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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   38163 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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The Gays Destroyed The "No Politics" Rule

Pride month began, and the moderators of /r/Battletech enforced their "no politics" rule as they have through elections, wars, referedums, economic crisis, etc. A long standing rule fastidiously kept by most Battletech groups I frequent. It's preserved Battletech as one of my escapes for long years as every other hobby I had got overrun with far left politics. Alas, no longer.

In response, Catalyst games launched /r/OfficialBattletech, specifically calling out the "bigotry" of /r/Battletech, and announcing Battletech is a "safe space". They parachuted in a community leader with experience moderating "safe spaces". People began making the sorts of spurious claims against the mods of /r/Battletech you are used to seeing, calling them being fascist at best, literally "Heil Hitler" nazi's at worst on the most spurious of circumstantial evidence. The originator of /r/Battletech came out of nowhere and completely removed the mods of /r/Battletech to make damned sure /r/Battletech participates in Pride Month.

Because it's not political. It's just being a decent person.

So I guess Battletech is explicitly left wing now. You are no allowed to opt out of their politics.

Hobbies/Fandoms I'm allowed in

  • Video Games

  • Board Games

  • Science Fiction

  • Star Wars

  • Star Trek

  • Battletech

  • Woodworking

And I log into youtube to watch Stumpy Nubs tell me how to sharpen a chisel every day in fear some flashpoint will have occurred. That the Eye of Sauron finally noticed that woodworking is too white and must be destroyed. And suddenly every content creator I watch will be posting these mewling apology videos for not doing enough to foster diversity and inclusiveness in this important hobby. And the rest of the month ends up being pride themed woodworking content. Making your own buttplugs on a lathe or whatever. How to add glitter to a poly finish.

Activists have a ready response to no-politics rules: "The personal is political" or maybe "Privilege is getting to define someone else's existence as political."

I'm not sure they're wrong though? On its face, this advice is independent of whatever viewpoint you might hold. Any kind of activity with people interacting will always involve value judgements about how everyone should behave. Post a woodworking video about making a dog toy? That's a statement that you think having pet dogs is okay, and if a subreddit allows that video to be posted then they're saying they agree.

I guess the point is, if you don't like LGBT pride in your hobby, then you're not going to get anywhere by arguing for a generic "no politics" stance since to onlookers it seems like you're ashamed of your own position and unwilling to advocate it directly. If you can't articulate to your fellow hobbyists why LGBT specifically is bad and should be opposed, then you're just going to keep ceding ground to the activists on the other side who feel no such compunction in advocating against "bigotry" or whatever they call their opposition.

In his 2001 book, “Letters to a Young Contrarian”, Christopher Hitchens wrote the following as a warning:

PS: Since this often seems to come up in discussions of the radical style, I’ll mention one other gleaning from my voyages. Beware of identity politics. I’ll rephrease that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying “The Personal is Political.” It began as a sort of reaction to the defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they felt, not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of small difference, because each identity group begat its subgroups and “specificities.” This tendency has often been satirised – the overweight caucuse of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs – but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance.

Anyway what you swiftly realize if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighborhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldn’t change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that “humanity” (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, this way.”

I don't know if you're feigning ignorance, but you're saying the things that someone feigning ignorance would say. If pet dogs was an issue for a major political party , people had pet dog rallies that were specifically there to rub pet dogs in the face of people who didn't like them, if people routinely got fired from their jobs for their opinions on pet dogs, and if people's opinions on pet dogs--or even their refusal to speak about pet dogs--marked them as irredeemably evil and not fit for polite company then pet dogs would be political. Just "I have an opinion on whether it's okay" doesn't make it political.

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