site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 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.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

And plenty of contexts where it's no problem at all or even a given. Not quite the same thing as being a White nationalist. Is it OK to punch a Zionist yet?

There are absolutely places where being a Zionist will get you punched.

No, it's not as radioactive as white nationalism, but so what? There's plenty of room for Zionism to be unpopular and provocative and something that might make Jews afraid without it being exactly as bad as the worst thing in modern politics.

The fact that Zionism is not yet as universally loathed as Nazism (though, again, there are certainly crowds people who think it ought to be) doesn't seem to prove anything, to me. Unless you're asserting that it should be?

You're also equivocating a bit between 'Jews' and 'Zionists', so I suppose I'll ask directly. Do you think that Jews should get punched just for being Jews? Or Zionists just for being Zionists?

(And to pre-empt any attempt to turn it around, no, white nationalists or neo-Nazis should not be punched either.)

It seems to me that by any reasonable standard Zionism is quite widely and publicly hated. I mean, anecdotally I know Jews who have been taking self-defence classes and buying more home security and avoiding wearing any outward signs of Jewishness in public because they're afraid of being harassed or possibly attacked. Some of those fears are exaggerated, in my view, but they're not totally unjustified.

There are absolutely places where being a Zionist will get you punched.

When was the last time these billionaire Zionists got punched? Anybody doxxing them like Supreme Court justices?

No, it's not as radioactive as white nationalism, but so what?

Well, then that's why you see more white nationalism-adjacent discourse on the Motte than zionist content.

People who want to defend Israel's right to ethnic cleansing can just do so on TV panels, government offices, billionaire whatsapp groups, Fox News ads, SuperBowl ads, etc...

Meanwhile Tom Cotton has the audacity to suggest that perhaps the violence in American cities should be contained and everybody freaks out.

A few days later, The New York Times published an opinion piece by Cotton titled "Send in the Troops", arguing for the deployment of federal troops to counter looting and rioting in major American cities. Dozens of Times staff members sharply criticized the decision to publish Cotton's article, calling its rhetoric dangerous.[89][90] Following the negative response from staffers, the Times responded by saying the piece went through a "rushed editorial process" that would be reexamined.[91] Editorial page editor James Bennet resigned days later.

When was the last time a billionaire white nationalist or Nazi was punched? The infamous 'Nazi punch' was one guy and it set off a whole debate on the left about whether it was acceptable. Meanwhile of course Jews get attacked sometimes - the ADL (I know you may not trust them, but I doubt they're all completely fictional) cites 161 violent assaults in 2023.

But I guess beyond this I'm not particularly sure why you're focusing on white nationalism? Yes, white nationalism is an extremely hated and ostracised position in the US. I agree that white nationalism is more hated as a position than Zionism is. What is that meant to show? The fact that there exists an ideology more hated than Zionism does not mean that Zionism isn't hated.

Is your point just that you'd like for white nationalism to be at least as acceptable to argue for in public as Zionism?

In that case - great, good for you, but I hardly see how that reflects badly on Zionists. You can just advocate for white nationalism. No need to bring Zionism in at all.

(Unless the implication is that the reason white nationalism is widely hated is the Jewish conspiracy to destroy white culture and so on, but at that point we're just right back into the tiresome nonsense that I was sick of seeing in the first place.)

What is that meant to show? The fact that there exists an ideology more hated than Zionism does not mean that Zionism isn't hated.

My point was included already:

Well, then that's why you see more white nationalism-adjacent discourse on the Motte than zionist content.

If you want to see less talk of Jews-bad on theMotte, then make Jews-bad talk more mainstream. If SecureSignals could publish his opinions in the NYT, why would it be interesting to post it here?

The infamous 'Nazi punch' was one guy

There was also the whole Charlottesville event when a blue city decided to completely pull police forces from a legally registered protest and let counter-protesters take over and harass the lawfully-protesting right-wingers. The infamous car accident even happened because a driver got confused trying to leave the city, got threatened by a gun-carrying antifa, and then took a wrong turn in a street crowded by illegally-assembled counter-protesters.

Note how nobody at that time dared to publish a headline such as 'Is it OK to run over antifa protesters?' and nobody yet is writing headlines such as 'Is it OK to punch a zionist?', but that may change.

You'll have to forgive me if there's something a little counter-intuitive in the idea that the best way to decrease the number of rants about the Jews is to have more rants about the Jews.

And the general theory here doesn't seem to hold? If your assertion is that a perspective's popularity on the Motte correlates with that perspective's unpopularity in real life, well, there are far too many counter-examples of that. It's true, anti-semitism is extremely unpopular in real life. Here are some things that are also extremely unpopular in real life: cannibalism, ISIS, police abolition, Satanism, paedophilia. Yet nobody argues for these positions on the Motte.

It's not a simple correlation, where the less popular an idea is, the more likely that idea's adherents are to come here and post long essays about it.

Well this is an English-language website on a European-created internet, populated with educated people familiar with the Western mindset. Antisemitism was historically very common among that group.

If we were sitting in a circle in Papua New Guinea then the pros and cons of cannibalism may be more common.

You'll have to forgive me if there's something a little counter-intuitive in the idea that the best way to decrease the number of rants about the Jews is to have more rants about the Jews.

No, there are other ways to decrease the absolute number of rants about the Jews, obviously, but we're talking specifically about the Motte. If you're sick of reading this content, there's still plenty of space on the wider English-language internet that is more or less curated of Jews-rants (for now). It's too bad for you that people that have interesting things to write about also seem to have a strange obsession for Jews-rants.

Perhaps we could have a separate Culture War Roundup Thread where talking about Jews would be allowed. We could have all the Ukraine, Gaza, NYC, Biden admin, Trump lawfare discussion in that thread, and for everything else, keep it in the Jew-rant-free thread, with the occasional link to a comment on the other thread if an user somehow thought that a discussion would be improved by adding an appropriate Jew-rant.

I guess the fascinating thing about Jews is their singular outperformance within a racial/ethnic set, even within 2 or 3 different sets (White, arab, north african). I guess we don't have enough subcontinentals here to focus discussion on Sindhis, or enough Africans to focus on Igbo. East Asians would be more difficult to find a distinct outperformer, since all the sinics are broadly equal in their regional outperformance.