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 -
Glen Greenwald on Tucker Carlson's show shits all over the CIA and puts in a succinct way the ties between Israeli intelligence and Epstein, lo and behold suddenly on the same day his private sex tape with his husband gets leaked.
My favorite part of this is the anti-woke-right brigade suddenly deciding they don't like gay sexual degeneracy.
Suddenly? Acknowledging that it is a dangerous disease spreading subculture has been part of the anti-woke right from the beginning.
Yeah looks like parentheses are in order. I meant anti-(woke-right), not (anti-woke)-right.
Following Trump's recent victory, some anti-woke centrists decided they need to make sure the pendulum does not swing back too far in the other direction, and started attacking people to their right. They coined the term "Woke Right" to show that their actions are justified by the more extreme elements on the right being functionally the same as the woke left.
It's these people that suddenly decided that boosting leaked videos showing you're a paypig findom-enjoyer is a valid angle of attack on someone.
People are still trying to make "woke right" happen? Give it up Gretchen.
More options
Context Copy link
Maybe using capitals? anti-Woke Right is different to anti-Woke right? Though I agree, it's confusing all round.
As to the videos - I don't know the guy, it's cheeky of me to put forward opinions on his personal morality, but it's a tough one. The gay acceptance/gay marriage movement pushed hard on mainstreaming as representing "no, all that stuff about gays being degenerate is propaganda, they just want to get married and have kids like you".
And then the guy has his sex tapes released and oops yeah gay widower with kids is engaging in kink with prostitutes. Well, just like straight guys too so I suppose that is true equality!
I have to agree that this particular kink isn't the worst example of perversity that it could be, just second-hand embarrassment for anyone who doesn't share those kinks. I think we as a society probably are gone past any surviving standards of "public figures should behave decorously" never mind "private citizens shouldn't be frequenting prostitutes".
I still don't understand why the hell people make sex tapes (or take nudes for their partners) in the first place, though. We have plenty of examples of how that goes bad - the tapes get leaked, you break up and your ex uses the nudes for revenge porn, or even in the first place while you're still together they're sharing those private images around with their friends.
There's... a lot of guys where "if it'd never leave my circle of friends" is absolutely a desirable state, rather than a risk. Exhibitionism can have a lot of different drivers, ranging from the less good (eg risk-taking) to the better (eg, here's power over me because I trust you, I want to be seen as scoring good at sex which is a normal and possible thing to do), but even outside of gay circles that have particular reasons for it (for Greenwald's age range, getting caught doing this was at least theoretically a crime when he started fucking, which adds a lot of frission to 'oh no someone caught me') it's pretty common.
The risks make it undesirable for even many with the kink, and should probably make it undesirable for many more that are thinking with their upper head, but it's not an ungrounded fixation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
woke-right is such a misnomer, you can't just use woke- for a generic "hardcore true believer" it waters down the term.
James Lindsay uses it on Twitter as a derogatory term for anti-Jewish right wingers, who then all abuse, ratio, and fart on him in his threads. That's all I know it as.
The dunking came after, he started the use of the term trying to convince people that Auron MacIntyre and the DR were running some conspiracy to bring Archangel Michael into this world. His terms, not mine.
In practice it's just a rethorical trick to try and paint any opposition to liberalism from the right with the same brush as opposition from the left.
Which frankly is a transparently losing tactic in world where most people (and an even larger proportion of serious political philosophers) have long given up on the sort of logical positivism that underlies Lindsey's worldview.
Well dang, this is the kind of bait that grabs my interest. Any details? I'm sort of accustomed to hearing about immanentizing the eschaton, but I've never heard of involving the Archangel Michael before, though yeah okay maybe I can see it... in his role as the Weigher of Souls, if you're gonna bring about the end of the world, you need him to appear first.
Not sure on the specific context that led to Lindsay making such an unhinged sounding tweet but here it is: https://x.com/ConceptualJames/status/1840510556056195340
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As I understand it, “woke right” doesn’t just mean “hardcore right-winger”; it means, roughly, co-opting the tactics and analytical methods of wokeism to advance a right-wing political agenda.
For example, hiring quotas for conservatives in academia to boost “viewpoint diversity”, or affirmative action for flyover-country whites, would be “woke right” policies, while Ramaswamy/Musk-style “green cards stapled to STEM degrees” would be “tech right”.
