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 find it simultaneously hilarious and kind of sad that you think Trads are "anti-sex". You've clearly never interacted with a sincere Catholic or Orthodox Jew before. (Or Mormon for that matter)
You have the causality exactly backwards. Trads, as a general rule, are pro-natal/pro-family-formation first and thier disdain for the liberal mantra of freedom from consequence/responsibility and "soulless pleasure seeking" is a result of them being pro-natal not the cause.
Nonsense. My family's full of them, and they usually don't deny it.
I don't have to take the words of christian apologists at face value. Their mythology, rules and actions betray an extreme hostility to sex. You yourself, in the middle of arguing christians aren't anti-sex, can't help but insult sex as "soulless pleasure seeking", whatever that means. Just accept that you're anti-sex and stick to the ascetic line.
The problem with accepting that I'm anti-sex and sticking to the ascetic line is all the sex I've been having with my wife. I would imagine most other Trads would tend to have a similar problem, given the available stats and evidence.
If you do not understand the concept of "soulless pleasure seeking", I'm not sure what to tell you. I have lived as a "sex-positive" Progressive, and I have lived as a Trad. In my personal experience, the trad life is much, much better. Progressivism aims for the blossom without the roots or stem, but without the roots or stem the blossom withers and is gone.
I guess I’ve just had better experiences than you. I’ve never been depressed about casual sex or masturbation. Or anything, really. Another difference between you and me is that I do not want to stop others from choosing your path, or the other, while your side is fundamentally willing to coerce.
Quite possibly this is true. Perhaps it will continue to be true for the rest of your life. What I observe from society at large, however, is deep discontent bordering on open rage at the sexual environment our society has delivered. Having attempted to have the bloom only, the bloom withers and is gone, and people generally are much worse off for it, and perceive themselves to be much worse off.
Meanwhile, I have a spouse, and children, and strong ties to a family of considerable size. Do you have these things? If you do not, how do you think that fact shapes the world over the next two or three decades?
Then you and your preferences are irrelevant to the question of what the future will be. Coercion is an indispensable building-block for large-scale, high-complexity social order. To the extent that you disagree, it seems likely to me that you are either blind to the coercion you endorse and participate in, or else you are in a temporary pocket of calm created by the push and pull of competing ideological constructs. The tide goes in and out, and there's doubtless a moment there in the middle where it seems that the water is being neither pushed nor pulled, but it will not last. You will be found either by the coercion of Progressive ideology, or the coercion of people like me, or the coercion of some other construct, because atomic individualism creates a vast power vacuum, and sooner or later that vacuum will be filled.
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller life
(Which started by loving our neighbor, and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children, and the men lost reason and faith
and the Gods of the Copybook Headings said, "The Wages of Sin is Death."
Vacuous predictions. That broken record keeps spinning.
Your life so far has been that of a zealot, flip-flopping from one extreme group to the next, fanning the flames of CW and even civil war wherever he went. Life at the end of a horseshoe, annexing societal and personal dissatisfaction for one cause or another (you're mad as hell, and you're not going to take it anymore), always trying to force on others the one thing, or its opposite. Perhaps too personal a criticism, but you’re bringing up your personal journey and mental health as an argument, so let it be weighed.
Read a relationships thread here some time. Read similar conversations elsewhere. Observe the collapses in sex, relationships, marriages and fertility. Observe general attitudes to such modern marvels as the Dating App. Observe how men and women talk about each other, as a class. Observe the history of the #MeToo movement, and its deployment of unsustainable coercion and attempts to escalate to the police and jail to settle what it perceived to be failures of the previous sexual order, an order built and defined entirely by the Progressive sexual revolution. Observe the grooming gangs in the UK, the total failure of governments at all levels to do anything but pointedly ignore the problem, and contrast that with their heavy-handed efforts against anyone who refused to allow the subject to be quietly buried. Observe the number of Americans willing to endorse political murder of their opponents, the generally bleak outlook, the proliferation of black pills, the evident rise of extremism on all sides.
It is entirely possible that the above is not your problem. It seems unlikely to me that it will continue to not be your problem indefinitely.
I do not mind personal criticisms. I do mind inaccuracy.
