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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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To WhiningCoil, we're all in a propaganda war whose outcome is critical. To you, it's just a game of sorts. Not a life-or-death conflict whose outcome determines whether normies return to functional normality, or end up in cultural-revolution tier insanity.

I get why he's pissed at you, and I get why you as a young gay furry aren't overly concerned with the possible normalisation of cultral-revolution tier social insanity.

Like most young people, you probably believe, deep down that you're immortal and it'll all work out.

Have you yet been forced to perform a maoist style self-criticism session IRL where you admit to your sin of being white-ish and promise to do better ? I guess not.

Have you yet been forced to perform a maoist style self-criticism session IRL where you admit to your sin of being white-ish and promise to do better ?

There is precisely one place where people have tried to force me to do something like that. It’s here, by posters like Coil but unfortunately also posters who are otherwise good, and I find that sadder than anything else about this place.

  • -11

Nobody here except the mods has any leverage to force you to do anything. And the mods haven't (and all they can do is threaten to ban anyway). Someone here wants you to do something, you can just... not.

Yes, that’s how every social group works, and there are consequences for every “not.”

Anyway, you’re one of the highest-volume, lowest-effort partisans here and you’ve been that way the entire time I’ve known you. If this forum hated Darwin for the reasons they said they did, you’d get at least as much criticism. I hope you enjoy the forum you’ve helped build. Take care.

  • -18

Yes, that’s how every social group works, and there are consequences for every “not.”

The consequences for not engaging in a "maoist style self-criticism session" here are certainly less bad than the consequences of engaging in one, and that's likely true in any situation where there aren't real-world consequences for refusal. You're getting needled by people you don't respect anyway, but no self-criticism session would solve that.

As for me being some sort of mirror-image Darwin, no. There's obviously some similarity in style; we're both short-form posters. But it ends there. Since I think Darwin's currently not here to defend himself (and his main account is banned, I think), I won't go further.

No, it is not how every social group works. And you know this because your hoax involved fake school teachings, and school is a kind of social group where the teachers do, in fact, have leverage beyond just getting mad at their charges.

Is it Festivus already? When do we get to the feats of strength?

Feats of strength are over here.

TW knows about the propaganda war, but has very different objectives to you. Much harder to balance ones too: he needs enough Progress for surrogate gaybies, but not too much that white gay guys can't get the good lawyer jobs.
That's why his targets range from LoTT to FAA-DEI. He can be useful to you guys, at least at the moment while your enemies threaten him more than you do.

Long term, of course, his brand of manipulation isn't compatible with your goals. But you don't need to be mean publicly, even if you know he'd eventually do an expose to get you fired (or you'd put him on the last train to Journawitz, depending on the breaks)

I think it is uncharitable to assume that Trace picks his stories to support some weird niche centrist agenda.

But even if his selection of stories was totally partisan, this would mostly be a problem if he was the only news source on the market. Last time I checked, he is not.

If there was a news story about how one in three gay men will eat babies which he would not cover because it does not fit the narrative he wants to push, I am sure that some investigative journalist somewhere could also pick it up.

From what I have seen, Trace provides truthful, relevant information. Such a thing is net good.

Perhaps not what SteveKirk was saying, but it seems plain to me that Trace promotes a centrist agenda?

That is, he often writes about things that he sees as problems, on whichever side they may be found (centrist agenda), and has something of a vision of the unusual things that he values (weird niche)?

Long term, of course, his brand of manipulation isn't compatible with your goals.

I mean, I'm not a bioconservative or anything, to me if we avoid a dead-end or insane planetary monoculture it's all ok. Even if we end up with some people engineering actual furries out there, whatever.

Sure it's weird but I'm all for more human speciation. If we've got aquatic humans comfortable with not breathing for four hours making a living tending sea industry and gigabrained autistic scientist castes, then admitting that blacks aren't that smart and maybe we could breed them to be smarter as to not be too embarrassed by them isn't going to be a big deal. It's our biology, and treating a product of evolution as sacred is just too weird to me.

As far as I can tell mostly accidentally trolling LOTT is small potatoes and as far as culture-war commentators are concerned, Trace is a very good one.

Not that I'd trust him with my real name, phone number, address etc., but then I'm notably paranoid.

It's the difference between a woman wearing dresses as clothes and a crossdresser wearing dresses because he gets sexually excited at it. Furries aren't a type of transhumanists.

Long term, of course, his brand of manipulation isn't compatible with your goals

The goals don't help, but it's the "brand of manipulation" that's off-putting. Walt Bismarck is probably an even better example of it, because even though his goals are superficially more compatible, all my instincts tell me to stay the hell away from that guy.

But you don't need to be mean publicly, even if you know he'd eventually do an expose to get you fired

I agree people should calm the hell down, and I disagree he'd go after anyone's job. That said, "not being mean" is not enough for him. He himself said the kind of Highlander's Holy Ground you hint at is unacceptable to him, and he wouldn't hang out here, even if that's what we became.