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 -
We are now in the timeline where the journalistic integrity of the New York Times rests upon whether or not it is physically possible to train a dog to anally rape a human.
The New York Times ran an opinion article by Nicholas Kristof wherein a number of Palestinians report being raped or otherwise sexually assaulted in Israeli prisons. There’s not much in the way of physical evidence, but that is hardly unusual in rape crimes. Israel has strenuously denied the allegations, characterizing them as blood libel. It seems to be a he-said/she-said that comes down to whether you believe the Palestinian prisoners (who often have ties to Hamas or other extremist groups, hence why they ended up in Israeli prisons) or the IDF.
Certain enterprising young pro-Israel influencers think they can to better than appeal to untrustworthiness. They puport to have found a smoking gun that proves the NYT published a complete fabrication in order to libel the State of Israel, and by extension all Jews. One of the more salacious anecdotes regards a man from Gaza who alleges that he was raped by a dog.
If, in fact, such a thing were impossible, then it would prove without doubt that the paper of record recklessly printed unverified falsehoods. We are now in the “doctors arguing with the author about the medical literature” stage of the discourse. See, even though we have documented evidence that dogs can cause rectal injury to humans, in none of those reports was the initial contact involuntary on the part of the human.
I am not well acquainted with dogs, but my understanding is that it is not particularly hard to get them to hump things. I guess the people making this argument are hoping that others won’t want to think too hard about the mechanics of dog rape.
Despite calls and rumors to the contrary, The Times so far has declined to retract the article.
I love the argument that dogs have sex with humans, yes, but they can't rape humans because they have an instinctual understanding of the Oberlin model of consent.
You know I always just assumed the vast majority of dog beastiality was like receptive oral where the human smears peanut butter on their genetalia or the dog is the receptive one either vaginally or anally.
I suppose training an adolescent dog to be the one penetrating is possible but it seems extremely difficult; aren’t dog members not nearly as stiff as humans? I don’t know how much anal sex you’ve had but it’s an “out” hole and it fights back more than a bit when compared to a vagina, unless it’s been really “trained up” so to speak.
Someone up thread described this as essentially a blood libel and it seems more likely; dogs are a very specific Arab / Muslim taboo so it smells like a maximally offensive myth made specifically to inflame an already maximally uncharitable audience primed to believe basically anything.
To my mind it reminds me of the 19th century Indian revolt against the British Empire. One of the precursors was a rumor spread amongst Indians serving as auxiliaries that the rifle cartridges were stored in beef fat. And crucially for my point, they told the Muslims that they were stored in pork fat. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, eh?
Plus, if you wanted to sexually brutalize prisoners there’s a lot easier ways to do it. We got a ton of examples of this.
Ironically this reminds me a bit of that old /pol/ bit about holocaust survivors talking about nazis freezing Jews with dry ice and putting them on mine carts so that they smash into a million pieces looney toons style. Way too baroque to be true but the ones spinning the yarn are given maximum charity due to their “victim” status.
The “Dogs raping prisoners” schtick is a double blood libel as well as it’s a pretty standard lefty canard against any unfavorable regime; I believe the same accusations were leveled against Pinochet, Franco, the Greek Military Junta, etc, etc. usually the CIA is invoked, as is tradition.
A final point; this to me is also illustrative of how certain sexual topics that are politically explosive are difficult to discuss because people are understandably reluctant to engage with the mechanics of the subject. I think for example the backlash against LGBQT ideology only could grow because increasing numbers of people were willing to frankly describe, outside of the gatekeepers eye, the physical acts being performed routinely in great detail. The rest followed.
Oral and anal sex? Non-monogamy? I know they do that. "They" being a portion of gay men. You got something more scandalous?
Very few people are scandalized by anal sex nowadays, it’s the fact that the average gay men has an astronomical amount of sexual partners compared to heterosexual men, and the most sexually active 10% of the population are essentially the male version of Bonnie Blue.
This combined with the prevalence of PreP usage, which is shockingly high to the average heterosexual, are the things that as they become common knowledge dismantle a lot of the “shucks, they’re just like us” line that the 90s and the 2000s cultural era built up so carefully.
In urban settings you can get a blowjob off of grindr faster than you can get a goddamn pizza delivered.
In the 90s and 2000s politically active homophobia used to be basically just the province of right wing religious types, that ship has sailed as we learn a lot more things than we wanted to know about each other via social media. Now it’s increasingly normal for secular people to be disgusted by this sexual culture, even if they keep it to themselves in public.
The whole monkey pox episode was a microcosm of this, once it seemed obvious it was sexual transmitted and certain people couldn’t stop sucking and fucking bareback at an extraordinary rate in order to actually combat the outbreak, it was dropped as a story. But people noticed, and remembered.
My favorite line about hyper partisanship in the social media age when magical “algorithms” are brought to be the ritual scapegoat in the divided society, I simply say “No, we just know a lot more about each other because we volunteer what would have been private or semi-private information freely to huge audiences. Certain groups were encouraged and told no behavior from them can be shameful. So now we know much more about each other and have collectively decided we don’t like each other much.”
Or to put it another way “They’re not confessing, they’re bragging.
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