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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   33742 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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Do we want each other dead?

True, I may not want your idea or voice in the world.

I might be happy if it just went away.

If all those like you went away, think what my side could achieve unopposed!

But I would not support what would be needed for you to 'just go away'.

Moreover I know that there are countless other aspects to you (hypothetical asshole) that I might not find as tiresome as your online persona.

No doubt if I met you we could find something to bond over.

If I watched you with people you love, I might warm to you.

Even if I saw you, a stranger, being hurt, I would doubtless hate to see that (let's assume there is no slapstick element; admittedly that might change the equation).

But I can't see any of these things.

All I can see are the asshole-ish parts of you that peek at me through the distancing device that is my laptop.

And if those parts vanished, I might be able to convince myself to forget about all the other putative parts.

And perhaps depending on how my day and life were going, I might be glad of whatever must have happened to make your asshole-ish online parts disappear.

I perceive all this more or less symmetrically.

You'd be happy if my ideas and voice went away too. Be honest.

Your contempt for that which I share with you through our screens is evident.

Or maybe you're a supporter of someone who expresses contempt for me.

Someone who views everything as combat.

If I just went away, he'd be good with it.

You'd be good with it.

Hell, maybe people like me are an obstacle to your goals, and if we all went away, all your dreams would come true.

But still. You're like me.

You wouldn't want anything done to me really.

Actually, if you met me, you'd probably like and respect me.

It's true – even if you say you're done with the concept of empathy.

We'd probably disagree on a lot of things, but we'd make it work.

You'd probably even wince if you happened to see me fall over, unless it was an especially hilarious fall.

Nonetheless, in your weaker moments, you might be glad if something happened and the news reached you that my voice was to be no more.

So I don't think we're so different.

There's nothing more to solve than our respective asshole-ish parts clashing over distant, linked screens.

Sort that little issue out and we can be friends.

The only problem is, it's not just the two of us here.

No, we don't want each other dead. Most people are really peaceful, to the point that even in some of the most extreme times in history countries have to conscript and draft able bodied youth to fight for them because they won't do it willingly. Even in self defense like Ukraine, a country fighting for itself against an invading force is still something like 1 volunteer for every 3 drafted.

We have all sorts of phrases expressing a similar sentiment "bark is worse than their bite" "talk is cheap" "all talk and no action" "actions speak louder than words" "paper tiger" "keyboard warrior" etc. This sentiment is that people say things to sound tough and cool, but in reality the large large large majority won't ever actually do it.

It's basically all signaling, a person who says "Look at me support super controversial in-group aligned thing" signals how dedicated they are without ever actually having to do shit. It's just as believable as other bullshit like "I'd do anything for you" in a newly formed relationship. Also of course a great SSC piece on this type of thing

In the same way, publicizing how strongly you believe an accusation that is obviously true signals nothing. Even hard-core anti-feminists would believe a rape accusation that was caught on video. A moral action that can be taken just as well by an outgroup member as an ingroup member is crappy signaling and crappy identity politics. If you want to signal how strongly you believe in taking victims seriously, you talk about it in the context of the least credible case you can find.

Publicizing how we're all basically the same and peaceful doesn't signal too much. Publicizing the hate you have for out-group and how you support the Thing Others Won't Support is lots of loyalty signal.

..

I propose that the Michael Brown case went viral – rather than the Eric Garner case or any of the hundreds of others – because of the PETA Principle. It was controversial. A bunch of people said it was an outrage. A bunch of other people said Brown totally started it, and the officer involved was a victim of a liberal media that was hungry to paint his desperate self-defense as racist, and so the people calling it an outrage were themselves an outrage. Everyone got a great opportunity to signal allegiance to their own political tribe and discuss how the opposing political tribe were vile racists / evil race-hustlers. There was a steady stream of potentially triggering articles to share on Facebook to provoke your friends and enemies to counter-share articles that would trigger you.

Also of course, a bit of Moloch

Under Moloch, everyone is irresistibly incentivized to ignore the things that unite us in favor of forever picking at the things that divide us in exactly the way that is most likely to make them more divisive. Race relations are at historic lows not because white people and black people disagree on very much, but because the media absolutely worked its tuchus off to find the single issue that white people and black people disagreed over the most and ensure that it was the only issue anybody would talk about. Men’s rights activists and feminists hate each other not because there’s a huge divide in how people of different genders think, but because only the most extreme examples of either side will ever gain traction, and those only when they are framed as attacks on the other side.

People talk about the shift from old print-based journalism to the new world of social media and the sites adapted to serve it. These are fast, responsive, and only just beginning to discover the power of controversy. They are memetic evolution shot into hyperdrive, and the omega point is a well-tuned machine optimized to search the world for the most controversial and counterproductive issues, then make sure no one can talk about anything else. An engine that creates money by burning the few remaining shreds of cooperation, bipartisanship and social trust.

No, we don't want each other dead.

Callous indifference continues to be an underrated descriptor complicating perception and reality of how much one side hates the other.

Only a small fraction want each other dead. Of those that do, only a tiny fraction would do anything to achieve those deaths. But there's a much larger fraction who are at best indifferent to deaths among The Other. Fine, to some extent that's signaling (of an extremely sick culture), but that still matters!

It's basically all signaling, a person who says "Look at me support super controversial in-group aligned thing" signals how dedicated they are without ever actually having to do shit.

The catch to this attitude being that ignoring how much someone hates you can have, relatively rarely but importantly non-zero times, quite disastrous results. I think there is very little to be lost following the adage "if someone says they hate you, believe them," and potentially a lot to be lost by ignoring clear signals of danger.

Callous indifference continues to be an underrated descriptor complicating perception and reality of how much one side hates the other.

Only a small fraction want each other dead. Of those that do, only a tiny fraction would do anything to achieve those deaths. But there's a much larger fraction who are at best indifferent to deaths among The Other. Fine, to some extent that's signaling (of an extremely sick culture), but that still matters!

Most people not giving a shit is common, but also not particularly bad. Do you know anything about what is happening in Sudan or Myanmar or whatever else? I don't! The average American doesn't!

I don't even know what's happening in the next street over and frankly I don't really care that much if it doesn't impact me. I'm not gonna intervene if I overhear someone say "Oh did you know Joe on 123 next street over beats his wife sometimes?" I just want the police to show up and arrest Joe, but I ain't getting personally involved and I'm not blaming Joe's neighbors or coworkers for his actions.

Does that make me evil? If it does, it's an incredibly common very banal evil that basically everybody has about something.

that much if it doesn't impact me

That's the big catch. The likelihood of anything in Sudan affecting me is basically zero. The likelihood of, say, inappropriate police behavior caught on video going viral and affecting me for months or years is not high, but significantly non-zero.

We have a culture that prioritizes concern based on identity, and in some ways it's a banal evil (cueing Hannah Arendt?), and in some ways it's an encouragement for people to violate or otherwise ignore their stated principles.

All this is true, and yet most people aren't all people.

The world is full of keyboard warriors. The real ones are in the military or prison.

Now you know why each political party wants to put their warriors in the streets.

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