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 -
I had the same feeling. Not quite what I'd call a whitepill, but something of a counter to the extremely blackpilled narrative of the establishment doing whatever the hell it wants against the wishes of the common people, or even it's own principles. I can't quite figure out why, though. The first term has shown they can oppose him and suffer no consequences, so why the race to bend the knee all of a sudden?
The antics of the FTC and the Consumer Fraud Protection Bureau may have something to do with it. The CFPB has been trying to make itself a micromanager of American business in various ways, and the FTC has been going after Amazon and Google. This may have finally convinced lefty tech executives that they'd better switch horses, or at least go back to the traditional policies of sucking up to whoever is in power.
More options
Context Copy link
The Silicon Valley seems to be swinging rightwards in general (a combination of ideological percolation of various ideologies familiar to the forum and tech queasiness with AI regulation and like), so no wonder the most visible tech barons are following the course.
Also, hasn't Adams always been a centrist for a New York Dem?
More options
Context Copy link
It's a very good question. I would guess that with billions of dollars at stake, they have their ear to the ground in ways that we don't, and they must have some indication that Trump is coming in better prepared to actually get things done this time around, for whatever reason.
More options
Context Copy link
After his first presidential victory Trump was deemed illegitimate because he lost the popular vote, colluded with Russia to steal the election and fooled his voters into supporting him. This time everyone who voted for Trump clearly knew what they were voting for and Trump won by enough that it's hard to claim he did so via fraud. Also, it's very likely that the next Republican presidential nominee will be pro-MAGA. Finally claiming that Trump is less morally qualified to be president than Biden isn't plausible given the Hunter pardon.
Additionally, running with Biden for as long as they did also undermined the competence critiques, while the way they removed him (threatening, but not actually utilizing, the 25th Amendment) undermines process-centric critiques.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
taps sign
Because the State Department and the CIA were looking at the dwindling military recruitment numbers in light of an imminent great power conflict, and decided that wokeness was becoming a liability to empire and had to go.
Wokeness is a great ideology for an empire standing at Fukuyama’s end of history, when the main priority is global resource extraction and the only threats are threats from within. It gives infinite excuses for neo-colonialist wars overseas (those tribals in the mountains need to be enlightened about trans rights and feminism by the application of a few 2000 lb JDAMs). It also gives infinite excuses to repress political opposition at home (we have to destroy democracy in order to save Our Democracy). There’s a reason the Obama administration decided to retool the entire military around counter insurgency, and it wasn’t just for conflicts in the Middle East. The military was literally running war games about how they were going to “pacify” troublesome towns in middle America. The only “conspiracy” part about the Jade Helm conspiracy theory was whether Obama was actually planning on using the many many contingency plans that had been drawn up to turn the Midwest into one giant Chechnya, not whether those plans had been made. The military would be turned into a politicized Syria/Iraq style Republican Guard, and minimized in size to make it easier for the political branches to control. Politically unreliable demographics would be driven out and replaced with ones that could be counted on to open fire on the plebes of it ever became necessary.
Unfortunately, all of that stuff is a giant liability when you actually have to think about fighting another country. When Russian tanks rolled over the ceasefire line in the Donbas and Chinese fleets started conducting practice encirclements of Taiwan, the US military establishment started shitting bricks when it realized that the nu-military would last about three weeks in that kind of conflict. There is no buy-in from the civilian population, so no one wants to join anymore. A draft would be a a complete non starter because everyone now realizes how much the government despises them. All the old patriotic illusions are gone. So now the deep state is scrambling to try and do damage control to get everyone back in line.
I don’t think they’re enthusiastic about working with Trump but I think they prefer it to the French Revolution nightmare scenario of an existential overseas foreign conflict running simultaneously with a hot civil war at home. Especially given that unlike back in 2010, if a civil war kicked off now, all parties involved would suddenly be getting mysterious crates of military equipment with Cyrillic writing all over them.
Where is a good place to read about these war games? Are these contingency plans documented somewhere?
If it's the war games I'm thinking of, these are random towns that get picked to play not-Iraqi villages in wargames because they happen to be located the right distance from the military bases in question. It's a thing that exists but it isn't about oppressing Americans, it's about practicing winning over local powerbrokers in the next pointless middle eastern forever war.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
here is the sign hosted on kiwifarms so nsfw categorically
The possible (if they succeeded at supplanting their enemies) new elite is much more hawkish on China, at least rhetorically, than the clueless one that's on the way out.
