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 -
Many things are habbening at once, here are for some more random culture war (and culture war by other means) news for the second part of the week.
Middle Eastern habbenings are already sufficiently covered elsewhere, things are going interesting even outside this part of the world.
1/Cancel culture files
Canceling machine is still running in overdrive mode, and it is coming for Cesar Chavez.
It turned out that "Moses of his people" routinely raped underage girls including another famous activist Dolores Huerta.
This is bad. Imagine if it came out that MLK raped Rosa Parks. That bad.
Many streets, schools, libraries, parks etc. are to be renamed soon.
It is already beginning.
2/Dukes, princes and kings of hazard files
Gambling is getting normalized and spreads all over the world.
Not only betting on sports for plebes, but betting on world habbenings for sophisticated situation monitorers.
In Washington DC, Polymarket just opened the world's first bar dedicated to monitoring the situation.
This sort of gambling, in addition to ruining people's finances and lives, adds another element of chaos to already spicy world's situations. With few clicks, anyone in even middling military/govt positions can personally greatly profit from insider info.
And if you are in high, decision making position ... another source of income opens, faster and more lucrative than old timey corruption and theft.
No suprise that tensions are running high.
3/US gun politics files
Illinois wants track all ammo and mandate microstamping of serial numbers to all ammunition.
Even if they could make it work, there is so much ammo already manufactured, you could say. This is no way to protect Black lives from gun violence!
This is the point. You cannot get the evil white gun hoarders for their guns (yet), but you can send them to prison for unserialized ammo.
4/Democracy files
In suprising news, Kim Jong-un wins North Korea’s parliamentary elections with 99.93% of the vote.
This was not something anyone could predict.
In 2023, Kim oversaw his party's WORST election results in 60 years, winning just 99.63% of votes.
But "to give up" is not in Kim Jong-un's dictionary.
He persisted.
He fought and regained trust of the people. May this tale of true grit and determination inspire all of us.
5/Woke culture files
You’re not hallucinating the great weirding of America
TL;DR: Wokeness is not dead yet. It might be wobbling at the top, but it is marching triumphantly across America.
Dinergoth is the aesthetic of ruined suburbia and dying small towns.
They are the mainstream now, they are not weird anymore. You are the weirdo.
6/Space invader files
Third recorded interstellar object at 16th March crossed the orbit of Jupiter and is now on the way out of Solar system.
So far, three interstellar objects were detected.
Number Two looked and behaved like ordinary snowy mudball, numbers One and Three were, in comparison to Solar system objects, very strange.
Either we live on rather busy interstellar highway, or interstellar objects are not at all like Solar system ones.
Alien starship monitoring community breathed in relief (and disappointment).
Close encounter with Jupiter was the opportunity for space battleship to rev up her engines and use Jupiter's gravity for course correction straight to Earth.
Previously, we had doubt about object origin. Now, we are certain that crew of 3I/Atlas is made of highly intelligent beings who saw nothing worth conquering on this monkey planet.
7/Cryptid files
The famous Patterson–Gimlin film was, for 59 years, known as the best evidence for existence of Bigfoot/Sasquatch.
Now, new documentary shows it all as "incredible hoax". Not only straight confession of Patterson's son Clint, but another 16mm film reel showing Bigfoot costume.
More links and sources here.
But, at the end, it doesn't matter.
Real or not, Bigfoot lives in our hearts. For forever.
While I compliment the author of that piece for coining the word "dinergoth", I'm not sure that I would make the same connection to wokeness that you are making here.
My main objection to wokeness was always more about the tactics than the things they advocate for. There are plenty of groups that believe in and advocate for weird things that I don't agree with from the Scientologists to the Jehovah's Witnesses. Heck, I think the Fundamentalist demonization of Harry Potter, Pokemon and D&D was always pretty silly, but I don't care about it as long as they don't make it my problem and attempt to restrict my access to things I enjoy through law. Wokeness crossed the line by trying to force everyone to live according to their dictates through a number of underhanded and illiberal tactics, but a little-L liberal wokeness would be as unobjectionable to me as any of the other crazy things my fellow country-men and -women believe in.
More than anything as I read the piece, I kind of wondered where the author has been for the last 20-30 years. A lot of the trends he was noticing for the first time with his dinergoth girlfriend were already in motion decades ago, as any kid who had a high school classmate who was a little too into Naruto can attest. I also don't think "dinergoth" actually captures what I see as the cause, which is the proliferation of "extremely online" subcultures as a pan-American phenomenon. This explains the loss of regional accents (which were probably already in decline from the TV era and the radio broadcast era before that), and why "weird" things like anime, memes, queer culture and many other things are becoming more common everywhere in the United States at once.
I just think that the author is a normie yuppie, probably raised by normie yuppies, and he's making the wrong generalizations about the why and how of "weirdness" in American culture. I think even if many young people didn't feel down and out in America, that we would probably still see a lot of the same weirdness. I found it especially funny the way he threw together phrases like "Nintendo Hispanic", as if Hispanics enjoying one of the longest running and most popular brands of video game consoles was some weird and mysterious thing that could only be explained by American decline and degeneracy.
The distinction you make between the sort of coercive vs. non-coercive wokeness sounds good, but it hasn't held up in practice. We really don’t have to speculate about that either because we’ve already seen how it has played out. At a certain point, little-L liberal wokeness reached critical mass within our institutions and they stopped being one perspective among many and instead became the framework that shaped all the norms and policies that these places enforced.
I suspect part of the issue is that a lot of the time, wokeness is more about the tactics than the actual beliefs. In other words, for example, a large number of wokies (perhaps most of them) don't start from the premise that they desire racial equality and then start thinking about ways to work for racial equality. Rather, these wokies really like the idea of terrorizing other people with ever-changing language rules; taking over buildings on college campuses; blocking traffic; getting laws passed to punish and humiliate their out-group; and so on. Wokeness gives them a means to pursue these activities while feeling righteous in doing so.
The problem I see with vorpa-glavo's comment is that it comes off like they think wokeness itself isn't really something that needs to be addressed, and that it only needs to be occasionally dealt with when it gets out of hand.
I, on the other hand, think it's more of a critical mass thing. Once an ideology reaches a certain scale, it obviously starts to affect the population, and at that point it almost inevitably develops coercive or oppressive elements, regardless of its original intent.
I started to use vorpa-glavo's example of Scientologists or Jehovah's Witnesses to make that point, but then I stopped and kept my orginal reply short. Nobody really cares about a quirky subculture or religion with strange beliefs so long as it doesn't have political power and control over the mainstream. But imagine instead of there being 1 million Scientologists there were 50 million Scientologists and they disproportionately controlled academia, media, corporate HR departments, and other institutions that affect how we view reality. At that point it wouldn’t just be a quirky and harmless belief system. It would define what is acceptable and what isn't, and it would be influencing policy in drastic ways that many people would not like. That's where we are with wokeness. It doesn't need to be occasionally batted down when it oversteps. We're past that point. It needs to be rooted out and removed.
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