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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27937 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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I am so profoundly glad I had my teens and 20-somethings before the age of, whatever this is. We had ICQ, AOL IM, irc, and to the best of my knowledge none of this was really permanent? Logs were all stored locally, if you missed something in irc, you just missed it. It was all far more ephemeral by nature.

I'm especially glad there are no recording of what went on at LAN parties even into our 20's. Or the insane conversations we had at college. Or the things we said drunk post college. Or the chauvinistic things we joked about when we started having some success with women.

Side note: Didn't we just get done watching liberals melt down over "comedy being illegal" because Jimmy Kimmel almost lost his job? Isn't Jay Jones still running in my state on a platform of making me suffer because I'm evil, I'm breeding little fascist, and I need to feel the boot until I change my politics? And not a single Democrat has called for him to drop out, or even withdrawn their endorsement?

JD has the right of this.

I am so profoundly glad I had my teens and 20-somethings before the age of, whatever this is. We had ICQ, AOL IM, irc, and to the best of my knowledge none of this was really permanent? Logs were all stored locally, if you missed something in irc, you just missed it. It was all far more ephemeral by nature.

I'm especially glad there are no recording of what went on at LAN parties even into our 20's. Or the insane conversations we had at college. Or the things we said drunk post college. Or the chauvinistic things we joked about when we started having some success with women.

Same. I said a lot of things as a teen and in my early 20s that I would deeply regret if they had been made permanent online. Thank goodness social media, and more importantly Twitter, wasn't a thing when I was most stupid.

My observation of young, confident males is that they are often disagreeable by their nature. The most hilarious thing in the world to me when I was young was watching one of my friends do or say something absurd that either straddled or blatantly crossed the line of what was considered acceptable to decent people. CKY (and then Jackass) had some of the funniest things I'd ever seen on video. I wasn't nearly as wild as some of the people I was acquainted with, but I would laugh very hard at the wild things they did. The incentive to be edgy in young male social circles is pretty high. All that being said, when you're running a political organization in the current era you cannot say the things they said and expect those logs not to be leaked. I think having some cooth goes a long way, even in today's world.

All that being said, when you're running a political organization in the current era you cannot say the things they said and expect those logs not to be leaked. I think having some cooth goes a long way, even in today's world.

Why? This was probably the first all male inclusive space (or so they thought) that they'd ever experienced. They'd been denied any third space to be boys their entire lives.

I mean, you aren't wrong, but also, what you expect is impossible in context.

Because politics and bed fellows, and because it has gradually become common knowledge that this is a "do so at your own risk" type situation where the risk appears to be increasing almost daily.

It is no longer smart to exchange jokes of that nature in text groups with your name attached to them while being a public figure of any kind, especially if you are a political figure.

If the context is, Young males should never make obscene jokes no matter the place or setting, then yes, that is impossible. If the context is, Young males who work with the public in a political role should never make obscene jokes in text chats that could be used against them later, then I think that is possible and it will work itself out naturally. Young, smart, politically active males looking to fill these roles will either take this story as a cautionary tale or they won't.

Or you could just work to remove the stigma against making obscene jokes in private chats. Vance's comment works toward this goal. The left has already done this for their people, there's no reason for the right to keep punishing their own.

See, but you skipped the part where I pointed out, how?! They have no third spaces to do so. None. Zero. Zilch. There is zero third space for male bonding. So of course the moment they find themselves in a remotely male third space, they begin doing the repressed male bonding rituals that are their nature. It's unfortunate that the first third space they found that fits the bill is a Young Republicans Group. But society failed them first, by denying them any other third space before that one.

Yeah, I see the predicament and agree it is a major problem for young males. To answer your "how?" question, I honestly don't know for the general population of young males, and it is a fair point. It currently serves as a natural filter to weed out those prone to edgy remarks and the occasional anti-social behavior (that is actually pro-social in context), but if the filter is applied to almost everything a young male does digitally, then the weeding out isn't just limited to bad weeds.

I googled myself in 2009 when I was a senior in highschool and the fourth result that came up was me on a Facebook post saying that a movie was stupid. In a group that I thought was private.

That was when I scrubbed what I could of old posts from Facebook and elsewhere that had my name attached. I started using reddit more instead to comment. But even on reddit I had it in the back of my mind that my username might be linked to my real name at some point.

Something in society has been damaged from everyone living in the panopticon. I don't even know what it is, because it has been this way my entire adult life. I do know that the way most people cope is by making the private spaces as different as they can.

Anyone leaking private space conversations is always the asshole. I try not to change my opinion of the victim of the leak, but that's not always doable.

'Did JD have anything to say about the comments on Charlie Kirk's shooting' is the pertinent question here, I think.

Don't care, and this is also a false equivalence. To the best of my knowledge, nobody was fired because of things they said about Charlie Kirk in leaked private messages. They were fired because they were in positions of trust (teacher, doctor, etc), and they posted horrific things endorsing his assassination publicly and proudly under their full name. These are not the same thing, don't pretend they are, I'm not playing along.

But that's how these arguments always go. Jay Jones wasn't directly telling his political opponents over SMS and then a phone call that they deserve to die, something which if I'd done would have been a terroristic threat, it was a "leaked private conversation" and a "joke". No, it fucking wasn't, and also, that's exactly what these Young Republicans are getting fired for.

I said before, when teachers were getting fired because nobody wants psychos like that teaching their children, that the left wasn't upset that the right were hypocrites, they were upset that the rules they thought were meant only for them were being used by others. Then Jimmy Kimmel was back on TV after blood libeling his political opponents, and people pretended cancel culture had been defeated.

I don't know how many times this needs to happen before people stop pretending the defectbots will never stop smashing defect.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody was fired because of things they said about Charlie Kirk in leaked private messages. They were fired because they were in positions of trust (teacher, doctor, etc), and they posted horrific things endorsing his assassination publicly and proudly under their full name. These are not the same thing, don't pretend they are, I'm not playing along.

They are the same thing. Both of these situations reflect the same interior motivations, and insofar as feeling joy at Charlie Kirk's death is horrific, all of these people ought to have been punished. It makes sense from a practical perspective to punish only the highest profile cases as a warning to the rest, but the point was not to punish people for "saying things".

Don't care, and

You waste time typing anything after "and" if you've already admitted you don't care. Anyway, pivoting from pearl-clutching over the other side being publicly edgy towards you to calling out pearl-clutching when it is directed at you, for any reason, is a whiplash hazard.

Not "did people who are freaking out about this have anything to say about the comments on Charlie Kirk"?

The principle of "who whom" has been, to my understanding, established to broadly apply to both sides. So the most new information that can be gained is whether it applies specifically to JD Vance.

The question is whether you are particupating in the "who whom" yourself.

Naturally.

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