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 -
My dad loves Tim Walz. I haven't seen him like a politician this much in decades. It's weird to me, because I'm way too cynical. It feels like when my wife makes me watch TikTok videos that have obviously been staged, and I can't enjoy them because I can't suspend disbelief, while she does. She's not a gullible person in general, her job depends on not being taken in, but she enjoys the videos and I can't. My dad is a smart guy, and a very cynical guy about politics, but Tim Walz' nice-guy schtick really works for him. He teared up repeating lines from one of Walz' speeches to me (my dad tears up a lot as he's gotten older, actually, and it makes me very uncomfortable), and he won't stop inventing things he wants Tim Walz to say to J.D. Vance.
I don't really get it. I like Tim Walz' schtick well enough, as schticks go it's better than some, but buying into lock stock and barrel seems kinda over the top. On the other hand, he's so out of the great white north that it seems Republicans won't come up with decent attacks before we get to November. ((Before someone brings them up, no, the horse semen attacks weren't decent, nor were the weirdo implications about race fetishism. The riot stuff might stick eventually, but it hasn't so far.)) Idk, I just can't get up that kind of enthusiasm. When I listened to Pod Save America after the debate, I'd hear them curse and think that I need to work on cursing less.
Trump supporters seem grimly determined. It's hard to get excited about Trump anymore, we know what we're getting.
I feel bad for JD Vance. I identify a little with him, and he's just getting hammered on bullshit day in and day out, over and over. I don't think he's doing great, but he can't get out of his own way. In many ways, 2024 Vance is like 2020 Harris: he's running against his own type. We're seeing it, once again, with Dave McCormick, who will spend millions of dollars telling me he was in the army for a minute and likes hunting; until I read his wikipedia I never knew he got a fuckin' PhD from Princeton, and he never brings up that he ran one of the world's biggest hedge funds. Vance and McCormick are running against their own achievements and their own intelligence and their own qualifications, which says something absolutely tragic about the Republican base electorate.
But why does he like Walz other than positive media coverage?
I don't really think it's attributable entirely to positive media coverage. Walz' schtick is different, qualitatively, from Trump's schtick or Vance's schtick or Dave McCormick or Bob Casey.
It happens to be perfectly targeted to my dad. He watches a bit of Fox News here and there, and reads the WSJ daily. It's not an MSNBC problem or a Twitter problem. It's just a good product.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, it's almost impossible to "get out of your own way" when malicious hyper-scrutiny is applied to every facial twitch, and it's definitely impossible when people simply make things up and meme them into existence with the support of 24/7 news media. This is exactly the Mitt Romney treatment all over again.
Yeah. I thought the same thing about Joe, once people decide you are senile, we all do things that offer evidence.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Has he had heart surgery? Don't know if it's been studied but family legend from doctors, nurses, and patients is that heart surgery has significant effects on making people, especially men, more openly emotional. Not just a "brush with death" effect, other surgeries and close calls don't seem to do it.
Yes, actually!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Stolen valor?
The people attacking Vance for his accomplishments are Democrats. Tim Walz literally said that Vance couldn't be a true country boy because he went to Yale. This is "stop hitting yourself" misdirection.
Show me the David McCormick tv spot where he mentions having a PhD in foreign relations, or running the world's largest hedge fund. If it exists, he doesn't play it during the news, jeopardy, or Phillies games in my town.
Literally an untreatable resume for a senator, and he's choosing to talk about high school wrestling.
Oh God, I have to hear about it every day, how my dad can't believe how stupid it is to attack a 40 year old man for retiring from the military.
This is where I get confused about the accusations of one-sided astroturfing.
No one begrudges him retiring per se. It’s how he retired and what he said afterwards.
More options
Context Copy link
Tim Walz left service before his unit deployed to war, carefully timed so the official orders hadn't come through so "he didn't know". Fine, it happens. Then across a long political career he is introduced as having served in war, or makes references to carrying weapons of war, in times of war. How did everybody get the idea that Tim Walz served in war? Who told that lie to every introductory speaker for 20 years?
