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 -
It's just strange you struggle to see the angle when the angle is directly laid out by Israeli newspapers, and Israel is even doing directly what the article recommends. Why did ultra-Zionist Michael Rubin, representing influential US policy NGOs, directly recommend this back in April? Do you think Rubin being a Zionist Jew had nothing to do with him calling for Morocco to do exactly what it did yesterday, even though Rubin directly cites Spain's enmity towards Israel as justifying his position?
Or to frame it another way, do you think Morocco was involved in orchestrating the crisis? NYT reports being told by multiple migrants they were directed by Moroccan security forces to cross the border.
Ok, so if you admit Morocco was directly involved in the event, then you think it happened totally independent of their military alliance with Israel and totally independent of the enormous enmity between Spain and Israel?
You are saying that it's just a coincidence that Israel's ally Morocco did the thing Israeli advocates and commentators said Israel should support Morocco doing. It's fine to take that position but weird to say you don't see the angle when the angle is corroborated directly from multiple sources.
Italy has suspended Spain from the Schengen Zone, there is going to be huge blowback to the left-wing Spanish government, with elections upcoming, which has been the sworn enemy of Israel for years. To say you don't see the angle makes no sense to me.
A lot of people would disagree but I’ve come around from thinking you are crazy to believing you have been fundamentally correct on Jewish influence. Atleast as far as the Holocaust was used as a means of convincing western society that any form of racial identity was bad. Maybe that was even a good thing for a while. Plus my gut says 40% plus or minus 10% of the top .1% of wordcells are Jewish so they tend to win a lot of arguments.
I hope now that you are seeing a possibility of the right and Israel having a lot of shared interests against third worldism that we can work together now.
The problem with Zionism is they seem to have had an interests in both promoting ethnonationalism for Israel and erasing nationalism in western society. In the current world I think Zionism should be seeing a lot of benefits to promoting nationalism globally.
I think Jews are overrepresented in the top echelons of a lot of business and intellectual fields, partly due to intelligence and partly due to a bunch of ingroup factors. However, I've always felt that people assume that these Jews are way more monolithic and unified than they actually are. 'There are Jews who are hardcore zionists who want to drive the Palestinians into the Med' and 'There are Jews who laid the groundwork for a lot of modern international moralizing' are both true but I think the actual overlap is minimal and those groups both don't get on particularly well.
This is further emphasized when you notice how low-functioning people who are simultaneously hardcore Zionists and hardcore SJWs tend to be, as they're often socially oblivious enough to have wandered without noticing into a set of beliefs that's extremely unpopular in both circles of the Venn diagram it's in. Sort of a similar pathology to true TERFs, that is, those who are simultaneously hardcore feminists and hardcore anti-trans.
How is that at all contradictory? If anything hardcore feminists should be true TERFs and not give a shit about nonsense males wandering into their spaces. Trans stuff being wedged next to Feminism and Sexuality issues (and Islam half the time on top of it) does produce a bunch of contradictory stuff but I don't see how anybody can find TERFs contradictory to Feminism if they can just reject the femininity/possibility of transition.
I'm not pointing to an ideological contradiction, I'm saying that they’re the overlap of groups that barely overlap.
True though the Rowling case seems indicative that TERFs are more likely to die on that hill/be proactively purged even if generally aligned
In the US, the TERFs lost and you can no longer be a feminist in good standing unless your feminism includes men pretending to be women. In the UK the battle between trans-inclusive and womyn-born-womyn feminisms is ongoing, with the "TERFs" (they are by no means all radical feminists) having the better of it. Rowling's money may be part of it, but I think it is mostly driven by the different class composition of 2nd wave feminism in the two countries - the most prominent trans-exclusive feminists in the UK are all older women from working-class backgrounds.
I don't think there's that much of a difference between the two countries in that regard. Much like in the UK, in the US a significant amount of the pushback against trans in led by feminists. Sure, they're not in good standing, but neither are the UK feminists. They all, including Rowling herself, get blacklisted, smeared, excluded from debates, etc. The actual difference that might exist is that in the US TERFs have chosen to cooperate with conservatives (likely for lack of other options), while in the UK they have enough numbers / institutional positioning to do their own thing.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link