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 would like to eat my words for an earlier post I made in response to @grognard. Apologies if this does not belong in a top level post but I'm not sure where to put it. I believe it does deserve its own post as a general commentary on the credibility of people on the internet.
I was extremely confident that this twitter post was posted by a disinformation, grift, or bot account. But it seems highly likely that this account is who he says he is, and has the credentials claimed.
After some google searching, I found a Facebook account under the same name, listing Army SF credentials with more specific details. I also found that account commenting on army related posts from around a decade ago. To tie that Facebook to the Twitter, going back to older Twitter posts I see posts from years ago referencing disc golf and jiu jitsu, both of which are found on his Facebook. The profile picture is similar enough though I'm not good at analyzing faces. Eric's public Facebook is mostly political posts similar to the Twitter, but is tagged in several posts from other local people who have not made political posts.
If this is a fake account, they played the looooooong game. So given the unlikeliness of that, I believe that it's highly likely that this twitter account is who he says he is and has special forces experience. I won't share the details to protect privacy but if you really want to it wouldn't be hard to dig up the same info.
So i guess the moral of the story is, maybe believe people when they say something, especially if it's been boosted by smart or influential people, since hopefully someone else out there has done their due diligence. Or at least don't dismiss them immediately at first glance. (I'm still triggered from when Nate Silver posted a link to a fake article) I'm also wondering if this is the first "real" entirely AI written piece to truly go viral and break out into the mainstream. I'm not aware of this happening before, though maybe it has. And goshdarnit I really, really, hate people who dump a huge wall of chatgpt because you have no idea what they were actually trying to say.
I think that the Twitter poster's use of military jargon is doing a lot of heavy lifting in his argument. Here is his key claim about what the anti-ICE forces are doing:
Let's break it down:
I don't know how Signal works, so I'll leave this one without comment.
I mean yeah, this is just specialization of labor, well-understood by humans for many thousands of years. Pretty much anyone who has been on a sports team or has had a job understands the idea of having different members of the organization focus on what they're good at.
This can just mean "some people are sitting around watching the feds and telling each other online where the feds are and how many of them there are, and there are enough such people that at least some of them are active at any time of day or night".
I don't know what a chat rotation is, but regularly deleting your data is the kind of thing that plenty of tech-savvy people would think to do, and would also recommend to others. And there is usually no shortage of tech-savvy people in large political movements in the US.
I mean, I should hope so. You don't have to be a military professional to figure out that this is a good idea.
Well yeah, of course sympathetic locals are going to help. That kind of goes without saying.
"People meet at each other's houses to discuss what is happening and plan further steps". I mean, yeah? Of course they do.
Yeah, most of them have cars. It's pretty easy for them to get around.
I've often thought that plenty of people seem to 'play' reddit the way I used to play massively-multiplayer games, and they just somehow missed the more appropriate outlet for their energy which would have served them (and the rest of us) better. And this kind of thing we're hearing about with these activist signal chats seems to be similar, just spilling out into real life.
In the 90s/00s, I missed out on actual early MMOs, but played a text-based browser game called Archmage, with maybe tens of thousands of players around the world at its height of popularity. You would gain like 1 turn per 15 minutes, such that you couldn't really 'play' more than once or twice a day. So the game really ended up being more socially-interactive metagaming, where people formed guilds, mixed it up on public & private forums, hung out in IRC, etc. There was scheming, strategizing, wars, alliances, propaganda campaigns, spying & fake identities, all kinds of fun emergent creativity. Some people were the superstars who were actually good at the game, others were reliable at monitoring opponents' activity at different timezones, some people had the social skills for being good leaders & diplomats.
I think there's an inclination to suggest that people waste their time and energy on games like this, and should instead put it toward something real-world productive. But I guess I'm practically the opposite now, and think people who managed to miss finding a 'gaming' outlet for expending & refining this kind of social energy are actually shitting up the commons by 'playing' less appropriate venues. Team sports, fraternities, and large mixed-up workplaces are at least pretty good alternatives. Being in discord/signal rooms for subreddits or local activism, not so much.
I agree with you that being an IRL Reddit anti-ICE protestor constitutes “shitting up the commons thinking life is a video game”, but I am simultaneously self-aware enough to realise that I only think this because it’s an objective I disagree with. If these were right-wing Reddit LARPers going out to help ICE round up foreigners then I’d consider it a heartening efflorescence of organic civic virtue.
As Dilos said of the Arcadians: brave amateurs, they do their part
Yeah originally I wrote "local inane activism", to leave room for causes that might be more deserving, but then edited that out to remove the subjective animosity. Though that just leaves it implied, if there are causes that someone feels deserve social-game-like energy. In this example at least, I would consider it more of a civic virtue for energized right-wingers to just join ICE rather than scheming & organizing into roles in backchannels to help them. Maybe to those who view ICE as the modern KKK, where regular people join up to get agency to 'just do stuff', it's basically the same thing.
Ultimately my pitch is slightly different than people acting like real life is a video game: it's that many people have a kind of energy that online social games are the perfect outlet for in the modern world, and not knowing that & missing out on them (or at least team sports, scouts, something) to scratch that itch leaves people obnoxiously channeling that unrefined energy elsewhere (even if I agree with a cause, LARPing is obnoxious, and I even cringe at past antics we got up to which were thankfully contained in games/sports/frats). But that could also be totally wrong, and my case would be in shambles if it turns out Pretti or Good or some powermods were epic WoW raiders or something, back in their day.
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