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 -
New Twitter policy just dropped:
It's like the man himself says
ETA:
Seems like some large accounts are calling Twitter's bluff. Dril posted a link to their linktree hours ago and so far both post and account are still up.
ETA2:
Musk now polling whether he should step down as head of Twitter, Yes in the lead with 51.5% and just over a million votes cast at the time of this writing.
ETA3:
The link at the top of this post is now a 404, apparently a result of the policy being rescinded, but the internet never forgets.
I've seen this "gotcha, you're a hypocrite!" tweet linked every single time someone has brought up this new policy in a discussion space I'm in, and at no point has the argument (implied or otherwise) gotten any better. Social media platforms are not socioeconomic systems and this is not a "wall" that Elon "built" to "keep people from escaping". At any time people are free to choose to leave Twitter without much consequence, which is not remotely the case if you're, say, looking to move to the US from Mexico, or if it's the 1960s and you're living in the USSR. Yes, yes, you can gripe that you'll lose all your followers or tweets or what have you, but that is not remotely the same as needing to uproot your entire life to move across national borders or needing to go through the US's complicated immigration system, nevermind the risk of death if you tried to do the same in the USSR, and to pretend that they are the same is... to put it politely, a category error.
This sort of hyperbole seems to be the norm around anything Elon Musk does. If Elon bans a bunch of journalists (nevermind all the journalists that were banned before he took over which didn't receive this sort of outcry), it's suddenly a "Thursday Night Massacre" and deserving of its own article on Wikipedia, alongside other actual massacres that took place on Thursday such as:
And just to be sure, let's look at the Chiquola Hill Massacre:
Yeah, that's right. People literally getting shot and murdered and evicted from their homes is placed on the same level of importance and described in the same way as some people being unable to use their accounts on a certain social media app. Nevermind the fact that they still have a huge massive platform to publish their views because, you know, they're journalists and they work at giant media companies, so really this didn't do anything, and to compound the amount of nothing this did, Elon ended up unsuspending them anyway.
I would say something to the effect of "touch grass", but I know everyone's already been told that and clearly it's not working. So instead I will just reiterate that the internet is not real life and Twitter is a platform barely used by less than 5% of the population. It's really not important. Whatever stupid shit Elon Musk does is not going to be the end of the world, and not even the end of Twitter for that matter. If Twitter ever does get run into the ground, life will go on and things will continue as normal.
Elon Musk is the new Trump. I can't read a goddamn thing on the internet without having to read about twitter related shenanigans. And Wikipedia articles are propaganda for the future.
Alright, many not literal massacres are labelled as 'massacres'. Fair enough. But a few journalists getting banned from a social media website is newsworthy enough to have that label and a Wikipedia article on it?
That's not where it ends. The college student who made the ElonJet twitter page also has a Wikipedia. A college student!
I mean, the leader of the Armed Forces of The World Hegemon getting banned didn't have its own article. It was discussed briefly in another article.
History is being rewritten in front of us. If one political tribes' story is lionized and signal boosted in the epistemic commons for the future to look back on, I don't know what else to call it. A Wikipedia article makes an event a part of history, 'something that happened'. What's written about at which length is weightage to assign importance to by readers in the future.
Roughly modeled as;
historical_importance_event = (wikipedia_article_exists)*(length_article)*(n_articles)Its not only that which point of view its written from, its the fact that its written at all combined with how much its written about and where.
The fights of {Elons Detractors plurality political tribe} want their fights to be remembered in the way they viewed it and they are doing a lot to make that happen, not just in this instance.
This is a great way of putting it; I remember trying to grope ineffectually towards this sentiment on The Old Place a couple of times.
One incident was where the NYT (I think?) published a "Gamergate: 5 years on" retrospective, which was pure its-a-harrassment-campaign agitprop, but raised eyebrows mostly for the question of WHY an e-spat needs a retrospective in a national newspaper. The answer, of course, is to complete the epistemic circle of "Newspaper -> Wikipedia notability criteria -> Wikipedia's article -> public consciousness -> official history". And why this needs to be completed on an e-spat is because GG has (rightly or wrongly) been identified by some as a watershed in distrust of the media and thus Trumpism.
In the present, people remember "You retarded shills, I was there and it didn't go down like that". In 20 years, when that defence doesn't work? The most accessible resource, Wikipedia, tells everyone (and with inline citations to "respectable articles in real newspapers") that it was all misogynistic trolling. Who ya gonna believe? References to contemporary / near contemporary accounts, or Grandpa's ramblings?
Propaganda for the future is exactly it.
And just like, the holocaust became questionable. Did it really happen? was it 6 million?
Just grandpas ramblings.
Of course I didn't ever doubt it in the past, but seeing the future narrative so blatantly being written (not just this but on other issues, e.g., Brexit, Trump, Covid, and now Elon) in a way that is completely wrong (or at least to my perspective) casts doubt on everything I didn't witness and everything that I haven't personally materially verified.
Whoever wrote the Wikipedia article on the Elon banning journalists, and whoever wrote that NYTs piece on gamergate have done more to make me doubt the holocaust than ten thousand David Irvings ever could*.
I am forced to wonder what cognitive defect I have that makes it impossible to not forget the previous truths and experiences I knew and had and just accept the new reality as written, as most people seem to do.
*which is still not much, maybe 10% doubt up from about 0.00001% in 2015, but don't let that dampen the dramatic flair here!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Seems like Wikipedia's "notability" rule is the same as (pre-Musk) Twitter's "notability" rule for verified accounts. Namely, it's nothing to do with notability at all, and it seems entirely to do with whether Wikipedia editors like it or not (barring cases that are too obviously notable to be dismissed like Trump).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link