Is trying to associate people, who's views you don't like, with nazis a woke tactic? Do you know who'd qualify as "woke right" if the answer to that question was "yes"?
Frankly both pro-Israel and anti-Israel right-wingers are guilty of this, so I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Even aside from Israel/Palestine stuff, I’ve heard NRA types go on about how the Nazis confiscated firearms and Ron Paul libertarians draw comparisons between the PATRIOT Act and the Nuremberg laws. If we relax the reference class to include communists as well as Nazis, then basically every strand of the conservative movement from the 1980s onward has had adherents who make such comparisons to their ideological enemies.
On the topic of anti-Israel right-wingers: they come in at least three different varieties, none of which is per se what I would consider “woke right”, exactly:
This group may have some overlap with the “woke right” in the sense that they view preserving the historic American “national character”, and perhaps even the specific “founding stock” ethnicity, as an important political goal; as such, they are, for example, opposed to mass immigration. But the overall vibe of paleocons is very different: more patrician, more old-school Ivy League WASP (at least in bearing, if not actual ancestry) rather than Ellis Islander/white ethnic.
These types are furthest from the “woke right” in my view: they genuinely want to go back to 90s-style colorblind meritocracy, with no handouts or special treatment for anyone, white or not.
This view is strictly orthogonal to “woke right”-ism, though I would hazard a guess that it’s more common on the “woke right” than on the “tech right”, if only because the latter (correctly, in my opinion) usually attribute Ashkenazi over-representation mostly to IQ, which rather tends to immunize them against crude conspiracies about Jewish subversion and the attendant animosity towards Jews.
EDIT: perhaps you were gesturing at something like the following syllogism: “woke tactics + right-wing views = ‘woke right’; ~every right-winger compares his opponents to Nazis, which is a woke tactic; ergo the entire right is ‘woke right’”
My claim, on the other hand, is that Nazi comparisons are so ubiquitous (cf. Godwin’s law) that it doesn’t make sense to call it a “woke tactic”; indeed, it precedes wokeism by decades.
In practice, lots of paleoconservatives are mildly antisemitic on a religious if not necessarily ethnic level; my filter bubble is ground zero for paleoconservatism-as-more-than-an-intellectual-movement and while antisemitism is not universal, it's by no means rare either. Part of this is surely that Jewish activists do not like paleoconservatives, but suspicion of non-Christian religion is also very core to paleoconservative conceptions of purity testing on 'heritage American-ness', indeed moreso than race.
There's also plenty of paleoconservatives who, although they do not center their ideology around race, are unwilling to disavow white nationalism, either due to genuine though usually limited sympathy or because they see it as a soldier argument, and pattern match Jews to 'not-white and stubbornly unwilling to become white'.
More options
Context Copy link
No, I'm gesturing at the exact people who are using the term "woke right" and insisting it's meaningful, using the most hamfisted equivocation between their opponents and Nazis.
I get that you could, in theory, define it in such a way that it actually makes sense, and points at similarities between the woke left and specific factions of the right, but in practice it's just a tactic to avoid discussing ideas liberalism knows it will lose against.
More options
Context Copy link
The more obvious contradiction is that the very rhetorical trick of "woke right" is equivocation to refuse to address the arguments from Lindsey's right and instead denounce people by association.
Which if you recall the last decades is exactly what the cultural marxist playbook has been all about all this time. Lindsey ought to know, he's studied it more than anybody.
He's therefore denounced by his own choice of tactics. He desperately wants people to keep participating in debate and the marketplace of ideas, but only if he's able to control the outcome. Some open society!
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
I mean, given how insane of a concept it is to pay a sex worker to aggressively not have sex with you, I do consider doing that to be a major red flag for someone's judgment even in non-political terms.
Kink is not rational insert shrug emoji It's like the old joke:
Masochist: Beat me, beat me!
Sadist: No.
More options
Context Copy link
Greenwald isn't exactly a spring chicken. If he has poor judgement, I think people should be able to show that directly rather than via proxy.
Findom might be insane, but is probably on the least offensive side of the spectrum of degen behavior, and I find it darkly funny that the liberals freaking out about this apparently don't see all their gay friends are doing this right now.
Ah, I see what you're saying now. Sure, his ideas should be judged on their own merits, regardless of what his conduct in his personal life is.
