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I have empathy for my family over empathy for the gay furry on twitter. It's that twitter meme about the empathy graphs come to life...
Is this just 'gay furry' as thought-terminating cliché? Heck, why do you keep bringing him at all? Why does TracingWoodgrains live rent-free in your head? He was brought up by someone else a few posts up as an example of someone who, whether you like his hobbies or not, has a place in the body politic, and oats then clarified that his point is to do with oddballs and dissenters of all kinds.
The point is not about TracingWoodgrains specifically, or about homosexuality, or about people who like to wear silly fox costumes, and cannot be addressed by going "lol I hate that guy". Oats' point terminated in the question, "Do you care what happens to yourself?"
Maybe you hope for a world in which the hammer of state power comes down on TracingWoodgrains and not on yourself, but that sure sounds like an awfully precise hammer - the type that squishes one specific type of online oddball but not any other type. How sure are you that a world that crushes one guy who posts spicy takes on obscure online discussion forums isn't going to crush another guy who posts spicy takes on obscure online discussion forums?
This conversation started out being about liberalism, not empathy. Whether you like so-and-so isn't really the point. But you're using "screw the gay furry" as an evasion. The point is - okay, sure, you can reject liberalism. You can reject the social compact that allows everyone from you to furries to coexist and even have their own discussion spaces like this. But if you reject it you open the door to a lot of boots stomping on a lot of faces, and maybe you shouldn't be so confident that the boots aren't going to be stomping on you.
If nothing else, your views seem significantly more repulsive to random normies than those of gays or furries or, heaven forbid, gay furries. Maybe a little caution is called for.
This would be better targetted at the person who brought up "don't you have any empathy for the gay furry?" With the implication being that I should give up on my political project of preserving my families future, in favor of his political project of depriving them of a future, because "empathy". Maybe I took obvious bait, but everything you are trying to but on me deserves to be on oats_son.
It looks to me like you suggested that liberalism was just a "stalking horse" used to destroy society. Oats asked the question - if liberalism goes away, what happens to people like me, or TracingWoodgrains?
At that point you then replied with "I don't care what happens to a gay furry".
But the question was about what happens to people like Oats, or people like you. You can be apathetic towards TW, but he was never the central point. The point was your future. You want to work on a project of supporting your family's future? That's the point.
I mean, obviously TW's project or Oats' project isn't to destroy your family. I very much doubt they care. But the question about whether destroying liberalism will be better or worse for you and your family is a valid one, and no amount of yelling boo furries addresses that. Here's what Oats said:
It's all very well and good to rant about liberalism, but it seems like many of the things you value, including your ability to express yourself right now, are products of liberalism. Remove liberalism, and maybe all that goes away. What's your alternative?
That's a funny way of encapsulating it. I would characterize it more as "I have about a half dozen immediate existential risks to worry about. When I'm done with those, I'll have a fuck to give about anything else".
It didn't have to be this way. I would have supported the Bernie Sanders who described open borders as a Koch Brothers Conspiracy. I donated to that guy! I would have supported the Bill Clinton that fought back against anti-white racism. I would have supported the Obama where the worst things we were fighting over were gay marriage and abortion. I even voted for that guy!
I don't want to explicitly hurt the "gay furry" (and don't put that on me, once again, that was the misnomer that Oats chose, not me). But I would literally vote for the worst monsters in history who's political platform was working me to death in the shit mines, so long as they didn't support mandatory education trying to talk my children into mutilating and sterilizing themselves. I'm for literally any political project that is against that. And to the extend there is collateral damage, well, I go back to the above. It didn't have to be this way.
Virtually every other "liberal" party in the western world has walked away from trans children as a central plank of their party platform. And I simply do not believe TW's approach of "Ask them nicely to stop, for a decade with no progress, in fact it's actually getting exponentially worse. But never ever under any circumstances punish them electorally" is workable, believable, or even in good faith at this point. To the extent my chosen political project makes collateral damage out of him, is probably less than the extend his chosen political project makes collateral damage out of my family.
I would rather live in literally any alternative system, than one which has mandatory brainwashing to mutilate and sterilize children. I would rather live in Communist China, Communist Russia, or crushing poverty in Africa (were I African). I'd rather live in literal 1984 Fascist Dystopia. I wouldn't live in an active warzone undergoing genocidal violence... but it's close.
