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 -
Yes, an opt-out liter just cedes the territory to the attackers, and you know they won't honour it the second they get the power. That's why my response was ignoring the sophistry at court and asking "how did we get to this point, and how do we stop it happening again?"
The only answers to that question, at this point, involve literal bullets.
Well, now that I'm off ban, to clarify: I mean less "2nd amendment solutions," more Suharto.
How we stop it happening again is we get a Caesar Augustus or a Bonaparte, with the loyalty of the warriors, and the willingness to use them to purge the enemy. It's "tanks in Harvard yard" as part of going Henry VIII (or Qin Shi Huangdi) on academia.
That's not actually a solution either. Putting bullets in people is downstream from doing politics. The left understands that better than the right, which is why the left keeps getting away with boiling the frog while the right polishes their gun collection muttering "one of these days, for sure..."
I mean, obviously any real solution to this involves eliminating a lot of evildoers, but that's literally the last step of the solution, not the first. The conservative frog in the pot uselessly fantasizing about killing the cook is just as doomed as the liberal one croaking "fact-checkers deboonk claims without evidence that the pot is starting to boil!"
Yes, which is why I'm not calling for rebellion, but a Caesar sending soldiers as "right-wing death squads" to purge the domestic enemy.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Do you remember the last time you were warned for toeing this particular line?
Yeah, you’re crossing it.
Unlike your extensive history of high-effort, high-quality comments on political polarization, there’s nothing here. Nothing to engage with, nothing to discuss. It’s snarling at best and a call to action at worst.
I’m going to go with a one-day ban pending discussion with the team.
Calls for violence can be engaged with. There's the violence is never a solution, view. There's the sometimes violence is the only solution, view and now it's timely or untimely. There's violence as a political tool.
Violence is never the solution for the weak, which is what the right is. If anyone who is right-leaning engages with violent methods, people will make an example out of him and you will see far worse kinds of censorship than 2021 but for decades.
Moldbug was right when he called violence a false path to power.
Does that include Trump sending in the Marines? Or a future President Vance rolling tanks into Harvard yard a la Yarvin?
It mostly relates to acquistion of power, so if you can send tanks to harvard, you have likely already won, therefore any violence now is not gonna get you screwed over. Simialr to protests, protests are a way of showing your power, not acquiring it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is true, if one arbitrarily declares that anyone who achieves solutions through violence must therefore have not actually been weak.
Are we?
It seems to me that we've gotten to the position we're in by attempting to cooperate with defectors. That position seems to be changing rapidly now that common knowledge of the defectors is spreading.
One of the things that I don't think most moderates have cottoned to is that enforcement of this sort of thing might not be a viable option any more. For the last several years, we've seen a consistent pattern of long-standing, load-bearing social norms abruptly dissolve, and the way this has repeatedly gone is that Red Tribers achieve common knowledge that the "norm" could not be applied to their advantage, and so simply stopped applying it to Blue Tribe's advantage. We saw this with sexual misconduct accusations, with character accusations, with appeals to rule of law, and many others. I think we've seen the beginnings of this pattern applied to political violence with the riots, Rittenhouse, the j6 pardons and now Luigi and Karmelo. You'll know for sure when notable Red Tribe violence occurs, and Red Tribers simply reject the appeal to "norms" en-masse.
Do you think, in the current environment, Red Tribers won't celebrate if a Blue Tribe politician has his strings cut, after years of watching their friends and neighbors openly wish for and celebrate lawless murder of Red Tribers? If so, I'd say you're quite the optimist.
Come on man, you can't even get the average conservative normie boomer to be upset about his own son being murdered. When we stop hearing "I wish that my son was killed by a 60-year-old white man (instead of a black illegal)", I'll agree that the right has decided to stop crippling itself with one-sided social norms. Until then they're just punching bags for the left to torture for fun and profit.
I can't speak to the boomers in your family, all the boomers in my family have passed.
Boomers as a population will only continue to decline.
Graph made by Claude it's likely directionally correct if not accurate.
/images/1745594968248754.webp
More options
Context Copy link
You're the one claiming elsewhere in this thread that there's a literal government agency that exists to threaten people in this situation into making these sorts of statements. I'm inclined to believe it! I'm certainly confident that the victim's family is under tremendous social and likely legal pressure to toe the line.
That wasn't enough to get Rittenhouse convicted. It wasn't enough to prevent the J6 pardons, or to cause those pardons to have significant costs. It seems to me that neither of those outcomes were predicted by you or others arguing the "Red Tribe is powerless" thesis.
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
More options
Context Copy link
All the viable solutions are outside of the law and politics.
Edit: Awesome, I make a neutral post in line with the choices I've lived and personally spoken of repeatedly. But someone fedposts near it after the fact, so now I look sus and eat a ban. This place is a fucking joke. "Well, he didn't say it, but next to this thing someone else said later, maybe he's thinking it."
Oh, great.
I just gave Capital a slap on the wrist for his near-identical response. For consistency’s sake, you can have one, too.
What a joke
You've been asked to not do this in the most clear way possible.
