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 -
What I found really disgusting were the imgur posts openly celebrating the assassination.
Now, I am not someone who thinks that every human life is sacred. I will celebrate if Trump finally croaks from natural causes, and I would not take any inconveniences to save Trump's life. But if someone were to shoot him (whose death would matter per se, in a way in which shooting a random MAGA proponent I had never heard of before will not matter), that would be quite bad in a lot of different ways, from normalizing political violence to turning him into a martyr.
Trump will not be defeated by murdering his supporters, nor would the cost be worth that.
I was not very upset about the killing of the United Healthcare CEO because I did not consider it to be a step on the slippery slope any more than any non-political murder is. Running a company which sometimes makes decisions which people feel (rightly or wrongly) are ruining their lives comes with certain risks, and even if one health insurance executive was shot every month there seems to be little danger of it spiraling out of control.
By contrast, Kirk was a clear political murder. Any effect the guy may have had as a human will be overshadowed by orders of magnitude by the effects he will have as a murder victim and MAGA martyr. If such a killing happened once a month, things would spiral out of control.
And the idiots who claim that he now became a part of the gun violence he had previously called an acceptable price for the 2A are missing the point. That would be an excellent point to make if he had been randomly gunned down during a routine school shooting. But he was not, he was very deliberately targeted for his political activism. If he had argued that assassinations were a legitimate form of political debate, that would have been mentioned in every other imgur post, so I guess he did not. (Apparently, he called for people to bail out the Pelosi attacker, which seems cringeworthy poor taste to me, but is still different from calling for her to be murdered.)
You could just look this up and see what he actually said (and then discuss it here) rather than just taking it on faith.
I find it disheartening that even when there are easily accessible primary sources, people prefer unsourced rumors. This isn't unique to the things people are saying about Charlie Kirk, but it sometimes seems like the internet has made this human tendency worse. All the information in the world at our fingertips and it doesn't matter one bit.
I don't know, maybe I'm just an old man yelling at clouds.
It feels like bad faith when a man like Charlie has hundreds upon hundreds of hours of his words out there, but his opponents will snip 5-10 seconds and claim it representative.
At least TRY to find something that would make him seem sympathetic while you're at it, rather than just taking the lastest NPC update and repeating it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link