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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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Don't call it the progressive consensus. That implies that a majority of left-leaning people are onboard with it. Call it the progressive orthodoxy.

Not trying to sound condescending but I can't help but think of that one James Franco meme. Reddit in general and Reddit mods in particular have undergone such an intense purity spiral in the last seven years that you're best off just assuming any English-speaking sub which isn't loudly and conspicuously heretical (even ostensibly apolitical hobby and sports subs) has been taken over by woke mods. The site is a lost cause as far as meaningful discussion is concerned.

Hell, even subs that are loudly and conspicuously heretical appear to have been taken over by woke mods. I was permanently banned from /r/ActualPublicFreakouts - Reddit’s current go-to spot for videos of minorities behaving badly - (ostensibly) for making a few (fairly mild) off-color racial jokes. Certainly I would expect an instant ban for doing anything of the sort on a large public-facing sub, but on a sub that seems tailor-made for people who would be into that? It’s the sort of thing that fuels my suspicion that any remaining redoubts of non-progressivism are honeypots designed to corral all the heretics into one place for observation and eventual termination.

Reddit is overwhelmingly woke, urban and (within the US at least) Democrat, to the degree "heretical" subreddits exist they are populated by woke democrat-voting heretics. As a general rule the mainstream right, IE the 3,000,000 people a night who were tuning in to Tucker Carlson, the 10,000,000 million people per show who listen to Rogan and the 74,000,000 who voted for Trump in 2020 are posting but they are not posting anywhere you as a member of opposing polity would be likely to encounter them and that is (at least in part) by design.

Status independence is a hell of a drug.

IE the 3,000,000 people a night who were tuning in to Tucker Carlson

Emphasis mine. The mainstream right, which has so much influence it couldn't even keep Carlson on Fox News. That's not status independence, that's irrelevance.

Case in point, I ate a permanent ban from Reddit for “hate speech” by posting copypasta which contained no hate speech whatsoever on an sub completely dedicated to shitposting. A copy pasta I had posted several times without so much as a warning.

After a few suspensions for essentially hurting people’s feelings I was clearly on the chopping block and all I had to do was annoy one person enough to have them report a comment and then it was over, no appeals.

I deleted the app shortly after my appeal was denied.

Increasingly convinced that I made the right decision uninstalling the Reddit app from my phone. Just about the only sub I still enjoy any more is /r/4chan.

Quitting Heroin for Fentanyl is a bold strategy Cotton, lets see how it works out. ;-)

Why wouldn’t you just browse 4chan?

Reddit subs dedicated to 4chan posts are much, much better than going to 4chan because they typically filter out the porn(which is the vast majority of 4chan) and in practice they mostly highlight the better posts(which is definitely not the majority of even the non-porn posts on 4chan).

I strongly disagree with this extremely overbroad assertion.

In the first place, /r/4chan is not a substitute for 4chan. 4chan is a discussion platform that happens to be humorous on occasion, while /r/4chan is focused exclusively on finding humor (not necessarily "the better posts") on 4chan. If you want to read a non-humorous discussion of electric cars or urban planning or Big Yud, you won't find it on /r/4chan—you've got to go to 4chan itself.

In the second place, it is not reasonable to say that pornography "is the vast majority of 4chan". Even assuming for the sake of argument that the statement is technically true—i. e., that, of all posts made on 4chan, "the vast majority" are pornographic (and I do not necessarily accept that premise)—it is not actually possible for a user to browse the entire category of "all posts made on 4chan". In practice, it is extremely easy for a person who uses the catalog view to ignore (1) the obviously-pornographic boards and (2) the few obviously-pornographic threads that are tolerated by the jannies on the non-pornographic boards, and to focus only on threads that actually contain discussion.

I've tried once or twice but found the user interface impenetrable.

Some would argue that's a feature. The medium is the message.

Try using the catalog view instead of the default view. And, in the settings, enable the "Inline quote links" option, so that you can follow a conversation without having to bounce up and down the page.