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 -
I loved Wikipedia.
If you ask me the greatest achievement of humankind, something to give to aliens as an example of the best we could be, Wikipedia would be my pick. It's a reasonable approximation of the sum total of human knowledge, available to all for free. It's a Wonder of the Modern World.
...which means that when I call what's happened to it "sacrilege", I'm not exaggerating. It always had a bit of a bias issue, but early on that seemed fixable, the mere result of not enough conservatives being there and/or some of their ideas being objectively false. No longer. Rightists are actively purged*, adding conservative-media sources gets you auto-reverted**, and right-coded ideas get lumped into "misinformation" articles. This shining beacon is smothered and perverted by its use as a club in the culture wars.
I don't know what to do about this. @The_Nybbler talks a lot about how the long march through the institutions won't work a second time; I might disagree with him in the general case, but in this specific instance I agree that Wikipedia's bureaucratic setup and independence from government make it extremely hard to change things from either below or above, and as noted it has gone to the extreme of having an outright ideological banning policy* which makes any form of organic change even harder. All I've done myself is quit making edits - something something, not perpetuating a corrupt system - and taken it off my homepage. But it's something I've been very upset about for a long time now, and I thought I'd share.
*Yes, I know it's not an official policy. I also know it's been cited by admins as cause for permabans, which makes that ring rather hollow.
**NB: I've seen someone refuse to include something on the grounds of (paraphrasing) "only conservatives thought this was newsworthy, and therefore there are no Reliable Sources to support the content".
Honest question: Do you believe that articles appearing in Breitbart or the Daily Mail are as likely to be accurate and well-sourced as articles appearing in the NY Times or Wall Street Journal?
Do you think the userbase who reads Breitbart and Daily Mail are as likely to care about truth and accuracy when spreading the news that appears in them as the userbase who reads NYT and WSJ?
To me, that list of deprecated sources doesn't sound like they said 'all conservative outlets are banned', Fox News isn't on there and frankly you can get as much anti-trans and pro-neo-liberal news as you could need from NYT and WSJ anyway.
To me that list just looks like 'outlets that are rabidly agenda-pushing in a way that ignores accuracy and facts whenever it's convenient, with a userbase that has a tendency to use their articles to push misinformation and inaccurate narratives online.' Like, I see meme posts from those sources on forums all the time, and the way they're presented is almost always inaccurate when you look into it.
'But why only conservative rags, where are the deprecated left-wing sources?'
With reference to our recent discussions about elites and institutions, I think this is a genuine difference in policy and aesthetic between the sides: the left retains a certain reverence for elites and intellectuals and journalism that forces their large and prominent news outlets to at least care a little about the truth, in ways that don't mean the things printed in them are always true or that they're not pushing an agenda, but does mean that the magnitude of the problem is much less.
And of course this is not to say that lies and misinformation aren't present in the left's rhetoric and narratives; just that when they are, they are more likely to come from social media or activist groups or other influencers rather than the type of large 'news' outlets listed on this page. I presume Wikipedia already didn't accept Facebook memes and Communist podcasts and PR statements from BLM and etc as sources, and those things are sort of the left's equivalent of Breitbart and Daily Mail.
I think you're right regarding an asymmetry, but as I said to someone else I think the blanket auto-revert is an overly-blunt instrument and I think there are cases where only conservative media cares about X that lead to X getting missed.
It wouldn't be so bad if Wikipedia still had a substantial base of established RW users that wasn't subject to the auto-revert, but No Nazis and the mess over COVID have basically extirpated it.
Also, while Fox isn't on there that's something that's been debated at least once and IIRC several times.
(Sorry about the wait. For whatever reason, your comment didn't show up in my notifications until today.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link