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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11021 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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Surfacing a maybe slightly more obscure reaction to the Lesbian Bar SNAFU discussed below, a comment from MetaFilter (bolding mine):

It doesn't seem like anything productive is being accomplished by this process. I think it is important that people stand up for justice, but I think there is more to it than just tearing down people you disagree with. The idea a process can be rejected out of hand because someone can dream of a hypothetical situation (e.g., mediator somehow having power to get participants institutionalized) seems really counterproductive. Anyone could be accused of anything, especially if the bar is just hypotheticals or vibes.

It seems like the outcome will inevitably be that no one finds it worthwhile to try to create anything. It's not unlike a web forum where are reluctant to make posts because so many of the comments nitpick every aspect of it.

This commenter nailed one of the main points of disagreement I have with the broader left, i.e., the whole "being charitable" thing, the rejection of the arguments-as-soldiers doctrine. And of course it's good to see a comment like this being heavily upvoted in a de facto progressive space that is still worried about COVID. I'd love to ask that commenter, as well as anyone who upvoted this comment: who has been cultivating the unproductive environment you are describing?

From where I stand, almost every leftist space inevitably ends up doing witch hunts, cancelling people for benign shit (recently DHH and Ed Sheeran, and I can imagine a gorillion other examples), essentially harming their own in the name of the greater good. There's a danger that is, to me, more urgent than COVID: a large portion of people in the West have a culture that incentivizes and perpetuates the same pattern, the outcome of which will inevitably be that no one finds it worthwhile to try to create anything.

This culture is what makes people so eager to ban cops from the bar but not the Soe Noire person, who effectively nuked whatever slim chance Matellian had of keeping the business running, all because Noire paints himself as a victim. Well, cops are ontologically evil, while Noire has a lot of intersectional points in his bag so...

Care for another MetaFilter comment?

Once again the looney leftists are trying to push their unpopular, impractical ideas on the rest of society, like wearing masks, or abolishing ICE, or calling the war in Gaza a genocide, or ending the war in Iran, or letting transwomen use women's restrooms, or prohibiting data centers, or solar panels, or bike lanes, or indoor public smoking bans, or legal abortions, or seat belt laws, or Medicaid for All, or airbags, or ending the war in Iraq, or network neutrality, or the ADA, or free school lunches, or ending the transatlantic slave trade. America is not a playground for their dangerous political experiments!

I'm glad that we have billionaires like John W. Henry who can direct their newspapers to take advantage of this Instagram drama to bring it to a national audience and cast these communist liberals as hysterical Chicken Littles. These rabid Maoists have splintered Greenfield, Massachusetts to its very core, just as they have polarized our country with their divisive rhetoric. I just wish this country would listen to anti-maskers for once.

I'm not posting this comment to sneer, I just want to talk to the person who posted it. Imagine I'm talking to them, maybe on my knees, pleading.

Like, okay, the problems you described can be fairly debated. Maybe I agree with some and disagree with others, but aren't you at least a little bit curious about the batshit-insane, hostile environment that produced a situation IN YOUR OWN CAMP where NOBODY won? The owners of the bar didn't win - duh. The scarce clientele they had didn't win. I lost brain cells while reading this article, so I guess I didn't win either. People of your tribe showed how they solve problems (and I repeat, this problem appears within ALL leftist spaces; it doesn't just manifest as cancelling): they sat down for three hours and failed to hash out a simple disagreement that maybe should've been an email - or, ideally, there shouldn't have been a disagreement in the first place, because adults understand that a bar has to make money. As for all the more important problems you profess to care about, did the insanity described in the article help you solve them, or are you worse off? And are they really not behaving like "rabid Maoists"?

I don't know, folks. Maybe another one?

I think concentrating on the mask issue is a red herring because it's clear that there were people involved here who did not approach this situation with any semblance of good faith. If the number of regular attendees of the events was even a reasonable fraction of the people commenting, and a majority of them could pay the cover charge, the bar wouldn't be in this situation.

The people fiscally responsible for the venue can't continue to run it, so they needed some alternate ideas to get more traffic. They proposed an idea with what seems like good intentions. People showed up online to tear them down while offering no ideas of their own. That's not community, that's wrecker shit. Some people live for wrecker shit, and inclusive spaces often have trouble figuring out how to address that without appearing exclusive.

