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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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I'm going to add a second comment that's different and much more spicy.

For a while now, I've had this growing knot in my guts whenever these types of things happen and the bad guys end up being women. I hate the knot because my brain says it's stupid to think women are somehow to blame for the increased pressure to root out anyone who's doing something wrong somewhere. But the knot keeps growing. I can't resolve the conundrum.

With Peanut, a lady in Texas presumably sent the complaint to a lady in New York who sent the city services to take the squirrel out back and shoot it. Clearly that's just a coincidence...right? Or is there something darker in here. Like....is the Karen meme deserved and legitimate? Why did that lady at the Harris rally scream about Palestine at a baby? What's with all the, "I'm speaking," moments? Do the ladies have more power and authority than they can handle?

I don't consider myself a woman-hater. Hell, once upon a time I considered myself a feminist. Is it just my imagination or has something in our national psyche gone and unleashed the worst aspects of womanhood upon the land? The puritanical hunt for all that is good and fun in life can't just be a female thing. Can it? Or is it that safety-ism causes men to operate in a different, more narrow theater (ex. geopolitics) leaving women to police the margins (ex. protesting pussy-grabbin' presidents and yelling at babies)? I really don't want to become a Trad Chad who wants to put the ladies back into some parochial 17th century box. But if one of the issues is giving too much power to people who can't properly wield it--and it has a gender bias--what on earth do we do?

I really don't want to become a Trad Chad who wants to put the ladies back into some parochial 17th century box. But if one of the issues is giving too much power to people who can't properly wield it--and it has a gender bias--what on earth do we do?

Why not? Maybe the 17th century got it right and the 20th got it wrong. Perhaps female participation in public life really does everything the anti-suffragists (many of whom were women themselves) said it would. I believe that "longhouse" is a real phenomenon, a failure mode of societies lacking enough masculine energy. Perfectly encapsulated: https://x.com/PopBase/status/1852801265425854866

I believe the 19th amendment was a mistake. Most expansions of suffrage have been. Can't be fixed without a societal reformation, and these reformations usually involve coups, wars, and collapse. The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and bloodshed return!

But if one of the issues is giving too much power to people who can't properly wield it--and it has a gender bias--what on earth do we do?

Punish people who scream at babies, regardless of their sex.

As a great sage wrote:

It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.

That character was wrong about the one example we see. I don't think the book portrays any woman meeting that description. Or any man, for that matter -- Parsons is completely orthodox but not bigoted about it, and O'Brien is fully aware of the party's duplicity. Syme (the Newspeak writer) is excited about the party but is aware of what he's doing, and get sent to Miniluv presumably as a result (or just as a result of talking about it)

I’m not surprised in the least. I’m not sure if it’s evolutionary psychology, but I tend to find that women have perfected the game of weaponizing the system against other people. In this case, it’s animal laws, but it could be technical violations of any rules to force other people to give them what they want. I’ve always somewhat assumed that it goes down to avenues of actual power. Men have access to physical strength, technical knowledge, and the actual levers of power. Women have limited access perhaps to the levers o& power. Not as much as people think, because they are rarely the main decision makers on projects, in business, or in government. So the best way for the median woman to get her way is to basically get a man to wield actual power for her.

Puritanical rule enforcement is a part of that. It’s a way to create new offenses women can use to shame people into giving them what they want.

it's stupid to think women are somehow to blame

I'm assuming you're a man.

Female hypoagency is baked hard into your evolutionary biology. This is your instinct of "do whatever gets you laid" doing the talking, and in an era where men and women are, in fact, equal on most fields (that were for the past 100,000+ years dominated by men) it's simply maladaptive. And a woman who can't or won't perform the productive parts of that role is no woman, and it's a mistake of men to consider them as worthy of any special social status whatsoever. The biological principle of "women [and children] first" falls apart when those women in aggregate can refuse to bear children (or fail to put the interests of the nation's children above their own self-interests and aesthetic preferences).

In an age of automation (and slavery) driven equality, women and men ought to be equal parts human doing and human being- the fact that women are both and men are neither is a clear indication that our current methods and measures of "equality" need some re-evaluation.

But if one of the issues is giving too much power to people who can't properly wield it--and it has a gender bias--what on earth do we do?

If you assume that the average man and the average women are just as inherently anti-social/destructive as the other (a fundamental assumption for my worldview), you need to tailor-make the way you deal with those things to suit their biological specializations. If a woman's speech is just as destructive as a man's violence, the speech needs to be regulated in the same measure as the violence, or you're just giving too much power to women and their particular version of anti-sociality eventually starts to dominate.

