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 moderated a forum once.
Like many forums it struggled with one of the basic problems of forum moderation — how much niceness do you enforce, which I'll explain by way of some endemic user types in any forum with enough people and anything but the most milquetoast topic.
A: Here's the troll who comes by only to post egregiously offensive "go kill yourself [list of slurs]",
B: Here's the more subtle troll, who keeps toeing the line as much as he can get away with.
C: here's the user who is not a troll. They actually do participate in discussion and are clearly trying to be a part of the community. They're also abrasive and/or obnoxious and/or inflammatory.
D: And then here's the final type of user that's problematic as a mod: They're a sensitive snowflake. Honestly they need to be sub-divided further, because some of them are just born snowflakes that can't handle any opposition to their viewpoint at all, and others are retaliatory snowflakes, because if I got a ban for three days for saying this opinion is dumb then that guy also needs to get a ban for three days for saying this other opinion is dumb.
The forum was one that was trying really hard to be heterogenous in terms of opinions and also to be nice and moderating it was a nightmare, not because of the obvious ban on sight trolls but because inevitably when you want to moderate niceness now 90% of your mod time — and the mod time becomes a balloon that expands to fill all available space — is spent on dealing with constant playground supervision of the snowflakes. Also you've been slowly but steadily banning your type C members when they eventually accrue enough complains from the type Ds, and because they're really annoying you initially don't miss them until you realize that conversation in your forum is drying up a bit and also some of the valuable forum members who were friends with type Cs also got pissed off and left and also mixed into the type Cs and their friends were, inevitably, some of the more useful members of the forum who knew a lot (and hence got into arguments that annoyed snowflakes).
Also it turns out snowflakes are basically never satisfied as long and are just a self eating death spiral of a forum culture.
After my experience moderating that forum and swearing off moderating ever again, I ended up lurking the notorious kiwifarms. It was full of people who engaged in what would definitely be termed elsewhere as hate speech against me. Now, I never actually made an account there, and I also stopped visiting a few years back so idk if things have changed, but at the time I remember being struck by how much less of a threat I felt reading kiwifarms, because yeah slurs were being thrown around but users were actually arguing, you didn't just have someone with the viewpoint that was the forum consensus and then everyone else against that consensus gets to tiptoe around what they can say or get banned. Everyone shared their most idiotic opinions and had other people arguing with them no holds barred, the forum also had reaction emojis so you could freely post your insane conspiracy theory but wou would get 50 "lol look at this insane conspiracy theory" reactions.
I remember a few years ago people were still making fun of t*kt*kers and how they would asterisk everything or use idiotic word substitution like "krill myself" because otherwise they'd get blackholed by the TikTok algorithm.
Meanwhile I took a long long break from reddit and only recently returned, to a forum dedicated to a game I play, and discovered that in the interim reddit has added some kind of probably AI based site-wide moderation against violent language (or actual human beings are being this dumb idk) and it's impossible to talk like a normal person there anymore, because if you say, in a joking and friendly fashion perfectly understood by you and the person you are talking to to be friendly, "you said my build was bad, I'm gonna have to shove you off a cliff" (this example is not great because I forget the actual exchange, but whatever, fill in something more normal) then you get banned from all of Reddit and the poor guy you were talking with gets to post your exit speech from the discord you're both in as well. It does appear to be a strike system where first you get warned, since I got my first warning for telling someone who posted about a pedophile moving into their neighborhood that hopefully the pedophile would die suddenly.
It's hard not to turn this into some kind of doompost about how the internet is turning into a horrible little hellhole where no one has a normal argument anymore just constant barricading themselves into their own opinions lest they be offended by the not niceness of having to hear someone else's opinions, each little forum and its own narrow band of acceptable ideology, all while the biggest social media sites are enforcing the most transparently fake bullshit kindergarten language upon us all. It brings out the free speech absolutist instincts in me, it really does.
But what if you don't want an aggressively anti-censorship forum that will involve a forum culture of calling everyone slurs? You want the veneer of respectability and gentility but also the ability to have an actual conversation?
Well I already listed the shitty experience I had trying to moderate such a forum, against what was not bad faith actors but just human actors acting predictably human hence this being a pattern you can see all over the place, and now I have to address the flip side of the coin.
Let's by analogy discuss locker room culture. I don't actually know if locker room culture is a real thing irl so I'm going to discuss hypothetical locker room culture.
It's a group of like fifteen guys in a guy's only space. They're basically all normal guys, plus rapey Kenneth and edgy Doug. Sometimes rapey Kenneth makes a joke about how some girl in the school really needs to be fucked into her proper place in society and Doug will make some follow up joke and everyone else is maybe thinking "c'mon man can we not do this" if it's been like too many times that day but usually you're just trying to finish getting dressed and maybe John also is like "that's not cool man" and pushes back. But like, the rest of the time the atmosphere is just a comfy men's only space plus the occasional rape joke or comment about how women suck or are all gold-diggers or are responsible for everything wrong with society.
