view. There's the sometimes violence is the only solution, view and now it's timely or untimely. There's violence as a political tool.

Violence is never the solution for the weak, which is what the right is. If anyone who is right-leaning engages with violent methods, people will make an example out of him and you will see far worse kinds of censorship than 2021 but for decades.

Moldbug was right when he called violence a false path to power.

If anyone who is right-leaning engages with violent methods, people will make an example out of him

Does that include Trump sending in the Marines? Or a future President Vance rolling tanks into Harvard yard a la Yarvin?

It mostly relates to acquistion of power, so if you can send tanks to harvard, you have likely already won, therefore any violence now is not gonna get you screwed over. Simialr to protests, protests are a way of showing your power, not acquiring it.

Violence is never the solution for the weak

This is true, if one arbitrarily declares that anyone who achieves solutions through violence must therefore have not actually been weak.

which is what the right is

Are we?

It seems to me that we've gotten to the position we're in by attempting to cooperate with defectors. That position seems to be changing rapidly now that common knowledge of the defectors is spreading.

If anyone who is right-leaning engages with violent methods, people will make an example out of him and you will see far worse kinds of censorship than 2021 but for decades.

One of the things that I don't think most moderates have cottoned to is that enforcement of this sort of thing might not be a viable option any more. For the last several years, we've seen a consistent pattern of long-standing, load-bearing social norms abruptly dissolve, and the way this has repeatedly gone is that Red Tribers achieve common knowledge that the "norm" could not be applied to their advantage, and so simply stopped applying it to Blue Tribe's advantage. We saw this with sexual misconduct accusations, with character accusations, with appeals to rule of law, and many others. I think we've seen the beginnings of this pattern applied to political violence with the riots, Rittenhouse, the j6 pardons and now Luigi and Karmelo. You'll know for sure when notable Red Tribe violence occurs, and Red Tribers simply reject the appeal to "norms" en-masse.

Do you think, in the current environment, Red Tribers won't celebrate if a Blue Tribe politician has his strings cut, after years of watching their friends and neighbors openly wish for and celebrate lawless murder of Red Tribers? If so, I'd say you're quite the optimist.

Come on man, you can't even get the average conservative normie boomer to be upset about his own son being murdered. When we stop hearing "I wish that my son was killed by a 60-year-old white man (instead of a black illegal)", I'll agree that the right has decided to stop crippling itself with one-sided social norms. Until then they're just punching bags for the left to torture for fun and profit.

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All the viable solutions are outside of the law and politics.

Edit: Awesome, I make a neutral post in line with the choices I've lived and personally spoken of repeatedly. But someone fedposts near it after the fact, so now I look sus and eat a ban. This place is a fucking joke. "Well, he didn't say it, but next to this thing someone else said later, maybe he's thinking it."

Oh, great.

I just gave Capital a slap on the wrist for his near-identical response. For consistency’s sake, you can have one, too.

  • -10

What a joke

You've been asked to not do this in the most clear way possible.

Not any other critics of modding have been asked to stop. Just you, and just these kinds of dumb comments.

I am tempted to take your advice and give you a permaban:

Letting obvious trolling go on this long is a bad look, but the mods are such easy marks for it.

After all these sorts of comments you make are obvious trolling.

Community sentiment is generally against perma-bans these days. 30-days for you

After all these sorts of comments you make are obvious trolling.

Um, no they're not. Trolling is deceptive posting in order to bait a response; Steve clearly does think that netstack's action was "a joke". I do not get "troll" vibes from him in general; he appears to be a sincere, very angry, very radical rightist.

Steve is a frequent flamer (i.e. someone who insults others). That is itself against the rules, but it's not the same thing as trolling.

Isn’t “baiting a response” the important bit? It’s the main reason I was ignoring Steve.

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This is a terrible ban and using his comment about the obvious troll poster troll posting and getting away with it because charity is endless to new posters who pretend not to know anything is ridiculous.