It might not matter to legacy media but there are people out there who care and are offended. It only makes sense to characterize Walz as a charming scandal-free puppy in a partisan media frame that ignores all such problems.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Mine too, I think it’s a hormonal thing unironically.
@FiveHourMarathon what's wrong with it? Personally I think being able to cry more freely can be quite masculine - the Greeks and Romans saw it as a sign of a strong character. (of course it had to be paired with physical strength and oratory skill etc etc)
It's not that he cries, or that it's a sign of defective character, it just makes me uncomfortable because he's my father and we're WASPy enough that it's atypical.
Like, ok, last week we're at a funeral for a friend he'd known for 50 years, talking to his widow of 62 years. There's gonna be tears.
But I stop by in the morning and we're reading the WSJ and he starts talking about a TV ad and chokes up? He happened to catch half of a black and white version of Les Miserables on TCM last night and he's telling me the plot and BAWLING? He's telling me about Tim Walz pausing his speech to get a woman help and crying?
It's weird for me.
Ok wow yeah those are a bit intense. Interesting.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's not hard. Tim is a guy everyone knows. Almost Forrest Gump-esque in his sincerity. Join the military, teaches at a school, coaches a football team and then runs for office. Minneapolis is one of the few non-coastal American cities with a positive storyline from the last decade. Dude has made no money from politics, loves his kids, is religious and just kinda does his thing.
You know when people say, "I'd vote for a random dude off the street, rather than a slimy Harvard educated lawyer."........ Tim is the random guy off the street.
Even Trump seems to like the guy (I know wikipedia is obviously biased, but the events happened)
Kamala is clearly going for a "neapolitan ice cream" sort of campaign. She needed an inoffensive flavor combination. She picked an inoffensive VP candidate.
I don't. You saw it with Bloomberg, and you see it with Vance. The typical executive types are too used to talking to intelligent people. Politics is a craft. Like standup, you need to work your audience. Meet them at their level. Vance is like people I meet in my peer group. The main problem with Vance is he's too smart to work for Trump. He can't play a wise-cracking used car salesman because he isn't one. He was only chosen because of the paypal mafia's outside support. He knew what he was getting into. Should've known better.
Ive never met someone like Walz. Every person who served I know underplays their service. Every teacher I know doesn't start pedophile adjacent clubs for kids (except the one who was arrested for giving 16 year olds booze and we all knew was a creep). Walz is an outlier in my life in that he simply lies about everything in very important ways. Much more important than Trump saying he had the biggest crowd somewhere. If Walz was in Vance's position he'd already have dropped out, that is how bad he is and how extreme the Democrat media advantage is.
What? I dont even understand this comment. Are you saying Walz is a pedo because he appears to be an actual good person?
How does this comment have 9 upvotes?
What makes you feel like he is an "actual good person?" Hes a hardcore LGBT ideologue that started a social club at his school that could easily be used as a vehicle for grooming.
A more common place for abuse has always been church youth groups. Every town I have lived in has had a scandal with one, and those are just the abusers that get caught.
More teachers than religious groups engage in sex acts with their subordinates. Even per capita it is very close.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not an evil act.
Not an evil act.
A description that includes so many social groups as to be meaningless, certainly not an evil act by itself. Of course all social clubs of our enemies are creepy weird grooming vehicles and our social clubs are necessary wholesome chungus.
This seems like a standard misunderstanding that may or may not be intentional by people sympathetic to LGBT causes. They think well these kids who are confused/different need a space to talk to adults. And then they need to keep it secret obviously because dad prolly isn't an "ally". But talking about sexuality and maintaining secrecy is exactly the first set of steps of the groomer playbook. So it doesn't matter what is in your heart of hearts, you are engaging in the same objective acts as a groomer, and by defending your own activities, you are providing them cover.
This is different than a soccer coach, who, I admit, many probably want to pork their players. But if the soccer coach starts talking to Johnny about tops vs. bottoms and Johnny says something to someone no one reflexively defends the soccer coach as having done the right thing. Which is why LGBT advocacy in youth populations is inherently dangerous, and I would say an evil act.