Of course, it's "wrecker shit"! How could I have thought that this pattern exists? It's "wrecker shit".

One person should be able to have a disagreement with another, but in leftist spaces we see, time after time, people taking disagreements personally and painting themselves as victims to get others on their side, like Soe Noire does. You did a racism is five years old. Gamergate, whose main character was a professional victim, is more than ten. Is this all "wrecker shit"? It's not - I swear, it's not. It's the same thing, it's the same cultural thing, it's the same thing as with the lesbian bar. How long can we pretend not to notice that good faith is abandoned as soon as it becomes inconvenient?

If you can't describe a problem accurately, you can't solve it. At this point, I just have to conclude that maybe they don't want to solve it.

This is a great example of Scott's analogy of "whale cancer".

I mean, think about it. Cancer results from a series of mutations occurring by chance in a single cell. So over a given time period, the cancer rate of an organism should be proportional to the number of cells in that organism. If a whale is a thousand times bigger than a person, it should have a thousand times more cells and therefore get cancer a thousand times more often. Since humans have maybe a 1% per year cancer risk, whales should get ten cancers a year. But most whales live a long time and don’t die of cancer. Why not?

I don’t know which of the various proposed solutions to this puzzle is true but the most hilarious is no doubt Nagy, Victor and Cropper (2007). Whales are very big, so in order to threaten a whale, a cancer must also grow very big. In order to grow very big, a cancer must evolve a complicated internal structure determining which cells expand where and who’s going to secrete the factors necessary for blood vessels to grow and so on. Cancers can do that: even in humans, tumors develop impressive amounts of structure and cooperation among the cancerous cells inside of them. But as tumors grow bigger and more intricate, and cells have to spend more and more time altruistically working for the good of the tumor rather than just reproducing, some cells will inevitably defect from the plan and just divide uncontrollably. This ends up in an unhappy equilibrium. Whenever the balance swings too far toward defectors, the tumor can’t support itself and most of the cells die. Whenever the balance swings too far toward cooperators, the defectors have a big advantage again and start expanding. As a result, the tumor either remains at a fixed size or dies off completely. It might get a chance to metastasize, but the same will happen to its metastatic descendents.

Essentially the lesbian bar is full of people who hit the defect button as hard as they can. Forget careers, children, or doing anything useful for anyone. Their lives are all about validating their exceptionally niche and numerous neuroses, making other people bend over backwards to accommodate them.

I think we've all seen the damage these people can do to society. They hijack the natural sympathy we have towards victims, a consequence of our high trust society that took a millennium to build.

Fortunately, they find it difficult to coordinate amongst themselves to destroy society because they are so individually destructive that any organization full of these people will collapse into a circular shooting gallery.

cancelling people for benign shit (recently DHH

He posts repeatedly about white ethnonationalism. Is that benign? I'm not sure that's in the Overton window.

I am only familiar with "As I remember London". The idea that functional society will be irrevocably changed for the worse by immigrants has been creeping closer to the overton window for a while now. It is honestly not that controversial outside of left-wing circles. People have eyes. They see what is happening around them, and increasingly vote against immigration basically due to similar concerns.

Saying the quiet part out loud is controversial, but it is no longer a fringe idea at all.

What did he post?

I am a bit more sympathetic to the idea of 'wreckerism' as a distinct phenomenon. As I've seen it used thus far, it tends to refer to those personalities who cannot surrender their own ideological purity for the benefit of the group's overall mission. It has existed since at least the 1970s, if not since the dawn of time. Spend enough time in group spaces of any persuasion and this dynamic is obvious. There will always be people who join for more self-serving reasons than mission-serving reasons, and vice versa. It's very hard to screen for this.

Now, I do think hyper-leftist spaces have a unique challenge in that their ideas attract more of these personalities in part because of the general ressentiment of their politics and in part because leftists tend to be averse to commonsense social policing for fear of being 'exclusionary.' In this sense, 'wreckerism' is a sort of absurd escalation of leftist epistemology and ethics. However, there are plenty of leftists and leftish people (I've met them and perhaps you could consider me one) who are able to hold the fundamental tenets of the worldview without devolving into endless internecene conflict. There are discussions to be had about what distinguishes these types of people. I just don't think it's accurate to call it a problem of the entire camp. This is a distinct, vocal faction that everyone happens to kowtow to at the first sign of instigation. It's this kowtowing that needs to stop.