I've spent long portions of my life as a moderate by-the-book "none of this matters, let's just chill out and go to work and save and invest in the stock market and let the experts sort it all out." When I became an extremist, I have been the sort that points out that widespread endorsement of unrestrained, lawless mob violence in support of tyrannical and unaccountable government authority will end badly, that incentives are decisive, and that sooner or later reckless hatred will recoil to the ruin of those who wield it. And now I confine myself to attempting to warn people of the foolishness they are evidently stumbling toward.
It's an evocative image, but the charge is baseless. I do not want to rule you. I do want to live in an orderly, structured environment, and I understand that this requires a non-trivial degree of coercion. There are many whose idea of an ordered, structured environment conflict with my own; we should each do our best to leave each other's communities alone, up to and including moving away from each other. To the extent that it is possible, I want to live in peace and plenty. To the extent that living in peace and plenty is not possible, I am pretty sure it is not the fault of people like me.
Listing random problems does nothing to justify:
The woke have largely backed down from their most extreme positions during the summer of george, on BLM riots, covid restrictions, metoo nonsense, DEI, etc. And the anti-immigration position is getting a lot more play in the halls of power. I wouldn’t say it’s the best of all possible worlds yet, but it’s fine. In time, all problems can be solved.
You did say you were going to coerce me, or else the woke (earlier you) would coerce me. So it looked like it will be only the fault of people like you if I can no longer live in the peaceful modern vacuum. But sure, if you're willing to renounce coercion, I can do peaceful coexistence with anyone.
My prediction has been for some time now that the culture war will continue to escalate until we either find a way to leave each other alone, or until violence and chaos become self-sustaining. I do not think this prediction has been postponed, and I think the developments of the last four years have born that prediction out quite well. Our current society is still best described as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble, and that search is observably advancing over time. If you disagree, give me the metrics by which you judge social cohesion, peace and prosperity to be increasing, and we can discuss it.
Which of my proposed solutions do you object to, specifically?
In what sense?
Race riots and zero-sum racial politics did not start with BLM. They ruined numerous major cities across the US in the 60s and 70s. They devastated the black community of LA in the 90s, blighting it for decades after due to the lingering economic and social effects. And after that mess, Clinton was supposed to have laid the issue to rest with his sista soulja moment, and then Obama was supposed to have paved the grave over for good with his two terms. And yet here we are, No Justice, No Peace, same as it ever was. Antifa-style gangs are still rioting in Blue strongholds, and their criminal violence is still being ignored, excused and actively enabled by major Blue institutions. Blues generally have moved to openly endorsing the murder of rival politicians, and we're seeing the normalization of straightforward political assassination. We're right back to the Days of Rage, because nothing actually changed.
Blues are on the back foot because we Reds dealt them a crippling and humiliating electoral defeat, and we're currently capitalizing on our victory by attacking their infrastructure directly. There's still several dozen million of them, and while the institutions they control are clearly in decline, they still wield considerable power and influence. There's going to be another election in a year, and then another presidential election two years after that, and there's no reason to believe that Progressivism will not come roaring back the moment they regain significant political power. All we have done they will attempt to undo, and they will aim to maximize the damage to our institutions in turn while the power is theirs. We're going after their institutions because we fundamentally do not believe the people running those institutions have changed their minds, and we are not confused about their approach to the wielding of political power.
BLM riots, covid restrictions, metoo/affirmative consent, DEI and so on are expressions of the contradictions within the Blue worldview. Those contradictions will keep right on expressing themselves whenever and wherever Blues secure power, and usually in these same forms or in forms very similar to them.
"Previous Me" was a standard-issue tits and beer liberal who believed strongly that coercion was unnecessary; I, like most of the other tits-and-beer liberals, was driven out of the Left when our erstwhile allies decided that free speech and tolerance were for pussies, actually, and that Liberals Got The Bullet Too. I now recognize that some level of coercion is necessary, because I've personally seen how the vacuum collapses, and how the supposed Liberal safeguards against such a collapse failed.
If you believe that people like me are just as bad as the Progressives, or perhaps worse, then go live with the Progressives and see how that goes. Either way, you need to accept that naive liberalism is not sustainable, and will inevitably decay.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link