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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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I wonder what that would be?

Like, there’s liberals who do dumb things. But there doesn’t seem to be a massive pattern in which dumb things. Obesity is in practice not a liberal thing. R/shouldn’thavefoughtthecops gets nuked for racial insensitivity, not ideology. R/detrans maybe?

Like, there’s liberals who do dumb things. But there doesn’t seem to be a massive pattern in which dumb things. Obesity is in practice not a liberal thing.

Obesity is arguably a dumb thing, but it's generally more seen as a lazy or weak thing. Glamorizing obesity - followed by the health consequences that follow - is the dumb thing that people could point to. I recall people actually have done this, with a viral clip recently of some transgender YouTuber listing examples of fat activists and/or others who tended to glamorize the lifestyle that would lead to obesity who died at comically young ages. Don't know that there'd be enough content to support a full subreddit, though.

R/shouldn’thavefoughtthecops gets nuked for racial insensitivity, not ideology.

I'm not sure how this works. Assuming this subreddit would be to showcase people getting beaten or killed for fighting the cops, and the racial insensitivity being alluded to hear has to do with the likely disproportionate number (relative to the general population, though perhaps not relative to actual police interactions) of people of certain races who would show up in such videos, that just seems like a case of ideology. The belief that showcasing a disproportionate number of people of certain races being harmed by police is racially insensitive is, in itself, ideological.

Trans stuff. Fatpersonacceptance movements tend to be more left-coded even if obesity itself isn't

I think the sub for making fun of fat acceptance advocates getting their faces eaten by leopards is, in practice, /r/fatpeoplehate, which got nuked for being horrible and insensitive and not directly for political reasons.

I agree that trans stuff, to a lesser extent other LGBT, and maybe progressive attitudes towards sex more broadly is the main liberal coded way to hurt yourself through stupidity(you might could add in certain categories of drug use but definitely not all of them). I agree that subs making fun of them for facing the consequences would probably be short lived, although I imagine the reasoning is more along the lines of ‘vulnerable people’ and less along the lines of progressive ideology. Offline conservatives don’t talk so callously about trans suicide either.

/r/fatpeoplehate, which got nuked for being horrible and insensitive and not directly for political reasons.

It astounds me that some people actually still buy this logic. You actually think Reddit of all places just takes some bold universal stance in the name of all that is wholesome and pure against the "horrible and insensitive"? The place where "horrible and insensitive" content directed at the right targets (that is, right-wingers, if the italics didn't strike you) is nearly universal and openly celebrated?

Incidentally, the public record will show that /r/fatpeoplehate was taken out by being accused of "doxxing" by the Reddit admins for highlighting publicly available images (that is, pictures on public "About Us" and other staff pages until they were taken down (I believe, been a long time, could be wrong) after being discovered) of overweight Imgur employees (who had started removing content from the sub uploaded there)... including the company's designated mascot/office dog (leading to probably the most notable aspect of the affair, the persistent slogan of "Even their dog is fat." (and yes the dog was indeed visibly and objectively afflicted by canine obesity)).

That's kind of the point, though. Obesity is a considerable bigger deal than COVID in terms of health impacts and yet making fun of fat acceptance is outside of the Overton Window

Well, /r/fatlogic is still alive and kicking, though it's mods tend to be cautious lest the admins nuke the place. About the spiciest type of comment you can get away with is remarking on the irony of various super-morbidly obese persons who advocated for fat rights and then died in their 40's.

That sub has fallen off tremendously in terms of activity from 6-8 years ago, which is a somewhat unusual thing to see on Reddit. I often wonder why that occurred.

I'm sure mod behavior is part of it; they've really narrowed the sub's boundaries to avoid becoming the new /r/fatpeoplehate and they're not shy about deleting posts that fall outside the lines.

I also feel like there's a certain inherent tension that causes a chilling effect. Is fat-activism a logical extension of the modern leftism, that calls the whole victimology apparatus into question, or is it a vile heresy that can and should be stamped out without harming the rest of the good and necessary structure? Only the latter is acceptable to say out loud over there, but there's a good chunk of the user base that leans towards the former, and mostly knows they have to bite their tongues on the subject.

Jared Taylor had an episode of his show dedicated to white missionaries who go to Haiti to run orphanages and get robbed and murdered. It was done in his usual respectful and restrained way but the subtext was 'these people are very naive and very very stupid': https://www.amren.com/videos/2024/05/haiti-devours-white-missionaries/

Similar things probably happen to aid workers too, from a certain point of view the religious and secular organizations are one and the same.

‘Missionary in a shithole’ says ‘conservative Christian’ to me, not liberal or progressive. I mean, I wouldn’t allow my kid to go on mission to Haiti, but that’s exactly the kind of person who does go on mission to Haiti- not a liberal. I think everyone knows the risks awaiting peace corps workers too and they don’t get made fun of because of the perception that they chose to take that risk perfectly cognizant of how big a risk it is.