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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23438 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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According to the results of a search right now, there has been no discussion here of the Pragmata controversy so far.

Wikipedia talk page

(There is no Wikipedia article on it, at least not yet.)

Summary on Know Your Meme

Shoeonhead's video

Forbes review

Slant Magazine review

I’d put forth the following arguments:

It seems the Blue Tribe generally views Gamergate as a propaganda defeat because they see it as a long-term contributor to the MAGA/alt-right phenomenon but at the same time I don’t think they concluded that they themselves are even partially to blame. Therefore they are looking for opportunities to fight back, and are now including the pedophilia accusation in their attacks on evil gamers. As far as I can say, this was generally not yet the case back in 2014.

I’m also noticing something that eluded me so far, namely that the probable reason why both the original Gamergate (the Zoe Quinn controversy) and the current controversy proved to be effective ragebait to the Blue Tribe is that they are fueling two of their grievances at once.

One: they generally believe that toxic loser men are aiming to police women's sex lives out of resentment and hatred. I don’t think they have anything specific in mind. (I once asked here what this stuff is even supposed to be. I only received one answer: ‘compelling or aggressively encouraging women to not be floozies.’) It’s just a general vibe that makes them feel the ick. It’s why they think Quinn was unjustly attacked.

Regarding Pragmata I think their train of thought is the following: this sleazy game feeds into the typical male fantasy of being the protector and patriarch of a nuclear family where he is supposedly owed sex, affection, food, services etc. His subjugated wife is the idealized woman who is virtuous and yet hot, basically a personal slut. And it’s not like these dudebros are making any effort to be the supportive, emotionally intelligent, suave etc. male ally that is worthy of a relationship, instead they want to realize their fantasies by curbing women’s freedoms. It’s just terribly gross.

Their other usual grievance, of course, is that toxic males want to appropriate hobbies and cordon them off for women, turning them into their own toxic ghettoized playgrounds.

If anything, the Pragmata "controversy" is an example of seeing the fake and gay culture war strings getting yanked in real time, or whatever metaphor you want, something something outrage farming, something something grifting. People say intentionally-outrageous things to get clicks, regardless of if it furthers their own stated ideological goals or even their reputation, because clicks are the sole aim.

This controversy has two elements to it: the pedo thing and the pro-family thing.

The pedo thing is just a cost of making anything with children in it, sorta like how anything anthro unfortunately attracts furries. Yes, they made the little girl very pretty. The bare legs/feet makes for a distinctive silhouette, but that also draws attention to her physicality. (Apparently pedos are really into feet, legs, and specifically the backs of knees, but that's precisely because those are parts of children's bodies that are typically exposed to view). Getting up in arms about accusing it of being a pedo game is someone actively trying to create generic moral panic outrage when there isn't any. If I run into someone in real life who goes off on an unprompted rant about how gamers are pedos and Pragmata is Incel Pedo Gamergate Misogyny Racism, I'll update my opinion and be disappointed.

The other element is a Hassan Piker line about how gamers (a lot of his audience and periphery audience, the guy is on Twitch) are pathetic losers something something. It's just outrage bait from an outrage baiter, what's annoying is that this naked-outrage-baiter hyperconsumerist grifting socialist gay-baiting himbo nepo-e-celeb gets fawned over and glazed by the NYT.

Socialists/Marxists shitting on the concept of the nuclear family isnt a good look for them, it annoys normies and sane people. Reminding normies that abolishing the family is technically on the Marxist platform is bad tactics when socialism is supposed to just mean "the government does nice things."

I think that the Marxist platform is very diverse because there are many kinds of Marxists. I think that most of them do not want to abolish the family.

As for Marx himself, as far as I know he did not want to abolish the family, he just wanted to get rid of the "bourgeois" style of family.

I'm no expert on Marxism though, so correct me if I'm wrong.

Perhaps most Marxists don't want to abolish the family.

But, most people who want to abolish the family are Marxists.

This is generally because they can't get a family for themselves for some reason, and they want [the qualities that make others able to do that] to be taken away from you and given to them. (Or they're academics.)

The way that's accomplished is to maximize the threat each person in the relationship poses to each other. This can range from most of the basic Western stuff that's "only" financially ruinous- no-fault divorce, alimony, child support- to the more extreme stuff like encouraging children to inform on their parents, separating them entirely Residential Schools-style, or mandating them be grown in a lab and punishing all sex as rape (the Demolition Man/1984 approach). Nobody's gone back to this in the modern age yet, but if they did, it'd look more like [1].

In this way, "the capacity to maintain a family" is redistributed by the State, with those that have it paying more of the bill in the form of needless oppression (as spouses and parents lack the moral hazards the State [as an extension of the people demanding redistribution] has in this matter), while at the same time allowing those with less to escape the consequences of lacking it by having the State exert pressure on the other member(s) in legible, pre-defined ways.

[1] The Harrison Bergeron-style handicapping method for functional families, where you're not allowed to talk to each other beyond an AI intermediate that perfectly mimics your [family member] screaming personalized insults at you for X amount of time before you can listen to whatever else they want to talk to you about. Conversations between couples are ranked based on how much you disagree naturally, so it could be several days before you're allowed to speak a single word to each other, in order to level the playing field for couples that can't do that.

(Actually, AI offers so many other possibilities for the virtue-Marxist; this is just one of them. Imagine a system imposed on you whose sole purpose is to cause you unbearable pain until you've abused your spouse or kid comparable to the State average. It's a handicapper general's, or equity commissioner's, wet dream.)

