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 -
Communist Terrorists, actually.
Consider the term "homophobe", intentionally chosen to frame opposition to LGBT as mental illness. Consider the sheer amount of propaganda in media and film, where anyone opposed was a violent, low-class, slovenly bigot, probably a criminal, or perhaps at best an ignorant, withered old church lady. This went on for more than a decade, and grew so hackneyed that it spawned a second-order meme of "not that there's anything wrong with that", to encapsulate the pervasive moral obligation that permeated culture. The Westborough Baptist Church was framed as the modal opponent of Gay Rights in the culture. A murder over drug money was framed as a hate-killing and blown up into national news, followed by new federal laws to combat the danger of hate crimes against homosexuals.
And as @gattsuru often notes, it worked. You won. Those you did not persuade, you shamed and abused and harassed into silence. "Protected Class" law formalized this for employment, the media and the Academy handled it everywhere else. As several Blue Commenters have straightforwardly stated it over the years, we lost, so it's our turn in the closet for a couple decades.
How fortunate that this sort of political hardball had zero negative consequences of any kind.
Are you beetlejuice? Or do you, gattsuru and germ have some kind of discord group? I don't see how else you could find a 6 day old comment in a two week old thread, short of trolling my comment history or someone else doing so and reporting everything I write.
It's foolish to ignore the actual issue being discussed and chalk it all up to what you view as a propaganda apparatus, both because you're ignoring a half dozen other issues (gun control? trans people? climate change? Taxation and social welfare?) that failed to achieve anywhere near the same level of unity and because you're going to fail when you try to spin up your own propaganda apparatus.
...political hardball? Winning the hearts and minds of a significant majority of the population is not political hardball. You're so blinded by your obsession with realpolitik, so deeply steeped in the culture war and obsessed with small-minded zero sum games that you can't see anything beyond conflict and winning or losing. You can't even reflect on whether the change was a net benefit to the country, you're just bitter that 'your side lost.'
Is a more perfect union simply one where your side wins, and blue tribe is eradicated? And what comes after that? You'd just fracture into normiecons and groypers, neolibs and church fundamentalists and repeat the cycle. Your path is just one of endless conflict.
Tell me, then, your model of ethically influencing the electorate without playing 'political hardball.' Or are you so far gone as to think it's impossible?
I read 99.5% of the comments that get posted to the motte using the firehose view, and especially make an effort to read anything you post, because I consider you "the iron that sharpens". This one I wanted to reply to, but between crunch at work and kids didn't get around to it till this weekend. Plus, the last couple times you name-dropped me, I didn't get around to a direct response; I get the feeling you enjoy our exchanges less than I do, so I've generally tried to give a bit more space lately. Anyhow, when I finally had time I just searched your name in the bar and scrolled down a bit to find "that CPAR post I missed earlier".
I disagree that it's foolish; I think Blue Tribe's dominance was largely built on propaganda, and I think the decay of the propaganda apparatus is why Blue Tribe dominance is now collapsing. This has been my thesis for near-on to a decade now. I think my side will win because, to put it as succinctly as possible, we are sufficiently closer to base reality that we need propaganda a lot less, and our lack of the Progress narrative means we have less need to rule people and can ask less from those we do need to rule.
I think the propaganda worked better for LGBT for the same reason it worked so well for Feminism and for the thrust that ended up as BLM; all three are core social justice narratives that lend themselves very directly to a model of bad people oppressing good people, and where a large majority of the action happens in peoples' thoughts, which conveniently for the narrative can't be read, and where even the parts happening in the real world depend heavily on the unknowable intent of those involved. Guns, taxes and global weather patterns don't hinge on peoples' mentality, and so are less amenable to the core Social Justice strategies. Even trans impinges far more on the physical world, and it is these impingements that have resulted in resistance and, seemingly, downfall.
I question whether you won hearts and minds, or generated a preference cascade through a massive social pressure campaign backed by threat of legal force. And sure, most people "believed it", in that when they were polled they truthfully told the pollster that they "supported LGBT". That's a thing that can be done by lying to cover all the negative aspects of one side and all the positive aspects of the other, in an environment where one enjoys total control of the knowledge-generation apparatus.
