culture war roundup
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17d ago
Are you beetlejuice? Or do you, gattsuru and germ have some kind of discord group? I don't see how else you could find a 6 day old comment in a two week old thread, short of trolling my comment history or someone else doing so and reporting everything I write.
I read 99.5% of the comments that get posted to the motte using the firehose view, and especially make an effort to read anything you post, because I consider you "the iron that sharpens". This one I wanted to reply to, but between crunch at work and kids didn't get around to it till this weekend. Plus, the last couple times you name-dropped me, I didn't get around to a direct response; I get the feeling you enjoy our exchanges less than I do, so I've generally tried to give a bit more space lately. Anyhow, when I finally had time I just searched your name in the bar and scrolled down a bit to find "that CPAR post I missed earlier".
It's foolish to ignore the actual issue being discussed and chalk it all up to what you view as a propaganda apparatus, both because you're ignoring a half dozen other issues (gun control? trans people? climate change? Taxation and social welfare?) that failed to achieve anywhere near the same level of unity and because you're going to fail when you try to spin up your own propaganda apparatus.
I disagree that it's foolish; I think Blue Tribe's dominance was largely built on propaganda, and I think the decay of the propaganda apparatus is why Blue Tribe dominance is now collapsing. This has been my thesis for near-on to a decade now. I think my side will win because, to put it as succinctly as possible, we are sufficiently closer to base reality that we need propaganda a lot less, and our lack of the Progress narrative means we have less need to rule people and can ask less from those we do need to rule.
I think the propaganda worked better for LGBT for the same reason it worked so well for Feminism and for the thrust that ended up as BLM; all three are core social justice narratives that lend themselves very directly to a model of bad people oppressing good people, and where a large majority of the action happens in peoples' thoughts, which conveniently for the narrative can't be read, and where even the parts happening in the real world depend heavily on the unknowable intent of those involved. Guns, taxes and global weather patterns don't hinge on peoples' mentality, and so are less amenable to the core Social Justice strategies. Even trans impinges far more on the physical world, and it is these impingements that have resulted in resistance and, seemingly, downfall.
...political hardball? Winning the hearts and minds of a significant majority of the population is not political hardball.
I question whether you won hearts and minds, or generated a preference cascade through a massive social pressure campaign backed by threat of legal force. And sure, most people "believed it", in that when they were polled they truthfully told the pollster that they "supported LGBT". That's a thing that can be done by lying to cover all the negative aspects of one side and all the positive aspects of the other, in an environment where one enjoys total control of the knowledge-generation apparatus.
But the people who such a campaign can't flip don't cease to exist, and their arguments were never defeated, only suppressed. Lincoln had it that you destroy your enemy when you make him into your friend, and that's not a victory the LGBT movement ever achieved. And then it went too far with Trans, and the grip began to slacken, and the old opposition comes popping back up like dandelions as things begin to slide the other way. Not that I particularly expect Gay Marriage to be banned again, given how debauched the institution of marriage is anyway... but I genuinely think we've seen the high-water-mark of LGBT, and even if the downslope is gentle, it's still down from here. Certainly no one is ever going to buy that it's about what what adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms any more. I grew up hearing about how the lethality of the AIDS pandemic was greatly exacerbated by society's intolerance and bigotry, which showed how necessary Gay Rights were to protect the marginalized. My kids are going to get a few samples of the narrative I got, and then learn the actual history, with a compare/contrast to the handling of the COVID pandemic, because that will provide them a straightforwardly better picture of the realities of the world they actually live in.
You can't even reflect on whether the change was a net benefit to the country, you're just bitter that 'your side lost.'
I reflect on that plenty. I think shoving Christianity into the closet was bad for society in strictly material terms, because it unleashed much harm that Christianity might have helped to mitigate or restrain. I note that many people on all sides express considerable nostalgia for the 90s, and even the 2000s; the point where we lost and were cast out is also pretty close to the point where things started taking a very serious turn for the bad, and not by my assessment alone.
On the other hand, "Cultural Christianity" is trash, and it's arguably better for Christianity itself to have good contrast between the moral order of the Almighty and the chaos of the world. I'm aware of and even sympathetic to the arguments of the Christians who wanted to impose that moral order through law, but Christianity is, at its core, voluntary. You cannot mandate love, nor loving obedience. No Christian end I can see is secured by imposing such things on the unwilling through the power of the state.