So no, I don't care what happens to the gay furry. There is in fact vanishly little I care about above stopping what the state is doing to children. And to whatever degree you misconstrue this to be about me "hating" or "wishing to hurt" anyone, as opposed to having higher priorities, that's on you.
You would prefer a society where your children are certain to face all sorts of brainwashing, and likely also mutilation and torture as adults, rather than 5% (extremely generous estimate) of them going medically trans? I believe that you have priorities, but as you express them, they look extremely skewed, to the point where it's easy to assume you're having a knee-jerk reaction to trans rather than actually thinking about the relative badness your children will experience in 2025 USA vs. 1984 Oceania.
Certainly if someone stated in plain terms they would rather their kids certainly 1984-suffer over living in a society where they have a small chance of being convinced to sterilize themselves, I would think that person is either innumerate or "hates" the concept of trans to an irrational degree. You could be framing it in terms of overall fertility rates and shit, and then, like, OK, this person values his genetic legacy, this is at least understandable. But this hyper-focus on trans is why other people think you've just overdosed on trans outrage porn.
Suppose you're in Communist Russia, and your son is getting bombarded by propaganda of Soviet martyr soldiers in school (They took this shit really seriously. Propaganda of WW2 child guerillas, too). How worried are you going to be that he, a bright-eyed patriot, enlists into the Afghanistan war immediately after finishing school and gets heroically blown up by an IED without leaving you any grandchildren?
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Okay, so you're a single issue voter on trans education for kids?
Um, well, then I guess I'd suggest that firstly you take the win you've just had, secondly avail yourself of the many options there are available in America to avoid any risk of trans education for kids (there are private schools, religious schools, home-schooling, etc.), and thirdly get involved civically to advocate for your views, like going to PTA meetings, running for school boards, and so on.
You will notice that none of that has anything whatsoever to do with TracingWoodgrains, and also that nothing TW has said or done prevents you from doing it. He's not collateral damage here. There's no need to single him out. The last I checked he was endorsing the Enlightened Centrist Manifesto on trans issues, and that manifesto is deliberately a fair distance away from the woke dogmatists you're criticising. But TW's work isn't even about trans. As he himself admits, he rarely talks about them. His big project for a while has been the FAA hiring scandal, and that sounds like an issue where you'd probably be on the same side. So why bother hating somebody who is more likely to be your ally?
Moreover, this whole discussion was about liberalism as a social order, and actually nothing you've said touches on that. You are wholly free to advocate against kids being exposed to anything trans, and to send your kids to wholly trans-free educational institutions. You have those rights under liberalism. You might not have them under an illiberal system. So it seems as if you've attacked the wrong target here.
You can be opposed to trans stuff around kids. I agree with that, actually! I wouldn't want my kids to see any of that! But I don't see how that gets you to either singling out TW, or attacking liberalism.
TW was opposing the candidate that gave WhiningCoil the win you're telling him to take, and endorsing his opponent.
Also I feel your reply would be more fitting to a is sentiment lime "fuck TW", not "I don't give a fuck what happens to TW, until I sort these other problems out".
He voted for Harris while loudly and publicly expressing his dissatisfaction with Harris and trying with all his might to drag the Democrats towards the centre. Personally I find his denunciation of Harris considerably more brutal than that of most people on the right - there is a deep bitterness there.
I think that ought to contextualise any reading of TW as defender of woke politics or far-left Democrats.
You said he should be taking the win, and that TW has nothing to do with the issues he cares about. You can't tell me he had nothing to do with it, if he was endorsing a candidate that would, at best, not provide the win (but given the performance of the Biden administration, she'd most likely pull as far from the win as possible).
The "brutal" denunciation of Harris literally does not matter when you're telling people to vote for her.
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I'm not talking about TW in particular but none of that ultimately matters. Political parties don't give a damn about public dissatisfaction (unless it gives them cover for something they wanted to do anyway). They care about votes. Any bloc who thinks they can get what they want without either subverting the personnel pipelines or voting against their party is delusional, which is why I played my part in trouncing the Conservatives and ushering in the absolute shitshow that is Keir 'Two-Tier' Starmer.
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I don't really care if you hate gay furries. Frankly, they have an easy out of not engaging in homosexual activity and not buying fursuits or going to furry conventions. What triggered my thought of "wow, this guy is extremely unempathetic" is when you dodged my questions about what happens to all the other liberals who post in this forum to 1) bash the gay furry in two comments, 2) say that this forum sucks, and 3) say that you literally only care about your immediate family, and no one else.