I do not believe the LGBT spaces must maintain secrecy. Without the secrecy being inherent, I again do not believe LGBT groups are inherently dangerous.
Well mainstream LGBT activists disagree with you.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Have you never met a politician. Overplaying their story & creating myths is in the job description. People in the wild are humble because they don't have to sell themselves to a full country.
I work at a tech company. The humble engineer is never picked to do public demos, because public demos are the place to be shamelessly self promoting.
Politics is this phenomenon at its peak.
More options
Context Copy link
This is a really bad mental model of what GSA clubs look like.
How so? The purpose, ostensibly, is to get kids talking about their sexuality around adults. The few who will be interested in hearing such banalities are likely to have other motivations. Its like a guy who enthusiastically volunteers to run the cheer-leading team for his 14 y/o daughter and her friends. Is it necessarily true he's getting something sexual out of it? No. But a higher % of such people than a randomly selected dad will be.
Maybe it's changed since mumblemumble years ago, but back in my day it wasn't like each meeting started off with everyone sitting in a circle and exchanging distaff American Pie jokes, or spin the bottle, or gay sex ed. When there's a new student you'd go around for introductions and have the option of disclosing your orientation, and then mostly a sit-around-and-bullshit social club. There were teenagers that were hooking up who'd met at the GSA, but even the people who'd brag about it weren't going to do that in front of as varied a crowd as you'd get at a club meeting proper (there were girls there!).
(uh, second-hand from my brother, band camp was closer to the actual gay relationship or 'relationship' space. I'd expect that was somewhat specific to the cliches at the school we went to, though.)
@SteveKirk's "oh boy relationship drama" is closer to my experience, though I tended to run into where it was most an annoyingly creepy teacher wanting a bunch of disposable and impressionable activists. Which is a problem, but a different sort.
(probably not universal, but pretty damned common).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is it? My only experience with one was a creepy groomer art teacher who reaaaally got off on being surrounded by gay boys having relationship drama.
More options
Context Copy link
Then perhaps it wasn't a good idea to name that kind of club something that suggests it encourages the sexual development and expression of children.
Yes, these clubs are basically just hangouts that staple the occasional rainbow around the school and exist as a space to eat lunch and not be called a fag every 5 seconds (and is indirectly an interest club for the things that type of person coalesces around), and while it's truthy (and perhaps somewhat obvious) that the kinds of teachers interested in encouraging the non-standard sexual development of students in ways that cross the line for some people are likely to be interested in encouraging the non-standard sexual development of students in ways that cross the line for most people I doubt that rate of [criminal] line-crossing is appreciably higher than the base.
While it is true that students come last on the list when it comes to what a school should do and calling it [what people will hear as] "gay kid's club" wasn't the best of moves, those things weren't quite as true in the '80s and early '90s as it is today, and sexual mistake theorists wouldn't be fully purged from the general sex movement until the mid-'90s (naturally, people who wouldn't have a problem with "straight kids' sex club" won't even look to see if their efforts can be read as "gay kids' club about sex").
Sexual conflict theorists would probably have just called it "tolerance club". And yes, Boomercons (and people who parrot Boomercon talking points) have a really bad mental model of what the general sex movement looks like because they never updated their mental models of it past the '90s; they don't even know the general sex movement has pivoted to being about angry old women ensuring young people have as little [straight] sex as possible now (and of the ones that potentially could, they're too distracted by the concessions the angry old women give to the non-straights to notice).
More options
Context Copy link
It's more a real bad mental model of how the public perceives a teacher advising the GSA club. Which is the important part of an election prediction.
Of course one must see media interference in public opinion, if one operates from the base assumption that the GSA in the 90s was a pedophile club. How else could one explain that the rest of the country doesn't see it?
Well covering up the link between pederasty and homosexuality is a long running media interference operation. That doesn't mean people still dont get a bit skeezed when they notice a guy jumping up and down to run the boy scout camp.