You're so blinded by your obsession with realpolitik, so deeply steeped in the culture war and obsessed with small-minded zero sum games that you can't see anything beyond conflict and winning or losing.
Maybe.
You've called me out twice in recent months, asking where all the worsening violence I was predicting is; and to be clear, I don't mind the call-outs one bit, and consider them entirely fair. The first time, before I could get a reply constructed, Luigi shot the healthcare CEO and the whole internet lit up with enthusiastic grassroots support for ideological murder. The second time, again before I could get around to a reply, Kirk was shot and the internet lit up again, and in much more of a concentrated and clearly tribal way. The first time, I thought it would be more charitable to just let it lie. This time, I'll ask: do you genuinely think my prediction was wrong, and that we are in fact moving away from large-scale violence? Do you genuinely believe the Culture War is winding down? And since no FCfromSSC post would be complete without a link to some other excessively-long comment, nor with a listing of recent violence datapoints, here's both in one from last week.
I do not think I am obsessed with small-minded, zero sum games. I am interested in what is going to happen next, and what is happening next is, it seems to me, largely determined by such games. Most people are obsessed with winning and losing, and because their values are now mutually-incoherent, cooperative victory is no longer a viable option. I think that internalizing this insight gives me a clearer picture of where we are heading, which is of course the main question we've debated for some years now.
As for myself, I am already saved. I think my side will win, but whether it does or not does not is a matter of no true consequence; nothing that truly matters to me is protected by victory or lost by defeat. I do not believe in progress, moral or otherwise. There is nothing new under the sun, all things are wearisome more than one can say. This is the bedrock truth as I understand it, and while I freely admit that it does not come naturally to me, I try to maintain a clear sight of it, even at some personal cost, even here.
Is a more perfect union simply one where your side wins, and blue tribe is eradicated?
No.
Kirk's murder pretty much ran over the story about the Ukrainian lady that got stabbed. I have an effort-post on that in the works, but the short version is, the local officials pretty clearly did their best to bury the story, delaying its viral breakout by two weeks, and then a lot of Blues got very visibly upset when people started talking about it. The local official's statement at the time of the murder was something like "we can't incarcerate our way out of this problem." The murderer had been convicted and released 14 times previously, with a long history of violent crime and clear signs of serious mental illness.
What I see there, briefly, is a situation where Blues are using a dominant political and social position to prevent a serious problem from being solved, while offloading all consequences generated by that problem to their outgroup. A more perfect union, to me, is one where they don't get to do that any more.
And what comes after that? You'd just fracture into normiecons and groypers, neolibs and church fundamentalists and repeat the cycle. Your path is just one of endless conflict.
If we can restore something like accountability to power, and if we can generate common knowledge of where we are and how we got here, it seems to me that many of our problems are solvable. One of our original conversations was about how education sucks for black kids, and how this doesn't seem likely to change. Well, since then, we've had the "Mississippi Miracle". One of the places where education sucked the hardest for black kids changed to being a place where it sucks a lot less than it used to. That's good! That's a win! ...And my understanding of how it happened, possibly flawed or excessively simplistic, is that entrenched Blue control got broken, and actual reforms happened. I want more of that, but it isn't going to happen so long as entrenched (and pretty clearly Blue, from my perspective) structures maintain a dominance that insulates them from all accountability.
Tell me, then, your model of ethically influencing the electorate without playing 'political hardball.' Or are you so far gone as to think it's impossible?
By no means.
Christianity is regaining a great deal of the cultural respect it lost over the last generation. It's regaining this respect not by playing "political hardball", but by having its predictions validated by subsequent events, and by maintaining its principles in contrast to the example of its opposition. Sexual continence and self-control were a hard sell in the 90s; now we have OnlyFans and online dating and a generation of intense porn consumption and cratering relationship rates to do the argumentative heavy-lifting for us, to give an example on one of the relevant axes. We believe we genuinely have a better way of living, and it requires only our willful action and communal cooperation, not federal law or corporate funding. The further the cultural consensus moved away from us, the more obvious and undeniable the benefits our faith offers become, even by the materialist metrics of the World. We have stable marriages, children, even, amusingly enough, higher sexual satisfaction. We can forgive and turn the other cheek; we can offer a hand up to a defeated foe, we can restrain ourselves in the heat of the moment. We have a basis for charity, in all senses of the word, to the point that the pagan Right routinely mocks us for our pacifism, for doing nothing, for being cucked. And yet, we can also fight fiercely, when that seems necessary and prudent.