But the reason this is a terrible ban is because WhiningCoil's ban was a joke on several levels of both being bad and lazy and sets an assuming the worst kind of rule to the forum as a whole that I'm sure will go well.

But the bad moderating here seems to be here to stay if you can't just admit that you made a mistake and should actually be as charitable to the people you mod as they are supposed to be to you.

We've extended a great deal of charity to Steve. We've asked him to stop making these sorts of comments. He chose not to.

He has also been warned many times for antagonistic behavior, both on this account and the previous account. He was very close to earning a permanent ban with his previous account's behavior. We made a note to ourselves to not completely ignore his previous account's bad behavior, but we mostly did and proceeded to be lenient with him as if he was a newish user.

Other people's bad behavior, even if it is a mod's bad behavior, is not an excuse for bad behavior.

If we specifically ask any user not to do a specific thing. We mean it and we will take note of it. If Netstack had broken every rule we have and gotten de-modded for his comment I still would have banned Steve for his comment. This is a 'fuck around and find out" moment. We literally only have two punishments in our toolbox, the first is asking people to stop doing a thing, and the second is bans.

I clearly said in my comment that no one else has been asked to not provide feedback. Only Steve, and only those types of comments.

I personally think netstack's ban of @WhiningCoil was fine. Its only that he should have been harsher with @Capital_Room. 5 days at least for capital room for clear fedposting. And just one day for whining coil cuz it sorta looked like fedposting.

As far as I am concerned fedposting is one of the few existential threats that this board faces. The other two are zorba kicking the bucket and a democrat party crackdown on free speech on the web.

One day bans are minor and basically nothing. That is us saying "yes really, this is a rule we will enforce, don't do it". For anything resembling fed posting I'm also willing to hand out bans like candy. Don't fucking do it. We can choose to be lenient when it is just the rules we care about enforcing. But this is a rule that the world will enforce upon us if we don't self police. Be annoyingly verbose and add a bunch of disclaimers if you insist on doing it. We still might ban you, because again we aren't really the ones making the rule on this. Sorry it sucks, I don't like it anymore than you do.

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To join the choir, initially I read the comment as being about culture, not violence. Entirely undeserved, in my opinion. It's not a quality comment as it doesn't speak plainly, but you inferred the worst possible meaning from it.

It's not a quality comment as it doesn't speak plainly, but you inferred the worst possible meaning from it.

There is a soft rule to speak plainly, for this reason...

FWIW I got this comment to rate and marked it as "neutral". You can read the suggestion of violence into it if you want but I think you have to bring that in yourself; there are other things that could just as well be referred to (culture, exit, self-segregation, etc)

Is there a way to express that some issues may not have satisfactory political solutions without being modded for fedposting?

Is there a way to express that some issues may not have satisfactory political solutions without being modded for fedposting?

Lean heavily into is rather than ought. Describe the specific mechanisms that you see driving people away from political solutions, how this driving works, how you see this process evolving over time. Analyze how it might be prevented, and why you think those efforts to prevent it are likely to fail, if that's your conclusion. Make rational predictions on the expectation you'll be held to them.

And if you really want to do it well, do what I do and before you start, take a couple minutes and contemplate your closest loved ones burned to charcoal, flesh shredded by bullets and shrapnel, their skulls shattered and evacuated brain matter fly-blown in the afternoon sun. Meditate on it, try to capture the sensory details, the texture and smell. Imagine yourself poor, hungry, maybe homeless, in a world that cares nothing for you, scrounging for food while your children sit starving and hollow-eyed at whatever itinerant shelter you're squatting at presently. Imagine fear, bone deep and omnipresent, defining every moment of the remainder of your life. That's what "no satisfactory political solutions" very likely looks like in reality: the rule of hatred, terror, malice and immiseration on a scale unprecedented in the experience of you or anyone you know, and the permanent end of every good thing you have ever known.

This still seems to me to be the most likely outcome, given our present trajectory, but I for one am in no hurry to reach the end of this particular rainbow.

