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I'm reading the instructions at the top of the page: "We ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War: ... Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike."
I mean we literally just had a discussion with someone arguing that inveterate lying was perfectly valid, after a campaign season full of the most shameless lying I've ever seen.
There are limits. I think people would appreciate an apology for the lies before extending any more charity. At least for the whole "our internal polls agreed with the prediction markets that trump was winning but we still called them insane cryptobro conspiracy theorists who did their own research (gross! Ick!)". Or "Biden's not senile you're just a rabid maga partisan for noticing." Or "the economy is amazing and Biden solved Trump's crime wave, illegal immigration isn't happening and you're imagining the price of eggs and why do you care anyway, you're weird!" All lies that were used here with no consequences for the liars other than going on some people's mental lists of sociopathic manipulators.
There's a point where you can't just get done with another round of lying and go "hey bro no hard feelings bro I was just using rhetoric to destroy your ability to understand reality and gaslight you into thinking you were insane for questioning our lies, leaving you helplessly adrift in a sea of mass propaganda to serve my own interests. Come on bro we've all done that, I do it to you all the time you can't stay mad at me! What about charity bro?! What about niceness and understanding?!"
It's time to coordinate some meanness against this tactic, because it's antithetical to everything this place tries to do, and it incinerates what little trust anyone has left. I want to come here to read people who will help me understand things I'm unaware of or confused about, not to get force fed this week's edition of "Blob Propaganda Magazine"
There are liars on that side of the aisle. There are also those who believe the lies - the lied-to (and some allies of convenience as well). Call the liars liars; don't call the lied-to liars.
I mean, at a certain point you become complicit in the lies. Like, if you catch me, bloody knife in hand, body at my feet, the body of a person I've had decades of animosity towards and threatened to kill, and I go "He fell", clearly I'm lying. Or at least you'd have significant reason to believe I'm lying. But if you turn around and repeat to everyone "WhiningCoil didn't murder anyone! The poor man just fell and anyone who says otherwise is a nazi!" I'd say you are also a liar.
The entirety of the Democrats and the media lied about Joe Biden's cognitive state for years. In private many of them knew he was thoroughly demented. When the dam finally broke and the rats fled the sinking ship, hoping if they came clean first they could salvage some of their credibility, you heard stories going back to his inauguration. The worst, and the one that condemns the most Democrats, is when he went to Capitol Hill to try to whip votes for the Inflation Reduction Act, he spoke with all the congressional democrats, and he was so obviously demented Nancy Pelosi had to excuse him and "clarify" what he was "trying to say". That was at least two years ago.
There were all the times in public he was obviously demented that got hand waved away. The media knew it was lying then. We all have the same eyes in our head. There were the times the media claimed Joe Biden had a stutter that he's wrestled with for years, despite five decades of public speaking stutter free. They definitely knew that was a lie and repeated it.
The conspiracy to hide Joe Biden's dementia, and the willful lying, or credulous complicity, damned every Democrat and every media mouthpiece that played ball. This isn't in the same class of lying as making and breaking campaign promises, exaggerating your record, denying corruption or moral failings, crass political posturing and the like. It's unlike any act of political dishonesty I've ever even heard of. And they were all in on it, and they didn't even care that it was obvious they were lying to everyone, because we all have the same eyes and ears on our head. If they could have bullied enough people into voting blue no matter who to drag a corpse across the finish line they would have.
If you say "these people are gullible and/or stupid and/or highly-mindkilled; what they say is apparently not significantly correlated with the truth and you should ignore it", that's a solid argument and one I'd actually mostly agree with.
If you say "these people are gullible and/or stupid and/or highly-mindkilled, and we should chop them up into little pieces", well, I don't accept that argument for a variety of reasons, but ultimately that's a matter of opinion; there's logic to that position and it's been taken before.
If you say "these people are all liars", then I'm going to call you out. "Lying" is saying things you believe to be false with the intention that others will believe them to be true. It is highly useful to have a word for that, and I think that's worth protecting against hyperbole like yours. There are definitely some liars among the Democrats, but less than you might think.
I don't think that's the singular definition of lying. Phrases like "lying to oneself" and "lying by omission" are quite common, and I don't think they're being ironic or hyperbolic. Often, lying to oneself is considered a lesser evil than knowingly saying false things with the conscious intent to make others believe them to be true, but I'd also argue that, often, the truth is so obvious and the false thing that someone believes when they "lie to themselves" is so blatantly self-serving that it's at least as much an evil.
