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 -
This was not a microaggression, it was a full-scale insult. I'm not sure what a microaggression towards a MAGA person would be, "Nice Hat", maybe?
Yeah but that’s the same sort of thing someone from 2019 who was pro cancellation would have said about the cancelled party
No, "microaggression" does actually have a meaning. It's supposed to mean those little things a privileged person does or (more often) says to marginalized people that add to their marginalization. It doesn't apply here; suggesting that e.g. black people were desperately trying to avoid responsibility for the Dylan Roof shooting would not be a microaggression.
The best illustration of a microagression I know of was in a Garfield comic, in which a television host asked his two-headed guest whether he had ever heard the expression "Two heads are better than one", to which the guest responded "Ever hear it eight gazillion times a day!?".
Man, this is also the best illustration of my take on the term - that it's just named wrong. It's close; it's very very close to being named correctly, but they just barely missed. What they mean is "microaggravator". An aggravator is something that is aggravating; it's unpleasant or irritating, particularly via the mechanism of happening over and over again. The micro bit is that it's, objectively, a small thing that is irritating, like the tag on your shirt being irritating.
Whereas to call it an "aggression" is just completely unsupportable. No one is committing a forceful attack, being hostile, etc., when they're too dumb to make a unique joke and say the stupid obvious thing for the gazillionth time. Not even a micro one.
I actually think it would be an affirmatively good thing if people talked about "microaggravators". It captures exactly the phenomenon that they claim to be pointing out, that sometimes people can find some things mildly irritating that you might not have realized, possibly due to different cultures or whatever. That seems perfectly fine. It's the bullshit move of trying to turn it into an aggression, a mini act of violence, alongside page after page of other nonsensical claims about what violence is, that, well, aggravates me. If "microaggression" is what they say it is, then using it that way is a microaggression against me, and they're literally committing a little act of violence against me every time they use that term that way. But really, it's just irritating to me; it's a microaggravator.
You're trying to work out the definition based on the etymology. Words generally don't work that way, and especially so for ideologically invented terms like "microaggression." The function of the word "aggression" in there isn't to describe what happened, it's to provide negative affect for anyone listening to the term.
The defining portion of a microaggression is that the microaggressor genuinely has no idea that he's doing anything aggravating to the microaggressed-upon. Their failure to model the other person well enough to recognize that what they said would be aggravating to them is enough to describe as an act of (micro) aggression. Implicit in this is the belief that all of society ought to restructure itself so that people who have been deemed "oppressed" doesn't suffer any sort of annoyance from others that they judge as "oppressive," without limit. This kind of pattern might appear familiar, because it's one of the guiding principles of modern progressive identity politics that you've probably seen play out all over the place.
This is what I'm explicitly against, ideology-based redefinitions that are clear perversions of the words, themselves, generally for the purpose of leveraging positive/negative affect for ideological purposes. War is Peace and all. No, sorry. We already have definitions.
I'm sure they genuinely have no idea that by doing this redefinition, they're microaggravating me. But if their definition holds, then again, they are committing a little act of violence against me every time they use the term that way.
Fair enough, but terms mean things based on how they're used, and the progressive identity politics crowd have done a pretty good job using this term (since they're generally the only ones who want to use it anyway). These people own the humanities and the media, so it'll be hard to keep them from redefining words as they see fit.
My personal attitude is that a rose by any other name smells just as sweet. Let's call it a microaggression and also acknowledge that microaggressions can be aggravating, they can be totally awesome and positive, they can be neutral, and anything in between, depending on the details. Just like how a White Supremacist can be a black egalitarian in treating individuals as individuals rather than representatives of their race, which means that white supremacists can be awesome people that we want more of in this society, depending on the details.
Absolutely. What did you think
decolonizationsocial justice meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? No, it's righteous violence to take away the chains that people we've judged as the oppressors are using to oppress the people we've judged as the oppressed. See, they've alreadydepicted themselves as the Chad and you as the soyjackjudged that they're fighting for Justice and that the people they like really are The Oppressed, which means that your complaints about them microaggressing upon you don't count.It's impressive what you can accomplish when logic, rationality, and reason are deemed as oppressive tools of white supremacy that should be
discardedused selectively as needed to achieve the desired outcome.I can simply regularly point out that War is Not Peace, that There Are Four Lights. Maybe people will not listen to me. I'm just some guy on an Internet Forum. But as for me and my comments, we'll just point out what is true and not worry too much about what bad things nebulous people may or may not continue to do (if I don't do what... start shooting people? I'm not going to stop them). Yes, people will still do bad things. No, I will not call those bad things good things. Sure, they might persist in recruiting others to do bad things. What did you think the gospel of Christ meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Righteous violence against political opponents? That we're going to magically stop people from doing bad things by writing comments in an Internet Forum? Mostly, we try to hold on to some measure of truth, observe that the wickedness of man becomes great in the Earth, and hope to not have to suffer too terribly in the intervening time.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link