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 -
Er. Obsession with "brown girls," "queer" and trans identity, fixation on sex and sexuality, a bit of "gay Jesus" blasphemy, like... if I were trying to write a fictional story about a mentally unwell person who had become the avatar of "orange Emily" Internet degeneracy, I could not model that character on Audrey's notebook because everyone would accuse me of unrealistically excessive exaggeration of negative stereotypes. You don't find anything interesting about that? It doesn't make you think, "huh, maybe this culture war stuff really can be damaging?"
Because, to be clear--maybe Audrey in a different culture becomes a terrorist, or a torturer, or whatever. The biological/sociological interactions that manifest in what we call "mental illness" are complex and poorly understood. But I think in many cases the radicalization process is deliberate. Muslim terrorists cultivate radical killers into ideological pawns. Race supremacists cultivate violent actors and train them to have maximum effect.
Whereas the "Woke" meme lacks central authority, tends to train institutional actors rather than radicals, and it's kind of an emergent ideology/neo-religion that mostly surfs on the backs of several not-entirely-comfortable-with-each-other-but-otherwise-basically-normal social and cultural institutions. Will there be more essentially "accidental radicals" in this vein? Or is Audrey just such an extreme outlier that there's simply nothing to learn here?
I'm open to the possibility that Audrey and most mass murderers are in fact such extreme outliers that they should not budge our priors much. But every time a scorned man goes on a misogynistic shooting spree, I'm assured that this is what we should expect from the Manosphere, and this is what the people asking to see the so-called "manifesto" were, I think, really asking after. It doesn't look much like a manifesto to me! But maybe this is just what a manifesto looks like, from the "orange Emily" ideology. How could we know? We don't seem to have a lot of cases to compare. Hopefully, we never will--but that brings us back to what makes this one more interesting than you seem to imply.
Beyond that, of course, the media's steadfast refusal to report on the thing lent it a great deal more mystique than might have otherwise been the case.
What the hell is an orange Emily?
I can think of a pretty wide spread of possible contents for the manifesto. Would it reveal the shooter was…
Those are arranged in rough order of drama. People were suggesting pretty extreme ones, but we ended up stopping at the first or second. Which, sure, the Culture War does nasty things to people. That’s just milquetoast compared to some of the theories. A few choice selections from this forum:
Compared to those, what we got is pretty tame!
It's a /r/PoliticalCompassMemes/ thing... orange Emily is the Woke wojak, basically. She started on 4chan as Art Hoe Wojak. She's usually lib-left but sometimes mid-left or even auth-left (especially when wearing a peaked cap). Characteristically the feminist inverse/counterpart of the purple coomer wojack, who is the "bad lib-right" character. There is pretty consistent "full compass unity" against orange and purple, they are characters who almost never get to be "based" or featured as the heroes in agenda posts (but see a counterexample here). Orange Emily hates Nazis more than anyone else, but is sure that everyone who doesn't identify as a black genderfluid differently-abled Wiccan is a Nazi.
So, you know. An unrealistically excessive exaggeration of negative stereotypes. Except, apparently, for this one time when...
I think the main thing your list omitted was "targeting Christians for being Christians," which the notebook (now I want to know what law enforcement or media figure first called it a "manifesto," because certainly everyone has been calling it that for a long time) seems to not explicitly confirm, while also not actually weakening the case for that idea.
Following the link to this forum's discussion was an interesting exercise; it seems to me that many, maybe most of the posts in that thread have proven basically correct. Very few of the posts address the notebook at all.
True, but you quoted a user with 21 posts, who hasn't been here in almost a year, who got moderated in that thread for (among other things) denying without evidence that anyone died at Sandy Hook, which like... yeah. Reality is always going to be more tame than whatever someone like that cooks up.
Ah, I do recognize that one.
I originally had "targeted Christians qua Christians" in between "wronged by (Christian) school" and "wronged by society," but I tried too hard to streamline the list.
And, yeah, I included psyop guy as an upper bound. I won't say he's representative.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Judging from the diary, it seems like ideology may have been part of the reason Audrey was so unhappy and mentally unwell. But it doesn’t look like she intended the attack to be propaganda of the deed for the cause, or to strike back at enemies of the revolution. To me it looks more like the typical mass-shooter motive for an aggressively postured suicide. Elliot Rodger seemed to have considered himself to be on a crusade of personal vengeance, but I don’t think he necessarily considered it a political act. Compare both of those to Ted Kaczynski, where although he was perhaps mentally ill, he had a pretty defined ideology he was acting under and specifically intended his attacks to advance that ideology.
This all seems correct to me, but what I'm wondering is about the nature of "radicalization" when the relevant ideology is ungrounded, emergent, deliberately obscurantist, etc. I think usually such ideologies just don't produce extremism, because it's hard to be a zealot for something so conceptually slippery. This particular case is exceptional in several respects, which might mean the best thing to do is chalk it up to noise in the system. But I don't feel sure of that. At minimum--I do not, at all, agree that these notebook pages contain, quote, "nothing interesting."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link