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 -
I am not sniffing at romances (or romantasies) because I don't understand the allure. I understand the allure. Of course everyone has fantasies, whether they are romantic, power fantasies, competency-porn, or whatever. What I mean is that every romantasy I've ever looked at is just so badly-written, and has so little plot beyond "Which bad boy alpha fighting over me shall I choose?" (I mean, I guess in some of them the chick is also a bad-ass fairy assassin or something, but that just makes it more badly written) that I cannot enjoy them. I feel the same about romance in general, though I've read a couple that were enjoyable enough, despite being very formulaic. Do you recommend any romantasy that would actually stand on its own, with good plot and prose in its own right, beyond serving up female wish fulfillment?
Without getting too serious (and off-topic), I don't quite understand your point here, because you seem to be saying that your Iran takes are fantasy and hero-worship, which I am pretty sure is not what you meant. I mean, I get that you literally worship Trump as a hero, but are you saying that framing all events as a fantastical narrative of good and evil is how you think we should understand the world? Rather than messy conflicting narratives where facts exist but are hard to discern or agree upon?
So I understand what you mean when you say I "worship" Trump, so I can talk in these terms, but I want to be clear that my appreciation of Trump is quite rational, bound up in specific material reasons, and that the only person I worship is Jesus Christ.
That out of the way:
What I'm saying is closer to, "we already understand events as fantastical narratives of good and evil". That is, essentially, how cognition works, our sense of good and evil is bound up in every judgment we make, all the time, everywhere. And you can say, ok, but life is messy and facts are hard and everyone is shades of gray. (Which is more or less what I think too.) But you still have a sense of good and evil, you still have the ideas as such. Nobody is ever really a nihilist. (Nihilism is essentially a death-wish, it is a failure of life, of life-spirit. Life, abundant vital life, wants to expand.) And especially in memory the nuances wash out and everything shades toward black and white. Because that's how cognition works.
What I am asserting when I assert that Trump is winning in Iran is not just the object-level claim that Trump is winning in Iran. (Which I also think is true.) I am staking my position that this is how everyone will eventually understand it. Modulo all the shades of gray or whatever caveats you want to add. I don't think I'm saying anything all that complicated. I could reach into more complicated explanations here, but thankfully Trump has already given us an analogue in Venezuela. After the Maduro raid there were a lot of people skeptical that it would work, that it had worked, and given that events are still in progress it could go any number of ways. But also anybody who bought stock in "Trump is right" is way up nine months later.
When I say, "Trump is Naruto," what I mean is, this is essentially how history is going to remember Trump. Everything gets simplified and reified in historical memory and "time makes more converts than reason". It would have sounded equally crazy to anyone in 1864 if you had said similar things about Lincoln. Lincoln was extremely controversial in his day and a lot of people thought he was an idiot. But if you sat in 1864 and believed that the war was going well and was going to be won, it's really easy then to understand that Lincoln would become a hero. Even before his assassination and the myth-making that engendered.
And we don't know yet how Trump's story is going to end. I think that's the most consequential thing of all, because the ending of a story tells you what it means. So nobody actually knows what any of this means really. But, at the same time, when history looks back on 2026, they aren't going to say, "Trump bombed Iran but his CIA report said not to except I don't believe in the CIA report but it still maybe cost him the midterms but we don't know the counter-factual because incumbents always lose their midterms." They're going to say: Donald Trump; Vladimir Putin; Xi Jinping; Elon Musk; Superintelligence; Starship; Golden Dome. They'll say, Trump started preparing the American economy for war, which is something I see evidence of every time I open the papers but I don't see anybody thinking of in those terms. They'll say, 2026 is when Artificial Intelligence became Superintelligence, and they'll understand that the entire world was changing and it happened under Donald Trump. I am of course betting that AI is going to change the world and everything in it. I'm also betting that people will eventually understand how badly Iran was beaten, because that's what I think happened.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link