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 -
Agree but with a quibble. Dems do very clearly favor a path to citizenship because, whether you believe anything else or not, it would be a much different story if Trump were kicking out people who had completed becoming American citizens. That said, I was contrasting with Trump who seems to be going after people on student visas, people with green cards, people who claimed asylum. They are people whom the government is essentially already tracking, and putting aside the current crazy progressive Dems, the 90's Dems probably aren't too concerned with them being here. I extrapolate from that that Trump is acting on vibes of "there are too many non-Americans staying in America, get them out."
My point is that I don't actually care about the distinction here. I know he does a lot of things for the votes, but the only thing that's relevant to me at the end of the day is "Did he do X? Yes or No." And a moderate Democrat from the 90's would not have done these things.
They are financed and supplied, but they are not that coordinated. The woke professor has no control over or in with the woke CEO or vice versa. All they do is see on the news that the other did something and approve (sometimes monetarily) or turn around and shame him. You mention the banks, but right now there's a protest over Visa/Mastercard cutting off porn video games. That notably includes LGBT games. Currently the leftist network is accomplishing jack shit. And I point out social media for a different reason. Social media thrives on forming echo chambers and showing you the opposing side's outrage. That helps form personalities that think the world is nothing but people who agree with them and crazy people/people who willingly align with the crazy.
Non-state colleges are not government-adjacent institutions. And even then, K-12 and state colleges are managed mostly at the state level. NGOs are also private organizations. I did not claim the right is not fighting back culturally. I am claiming that the federal government is what they expect the use to achieve their biggest aims. And I think they're taking a lot of creative liberties to get around the question of "Can the federal government even do this, particularly by Presidential fiat?" And Trump is treating every interaction point with the government as a stick (such as cutting off international students from a university), as if the government could one day decide that your tax return is based on your political beliefs and this would be totally acceptable if the correct side was behind it.
That's a more precise definition of the damage. I was objecting to "cities destroyed" which is quite obviously false. I did see that damage estimates from BLM are estimated at $1-2 billion. For some context, a quick search suggests somewhere between 15 and 26 million participated in BLM nationwide protests. Brave AI thinks that a basic grocery store would cost $1-2 million to build, stock, and staff. A relatively small number of idiots out of a huge pool can make numbers add up fast on that scale. If 15 million people really want to cause destruction, they can easily make $2 billion look like chump change. I'm not trying to excuse away $2 billion. I'm trying to show you the scale of fuckery that even a subset of 15 million people can get up to.
As for the minimizing it, nobody likes to admit the bad. I see the same thing when the right says Jan 6th was just some people walking around and Babbitt was a victim. Though yes I know you are going to claim the scale of these are way different and I agree. It's just an example.
Hold on, this is a different argument. The argument was not over which side is worse, the argument was over "wanting to be left alone." Harassment is definitionally not about wanting to be left alone. Here you are doing similar minimizing the bad.
Even getting to this new argument, it's a bit of a gish-gallop. I don't even remember most of the things you're referring to except the one where organizations were accused of engaging in political activities despite claiming to be a nonprofit that does not engage in politics.
A, the distinction still matters because the way you stop a tyrant and a zealot differs. B, what I am talking about is the tendency of the right to turn around and say they are righteous in whatever they do to oppose the left.
You seem to be doing this thing repeatedly, where you take a specific case, throw out what makes it specific and declare the hollow husk support for your argument. Trump is not just going after "people", Trump specifically is going after people who are involved in criminal mischief, and not just any mischief, but in violent support of foreign terrorist organizations and publicly calling for a violent uprising on US soil. Student visa is not a "get out of jail free" card, and revoking such visas for individuals that commit violence and call for insurrection in the US is a legitimate measure. If they hate US so much, they should be in some other place they'd hate less. Trump never made any move against people who are not involved in such criminal acts, and never objected to the concept of student visas in general.
That's a completely false and libelous statement, and you should be ashamed of proclaiming it, contrary to all known facts, but I don't expect you to be.
Congratulations, you found the coordinating node! What you generously called "the news" is the propaganda organization whose sole purpose is to instruct the woke CEO and the woke professor what they are supposed to be outraged about now. And those organizations have been witnessed many times to push literally identical message all over the networks.