But war..yeah, could break out. But barring an unlikely military/industrial renaissance- the entire military procurement market is as corrupt as the legacy space launch was-, such hot conflict could only go one way.
I guess they're banking on AI being able to do what Soros, NED and Gene Sharp couldn't.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Woke people in the west would be exactly the demographic to fetishize such communities and most vocally oppose bombing them.
If the woke were intellectually honest/consistant perhaps this would be the case, but this has not been the case historically.
Yes, I think the Columbia pro-Palestine protests were worrying to the establishment because it showed that the younger generations actually wanted an internally consistent and strict application of woke ideology and weren’t content to just go in whatever direction they were pointed in.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How did that George Floyd mural make it to Kabul then?
Found this on Stupidpol Reddit:
More options
Context Copy link
Either deliberate policy(which could well be local allies aping something going on in the US, maybe without knowledge of why it's absurd), or black soldiers who don't necessarily buy into the rest of wokeness but unironically believe anti-black racism is a major problem killing hundreds of black men at the hands of police violence(and make no mistake- this idea originates in the black community itself, not from academia. Academic theoreticians have the good sense to make their incorrect mental models of the world non-falsifiable, eg trans stuff. The black community already unironically believed that racially motivated police violence was a huge problem with a large bodycount being covered up by anti-black racism in society at large; SJWs were late to the bandwagon.)
More options
Context Copy link
Probably because there are black people in the military? I think if you polled people who had been on a BLM protest the vast majority would oppose the US having any presence in Kabul.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is the failure of the Kamala Harris campaign to achieve a close loss, particularly the loss of the popular vote.
I said on here at some near the time when the swap occurred, that it was likely that Kamala would lose the election, perhaps even more likely that she would lose than that Biden would lose, but that the Democrats had to make the swap to try to win the popular vote and maybe hold onto the House, and preserve some argument that they weren't completely spent as an electoral force.
The popular vote win in 2016 provided a talismanic argument for the Dems that they still represented, in some way, the will of the people, and that with better luck or reshuffling of the deck or minor procedural changes they could win again. It was of course legally meaningless, but it was important to the spirit of the team. The Coalition of the Ascendant was still Ascendant, this was white men's Dead Cat Bounce. This time, there is no such rhetorical fig leaf to hide behind. The campaign was a disaster for the Dems. New Jersey was closer to flipping Red than Texas or Florida were to flipping Blue. Kamala lost women and minorities relative to 2020. Culture war issues were largely hidden under the rug by the Harris campaign, who feared to say anything out loud at all. It was a pure defeat.
Where 2016 Hillary's defeat was like a close defeat in which the losing team had more possession of the ball, but the winning team got lucky on a few plays; 2024 was a wall to wall domination, where the winning team was clearly better.
Rhetoric matters.
I don't know if it's wise to get carried away here, they lost a single election, and a lot can happen between this one and the next one. I don't know how things are in the US, but at least in Europe the economic vibes are getting kinda weird, and a 2008-style crash could easily see them rebound. I guess this part of my confusion, it's hard for me to see this election as more than a temporary win.
The economic vibes have been weird in Europe for 15 years now.
Europe is over unless the business weecking EC gets the Milei treatment and Council of Europe and the atrocious ECHR that prevents deportations of illegals gets utterly destroyed.
More options
Context Copy link
I suppose we never really recovered from 2008, but most of the 2010's felt normal-ish to me.
In my particular European country, 2008 threw the entire political system into permanent disarray. Societal trust never recovered, and the infrastructure-debt incurred by the austerity of the 2010s was never paid back.
I have honestly never gotten the feeling that we properly recovered from 2008, despite many economic indicators showing otherwise. The Southern European countries by and large don't even have those.
What is this?
Investment into infrastructure that's needed, but has yet to happen. In other words, it's what is "owed" to your country's infrastructure to keep everything functional at the desired level.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Speaking for England, we didn’t crash in 2008 exactly, nothing visibly changed. It’s just that from that point, things started slowly deteriorating. The cohort before me were being begged to use up academic funding, mine was scrambling for cash. University fees went up. Salaries went down. Just, very slowly, absolutely everything started getting worse and hasn’t stopped.
Personally I think that the period between Thatcher and 2008 was an illusion. We had nothing real to sell, so we sold our seed corn and our prestige. 2008 was just the day that stopped working.
What was the seed corn that you sold? I’m having a hard time figuring out what you’re thinking of.
Was thinking of things like our utilities, factories (all the car brands), our transport systems, our real estate (all those flats in the centre of our capital being sold to Chinese investors as glorified safety deposit boxes), our engineering (ARM) etc.
