site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 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.

6
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I won't belabor the point around pandemic response, but there is simply no reason to believe that the Dems would have done categorically better than Trump, and some reason to believe they'd be worse.

Without Trump, there might not have even been a pandemic...because the media and institutional apparati wouldn't have been so motivated to belabor the crisis and keep it going. The COVID Death Counter only got removed once he was out of office. Under Trump, every event got magnified into a crisis to keep people wound up and deranged.

Trump was the one who stupidly lifted the ban on GOF research, so you may be right that there wouldn't have been a pandemic without him.

  • -15

GOF research was being funded by Fauci the entire time it was supposedly "banned"

Cunts like Fauci, Daszak & co have a whole lot of blood on their hands, but does it bother them?

I'd love to see a source for this claim. According to Wikipedia, the Wuhan Institute of Virology was conducting research into coronaviruses in bats as early as 2005.

In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect a human cell line (HeLa). The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.

That sounds pretty similar to GoF to me.

Also:

[In 2014], the US government granted exceptions to the GoFR moratorium to 7 out of 18 research projects that had been affected.

The covid death counter is alive and well.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#maps_deaths-total

There was one on CNN or some other major news network, that they literally removed the day of Biden's inauguration.

I have never watched CNN but this appears to be false.

https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-cnn-remove-covid-19-tracker-after-joe-biden-took-office-1564233

There's a pic of biden's inauguration speech with the counter on it, and on later days as well.

Maybe they showed it less frequently, I'm not in a position to judge.

Fair enough, in the end neither am I. Just remember someone posting about it on /r/stupidpol.

I would occasionally remind people that Nancy Pelosi was actively encouraging people to go out in public in large groups in those very early stages.

It might be arguable that the Pandemic wouldn't have gotten so aggressively politicized (that was the biggest disappointment, to me) sans Trump but I don't think there's much argument over who was doing the politicizing.