That's really weak. Banks have been scared of porn for decades, and it's not some kind of political anti-gay move you are trying to present it. If that's all you got, you are really scrapping the bottom. The processors are scared of any kind of porn, gay, hetero, Christian, Muslim, whatever it be - they won't touch it. That has been like that since forever. On the contrary, there was recent push to debank any outlets to do with guns (I personally closed all my accounts with Citi because of it, something that is being rolled back now btw), which is clearly politically coded, even more precisely - woke coded. And even more recently they started to debank people personally, for political activities. I hope it will now stop, but it happened. Don't get me wrong, I'd be happy if Visa/MC stop being dumb prudes (and invest in some proper fraud prevention) and embrace the lucrative world of porn. But this example - and especially trying to link it with gay stuff - is super weak sauce.
Most of them are very dependant of govenrment funds and government loans, even those who are formally private. The amount of woke pushed by the governemnt through the colleges, either directly, or by just dangling money in front of their noses, is gigantic.
Formally, yes. Huge amount of leftist NGOs, however, are financed by taxpayer money and often created with that explicit purposes. A lot of local money allocated to various programs - homeless, drugs, migrants, poor, etc. - are allocated to NGOs. Have you ever heard of "GONGO"? That's what most of those leftist networks are, either officially or factually.
Universities that insist on violating the law and discriminate on race, for example, deserve a lot of stick. In fact, I am unhappy how little stick Trump is giving them for being such a bunch of unrepentant racists.
Are you new to this whole thing? We had whole huge scandal where IRS was doing this - it was deciding which organizations to allow tax-exempt status and which not, by political beliefs, and then somehow all the evidence for this turned out to be on some hard disk, that had misteriously failed... Your "can't even happen, it's ridiculous" scenarios are my "already happened and everybody on the left cheered it" scenarios.
I said "burned down", not "destroyed", but yes, it was somewhat exaggerated - never the whole city was burned, just parts of some. But for me, presonally, a lot of cities were effectively destroyed - there are a number of cities to which I previously gladly went - and even considered living there - and now have to avoid, because they turned into shitholes. San Francisco, Portland, parts of LA, etc. That's my problem, of course - and thousands of other people who feel the same.
When the whole movement endorses the outbreak of violence, and fuels it, and incites it, and says absolutely wild things like "in the middle of raging pandemic, we must lock people up in their homes and arrest people for surfing on the beach alone, but mass protests are completely fine because that's what the science says" - then it's way beyond just "nobody likes to admit mistakes". It's somebody likes to make the mistakes way, way worse abd double - no, throusand-fold - down on them. And keeps insisting those weren't mistakes but the righteous deeds.
You know, willful ignorance is not as strong argument as you may believe it to be. Maybe watching "the news" does not make you as informed as you may think? Maybe "the news" are not telling you something that they don't want you to know, and you should lookup up beyond them if you want to be informed? Provided that you indeed want to be informed, and not just reassured your side is good and all is good, of course.
Babbit was definitely a victim, especially if you apply the same criteria as the left had been applying to other cases. But even by any sane criteria, there was absolutely no need to kill her. As for other Jan 6 participants, there definitely were some violent ones - at the same level we see at any leftist protest where they regularly and routinely clash with the police. Since this was pretty much the only case where the right did what the left by then has been doing for several years (including occupying government buildings, and not for minutes, but for days, and sometimes burning them down) - they blew it up absolutely out of proportion - including falsely claiming the protestors killed policemen - in an explicit effort to diminish the mayhem their side has caused and deligitimize any claims from the right. They had a lot of success in that - the treatment that Jan 6 protestors got - even those who did not do anything violent - has been horrendous and ruined any semblance of respect that FBI by then had. That is one more illustration of how awfully skewed the political life in the US has become - the left does something hundreds of times, no consequences, the right does it once - it's an historical event and Congress enacts a live TV drama, orchestrated by Hollywood producers, to make sure nobody ever forgets that, and everybody who is even minimally connected gets the book thrown at them. There's a huge difference.
THe right never did even a tenth of what the left has been doing recently. However, when the right did have the power, when they did bad things - like censorship - they were wrong. They don't hold that power anymore, and haven't been holding it for a couple of generations at least. If they ever hold it again, and try to use it again for evil - like, I don't know, ban porn or something - then it would be righteous to oppose them. It's not the problem that is currently has any real importance.
The tiny, tiny flaw in this argument is that it's not true. Protesting is not criminal in and of itself no matter the reason they are protesting, and Trump has not signaled in any way that he's only going after those who commit crimes during the protest. "To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests," he said, "we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses.". Even putting aside the "Is having sympathy for Palestinian citizens the same as supporting Hamas," I see two possibilities here: either they are being punished for a crime or they're being punished for their speech. And I don't see the bar being met for the first. There are legal definitions of what counts as "supporting" a terrorist organization to a criminal degree.
