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.

If the Russians were funding the Greens it would be because they wanted to push for shutting down coal and nuclear power plants which would increase Germany's reliance on natural gas as a way to fill the gap when the baseload becomes more unreliable.

The weird thing is I thought there was a thing about the German secret service infiltrating the Green party due to Russian ties. The problem is I don't know when this happened. In my head this must have happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union because of my age but also in my head my thoughts were 'I hate the Greens. I hate the Communists. But you really shouldn't be doing this in a democracy'. [weirdly enough the USA did the same thing to the Republican party 16 year later]. Also, if I search for the terms 'scandal over germany secret service green party' in Google I can't find it so maybe I'm hallucintating. I asked chat gpt and apparently it happened in 2000 which make sense to me but maybe this is chat gpt hallucinating as well. Chat GPT wouldn't supply me with links and I can't find anything on google in the front page.

this is the closest i could find to what i remember: https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/german-spies-target-left-wing-party but that doesn't mention Russia or the Green party. i could have misremembered and thought it was the green party when it was a leftist party.