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Are food allergies another aspect of the culture war? I was reading Reddit and a person was feeding 100 people and someone mentioned to make sure you have all the allergies/food restrictions covered. Being honest I’ve never met anyone with a food restriction I can think of except a lot of brown friends who won’t eat sausage but also have no problem with alcohol.
Ancient religions had a lot of restrictions, now Im borrowing this from elsewhere that the rise of food restrictions is just the same thing as ancients banning certain foods as holy acts. I’ve long argued that the culture wars are less of a culture war and more of a religious war and dietary restrictions are just a modern form of Jews and Muslims banning pork/shellfish etc and Catholics not eating meat on fridays. All religions seem to have focuses on eating and sexual rituals.
I know mental illness has far higher rates amongst lefties. My guess is dietary restrictions and food allergies are much higher in lefties and if your not in that religion it’s something you never think of.
Maybe slightly, just because a lot of leftist I know are a bit neurotic and hypochondriac. Food "sensitivities" are very trendy among them, and they obsess over their state of the mind and body after ingesting seemingly random ingredients that have been brought to their attention, like gluten, soy or nightshades. Then they draw all sorts of spurious conclusions between a food item and some vague, probably psychosomatic phenomena like "brain fog", "bloating" or "gas".
Where as I just laugh about getting death farts after a night of terrible decisions.
But I think you also just notice red tribers with restrictions less, because to them it's nobody else's business. They avoid what they have to avoid, and don't expect the entire world to cater to their diet. Blue tribers seem to think the world revolves around them, and if they can't eat absolutely every food item at a pot luck, nobody should.
Consider MCCX theory as an explanation for this. I find it plausible as a theory, but wouldn't bet the farm on it being true. Basically, hypermobility, autism, ADHD, autoimmune disorders, and allergies are a "cluster". Because of this cluster, you've got flexible, autistic, often androgynous, intelligent people moving to big cities. Why? Because hypermobility and manual-labor careers don't mix well.
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Arguing that food sensitivity is a trendy affection popular in lefty circles is... okay, I guess. I can't even say I disagree. Anecdotal observations, even slightly cherrypicked ones, are fine.
But of course you had to finish with a bit of pure culture warring boo outgroup. You've been warned often enough now that it should not surprise you that "Boo blue tribe, so narcissistic and entitled, amirite?" is going to get you another warning. You seem to be determined to keep doing this because you just can't help yourself when there's an opportunity to poke your outgroup in the eye (and, I expect, you will complain again about being told not to do it), so do not pretend to be surprised when your already lengthy record of warnings turns into a ban.
Fair enough, this time. But here is the thing I am increasingly struggling to get.
A user can write paragraphs and paragraphs describing textbook narcissistic behavior. And so long as he doesn't call it narcissism, no problem. The moment someone comes along and goes "Yeah, that's called narcissism." out comes the "You aren't being charitable, that's 'boo outgroup'". It's like we're only allowed to point out the obvious and undeniable transgressions of the successor ideology, and those who follow it, by leaving negative space in the shape of it. The moment you point and go "Yeah, they're derange entitled narcissist" because that's what all the behavior that is being described ad nauseum is examples of, you've crossed a line.
I get it, the project of this place is some sort of open forum where both sides can talk. But increasingly I feel like I'm trapped in a room with cannibals, and it's against the rules to point out how my friends keep disappearing. Or I can make vague statements like "Man, it sure is weird that I haven't seen Steve in three weeks. I mean we're all locked in a room together, it's not like there is anywhere he could have gone. And you sure look well fed." But I'm expected to hope that the secret cannibal will just admit they are a cannibal. I can't point out their obvious cannibalism. Even up to the point I wake up and my own arm is missing, I can't accuse them of anything lest I be accused of "lack of charity".
Edit: Let me give another example, because I am curious how the "rules" would handle this.
Suppose there was a Heaven's Gate cult member here. And he took extreme umbrage that people described it as a suicide cult. He went hard that's uncharitable, and generalizing, and boo outgroup. And no matter how much you tried to point out that all the members of the cult, except for him, killed themselves, he just insisted they didn't. And it's really hurtful, and alienating, and unkind, to keep insisting that they did.
