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 -
Interestingly, no coverage of a hot-button recent CW issue.
TL;DR: a low-class looking married mom of 2 had an altercation on a playground in Rochester, MN. Her story is that a kid stole from her bag and she alled the kid the gamer word.
Then, a Somali man who was also present on the playground and who then was due for court over a '22 rape this week confronted her, phone in hand and recorded the confrontation. {obviously, multiple instances of gamer word in the video, from both parties}
She called him the gamer word too and flipped him the bird. Cue online outrage, she is collecting donation to relocate.
After this blew up, the rape charges against the guy who made the video were dissmissed. (see bottom of post, links). It's fairly close to a textbook perfect 'scissor' event, seems to me.
The video was amplified by some sleazy music video director and the mom claims they are getting death threats. People who went through his old tweets found..interesting stuff, he is some sort of perv. Needless to say this isn't his first rodeo - he's been chasing view by covering race and other hot-button nonsense online.
A recent development I just found about while writing is, the man who made the video had the rape charges against him dismissed 'in the interest of justice'.(local news link). It wasn't just some silly statutory rape - he and his brother offered shelter to a runaway from the foster system and supposedly raped her multiple times. The two defendants of course maintained it was all made up.
All in all, it's an interesting development. I don't understand how someone can just dismiss rape charges (more detail including a link) like this. I haven't read the court documents though.
^^this seems like really, truly bad optics. Is there an innocuous explanation - e.g. the case was really flimsy etc? But if it was flimsy why was the court system keeping it going for almost three years only to dismiss it now. The news article makes it seem the trial was set to begin on May 5.
Is that needed here of all places? We're not on reddit anymore. The considerable efforts of the admins are wasted if nobody uses the fruits of their labour, one of which is use of language that would rack up bad-boy points on other websites regardless of context.
Far be it for me to police the language of a post about language-policing but really, if we're talking about the word 'nigger' then this should be made clear.
As a more substantive point, the donations for both Karmelo Anthony and Shiloh's have both been censored now, though this hasn't stopped people doing the funny 'make username of N' trick to spell out nigger that 4chan loves so much. Some of the comments: https://x.com/tsarlet2/status/1918360755977748550
Clearly givesendgo wanted to suppress that kind of thing while retaining a certain perception of even handedness. There was plenty of time to censor the 'fuck white people' genre of donation comments earlier.
The George Floyd one is pretty good. There's something inherently hilarious about the juxtaposition of chuddery and heart icons.
But darn, I didn't even realize GiveSendGo usually allows comments to go with donations. It was already only usernames by the time I got to take a peek at Shiloh's donation history, largely motivated by the amount of pearl-clutching and Streisand Effect'ing over it.
I remember seeing a username based around "Nate Higgers," one about whites in South Africa, one with "White Pride" in it, and one or two about Jews, but for the most part the donations were just innocuous or anonymous. No TNDs, "DESPITE..."s, 13/52s, or attempts at N-trains, but I also didn't scroll for very long (it got kind of boring quickly).
The most eyeraising spoonerism I've seen is "BigDiggerNick", this was as a username on MagicArena which is ultra anal as a platform about what letter combinations it allows in usernames which includes banning certain 3 letter substrings enitrely from anywhere in the username.
Dude was playing a next level toxic deck too...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link