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 -
Well, when you thought the week was boring...
Charlie Kirk was just shot at an event, shooter in custody. There's apparently a video going around of the attack, but I haven't a desire to see it. People who have seen it are suggesting he was shot center mass in the neck, and is likely dead. That makes this the second time that a shooter targeted a conservative political figure at a political event in two years. If Trump hadn't moved his head at the last second, it would've been him, too.
I've never followed the young conservative influencers much, but Kirk always seemed like the moderate, respectable sort -- it's wild that he would be the victim of political violence and not someone like Fuentes.
I fear this is what happens when the culture war is at a fever pitch. Political violence in the US is at heights not seen since the 1970s, from riots in the 2010s and especially 2020 over police-involved shootings, to the capitol riot in 2021, to the attempted assassination of Trump in Pennsylvania, to the United Healthcare killing, to finally this murder of a political influencer. I fear for my country when I look at how divided we are, and how immanently we seem to be sliding into violence.
I guess I just find politics tiring nowadays. I vote for a Democrat and they do stupid things that conspicuously harm the outgroup. I vote for a Republican and they do stupid things that conspicuously harm the outgroup. Whether J.D. Vance or Gavin Newsom wins in 28, there will be no future in which Americans look each other eye to eye.
I actually believe things are much better in this country than people think: our economy is surprisingly resilient, we've never suffered under the kind of austerity that's defined post-colonial European governance, our infrastructure, while declining, actually functions in a way that most of the world isn't blessed with, our medical system is mired in governmental and insurance red tape yet the standard of care and state of medical research is world-class, our capacity to innovate technologically is still real and still compelling, and one of our most pressing political issues, illegal immigration, exists solely because people are willing to climb over rocks and drift on rafts simply to try and live here.
We have real problems. And intense escalations on the part of our political tribes are absolutely in the top five. We also have a severe problem with social atomization -- and these two things are related -- which has led to our intimate relationship and loneliness crisis, the rapid decline in social capital, and the technological solitary confinement of the smartphone screen which dehumanizes people like real solitary confinement while confining them to the most intense narrative possible. "If it bleeds, it leads" means that many will be led into bleeding.
I don't know how we rebuild the world, or come to a point where Americans of different views can view each other as well-intentioned. But Kirk is just the latest victim of a crisis that I don't know if there's any way to solve.
The amount of handwringing in this thread as if this is the moment that we've passed some sort of threshold as a society makes me really believe that a lot of people here are quite desperate to witness an event that allows them to declare that a threshold has been passed. Accelerationism and extremism. We know nothing of the shooter, or their motivations. Where was the uproar when Democratic senators were assassinated in Minnesota? The red tribe does not have the moral high ground, and some sort of grim moral imperative, simply because a red tribe figure was assassinated. Hysteria.
Also, I mentioned it elsewhere in the thread. Don't rely on the algorithms to feed you the opinion of those who you believe are your outgroup. The algorithms have two focuses: (1) create a bubble for the ingroup to feel comfortable, and (2) create ragebait for the outgroup to feel enraged. Reflect on how you've interacted with social media in the past 24 hours with this in mind. Touch grass and talk to a human - because I definitely know you haven't had the chance to talk to more than a few people since this event happened.
There was minimal uproar over that assassination because the assassin was a former colleague of the victims who appears to have gone very unambiguously and very publicly crazy in the runup to the shootings. We had considerable discussion of the assassinations at the time, including a number of people, myself included initially, claiming it appeared to be ideological and was a very big deal. Only, by the next day he was in custody and we could read excerpts of his ramblings, and had testimony from his friends and neighbors showing that he had very clearly gone crazy.
People are ringing their hands in this thread because one of the most prominent political activists in Red Tribe just got very publicly murdered, and leftists were visibly celebrating his murder within literal seconds of the shot being fired. I understand that people pointing out this reality might distress you for a number of different reasons, but this is, in fact, very direct and undeniable culture war.
Further, it seems to me that Red Tribe does in fact pretty clearly have the moral high ground here. As I mentioned above and can substantiate at some length, there does not appear to be any substantive evidence that the Minnesota killings were ideological, and there was no widespread public celebration of the sort we are seeing even before that became clear. This is not me attempting to gerrymander definitions, this is the plain facts as I see them.
The American left has been fomenting violent radicalism ceaselessly for more than a decade. They have repeatedly and communally celebrated political murders over that time, have grown increasingly shameless at doing so, and they are again doing so at this moment, all over the internet. This does not appear to me to be a "both sides" problem. It is not going to be resolved by "touching grass".
As much as I denounce Kirk's murder, especially if it was politically motivated, and denounce any celebration my tribe is engaging in, I have a hard time with the pearl clutching going on in conservative circles about this, and especially statement like "The American left has been fomenting violent radicalism ceaselessly for more than a decade."
For the right, it seems that the acceptance of political violence as a potential solution is just baked in. Many on the right love their guns, and they love to make ""implications"" or even more outright statements that they are willing to use their guns against "tyrants". But if you spend 5 minutes around these types you will see that their definition of "tyranny" is not far from "a liberal policy I don't like". This has been a key pillar of conservative politics going back far more than a decade.
I can rest easier knowing that these things generally stay at the level of fantasy. But it IS a consistent conservative fantasy. If we are comparing like to like, liberals "celebrating" by making bluesky posts and conservatives making gun memes about "the tree of liberty", "ten cent solutions", "kill em all and let God sort em out", or shooting targets with Hillary's face on them, do not strike me as having significantly different moral valence.
It’s true the right definitely does have its revolutionary fantasies but the form is very different (and less realistic) than what you see on the left. The right wing fantasy of political violence seems to be informed by experiences in American history where we fought the British, or the Indians, or each other in the civil war. Cases where there were clear out groups, often uniformed. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of appetite on the right for random killings of people in their own country for peacefully disagreeing with them. Or for working a job they think is negative utility (Luigi.) Whereas the far left seems to understand that this is what a modern civil war/years of lead/troubles type event looks like.
A good left wing equivalent to Charlie Kirk would be Cenk Uygur. If he was murdered I could definitely imagine some groypers or anime avatar types being smug about it. But I don’t think your normie conservatives would be posting mockery under their real names on Facebook as I’ve seen dozens of leftists do. If a right wing equivalent to Luigi happened (perhaps something like a high level and very woke partner at a law firm getting killed) I don’t think the reaction would be nearly as positive as it was for Luigi. I also think it’s pretty clear these things are less likely to happen in the first place than the reverse
If an assassin killed, say, George Soros, or a higher-up in the DEI/ESG program at Blackrock, I could absolutely see the very-online right gloating and joking about it.
I can too. I don’t know if I would see literally dozens of people I knew in real life gloating and joking about it under their real names on Facebook though…
More options
Context Copy link
Soros, I'll grant you. I can add a few other cartoon-villainesque people like Klaus Schwab, Yuval Noah Harrari, Ursula von der Leyen or Christine Lagarde. But a noname DEI Blackrok patsy? I doubt it.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link