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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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IMHO at this point they should just remove the boo-outgroup rule rather than make a continued mockery of it.

Edit: jeez and +17

I don’t think it’s boo-outgroup to say that large sections of social media are awful people who want to hurt you and engaging with them honestly is a mistake. Right now those are all leftists because of other civilisation all dynamics but it would just as bad if they were rightists.

I referenced /pol/ to try and demonstrate that it was a general point about the risks of letting propaganda weapons into your brain without a filter. Although admittedly even there a lot of it is committed by leftists for trolling or demoralization, it's still a good example of a community poisoned by all sides.

But yeah, if some people want the boo outgroup rule to mean "you have to take 'Kamela is Brat, Vance fucked a couch!' propaganda at face value," rather than treating them as weapons to be analyzed and defended against at arms length, I think the community is fucked.

The boo outgroup rule means you should not refer to your political opponents as literal inhuman "things." If all you said was "don't trust propaganda and liberal social media," your post would not be under discussion.

The "weird" attack on Vance was literally invented by a propaganda consultancy firm and algorithmically boosted by bots. If that doesn't count as the product of an inhuman "thing" we're going to have to have some discussions about the nature of humanity.

If your mother gets called by an automated telemarketing scam pretending to be you needing bail money/gift cards, is that the action of a human, or a malicious thing directed by human intelligence? Is the correct response for her to argue with it, or slam the phone down and curse the thing that tried to hurt her?

If something that looks almost exactly like your wife except for the featureless empty black eyes comes to your bedroom window and asks you to let it in, what do you do? Ask it politely how it's floating outside the 2nd floor, or nod to your actual wife to get the fucking shotgun and a bible?

That attack on Vance would have also been out of bounds of the rule and, were posted here, worthy of censure.

If something that looks almost exactly like your wife except for the featureless empty black eyes comes to your bedroom window and asks you to let it in, what do you do?

I would say “you don’t have to tell me what happened, but you do have to eat these” as I hand her a bowl of eggs.