Or take the example of Red states versus Blue states. It's been noted for some time that people are leaving Blue states and moving to Red ones; this is not a consequence of Red states somehow coercing or bribing these people to do so, but seems to simply be a result of differences in governance and the living conditions that governance produces.
When truth is truly on your side, no political hardball is necessary, only contrasting outcomes and the ability for people to choose freely.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
18d ago
Maybe because there is in fact a fact of the matter one can appeal to.
There is (seemingly) no (obvious) empirical fact that will settle the debate over whether MTF transsexuals are women, and yet the claim "Caitlin Jenner is still a man" would be censured very aggressively in lefty spaces.
The same goes for religious claims, ethical claims, all sorts of claims for which no empirical verification is possible.
The claim was that there's at least some theoretical yardstick some evidence that could be offered on many issues or some prediction that could be validated.
I previously argued that a sentence need not be empirically verifiable in order to be meaningful or truth-apt in general. So, if you're trying to assert that "being able to answer to a ground truth" just is the same as "being empirically verifiable", I would reject that.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
18d ago
The overwhelming amount of theory has always been apologetics - start with a desired bottom line, derived from vibes which were absorbed from or imposed by the environment, and reason backwards until a good theory that just so happens to prove the bottom line
Sure. But, what else is there to do but press onward anyway?
In order to get an actual understanding of the Culture War, which is this forum's raison d'être, you have to theorize about the psychological and material motivations of different factions and individuals, you have to produce a unified narrative of historical causes, you have to take an accounting of the ethics and implied metaphysics of different positions, you have to have some notion of the aims of political activity in general... in short, you have to do philosophy.
Without a theoretical account of the Culture War and its constitutive elements, the forum is reduced to simply giving a factual account of current events, along with perhaps some strategizing and some sentimental commiserating with people who are on the same "side" as you. In other words, you'd just be fumbling about in the dark without any understanding of what's going on. A mere subject of historical forces rather than someone who might hope to know them.
unlike scientific theories
Science is not exempt from politics and emotion. Otherwise, empirical research into race and sex differences, or even just IQ, wouldn't be as touchy as it is. Researchers get invested in their own theories all the time even when there's no overt political content, "science advances one funeral at a time", etc.
philosophical theories have no ground truth to answer to
We just went over this. It certainly seems to be the case that philosophical claims are either true or false, just like most of the other ordinary types of claims that we're familiar with. MTF transsexuals are either women, or they aren't. There are either mind-independent ethical facts, or there aren't. There is either at least one conscious entity, or there isn't. The ground truth that these claims answer to is the same ground truth that everything else answers to: the facts of reality.
Of course, there have been many attempts throughout the history of philosophy to show that individual philosophical questions or classes of questions are in fact meaningless (in the neither-true-nor-false sense), contrary to initial appearances. But these types of arguments too depend on their own non-trivial assertions about reality.
However, this requires an actually diverse set of people willing to theoretise; and neither society at large, nor this forum in particular, has done anything to rein in the forces that compel people to just assimilate to one or another existing bottom line rather than hold onto their idiosyncrasies alone and weather hostility from all.
It's true, our present lack of intellectual diversity isn't really conducive to good discussion. But we still have substantial disagreements on this forum regarding AI, race and immigration, the ethics of sexuality, etc.
Dirty_DemSoc
Registered Demoncrat
19d ago
See, Finns on bikes seems appropriate. Swedes? Ehhh...
that motorcycle gangs can be seen as a replication of certain elements of industrial working class existence
Neat. I am only partially surprised this connection has been made. You could also tie in the post-war origins that @HereAndGone provided context for above. The American proletariat returned home from the war to replace the women in manufacturing who they perceived as having emasculating their manhood. Without any other way to ease their suppressed class consciousness or account for their male insecurity they sought out to create alternative recreational hobbies with an industrial identity...
I offer an alternative:
Machine go brrhuum-brrhuum-brrhuum and chuugha-chuugha-chuuugha-chuuugha and vvvvvvrrrRRRRRrrrroooooom. Boy like machine. Boy ride machine. Machine go fast.