I didn't say Trump hates literally every immigrant. I think that Trump sees the number of people deported as a high score list, and doesn't actually give a shit what the details are. Stopped for marijuana in the 90's? Leave the country. DUI in 2009 that you already served? You guessed it, leave. I will be fair and say that events like these happen under other presidents and maybe the media is less apt to report them, but based on Garcia I don't think Trump is capable of much besides doubling down.
That's it? It's all controlled by big CNN? Most news outlets can barely make a fucking profit nowadays, and you're telling me they're the head of the Illuminati? Sure, the news can spin a story to some extent before being able to be sued, but reporting on things is not control, else I'd argue LibsOfTikTok is in fact organized harassment. Either you control how people react or you don't. Even if it's not editorialized, it's still selected to show only the arguments that invite ridicule.
I didn't claim they were doing it to target the left. My argument is you claim they are part of the leftist network, and the predominantly left media is criticizing them for it. They are obviously not in lockstep with the left on this and the left has absolutely no power to make Visa/Mastercard change course.
If you want another example, how many groups have actually divested from Israel? I decided to take a look. Many universities have refused, or given vague promises to consider. This link shows 56, most I haven't really heard of. Oh, and the city of Portland, of course.
Well yes, welcome to America where barely anyone can afford to go to college without going into debt. But now we get to the leftist argument that giving money to someone is endorsing their beliefs. To say that "I won't give you money if you espouse X beliefs" is to say that government can control speech if there's money changing hands, and I very much don't like that. Whatever happened to small government anyway?
You mean the one where they also doing it to progressive groups?
They don't endorse it, from what I've seen. They excuse it or deflect from it. That's where you get the "93% of BLM protests were peaceful" or "Fiery but mostly peaceful protests" from. Which is still bad, but different from "Hell yeah we did it!" The part about scientists weighing in to excuse breaking covid was completely dumb, I agree.
Done with the little rant? I may or may not have even read some of these at some point, but I don't keep a folder on my computer labeled "Things that pissed off other people that happened 10+ years ago." You don't actually have a clue what I read and what I don't, thank you very much.
She was in the front of a mob of people trying to get past a barricade leading to multiple VIPs, and people with guns were telling everyone to stop. Sometimes it'd be nice to live in a world where teens do stupid things and live to realize how dumb they were too, but, well, oftentimes the predictable happens. And as for the rest of the group, well it turns out if your protest happens to involve going into a large restricted area and there are lots of cameras, it makes it easy to prosecute.
It's easy to say that when the right hasn't targeted you. The gay kid who grew up in a conservative town would say otherwise. I like how your example of them hypothetically abusing the left is porn. Porn is not the right's battlefield anymore. This is Trump's party now, and everything is about owning the libs.
Here we go again. Going to generalities and completely omitting the specifics. Yes, protesting in general is not criminal. "Protesting" like the Hamas mobs did definitely is - property destruction, attacking other students, shutting down campus, preventing other students from learning, etc. It should have been criminally prosecuted, if the campus management did their jobs - but they do not intend to, because of their ideology. That does not make criminal actions less criminal.
I want to notice here also how the left has suddenly rediscovered freedom of speech - in one single case. If you show on campus in KKK uniform or in blackface - you bet your sweet behind you're going to be kicked out. If you burn a rainbow flag or say something against Muslims or transgenders or immigrants - there would be grave consequences. Professors have been fired for much less than that. But if you call for murder of Jews and islamist insurrection in America - oh, here we must tread lightly! Here we must take all measures to not sudenly over-react and give any impression that this kind of speech is somehow unwelcome and that we may not want to see people who speak like that around! That treatment is reserved for somebody who says there are two genders or that maybe equal test scores should give people equal chances for admission, regardless of their genetics. That speech is horrible, but the one about the Jews - that's precious, we must keep that one. Fascinating, how it works. And that's another thing that is way out of normal with the modern Left. They don't believe in freedom of speech, but they select some of it to pretend they do. And the kinds they select is raising a lot of eyebrows for sure.
Seriously, you are choosing a MS-13 member, a human trafficker, a domestic abuser and an illegal migrant who has an active removal order from a judge, to be your best example of how Trump is deporting people just because he's racist and no other reason but thinking there's too many foreign people in America. I guess that does close the case, just not the way you think it does.