The current folly of liberalism was believing that legal equality would lead to objective equality, where what actually happened is that by removing the societal safeguards from the gender that has had 100,000+ years to specialize in manipulating men to do things on their behalf, they [predictably] unleashed that machinery upon society. People get confused about "well, then why didn't gynosupremacy have massive negative effects earlier?" but fail to recognize that this is a 1920s problem that we got to punt on for 50 years because the post-WW2 economic boom gave so many advantages to male social power that women would actually end up on the losing end for a while, but naturally they wouldn't last.

I really don't want to become a Trad Chad who wants to put the ladies back into some parochial 17th century box.

We already recognize strict legal equality in the face of women as a stepping-stone to strict objective equality, and women in aggregate recognize the concept of intersectionality and equity. They're correct in that these are things that should happen; where they're incorrect is that if it was applied fairly it would be almost exclusively at the cost of their current social license to be destructive. And, as these same women are quick to point out, loss of that privilege will feel like oppression (but, of course, isn't).

The problem I have is that, if this is done improperly, you catch the "transgender" women and men in the blast radius (i.e. the women and men who don't need rules restraining a latent gynosupremacist/androsupremacist attitude they didn't have in the first place). They tend to be the most productive/least disruptive people society has and the cost of this change might not be worth what it costs them.

I have some ideas for the way this might work, but the trick is implementing them in a way contradictory to instinct, are not feasible while men are still in socioeconomic oversupply, and are just as easy to conveniently leave pointed at men (just like how we use paper-bag tests to determine which criminals to prosecute now). (Of course, these measures wouldn't be needed if women were all of a sudden in socioeconomic oversupply -> in less of a position to demand men conform to them; this is why, ironically, that gynosupremacists being able to exclusively choose to bear saintly girls and not toxic boys would eventually end up diluting their current power over time.)

With Peanut, a lady in Texas presumably sent the complaint to a lady in New York who sent the city services to take the squirrel out back and shoot it. Clearly that's just a coincidence...right?

No, it's probably not a coincidence. Ignoring petty complaints, that's a Boys' Club thing. The Boys' Club decides it's not worth the time and ignore it. Sometimes the Boys Club decides to ignore the casting couch. Sometimes it decides to ignore women who complain about too many ice cubes. Sometimes The Boys Club isn't a Boys' Club at all and is instead a restaurants wait staff full of Non-Boys.

You guys talk about a decrease in state capacity. How's'a'bout the capacity to investigate and euthanize wild pets in an orderly and timely fashion? Didn't think of that one, did ya? I would have guessed that the NY Department of Environmental Conservation would just ignore complaints from out of state. It's what I would do. Where did you learn it was a lady from Texas sent a complaint? I just see "anonymous" complaints. Why not a neighbor?

If my neighbor in the next apartment kept weird wild life pets I'd probably ignore it. If they posted cute videos online I'd ignore it. If those pets did things like cause minor problems for my dog I'd be less inclined to ignore it. If that happened more than once I'd probably report it after speaking with them*. This seems possible. If you want to collect wild life without consideration of your neighbors, then live somewhere you can do that.

A lot of people seem fine critiquing this event. Not a lot of defenders. Biden hasn't denounced all garbage squirrels. Maybe he should though, because they are crafty assholes that empty bird feeders.

Why did that lady at the Harris rally scream about Palestine at a baby?

Young woman lost sight of herself and actions at a political event. Her political ally recognizes the malfeasance and polices her behavior. That's a learning experience for most.

A lot of people seem fine critiquing this event. Including one in the video. Not a lot of defenders. We can all make mistakes. Ping me if we see her again.

Like....is the Karen meme deserved and legitimate?

Probably. People's wills can be overbearing and annoying. I wanted to attribute a defense of 'Karen' as a social policing agent to a Freddie deBoer article, but all I can find at the moment is this regarding Covid.

Meanwhile we live among a Praetorian guard of busybodies who want everyone to know that the rest of us aren’t taking Covid seriously enough. These are people who are existentially similar to the “Karen,” 2020’s favorite archetype, except that they’re used to calling other people Karens. But they are precisely that figure of clueless white deference to authority that self-nominates as the world’s hall monitor. And while they want you to mask up and vaccinate and obey other rules, what’s much more important to them than regulating your behavior is that they let you know that you don’t feel the right way about Covid.

Which reads like a truncated version of Planet of Cops. Which is not a defense of Karen.

There's a some Defense of Karen thinking out there. This one is kinda one. as an important (if elevated) part of society. We have a need for Karen. Some business interests want to stop Karen, but they are powerless. Karen keeps the trains running on time. Except for the times where the train isn't on time and she inconveniences the line of people behind her by not shutting up about it. Then she makes me late.

I don't consider myself a woman-hater. Hell, once upon a time I considered myself a feminist. Is it just my imagination or has something in our national psyche gone and unleashed the worst aspects of womanhood upon the land?