This is how it felt to me watching the groomer debate of a few weeks ago. By every act that we have come to recognize as grooming, grooming is occurring. And yet the side perpetrating it just doggedly claims they aren't, and out go the mod warnings that calling grooming grooming is unkind, uncharitable, generalizing, blah blah blah. What even are these rules? Are they supposed to facilitate truth finding? Or are they supposed to protect malicious actors who can just lie with a straight face and feign indignation? Or people so cognitively mutilated they can't draw the connection between their actions and their consequences?
This is false and not descriptive of any mod action I can recall. If you are describing behavior, you're fine. "This thing I have seen a lot of Blue Tribers do, it's narcissistic." You'd be fine. Did you notice the key words "a lot of" in the preceding sentence? That's all you need, but apparently that's too big an ask of you.
If "they" = specific groups of people doing the thing, you have not crossed a line.
If "they" = every person in my outgroup, you have crossed a line.
You know what we mean by "outgroup" and you know what we mean by "Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible" because you have been around too long to keep pretending you are "struggling to get" the rules. You know the rules. You know where the line is. You know because all I'd have to do is rewrite one of your boo outgroup polemics with the polarities reversed, something about all those MAGtard Red Tribe chuds (so racist and fascist, amirite?) and I am absolutely certain that you would have no problem identifying the lack of charity and unacceptable weakmanning and booing in that post, and you would remain unconvinced and unimpressed if I tried to defend it with a catalog of Red Tribe chuds being racist and fascist.
Who are the cannibals in this analogy? All Blue Tribers everywhere? Blue Tribers here in this forum? If you want to complain about cannibals eating your friends, point out the cannibals. You know, the people actually eating your friends.
Right, you really truly believe that all Blue Tribers are cannibals. All of them. And we're quokkas because we can't see them feasting on your friends and when you scream "They're all cannibals!" we're telling you "You can't say that, either point out the person actually eating people or knock it off."
I'm sure it's very frustrating to be the only person who can see the horror.
The problem here is, you are not wearing magic glasses and all of Blue Tribe is not cannibals.
"What if a literal Nazi was a member here claiming that the Nazis never killed any Jews?"
You can argue over questions of fact (did those other people do that thing?) without insulting that member. If you really equate half the population (i.e. everyone not politically aligned with you) with a suicide cult, then I guess you will continue to struggle with how to express your abhorrence of them without breaking the rules, but what I would actually suggest is to not use ad absurdum arguments. Yes, there are Blue Tribe members here, and no, you may not say they are all self-centered narcissists, even if that's what you really believe.
Are you talking about reddit, or TheMotte.org? If the latter, you're going to have to point me to the mod warnings in question, because even if they were mine, I don't remember them, and considering all the spurious reasoning above, I am deeply skeptical that you are accurately describing what happened.
"Why can't you fools see that I'm objectively right and my enemies really are that terrible and you should be taking my side, so please start enforcing the rules keeping in mind that my outgroup is in fact The Worst" never seems to go out of style.
Even granting that you sincerely believe this, try engaging in some epistemic humility.
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I think the point is, in the analogy you are locked in the room with 20,000 people on your side and 30,000 people on the other. When Steve vanishes and 20 of the other side look suspiciously fat and are wiping blood off their lips, then you can say that. But you don't get to tar the other 29,980 people in that group just because they are in the opposing group. For that you need evidence all of them ate Steve.
To push it back to the example you used "Blue tribers seem to think the world revolves around them, and if they can't eat absolutely every food item at a pot luck, nobody should." That is the equivalent of noticing some people in your opposing group are bossy picky eaters and extrapolating that to the Blue Tribe itself with no further evidence of that. Either you need evidence it applies to all of them OR restrict the critique to those who do the bad thing X themselves.
Note that mod feedback said your open was ok, where you said: "Maybe slightly, just because a lot of leftist I know are a bit neurotic and hypochondriac." because you restricted that to a sub set of leftists that you knew personally rather than all leftists. So a subset, informed by your observations.
I'm not a mod, but that is the difference that struck me.
The other 29,979 are bleating about "charity", and the 1 that goes "Hey... maybe you are onto something" vanishes next.