Not controlled, but coordinated. And not by CNN alone, of course, as I explained numerous times, it's a network. Propagandist outlets like CNN serve the coordination function in it, disseminating the Currently Correct THinking, so that the faithful would know what they must think. I'm not sure what this has to do with "profit" - their point is not to make a profit, and they are doing piss-poor job as a business, but they are not traditional businesses anymore. They don't need to be, it's not their function.
It's practically impossible to win a case against a news outlet on bias. If they straight out lie - which they do often, because, see above, they are piss poor at their job - they can be successfully sued, but that rarely interferes with the primary function.
Again, they don't "control" how people react, they serve as a conduit to inform the faithful how they need to react. Nobody forces the wokes to be wokes - not by threats or anything like that. But once they become woke - they'd listen to CNN, or read the NYT, or whatever flavor they'd prefer, there are many - that's how they would get their marching orders.
So what? Stalin murdered Trotsky, and they both were Communists (and Stalin murdered many, many more communists too). Of course inside the left there would be some tensions and clashes. I am not saying the leftists always and in everything are in lockstep. I am saying in the question of suppressing the political opposition they are able to deploy vast number of resources, and the banking system is one of those resources that they were successfully able to use for that. Of course it doesn't mean some on the left never had any conflicts with any banks (ignoring now Visa/MC aren't even banks) for any reasons.
Why? Because if was set up this way. Why it was setup this way? Because this way it's much easier to control and manage. Who controls and manages all this system? Deep state bureaucracy. Which side of political spectrum the deep state bureacracy leans to? Bingo! The dependency on the government is a feature that was carefully implemented and entrenched. That's why the left is so infuriated that the right is trying to use it against them - how dare they to use the weapon that was designed and implemented by the Left to fight back against the Left?! It's not fair!
That's what the govenrment had been saying for many years, only the X beliefs were the correct beliefs, that the Left and the deep state condoned, so everything was well. Now that the right is trying to use same tools, the left is screaming "what happened to the small government?!" You killed it, you bastards, that's what happened to it.
Yes they did. BLM riots were widely endorsed and supported - including absolutely mind-blowing declaration in the middle of pandemic that mass gatherings against racism are exempt from any medical concerns - and the premise of US being deeply racist country, solely based on oppression of non-whites by whites, and various race hate hoaxes, from "hands up don't shoot" to finding various nooses in random places etc. has been very actively propagandized. If you haven't seen it, that means your information sources are lacking. That's just explicit endorsement, with second line had been by refusal to address and prosecute any lawbreaking that accompanied those events, and in rarest cases where somebody was arrested they usually were either let go immediately or given slaps on the wrists.
I do. Well, the label is different, but recording things that pissed me off about US politics had been a little hobby of mine for over a decade. Call me crazy but that helps me being less pissed off about them, kind of therapy if you will. I don't often re-read them but sometimes I do.
No I don't, but you do. And when you repeatedly say that you haven't seen or noticed things that I witnessed to happen - either in person or by reading contemporary reports about them as they were happening, and I know that they happened, then I know whatever you read it's not enough to keep you informed. That's how I know.
People with guns tell protestors to stop all the time, and protestors ignore them all the time. If that led to killings each time, all Portland antifa would be dead already, and most of other leftist militants were too. It's not how it works though - except in one single case. In the case where this person posed absolutely no immediate danger to the people with guns or anybody else - and was actually surrounded by people with guns, and people much stronger than her (5'2" woman) who were able to subdue her in seconds without any danger to themselves. Heck, there aren't many 5'2" women that even myself, who isn't a trained police officer at all, would have a problem to handle - unless she had, say, a gun, which Babbit didn't have. This was a clear case of "shoot first, ask questions later" - which poorly trained police, unfortunately, did many times before - but in this case, the victim was a deplorable, so it was deemed ok.
It was easy to prosecute, especially because all the FBI and all the surveillance network (including financial companies, cell companies, etc.) have been mobilized to hunt those horrible criminals - old women that walked in "restricted area". But it wasn't the right thing to prosecute, and it was absolutely horrible injustice in the way it was done. And it was done on purpose - they were prosecuted with maximal effort and maximal cruelty specifically because this was to send the message - the left can do such things any time they want, but the right is not allowed it. There is no symmetry, there is no equality, and the right must be put in their place.
You know btw who FBI didn't find easy to prosecute, despite lots of cameras? Somebody who placed the pipe bombs at DNC and RNC HQs. Somehow nobody cares about that, and the FBI is absolutely content to let it slide while zealously prosecuting every last grandma and grandpa who walked anywhere near the Capitol. Is this normal?
He would say the bank refused to open his account because he was gay? Or the college kicked him out? Or he was attacked by a mob in a restaurant? Or blacklisted by all employers? Which town is that?