WandererintheWilderness
20d ago
See my steelman here: it can be argued Robinson was "one of [MAGA's] own" in an essential and relevant sense, even if he was an apostate who had taken on Blue values, and that a version of Robinson who believed much the same things but had not been raised in a Red environment would not have wound up a murderer.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
20d ago
Nope. Unless I'm missing a press release, Sinclair's own release specifically cited Carr and his same-day remarks, so the direction of cause and effect seems pretty clear and Carr does seem to be one of the earliest causes (don't know how Carr became aware of it, if it was on his own or in reaction to something) as I pointed out in a comment above here
gorge
20d ago
No, in the full quote he specifically insulted Donald Trump saying he was grieving like a four-year-old mourning a goldfish -- https://www.themotte.org/post/3263/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/367826?context=8#context
WandererintheWilderness
21d ago
The sha256 above was calculated from this. I'll skip over a couple inside baseball ones because Amadan has convinced me that they're pretty, but they don't really break the specific metrics and they're easy for anyone who wants to call me out to check themselves:
Not a single person from that RPGNet thread is getting a ban or a warning for it: this is what their definition of A+ means.
Not a huge surprise, here; zero infractions for this entire thread. There's been one person slapped in their Infractions forum in the last week (for fighting over the Superman movie). Trouble Tickets has a thread asking about boycotting people for supporting Kirk; the mods haven't condoned it (though it's happening anyway without their intervention)... because they're worried about brigading and user safety. Today, there's a new thread terrified of the fascism going after Jimmy Kimmell, by an entire forum that's incapable of even noticing what Kimmel said or what the murderer did or was.
To be explicit, that means that there's a mainstream part of the web where "Do not feel sorry for this piece of shit. He, in an absolute sense, got what he wanted. He succeeded. And so laughter, sneers, and a desire to piss on his grave are much more appropriate reactions than grief or empathy. In a real sense, the world has been made better by his death. His killer committed a just act. There will be less tragedy on this Earth because he is underground and cannot commit further harm. And therefore my only reaction is 'good!'." and "I am grateful that his evil influence has been removed." is acceptable and 'Dobbs was correctly decided' is a dire attack.
And, unsurprisingly, they have not gotten the ARFCOM treatment from their DNS registrar. There's no boycott of their advertisers, or panicked newscasters diving into their politics, or anti-hate-groups supported by Harvard hacking in to call anyone's employers.
Not a single one of the Discords I've seen tolerate or blast out this sort of advocacy are going to get banned.
The same, and as far as I can tell, not a single one has. Most of them haven't even updated to reality as-is -- the best I can offer is the FFXIV FC that's at least struggling to recognize the obvious.
Julia Ioffe won't be blackballed from every publishing outfit right of TNR.
Ditto.
Neither Megan McArdle nor Conor Friedersdorf will have called out Matt Yglesias on an X page, and I've give 60% odds that they don't have three specific bad actors at all that they've called out.
Obviously on Yglesias, harder to prove for calling out specific bad actors. McArdle has two pieces at WaPo, pretty clearly all without specifics (albeit some humor when she 100%'s her cohost warning about "Democrats are so feckless as an opposition party, more disgruntled young men (and women) will give up on the political process"). Friedersdorf's only post-assassination article is a short piece blasting... Bondi, which fair and technically a name and also a got a fascinating case of dancing around the elephant in the room. Neither look better from their twitter feeds, but I'm open to correction if I missed something.
Nope. He's also promoting a conspiracy theory about some other schmuck's suicide as a racially-motivated lynching, not that anyone cares about disinformation anymore.
The SPLC isn't going to trim back its "hate map" to only focus on actualfa; it's not even going to public recognize that TPUSA didn't fit...
Duh. Also promoting the same conspiracy theories, coincidentally, as the only post on their Apathy Isn't An Option-branded website.
... and none of CNN/NBC/CBS/New York Times will go the full Palin.
Hahahahaha. CNN, NBC, CBS, even now seem to be trying to push hard on the We'll Never Know The True Motive. NYT finally got there despite their own best efforts. I missed them in my list, but ABC had a reporter give the shooter a loving and entirely hallucinated tongue-bath of his own. And that's just for the killer, specifically.
No left-wing or 'centrist' media is diving into rhetorical motivations, and you'd think Trump had banned the word stochastic.
We're not going to get the name of the guy who yelled "Hell No" at the federal house of representatives...
I'm open to correction, here, but as far as I can tell, no.
Pritzker isn't any more likely to get censured than Lujan Grisham was.
