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 rules for ex post facto laws are complex and more than a little arbitrary: the courts have basically allowed everything and anything to pass muster in civil contexts, criminal laws which are 'merely' regulatory in contrast to punitive ones get a pass, and for kinda goofy historical reasons only a very small subset of process changes specific to testimony or rules of evidence are really taken seriously.
There's definitely stuff that would fall into that category, sometimes even stuff that would heavily squick out normies, but I'd caution against overestimating solidarity of any group. Even outside of cases that ultimately revolve around stupid interpersonal shit, there's a long-standing interest in reporting certain classes of bad actors when they're exposed through the fandom. That's not even always necessarily wrong, but neither code nor major names in the fandom notice the difference between Laws I Like versus Potential Laws I Don't.
As a trivial and probably-not-too-controversial here example, were federal law changed such that use of uncleared AI image generation models were criminal copyright infringement, I'm very skeptical that a lot of the mainstream fandom or even its Google-specific employee base would be willing to bend over backwards to protect customers from overbroad warrants in the way that they would over, say, sex toy sales receipts or did over normal copyright infringement.
I don't think it's likely we'll see a massive swing back (zero isn't a probability, though) on the more standard homosexuality, or even just Braeburned- or Rukis-level stuff, but I'm old enough to have seen a number of new taboos established around the borders or less common tastes.
Yeah, lots of agreement there. Cryptomator is supposed to be pretty decent as per-file encryption goes, but their security audit situation is nowhere near as robust as VeraCrypt's and the user experience is Not Great Bob (though better than using GPG raw!), and per-file encryption unavoidably leaks some metadata. Bulk-mounting a variety of smaller veracrypt volumes can kinda work as a compromise, but it's definitely not supported well by the VeraCrypt GUI, acts inconsistently if you're working with volumes rather than files, most workarounds risk leaking password info, so on. Dunno of any approaches that are better.
More options
Context Copy link