But to be clear, I don't find findom offensive because it's degenerate, I find it offensive because it's stupid -- there are much more efficient ways to pay people to get your rocks off, even if your thing is being humiliated. For instance, you could pay someone to actually have sex with you while telling you you're a loser.
It's an economic waste, is all. Like someone investing their fortune in beanie babies. I just couldn't look someone in the eyes or think them intelligent if I found out they did it.
I believe that is the sub-type of kink known as humiliation kink? And the ultimate humiliation, I guess, is that you're not even good enough to use as a disposable fuck toy. Look, I dunno, even normal vanilla sex is not my thing so I have no idea how the wiring for the kinky stuff goes. Maybe it's all by degrees: you start off with having sex while being insulted, but after a while that's no longer good enough so you need more.
More options
Context Copy link
I think there are too many stupid hobbies and sinful acts that too many people engage in for your point to be of much relevance.
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
I think Arjin means the 'anti' woke right, as opposed to the 'anti-woke' right, which is what I think you mean. But I can't be sure either way, we need new terms for these things.
Yeah that's also my read, but it remains confusing, and the hypocrisy accusations don't help, since there's hypocrisy everywhere and all the way down. I guess arjin means james lindsay (who is the main anti-("woke-right") figure) who dislikes trump and tucker for being post-truth populists, may have also condemned greenwald, using his recently exposed sexual proclivities?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The anti-woke-right brigade has an almost perfect overlap with people willing to lie on behalf of Israel, which makes it perfectly understandable.
More options
Context Copy link
There's been some principled people out there, whether I like their principles or not, but yeah, it's been kinda hilarious watching people bend over backwards to either suddenly find a journalist more important than their longstanding adherence to natural law, or where the same people horrified that a musical center guy was fired for being gayand a bunch of competence issues suddenly find hoist petard jokes hilarious because something something Russia fandom. Especially for degeneracy that's little more than dressing in drag and doing the hula, so to speak. I expect Lindsay to be a hypocrite and a dumbass, but it's not just him, either.
((Though I can't claim any special level of correctness, here. I'll offer the Nice Cock complement to someone like cathode_g; for a journalist I can't really offer more than 'at least he found a hobby with some dignity'.))
More options
Context Copy link
“anti-woke-right” needs parentheses or something for clarification.
Three of them, even! (Sorry, couldn't resist).
Topical for Greenwald and maybe his opposition!
Braces -> LISP -> lisping -> male homosexuality -> also topical for Greenwald with some stretching? So maybe brackets.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean they’re mostly calling him out for being a hypocrite. Which is totally deserved.
Why does it seem like so many conservatives in the public eye are degenerate perverts? Lord have mercy on this wicked generation.
Glenn Greenwald is a 'conservative' in the same way that Cindy Sheehan was a conservative for running against Nancy Pelosi.
Which is to say- he was a highly acclaimed / respected public voice when he was criticizing the Bush administration and Iraq War, and then quickly lost support when his criticisms continued despite the party in power changing.
More options
Context Copy link
Hypocrite how? He was never a right winger or social conservative. The only reason you're confusing him with them is that they're both opposed to the liberal elites.
More options
Context Copy link
He isn't right-wing, he is a life long leftist who has been consistently right about the forever wars, the surveillance state, military industrial complex and the over reach of intelligence agencies. As a right winger I don't like his social policies but I deeply respect the work he has done with Ed Snowden on the NSA and his continued reporting on the war machine.
More options
Context Copy link
Conservatives are more likely to anger intelligence agencies these days
More options
Context Copy link
About conservative degenerates generally:
Something has to be a little bit
wrongaberrant with you to be a conservative in a time when their sentiments are flatly unwelcome at our various employers' pride networking corporate events. When I meet someone with conservative leanings I have to determine what that guy's specific deal is, because there always is one. Redneck? Really religious? Too-clever-by-half contrarian? Socially retarded?Anymore I expect liberals to have some gay stuff going on, or at least to enthusiastically encourage it. So there's no opportunity for delicious, delicious hypocrisy and it's never framed as a clash with a larger set of values. Or the more sinister predators among their ranks are de-emphasized in order to minimize any damaging stigmas against other sexual deviants.
Concerning Greenwald specifically, it may be that gay white men will simply always be on the outs with whomever is in power.