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How many people do you think would be less than I think? Like I said, I already consider all congressional Democrats liars for this. They all met with a demented Joe Biden trying to whip votes for the Inflation Reduction Act. They lied about his mental state for 2 years. Maybe that does not indict every single congressional staffer, or literally every single person who is a registered Democrat, or every single person who voted D. But it absolutely indicts almost every single person of rank and consequence in the DNC. Now that the beans are spilled, we know they all lied for years, and they knew they were lying.
As I said, call the liars liars. But target discrimination like this is important, damnit. It's the point of that rule, and it divides discourse from rhetoric.
How have I not done that? You keep banging on about how I'm casting too wide a net. Do you think I'm wrong to consider every Democrat of rank and consequence a liar for their conspiracy of silence around Joe Biden's mental state? Do you think it's wrong, if every Democrat of rank and consequence in the DNC is a liar, to claim that the DNC is full of liars? Do you think it's somehow ambiguous who I'm talking about when I say capital D-Democrats are liars? Do you think someone is confused that I'm actually talking about their Nana who heard on the news that Trump is Hitler and voted for the first black female president instead? Here?!
I am in fact 100% sure of this, because I was personally confused. I was more thinking of "random teens on social media resharing everything from the goodthinker sources", though.
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Why not demonstrate they are wrong or mistaken? Is that mean enough? If there's specific concern trolls you are concerned with, then it'd be good to point them out to Mom--erators. People should be allowed to be wrong here. They should be allowed to make bad, misinformed arguments. They should be allowed to be duped and fall for the latest propaganda and regurgitate it with a fresh coat of polite paint on it here. They should be allowed to be embarrassed, apologize, or quietly slink away and come back with a new humility. You should be encouraged and motivated as you easily dispel provably false things. Easily dispelling provably false things is a major contribution and part of the immune system. Then for things that are not provably false you maybe can take it easy?
I don't make it around all the way through every thread, but I haven't seen an epidemic of DNC concern trolls here.
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I mean honestly, I don’t think the press just started doing thing. I’ll be honest, I’ve near zero trust in the mainstream media as a truthful source of actual news. And I don’t think an apology fixes it. The issues are too deep for that, and they won’t change just because they promise to do better. I think at this point, the press need to clean house, top to bottom. Until then, I think it’s just reasonable to ignore the media and look for actual news.
I knew that they were lying about the polls when suddenly the “Keys” history professor showed up everywhere telling people how he’d never been wrong and only he could turn the keys. And if you paid attention, the keys he was talking about were either clearly false or manipulated to become true. Kamala was declared the incumbent, for one, which isn’t true. No major wars (just forget about Ukraine and Israel, both of whom were funding), a good economy (stop noticing the price of things). I felt like I was watching Baghdad Bob declare that there were no tanks in Baghdad while a tank rolls by behind him. More ridiculous than anything, but I felt like this was an insult to my intelligence. They couldn’t possibly think people would fall for this.
Man, this is a bit off the path of this topic, but it's been months since the hurricane fucked up western North Carolina, and I still can't tell fact from fiction. All I see are randos on twitter talking about FEMA kicking people out of shelters, and then taking their kids because they don't have adequate shelter. Some road a bunch of good ol' boys cut through a mountain to Chimney Rock that FEMA closed down, despite there being no other road. Some guy devastated that FEMA stole the building he'd leased for his business, and since his home was washed away, now he has absolutely nothing. There was definitely that one lady who instructed FEMA workers to skip houses with Trump signs, and apparently she went out trying to take everyone down with her, claiming those orders came to her from higher up as well. Was that ever substantiated? I don't know!
It reminds me of the oral tradition from the Great Depression, about FDR stealing gold from lock deposit boxes and slaughtering entire herds of cattle to fight deflation. Visiting local national parks there are exhibits about all the people forced off their land by FDR to establish some of those parks, and how they were totally given a fair market value when they were forced off. I'm pretty sure the worst allegations about FDR stealing people's gold might not have happened exactly the way it's described. But this debunking does not inspire hope as it's full of the usual managerial weasel words I'm used to. FDR didn't steal the gold. He just passed an executive order requiring it be sold to the government at a price they immediately raised after they'd gotten it all. And even when the government did confiscate people's gold, it's because they committed a crime. Like not obeying the executive order to voluntarily sell their gold to the government.
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Oh the press has been doing it since before JournoList, that's baked in. What's new is spreading it to places like this through sophisticated distributed propaganda campaigns: delivering talking points to partisans and using them to manipulate people who trust them.
