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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17147 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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So I've done my best recently to avoid being subjected to personalized social media feed. So my lurking on mastodon without account saw that something happened over at Bluesky and people were leaving to go to the fediverse instead. It turns out it is classical Culture War stuff. Bluesky is apparently imploding because of "Waffles".

So this is not a "boo outgroup" post, my observation is that bluesky is resisting its best of becoming an "ideological monoculture", failing at that though. It is as uninteresting because of the monoculture for me as getting an actual account mastodon instance or truth.social and gab due to the ideological alignment of majority of their users.

It seems that it is hard to make large scale "microblogging" platform that caters to heterodox political culture and I'm a little curious if there is any insight for why it is hard to make one?

Hilariously seems like Bluesky has the inverse of the Witches Problem.

The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.

They witch-hunted all the witches off Twitter, pushed them to Gab, Twitter, Parler, Truth, etc., then a new monarch came to power and let (most of) the witches return.

So the witch-hunters all filed off to form a new community that was in theory was against witch-hunts but also promised to prevent the witches from doing their witchy stuff too much.

Witch-Hunters started making some really questionable accusations and some of the accused just shrugged and returned to twitter, and a few leaned into it and antagonized the witch-hunters enough to garner the current reaction.

Like its crazy, Bluesky might have managed to gain real traction as a Twitter alternative if the users were allowed to have fun and the primary userbase wasn't exactly as censorious and bigoted (using the proper broad definition, look it up!) as their stereotype. Now its arguably a more petulant echo chamber/breeding ground for radicalism than ANY of the RW twitter alternatives.

Now they can't even easily return to twitter because the witches are pretty well entrenched. Also they've declared the owner of the site to be a particularly dangerous witch.

Hilariously seems like Bluesky has the inverse of the Witches Problem.

Like "reverse racism" is just racism, "inverse Witch Problem" just means the left did, in fact, have a Witch Problem. It's not a different thing.

The main distinction is that the right-wing witches were driven out by the left-wing witches, while the left-wing witches left because they were unable to continue to keep the right-wing witches out.

I feel like there is a useful distinction to be made between witches and witch hunters. The most commonly ascribed issue with witches is one of moral or spiritual corruption. Witches don't want to destroy witch hunters, they want to convert them into witches. Witch hunters on the other hand are all about accusing people of being witches and burning them at the stake to prevent their corruption from spreading.

I think that blueskies problem is with too many witch hunters and not enough witches.

Hard disagree. All that does is launder into the premises that there is a good version of being a lunatic fringe that is frothing at the mouth for violence. It once again centers this notion that even the crazy lefties have their heart in the right place.

I reject this fully.

I don't see how it launders in such a premise, especially if you know that all real world harms caused by witch hunts was caused by the hunters, not the witches.

Eeeeeeh, that's really not how the metaphor is used. At no point in any essay about "banning witches" has the premise been "but witches aren't real".

I mean, yes, in the real world there are no witches and witch hunters do more damage. But in the context of all the essays about "What happens when you ban witches, and by witches we mean right wing racist", witches are real and witch hunters are necessary.

I think that blueskies problem is with too many witch hunters and not enough witches.

Western societies in general suffer from a systems-level equivalent of an auto-immune disorder where the demand for witch activity far outstrips its supply.

Also, it is noteworthy that this case is literally "Burgers?". I guess life does imitate art.

Also, it is noteworthy that this case is literally "Burgers?". I guess life does imitate art.

Given how often Stone Toss gets parodied both by his fans and haters, I feel like someone must've already made an edit of that comic using "Waffles?" as a punchline, but I'm not clever enough to figure out what the joke would be.

Western societies in general suffer from a systems-level equivalent of an auto-immune disorder

I see what you did there.

Its witches all the way down.

Although in my mind the distinction is that most Right Wing Witches aren't trying to drive lefties out, they need 'em as a foil and might even enjoy the conflict. Its the lefties who are insistent they must burn the witches.

Driving away your opponent is not fun. The fun is keeping they/them alive and kicking while forcing them to watch you butcher their sacred cows

That seems more a right-wing thing than a left-wing thing, IMO (cf the owned by facts and logic genre, which is heavily right-wing).

The Left does need to have opponents, but the point of an opponent isn't for him to be humiliated over and over again. It's to offer a target to express power over, and particularly symbolic/verbal power, because that's where the Left dominates now. The Opponent's role is to say something and then be expelled, as a symbolic ritual. The Right cares about the psychological humiliation and hierarchy you can inflict on an individual, while the Left cares about using someone as an example pour encourager les autres.

But, if you keep on expelling people, eventually those people will be gone. So you have to find a new Opponent to maintain the ritual, and that's how Jesse Singal ends up the witch.

It does seem to me like you are on to something here. At least in the US context, "torture bad people until they become good" seems to be more of a right-wing solution, and "execute bad people in the town square and spit on their corpse" to be more of a left-wing one. Perhaps this is just of an outgrowth of individualism vs. collectivism - an (individualist) right-winger would feel that evil must be defeated within every individual, while a (collectivist) left-winger would be more concerned with the evil of groups and think that "reforming" individuals is a waste of time and effort when they are better used as a teaching piece.

(Seemingly relevant anecdata I can't slot into this theory: the concern of Puritan witch hunters with making their marks repent as they were tortured to death; Orwell's fantasy communists being obsessed with the same on a longer timescale, even as their real models didn't actually seem to be so concerned)

I don’t think that checks out.

The death penalty is extremely right-coded. Even back when opposition came from Christians it was considered progressive.

Instead, I would say conservatives are more comfortable with solutions that require any sort of violence. Domestically, that means “tough-on-crime” policy, low tolerance for riots, and at least lip service given to the Second Amendment. It might also apply to the neocon style of foreign interventionism.

The death penalty is extremely right-coded. Even back when opposition came from Christians it was considered progressive.

Yep. I recall the 1995 film Dead Man Walking featuring Susan Sarandon as a nun iirc, whose heart bled for convict Sean Penn

I think that what you are saying might be an orthogonal aspect of the modern left-right distinction, though? The Soviets, the Chinese and the revolutionary French all had no issues with "justice, prompt, severe, inflexible". In the scenarios we are talking about, the putative violence on either side is metaphorical, anyway - the Right "tortures" left-wingers with "facts and logic" or hanging-transsexual animated GIFs, while the Left "executes" right-wingers by summary bans and damnatio memoriae.

Even with the death penalty (for criminals, not heretics), I do also see some tendency towards being attached to the aspect where there is no quick timeline and the subject is kept in the dark whether they will be spending a day or a decade on death row. Admittedly the "free helicopter rides" meme does put more of a dent in my theory, though.

One possibility is that the Right implicitly accepts that there will always be disbelievers/bad people/whatever, and so the role of the inquisitor is to put them lower on the hierarchy. But the Left believes in the perfectability of society, and there's no room for bad people in a utopia.

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