site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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.

13
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Thanks but - side question- does Nitter just not ever work for anyone else?

nitter DOT net is based in Germany, and German instances seem to work worse for me. I use nitter DOT 1d4 DOT us which works pretty well. There is a list of public instances at https://xnaas.github.io/nitter-instances/

Interesting - your comment reads "twitter dot com is based in Germany," but I assume you wrote "nitter dot net is based in Germany,". A side-effect of the Nitter option in user settings?

Looks like it. I didn't realize bare domain names got automatically converted to links.

Let's test something:

twitter.com twitter.com twitter DOT com

twitter.com twitter.com nitter DOT net

Yes! Although it seems to vary from day to day for me. One day it will load fine or after a couple of refreshes, the next day it just won't load no matter how many times I refresh. Now if it doesn't load after the third refresh I just cave and replace twitter.com with twitter.c0m like the quitter I am. I know I could change my account settings back to not redirecting, but nitter really is so much better when it works.

Edit lol I am dumb

I self-host my own instance, hadn't had issues since.

Twitter's API has been throttling lately. Just keep hitting refresh periodically.

Tends to work for me, but if it doesn't work for you there is a profile setting to not update the links to nitter.

Ah, that there is. Thank you.