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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.
I have moderated forums before this one. You have pretty accurately described the personality types.
I don't want this place to be dominated by snowflakes like so many of my hobby forums, and reddit, and most mainstream forums now, really. I also don't want this place to be kiwifarms or rdrama.
I hear what you are saying about, for example, merely annoying people vs. people motivated by hatred of certain groups, especially a group of which you are a member.
Unsurprisingly, my answer to you will be the same one I usually give to people who think we haven't set the dials and thermostats correctly, which is that I think you are wrong about some things, and that there just isn't a great solution to other things.
We have had annoying (by which I mean outspoken and argumentative) liberals (who got reported and downvoted heavily) who still didn't get banned (or even warned in many cases). They still leave because even if the mods are fair to them, the rest of the forum largely is not, and it's not much fun being extremely leftist and trying to engage in good faith with people who, at best, seethe with barely restrained contempt in their every reply to you. I can think of several normie liberals, a couple of trans-women, at least one black guy, and one or two outspoken unabashed leftie feminists over the years who gave it a shot, made some decent contributions, but haven't been seen in a long time because, I assume, they just got tired of people politely telling them they are despised.
The Joo-posters have been warned when they cross the line -- and I don't want to name names here to avoid this being a "call-out" post or making it about individual personalities, but the most prominent ones you are thinking of have somewhat ratcheted it back after being modded repeatedly, and several others have been banned. (Not for their Joo-posting alone but because they were general pains in the ass.) This, of course, was not taken with good grace and acknowledgment that we were trying to maintain a forum where Jews and Jew-haters could somehow engage in mutually respectful dialog. It was met with indignation, anger, claims that we are trying to suppress certain viewpoints, and accusations of the forum being secretly controlled by Jews.
Are we a locker room culture where we put up with Kenneth and his occasional unfunny rape jokes? I suppose that's not a terrible analogy. And should we become a coed locker where everyone now has to avoid offending the more sensitive members now sharing space with us? A lot of guys might not like Kenneth and his rape jokes, but they're willing to put up with it if they can speak unfiltered and the alternative is being policed by the kind of people who would punish all of them for not exiling Kenneth.
I guess the problem with this analogy (or maybe the point) is by implication women aren't just expected to put up with Kenneth and his rape jokes, but to not even be present, whereas we do allow Jews and blacks and women and trans people and liberals to be here... and listen to what some other people really think of them.
The Motte really was not meant to be a "right-wing" forum, but it has more or less become that by virtue of being one of the only places where right wingers can say right-wing things and not get banned. However, I maintain that we do put up with "libtards." We moderate on tone, not content. That's always been by design and one of our explicit principles that sets us apart from most forums. That means yes, the polite Holocaust denier gets to post about how in a purely hypothetical way, the world would be a better place without Jews, while the annoying shit-stirring leftist gets banned for being a dick. I understand how that may seem like we are favoring Holocaust denial and picking on liberals, but we're not. At least not intentionally.
I dunno. A lot of people (including the mods) think the Motte is ultimately a doomed project and it's just a matter of how long we can keep it going. So far we've lasted longer than most expected. I don't know what to tell you. Speaking for myself, I really do try to apply the same moderation principles to the shit-stirring libtards and the Joo-posters, and unsurprisingly, they both think I am clearly out to get them and run cover for the other guys.
Amadan, you are a fucking hypocrite and you're a disgrace of a mod. You constantly spread Zionist propaganda while pretending to be politically neutral.
You intentionally conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism and deride criticism of Zionism as “Joo-posting”, an intrinsically dismissive term, as if the people who have some concerns about the genocide-in-all-but-name that is being perpetrated by Israel in the middle east are just cuckoo-bananas.
Again in this comment, you create a false dichotomy between “Jews and Jew-haters” as if you can be either in support of Israel, or you must hate the Jews, which is far from the truth. I have no issue whatsoever with the many Jews who live in my neighbourhood, nor with those Israelis who are content to remain within the internationally recognized borders of Israel. I do hate anyone who supports the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, whether they are Jewish or not. I make no secret of this. Any attempt to conflate that opposition to Zionism to “hating Jews” is obviously disingeneous.
Even in this reply you stroke your own dick by waxing poetically about how you magnanimously tolerate the “Joo-posters” (a derisive term you invented to ridicule those who don't share your pro-Israel bias), as if banning people for disagreeing with you wouldn't violate half a dozen stated rules. Your tolerance of anti-Zionists is only commendable if this is an explicit Zionist space which is founded on the principle of promoting Israels divine right to annex Palestinian land and carpet bomb Palestinian civilians. If that's not a founding principle, you don't get brownie points for tolerating people who are calling out the state of Israel on its gross violation of international law.
I wouldn't be writing this reply if you were just another random Zionist voicing his dumb opinions. In that case, I would just flip the bozo bit on you and ignore your stupid takes from now on. But the fact that you're an actual moderator makes that impossible. I would think moderators should be extra committed to following the rules of the Motte, including being kind, charitable, not antagonistic, avoiding weakmen, not being egregiously obnoxious—all standards you fail here.
Er, in this context I'm pretty sure that he is not talking about people who are critical of Palestine. He is likely talking about the multiple posters on the Motte who are directly and openly anti-semitic, in ways completely unrelated to the state of Israel. Out of respect for Amadan I won't bother with specific links, but I assure you, the Motte has unrepentent neo-Nazi posters.
It's not accusations of anti-semitism being used frivolously to condemn people who criticise Israeli state policy. It is, bluntly, accusations of anti-semitism being made against people who genuinely hate Jews for being Jews.
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