This seems exaggerated. You had a literal civil war and it wasn’t this bad AFAIK. Obviously quite a lot of people died but ‘the end of all good things and a life of permanent misery and terror’ doesn’t seem like a good way of describing post-civil-war America.

We had a civil war back when "States" actually meant "independently governed polities", not "administrative prefectures of the single government", and people were pretty loyal to their states, and so despite some exceptions like West Virginia, the "War Between the States" was actually a war between (collections of) states. The front line was a mostly well-defined, somewhat-stable thing.

The most exceptional change to the geometry of the combat was probably Sherman's march to the sea, and it's not a coincidence that that's the main US Civil War example on Wikipedia's Scorched Earth page. If you're in a position where you have a locally small value of territory occupied relative to the length of frontage needed to defend it, then you don't want to sit on it and defend it. The best thing you can do defensively is to keep maneuvering until you're somewhere less dangerous, and the best thing you can do offensively is reduce the value of territory you maneuver through before the enemy takes it back. Scorch the earth.

What would the front line look like in a US Civil War II? Something roughly like the old maps of the "Hillary Archipelago" and "Trump's Ocean", to begin with. And that looks like an astonishingly high ratio of boundary to territory, doesn't it? That's not going to be what a somewhat-stable front line looks like. That's what the battle lines of a guerrilla war look like. If the war goes on a long time, those fractal boundaries are going to change into something more connected, and a lot of people in both the red areas being seized for connections and the blue areas that are too isolated to connect are going to be unhappy about the process.

For that matter, a lot of people in the "red" (actually reddish-purple) and "blue" (actually bluish-purple) areas aren't going to be happy no matter what happens. Being so ideologically divided in a way that's so geographically diffuse makes it less likely for another civil war to happen, but also makes the consequences if one does happen much more dire.

War (sigh) has changed.

Motorization. Improvised explosives. Handheld automatic weapons. Radio. A small number of motivated individuals can deal a lot more damage today than they could during the March to the Sea.

Personally, I think a hypothetical U.S. balkanization would look more like the Troubles than the American Civil War. It’d be high-variance: some regions would see a bombing every week, and others would be left untouched up until the point a militia rolled into town. Even the best-off, though, would suffer compared to the globalist, interconnected society we have today.

Not everyone would see the outcomes FC described. But enough of them would, and then they’d take up arms and gouge back. And your children would never expect to have it as good as we did.

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I observe a lot of civil wars do and have had these results. I note that more mild civil wars, like the English one and our own, happened a long time ago and under very different conditions.

If you think serious violence cannot happen here, I think you are badly mistaken. If you think that such violence can't get bad enough to kill the American economy or seriously compromise our national security, and possibly both, and possibly for the foreseeable future, well, you're much more optimistic than I am. It seems to me that there is a tipping point, past which gravity takes over and we are all along for the ride. Violence causes political instability, political instability crashes markets, market crashes create mass dysfunction, mass dysfunction begets more violence. Maybe I'm overestimating the feedback effect, but I observe that a lot of people are vocally enthusiastic about violence, and that this enthusiasm appears to directly result in actual violence being inflicted. I think it is the sort of thing people are really going to regret having not taken seriously when they had the chance.

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Rdrama mocks us for words, words, words, but it do be like that though, and it's a good thing.

Explain why a political solution won't work, explain what might work instead, try to keep a relatively morally neutral tone. It's not that hard, you can literally boogaloopost if you put enough effort.

You belive that had @Capital_Room explained his literal bullet solution or @WhiningCoil his outside the law and politics solution in a morally neutral tone they'd be grand?

Maybe one of them will edit their posts with your suggestions.

Yes, I've seen it done, and I've seen prominent posters (who used to be mods) clutching their pearls over it, and leaving in a huff about it, and no disciplinary action being taken.

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What Montgomery County did was pretty classically tyranny (remove the safety valve from a policy when it exposed the unpopularity of the policy) it shouldn't be a surprise that some people respond with the correct response to tyranny. Sic semper...

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