Anyway, if for whatever reason that locker room decided it wanted to actually be a co-ed discussion space instead, it would have a little problem, which is that any individual woman walking in would get the vibe — they're the barely tolerated outsider — and then leave unless they're like extra autistic/socially challenged.
Because there's just the microculture of what kinds of things are ok to say there and what aren't, and sometimes what's ok to say is anything negative about group A and what's not ok to say is anything negative about group B, and it's not really about an active policy one way or another it's just this is the overall culture of the social group, read the room and get out.
This is, unfortunately, the part where I admit that I've spent weeks now debating if I should just quietly show myself the door. I didn't mean to enter themotte under false premises, I just decided my first post wouldn't be some "here's all my labels and opinions" and would be an actual post about a controversial topic I wanted to talk about. And then before I had the chance to like, casually drop the relevant information about me and get it over with (I despise sharing personally identifiable information online, but it was nonetheless something that needed to happen eventually if I wanted to talk about any number of topics I wanted to discuss), my government did a surprise attack on Iran. I quite vividly remember someone posting a comment about there being a siren and someone else saying "can't find any news confirming it" and not piping in with "it's me, I'm the news, posting from the spotty internet in the bomb shelter". And then it became just increasingly not the right moment for it (also I was quite sleep deprived and dealing with lots of other more immediate concerns).
And in the meantime I got to have the uncomfortable sensation of listening in on conversations I felt were very obviously not meant to include me. For several days now I've been debating doing a rip the band-aid off kind of post (how? What framing?) to get it over with and be able to discuss things again or to just... Leave.
Because of course the alternative is to figure out the correct, respectful way to tiptoe around the conversation over whether Jews control the American government/assassinated Kennedy, since we aren't doing kiwifarms style dialogue where someone talks about the kikes ruining everything and someone else responds by calling him a retarded autist, you've got to politely request sources and carefully have respectful mutually productive dialogue.
Or to just like ignore that the conversation is even happening? Stick to discussion of feminism and essentially continue faking being a normal non-Jewish mottizen...
Polite respectful mutual dialogue.
But only for some opinions, because others are an "immense pain in the ass".
Yes this is the actual reason I ended up writing this comment instead of continuing to waffle over if I should just leave. Because it is actually really annoying, if I need to play nice with the neonazis and have polite and measured conversations — I am willing to do this, even though conversations with people who are (only theoretically!) interested in me and my family being dead are a "pain in the ass" to conduct civilly — and to then see someone else express some opinion that is more objectionable to the baseline motte culture, but expressed according to all the rules of the site, and get banned (temporarily) for it. Because it just means setting the lines around what kinds of people are in the locker room, which is pretending to be a co-ed discussion space, but isn't. And yes I'm biased by being more inclined towards free speech over banning and thinking that it's better to have the opinions and talk it out then constantly police what people say, sure, but if the forum can tolerate holocaust denial I think it can also stretch itself to tolerate libtards. I'm not interesting in doing some tit for tat thing where I'm like "well if you banned them for this, why didn't you ban that other person for that" because like I stated up front that's just the path to a death spiral where almost no one interesting sticks around. But still, come on, you didn't ban them for constantly sticking their conspiracy theories into every discussion couched as consensus building obvious fact. Apply the same low bar consistently. Let people have an actual conversation with actual disagreement.
Eh, you can't have a forum dedicated to political discussion and complain when people hold opinions you disagree with.
I've wasted a lot of time here arguing with Holocaust deniers, until I realised that if it were possible to convince them with evidence or sound argument, then they wouldn't be Holocaust deniers. I found the block function a better solution. I suspect many others have chosen the same approach of non-engagement.
I think the moderation here is excellent. There will always be a few users who manage to get their pet issue into every topic. That's the price we pay for moderation that doesn't descend to purity spirals or 4chan-esque vulgarity.
My guess is that you will, for good reason, not believe me when I tell you this, but I'm not exactly a holocaust denier yet I still want to challenge you on the matter. JAQ etc. Sorry in advance for the broken formatting; idk how to fix it.
I haven't spent a huge amount of time researching these things, but I've read several books on the topic (including the ones they made us read in school), watched youtube videos from different perspectives, observed many acrimonious debates, etc., and my current assessment is as follows:
1a. Nazis are on record admitting to all sorts of absurd and bizarre abuses which clearly never happened, including but not limited to whimsical electric execution floors, massive mobile body-grinding machines which are postulated to explain where all the bodies went, and even nuclear explosions deployed to vaporize corpse piles (same reason). We shouldn't be surprised that confessions under duress are less than reliable.
