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Just to clarify: where was it argued that women's rights should be revoked? Not that I don't believe it, people argue for all kinds of modest proposals on the motte.
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Argue the benefits of your political agenda, the detrimental effects of his political agenda, or that revoking your rights is not necessary for his political agenda, for example.
"I think you should have rights revoked because it's inconvenient for my political agenda" is an argument that I consider perflectly legitimate. Forbidding that would leave large swathes of politics unexplored. That is not what I meant by asking for more charity. Strenuous application of the spirit of the rules would suffice. It got awfully personal in that thread. "You're only saying that because you're a woman!", "You're shaming men! " Even if true, so what? That is not why we're here. Pretend your opponent is a disembodied collection of logical statements.
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Culture wars are about taking someone's rights away, whether positive rights or negative rights. Off the top of my head I'm struggling to think of any culture war that can't be described in those terms. What you're saying is that The Motte is stupid and conflict theory should reign.
Which is a thing you can believe, but be cognizant of that.
No, unless you're a nihilist, the difference is that some rights are "privileges" that one side is falsely characterizing as a natural right.
As for bombs and firecrackers. The outcome of every culture war has been an existentially threatening 5000 lb bomb to at least some people. There is, for example, the dumpy fourth natural son of a plantation owner who would have been happily married if slavery continued, who instead died penniless with no issue. Or there is a sect that a community considered the true word of god that went defunct because a German town legalized adult re-baptisms in the 1500s.
For you to characterize culture wars as firecrackers is only because you consider the casualties of lost culture wars worthless. Future people will consider the death of things you consider holy and the people who defended them likewise worthless.
You edited this in, so I'll edit this in. Don't look down. The ground is made out of skulls.
Not true. Slavery was dismantled peacefully in many places. The US just happened to have a weird politial configuration that caused it to go out with a bang. In most places, those who did not benefit from the "right" to own slaves were persuaded by discourse such as we have in The Motte, and eventually those who did benefit were so politically isolated they surrendered and became skulls without a fight. The winning side usually granted a fig leaf that some portion of the losing side would not become skulls.
To give a contemporary example that's being discussed here of late, incels. In a Handmaid's Tale society, many incels might get the "right" to a goverment issued GF. So do all incels become revolutionaries to reimpose the patriarchy?
No. They know they've been outgunned by peaceful spread of feminism in the last 120 years. So instead 99% of them become skulls peacefully.
Maybe. But certainly Britain itself decided on the slavery issue peacefully, and that was a rather important domino, yes?
EDIT: To the part you added in:
This is a meaningful distinction. But the people on the losing side of culture wars often know what losing will mean for them -- that members of their team will end up socially marginalized and that the rights they hold holy will go extinct -- but after getting outmaneuvred by changes in public opinion, peacefully surrender in exchange for a few rats on their side being allowed to board a life raft.
Take the upper crust of old European nobility. A lot of those peacefully gave up their estate and are still rich. But the baronets and lesser gentry plummeted in status, and some surely became penniless and died without issue, who otherwise would have still been noble.
To recap, my claim is (a) you do not always need knives to force your enemy to surrender, discourse is still useful, and (b) there's nothing special about this culture war existentially threatening rights you consider sacrosanct and non-negotiable, all culture wars have been like that. All culture wars have been "5000 lb bombs".
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