Then you need to say that and possibly evidence it before you can extrapolate it to groups. That's the rule to try and keep this place somewhat palatable to everyone (as much as possible of course). But even then notice you are bringing in more nuance!
Some of the Blue Tribe think the world revolves around them and others within the Blue Tribe enable them because X Y and Z is a more nuanced take that enables discussion more than Blue Tribe X.
Again I'm not a mod, but if you think all Blue Tribe bad, then it's going to be tricky to exist in a space which explicitly wants both Blue and Red to talk to each other constructively and so limits how broadly you can generalize your outgroup to be bad without doing a lot of work to back it up.
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He's right though.
Laughing about the pussification of the Blue Tribe seems strange at a time when they run the world, are winning so much that they are tired of winning, and their opponents have basically given up to the point where their best hope is for the Blue Tribe to self-destruct in a woke-stupid dumpster fire (admittedly a highly plausible outcome). But the basic error isn't new - people were talking about how wealth made the British soft before, during, and after the peak extent of the British Empire. More recently, people were using "they/them army" memes to explain why Russia would win in Ukraine.
What's the alternative to laughing though? Aside from the Hemingway impression forever whispering sweet nothings to me from the sidelines.
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so totally free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
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One angle of this is that the "winning" is the successful weaponization of said pussification. Crybullying. In other words, being a contemptible, pathetic pussy, and leaning hard into modern civilizational norms that reward being a pathetic pussy and deny any normal consequences. Attacking their social status is at least an actionable plan, until you can coordinate sufficient meanness to atomic wedgie the woke into oblivion.
Obviously there's a huge incentive to overgeneralize here, clearly there is more to Blue success than just sobbing about their sandy bussy until bureaucrats give in to their demands. But it's also not an imaginary phenomenon, it's an archetypal deployment of Slave Morality, which has a solid track record in the West. "Laughing at the pussification" seems useful to the extent that it's a search for an effective immune response to slave morality concern troll crybullying.
The crybullying only works at an individual level because the Blues have already won at the social level. Institutional rules that reward crybullying are imposed top-down by people who achieved power when the norms did not favour crybullying.
The bottom-up norms of the Blue Tribe treat white women’s tears - i.e. Blue elites and aspirant-elites crybullying each other - as almost as worthy of contempt as men’s tears.
Another way of thinking about it is that crybullying only works if you are a designated Blue client group. (The Red Tribe often try crybullying the Blues, and it doesn’t work). Crybullying culture only appeared when the Blues were powerful enough to have client groups.
I disagree. I think it works because it exploits values most people have - like compassion, justice, kindness, sense of belonging, desire to protect the weak - and weaponizes it to goals completely alien to these values. Most people do not have innate immunity for that, at least not yet. It's like the virus getting into the cell - it uses its own resources for the goals that have nothing to do with the goals the cell is for. Most non-tribers and red-tribers do not know what to do if somebody attacks them with "here's some oppressed people and either you do exactly what I say or you're the oppressor" - and most people do not want to be the oppressors. That's where the crybullying gets its power - from the desire of people to be good and fear of people to fail to be good, which is successfully weaponized.
Because Red Tribe's values make for them very hard to weaponize compassion. The tribe that values individual strength, individual responsibility, individual merit and individual freedom would find it hard to convincingly pretend to be a helpless victim of circumstances and evil conspiracies. It's hard for them to pretend to be an innocent victim convincingly enough for the feelings of sympathy to overwhelm logical defenses. They are not ambush predators by nature. So copying a strategy that was not designed for them is not going to work very well. You can't have a spider and a hawk to hunt the same way.
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"Blue Tribe" is a huge swath of people, and this sweeping generalization doesn't apply to the overwhelming majority who are psychologically healthy. This statement has got to violate several site rules around being kind, being no more antagonistic than necessary, not weakmaning to show how bad a group is, and there's no evidence cited for an inflammatory claim.
Agreed. Liberal (in the US sense) are more likely to be higher in neuroticism, as defined by the Big Five model, but it doesn't follow that liberals are generally neurotics. Americans are more likely to run for Congress than people in general, but Americans generally don't run for Congress.
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You’ve also got a general blue tribe tendency to go all in once they’re in survive mode- there’s no allergy that’s best avoided, it’s an allergy where accidental cross contamination could cause them to literally die.
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