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 -
The trial of Darrell Brooks is set to start this coming Monday, October 3. Brooks is accused of running over 77 people at the Waukesha Christmas Parade.
Brooks will be representing himself. His motion to do so was granted today. There have been a few entertaining / exasperating videos of Brooks and the Judge going back and forth on this matter.
Brooks believes himself to be a sovereign citizen. In one of the videos he's crossed out the words "I understand" and replaced them with "I have been informed of." These were on a form he had to sign that warned him of the perils of self-representation. It turns out this is a sovereign citizen thing. They believe that to say "I understand" means that they "stand under" the court and are subject to its authority. In the video granting his motion the judge finds that "I have been informed of" is functionally equivalent to "I understand" and Brooks objects, saying he never said those words.
Culture war angle: this was a big culture war story last year as people perceived the attack as both under-covered and when it was covered, downplayed. The Rittenhouse case got many orders of magnitude more coverage and had an order of magnitude fewer victims.
Additionally, on the videos I discovered that YouTube tacks on a link to the sovereign citizen movement page on Wikipedia, giving it the same treatment as COVID-19 misinformation.
Hot take:
The partisan games of the two parties are particularly harsh on those with mental illness or some weakness. While I think a lot of American politics today is a heavy dose of Larping the mentally I’ll can’t differentiate.
Either that or Biden is serious and not Larping that half the countries an extremists KKK nazi fascists Hitler in the flesh. Scared that I’m not positive he’s just Larping.
Eh, I get schizo posting for funsies but what do you mean? Just examples? I'm curious, not trying to nail you.
I'm no expert, but what little I've heard about QAnon sounds like the most deranged rantings about the Bilderberg Group/Elders of Zion/NWO dialled up to 11.
A family member of mine is a deeply committed QAnon type. I've heard about it and spoken with her about it extensively. My takeaway:
QAnon isn't a conspiracy theory, it's the conspiracy theory. Q is fully generalized skepticism of the intellectual, moral, and scientific consensus. It started out as something specific and more focused, but now all kooky stuff falls under its umbrella -- I've found myself dragged into conversations on Bigfoot, aliens, mind control, demons under the Vatican, Jesus being fake, child abduction, the inevitable ascendance of humanity to their spiritual forms as we pass through the North Gate (or was it East? I forget)...
Q has embraced all conspiracy theories. It is the platonic embodiment of Conspiracy Theory. And like all conspiracy theories, really, what it means is that the people have decided authority can't be trusted.
So Q's crazy, and wrong, but they're wrong in the right direction, usually. I find them pretty sympathetic.
From what I learned about conspiracy theories and theorists before QAnon was a thing, this seems like something that's just common to all/most conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories seem to be very highly correlated, so that if someone buys into moon landing fakery, then they're also much more likely than the typical person to believe in Big Foot and/or flat Earthism and/or lizardmen rulers from outer space, etc. and vice versa. As if there's some sort of generic, say, c-factor in humans that predicts their likelihood to buy into conspiracy theories, and the specific conspiracy theory doesn't matter much. Perhaps QAnon is just the current in thing among conspiracy theorists that caught fire due to circumstance.
Once you've learned enough about the world to realize how little you know and how easy it is for power to lie, everything collapses. If you're on the right side of our culture, you have seen, in real-time, how captured institutions propagate falsehoods and immediately sear them into public consciousness; 80 years from now, the official story of Gamergate will be what the journalists said, even though they lied constantly and it was called out constantly.
Now, Gamergate's not really a big deal. But once I realized every respected institution in the country -- if not the world -- was ideologically corrupted and willing to lie in unspoken cooperation, I realized I can't really trust what I know about the world and history. Epistemic learned helplessness is real, and conspiratorial thinking is one of the ways to cope; you can't tell when something is true or false, but you're pretty sure the people telling you are bad, so just assume they're lying.
I'm educated enough that I don't believe most of these things. But the older I get, the less I trust what I used to believe. Who knows. Talk to me again in ten years and maybe I'll have radicalized into a Holocaust denier insisting the Jews faked the moon landing to hide Bigfoot.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It kind of got out of hand, I'm pretty sure the spooks who came up with QAnon (I say spooks because who else would say 'trust the plan / the deep state') didn't expect the more deranged pizzagate theories getting attached to it, but here we are.
QAnon isn't really far right though. It's a boomer fairy tale about quiet patriot waiting to fix the big bad conspiracy.
More options
Context Copy link
How big is that stuff, really? I am not American, so I have little sense of it -- do these people really exist in significant numbers, or is it another case of progressives calling anyone who thinks they're acting even a little bit dishonestly a conspiracy theorist? When people say "X has gone full QAnon" do they mean "X genuinely believes that elites blend up babies into a smoothie to keep them young" or do they mean "X voted for Trump"?
deleted
Where are you from?
Your story is interesting to me because no one in my family is like yours but you and I are still here and probably both concerned about the sudden appearance of the Orz.
More options
Context Copy link
He was just rendering onto Trump the things that are Trump's.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
According to the latest ACX post, a QAnon-type newsletter is the top Substack in the "International" section.
I'd say "official" QAnon folks are pretty rare, but the ideas from that community have definitely gained a strong footing in US conservative circles. You won't find "X genuinely believes that elites blend up babies into smoothies," but you will find a lot of "X genuinely believes media and (liberal) political elites harbor a large number of pedophiles who are trafficking children."
Heck, I'm pretty close to believing that, if you take out "liberal" and "large."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'd say it's simultaneously bigger than you'd think and smaller/less relevant than a lot of people online try to paint it as. Just about every family has that one drunk conspiracy crank uncle who will take any excuse the can to go off about their hobby horse and this is just [current year]'s flavor of it.
More options
Context Copy link
I am an American, and honestly, I don't think there's a way to tell. I don't know of any polls trying to measure this stuff, and even if there were, their accuracy would be quite questionable given the lizardman constant. From my own personal experience, I don't know of anyone who buys into QAnon, but that's 99.9999% a function of the insularity and polarization of where I live, which is basically filled with and run by people I would consider to have QAnon-like beliefs in terms of epistemic rigor, but has no actual QAnon believers AFAICT.
Given the patterns of progressives and the lesson many of us learned from The Boy Who Cried Wolf, gun to my head I would guess this is just the umpteenth example of a tiny, inconsequential portion of the population being blown up like the boogeyman for a politically convenient narrative. But that guess of mine is itself a politically convenient narrative, so should be taken with at least one ocean's worth of salt.
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