site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   18549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

(you did that),

I of course didn't, but since that's a meme started on here by my #1 long-term stalker who also happens to be a mod, I don't expect people to be much interested in being careful about the facts of the matter.

(as per any slander, it's a bunch of lies and mischaracterization built around a true seed of a real event. You'd think 8 years of seeing the left lie about Trump and Trump lie about the left would make the pattern clear to people discussing those events every day, but w/e)

  • -11

I of course didn't, but since that's a meme started on here by my #1 long-term stalker who also happens to be a mod, I don't expect people to be much interested in being careful about the facts of the matter.

@gattsuru is not a mod. He's not a stalker either, just unusually well-organized.

In any case, what's the response you're looking for with this comment? I'd like to provide it, if possible. I can't speak for anyone else, but I would like to be as careful of the facts as possible. I certainly am not interested in perpetrating lies or mischaracterizations. What's your understanding of events, and how does it differ from the description above? The original thread and subsequent threads aren't hard to find, and if there's a misunderstanding or a mischaracterization it shouldn't be too hard to demonstrate. Even if trawling the old threads is too much trouble, I'd at least be interested in hearing a more detailed description of events from your perspective.

It seems to me that this post, like many of your posts, is essentially a lament that people are treating you unfairly despite considerable forbearance on your part. I would like to treat you fairly; normally I would do that by responding directly to your statements, but given past experience I have some doubts that would be productive. So instead, I'll ask you directly: what sort of response would you like to the above? This is a discussion space, which means if you're posting here, we can presume you're looking for discussion. What should that discussion look like, in your view? What would be the proper way to proceed constructively? I can't promise that you'll get it from anyone else in this thread, but I can at least try to provide it myself, and maybe it can set an example.

To lay my cards on the table, I don't think you post in good faith, and believe that your general strategy is to push the edge of the rules as hard and as skillfully as possible, and then concern troll and play the victim when people push back. I think this has been your pattern for pretty much as long as I've been interacting with you, and believe I wasted a lot of time trying to have productive discussions with you before I got a handle on how your schtick works. If that model is correct, the next logical play would be for you to ignore this message and focus on the lowest-quality and most angry responses in the thread.

On the other hand, it seems to me that even if that is your schtick, the best response is to exert a bit of effort offering you what you appear to be asking for, and then make it clear that you probably won't take it. And if I'm wrong and you will take it, and we can actually have a high-quality dialogue, well, mission accomplished, as they say.

So, again, we have a clear disagreement here. You think you've been slandered, I think you are objecting to people pointing out your very real bad behavior. It doesn't seem to me that this disagreement should be unsolvable; people have criticized me for posts I've made in the past, and I've always been happy to discuss the issue with them at their pleasure, and will remain so in the future. So what's the proper way to proceed?

You'd think 8 years of seeing the left lie about Trump and Trump lie about the left would make the pattern clear to people discussing those events every day, but w/e)

When do you personally think the left has ever lied about Trump?

In any case, what's the response you're looking for with this comment?

I'm not particularly looking for any specific response, I'm just saying the things I think are true in response to accusations against me. I don't think there's any response that 'fixes' everything, and I suspect our disagreements on matters of fact are too broad for such a response to be honest if it happened. I'm just saying my piece.

If you want to ask what outcomes I would like from this, it would be great if you would refrain from falsely accusing me of endorsing fake rape accusations (hah), jumping in to conversations to talk about how awful and dishonest I am and then holding court on that topic throughout a 50-post-long comment chain, pulling up ancient comments by me to use as examples of how awful progressives are, and so forth and so on.

(I also remember you as someone who did a ton of this back on /r/SCC and /r/culturewarroundup and /r/themotte too, which is informing a lot of my strong feelings about this. But admittedly in my memory from back then you sort of blend into the group of 'generic perpetual rude antagonists' with Jtarrou, nybbler, TPO, etc. etc. So, sorry if you didn't do that and I'm thinking of one of them, in that world this response would be slightly hyperbolic towards you personally and more about a general phenomenon I experience from many sources)

Of course, I don't actually expect you to stop doing that stuff.

Regardless of how fair or true or within-the-rules-for-this-site those types of posts are, they're just fucking weird. It feels really creepy to be such an extensive topic of conversation among strangers, to know that people are keeping tabs and grudges and ledgerbooks on me that they are just waiting to pull out at any moment, that they seem to think they have some kind of relationship with me (adversarial, but real and persistent) when I feel nothing of the sort towards them and just want to have anonymous discussions of ideas.

