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.

[A]proximately nobody wants to make the lives of your other friends worse.

Prefacing this response by stating that I am on the side of Team Nerd rather than that of your interlocutor: this statement in particular seems false. In particular, it seems false in a quokkic, mistake-theorist’s way. There are absolutely many right-wing nerds who want to make e.g trans people’s lives worse. For example, when a poster suspected of being trans on 4chan is met with countless replies of “you will never be a woman”, I doubt that those replies’ authors are not intending to cause pain. Granted, one can say that this is a defensive reaction to an SJW takeover of nerd hobbies—hence that old “why did you make us do this? We just wanted to play video games” image. But if that’s the case, then this is just arguing that the conflict is justified instead of arguing that there is no conflict.

But if that’s the case, then this is just arguing that the conflict is justified instead of arguing that there is no conflict.

In topic-oriented spaces, there are 2 genders: male, and political. Especially on the internet, where nobody knows you’re a dog- the only reason one would want their gender to be relevant is because you’re looking to leverage it as an advantage.

Which is why “tits or GTFO” is the expression- you either disclaim your protected status by doing something that demeans it, or you don’t participate. It is a gatekeeping expression to keep women away, but if you assume that at least some of them are naturally driven to make it all about themselves and that the highest-value women aren’t bothered, then it is useful.

Again, how is gatekeeping your hobby from those gosh-darned attention whores morally different from gatekeeping your hobby from the microaggressive white creeps?

It's about who was there first. If some Black Hebrew Israelite hobby club wants to keep whitey out, I'd hardly be offended.

Curious. In your opinion, then, people who had not been in the hobby before need explicit approval from oldies to adopt the hobby, create their own spaces for it and police those spaces as they see fit?

They're free to create their own, but what does that have to do with what we're discussing? It's not what happened.

Alright. In that case, if a particular venue was founded by people with views A, and they gradually accept enough people with views B that B can have sway in internal politics, the Bs are morally restricted from acting on their views, yet As are not?

"Acting on their views", in this case, being largely reduced to "which people do we want to play the game with".

Depends what you mean by "restricted". Once we're that situation, it's not particularly realistic for A's to restrict B's, so it's all rather abstract. I'd say A's have a valid grievance if they're made to feel unwelcome by B's, but not the other way around.

By the way, this isn't what happened either. The mechanism for the change was not democratic, nor was it about letting people voluntarily decide who'll interact with who.

For example, when a poster suspected of being trans on 4chan is met with countless replies of “you will never be a woman”, I doubt that those replies’ authors are not intending to cause pain.

On 4chan? 4chan specializes in being outrageous, which also serves as a filter to keep outsiders away. Everyone gets attacked on 4chan.

Sure - I don't deny that there are culture warriors on the right as well. That's why I said "approximately nobody", to try to make it clear that I meant the colloquial usage where people say "nobody" to mean "only a small minority". But I feel like maybe I should've just changed the phrase entirely, to make it more clear.

For example, when a poster suspected of being trans on 4chan is met with countless replies of “you will never be a woman”, I doubt that those replies’ authors are not intending to cause pain.

In defense of assorted chuds, personally I see this less as a dreadful voodoo curse summarily invoked upon any transperson who dares show their face in chud-adjacent places, and more like a general chastisement against bringing identity politics into supposedly anonymous spaces. YWNBAW is basically "tits or GTFO" of the modern age - an insult that seems general on the surface, but in practice is levied specifically against those who claim to be women to get something out of it, be it attentionwhoring, enforcing consensus or jockeying for clout.

I could say the same about the treatment pale stale males like me get in today's mainstream board gaming. As long as I'm not trying to get something out of it, I do not receive the white genocide threats. (Neither do I see those threats in general, that seems to be mostly a twitter thing.)

Yeah, I think that’s true in a lot of cases. But I also see a decent number of posters who seem to be absolutely “OBSESSED”, as it were, with “trannies” in a qualitatively different way than the former crowd. Working it into unrelated posts, bringing out barrages of buzzwords…. (Using your example, there’s a difference between your average anon who replies “tits or gtfo” to a low effort “as a girl, I don’t see why guys like these stupid cartoons so much” post, and an /r9k/ native.) At the very least, these latter anons’ actions are best described by conflict theory.