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 think more generally it's that you remember and internalize what offended and outraged you, and not what didn't. I'm sure there's a certain kind of trans skeptical person that can cite chapter and verse of every bad thing a trans person has done in the United States over the last 10 years, while your average trans-friendly progressive either didn't hear about such incidents or even if they did hear about them, they weren't horribly offended by them or were happy to say something like, "Yeah, trans people are human, they do bad things just like everyone else," and moved on with their lives.
In a way, it is a form of political myopia that basically everyone who sees themselves as part of a larger political coalition ends up experiencing. The only way to avoid it is to feel in your bones that neither the Right nor the Left are "us", and to instead center your "us" in some completely orthogonal grouping. Otherwise, it will take constant effort to correct for this "myopia" due to then nature of human psychology. And most people don't want to correct the myopia because righteous fury feels good.
There's certainly truth to that, in that most people tend to downplay the infractions of their friends and play up the infractions of their enemies. However, I consistently observe a meaningful difference in how left-wingers and right-wingers have talked about political violence over the past decade, which I think reflects their differing attitudes towards politics more broadly.
Left-wingers (or, more properly, the forerunners of the social justice movement) brought us the phrase "everything is political". While obnoxious to argue against because it involves dealing with people playing word games, it at least clarifies how many of them view the world. You don't have to struggle to get them to acknowledge the political nature of an act. Right-wingers (or at least the current populist-right), by contrast, have a habit of dividing things into 'not political' (meaning: reflects their beliefs/assumptions) and 'political' (meaning: challenges their beliefs/assumptions). Thus you get RWers complain about something being made political because, e.g. it has a gay character or something.
This difference in mindset impacts the way they process acts of political violence. For left wingers, they might condemn it, they might support it, they might try to disown it depending on their mood, particular beliefs, and the act in question, but they're generally not going to insist it wasn't political or didn't happen or doesn't count because the perp was crazy. This is not the case for right-wingers. Right-wing political violence is almost always either outright denied or shifted to another category in the eyes of the broader right (often in a way that is incoherent).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link