What I want to do is just scream 'Stop thinking about me! Stop talking about me! I don't know you!'. Debunk my ideas and arguments if you think they're wrong, stop talking to me if you don't think it's worth your time, please stop treating me as a character in stories you tell.

But it's a free country and a free-speech-motivated board. If that's how you enjoy spending your time then that's your right, if that's how you relate to arguments and ideas and discussions then that's a legitimate form of human experience and you probably can't just flip it off. And I always have the option of staying gone next time if the creepiness I feel from it outweighs the benefit to me of the good conversations I do sometimes have here.

BUT: if you and other mods are going to keep talking about me like that at regular intervals, and ignoring other people who do so, then I'd like it if I stopped getting modded for 'antagonism' when making drastically less pointed and accusatory comments.

I don't really expect that to happen either, because it seems like there's a standard firmly in place by which me directing any detectable hostility at others is antagonism and people directing infinite hostility at me is not, and I'm sure each mod individually has a reason why those standards are fair in their own head that they firmly believe is true and fair. Maybe they're even right, and it's the type of thing that's hard to see when you're the one getting the spiky end of the stick every day.

So yeah, if the question is 'what do I want and expect to get', the answer is probably 'nothing, I'm just defending myself and speaking honestly'.

What's your understanding of events, and how does it differ from the description above?

Having this discussion in a parallel comment chain, going to keep it localized there. You can join it if you want, but it feels pretty straightforward to me.

normally I would do that by responding directly to your statements, but given past experience I have some doubts that would be productive.

That link is to you responding to someone who is not me, I was never aware of that conversation. What was the point of the link?

When do you personally think the left has ever lied about Trump?

Just this week I saw a bunch of articles pointing to him slurring his speech slightly or confusing two names and saying that's definitely dementia and he'll be cognitively declining and falling apart before election day. While I don't rule out early-onset dementia for either candidate given their ages, those are the types of mistakes anyone will make if they talk in public for dozens of hours a week and are not any strong evidence of the claims being made.

When do you personally think Trump has lied about the left, if ever?

And, don't you think it's ironic how you can't help but seize on this statement where I opened myself to the possibility of vulnerability, as a way to 'put me in the hotseat' at the end of your long post about how reasonable and constructive you want to be, especially the part where you said:

If that model is correct, the next logical play would be for you to ignore this message and focus on the lowest-quality and most angry responses in the thread.

I of course didn't, but since that's a meme started on here by my #1 long-term stalker who also happens to be a mod, I don't expect people to be much interested in being careful about the facts of the matter.

Hey, I'm not a moderator.

... as per any slander, it's a bunch of lies and mischaracterization built around a true seed of a real event.

Source.

as per any slander, it's a bunch of lies and mischaracterization built around a true seed of a real event

Thanks for pointing out the seed. Now, the actual claim being made:

I was radicalized by interacting with the kind of progressive who calls people racist for not believing Jussie Smollet and then refuses to acknowledge the case ever again once it becomes apparent that they've made a booboo.

Nowhere there or anywhere else do I call anyone racist for doubting the claim, or call anyone on the board racist. In fact, in the thread you link I have a later post explicitly saying it would be stupid to call anyone racist for those reasons, and I was asking for the people who were calling people racist in an analogized incident about a highschool debate to stop calling people racist using that type of logic.

And we have had this discussion with me talking about my mistake of getting drawn in and believing there must be some truth to the story several times on the old subreddit (mostly that I didn't think cops would fail to correct misstatements about gross physical evidence of injury, updated on that now). The idea that I haven't is, again, just a meme spread by some people who seem really devoted to cultivating ad hominems instead of addressing my actual arguments, for whatever reason.

So, like I said: the core of a true event, but then the parts that are actually the most damning accusations are just lies.

Standard tactics which I would expect people around here to recognize by now, but no, not when the target is chosen properly.

Nowhere there or anywhere else do I call anyone racist for doubting the claim, or call anyone on the board racist.

Hm...

And, yeah, this is white fragility. In a week when two white kids lost a highschool debate for quoting Ben Shapiro, and also a week where a black homosexual was severely beaten with a rope tied around his neck while the attackers yelled homophobic and racist slurs and yelled 'MAGA Country', which one did we spend 3x as many comments talking about? When some people can't walk down the street without fear of violence, why is this tiny incident apparently so much more worthy of our notice and concern?

