site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 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.

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 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.

I think that proves too much; consider

I don't really care if you hate Catholics. Frankly, they have an easy out of taking the soup and becoming Protestant.

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.

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"