You still haven't really outlined your ideal society even still; would you be okay with your family ascending to royalty and everyone else being a miserable serf? For me, it's easy to say that Marxists and neo-Nazis and other radicals who want to kill people and wield the state should be suppressed, but that standard would still include the progressives and the dissident right, and that's mostly the same position we're in now. Where is the wiggle room on how much you can deviate in your ideal society? Is reading about political philosophy for 8 hours a day okay?
I think that proves too much; consider
I'm not sure that it's very equivalent. Homosexuality was considered a behavior, not an inherent part of the self, for a long time. Same goes for engaging in furry activities like going to conventions and buying fursuits and jerking off to erotic furry artwork. You can even be a private furry wanker and no one would know unless they cohabited with you or raided your phone. Catholicism is a set of behaviors stemming from a set of beliefs about the afterlife that are not so easily modified and come with greater demands from above. There is no greater purpose to furry art or gay sex than self-pleasure, but there definitely is for Catholicism and other religions.
If someone wanted to explicitly exclude Catholics from their new non-liberal society, it would be bad, but perhaps justifiable, depending on conditions. Most non-liberals would want to exclude Muslims, anyway, and maybe the non-liberal versions of different sects of Christianity go back to holy wars. That's bad, of course, and it comes with the territory of losing our liberalism.
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I'm going to state this as simply as possible. Because now I'm just repeating myself.
I don't need an ideal society. I want literally any society that isn't transing kids, importing infinity third worlders, and openly discriminating against me in my native country. It's a low bar to clear. It could be virtually any society you choose in 4000 years of human history minus the last twenty. Don't act like this is some impossible ask, and I'm just being so obtuse and confusing and hateful. And don't act like for reasons of empathy I must still support an aberrant political projects which has these as it's core goals and virtually the only thing it's willing to expend political capital on achieving.
It's pretty easy to live in very white areas and join a subculture that has no truck with the whole trans thing without leaving the USA.
Is it? Even people in Redtopia Idaho wonder why their daughter's volleyball coach keeps calling her "Aiden"
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The Twitter meme does not imply what people think it implies. It shows the extent of a person's moral circle of concern, and does not mean that liberals care more about distant strangers than their own family or neighbors.
But let's not let actually reading the study get in the way of easy gotchas or reasons to yell at the outgroup, eh?
The study on which the meme is based on does not imply that, the meme on the other hand...
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It's hilarious to me that people who are usually screaming that all social science is fake and gay and data collected by surveys is meaningless suddenly think its SCIENCE! when it allegedly shows something bad about leftists.
I found that survey meaningless because the question, as presented, would leave me very confused about how to answer. Like, "my inner group"? My social circle? In a very abstract sense I do care about the entire human race, so maybe I'd choose one of the outer circles. But in concrete, day to day concerns, where I place my priorities (and my money)? Inner circle for sure. So would I be in the "Good conservative family values" blob or the "Sociopathic liberal who loves random Africans more than my own children" blob?
The study is useless except as a source for a cheap meme.
Why? It's human nature, and goes in all directions. For example all the lefty social science enjoyers are gangsta, until you bring up IQ genetics (note: not even HBD).
Well,. here on the Motte at least I wish more people would be intellectually honest.
(I am frequently disappointed.)
In retrospect I think it was pretty pretentious to think we, or all the rat-adjacent communities, represented any form of departure from human biases. Conversations here became a lot less frustrating once I accepted us for what we are - normal people with slightly above average IQ.
One of the ideas I liked from LessWrong was that of "anti-inductive systems": systems where a proposition about them can become false via the process of discovering it was true. At first glance the idea sounds paradoxical; then at second glance you can come up with a couple cases where it's so obviously correct you don't need to think about it, but there are cases in-between where consciously worrying about the problem is helpful, and I think "don't take your own or your group's own virtue for granted" encompasses a whole category of them. "I'm too rational to fall for simple human biases" is like "we can trust the priests/feminist-allies/cops/non-profits/Crusaders/etc. completely" - even if such a proposition is actually true at the moment you conclude it, as soon as you come to believe it you're likely to drop your guard too far and eventually be betrayed by your own overconfidence.
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That study really should be redone showing priorities allocated to each band per ideological grouping. Maybe it already contains this, no idea. My intuition is it would illustrate the same dramatic difference as is already assumed on the right.
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