Fellas, is it pedophilic for a man to run a Boy Scout camp?
Its BORING to run a boy scout camp. Why you are dealing with that boredom is probably because you love your son. But that guy who doesn't have a son at camp? Weirdo.
More options
Context Copy link
When the boy scouts were a designated party enemy, yes, it was. We both lived through 00s late night television.
Now they aren't enemies because the party took them over, being a boy scout leader isn't creepy any more.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Or at least he plays one on TV.
More options
Context Copy link
I agree that he's a guy everyone knows, but I don't agree even a little bit about him seeming like a sincere, earnest guy. He's the bullshitter, he's the guy that has to inflate every single thing he does. Even the things that are honest-to-god admirable, he still has to be an E9 instead of an E8, he doesn't just know a thing or two about rifles, he carried them in war, and so on. He's never invested a penny, never genuinely risked anything, and he resents the hell out of the guys that got more money and status than him in the private sector. He babbles about racial justice while a half billion dollars in damage is done to Minneapolis as his wife enjoys the vibes (and scent of burning debris). Someone else's business is a small price to pay for him to feel better about white supremacy.
Yeah, I know guys like Tim Walz.
In a way something quite Germanic about this
More options
Context Copy link
And Trump isn't?
The media will fact check Trump for stating opinions that they don’t like.
Walz gets a free pass. There’s about half a dozen of his previous colleagues in the military that have come out against him, but a viewer of the mainstream media wouldn’t know it. The media has decided that they’re not going to allow swiftboating, whether legitimate or not.
I have a theory that the Republican strategy teams are waiting until the timing is just right to launch this one. There's some serious shit in Walz's "Military Service."
They're running out of time. More likely they just can't find a way to launch it outside the already-right-wing bubble, because the mainstream media is maintaining message discipline.
Also it’s rare that a VP sinks it. Palin didn’t sink McCain, Obama did and even then Palin was a character and an image very different to Walz, who is much more inoffensive. If he lied about his military career it wouldn’t affect much, Trump has not getting AIDS from whores as his ‘personal Vietnam’, Kamala is a woman, Vance was a ‘military journalist’ writing articles for the press office. There are no war heroes there.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is there an insulting mass media propaganda campaign insisting he isn't?
It's the same as biden's senility. The worst part was the lockstep lying in the face of what we could plainly see, which was then abandoned the literal second their political objective changed.
It's the difference between a used car salesman lying to you (expected, almost charming), vs realizing the mechanic you brought with you for advice is also working for him (creepy and sinister).
Then you turn to your wife who's had her heart set on this car at any price, and as you look into her pleading coal-black eye slits you remember you don't have a wife. All three of them start chanting in an unspeakable language as the stolen flesh melts from their faces, and the sky outside is red redredredredred.
In a final moment of sanity-shattering realization, you understand you will be walking out of there with a 19% financing agreement.
That's the basic sensation of watching CNN for five minutes. Or seeing a still frame of that Anderson Cooper(?) lizardman wax model robot.
The sensation of being under bombardment by the American media makes me jealous of the countries that just get regular bombed.
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, the Orange Man is also Bad. To my knowledge, very few people believe him to be a sincere man, as was articulated about Walz above. I've got a solid decade of saying I don't like the Orange Man though, as where Walz being an annoying bullshitter is new to me.
So in essence, Trump being a bullshitter is already "priced in" whereas the worry is that Walz being (possibly) much the same might not be?
Walz isn't possibly. He's orders of magnitude above. Everything he claims is a lie. Trump says he gets the best crowds when maybe he gets the second best crowds. Walz lies about things for no reason. He claims to be head coach of a football team when he is assistant coach. Thats not exaggeration, its lying. I am an attorney. If I claim to be a good attorney despite losing a lot of trials, that is exaggeration. That makes me like Trump. Walz claims to have a great trial record in court despite both being a secretary, not a lawyer, and his superior lawyers losing all the time.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, he is a politician.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link