site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

a charitable reading of the above users post is the evidence did exist, it existed on the internet, but he cannot find it using the typical indexing sites like google

there is ample evidence of google doing this with basic searches, e.g., election fraud or vaccine safety now return 100+ pages of the exact opposite of whatever phrase the searcher is looking for

there is ample evidence of these sites delisting and deboosting sites which had this information, there is ample evidence of posts being censored across all social media sites in the wake of the election, including an entire denial of service attack against Parler by their web host (AWS) which destroyed the competitor

being genuine means when you ask someone a specific question or for specific evidence, you're asking the question because you want engage in a dialogue as opposed to it being a rhetorical tactic to win some argument on the internet or through attrition whereby you, who have expended exactly zero effort here but have set yourself up as some arbiter of truth, demand others expend lots of effort to move you

when a user responds to someone else's genuine explanation with something like "how convenient" or "hyuk hyuk that's what I thought," it's the later as opposed to the former

this sort of behavior is cancerous to a discussion forum and should be sanctioned

One of the rules of the site is "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be." Hard to imagine a more partisan and inflammatory claim than "the Democrats rigged the 2020 election in order to install their preferred candidate". It's very aggravating when this rule has been egregiously violated (i.e. an extremely partisan and inflammatory claim was presented without any evidence in support of it), I try to be charitable by specifically requesting that various posters provide evidence in support of said claim, and the best they can cough up is "well there would be evidence in support of this partisan and inflammatory claim if the Dems/deep state/Big Tech/WHO/Bilderberg Group/Illuminati/whoever hadn't suppressed it". This is not evidence in support of an inflammatory claim. This is an IOU for said evidence. This is a glorified "source: dude trust me". And when I respond with more than a little exasperated frustration at multiple posters egregiously violating the rules of this space, you accuse me of being "cancerous" and failing to argue in good faith.

Put yourself in my shoes: imagine if someone made an extremely partisan and inflammatory claim with which you disagreed without presenting a lick of evidence to back it up, you asked them to do so, and their response was "I don't have evidence for it because it's been suppressed". Would you respond with "huh, how unfortunate, that must be really frustrating, this thing must go all the way to the top"? Or would you roll your eyes and say "come on dude, get real, I need more than just your word to go on"? I strongly suspect the latter, as I did.

the user responded to your question with a genuine answer about his experience the night of the election about what he remembers experiencing in live time which you responded with a low-effort quip

Imagine if someone made an extremely partisan and inflammatory claim with which you disagreed without presenting a lick of evidence to back it up, you asked them to do so, and their response was "I don't have evidence for it because it's been suppressed"

one, that's an uncharitable reading; the user wrote "seems to have been scrubbed from the internet" which implies the user went looking for the things he remembers which convinced him the election was stolen and couldn't find them

two, he gave you evidence of his experience which supports his "inflammatory" comment; the fact you don't find it convincing doesn't mean he didn't provide evidence

three, vast numbers of posts and articles were scrubbed from indexing sites or censored off social media making finding linkable evidence exceedingly difficult and time consuming

I can see you're frustrated. We're over 4 years post less-than-the-most-secure-in-history election and this has been discussed to death and many users are generally frustrated about the topic. When I'm frustrated I try not to respond because I try to engage genuinely or not at all. I try to not engage on forums like I'm trying to win some argument on the internet because I think some version of effortless "source?! you got a source!?! source?!?" and otherwise disingenuous interactions are cancerous to a discussion forum. Effort should be met with effort for one to remain healthy.

I don't really think people (or at least me) would enjoy strict rules around anyone who isn't repeating the status quo or consensus being required to make some huge effort post or not engage at all. For top posts that's probably necessary, but I think requiring a high standard for responses in a thread will lead to less engagement and a more boring forum.

I'm unsure if you've seen this post, but I think it does a good job attempting to answer this question in a defensible way with effort and evidence you may find interesting.

When I ask a question like yours, I try to think of what would be the minimum amount/type of evidence which I would find convincing. In the context of an election, I would say the minimum evidence would be there exists enough illegal ballots which are larger than the spread between the races. Given how shit US elections are (like comically shit for a 1st world country, they're unauditable and purposefully so, and entirely rely on unearned trust to carry them), I don't think a higher minimum should be required nor do I think this is a hard bar to meet in most elections let alone one where stated engages in rampant, unilateral executive illegal changes to rules and election security and straight-up failed to even perform required signature checks across all the close states while at the same time vastly increasing the number of ballots floating around.

I mean, fine. Forget the statistical stuff, and just focus on the top paragraph that I wrote regarding the lived election night experience. You don't agree that it was all pretty fuckin' weird?