But the people who such a campaign can't flip don't cease to exist, and their arguments were never defeated, only suppressed. Lincoln had it that you destroy your enemy when you make him into your friend, and that's not a victory the LGBT movement ever achieved. And then it went too far with Trans, and the grip began to slacken, and the old opposition comes popping back up like dandelions as things begin to slide the other way. Not that I particularly expect Gay Marriage to be banned again, given how debauched the institution of marriage is anyway... but I genuinely think we've seen the high-water-mark of LGBT, and even if the downslope is gentle, it's still down from here. Certainly no one is ever going to buy that it's about what what adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms any more. I grew up hearing about how the lethality of the AIDS pandemic was greatly exacerbated by society's intolerance and bigotry, which showed how necessary Gay Rights were to protect the marginalized. My kids are going to get a few samples of the narrative I got, and then learn the actual history, with a compare/contrast to the handling of the COVID pandemic, because that will provide them a straightforwardly better picture of the realities of the world they actually live in.
I reflect on that plenty. I think shoving Christianity into the closet was bad for society in strictly material terms, because it unleashed much harm that Christianity might have helped to mitigate or restrain. I note that many people on all sides express considerable nostalgia for the 90s, and even the 2000s; the point where we lost and were cast out is also pretty close to the point where things started taking a very serious turn for the bad, and not by my assessment alone.
On the other hand, "Cultural Christianity" is trash, and it's arguably better for Christianity itself to have good contrast between the moral order of the Almighty and the chaos of the world. I'm aware of and even sympathetic to the arguments of the Christians who wanted to impose that moral order through law, but Christianity is, at its core, voluntary. You cannot mandate love, nor loving obedience. No Christian end I can see is secured by imposing such things on the unwilling through the power of the state.
Maybe.
You've called me out twice in recent months, asking where all the worsening violence I was predicting is; and to be clear, I don't mind the call-outs one bit, and consider them entirely fair. The first time, before I could get a reply constructed, Luigi shot the healthcare CEO and the whole internet lit up with enthusiastic grassroots support for ideological murder. The second time, again before I could get around to a reply, Kirk was shot and the internet lit up again, and in much more of a concentrated and clearly tribal way. The first time, I thought it would be more charitable to just let it lie. This time, I'll ask: do you genuinely think my prediction was wrong, and that we are in fact moving away from large-scale violence? Do you genuinely believe the Culture War is winding down? And since no FCfromSSC post would be complete without a link to some other excessively-long comment, nor with a listing of recent violence datapoints, here's both in one from last week.
I do not think I am obsessed with small-minded, zero sum games. I am interested in what is going to happen next, and what is happening next is, it seems to me, largely determined by such games. Most people are obsessed with winning and losing, and because their values are now mutually-incoherent, cooperative victory is no longer a viable option. I think that internalizing this insight gives me a clearer picture of where we are heading, which is of course the main question we've debated for some years now.
As for myself, I am already saved. I think my side will win, but whether it does or not does not is a matter of no true consequence; nothing that truly matters to me is protected by victory or lost by defeat. I do not believe in progress, moral or otherwise. There is nothing new under the sun, all things are wearisome more than one can say. This is the bedrock truth as I understand it, and while I freely admit that it does not come naturally to me, I try to maintain a clear sight of it, even at some personal cost, even here.
No.
Kirk's murder pretty much ran over the story about the Ukrainian lady that got stabbed. I have an effort-post on that in the works, but the short version is, the local officials pretty clearly did their best to bury the story, delaying its viral breakout by two weeks, and then a lot of Blues got very visibly upset when people started talking about it. The local official's statement at the time of the murder was something like "we can't incarcerate our way out of this problem." The murderer had been convicted and released 14 times previously, with a long history of violent crime and clear signs of serious mental illness.
What I see there, briefly, is a situation where Blues are using a dominant political and social position to prevent a serious problem from being solved, while offloading all consequences generated by that problem to their outgroup. A more perfect union, to me, is one where they don't get to do that any more.