1b. Meanwhile inmates are on record making the most outrageous, fanciful accusations including straight up Tom & Jerry style hijinks, including but not limited to the nazis making prisoners push a shotgun into a hole in the wall that bends the barrel around backwards at them, then pull the trigger, such that the prisoner shoots himself. (If you don't know anything about guns let met assure you this is entirely impossible. This is bugs bunny-tier nonsense.) Many of the first-hand accounts of extermination camps I've read (it's late and I'm a bit tipsy and can't remember which) turn out to fall apart upon even cursory historical examination and even mainstream historians will, when cornered, acknowledge that they're, to put it lightly, embellished.
If the holocaust were entirely a hoax (and I don't think it is) mainstream institutions are in a political situation where they have no incentive to entertain the possibility whatsoever and every incentive to double down wherever possible. The justification for this statement I'll leave as an exercise to the reader. We all know that if anyone even implies it might not have been quite as commonly portrayed everyone else absolutely flips the fuck out and actual arguments need not ever enter the picture.
Pursuant to the previous item, every incentive I see pushes the official narrative toward inflating the horrors of the holocaust not just qualitatively but also quantitatively. It's a classic ratchet situation. Anyone is free to claim more victims (and more monstrously) than usual; no one is free to claim fewer victims (or less monstrously) than usual. The numbers we're given seem historically tenuous at best and given these dynamics were likely much smaller.
It is certainly true that nazis didn't want jews around and tried to expel them, only nobody wanted to take them. Given the war, this subject population was put to work as slave labor in horrible conditions which, due to disease, malnutrition, and (yes) hateful abuse resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions. These slaves were used to help the war effort and were considered expendable. Given that Germans themselves were often facing death by starvation near the end of the war, it is not at all surprising that their slaves were often left to starve first, or even executed as convenient.
Here's the curveball: For all that, I'm A) Jewish and B) Once did a shitload of ketamine and... well, describing the experience probably won't make sense to anyone who isn't Jewish and who hasn't done that, but suffice it to say I'm entirely convinced that the holocaust did happen roughly as commonly described in the broadest strokes -- that does fit the Pattern of Reality and, uh, ancestral memory that I encountered -- but notwithstanding any of the above. An industrial state putting huge resources into mechanically killing a slave labor force while it's in the middle of an existential war for existence just doesn't add up. The targeted destruction of jews surely did happen, but sheer common sense indicates that the murders, rapes, and local pogroms happened relatively incidentally and organically, while malnutrition and disease did most of the work in the camps.
Instead European Jewry was first encouraged to leave, then pushed toward other countries as refugees, then massively conscripted as a slave labor force with zero compassion or concern about their wellbeing, then basically liquidated as convenient when resources ran low so as to conserve resources for Germans and the war effort in general. Colossal-scale industrialized killing just doesn't fit into this model.
As the war wrapped up, and afterward, it was obviously enormously politically beneficial for the winners to record history so as to make the losers look as bad as possible, and especially for Zionists to have something to point to in order to justify... whatever they want, really. Everything after that point follows naturally. The holocaust is huge business both politically and financially.
So -- I feel like I don't often get the chance to sincerely expose this perspective to anyone who A) has the background to correct me and B) is enough of a gentleman to do so without histrionics, but if I'm reading your post right you just volunteered yourself as both. So do let me know. I'm not even sure whether I technically qualify as a holocaust denier, which is a weird position to be in.
(But seriously, this autoformatting. Why is it designed around a use case where someone starts a numbered list with a number other than 1 but actually wants 1? When would that ever possibly happen? And what can one do to get around it?)
It's the second time today when I semi-sincerely wonder if someone on this forum needs a psychiatrist. I'm very cheap, I even do it for free.
(I hope this is a joke and that you're not looking for historical insight from a dissociative drug. Might have cured any depression, if you had it.)
Reading this I was thinking to myself, well if you're Jewish whether the Holocaust happened or not, of course your ancestral memories will be of the oppression of Jews, it's pretty much their entire history other than the reigns of like three or four guys in the Old Testament. Which made me imagine a guy who isn't just a Holocaust Denier but an Antisemitism denier: the Pogroms never happened, the Blood Libel never happened, the expulsion from Spain never happened, the Second Temple never existed so it was never destroyed, etc.
Hold up, new type of person just dropped. If they don't exist, I'd like them to, it would break up the boredom of bog-standard antisemitism.
Propose it to jet fuel denialist Twitter. They’ll probably get right on it.
I just hung out with a dude who at least expressed some degree of belief in the claim that 9/11 was an inside job. About all of.. 2 hours ago.
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