Are you particularly sympathetic to gender critical view? Smarmy, scolding Karen might be annoying, but men do a violence and rape. I don't think making men an outgroup is necessary to denounce or police murder and rape. I'm not saying you can't or should not police Karen's gross excess. The culture even still allows and, sometimes, encourages this. If the conditions are right.

I have sympathy for the view that detests the feminization of society. Not all of it is bad. I'm glad not every dispute is concluded with a rock to the head. I would like to work towards something... healthier and more easily appreciated. I wouldn't make women your outgroup, though. Go find you a nice girl that doesn't like yelling at babies or killing squirrels. And there's always Sam Hyde's sage advice.

Go find you a nice girl that doesn't like yelling at babies or killing squirrels.

My wife and 2nd daughter were aghast that this happened.

I don't think I'm particularly sympathetic to a gender-critical view. I know a lot of women. I don't view women as out-group, that's maybe, sort of the problem? Because it seems the evidence is mounting that there may actually be an out-group, largely composed of some type of woman that can't be identified or encircled; something like Vance's cat-ladies but not quite. I think it's closer to something revealed as an epistemic preference to always automatically believe the worst, caused by the flattening of society vis-a-vis the Internet. Similar to how you can't tell if a terrible opinion is a naive adolescent or stoned octogenarian.

You guys talk about a decrease in state capacity. How's'a'bout the capacity to investigate and euthanize wild pets in an orderly and timely fashion? Didn't think of that one, did ya?

Since we obliterated Posse Comatitus even the forestry guys have flash-bang grenades, heavy machine guns and tanks. The state capacity can be summarized as: We can ignore it or atomize it, which do you want?

Where did you learn it was a lady from Texas sent a complaint?

https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/texas-woman-monica-keasler-reported-peanut-the-squirrel-to-dec-claims-surface/ar-AA1tuR8j

Example link. All alleged. Apparently she deleted her Interweb accounts so who knows. It would be very interesting to have the state-run agency that acted on the anonymous tip not leave us in the dark, but privacy for some if not for others, I guess. I would absolutely agree that a state receiving an anonymous tip from outside the state would ignore it, that is my prior. At the same time, who would know? That's kind of the point of anonymous tips. What leads people to think it was the woman in Texas is hearsay that she was bragging about it on Facebook. That doesn't really change the situation tough: a government department acted on an anonymous tip from...wherever...and took someone's unlicensed an unregistered pet (the pet was allegedly in the process of being registered). One can easily see how this is raw meat for Libertarian types, but Leftists would also be historically appalled by this + it's cute animals!!

Here's an interesting update regarding the alleged reporter of the mis-housed animal.

https://www.dexerto.com/tiktok/woman-speaks-out-after-being-wrongly-blamed-for-peanut-the-squirrels-death-2971538/

It would be interesting to know who the people are hounding this unaffiliated innocent, but I'd suspect the boy's club you mention are mostly happy to let their wives do the chiding.

And maybe that's all it is. Men know they can leave the small stuff to the ladies to clean up and the Internet simply opened the door to every level-one nudnik to run rampant.

My wife and 2nd daughter were aghast that this happened.

Cheers, then not all is lost. I wasn't trying to cast you into inceldom. Vaguely recognizing like shapes. Maybe that's uncharitable.

Jumbles, rumbles, and rambling:

Because it seems the evidence is mounting that there may actually be an out-group, largely composed of some type of woman that can't be identified or encircled; something like Vance's cat-ladies but not quite.

People make such identifications, but I agree it's difficult to land on any particular one. AWFL exists. I'm not sure it's accurate, because I don't know if white or liberal is necessary to yell-at-baby or badger an authority to Do The Right Thing. White women are the acceptable target of the day. There's a brand of white trash that's not really afraid to pull any lever, other than cops, to settle a grievance or perceived slight. Narcissists. The internet loves that one. Black women have a stereotype around around the kind of self-interested, righteous grievance balloon.

The lower class offender looks more like narcissism to me, whereas the higher class offender has more sophisticated (cultural, political) justifications for (what I consider) bad behavior. Perhaps that's the tie in to race. So, uh, are we just talking about intelligence? How are the Asian women doing out there compared to white women?

There's been an absolute increase in the number of jerks and a lot of jerk behavior gets covered in America by culture warring. Women more likely to utilize authority for little reason other than it's something to do-- or easily convinced it's The Right Thing to Do? Probably, yeah. Women more likely to yell at baby? Probably that too, but maybe because a man has more experience thinking of consequences when it comes to other people's kids. At least compared to pretty girls.