If we can restore something like accountability to power, and if we can generate common knowledge of where we are and how we got here, it seems to me that many of our problems are solvable. One of our original conversations was about how education sucks for black kids, and how this doesn't seem likely to change. Well, since then, we've had the "Mississippi Miracle". One of the places where education sucked the hardest for black kids changed to being a place where it sucks a lot less than it used to. That's good! That's a win! ...And my understanding of how it happened, possibly flawed or excessively simplistic, is that entrenched Blue control got broken, and actual reforms happened. I want more of that, but it isn't going to happen so long as entrenched (and pretty clearly Blue, from my perspective) structures maintain a dominance that insulates them from all accountability.
By no means.
Christianity is regaining a great deal of the cultural respect it lost over the last generation. It's regaining this respect not by playing "political hardball", but by having its predictions validated by subsequent events, and by maintaining its principles in contrast to the example of its opposition. Sexual continence and self-control were a hard sell in the 90s; now we have OnlyFans and online dating and a generation of intense porn consumption and cratering relationship rates to do the argumentative heavy-lifting for us, to give an example on one of the relevant axes. We believe we genuinely have a better way of living, and it requires only our willful action and communal cooperation, not federal law or corporate funding. The further the cultural consensus moved away from us, the more obvious and undeniable the benefits our faith offers become, even by the materialist metrics of the World. We have stable marriages, children, even, amusingly enough, higher sexual satisfaction. We can forgive and turn the other cheek; we can offer a hand up to a defeated foe, we can restrain ourselves in the heat of the moment. We have a basis for charity, in all senses of the word, to the point that the pagan Right routinely mocks us for our pacifism, for doing nothing, for being cucked. And yet, we can also fight fiercely, when that seems necessary and prudent.
Or take the example of Red states versus Blue states. It's been noted for some time that people are leaving Blue states and moving to Red ones; this is not a consequence of Red states somehow coercing or bribing these people to do so, but seems to simply be a result of differences in governance and the living conditions that governance produces.
When truth is truly on your side, no political hardball is necessary, only contrasting outcomes and the ability for people to choose freely.
Wild. I never imagined anyone would use that feature to read 2,000 comments a week.
You're a good guy. So is Whiningcoil; I imagine we could easily meet at a party and have a few drinks without incident. But two things drive me crazy, insofar as I let anything on the internet drive me crazy: blackpills and political violence.
Even setting that aside, you're like the friend who's a huge sports fan and is either constantly bitching when his team is in the dumpster or gloating and rubbing it in your face when he's winning the division title. Your specific ideology (and I don't mean Red Tribe ideology here) means that you're either constantly winning or losing an existential struggle, with all the attendant emotions.
Life's a lot easier when you can just kick back and watch the game with a few beers.
I've already expressed my skepticism on this point.
On the contrary, your lack of a progress narrative makes your message ultimately soulless. People don't want to believe that it's iphones and laissez-faire capitalism and poverty until the heat death of the universe. And they certainly don't want a retvrn to housewives and the cultural norms of the early 20th century let alone whatever era twitter has decided is best this week. If anything, malaise is from a lack of progress relative to the norms of the last century, and it's clear your movement doesn't have a widely palatable solution to that problem beyond grievance politics.
What? The bad guys, narratively speaking, are white nationalists/white suburban teen boy school shooters, and wealthy old white men oppressing the lower classes for the latter two. The Social Justice narratives write themselves.
Did abolition occur through social pressure campaigns, legal and actual military force? Desegregation? Pick any social change in history - the rise of Christianity, American independence, whatever you like - which of these were legitimate? And what criteria did you use to decide?
It seems ironic that you would accuse the gays of strongarming you into accepting their movement, then quote someone who literally waged a war to force acceptance of his.
Regardless, large numbers of people opposed to the gays were converted. There are plenty of gay conservatives, and they don't seem to suffer any major consequences for it. After abolition, slaveowners didn't disappear, and yet we've still arrived at a future where genuine supporters of slavery are vanishingly rare. Give it a couple generations.
They are fortunate, indeed, to learn Actual History.
It's funny that you should frame it that way, when I raised in a much more secular area and the stereotype is that Americans are obnoxiously in-your-face Guns & God religious. And there is some of that, to a degree you likely don't notice and can't comprehend because you've been swimming in these waters from birth.
They're also the years where we had just won the cold war, were the sole hyperpower in the world, ran a budget surplus with bonkers economic/technological growth and it also just happens to be the time of our childhood/adolescence. It's bread and circuses with a side of martial victory, not normies longing to spend two hours of their Sunday doing bible study.