Is that your moral barometer? I've heard of people using the Church's approval as a proxy for moral behaviour, but this might be the first time I've seen someone use corporations in that role.
The absurdity was very much intended.
Thanks for the candor.
Being self-aware that your opinions are absurd is much worse than standing defiant against accusations that your opinions are absurd, regardless of how strong the accusations are. If you already know you're wrong, why don't you change your mind?
I think brawnze is pointing out the absurdity of the corpoclerics and their religion. It's meant to be a little self deprecating, but also an indictment of tribalism. That's how I read it anyway.
Thank you Fruck. This is basically it. But also I'm not a liberal. Grouping the religious together with the socially retarded was supposed to be the self-deprecating part, but I didn't loudly enough signal my alliances or use enough long paragraphs, I guess.
I thought the comment was pretty even-handed. Who ever heard of a liberal calling people sexual deviants?
Also ulyssess just blocked me, after thanking me for the candor and asking me a question. Very lame of him.
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
This is very boo outgroup. No thanks bud.
Less boo outgroup, more a total lack of insecurity concerning my beliefs, at least on this anonymous forum.
A rebuttal is much more welcome than accusations of rule-breaking. Refer me to Amadan via the report button if you don't plan to add anything.
Edit: look I changed a word for you. Based on your profile it seems like your specific thing is that you're religious. The zeal of a convert, perhaps? Sometimes I wish I had found Christianity as an adult myself. I mean you no offense.
The report button goes to all the mods, not just me. I do not make all mod decisions, I just tend to be the most visible.
As for your post, well, kind of borderline. "Something has to be a little bit
wrongaberrant with you to be a conservative in a time when their sentiments are flatly unwelcome at our various employers' pride networking corporate events." On one level, I get what you are saying, that someone who is publicly signaling opposition is probably a confrontational sort of personality and maybe looking for a fight? But phrased as if there is something inherently wrong or "aberrant" about being a conservative, it is not surprising you got peoples' backs up.Otoh, @ThomasdelVasto saying:
is hardly more conducive to a respectful exchange of ideas with people who do not share your ideology.
I don't think either post merits modding, but neither of you have much room to be complaining.
I appreciate you chiming in, and I apologize if I came off as complaining or if you felt as though you were being dragged into the discussion.
I was using synecdoche to refer to the mod team, yes.
The irony is that Thomas and I probably agree on a great number of issues, but he didn’t like my specific examples of potential low-agreeableness groups (some of which I am a part!) and unfortunately appears to have stopped reading.
More options
Context Copy link
Heard! Thanks for letting me know. I'll tone it down.
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
He can blow midgets in a gangbang of dolphins for all I care, what matters is his journalism, and he has been consistently on point. Also he's not an anti-degeneracy firebrand conservative.
Yeah I was mistaken for some reason I had him tagged in my head as a conservative. Idk.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Where's the hypocrisy? Where did you get the idea he's a conservative?
I've seen complaints about hypocrisy of conservative commentates defending Greenwald but those very same complaints (retweeted by James Lindsay) fume about "A leftist pervert with a public sex tape..." (as if he's the one that published it, lol). No sorry, the only hypocrites here are anti-woke-rightists.
I watched him on Tucker and it was very hard to take him seriously after seeing/hearing about the video.
The hypocrisy was at the end when he talking to Tucker about human connection being the most importsnt thing in life. Impossible to reconcile that with interracial gay findom meth sex.
You should not take any gay dude of his generation seriously then.
Him being into humiliation and findom is (in my estimation) somewhere in the middle of the scale for aberrant peculiarities when it comes to homosexuals.
More options
Context Copy link
I found it extremely easy to take him seriously, especially in the way he highlighted the political influence of israely politics over the US. They act as if we are their vasal state instead of the other way around.
More options
Context Copy link
That's a bit of a stretch. Hypocrisy would be if he claimed to be a good Christian boy, and then this stuff came out. Or if he made the same claim you did about the impossibility of human connection while engaging in interracial gay findom meth sex, and then the video came out. But this? Again, where is the hypocrisy, other than in some of the same people attacking him simping for literal porn actresses?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Oh weird I always just thought he was conservative. Never paid much attention to him tbh lol.
Yeah nevermind I retract my statement.
You may be confusing him with Greg Gutfeld, who hosts a program on Fox News. I make that mistake a lot.
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