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 -
“The damn commies mind controlled our women!” is a pretty lame excuse, given that women are well-known to be more little-c conservative than men (which is why so many of them are big-L Lefty these days).
The actual problem was exactly what I said: the suburbs were deeply deracinated and undermined two of women’s deepest sources of stability and happiness: connection to their (non-atomic) families and to a strong network of peer women, especially including older ones. Those connections provide material support for the primary duty of childcare and serve as a stabilizing factor for emotional distress, as well as being simple entertainment and fulfillment. Being locked down more to her husband made a woman more fragile and increased the aspects of her life which she required from him in particular, proportionally lowering her own self-reliance and alienating him (as the demands put upon him grew ever more conflicting and severe). In the edge cases the relationship fractured in some dimension or another, and this fracture in turn alienated daughters from their mothers’ way of life. The most determined and hot-tempered became feminists and started changing the tradition from the top down.
Properly big-c Conservative cultures give women the strong same-sex support groups they need, typically through something as simple as a village gathering or an extended family.
I don't have an issue with everything else you said (other than it being a theory, rather than evidence), but I don't know how to process the last decade or so of my life, without "mind control works" being somewhere in the top conclusions. It's not just women, though. Men have proven themselves to be at least as susceptible.
Ideas spreading is not like mind control. I don't know how you would arrive to that conclusion. A lot of factors have facilitated the spread of ideas that did not exist before the last few decades. I would like to read a more elaborate post from you on this topic too.
It's simple - the "entry points" through which these ideas are spreading through society are centralized in the hands of a relative few. Sure, they can't control the entirety of society at will, 100% of the time, but engineering does not require 100% accuracy, just predictability.
I don't think it matters what entry points an idea comes from. New ideas being able to originate from a few people and being spread to everyone is a good thing in my opinion. I would consider it mind control if there were restrictions to people encountering other ideas, especially ones that oppose the original, like how terrorists brainwash suicide bombers.
Control over these relatively few entry points means you can control what ideas will be spread.
How does that address anything I said?
Ok, this is exactly what we have now.
I don't know why you believe that there are very few entry points for ideas. Every person is a potential originator of an idea. Spreading ideas has never been as easy as it is now.
I don't know why you believe this. Censorship has never been lesser than it is today as far as I can see. People may fall into peer pressure to not say what is considered politically incorrect, but that has always been true because humans are conforming and tribalist by nature. I gave the example of a terrorist camp specifically to illustrate the level of extremity and control required for an environment in restricting ideas to qualify as brainwashing. It's not difficult to be agentic about spreading ideas opposing the current perceived consensus if someone really wants to do it.
Because effectively, they're not, and there's only a handful of entrypoints which allow you to flood all of society with an idea, while all the other ones give you an extremely limited reach. Why do you think all the creators whine so much about The Algorithm?
Yes, if people controlling the entry points want to let you spread it.
Because we've seen open and deliberate measures to throttle and restrict what was deemed "harmful misinformation".
I'm not particularly interested in litigating whether the control over thought was greater in the past than it is now, my thesis is: mind control works. The past might have had it's own forms of mind control, but today it works, to a large extent, by deciding what ideas get to spread over mass media (+a handful of institutions like the education system). This is undeniable, not only did we see it happen in real-time, we were explicitly being told that this was the goal of people in charge of said media.
But what they ultimately wanted to achieve, more than anything else they ever wanted before, was preventing Trump from getting elected, twice, and they failed at that. In that light, mind control does not work at all. I don't think HBD or lab leak theory or grooming gangs or trans scepticism or any other dangerous idea has been successfully suppressed by information control.
There’s this contradiction at the heart of anti-establishment movements – according to their own central myth, they are doomed rebels against the all-powerful, entrenched evil forces of the establishment, the cathedral, the megaphone, the elites, and so on. So when they win, as they often do because it’s a popular message/beloved fiction trope, they have a dog caught the car moment. In reality they were always more powerful than they thought they were.
Holocaust denial is not about maintaining the moral righteousness of nazism, but its essential myth of the all-powerful jew. 'it didn't happen, but it should have'. Or 'according to my ideology: it should have, and it couldn't have.'
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