Okay, that's less of a prediction than 2+2 = 4. He's in the news now for asking everybody else ratchet down the rhetoric, while (falsely) denying that he called Republicans Nazis. Someone filed a bill of impeachment, and it's going nowhere, and everybody with an IQ above the single digits knows it. (also for taking a photo-op with a different murderer.)
I made some other predictions, in the last week, in PM. On Friday:
Will the DNC censure Ilhan Omar before the Republican Congress does (or will neither)?
The answer is neither; not a single Democratic congresscritter voted in favor of censuring Omar, and four people with Rs after their names refused to as well. I would like to make a contrast.
Will news organization slap down reporters publicly before the
Eye of SauronLibsOfTikTok brings it forward?
Today's conversation is about the government pressuring ABC over a 'comedian' making pretty overt lies, and the only thing remotely funny about it is that it'll end up with ABC's entertainment section having higher standards than their newscorps by a significant amount, and only thanks to harsh pressure. I haven't been able to find a single example of someone coming out of the blue and say they were fired before publication or the conservative outrage; I'm certainly open to correction.
Will any college treat a professor endorsing murder more harshly than they do a prospective student that said the n word, without the threat of conservative oversight?
Hah. There's been firings, but even the most overt calls to evil action by professors has taken direct threat from conservative lawmakers to get anywhere.
Will twitch and youtube start purging Hassan-likes before subpeonas start flying, where they already booted guntubers for such crimes as 'lawfully firing a machine gun'?
No. Hassan specifically got an NYT opinion slot to promote his positions about increasingly punitive rhetoric, and no one on the Grey Lady of Bullshit Record has felt it worth mentioning his less-than-one-month-old call to literally disembowel his political opponents. There is a post of Destiny getting banned from Twitch floating around... and it's from 2020.
Will the people -- even now! -- trying to confidently paint the murderer as some Groyper get banned from reddit for disinformation posting?
somethingiswrong2024's still there, and still apparently huffing whippits as hard as possible. Open to having missed anything, here.
ulyssessword
21d ago
A comic is obligated to be aware of how it's related to truth, and to manage that relationship. For example:
(The monologue, for reference)
- "This deal is very important, because TikTok is his son, Don Jr.'s, only friend." It's exploiting the shock value of the falsehood as the punchline of a joke.
- Larry Ellison does not have a plan to kill James Bond. Again, the punchline of a joke.
- "Trump has entered into the fourth stage of grief: Construction". The fourth stage is depression, not construction. Also, Trump doesn't appear to be grieving. It is a blatantly false statement, but it's unobjectionable because of what its relationship with truth is: It's pointing out a missing mood from the person who decided to fly all the flags at half mast.
- "By the time [Trump]'s out of office, the White House will have slot machines and a waterslide." I'd take that bet, but for some odd reason I doubt if Kimmel would. It's a hyperbolic reference to the construction Trump talked about.
His references to MAGA denials were during the setup phase (when the information is usually supposed to be true, to serve as contrast to a false punchline), and he didn't use it to do anything before switching to talking about the Emmys.
I've said it before, but Bablyon Bee has a good relationship with the truth. They earn their moniker of "Fake News You Can Trust", and looking at the current front page, we have (complete listing):
- funny/false arguments supporting a true conclusion
- obvious hyperbole that mirrors the truth
- One true event, with perfectly-backwards reasoning that mirrors the event's
- 100% truth, with funny formatting
- exaggeration of a call to action (not fact based)
Outside of the front page, good examples include:
(which presumably you trust as a fair source since you used it)
remzem
gattsuru
?
I've got an icon on my posts for a reason! And on that specific matter, I specifically and try to caveat YouGov almost anytime I do reference them.
EDIT: I'm also extremely skeptical of YouGov's specific poll question here given the combined use of the Likert scale and literally never showing its breakdown.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
23d ago
· Edited 23d ago
Bug report:
In this post, I input the following URL:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/my-response-to-daniel-bergners-new? utm_source=publication-search
I can see this upon opening the post up to edit; I correctly entered it. However, the post renders with the link pointing to this URL:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/my-response-to-daniel-bergners-new-search
As you can see, part of the URL has been stripped out, breaking the link. Hence, y'know, the bug report.
EDIT: I've had to add code tags around the first URL, as it "autocorrected" when I made this post. So it applies to bare URLs as well, not just [] () links. Note that this doesn't affect the preview, which is why I've had to edit rather than noticing it then.
EDIT2: Code tags weren't enough; added a space to the first URL to break it. URL I entered doesn't have the space. Seriously, this "some bugs don't affect the preview" thing gets annoying.
