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 -
Last year I made a prediction about 2023 marking some sort of turning point regarding the Trans issues. But how does one judge the accuracy of a prediction that boils down to "the vibes are shifting"? To attempt that, let me explain where I was coming from when I made it.
My first exposure to trans issues was on weird rat-adjecant Internet forums, Somewhere between 10-15 years ago. Either a trans person would join the forum and bring the subject up, or, interestingly, a cis regular would bring it up, and a trans-poster would appear, seemingly out of nowhere (and in retrospect it's somewhat scary how often it turned out to be Zinnia Jones, speicifically). They spoke with confidence, they knew the Science (and in those places we respected the Science), and could dispatch any argument coming their way like pros. Through it all I had many doubts - is it really wise to let minors make that decision? How exactly can puberty blockers be reversible? How do you even diagnose dysphoria? But that was just my stomach grumbling, and they had the Science, they seemed ubeatable.
Fast forward a few years, and a whole bunch of things have happened. The replication crisis cast doubt on the Science writ large, and critical look at some of the foundational research in Trans-Science turned up massive issues in that specific branch, detransitioners started showing up, massive shifts in the demographics of transitioners started making it's way to official statistics, not to mention an exponential increase in the raw amount as well. Instead of confidence, I started seeing trans activists genuinely flustered, not dumbfounded, but clearly things were happening that they weren't expecting, and didn't know what to make of yet. For my part I still felt uncertain, maybe some new information is going to come up that will contradict what flustered them? Maybe they'll dig out some detail the critics overlooked? Maybe they'll come up with a really good argument to address the issues raised? By the end of 2022 I felt like clicked through the dialogue tree several times over, with several different people, over a long enough period of time - if they could come up with something, they would already.
So what would a vibe shift look like?
Around that time I saw the documentary The Minds Of Men (it's quite rambly, very conspiracy-theory-y, but if those aren't deal breakers, and you have 3.5 hours to kill, it's well argued, and I recommend it), it is about MK-Ultra and psychosurgery, and it is in fact what inspired me to get that copy of Time Magazine as well as a bunch of historical documents I could dig out online. One recurring question I had when watching the documentary was “how the hell did I not hear about tthis”? It's not like I'm an expert, but this is the sort of stuff that felt like it should pop up along the way in my areas of interest. I heard about the Rosenhan experiment, I heard about the Stanford prison experiment, the Milgram experiment, even the 30-50's era lobotomies, why not the late 60's to early 70's era of psychosurgery? Was it just not a big deal? Well, it was big enough to be covered in Time, it was big enough for a best-selling thriller based on the premise, and it's movie adaptation (I wasn't sure when I wrote the post originally, but the Terminal Man is indeed based on the case of Leonard Kille, sometimes referred to as Thomas R. by the media, who was treated in the clinic that was covered in that Time article), the documentary featured footage I also recall from edgy 90's grunge MTV videos, hell my mother remembered hearing about it at the time, through the Iron Curtain, no less!
So assuming psychosurgery was indeed a decently-sized issue, could it just disappear into the mists of history? I asked that very question and the consensus response seems to have been “yes, definitely!”. Your theory on that may differ from mine, but I ended coming to the conclusion that memory of such events needs to be actively maintained or it will fade. We remember things that are useful for people writing history books (or the ones who employ them) and forget the others, so while a similarly sized scandal like the Tuskagee experiment has a certain “Never Again” quality to it, others, like psychosurgery will fall by the wayside. And before you bring it up - no, this is not due to the affected demographics, which are largely the same. If you read the Time magazine article, you'll see doctors Sweet, Mark, and Ervin were planning to deploy psychosurgery as a cure against the race riots of the 60's.
Some might notice that the hypothetical I linked to in the recent paragraph is specifically about trans issues. Indeed, all these thoughts were bubbling in my head for over a year now, and I pretty much expect the hypothetical to become reality. What does a vibe shift look like? That. Was the prediction accurate? Well, I was avoiding specifics because I don't know how to even begin to pin those down, but looking at the state of the discourse on this forum, the pro-trans side seems to have officially moved from “that did not happen” to “and if it did, that's not a big deal” regarding medical interventions on minors. But it is perhaps the reactions of relative outsiders to the debate that are more indicative of the vibe shift and it:s mechanics:
If we were to see a vibe-shift-fueled memory-holing of the issue, would it not happen through People of Status suddenly finding the subject “tacky”, and “played out”?
Now I'm not saying this is going to happen tomorrow, timing is exactly the thing that's going to be hard to get right in a prediction like this. It also might feel silly to make sweeping societal predictions off of changes in internet discourse, but who ended up being right, people freaking out about the changes in Internet discourse seen in Tumblr Social Justice Warriors, or people claiming it was just a couple crazy kids on the Internet?