All those things are what a country needs to thrive IMO. Most of it was stuff that had broken down after decades of socialism. Despairing of being able to fix those things, or find money to invest in them, we sold them instead. And because we had loads of cash, we told ourselves we were rich and congratulated ourselves on how well we understood the post-industrial globalised world. See Terry Pratchett’s Making Money for an example of the genre. But we weren’t rich any more than an aging dowager who pawns her jewellery, and we understood nothing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Oh certainly, I'm old enough to remember seeing Forty More Years on the shelves at Borders.
But, to take that as a clear analogy, the Republican party that came back and proved Forty More Years and the Obama Coaltion of the Ascendant false, was very different from the Dubya-McCain era party that was defeated. Not as different as some would have you believe, many of the same guys are still involved, and many of the same aims are still pursued. But the changes are obvious and manifold.
The hypothetical Democrats who come back and win the 2026 midterms and then run the table in 2028 against JD Vance would probably look very different from the Harris campaign. Quite likely in ways we don't quite know about yet! McCain was perceived as a bit left of Dubya on social issues, civil and bipartisan, focused on getting money and corporations out of politics, but hawkish and interventionist on national security; the McCain strategy was certainly not the one that lead Republicans to victory in 2016 or 2024.
I mean there are two radically different timelines that result in a Dem win in those years. The Dems winning because they retolled and redid there messaging looks way different from the dems just winning because the worst-case scenario about the amount of damage Trump could do to the economy came true and they just win by default.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Can't overestimate the body blow of losing Latinos to a guy they've been trying to protect Latinos from since he came off the
elevatorescalator. Total narrative collapse.Only thing worse would be losing black people. That'd be existential.
We warned them to stop calling us Latinx.
I really wish latinx was around when I was in college. Id have had so much fun introducing my latino friends as latinx at parties full of white kids. My friends would have to grin and be polite as I wax effusively about their journey to the hallowed shores of america where their latinx identity would be given the respect in this safe space of understanding. It'd be seeing a human pressure cooker in action.
More options
Context Copy link
"Latinx: a word used only by gringxs."
Where do you stand on 'Latines' or 'Latinaos'?
I've noticed the use of 'hispanohablantes' in the wild. While this sounds like a politically correct euphemism, it's at least a reasonable term to use in writing that doesn't, say, break the rules of Spanish grammar and pronunciation.
Hispanohablantes is real and commonly used in the spoken language, it just means Spanish-speakers.
I have never heard an actual Spanish speaker use the term Latinx though, or Latine/Latinao. The furthest Spanish language political correctness goes is 'Latinos y Latinas' or 'chicos y chicas'. Even then, the PC versions are more commonly used by European Spanish speakers, Latin Americans are more likely to use the more concise, masculine/neutral versions.
Willing to believe that(and the translation is literally correct), but to a second language speaker of Texas Spanish it sounds like a politically correct euphemism for which the usual term is 'Latinos'.
It definitely has an academic ring to it, a bit like saying 'anglophones' in English.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As a US-born spanish speaker "Latines" is obviously the correct term, but is also rarely used outside formal/academic settings. Colloquially everyone just uses "Latino" or "Hispanic"
In the meantime nothing screams "I am an illiterate gringo with a room tempreature IQ" like "Latinx".
In my opinion, latines is as woke as Latinx or Latinaos. Granted, It's the only spoken term that is seeing a push in latino-american, but it's correctly mocked when encountered. The plural is Latinos or Latinas if the group consists entirely of females. Wokies must accept that there are gendered languages.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
"Latinaos" I have never seen in my life.
"Latines", (and "e" as gender neutral in general) is indeed the form south american leftists actually use. It seemed ascendant for a while, but luckily there has been a pretty big pendulum swing, so I'd say we have at least another decade until it takes over normal life.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
2016 was a bit of a culture shock, a surprise, and widespready expectation of significant restraining factors (both the still-active Never Trump wing of the Republican party and the Democratic Resistance) that would limit Trump's ability to act.
2024's margin of victory and the nature of the transition to date has made it very, very clear those limiting factors are not in play. The Cheney-Never Trumper wing of the party self-destructed after 2020, the Democratic Party is not what it once was, and not only does Trump have a trifect but it is a far more coherent party base, and one with sharp memories for the obstructors of last time.
As a result, there are far fewer institutional barriers to prevent Trump from acting, and so personal diplomatic mollification has a lot more value.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link