EDIT3: Putting a space before the ?, rather than after as it now is, results in the behaviour still occurring despite the deleted section no longer even being part of a hyperlink. Result:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/my-response-to-daniel-bergners-new -search
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
23d ago
I admire the gumption of reversing the usual argument against the one state solution, but I must again remind you that Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza and only levied the blockade when the Gazans continued to fire rockets at Israel.
It would have been very weird for Israel to withdraw unilaterally if the only thing that was keeping them from genociding the Palestinians was Palestinian resistance.
zoink
23d ago
These Romney conservatives were willing to buy into the Motte of DEI and Woke - especially in finding Trump crass and distastefully - but in the face of the worst 2 weeks for the left I've ever seen large portions of the left decided to throw a party in the Bailey.
From Different Worlds
I’ve written before about how 46% of Americans are young-earth creationists, and how strongly that fails to square with my personal experience. I’ve met young-earth creationists once or twice. But of my hundred closest friends/co-workers/acquaintances, I think zero percent of them fall in that category. I’m not intentionally selecting friends on the basis of politics, religion, or anything else. It just seems to have happened. Something about my personality, location, social class, et cetera has completely isolated me from one particular half of the US population; I’m living in a non-creationist bubble in the midst of a half-creationist country.
As has been remarked on several times in the last culture war thread [1] [2], it appears Charlie Kirk was outside of most Motteizen's bubble. I was more aware of Fuentes and Groypers, which is ironic in light of all the people who heard of them 30 seconds ago and are now talking like experts.
From friends and family (And now Not the Bee), some prone to exaggerations, some not, I've heard multiple reports of churches having attendance exceeding Easter/Christmas levels. A friend of a friend claimed 1,300 attendees over normal, though this seems rather implausible, but several anecdotes mention standing-room-only situations and cars parked down the street from churches as people drove to their own. I was not able to go to church this Sunday, but I'd be curious if others have personal anecdotes. I'm guessing attendance at the Seven Sisters was normal.
Another anecdote that I want to share would be better if I doxxed myself. In the past, I have commented about my experiance with the Professional Managerial Class believing the Motte of wokism. I wasn't in the meeting, but I am told that the owners of said company were quite shaken upon hearing about the murder of Charlie Kirk.
I'm still getting the vibe that those on the left aren't groking why this is a big deal.
Aside: As someone who has made this mistake before, Ruby Ridge was under Bush Sr.; the Attorney General was William Barr.
P.S. Last thread appears to be the most comments in site history:
Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025: 3,000
Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022: 2,781
Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022: 2,775
Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022 2,708
Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023: 2,601
FarmReadyElephants
25d ago
My opinion, already expressed on this thread, is that celebration of assassination is something we should have a bipartisan "cancel culture" about, because it's a load-bearing taboo that allows the rest of freedom of speech to function. This is similar to how Lee Kwan Yew banned the communist party in Singapore at a time when SE Asian countries were falling to communist revolutions. A 99% commitment to liberal norms is more durable than one that commits to 100% with obvious loopholes for bad actors to end the liberal system.
Cancel culture for other things are bad, since it cordons off plausibly true ideas from public discussion. You shouldn't be cancelled for "misgendering", or stating FBI crime statistics, or making the okay sign, or having once made racist jokes, or donating to a conservative cause, or saying riots are bad.
The effect of cancel culture over support for assassination is to preserve liberalism. The effect of cancel culture for slight deviations from the Left platform is to end liberalism. This isn't hard.
https://www.themotte.org/post/3128/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/365663?context=8#context
It was "Cancel Culture is out of control" when (as found downthread (news article)) someone got their sponsorship cancelled for a different person's offensive speech before they were born.
This is Cancel Culture under control. It's entered the range where I can see valid arguments for both sides and the relevant tradeoffs. I still want even less of it, but having social policies/practices that are a bit off from with my desires is normal so it's not worth highlighting anymore.
roystgnr
25d ago
This guy needs to be banned.
Only took another hour, albeit for a short ban.
He states views that are basically unfalsifiable.
