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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11181 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.

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.

I agree that this is a weakness of Leftism, but I'm not sure I share your optimism that it's a fatal flaw. One possibility is that as the Leftist cancer grows, a charismatic and psychopathic leader will seize power semi-permanently. Someone who is Machiavellian enough to know that the next step is to clamp down and start sending members of his own party off to the gulag. Along with anyone else who threatens his rule.

So that at the next annual meeting of the Socialist Party, when someone interrupts with some point of privilege regarding land acknowledgments to gay and lesbian native Americans, that person is simply taken out and shot. No circular shooting gallery

In fact, I would argue that part of the reason Communist countries tend to be so repressive is that there's no other way to hold them together. The same process that led to the communist takeover can be expected to undermine and destroy it and the only way to stop this is through secret police, fake elections, prison camps for wrongthinkers, etc.

I do think that democracy might be something that was only viable during a short period of history, when the common people were educated enough to exercise the franchise but also retained enough masculine virtue to prioritize liberty and the enforcing the rule of law (what's the word that means the opposite of anarchotyranny).

I think we all can accept that democracy has failed in places like South Africa, and that they'd be better off with a dictator.

But Western countries might be in the same boat. If not now, then soon enough given demographic change. How are the people of England or Germany being served by democracy? Their countries are going to shit but the people don't want to "be mean" to actually fix the problems. They need a strongman to do it for them, then the sin won't fall on their own heads.

The problem of course with dictatorships is dictator selection, with the first one usually being a charismatic psychopath and successors being his failsons or geriatric party cadre members.

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