A lot of history fades from public awareness, even if people actively try to maintain it. This guy is a grifter, but in case that isn't damning enough, the difference between his summary and a more genuine one is serious, and that's despite a small industry of people like David Hardy spending years of their lives to both uncover and publicize the fine details.
'Psychosurgery' falls into a similar boat -- it's a fun trivia topic to reveal that a famous and popular-until-his-death President of the United States had a sister who was treated for 'depression' in a way that left her with the mental capacity of a two-year-old, so it's not forgotten. But in turn there's also just not that many survivors who were in that place where significant but not incapacitating harm could make them cause celebres, especially by the time you get to the 1960s amygdalotomies, where only thousands of the procedures have been done worldwide, rather than tens of thousands just in the United States.
Eh, that's a possible route -- the extent people suddenly stopped caring about where and how the Chinese government might have had any involvement in early COVID stuff is an overt case -- but it's not the only one. Contrast the treatments of masks, where an initial hard press against flipped in valence toward mandates (and still floats up and down in valence by time); or with common fashion cycles among 'progressive' media where a popular culture name goes from hero to villain and sticks well past their cultural relevance. And there's a possibility it just evolves.
I'm skeptical that any of these are going to happen. There's just too many trans people already around, in ways that are too hard to extract not just from doing trans stuff, but from being in social and environmental characteristics where .
But I'm a lot more sympathetic to the trans perspective than the median American, and significantly more so than the median poster here. Which brings the more immediate issue up:
In addition to the obvious issue you already recognize where posters on this forum and unrelated outsiders aren't great signs of what direction Discourse is going, and especially where People of Status are going, there's the more specific problem where even for our subculture this particular topic is hard to make fun to write about.
I try to spice up matters when I can, and there's part of me that hopes this is some place where there could be a reasonable meeting of the minds if we better understood what the hell we were talking about.
But mostly, that's not the sort of thing that happens, or even has signs of happening, and it's boring. The disagreements here are axiom-level, and while there's somethings that can change people's minds on the edges of pragmatic policies, maybe, it's not what the actual disagreements are. That's not a fault specific to the Motte -- the few trans activist spaces that allow disagreement on the margins or recognition of Red Tribe disagreement still don't actually have much to say -- but it's more frustrating here because there's many better options.
I'm unclear what the distribution of opinions is around here. I get the broader strokes, but on some details I'm apparently confused.
I casually dismissed white nationalism recently and received more pushback against that than for any other opinion.
I don't think we are largely a cabal of rightoids. But maybe I'm confused on how large of a subfaction they are around here. We need an ideological consensus around here. I predict the Motte is more sympathetic to trans people than the median American, and by a large degree. But also vastly more critical of trans talking points than the median upstanding PMC progressive.
I didn't see exactly what happened in that case, but as someone who was occasionally part of pushback like that, my perspective is that it is simply because there's a lot of lazy thinking when it comes to criticism of the white nationalists. When you're talking in mainstream society you can just say "x is a white nationalist" and if true that's a devastating critique that destroys someone's reputation by itself, let alone the argument they're making. But that's not the case here - they can actually mount arguments without just instantly being obliterated from the discourse. This means that if you use the same lazy and poorly thought out attacks that get by just fine when the white nationalists have no ability to respond, you'll get destroyed when they can actually mount a defence at all. That's not to say that there aren't any white nationalists here, but I really don't think they're a majority at all.
I also don't think white nationalists are more than a small minority here. But I didn't expect significant pushback again rejecting their silly redefining of terms. One of them tried a lazy gotcha redefinition. I said "no". A number of them leapt to defend the lazy invalid gotcha redefinition.
The redefinition of otherwise sensible terms in question was: if you care about white people, then you necessarily must be a white nationalist. "Ethnostate or you don't care" was the completely invalid false dichotomy. Given that level of argument: they are the ones being obliterated by their wrong redefinition of terms. A single "no" is a complete argument against hostile fringe redefinition of common terms. That's indeed not what "care" means to almost everyone almost always. They can't trap me into saying I don't "care about white people" because I'm not a white supremacist. They don't get to define these words or make me answer to them.
But I have seen young American progressives and religious immigrant Muslims being completely unable to form a counterargument because they've never before been challenged. They think merely asserting their group's consensus is a knock down argument. "I understand you think that, but I don't agree" is beyond their experience or ability to deal with. So I get your larger point.
This sounds strange and unlike most interactions I see on these forums, are you able to find a link?
That’d be hammi in this train wreck of a thread. See also his response for some of the pushback he got.
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