Yeah abolish the family is essentially capitalist propaganda the Soviet Union and Maoist China never tried or planned anything like that.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1926/07/the-russian-effort-to-abolish-marriage/306295/ "The Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage", written in 1926

When the Bolsheviki came into power in 1917 they regarded the family, like every other 'bourgeois' institution, with fierce hatred, and set out with a will to destroy it. 'To clear the family out of the accumulated dust of the ages we had to give it a good shakeup, and we did,' declared Madame Smidovich, a leading Communist and active participant in the recent discussion. So one of the first decrees of the Soviet Government abolished the term 'illegitimate children.' This was done simply by equalizing the legal status of all children, whether born in wedlock or out of it, and now the Soviet Government boasts that Russia is the only country where there are no illegitimate children. The father of a child is forced to contribute to its support, usually paying the mother a third of his salary in the event of a separation, provided she has no other means of livelihood.

Interesting, I didn't no about this. Though to modern eyes equalizing bastard children doesn't seem very radical.

Note that my quote from the same article clarifies that the original draft of the bill was much more radical, practically legalizing polygamy. But that portion was omitted from the final law.

Interesting. The early Soviet period was incredibly experimental but I didn't know this bit.

Better quote:

The session of the Tzik which discussed the abolition of marriage as an institution last autumn took place in the famous throneroom of the Tsars…

The bill was introduced by the Commissar for Justice, Mr. Kursky, a large man with tremendous blonde moustaches. He pointed out that whereas, according to the old law, the wife had no rights in the case of an unregistered marriage, the proposed law would give her the rights of a legal wife in holding property and other matters. Another new point was that wife and husband would have an equal right to claim support from the other, if unemployed or incapacitated for work. The woman would have the right to demand support for her child even if she lived with several men during the period of conception; but, in contrast to previous practice, she or the court would choose one man who would be held responsible for the support. Commissar Kursky seemed especially proud of this point because it differed so much from the "bourgeois customs" of Europe and America. In those countries, he said, the husband can bring a friend who declares that he also lived with the woman, and the latter is then left defenseless. In the villages, where sons continue to live with their parents long after they are married, the whole family is held responsible if a woman claims alimony, according to the original draft of the proposed law.

The opposition to the proposed law seemed to center around four points: (1) that it would abolish marriage; (2) that it would destroy the family; (3) that it would legalize polygamy and polyandry; (4) that it would ruin the peasants.

Leon Trotski also pronounced himself in favor of the proposed new law at a conference of medical workers engaged in medical maternity work. Trotski stressed the point that such a law, by giving more protection to women, would make for the benefit of the country's children.

Although discussion is still going on all over Russia, there seems to be little doubt that the bill, with certain modifications, will be passed at the next session of the Tzik, which will be held in the summer. The more important changes to the draft law, to which the Commissariat for Justice has agreed in deference to the widespread popular protests and opposition, are as follows:

Unregistered marriage will entail legal rights only in cases where the parties concerned mutually acknowledge each other as husband and wife, where it is established before a court that they lived together and had joint property, either by the testimony of a third party or by the evidence of their personal correspondence or other documents, where there was mutual material support or joint bringing up of children.

I genuinely can't tell whether you are being sarcastic or not.

No? but I'm happy to be corrected see my other post.

Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky all wrote at length about how "bonds of blood and affection" presented an obstacle to the revolution and would need to be at weakened if not eliminated in the name of social progress. They may have never literally uttered the precise words "abolish the family" but what they were advocating for was functionally indistinguishable from it. The bit in 1984 about schools teaching kids to rat on their parents and siblings was based on real world policies enacted by both the Third Reich and Soviet Union.

Furthermore, the position that children ultimately belong to the state and that parents are merely temporary custodians seems to remain a reasonably mainstream position amongst progressives to this day, and I would argue that this fundamental disagreement about who children belong to, their parents or the state, is the source of much of the vehemence and vitriol behind issues like school choice and whether schools should be allowed to keep secrets from parents.

I'm really not trying to nitpick as you made a really good faith effort to answer my honest question. But I just can't see it, by this standard the family has been abolished in many Western European countries which I don't think I've ever heard anyone say.

Could you provide the definition of "abolish the family" which neither the Soviet Union nor Maoist China tried or planned?

I don't know because I don't know how you'd even manage such a thing it seems fundamentally incompatible with human nature which I guess is why it works so well as an accusation. Actually I realize I might be totally wrong here and not understanding the criticism, so feel free for you or @JeSuisCharlie to correct me. I've only ever seen the allegation of abolishing the family in conservative fearmongering or Socialist apologists against the same. I know Marx wrote about abolishing the family in some 19th century context. But both the Soviet Union and Maoist China were full of families and maintained the institution of marriage and allowance for parental rights over children. If your going to say parents didn't have the right to educate their children themselves sure but that's true in many Western European countries and no one says they've abolished families. I guess just they fact that the Soviets and Maoist China were full of families and on a policy level they made no moves against this, I don't even understand how one would abolish the family but getting rid of marriage seems a basic first step but every socialist/communist country, except maybe Democratic Kampuchea, maintained the family as a basic unit of society. I suppose the Cultural Revolution had children denouncing parents which is an inversion of Confucian values and a deliberate effort to flatten the hierarchy but children denouncing parents often happens with mass hysteria the fundamental structure is still maintained. Again feel free to correct me I've always just seen it as a snarl accusation based on esoteric Marxist theory and self evidently false given that Communist societies were full of families.

I believe the official BLM website had a line about "disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure"

My point is that it's a cringe artifact of Marxism. It scares the hoes, so anyone who still holds to it is an idealogue, or a shock-jock farming outrage clicks.

The Soviet Union actually briefly tried it in the 20's, with children raised by the whole commune. The bigger problem was polyamory, as it greatly increased the prevalence of both drama and STDs in the communes.

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