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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12179 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.

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.

As I remember London says that the fraction of "native Brits" in London has dropped to about a third. Clicking the link (which is to the Wikipedia article on ethnic groups in London) suggests that he uses "native Brits" to refer to people who tick the "White British" box on the census. (I tick "Irish" because it won't hurt me professionally and might help, so according to DHH I am not a "native Brit" despite having four grandparents who were drafted in WW2). The literal English meaning of "native Brit" is, of course, someone born in Britain - and London is still about 60% British-born.

"Britishness is tied to skin colour and being born in London does not make you a native Brit if you have the wrong ancestry" was cancellable back in the 1970s when Enoch Powell was cancelled for it.

Enoch Powell is portrayed as this crazy voice in the wilderness, but he was just completely right about everything.

I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation? The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that the country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking—not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen.

Everything that's happened to England, the horrors of Rotherham, it was all avoidable. But it happened because people didn't think through the consequences over a long time period. Immigration must have seemed like a very small thing indeed in 1968 when England was like 95%+ White British. But all it took was to do the math and see that, over decades, it would grow into a very big problem. People had their heads in the sand then and , even today, when major cities are on the cusp of becoming majority Muslim, people still minimize the problem.

There have been three major population replacements in English history. The first was the Bell Beaker culture around 2500 BC which replaced 90% of England's DNA. The Celts replaced about 1/3rd around 1000 BC, and the Saxons also replaced 1/3rd around 500 AD. The Romans, Danes, and Normans left much smaller genetic traces. Notably all of these replacements took place gradually.

The current population replacement (the 4th largest to date and on track to be the 2nd largest) is happening more quickly.

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