I also can't help but reiterate that they stopped enforcing their cover fee, which is the idiocy that kicked off this whole chain of events.

This is a distinct, vocal faction that everyone happens to kowtow to at the first sign of instigation. It's this kowtowing that needs to stop.

This is the core problem with the left. They have no ideological immune system. There's no way, within the confines of modern leftism, to rebuke or defend against someone who attacks from a more left position. And if they develop such an immune system, such a capacity for psychologically handing trade-offs or accepting that some desirable things are too costly, then they lose their most effective tool against the right.

I'd argue that it's the core problem with the Boomer right as well, that they fundamentally believe in victim culture over honor culture or dignity culture.

You have seen a lot of people on the right "troon out" as they say, completely abandoning their stated beliefs, when they see a video of a sympathetic woman being deported. Like Joe Rogan will be so persecuted by the left that he'll move to a different state. But then he sees a sad video, and he's back to voting Democrat again.

"Women's tears win in the marketplace of ideas"

What is this "most effective tool" that risks being lost in the face of pragmatism? I'm not sure I'm following you.

This is a microcosm of exactly why even if I agreed with them on something, I would never stand with or support such ardent leftists on any topic, even to my detriment. The people highlighted in the original article and in your comment are so thoroughly tedious and fundamentally unlikeable that I will voluntarily self-harm in order to spend as little time around them as possible and retard their political movement's growth as much as I can.

And you're right, it is utterly impossible to explain to them how much damage they are doing to their causes by being so completely insufferable that it actively turns people against them. Because their reaction will simply be "good".

The reason for this is that such people, I suspect, are not in it for the cause, not in it to make any real positive changes or to support the operation of a local bar. They're in it to feel good about themselves. And what makes them feel good about themselves is shouting people down, asserting power and authority over them, and "making a change", even if that change is wrecking things for everyone else.

Metafilter is still kicking around? I googled the thread and was surprised about the many maskers still around. Though one notices:

Strangely, several of the very covid-cautious places I've frequented relaxed their mask policy because the vibe was that the most assiduous maskers were white middle class people and that requiring masks for all was alienating others.

Metafilter is still kicking around? I googled the thread and was surprised about the many maskers still around.

When people here worry about "evaporative cooling" of beliefs, that's not just a theoretical concern; it's been observed in practice too.

Lots of people are now so alienated from anything resembling actual production of goods and services they operate on an ultrasimplified world view where meat comes from the back of the grocery store and modern life is just the automatic median human experience.

This underpins their politics and their inability to consider trade-offs on anything.

the batshit-insane, hostile environment that produced a situation IN YOUR OWN CAMP where NOBODY won?

I think someone like Noire thinks he won. He did damage, he exercised power. He must've felt pretty good about himself. We call these people assholes, and you find them everywhere.

One thing about these anarchist-style places is that they're very susceptible to such people. You can apparently just barge in and start making demands and everyone has to at least listen to you. He went eight times? How is he a stakeholder in any way? It works only if everyone is playing in good faith, which requires keeping the circle small and invite-only.

You need proper formal decision-making structures. It doesn't even really matter what kind as long as you have something.

prohibiting data centers

Didn’t know they cared so much about forcing businesses to move their hosting on-prem but okay!

Or would any commercial servers be banned and we’d have to rely on people self-hosting everything for everything? Will I get branded a digital kulak for having over 3 petaflops of compute at home?

If you're not going into a scenic rural area and building a facility the size of six football fields that employees fifteen people they don't have a problem with it.

Noire paints himself

Does anyone know if "gender-expansive lesbian using he/him pronouns" is a new type of bulldyke or a new type of autogynephile?

The male pronouns makes it like 95% biological female IMO. I know one biological woman who goes by male pronouns who is the ur example of bull dyke and whilst there's a bunch of absurd transbians around rare that one wouldn't swap pronouns

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