site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 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.

7
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I think you meant to post this as a top-level, not a reply.

I'm not looking for a perma-ban for "single issue posting".

And you’re doing this by…joining other threads to talk about the ADL?

The OP hewed pretty close to bare links, so I can’t really blame you for taking your own spin.

Yes? Adding it as a comment to more of a roundup thread is less risky than a top-level thread, I received a 7-day ban for my last one.

The OP hewed pretty close to bare links, so I can’t really blame you for taking your own spin.

The thread is "Time for some links about breaking and not so breaking culture war news" and my reply is contributing to that.

Yes? Adding it as a comment to more of a roundup thread is less risky than a top-level thread, I received a 7-day ban for my last one.

No, it's not. Do you think you're invisible if you don't post a top-level thread?

I'm not going to ban you for this comment, but it's borderline and adds to our stack of evidence that all you ever post about is Jews, and that even when you pretend you're posting about something else, it will always turn out to be about Jews, and when you respond to someone else in another thread, you will make it about Jews. So yes, if you continue to do this, you will eat another ban.

  • -11

If there's relevant CW topics like the Indian Reservation excavations, or this controversy between Musk and the ADL, I'm going to post about it, sorry. If you're going to perma-ban me, then whatever.

We're not asking you to not post about it. We're asking you to also post about other stuff.

Is single-issue posting really such a problem? If a user has a limited knowledge or interest range, what else are they supposed to do? I could understand limiting top level posting frequency so that a single user can't swamp the forum, but allowing them to post and then giving other users free reign to strawman and attribute malicious motives to them seems to be the worst of both worlds. We have a mod, @Amadan, openly and repeatedly refusing to respond to this user's arguments because, (to paraphrase) 'you're only making these points because you hate "da joos" and think they're "lizard people"' (which is just as stupid inane as "muh freeze peach"). To me, that's a far bigger failure of this forum's ideals than a few users with their own hobby horses.

Is single-issue posting really such a problem?

Yes, very much so. Humans treat "How many times they've seen a thing happen" as equivalent to "How big a problem is this thing". Our minds, left unchecked, will make this conclusion for us, but we have a name for it - the Chinese Robber Fallacy. Or, if you want a less politically salient example, YouTube's algorithm rewards daily uploads instead of high-quality uploads. While new content has its value, this results in people posting low-quality garbage that is often directed at kids at a higher volume.

It's not SS that is inherently the problem. It's everyone who posts frequently about the same things, because the world is big enough that you could make two or three threads discussing the same basic idea ("progressives do X", "conservatives do Y", etc.) without actually having anything of value to say, but driving the point about some connections in the world into people's minds.

There is an argument to be had that we need people to scrupulously report on every instance of something happening so we can pull from a bigger body of facts to establish a narrative or trend. Organizations like the ADL or NRA for anti-Semitism and gun control respectively do need to constantly be informing their readers about the latest things to happen. But out of respect for avoiding the Chinese Robber Fallacy, no one, not even SS, should be posting "here's 15 things about this topic in the last month", but instead talk about it at a much lower rate and build on a narrative with trend analysis and whatnot.

Basically, we don't need 10 top-level comments about something Disney might do. We need one that goes through each of those events with contextualization.