site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 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.

8
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

This is all "boo outgroup," which you've been warned and banned over before.

Stop, or the next ban will be longer than the week I'm giving you this time.

EDIT: User permabanned and comment removed for post-ban comment editing.

EDIT: User permabanned and comment removed for post-ban comment editing.

I understand the policy of removing comments for post-ban editing, but for the sake of moderation transparency can you share what they wrote and were banned for?

In case you were asking about the post-ban edit, it was exactly the kind of “they hate me cause I tell the truth” that you might expect.

What they wrote was

Call an online rightoid weird and he responds with thousands of anti-trans memes that he has saved on his phone for some reason, starts talking about drinking horse semen...

As a repeat offender they got escalated to a week ban. It's been a long time, I think, since we had someone break the "accept bans as a time out" rule and get perma-banned for it, though.

I mean, Vance is Midwest and looks normal too. Yet you claim he is weird but Walz isn’t. Which is it?

Hatred of White men with Brown women is pretty common as far as I am aware. Maybe Tomato just has issues with interracial relationships?

Tomato appears to just be waging culture war. He hasn’t shown anything to suggest there’s more to it, just naked assertions that “rightoids” are completely devastated

It's just trolling that the mods won't ever do anything about, no point pretending there's something real there.
(Edit: I was wrong, thank God)

I think it's shilling rather than trolling (or perhaps shilling is a specific form of trolling)

But dems made up the couch thing completely out of whole cloth, so the thing they lie about him having done makes him weird. Rs haven't made up anything about Walz yet, and the media wouldn't signal boost it if they had, so he is normal.

I would normally ask for sources but I am convinced enough by your weird intensity (if not your choices of phrasing which read as rather uncharitable, I too have a caricature of an obsessed leftoid residing in my head but I don't talk to him much) that I will uncritically buy it, and instead note that judging by the sheer knee-jerk reactions to the "weird" angles from both sides, the term seems to be primed to become the political hot potato of the year. The involved parties throwing avalanches of stones while frantically reinforcing their glass to make the other guys out as ACTUALLY WEIRD AND GROSS LIKE EWW is going to be very entertaining to watch, especially from a third world shithole. If this'd still been 2016 I'd say reds have it in the bag, but I think blues are swiftly stepping up their meme game so it really can go either way. I humbly retract my complaint that this season is fucking boring, god bless America.

"I can't believe rightoids think a family from the Midwest is weird" is the same caliber as Joe Biden pulling his "Do I look like a radical?" schtick while he stocks his administration with with fake women and obvious perverts like Sam Brinton.

I get that you can barely contain your relishing this situation where the manufactured optics around it are tilting against the Republicans' favor at the moment, but could you maybe try a little harder.