The failure at "making beliefs pay rent" is ironic when juxtaposed against moaning that "This place used to be LessWrong and SSC", but epistemology is hard and sometimes you can come up with an idea that's falsifiable in principle even if you have trouble figuring out how it might be falsified in practice. I think the point where he really went off the deep end was the thread where one of his claims actually got falsified and instead of taking the opportunity to literally become less wrong he started misinforming everyone about the response and insulting the respondent and calling correctness "pedantry". I've seen people speed-run the decay that LessWrong described as "pass from lying about specific facts ... to lying about the rules of reasoning" before, but I've never seen someone doing it while approvingly citing LessWrong!
who the fuck would say that if Kirk was more “gracious,” the shooter wouldn’t shot unless they were tacitly explaining away the murder?
But, to be fair, this is exactly the sort of distinction between causality and blame that autism-adjacent LessWrong-type folks have no trouble making correctly. There is no logical incompatibility between positive claims like [if you hand over your wallet a mugger is less likely to shoot you] or "if Kirk had been gracious in his response, the Tyler may not have even shot at all" and normative claims like [the mugger is completely at fault and the victim not at all at fault for the negative consequences of the mugging] or "I'm not contending any of this was remotely justified", even if the positive claims feel like victim blaming.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
25d ago
Is this what you mean by "Interesting, intelligent people being banned for petty rule violations"?
You are filling the mod queue with these obnoxious attempts to bait people. I'm sure in your own mind you're a brilliant debater pwning the chuds. I am not impressed.
I'm not going to permaban you. I'm going to ban you for two days. In your own words: "Do better."
naraburns
nihil supernum
25d ago
It's not clear to me what your point is, here. My point was that we do in fact live in a liberal nation; if your point is "and that's a good thing," like--okay? I happen to be a liberal myself! My point was simply that we should presumably therefore expect "political violence" to generally not come from liberals, given that liberals pretty much live in the society they want to live in. And indeed, both right-wing and left-wing political violence appears to generally come from the illiberal factions of those political tribes.
But we did just recently have a discussion on the Motte about the criminalization of heterosexual norms, if this is something of particular interest to you.
Skeletor
25d ago
Isn’t it just memes from a video game?
No, as pointed out here.
https://www.themotte.org/post/3128/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/365897?context=8#context
Dirty_DemSoc
Registered Demoncrat
26d ago
Pretty much sums up my own position.
I’m certainly not going to cheer over Kirk’s death, and it’s not exactly ideal to see people cross the line from ‘ambivalence’ to outright ‘saying Kirk deserved it’…
But at the same time, I understand a lot of the frustration currently gnawing at my fellow disgruntled left-wingers. None of us are under the impression that if the situation had been reversed, and some left-wing influencer had been killed, that there would be tears shed by MAGA conservatives over it, nor any conciliatory hagiographies published by center-right publications.
Trump-era conservatism is loudly and proudly founded on naked tribalism and an explicit “fuck you” to the left, so the right demanding contrition from the left while simultaneously talking about how we need to be punished, rooted out, and generally crushed is pretty rich.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
26d ago
I can agree with this post in vague terms, but the problem is with the definitions. What does "celebrated political assassinations" start and end? If it's specifically limited to political violence, then great, but the problem is that plenty of right-wingers want to extend that to functionally mean any criticism of the deceased, or anyone pushing against their narratives. Heck, I'm sure there are plenty who think my post yesterday goes too far by daring to criticize the idea that perhaps Kirk was not as great as MLK x Jesus.
The past few years should have made it clear to anyone that much of the Right's dedication to "free speech" is just as much of a lie as the Left's. For many, it's just a cynical ploy to gain support from moderates while their true feelings are that censorship is actually amazing, and that the Left was just censoring the wrong people.
Like, I could also support censorship of "fascism" in vague terms, but the Left quickly expanded the meaning of that word to functionally be "anyone who disagrees with me".
Your most downvoted comment ever was this one, which as far as I can tell is trying to say that intelligence is a bad trait because being intelligent increases your ability to do things and some of those things are bad? Not really sure, some of the context is deleted comments.
Your second most downvoted comment ever is the comment I'm replying to right now, complaining that people downvote you for bad reasons.
It does seem like your takes on Ukraine in particular don't land with this audience. Aside from that it seems like you mostly get downvoted when you make low-effort dunks. And you just genuinely don't have that many downvoted comments.
All that said it seems like you genuinely do have different perspectives. I don't know that we have very many people who are fully immersed in Russian culture on here. I bet a lot of your stuff would land better if you expanded a bit on the things that seem obvious to you but which the rest of the people here seem not to be taking into account, particularly the things where mottizens are pushing for policies where there's common-knowledge russian history of how that went horribly wrong.
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