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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8298 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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Have you stopped beating your wife?

  • If you answer “yes,” you’re either a liar or an (reformed?) abuser.
  • If you answer “no”, you’re either an abuser or a pedant.
  • If you refuse to answer, or give a waffly non answer, what does it mean?

You can also answer "I've never started", no one can actually force you to give a yes / no answer.

The reason progressives refuse to answer "what is a woman" isn't because it's some sort of trick question, it's because any possible answer is offensive to some part of their ideology. That's the only reason they settled on "anyone who identifies as a woman" even though it doesn't actually answer the question, and makes them look deranged - it beats the alternative of straying in to heresy.

Right.

There is an obvious third reason: you aren’t an abuser, but it takes more verbiage to explain so, because the question is stacked against you. Both of the one-word answers are inadequate by design. You are forced to spend more time structuring your defense than the opponent had to spend making the attack.

Adding qualifiers makes your answer weaker. Doubly so if your every word is being mined for sound bites. The most charismatic and agile speakers can still manage it, making a “gotcha” look like a normal question. (I was reading some of the Lincoln-Douglas highlights, and they’re chock full of qualifiers and hypotheticals. It was a different time.) These clips are not particularly charismatic.

Adding qualifiers makes your answer weaker. Doubly so if your every word is being mined for sound bites. The most charismatic and agile speakers can still manage it, making a “gotcha” look like a normal question.

It's not about sounding weak or soundbites, it's not about looking good in clips, and it's not about charisma. This happens all the same in autistic wordcell forums, where people write page-long arguments, and getting clipped is simply not a relevant dynamic. We still either claims that the question itself is somehow unfair, with no explanation what isunfair about it, or Celestial-body-NOS's heroic attempts to come up with something, and quickly running into one of the contradictions with an important part of the progressive ideology.

I can walk you through all the options and point out how they run afoul of progressivism. I can explain why "anyone who identifies as a woman" really is the only option for them.

I can understand that you want to be fair to all sides here, but ideologies do sometimes paint themselves into corners, and there's nothing wrong or tribal about that out. Do you think creationists or flat earthers are being unfairly gotcha'd, or is it that they just don't have good answers to many questions, and have to resort to mental gymnastics? I know, the question might seem provocative in itself, how can I compare reasonable people like liberals, progressives, and academics to religious and conspiracist weirdos. If this thought went through your head, consider that you're the tribalist one that wants your tribe to control the narrative. I'm just saying there are weirdos with goofy ideas on either side.

You can also answer "I've never started", no one can actually force you to give a yes / no answer.

"Force" is doing all the lifting, there. They can try so intensely hard to force you to give a yes or no answer that you have to either counter-bully or play slippery, and either way, you've lost just as hard. The only defense that works is to lean into the worst possible response and dare them to try and guilt-trip you over it, and that comes with its own set of issues.

They can try so intensely hard to force you to give a yes or no answer that you have to either counter-bully or play slippery, and either way, you've lost just as hard.

No, normally they can't, it would make them look unhinged.

Here's a recent example of what you're talking about. The only reason it worked is because the target of the tactic is responsible for an unhinged statement she's not willing to defend, but can't back down from for political reasons. If she was actually explaining what the statement means, or distancing herself from it, the tactic would look deranged.

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