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 -
I honestly can't tell whether you're being ironic or just aggressively misunderstanding my point. I feel like the most generous thing I can say might be "keep in mind your aims in writing this response to me; now go back and read my post with the idea that I was trying to make the same point to magicalkittycat, for analogous reasons, as you had when writing this response to me."
Less charitably, I did find this line to be unmitigated bullshit:
I am not running cover for antisemitism on the right, and nothing I wrote can be reasonably construed that way. Hell, I am occasionally accused, here, as a moderator, of running cover for the Jews! But neither do I think that the antisemitic left should be simply allowed to do what it does because everyone is so distracted by the tiki torch cosplayers they fail to notice (or outright excuse) blatant antisemitism from the left and its political allies. (And while the 9/11 hijackers weren't formally "leftists," their presence in the United States was arguably traceable to changes in American immigration law plausibly attributed to the left.)
My beef is with identitarians. To my mind, the main difference between leftist identitarians and right-wing identitarians is that right-wing identitarians are a bunch of reactionaries doing reactionary things. Leftists set the stage, defined the terms, and picked the fight. Reactionaries are doing exactly what (as @Fruck correctly observes) the radicals were told they would do. I don't like it. I don't agree with it. I think that nothing good will ever come of identitarianism, no matter how righteous-minded its practitioners. I don't think any of it is good. But neither do I think it reasonable to apportion blame equally to both sides; this is a mess of progressivism's making.
Discussing the culture wars is not the same as waging them. Yes, I acknowledge that people do wage them, to various degrees. But we do try to discourage that.
I am neither being ironic, nor am I aggressively misunderstanding you. Thankfully options exist outside your false dichotomy!
Thank you for your honesty. Now, moderator, ban thyself.
Your post was a mix of whataboutism, if it's true that there are nazis on the right it's not their (red tribe) fault, and oh, while I hate nazis they'll treat me better than the woke police. Insofar as 'running cover' implies you have some secret agenda to promote Nazi material, no, I don't think it's true. Insofar as you're sequentially denying, deflecting blame, minimizing (lol Tiki Torch cosplayers) and whatabouting - yes, you're running cover for them.
In reality, you are a flawlessly objective crystal passing judgment from on high. You have principles that you live your life by, and you chide the left and the right equally, god damnit! Anything less would be to descend into partisan hackery.
And Nara, I am (whatever people may think) fundamentally of this place. I believe that we should strive towards objectivity, that it exists, I deeply believe in mistake theory and progress and that things are getting better and discussion is good. I reject the people on the left who claim that everything is political, nobody is objective and it's all just white supremacist/patriarchal/isms all the way down and doubly so if you're a white man.
But dude, I have to actually invoke that progressive argument here, much as it pains me. You fit the trope of the partisan pretending to be objective and principled to a T to avoid confronting the fact that you are, in fact, also waging the culture war most of the time.
Tiki torch cosplayers vs. blatant antisemitism. I am impressed by your objective framing of the political situation!
Your beef is with the vast majority of the modern left. Seriously, replace identitarian with vast majority of the modern left - is your statement significantly different?
Nara, go to West Philly. Go to Baltimore. Go to Chicago. Much as I love your race-blind ideals, much as they resonate with me, the modern incarnation of progressivism and identitarianism didn't build the slums and the poverty and the suffering. Cancel culture wasn't a thing during the Rodney King riots. You can't be naive enough to ask an entire nation not to Notice that people of one skin color are overwhelmingly worse off, and it doesn't even matter what the cause is. People take that information in the direction they prefer.
The problem is that people like waging the culture war. I commend you and the moderation team, because the failing lies with the users. You can't mod yourself a better forum population.
It looks from this post as if "aggressively misunderstanding" is still in fact what you're doing, though--including, here, by skipping the most generous recommendation I could think of. Look--
My point was that magicalkittycat was engaged with a mixture of whataboutism and the Chinese Robber fallacy that is presently circulating in furtherance of running cover for Leftist antisemitism. Insofar as 'running cover' implies the news media has some secret agenda to promote antisemitism, no, I don't think it's true. Insofar as they're sequentially denying, deflecting blame, minimizing and whatabouting, yes, they're running cover for antisemitism.