The prototypical Karen is the bored busybody. Karen adopts and uses the HOA as an extension of herself. Because. Type A Karen. If that is related to yelling at babies at a political event I'm not sure how. Maybe it boils down to 100 years ago the yell-at-baby girl would have had a husband drag her off before she could embarrass herself in front of the entire nation?

Don't get hysterical, darling. Protesting is uncouth.

And maybe that's all it is. Men know they can leave the small stuff to the ladies to clean up and the Internet simply opened the door to every level-one nudnik to run rampant.

A lower trust society, they say. If we want a more polite society we will need women to enforce it. Tying all this together feels like it is doing too much. But that could be my lack of imagination.

There's been an absolute increase in the number of jerks and a lot of jerk behavior gets covered in America by culture warring.

Hear! Hear!

With Peanut, a lady in Texas presumably sent the complaint to a lady in New York who sent the city services to take the squirrel out back and shoot it. Clearly that's just a coincidence...right? Or is there something darker in here. Like....is the Karen meme deserved and legitimate?

My day job involves handling a lot of regulatory compliance matters and fighting administrative accusations not entirely dissimilar to the P'Nut saga. In my experience while women appear to be slightly overrepresented among the public complainants that I ultimately find out about (which is a small minority of all complaints - my state regards the identities of complainants to public agencies as privileged), there's no particular trend when it comes to which bureaucrats are particularly censorious and which are more lenient. The culture of the particular district office or subunit appears to matter a lot more.

This makes sense. Most of these types of offices have a culture, often driven by one or two people, and that makes the overall consistency seem...inconsistent. Thanks for talking me off the gender-critical ledge.

I mean, it may well be that women over all are more likely to be nosy busybodies, or to go drunk with petty power. The old stereotypes of the gossiping shrew and harridan didn't come from nowhere, just like the male stereotypes of the sex-obsessed brute and violent thug didn't come from nowhere. But I don't know if the effect translates to the modern day, or if so how big it is.

And if it is an effect that is somehow historically out of proportion, what's the solution. Back in the day we built pyres, but that was barbaric, I'm sure all will agree. I guess forcing people to wipe their socials is our best analog.

But I don't know if the effect translates to the modern day, or if so how big it is.

Polls not only show this effect exists, but translates to a roughly 30 percentage point lead among young women.

The biggest mistake of modernity is that we don't treat the gossiping shrew/harridan with the same seriousness as the sex-obsessed brutes and violent thugs. In an age of equality they're both as destructive, but it's only the latter we deal with.

I would appreciate any links you have to hand on this; I'm trying to keep a better library of supporting evidence for my beliefs.

For a while now, I've had this growing knot in my guts whenever these types of things happen and the bad guys end up being women. I hate the knot because my brain says it's stupid to think women are somehow to blame for the increased pressure to root out anyone who's doing something wrong somewhere. But the knot keeps growing. I can't resolve the conundrum.

As just so theories go "women tend to eschew direct physical conflict in favor of other, less risky forms of social combat" isn't one I'd be particularly afraid to lose money on.

I feel no guilt in admitting that violence crime is a burden mostly-males impose on society, one that it can "unleash" through unwise policy. Unless women are a higher evolved being they'll have their means of wreaking havoc that we shouldn't encourage.

Here's a theory for you - blame cultural marxism....

... Okay, I'm intentionally being a bit obnoxious, obviously, but let me try to make a case here.

Here's one view: women have a lot of power, and women have always had a lot of power. In many cases, that power has looked somewhat different than the power that men have wielded. That's fine and normal. And in a healthy, functional society, gender roles and ideals and responsibilities evolve that take the natural human tendencies of both men and women into account and help temper reliably occurring problems in both men and women to keep their worst impulses in check and help them wield their various kinds of power responsibly, stably and pro-socially. All of this is the ideal, anyway.

But then, enter enlightenment ideals about legibility, equality, and combine them with post-enlightenment ideals about oppressor-oppressed dynamics. Now, the fact that lots of ways women wield power is illegible means it is invisible in political discussions. And an insistence on a sort of a priori equality between men and women means that even accepting that men and women might wield power in different ways is seen a suspect, like it's just a justification for women not having more legible power. And finally, an insistence on seeing things through an oppressor-oppressed binary means that even the basic idea that women might routinely and predictably behave in ways that hurt people, and those ways of being might need to be tempered, is no longer basic wisdom, but rather just one more way to keep women down.

That combination of world views arguably has a tendency of infantilizing women and stripping them of any real agency and responsibility, which over in reality ends up being a giant problem if they actually DO have a bunch of agency and power that actually needs to be kept in check sometimes for the good of broader society.

Anyway, that's one theory, anyway... something like that.

So...a traditional perspective like, "Rooster rule the yard and hens rule the roost." would dial this back? I suppose I could see it.