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 -
Funny you ask, I noticed something a year and a half ago.
A question that intruiges me as well. My guess is that that it will be entirely forgotten the same way that the pedo rights movement of the 70's was. Sure every once in a while someone will dig out some receipts, and it will be seen as that weird thing that apparently happened in the past, but it will not be something pinnable on the progressive movement
According to the brief you mentioned, WPATH is sitting on like a dozen of those. I posted about it too.
Thanks for the links to your posts. I was trying to find previous discussions on this, but I must have missed this. Off topic a bit, but I'd love to be able search for something like "top level comments, in the culture war thread, with these keywords". Top level comments in the culture war thread are very similar to new posts with the discussion they generate, so there should probably be a way to search for them like you can specifically search for posts (or maybe not given the intentional rule of sort-by-new so people are forced to skim past topic they aren't normally interested in).
Thanks for making this top-level post, I have to rate-limit myself, or this place would become a TERF twitter feed!
Every once in a while I promise myself I'll start helping out with the code and add a few features like that for the benefit of users and mods, but I can barely find time to work on the projects I do for fun, so...
Anyway I don't mind people coming to similar thoughts to mine (quite the contrary), just couldn't resist the opportunity to say how I was doing this before it was cool.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I wonder about this. Unlike the 70s or any time before the 21st century, the dialogue and commentary around this is largely done on the internet, which is very easily accessible. Memory holing something that can be looked up with a single click of a hyperlink on your phone is harder than doing so for something you'd have to look up old newspapers or journals in a library.
Yet it certainly seems doable. Stuff like the Internet Archive can be attacked and taken down or perhaps captured, thus removing credible sources of past online publications. People could also fake past publications in a way to hid the real ones through obscurity. Those would require actual intentional effort, but the level of effort required will likely keep going down due to technological advancements. More than anything, human nature to be lazy and ambivalent about things that don't directly affect them in the moment seems likely to make it easy to make people forget.
I wonder how much people in the 20th century and before were saying "We're on the right side of history" as much as people have been in the past 15 years. Again, people saying that has never been as well recorded as it has now. It'd be interesting to see in the 22nd century and later some sort of study on all instances of people saying "this ideology is on the right side of history" and seeing how those ideologies ended up a century later.
Suppression of undesired facts is entirely possible without Minitrue-style erasure and rewriting. It can be done pretty much as effectively with but a single word:
"Ew."
If it's common knowledge that anyone who'd even begin to question the default narrative is Gross, Icky, and Super-Low-Status, then people won't listen to challengers no matter how much evidence they bring. (In fact, bringing more evidence just makes it worse, because that "proves what obsessed sickos they are.")
Not to put too fine a point on it, but isn't this is how "HBD" is handled? The awful IQ statistics are still out there, neither erased nor rewritten, but to even wonder if they might exist and show anything contrary to the default narrative is to be declared racist, deserving exile.
While this doesn't perfectly erase anything, it does ensure that any dissent on the matter is scoured out of polite society and limited to - well - thrice-banished communities like this one. Probably it's less risky to use sheer social force like this than to attempt an outright cover-up and risk being caught in the act.
I know this method works, at least for a time, because it worked on me. I did not look into HBD deliberately and I still have an aversion to looking in detail lest I be an "obsessed sicko." I can only wonder how many other things I avoid without realizing it.
More options
Context Copy link
The persistency of the Internet is somewhat overrated to begin with. My goto example is usually this compilation of epidemiologists saying Covid is no big deal.
But aside from that, it's not a question of accessibility, it's a question of who cares. In the linked thread I gave an example of a similar episode in medicine, where scientists were selling the idea of solving personal and social issues with brain surgery. The academic papers are there, the newspaper articles are there, the bestselling books and Hollywood adaptations are there... it's all just collecting dust, all these people are long dead, nobody cares.
Without a constant drumbeat of how we must Never Forget, this will be the fate of any atrocity.
More options
Context Copy link
Wouldn't the obvious stance be "we aren't the progressives of the past?" Residential schools have plenty of evidence towards their existence in Canada, and were certainly pushed by what would've been a progressive mindset back in the day.
I think by their very nature, conservatives are more tied to the past of their movement than progressives are. I don't think it'd be memory holed - it would simply be treated as "how awful that society did this - good thing we are making progress to change the horrors of the past"
Yup. There is some irony there considering how in vogue collective responsibility is right now for those with a progressive proclivity. Progressives in 20 years will feel no responsibility for a tired, irrelevant movement of yesteryear that, thankfully, didn't succeed. If it plays out that way. People's hearts were in the right place, after all. Until we grow enough time that we can well and truly consider the past as ignorant and backwards as any other.
It's not necessary to scrub the Internet Archive. Unless we get the really bad ending.
Let society make history. Irrelevant, old, and forgotten. The progressive drive and impulse maintains direct connection, but the cause of day in the future won't be directly related. Except maybe transhumanist stuff. It is not as if we can't go read Days of Rage today. Perhaps if conservatives take the cultural reins they can bring up the historical excesses of progressivism more frequently. There will be no introspection at scale and nobody should expect any-- and that is the good ending.
Learning from history is not a commoner's interest, but learned men are meant to know how we got where we are. We are all too great and unique and, for progressives, too sophisticated to repeat mistakes or learn from the inferior past.
More options
Context Copy link
My rejoinder would be "you are making the same mistakes they did."
One problem is that when Progressives win they write the history to make it seem that the victory was inevitable. When they lose it just gets quietly ignored, and conservatives likewise get no credit for holding the line against them for the greater good.
Oh, sorry, I may have been unclear - I am not a progressive. My comment was simply a model of how I think they would respond in this circumstance.
I think your model is on point, I'm mostly just considering the point and seeing what seems like a solid 'rebuttal.'
My main point is that progressives are consistently convinced they're in the right at all times, and dismiss any arguments that might disprove that belief. So even after they've been 'proven' wrong, they don't have to admit it. So yeah "we aren't like those old progressives, we're smarter and we won't make the same mistakes" is an argument I can believe they'd make.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The issue is that "we aren't the progressives of the past" is the stance of the progressives of today. So saying that doesn't escape one from repeating the mistakes of the past; it's how you repeat the mistakes of the past.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link