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 -
A question: why do people believe that people - especially men - who are unsuccessful with romantic relationships are unsuccessful because of a lack of moral virtue? A man who's 30 years old and has never gone on a date or kissed anyone is assumed by default to be some kind of fat, basement-dwelling loser. When he is in fact a short but fit engineer, or a corporate lawyer, or a programmer for Google, he's then roundly criticized for being misogynistic or lacking in moral virtue. Occasionally, darker - much darker - suspicions are raised: let's say that there are reasons why these men frequently avoid being around unrelated children. It seems difficult for people to comprehend that an apparently healthy, gainfully-employed individual could fail to meet with romantic success despite a decade of trying...unless there is something seriously morally wrong with them.
Someone who fails at being a salesman, or a business owner, or even at playing basketball worth a damn...doesn't get that. "I'm a nice, decent, hardworking guy...but I can't sell shoes at Nordstrom, I've been working hard to do this and have dreamt of being a salesman since I was 12" is a kind of absurd complaint. He might be a fine human being and maybe he'd make a great heavy equipment operator, but he just doesn't have the talent for sales. We don't think there's something morally wrong with our hero because he can't sell shoes, or because he's a short, clumsy guy that sucks at basketball.
I've never heard anyone suggest that it was a moral failing. That sounds like a completely made up strawman to victim oneself against.
Obviously the reverse causality makes sense: bad people should be less datable. But i e never even heard anyone suggest this should is an is as it's plainly not real.
Where are you getting this moral failing narrative from? You need to justify the premise, because it sounds like extrapolated wallowing or self-loathing.
Literally every feminist on Reddit. It's ubiquitous. Guy asks for advice or sympathy about his dating/sex troubles, immediately gets pounced on by everyone saying "actually it's your lack of confidence and your bad attitude that you're entitled to sex." Every time.
And they claim that things like looks have no effect on dating. "I know one guy who's short and bald and gets lots of dates, therefore your lack of dates mean you must be an evil misogynist". Or they'll tell guys to "take a shower" as if every unsuccessful guy is an insane hobo who never bathes.
Ok link me an example of that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Doing it on the meta level is pretty funny, I have to admit. 10/10
But like others who point it out in this thread I've seen it both online and in real life. Consider how "incel" went from a morally neutral descriptor to a moral condemnation, with the absurd side effect of married men people want to denounce constantly being called involuntary celibates.
Self loathing is certainly bad, but it seems fair to notice that romantically unsuccessful men are about as low on the totem of sympathy as you can get. Even criminals and prostitutes are more sympathetic. You have to get to pedophiles or something to find people with less cachet.
I can't consider it because I've never seen it except in these scenarios where i'm assured it's true by its detractors. I especially haven't seen this in real life.
Again, Ive never seen this. Get better friends people. Romantically unsuccessful men are to the contrary some of the most sympathetically talked about people I know. Even where it's not sympathetic and just pathetic, that's not the same as immoral.
If you're contorting my comment into moral repudiation of someone for specifically being poorly undatable, I think we've found the disconnect.
This looks like nothing more than a victimhood mentality looking for a bully.
Even if it were somehow morally (I'm not) maligning the OP it's not for being single or unlucky in love.
If a Jewish guy stands up in a movie theater and shouts, 'AntiSemites are trying to silence me!!", His point isn't proven when people shush him.
Similarly, if you come in and say, 'how come I'm morally maligned for being undatable!", I'm not proving your point by repudiating that claim.
You misunderstand, the meta moral condemnation I'm pointing at is precisely the idea that such complaints could only come from victim mentality, which is pretty clearly a moral error. This is different from the question at hand but it is funny because it's the same fallacious mechanism operating.
You're justworlding too: you haven't seen something bad happen so despite multiple people telling you it's happening it must be because of something inherent to the victims.
Just world theory has nothing to do with my skepticism.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/ben-shapiro-calls-joe-biden-the-kurt-cobain-of-politics/
https://youtube.com/watch?v=nAaZvlYc71w&t=205
https://www.thedailybeast.com/sarah-silverman-savages-pathetic-incel-elon-musk-on-daily-show
https://www.lipstickalley.com/threads/incel-elon-musty-backs-out-of-fight-with-incel-mark-zukerberg.5352488/
https://youtube.com/watch?v=xGGKJ3REusg?si=PnJxvLZlcauYMGxs
https://variety.com/2022/film/news/jordan-peterson-cries-olivia-wilde-incel-hero-dont-worry-darling-1235388024/
https://thespectator.com/topic/delete-facebook-zuckerberg-incel/
A cursory Google (I'm on my phone) to provide examples of public figures being described as "incels". All of these men have been married at least once, all but one of them are still married, all of them have fathered at least one child, at least one is known to have fathered multiple children by multiple women, and at least one is known to have had multiple extramarital affairs.
Elon has ten kids from adult to under 2…. Calling him an incel is literally retarded. Clearly this is not a man who lacks for sex.