Yes, and no. I agreed with whichever post you wrote in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting that this event certainly moves us towards the brink and I denounce it. But no, I do not think we are close in any meaningful way.
The culture war, defined as people self-assorting into tribal groups and flinging shit (verbal and otherwise) at each other is eternal. To dream otherwise is to dream of Progress and Trying Something Different, but I'm not holding my breath. I do think the temperature is lower than the early 2020s when I would literally routinely watch proud boys and antifa beat each other with sticks in the streets. Do you genuinely think that tensions today are as high as they were in 2020 and 2021? Or 2016? Or what I imagine the 70s were like?
Whether we're in a trough, a peak or just about to keep chugging along for a while - I don't know.
I wish you luck. But I'm pretty sure 'restore accountability to power' means 'my political opponents don't have power anymore' and 'generate common knowledge' means 'teach Actual History to other people's kids.' Not to mention people have been mouthing 'restore accountability to power' since at least the 2000s on reddit, if not the ancient Greeks.
It might amuse you to hear that I've considered going to church recently, largely to try and surround my family with a functional social circle. It's a tough trade-off when I have such limited time to teach my children already.
That said, you're living in a bubble, my man. But then again, I suppose I am too.
A wager then - weekly church attendance isn't going to significantly increase in the next couple years (say, an increase of 20% or more - so if 30% of Americans attend church weekly, a boost of 6%). Me, living in a large blue city, will be 100% unaffected by political violence in the next year. By this, I mean I will not witness any shootings/melee/violence between two large gangs of Red/Blue tribers/insert your definition here, nor will anyone I know. There will be some nonzero number of school shootings/political assassinations/assaults on ICE at maybe a rate of 1 every 1-3 months? Were real money on the line, I'd dig up the actual numbers to get a background level over the last decade but I can't imagine it's much more frequent than that.
Feel free to make your own wagers.
lol. This is funny on so many levels, but maybe in the interests of brevity: we'll see whether people freely choose conservativism and Christianity and the Hallmark channel or whether they want to smoke weed, watch netflix and have premarital sex. And I say that while holding a dim view of at least smoking weed and watching television! Your idea of freely choosing is fiercely teaching your children 'Actual History' because you're terrified they'll internalize values and ideology from mainstream culture instead.
I'm not even making a value judgment one way or the other, but to say that the people will freely choose your way is both breathtakingly hubristic and seemingly ignorant of the last century of history.
To be fair, if America is anything like the UK then history is just egregiously bad. I learned GCSE history under the auspices of the Blair government and it was basically a panegyric to the Welfare State and Women’s Suffrage (plus some stuff on the Weimar Republic and why they let Hitler take power). I don’t recall ever reading the arguments of any serious opponents of either of these movements, nor any attempt to analyse their consequences.
Instead I learned that it was hard to create the Welfare State because the rich didn’t want to pay for it, but once it became clear how badly off the poor were, noble left-wing politicians were able to convince the public that it was necessary and then Everything Was Fine. Likewise with women’s suffrage, it was very difficult because stupid bigots believed that women were hysterical and belonged in the home, but brave activists worked hard and then Everything Was Fine.
I learned a lot about how to dissect bigoted cartoons and the biographies of specific left-wing activists who had helped bring about victory, and almost nothing about what arguments were really had or how people really felt at the time.
When your history is a children’s morality play, almost anything is a step up. Even showing a different morality play is giving them much more info than they had before.
You're sanewashing what he's saying into 'multiple perspectives are good.' He's free to teach his children whatever he wants, but I'm going to mock him for having the arrogance to think that he's teaching them Actual History.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There are dozens of us.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't have anything to say about the actual topic at hand, but I'll note that I usually browse the site via the comments feed and thus am not usually aware of the age of the "threads" the comments are in. I also frequently take days if not weeks or months (or years on occasion...) to finish writing non-trivial responses to comments. This combination naturally leads to exactly the behavior you're observing without the need of a discord group or trolling comment histories. Text forums are asynchronous; not everyone will or even can respond immediately. That doesn't mean they are stalking you.
EDIT: Grammar.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link