Take the surge in shoplifting for example. It wasn't just MSNBC or Vox lying about it, they had explainers on how to lie to family members about it. They had people showing up even in tiny communities like this to dress up the propaganda line in rationalist colors and make it go down smoother. They had YouTubers paid to go on rants about how it was all in our imagination and anyway it was just Corporate Greed.
What do you even do against a fully distributed and inescapable reality distortion machine like that? Obviously this election showed the limits of convincing people to ignore their lying eyes, but it took an amazing set of circumstances to wake people up.
My mom's told us a story a bunch of times about how, when she was in school as a kid, one day she and her classmates were told to head out to the sports field because some reporters wanted to take a picture. So the reporters had her and her classmates sit on the bleachers, and took a couple pictures, and then they told the kids to start make fists, start yelling and waving their fists in the air, look real angry. The kids did it, and the reporters took a couple more pictures. The next day, one of those last pictures was in the paper for a story claiming that she and her fellow classmates had staged a race riot.
Point being, it's definitely older than Journolist.
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Don't take this the wrong way (I agree with you), I'm not trying to pull a Reddit "source?" move, but I would genuinely love to see links for each of these things.
I'll see if I can still find them. Those particular ones were on the motte reddit I think.
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Ah, the old pivot from one persons "They are inveterate liars and it's smart and great, which I can attest to due to my decades of working in politics" to "You can't call them liars, that's against the rules!" I don't know what else to call them after this political cycle. Is there one single truthful thing they actually said?
Who is "they"?
You can call Nate Silver a liar. You can call (specific) Democratic politicians liars. You can call any particular organization or individual a liar (if you can back it up). You can argue that specific statements are lies or that people who claimed to believe something were lying. You cannot just say "Democrats are liars." Unless you think you can actually make a case that every. Single. Democrat. Is a liar. If you really believe that, write your effortpost about how Every. Single. Democrat. Is a liar. Otherwise, yes, culture warring with "Democrats are all liars" will get modded.
Of course if someone came in and said "Republicans are all Nazis," you'd expect that to be modded (and you know it would be). But then you'd continue to be pretend to be confused and indignant when "Democrats are all liars" gets modded.
More seriously? The entire apparatus around Joe Biden that hid his dementia. Here is an article from 6 months ago, after the debate. It described how years before that his dementia was obvious to everyone who worked around him. There was an anecdote about how when they were trying to get the Inflation Reduction Act passed, he met with congressional democrats for the last time to try to whip votes. He was so obviously demented, Nancy Pelosi had to excuse him and try to make his comments make some sort of sense.
They all lied All of them. Every single one of them, to a person, lied about Joe Biden's mental state for years. The entire party, the media handlers, every single person who had met with him and saw how demented he was. They are all liars.
There, done. It wasn't even that hard.
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LOL. "Liar" is on the same level as "Nazi". I mean I know Nazi has been thrown around so much it's been severely devalued, but I don't know it had fallen all the way to "Liar". Good to know, good to know.
Again, stop pretending to miss the point.
"Nazi" is not the same as "liar," and you know I do not think "Nazi" is the same as "liar," and you are not LOLing.
I took two very common generalizations we actually see, by way of illustrating the point. If I thought you honestly needed something with exact moral equivalence, I'd come up with more closely-matched pairs, like "Nazi/groomer" or "liar/misogynist" or whatever. But (1) this would be pointless, you'd just pedantically argue the equivalence; (2) it's not necessary, you didn't really miss the point.
You got the point.
Don't tell me I'm not LOLing. I just woke up my sick wife with my LOLing, and the dog too. I LOLed in a deep, throaty way, from deep in my gut. It was the LOL of a man deeply satisfied, and you can't take that away from me.
Edit; I mean, seriously. If you are about to mod in so silly and unserious a fashion, so much so you can already anticipate how I'll object (because it's true), but you plow on ahead anyways, and then you get all butthurt for your deserved mockery, just hang up your hat dude. You're cooked.
I wasn't about to mod you, and as much as you wish it were so, I don't get "butthurt" by your tantrums. That said, unless you are trying to get modded so you can feel more persecuted, editing in personal attacks makes it a lot harder to treat you as having (another) bad day.
Blowing up being called "silly" and getting laughed at into a "personal attack" is textbook butthurt. I don't make the rules.
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To be fair, I am 1) Not American, 2) Not a Democrat and 3) A Mottezin so how much you can extrapolate from me to the people you are talking about is an entirely different ballgame.
If you want to say SSCReader is an inveterate liar, then certainly yes for much of my career I was. But of course, I also worked for both Right and Left wing parties. So as much as I am an exemplar for Democrats it is also going to implicate Republicans.
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