I completely agree, but there's no shortage of people flinging that accusation at him anyway.
Occasionally it'll happen that someone will say "omg X is such an incel" and I'll point out "X? You mean the happily married man with two kids? How can he be an incel?" and the person will reply "well he just gives off incel vibes" which is vague enough that it could mean anything.
It seems like one of those situations where people go through a superficially logical chain of thought but commit a bunch of fallacies along the way without noticing.
More options
Context Copy link
It seems to be the same kind of definition creep around "racist" or "fascist" where it is now simply a general term of abuse or denigration towards someone who is disliked or does not share the same political views.
Like, if you read Eliot Rodgers quotes online, you can see why he failed so badly with women and friendships, and it had nothing to do with his looks or his ancestry; he was so self-centred and so hung up on his image as the 'perfect handsome gentleman' and yet the way he says things and the things he says, you can see why nobody wanted to spend longer than ten minutes in his company.
There's a complicated problem here with people who are, to be blunt, losers in life not due to their own choices but due to genetic lottery failing them when it comes to looks, intelligence, ability to be not-weird, and so forth. And the problem won't get solved just by "be yourself", but it's too cruel to say "yeah, you need to work hard on making yourself more of a sale, and even then you won't get very high quality in return" even if it's true. Then there are those who put the blame for their own failings (like Rodgers) on "it's women, they're bitches" and that engenders the angry and mean responses in return.
I don't have a solution. Government-mandated girlfriends won't work, because if you want someone to love you for yourself, then someone who is being paid/compelled to spend time with you isn't what you want - they don't care about you really, they are doing their public community service in pretending to like you for the 'girlfriend experience'. Telling people they have to resign themselves to being alone even if they want love and companionship is hard and seems cruel, even if it's true. Telling people if they do X, Y or Z they'll get that girl of their dreams is lying to them. Maybe readjusting expectations? This is not the 60s and the first flush of the Sexual Revolution anymore, historically a lot of people never got to have love and sex, there were always a lot of bachelors and spinsters, the idea of having tons of great casual sex in your teens and twenties and then finding a suitable mate and settling down for marriage and children only worked for a limited time (because you could sleep around, or you could get married, but unless you were rich or very charming, you couldn't do both) and now the sexual market has adjusted to the new conditions.
Really, Elliot Rodger seems like the victim of his own coping mechanisms. His inability to attract women (and same-sex friends, by extension) seems to have been entirely social in nature - as he correctly noted in his video, he's fairly handsome, he was only an inch or two shy of six foot, physically fit, obviously of above average intelligence. Unlike many incels, he couldn't blame his lack of success with women on a physical deformity or a learning disability. There are many incels who, one suspects, would have had just as little success with women had they been born 100, 200 or 500 years ago, but I would not put Rodger in that category: born in another context he could well have ended up content and thriving.
Because socialising didn't come naturally to him, he must have found it awkward and discomforting. In the past, he would have had no choice but to power through this initial discomfort, awkwardness, and platonic & romantic rejection, and had he done so he most likely would have ended up a more or less well-adjusted young man. (This is no mean feat! By "initial", I recognise that it might have taken years of persistent honing of his social skills with very little immediate reward. But it would be quite surprising if he didn't eventually get over it.)
But because he found this awkwardness and discomfort absolutely intolerable and because he was born in the West in 1991, he had the option to, rather than powering through, instead opt out and retreat into online spaces, in which he had absolute control over how he presented himself and with whom he interacted. Spending time in these online spaces made it even more challenging and distressing for him to interact with people in meatspace, creating a vicious feedback loop. Besides depriving him of opportunities to develop his social skills, the other big drawback of spending time in these online spaces (social media, porn, video games) is, unbeknownst to him, how heavily curated and idealised their depiction of the real world is, which resulted in what Rodger wanted out of life becoming concomitantly unrealistic over time. As a teenager, he probably thought to himself "I just want to meet a pretty girl who's nice to me", but by the time of his rampage his goal had curdled into "I want a 10/10 blonde bombshell with DDs, and anything less is a travesty on a galactic scale. 'Everybody' of my social status has that, why can't I?".
Really, the modern "therapeutic" social paradigm criticised at length by Freddie deBoer among others - in which every discomfort or obstacle (no matter how trivial) is an injustice to be remedied by fiat; in which the powers that be must go to great lengths to ensure that every individual feels "valid" and "empowered" at all times; in which adversity is not a potential opportunity for growth, but something always to be ameliorated or avoided under the auspices of "self-care"; in which smartphones and social media to connect with like-minded people are an effective coping mechanism for the "neurodivergent" - seems tailor-made to produce an army of Rodgers. I've spoken to Americans younger than Rodger who've grown up fully immersed in this milieu, and they genuinely seem to see no distinction between "this made me unhappy" and "this is a social wrong". They legitimately talk about the guy they like not texting them back as if their civil rights were being impinged upon. I fear for this generation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link