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'm writing this off the cuff after sitting through a particularly tedious lunch conversation and having the feeling that there's a culture war angle here.
The conversation was basically dominated by two people excitedly trading drawn out and inane stories from their personal lives while the rest of the group occasionally tried making little interjections. If one person told a story the other related to, the other person had to quickly follow with their almost exact same story from their own life, start to finish with the same inane outcome, instead of saying something like "that happened to me too" and letting someone else talk.
I think there's a missing personality trait that I thought was conscientiousness, but it turns out that means something different (being organized and careful). The trait I am thinking of is more like "conscious awareness of reality," which is like, can you tell how your behavior is interacting with the people around you, do you work with theories of mind, are you able to weigh your thoughts and feelings and choose what to say next, etc.
Maybe this all boils down to rising autism numbers but I feel like this is something that is supposed to be learned, and I would hope that if you haven't learned this by the time you are an adult there is something wrong with you. Instead it seems to be almost the default human condition to anxiously spit up each little itemized story you've accumulated that is interesting only to you, or seal-clap when others do so, when instead you could be doing something interesting like asking open ended questions to the group because I feel like I encounter this constantly.
My gut feeling on this is that it's not just a kind of autism style drug or biological induced disease, it's more a symptom of cultural decay, and seems more like we have bad values -> we get worse people type of movement over time. And I feel like it could be a generally self-reinforcing thing where people are getting less "nutrition" from their conversations with others, therefore they spend more time alone, conversational skills decay, etc.
So this is a bit of a rant but maybe someone here has thoughts to debate or add onto this?
Man do I hear you,
brothersistersibling. This describes such a depressingly large portion of my daily small talk, online and offline, that I will display a stunning lack of awareness and reply with my own vent along largely the same lines, to draw the same inane outcome.This shit is so endemic that it must be some sort of fully general brainrot, possibly internet-induced. If I wanted to simply dump my shit I can talk to chatbots; we talk to other humans for that inexplicable feeling of namaste, "the light in me sees the light in you", a certain ineffable assurance that you are communicating with a conscious being - and in seeing your reflection in their eyes, become assured of your existence in the world. I increasingly feel like the demiurge has recently pushed a patch that fixes this bug and absolves humans of this need, and my software version is too old and retarded to be compatible. This tendency is everywhere, no matter where I turn I cannot unsee it.
PMs with friends? I am a person very ill fit for the modern internet - one that feels like reacting to everything you are sent is just common modesty. Namaste, etc. ...I started to see downsides to my approach in about the 100th tiktok/insta clip that my friend finds funny and sends me with no caption and no real relation to us per se. Memes of the olden era at least had a certain relatability(?) to them - haha literally me/us, haha funny word, haha [TOPICAL BLUNDER OF OUTGROUP] - whereas now it's mostly ragebait, some other sort of e-celeb slop, or barely comprehensible Jenga towers of irony best encapsulated by a median Max0r video.
Worse still, when I try to resist yearning for the slop and share (what looks to me) like topical, relevant things, half of the time I don't get a reaction at all. The slight sliver of sovl I try to dredge up goes literally ignored. Hans, are we the sloppers? I know one man's sovl is another man's slop but come the fuck on, not even a telegram react? Bruh.
Discord chats? Take the above and remove what little educational/relational value was left.
Email chains? Same shit mostly, except the tendency to answer a story with a story also very quickly bloats the response body until it takes over a day to cover everythint and reply at all, unless I take it upon myself to mercilessly prune chunks of it (and in doing so deprive the other person of acknowledgement).
Imageboards? You'd be lucky to get one actual thoughtful reply instead of some local samefagging retard who has made his life's calling to shit up this specific board/thread/general. (This is at least not new.)
Twitter? Thank fucking God I am not on Twitter, my heart goes out to everyone who is.
Youtube comments? If it's
eceleb slopcreator content, expect many """thoughtful""" Reddit-tier barely-related personal story from the poster's tumultuous life, something like "thanks for covering Doom 2, my sadly late grandfather would've loved this review so much when back in the day he was a real fan and <...>".Fuck, even literal music videos will inevitably have at least one highly-updooted traumadumping comment which barely pretends to be on topic. And don't even get me started on the comments to those comments, I think literally zero information exchange takes place there, its trauma dumping all the way down. Uplifting/powerful music? Stories of how it helps the poster overcome adversity. Sad music? Thrice as many stories about some immediate family member's death. Literally just a fucking cover of a song from a videogame? Scroll down and witness
Week long, man. I dread to imagine.
This shit is a plague, and it's absolutely tearing through the proverbial commons. My current spicy theory of why this is so rampant is because, after a decade of culture war and arbitrary censure of ever more innocuous viewpoints, the unwashed masses have finally internalized a lesson: faves may be problematic, today's Breathtaking Wholesome Person is tomorrow's Literally Nazi, the tides of kulturkampf are stupidly capricious - but amidst the tumult of it all, the Lived Experience is sacred. And so it is mounted as a preemptive shield, the last line of defense; your reaction or input on [anything] cannot be found problematic if you throw your entire self on top of it to shield it. This has been the case before with the rise of defensive "As a [PROGRESSIVE IDENTITY], my thoughts are..."-posting on Reddit and its ilk, and now this has finally trickled down to the masses, as meme economics say it must. We live in a fucking society. At least I still have this place.
exhales
...uh,
burgers?sorry, this tangent got away from me, I know it's overly cynical, its been a long time Nooticed and coalesced spontaneously while my melatonin is kicking in to help me sleep through my depressive episode. Get through this, suckers.To conclude, I agree. I am trying to resist this tendency myself and still include question marks and pronouns other than "I" in the things I write, even if I do not get this courtesy in turn, but I too am starting to feel outgunned. This seems to me like a true tragedy of the commons, and I have no idea how to even try fixing it.
Can you explain what youtube comments should look like? As you yourself noted, your comment was basically just a giant “me too man” parallel venting, following the OP, but what’s wrong with that? You commiserated with him and expanded upon it with your own thoughts. To me it seemed a fine comment, and if you and @somethingsomething had this exchange in person it would seem to me you two were having a good conversation. Perhaps I’m outing myself as an NPC or socially inept but this all seems fine and normal
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link