Every once in a while it will happen that I am in a conversation with someone here, using the terms and tropes of this place, and it will turn into a kind of "no, you" debate. This seems to be most common with motte-and-bailey arguments--"no, I'm not playing in the bailey, you're playing the bailey!" Sometimes people find ways out by finding a good word to taboo, or through careful charity, or whatever. I'm honestly not great at this (Zorba is genuinely great at it) but I do try. Anyway we seem to be in one of those circles now, where I get accused of whataboutism (maybe simply because I'm not the OP, and so there's a "first mover" advantage or something) for pointing out how OP's sources are engaged in a kind of whataboutism.
Right, and the circlular firing squad for this argument is the one where I point out that you're playing the role of the leftist who simultaneously speaks as the arbiter and adherent of objectivity and truth while downplaying the possibility (or at least likelihood) of objectivity and truth. Why is it that forums with actual free speech so often begin leaning to the right--almost as though leftism can't stand on its own two feet? Clearly I am not without my priors! And yet exactly one of us in this discussion has frankly admitted the existence of, and offered criticism against, both right-wing and left-wing antisemitism and racism, and it isn't you. I wasn't kidding, here:
Yes! White supremacy is not a new kind of identitarianism, though the term "white supremacy" has gotten woefully overextended and maliciously distorted in furtherance of Leftist aims. And I think a lot of Leftists are not identitarians, though sometimes they have to be reminded of that. The anti-Woke Left is not a group of insignificant size--and relevantly, my sense of this forum is that most users are anti-Woke leftists who have been surprised to find themselves in the center-Right of the Overton window, as radicals have stretched it to reach the territory of identitarian spoils systems.
The main difference between left-wing identitarians and right-wing identitarians so far is that left-wing identitarians mostly control their political coalition (the Democratic Party) while right-wing identitarians remain at the fringes--albeit, less at the fringes than they were before the Great Awokening. With specific reference to antisemitism, the antisemites on the Right are reactionaries who fetishize a failed effort to implement national socialism in a country they often know nothing about. The antisemites on the Left, by contrast, are the vanguard of Islamofacism, a movement with at least tens of millions of supporters around the globe, who are prosecuting a centuries-long grudge against the ideological descendants of Judaism and Christianity. I don't think it's "whataboutism" or "running cover" to suggest that if we're going to talk about political antisemitism, we should talk about all of it, not just those bits of it that are most convenient to our preferred narratives.
I echo @Chrisprattalpharaptr’s half-bemused, half-despairing incredulity at the fact that you apparently genuinely think that MAGA isn’t an identitarian movement.
‘Remove the log from your own eye’, indeed.
I suppose you can make the case that they are "identitarian" in some vague abstract sense, but you're just not going to find the kind of racist screeds published by MAGA that routinely get published by progressive institutions. Or if I'm wrong feel free to enlighten me, but you seem like the one with the log in the eye.
Give me the worst such screed you can find, and I guarantee you that I can give you a MAGA screed that’s just as bad, if not worse.
Okay, let's start with something basic. Here's 3 day training that Lockheed Martin executives were sent to, where they were asked to connect the term "white men" with terms like "old, racist, privileged, anti-women, angry, Aryan Nation, KKK, Founding fathers, guns, guilty, can’t jump.". Or here's a chart by the Smithsonian that's so anti-white that it somehow managed to flip over into being racist against non-whites.
Eh, fuck it.
After spending the better part of a day dumpster-diving through the worst MAGA shit I could find, I finally started wondering why I was doing any of this.
I mean, shit, it’s not like whatever I can throw at you is likely to convince you that actually, you’re wrong and I’m right; any more than than your (IMO unimpressive) examples actually convinced me that I’m wrong and you’re right. All I’ll succeed at is wasting both our time, probably irritating you with my unwillingness to cede any ground in the face of what you consider to be indisputable evidence, and further disgruntling me with continued exposure to anti-woke talking points.
So whatever; you win, I guess. Congratulations on your argumentative stamina. Feel free to get in the last words at your leisure.
If you haven't yet completely flounced, would you mind posting what you found anyways? I'm working on something of a steelman of your and magicalkittycat's positions and I'd like to see what you managed to dig up.
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