It is Trump's party because of the abonrmalities that happened in the previous two decades. His sucess is the direct consequence of the woke abuses. There's a limit to what people could take, and when that limit is reached, you get Trump. Or somebody worse, if you're unlucky. If there was another way of somehow restoring at least some measure of normalcy, then Trump weren't necessary. But the Left is not going to correct itself and roll back the woke insanity. They are too invested in it to stop now. So, an equal and opposing force is needed if we don't want to go deeper and deeper into insanity. That's Trump.
You are the one omitting the specifics. If Trump wants to cancel the visa of John Smith, then the argument should be that "John Smith committed property destruction" and bring the evidence, not "the mob committed property destruction and John Smith shares ideological views with the mob." Sorry, when it comes to government, guilt is not communal.
No, I think the combination of Trump's views on travel bans from Muslim countries, birthright citizenship, asylum claims, ICE tactics, student visas, etc. and the way he goes about doing them almost exclusively through poorly thought out executive orders, combined with his belligerence to any pushback from the judicial branch on virtually every issue, represent an attitude of "I am going to take every nativist stance (I don't care whether this is genuine or political), and I don't give an actual fuck about the people this will affect or how this policy will actually work."
Big CNN was a joke by the way, not that I thought you meant CNN alone. If CNN is simply "disseminating" information, who is the shadowy figure giving CNN and MSNBC and so on their next propaganda to deliver? Because if it's just "people share information when they agree with it" that's just how society works. They need to make a profit because they can't disseminate propaganda if they close. More money means more propaganda.
I am saying that you act as if they are coordinated when it's convenient. I am asking you to elaborate on where the actual coercive power lies. What group fills the Stalin role of the current left, and can make everyone bend the knee? Sure, maybe the Visa example was too small potatoes. But progressives really want to put pressure on Israel right now. How much actual coercion are they deploying, and how much effect is it having? How much coercion power are they using on the left to coerce them to put more pressure on Israel?
In other words, did they put pressure on the banks to stop gun sales or did the bank do it themselves? If they put pressure, why are they not successfully doing it in other leftist causes?
LOL no. Business wants people who are already trained. You can learn programming on your own, but when it comes to job hunting that paper makes it so much easier. Government wants to be more prosperous, so funding college increases the net wealth of America. Colleges know their value and price accordingly. It's not "deep state," it's three portions of society interacting with other to fulfill their own goals.
The left was never really crying for small government, the right was. Now they are not, but what they stand for now I genuinely only have vague ideas. You want to say I wasn't paying attention to all the left's transgressions, you are probably to some degree right. And by the same token you aren't really paying attention to the right's transgressions. That's how information bubbles work, and the right is not immune to it either.
You are missing the nuance of what I am saying. I am not saying BLM wasn't supported. It absolutely was. I am saying that the elements of the left that specifically call for violence are not endorsed, they are denied. Denied in the sense that most of the left doesn't even want to think about the fact that some of their members commit violence. That's not a good thing, but it's a thing you wouldn't really do if you were on board with the violence.
But do you keep a record of everything that pissed off other people? And second of all, you're missing a big thing here. I did not say I had never read those stories. I said that I do not know which stories you are referencing, which can also mean that I have read those stories but I am not remembering or not making the connection of what you are referring to.
During your average protest, the police's goal is to prevent violence towards other people, and if they can arrest someone causing property damage without triggering the mob or leaving a formation that needs to hold, do so. During this particular protest, the goal was to protect a specific group of people that the mob was moving towards. The police had to back off before, and now the mob is getting close. They don't know what Babbitt will do, and they don't know what the group of people behind her will do. But if she goes through, more will follow.
Even if a prosecutor wanted to, it's very difficult to make a case out of someone being on the street in Kenosha when a protest happened. It's easy to prove that they didn't have the right to be in the Capitol building. It absolutely was the right thing to prosecute. First of all you argue that the left should be punished. Sorry, but the government does not operate on "you can't prosecute a murderer unless you prosecute all murderers equally." Either you did it or you didn't. Unsurprisingly the government looks down on actions taken directly aimed at the heads of government.
Don't know enough about that case, but a politically motivated prosecutor certainly would try to find someone who tried to bomb their own HQ, even if said person also attempted to bomb the opposition.
Debanked, no. Christian colleges absolutely have kicked out gay people. Attacked by a mob, no, but absolutely hazed at times, sometimes physically, and without facing any consequences. Blacklisted? Can't say but fired, absolutely.
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