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 -
...that I'm not interested in at all...
First, I just can't get into the mindset of someone who cares about votes beyond them being a metric of engagement, but more importantly, and I've been gesturing at the idea for a while, but I'm done with this entire "democratic" framework of analyzing anything. Any forum will have it's share of high-, mid-, and low-frequency posters, and a whole bunch of lurkers, why should the former be judged by the latter? Why should anyone care what people who don't bother to say anything think?
Aren't they on Reddit? For all the complaints about the bias of this place, they seem to have monopolized that site to an even greater extent.
Same answer as above. As long as we were all on the same site progressives could swing by and drop a comment or a vote, now that you have to register and check up on the place separately, a lot don't bother. The other side doesn't have many other places to go, so they disproportionately end up here.
Well maybe but that's sort of the point. If this is simply a right-wing reddit that doesn't say a great deal for it really.
It’s not.
The quality of discussion is higher than anywhere on reddit, and unlike reddit, the admins have no interest in censoring certain political viewpoints; leftists and rightists alike are welcome.
Let's be honest here - nobody is censored here, but it turns out, people don't like arguing 20-on-1 anywhere in society, regardless of ideology. Which is true of left-leaning spaces as well, for conservatives. But, well, those spaces don't do the whole "we're not censoring viewpoints" thing, they just say forthrightly, 'yeah, this is a place for people who agree on x, y, and z. Like it or leave.'
I think this place is mostly forthright about saying, "Yeah, this is a place for people who are willing to expose themselves to 20-on-1 arguments based on the strengths of their arguments, regardless of political leanings. Like it or leave." That such an environment tends to draw a more right-wing crowd, I think, is mostly down to modern leftism rejecting liberalism, which leads both to leftists having access to more mainstream forums where challenges to their views get censored and to leftists just not wanting to go to places where such challenges are tolerated. And the vicious cycle that follows.
It's easy to say that when you know you'll always be on the side of the 20:1.
Also, I just do think it's true. The smartest left-wing person with immense writing talent could show up here, and honestly, I don't think a single mind would be changed. Now, I know the response to that is, "that's just because progressivism/leftism/wokeism is such a weak ideology, that even a genius-level intellect can argue for it, and the only reason it wins today is the rich, powerful blah blah blah."
No, I think it's because most people here are right-wing. Which is fine to have solid views - God could come down from Earth, say, "actually, all abortion is evil according to your Creator, and all aborted babies end up in Limbo forever" and I'd say, "cool, I don't care. Sounds like you have a shitty ideology." But just admit that, instead of just being, "well, I've heard all the arguments and mine were the most logical and true."
That's the reason I only comment here to put forth the actual left-wing view on stuff, instead of the imagined one, to push back against obviously incorrect stuff, and stuff like this, where it's not really a political issue mostly,
Now, the other thing is, I don't get when it became conservative/right-wing/etc. dogma that liberalism means anybody can say anything anywhere and if you don't want to argue that issue or point, that's censorship and the death of liberalism. Like again, I'm almost middle aged. I've been arguing on the Internet for a long time - even in the early 2000's, there were still TOS and yes, they were maybe more free-wheeling than 2021 in what you thought Twitter was then, and obviously, some politics has shifted, but you could always get banned, and while people may have argued person x didn't deserve a ban, the argument was never, 'banning people is wrong and against free speech,' because even the right-wingers understood there were rules, and if they didn't like the rules, the door was over there. If mods went too far, obviously there'd be a mass dispersal, but the secret was, in most cases, most people who got banned deserved it.
I know the response will be 4chan and it's antecedents, but 4chan was always the place for edgy losers who couldn't follow the relatively loose standards of the Internet, and the fact the young Right is basically all 4-chan adjacent is probably why all decent youth polling still shows them as overwhelmingly left-leaning, because the alternative is the people who were seen as edgy weirdos in 2004, let alone 2024.
That's why even though I dislike it, I'm fine with Elon changing the rules on Twitter/X. Now, he's currently paying the price for it, because it turns out people don't like 'nudes in bio' bot responses, and all the other stuff that has bubbled up, but it's his house, his rules, as long as he's not breaking any other laws. Now, the way he has happily limited the free speech rights of certain groups when certain governments come calling makes him a hypocrite, but that's another story.
I think fictional made-up examples are less than worthless.
This is just a strawman. Approximately no one argues that "liberalism means anybody can say anything anywhere and if you don't want to argue that issue or point, that's censorship and the death of liberalism." I am middle-aged, and I was there in the early 2000s too. Yes, there were TOSs and bans and such. What makes it still liberalism is that bans and such were meant to be viewpoint-neutral. This isn't an easy thing to strictly define, but certainly one side choosing to respond to an argument with offense or choosing to claim that it activates some "fight-or-flight mode" in them merely for seeing such arguments was clearly not considered proper grounds for such bans.
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