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 -
The Pogroms Will Continue Until We All Get Along
This is some good old fashioned culture warring. Happy New Year, y'all.
This clip has been popping up on twitter recently, most likely because Elon Musk re-tweeted it.
It's a doozy. I'm probably in too deep in AI land, but I thought for a moment it may have been a very well done deepfake. The cliches are just too juicy:
A little Wiki background on the host here turns up the clown world dial even more. This is an atheist progressive white woman who has a podcast with a title that is synonymous with exasperation. She's been wanting to speak to the manager since before it was cool. The Wiki entry concludes with a Hasan Piker endorsement. Hashtag resistance, hashtag StayWoke.
I thought both left and right were starting to slip into a post-post-liberal dichotomy. Gen Z conservatism was figuring out how long is was going to stay in its Nick Fuentes giga-irony phase before figuring out how to TradLife it up but with good vibes. Gen Z liberalism was establishing a pansexual polycule, ordering designer embryos, microdosing, and flirting with anti-semitism. Yas Queen, Globalize the Intifada.
Turning down my own sarcasm, this appears to be like a kind of resistance-within-the-resistance of severly disaffected former Obama style liberals / progressives who have decided to go full Provisional IRA. It isn't the weirdo terminally online language of Gen-Z etc, but a hyper violent rhetorical style of a group that feels they are the besieged templars of the Final Stand against The Big Bad. I didn't think this was, well, real. I thought the "Karen" archetype was mostly a lot of bad looks on very bad days for otherwise milquetoast suburban ladies. Mostly, I felt sympathy.
But these folks seem serious! If this is TollBooth losing some of his childlike wonder of the world, so be it.
There is something very interesting going on with middle-aged White women, you see it with the hosts of this podcast and with all the recent ICE protests too. Obviously, I get middle-aged women being the moralizing demographic of Christian moms protesting video games, but recently White women seem to be radicalized with a degree of violence that is unfamiliar and shocking to me. Now, they aren't going out and committing mass shootings but they seem to have an open bloodthirst that seems very uncharacteristic. Anyone have any theories what is happening here?
Edit: The fact that Jennifer Welch is a divorced divorce attorney probably puts her in the 99th percentile for hatred towards men.
Internet outrage is inherently futile. You can doomscroll through endless provocation, but no short form video is ever going to give your ape brain the catharsis it wants. That's why these same women go on Scream Retreats and post videos of themselves having unhinged meltdowns. And that's why they spiral into more and more extreme rhetoric (and eventually, action) - because no amount of performative fury spewed into a screen ever actually scratches that itch. Combine that with a total lack of experience with real violence, and the end result is this nonsense.
One of the notable things about the MN shooting was how hard people went giving Good the benefit of the doubt. Even most people who think it was a justifiable shooting presume she couldn't have really had a murderous intent. I doubt that's a valid presumption. We don't have info about her media habits, but given who she was associated with and what she was doing, it seems very plausible that she was mainlining deranged homicidal ideation towards ICE agents, in the form of videos and posts from women and soyboys who think of the situation as something between a Marvel movie and a 7 year old daydreaming about fighting off bandits.
Why not run the ICE agent over? They're basically Nazi Death Eaters. None of the videos in which some septum-pierced crazy person loomed at the camera while calling for the deaths of federal agents ever raised the possibility that they were people, or might leave a real corpse. They're basically CGI robot aliens that don't even bleed.
I presume she fantasized about using lethal violence and ICE agents, and that she would realize those fantasies if given sufficient permission structure by society. She surely held a general malice towards ICE, as presumably most ICE agents do towards these types of protesters. I still think it unlikely that she meant to drive into him at that moment. I doubt she was capable of the 3d spatial awareness necessary to clip him just enough to hurt but not seriously injure. Mostly I think it was woman driver not correctly perceiving how big her vehicle was and how it would accelerate on a slippery road.
The permission structure is here. She went to an openly advertised training session to learn about how to ram ICE agents with her car. Approximately zero people on her side condemn her for hitting an ICE agent, and approximately 100% of them would have openly feted her if she killed him. The only Democrat I am aware of who is calling this behavior/mentality a bad thing is John Fetterman, who is so unpopular with his party that he ought to flip teams if he wants a shot at being reelected.
No, massive difference in "type" of malice. In video after video, the attitude I see from ICE towards these protestors is the same attitude a retail worker has towards Karens. They are annoying fucking bitches, and sometimes they escalate things into genuinely stressful situations, but you mostly just want them to go the fuck away. And if they did go away, they would transmute from "target of malice" to "amusing work anecdote" about an hour later.
And the ICE attitude is actually even less extreme than that. Part of what makes the retail worker so molten furious is how powerless they feel. Conversely, the ICE agents are allowed to sass back and if things escalate enough, forcibly arrest the entitled assholes.
Sounds like women drivers who put themselves in stressful situations are inherently a threat to the public.
Do you have a source for this? It's the first I've heard of it.
NY Post.
I didn't see anything in this article to corroborate your specific claim. Per the article:
The article does not say that Renee Good received training in 'how to ram ICE agents with her car', merely that she had received training from ICE Watch. The article does seem to imply that Good's training involved ramming, but recall how "The Media Very Rarely Lies" -- the NY Post isn't stating it as fact, but merely pushing that interpretation by how it arranges true facts, in the same way that left-leaning outfits did their best to slander Rittenhouse without directly lying about the facts of the case.
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