While earlier:

But I'll say this, for those who aren't aware: part of the standard progressives critique of classical liberalism - ie 'lets be blind to differences' - is that, in practice, it always ends up favoring those already in power and reinforcing existing power structures, and that when there are 'accidental' deviations from the maxim of blindness, they always coincidentally seem to involve hurting minorities and those without structural power. See What was Liberalism, especially section 2 starting around 3:30.

So while it's off the mark to directly call this sort of classic liberalism 'racist', the steelman accusation is that it has a tendency to favor the continuation of racist structures if such things just happen to already exist. And the corollary is that any public intellectual who talks about these issues should be aware of this tendency because this is a pretty basic and old critique. And the corollary to that is that the people who stridently ignore this problem and pretend it doesn't exist, are probably doing so for motivated reasons... which is where we come to the accusations of racism and the relevance of pointing out the demographics of the speaker.

You not saying it, just implying it favors the continuation of structures that do it... well, if you want @somedude to issue a mea culpa and say "the kind of progressive who calls people racist makes two-faced and not-especially-subtle insinuations people are racist", hope you enjoy that. I'm sure they'll love the opportunity to say it twice. But it's a pretty weak defense.

And we have had this discussion with me talking about my mistake of getting drawn in and believing there must be some truth to the story several times on the old subreddit (mostly that I didn't think cops would fail to correct misstatements about gross physical evidence of injury, updated on that now).

That's closer (perhaps I missed the 'several'), though it rather failed to engage with your original position.

You not saying it, just implying it favors the continuation of structures that do it...

Literally what are you talking about, the second post is referring to a highschool debate, nothing about that comment invokes the Smollet case or anyone on the board or anything related to the claim against me here. I would accuse you of taking me out of context to try to trick people, except I think you're competent to do a better job if that's what you were trying to do and wouldn't link to the source, so I'm honestly baffled.

Once again: the accusation was 'calls people racist for not believing Jussie Smollet'. Not, 'says that the steelman position that some highschool students were grasping at is that classical liberalism is not well-suited to dismantle existing historical elements of structural racism'.

I believe you can tell the difference.

I would accuse you of taking me out of context to try to trick people,

But you'd look ridiculous when he's giving the links to the conversations in question, so anyone can check the context for themselves.

...yeah, literally the next thing I said in that sentence you are quoting one section of.

Which is incredibly funny.

Good job if that was an intentional joke, I guess.

Who do you actually think you're gaslighting here? The list of people eager to call you out after the hoax became obvious was practically endless, and the way you shamelessly feigned blindness to all of it was an instant meme with no moderator help required.

He had a post about "things I was wrong about" where he "acknowledges" the case by saying something to the effect of "haha, I guess I should have waited a few weeks before commenting", and would probably claim that means he didn't do what he's being being accused of.

What I'm being accused of:

and then refuses to acknowledge the case ever again

Even if you weren't satisfied with the depths of my grovelling at the time, would you agree that making a post where I said I was wrong about the case contradicts the claim that I refused to ever acknowledge it again?

"The case" was you calling us racists and conspiracy theorists, so no you never acknowledged that, or that it was wrong.

I was radicalized by interacting with the kind of progressive who calls people racist for not believing Jussie Smollet and then refuses to acknowledge the case ever again once it becomes apparent that they've made a booboo.

You honestly believe that is the most straightforward and parsimonious reading of the plain text of that comment?

That in a single sentence which references a police case in the first half of the sentence as the central matter at issue, and then uses the words 'the case' in the second half of the sentence, they are awkwardly referring to 'the case of the guy who was rude on the internet' rather than the police case the sentence is about.

That's what you're going to go with?

Your answer will tell me a lot about whether to treat your criticisms as good-faith in the future.

Yes, I'm going to go with "the case" in "refuses to acknowledge the case", referring to "who calls people racist for not believing Jussie Smollet " that literally immediately preceeds it.

That in a single sentence which references a police case

You honestly believe that is the most straightforward and parsimonious reading of the plain text of that comment? That because the sentence contains to word "case" it must refer to the police case?

Your answer will tell me a lot about whether to treat your criticisms as good-faith in the future.

Who do you think you're fooling here? I've never seen you have a constructive conversation with anyone here. You always came here to get your rocks off by riling people up.

Thanks, I know what I need to know now.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats