site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 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.

7
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

It will come down to TikTok and instagram. Dems lost the Twitter stronghold but if they can shill their narrative on TikTok and insta then they can get a momentum going.

We'll see, but as far as I can tell, progressives seem pretty burned out at the moment. I don't see them throwing themselves into another riot, especially since the last one - and it's consequences - is still fresh in people's memories. They'll at least need to come up with a new topic to whip up a new frenzy about, but I doubt even that would work.

I think an underrated ingredient is the Floyd video just looking unusually bad, meanwhile this is clearly a case of suicide by cop- tragic, but not indicative of nationwide systemic problems.

I'm not seeing it. You can go back to the old CW threads and see the process unfold - the Arbery Shooting, Central Park Karen... and Floyd (there might have been something in between that I forgot). You can see it wasn't anything about that case in particular. If it wasn't Floyd, they'd just keep looking for cases until they had the momentum. The Riots in Kenosha were over arguably the most unsympathetic "victim" you could find, but people rioted over him anyway.

The Riots in Kenosha were over arguably the most unsympathetic "victim" you could find, but people rioted over him anyway.

The Wendy's guy in Atlanta was possibly worse.