site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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.

10
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/shows/meetthepress/blog/rcna90023

Apparently there’s been a big drop in conservative support for gay marriage, all in the space of a year.

I think this says a lot, mainly because it’s a point I see brought up by a lot of the blackpillers in this community “look, look - even conservatives support gay marriage now, there’s no stopping progressivism”.

Well, what now? Apparently the left has pushed too hard and too fast and it’s turning the GOP away. Being LGBT isn’t seen as some harmless thing anymore, especially when it seems being “tolerant” means accepting gay drag nuns on crucifixes. The parodies are no longer a parody, and grooming children to accept gender ideology seems rife in schools even in deep red states.

Recently I read about a Muslim city in america voting to ban the pride flag. This is just one example of the incoming shift and realignment being forced by progressive extremism becoming more forcibly mainstream

I think this 'toss captures very well the feelings of a lot of people on the right wing.

It's easy being pro-gay when they're being thrown off roofs by your religious ennemies and only demand the same rights as everybody else.

It's much harder when they're arguing that your kids should be exposed to graphic pornography, lewd spectacles and make political alliances to destroy you.

Activists have failed to understand the same thing they failed to understand about abortion: that it was a compromise not a surrender.

They've made all the arguments about there not being a slippery slope, that all they wanted was just this one decent thing, and then once they got it, proceeded to just keep on pushing for more radical things. Evoking directly the feeling that used to be the butt of the joke made of their ennemies.

As someone who was on the other side of the argument back then, I've had some introspection about how much more consideration I should now give to the bible thumping bigots I used to dismiss, because they were right and I was wrong.

These days I'm about of the opinion that the proper place for my people in society is one of discrete indifference, which is why I was always skeptical of "pride" and now even of the idea of a marriage that very few actually use in practice. I've always feared this push for celebration of what physically can't be adopted by everybody would create some backlash that would push the West towards a more Islamic direct confrontation, and here we are.

As someone who was on the other side of the argument back then, I've had some introspection about how much more consideration I should now give to the bible thumping bigots I used to dismiss, because they were right and I was wrong.

This is where I wound up as well. I was aggressively in favor of gay marriage, but I have to admit that I was plainly wrong about there not being any slippery slope. I genuinely thought that gay marriage represented the end point of winning equal rights for gay people, not just another battle on the way to whatever weirdness comes next. Such is the peril of youth, I suppose.

What's wild to me is how many of the activists that I thought I was on the same side as, but am now significantly to the right of, don't seem to have any personal memory of having held a position other than insisting that government funding of trans hormones for kids was morally obligatory and constitutionally required. The number that must have actually thought that a decade ago must have been vanishingly small (the term "gender-affirming" didn't even exist yet), but it is now the bog-standard Democrat position.

If I had to guess, those Democrats hadn't given any significant thought to the issue beforehand. So when it became a culture war topic, their first exposure to it was through the lens of the party-approved messaging. Thus, Democrats can credibly say that as long as they've been considering it, they've been in favor of giving "trans kids" hormone treatments.

The reason they hadn't considered it beforehand, of course, is that it's so completely insane that it would never enter an average person's mind except in the most cartoonish dystopian cartoons.