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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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"Your rules, applied fairly."

I don't think we should take them seriously. I think they should be tarred and feathered and expelled along with anyone that put up "it's okay to be white" posters. Trolls should be treated like trolls across the board, not given a scholarship on one side and treated like dogs on the other.

In principle, I agree, though I think tarring and feathering and deportation is a little extreme...

That said, I absolutely believe #killallmen posters are almost entirely performative, whereas Joo-posters are not.

deportation

The context wasn't perfectly clear but I meant expelled from college, not from the country. IOTBW posters were mostly a college phenomenon, and while #killallmen isn't limited to colleges, I'm sure it's as common there as anywhere.

I like to think I could stand on principle enough that they don't deserve to be fully depersoned, just face the same consequences as equivalently-hateful people on the other side.

I do not share the interest in drawing a performative/satire/etc distinction, since such judgements are themselves so often biased. One can imagine the Russell conjugations there; one woman's satire is another man's violent manifesto, and so on.

It’s performative in that the #killallmen posters probably haven’t killen any men, but the disgust/hatred each group has for its target demographic is probably quite similar.

That said, I absolutely believe #killallmen posters are almost entirely performative, whereas Joo-posters are not.

I'm not so sure of this. Men are significantly more likely to be victims of homicide than women, particularly when accused of victimizing a woman. I think there's a very good argument to be made that use of #killallmen is at the very least intentionally reinforcing that particular inequality to hang a sword of Damocles over men in an effort to control their behavior.

The problem is some of the #killallmen posters are serious. And they tend to get power in the movement, and their less-serious counterparts never seem to take them aside, horrified, and explain (to them) how no, this is hyperbole.

Similarly I suspect most of our Naziposters, given a knife and a bunch of tied-up Jews, would chicken out. But there's probably one or two that would happily cut some throats... and the others, while relieved that they didn't have to do it, would neither stop them nor re-examine their own views.

The biggest difference is that people outside the movement are less likely to excuse the Naziposters than the #killallmen group; being a performative Nazi is still a BAD thing to most, while too many people will say the #killallmen group 'have a point'. So the Naziposters are less dangerous through no fault of their own.

The actual Nazis chickened out of such primitive methods of mass murder; famously they sent baron von Killingren to stop it in Romania and took over from the ustaśe in Croatia to prevent it.