Not any other critics of modding have been asked to stop. Just you, and just these kinds of dumb comments.
I am tempted to take your advice and give you a permaban:
After all these sorts of comments you make are obvious trolling.
Community sentiment is generally against perma-bans these days. 30-days for you
Um, no they're not. Trolling is deceptive posting in order to bait a response; Steve clearly does think that netstack's action was "a joke". I do not get "troll" vibes from him in general; he appears to be a sincere, very angry, very radical rightist.
Steve is a frequent flamer (i.e. someone who insults others). That is itself against the rules, but it's not the same thing as trolling.
Isn’t “baiting a response” the important bit? It’s the main reason I was ignoring Steve.
I wouldn't consider it so. Also, my read on Steve is that he's not even trying to bait a response, just lash out at people he gets mad at. Could you maybe link me some examples of Steve trying to bait people?
@SteveAgain, to be clear, I don't actually hate you. I see too much of myself in you to hate you. With that said, "you must learn control". I'd suggest putting some kind of spacer into your post routine so that you have time to calm down before a post goes live, because it's specifically your angry snarling at people that's causing the problems.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is a terrible ban and using his comment about the obvious troll poster troll posting and getting away with it because charity is endless to new posters who pretend not to know anything is ridiculous.
But the reason this is a terrible ban is because WhiningCoil's ban was a joke on several levels of both being bad and lazy and sets an assuming the worst kind of rule to the forum as a whole that I'm sure will go well.
But the bad moderating here seems to be here to stay if you can't just admit that you made a mistake and should actually be as charitable to the people you mod as they are supposed to be to you.
We've extended a great deal of charity to Steve. We've asked him to stop making these sorts of comments. He chose not to.
He has also been warned many times for antagonistic behavior, both on this account and the previous account. He was very close to earning a permanent ban with his previous account's behavior. We made a note to ourselves to not completely ignore his previous account's bad behavior, but we mostly did and proceeded to be lenient with him as if he was a newish user.
Other people's bad behavior, even if it is a mod's bad behavior, is not an excuse for bad behavior.
If we specifically ask any user not to do a specific thing. We mean it and we will take note of it. If Netstack had broken every rule we have and gotten de-modded for his comment I still would have banned Steve for his comment. This is a 'fuck around and find out" moment. We literally only have two punishments in our toolbox, the first is asking people to stop doing a thing, and the second is bans.
I clearly said in my comment that no one else has been asked to not provide feedback. Only Steve, and only those types of comments.
I personally think netstack's ban of @WhiningCoil was fine. Its only that he should have been harsher with @Capital_Room. 5 days at least for capital room for clear fedposting. And just one day for whining coil cuz it sorta looked like fedposting.
As far as I am concerned fedposting is one of the few existential threats that this board faces. The other two are zorba kicking the bucket and a democrat party crackdown on free speech on the web.
One day bans are minor and basically nothing. That is us saying "yes really, this is a rule we will enforce, don't do it". For anything resembling fed posting I'm also willing to hand out bans like candy. Don't fucking do it. We can choose to be lenient when it is just the rules we care about enforcing. But this is a rule that the world will enforce upon us if we don't self police. Be annoyingly verbose and add a bunch of disclaimers if you insist on doing it. We still might ban you, because again we aren't really the ones making the rule on this. Sorry it sucks, I don't like it anymore than you do.
The charity I was referring to was to WhiningCoil. But I can see, as usual, you guys can never, ever admit you were wrong or made any kind of mistake in moderation. It's not a small ban that is basically nothing because it's the reason why Steve was just banned. Every modhat is one step closer to a permaban unless you are a mod or someone like Dase who gets to show up like TrannyPorno every month and insult a bunch of people and get a warning for one of the five insults and the others are ignored and each one of those ignored posts and the warning would be a ban for someone like Steve or WhiningCoil because even if you guys can't see it it's pretty obvious to me there is a bias against a certain type of poster that comes down to not liking how they post and never the actual content because I've seen "fedposting" like WhiningCoils about once a week here without any even warning. But the point is Steve just got banned for thirty days for an accumulation, if this ban means nothing about WhiningCoil then it surely wouldn't be used against him in the future for a 30 day ban, right? I've never seen that to be true.
And I'm not advocating for banning Dase (I don't even think TrannyPorno should have been banned) but I do think direct insults toward other users is actually the worst thing to allow to slide in a forum. But even moreso than not giving charity to WhiningCoil, that maybe he didn't actually fedpost because you have to assume things to make that true, but that absence of charity becomes even more absent when this will get used as a accumulation of infractions that gets him further banned for an increasing amount of time. I've said it before but if you want people to not actually post something then actually make the consequences matter because saying "this doesn't really matter but don't do it, 1 day ban" is always going to lead a permaban and at this point that pretty much feels like its the point because I've been pointing this out for years and years.
Here it is, an amazing moment for you:
I am not perfect. I have definitely made mistakes in moderation. Based on what the other mods say and what users say I am often too harsh in my moderation. I have in fact been overridden on my moderation decisions and have had them scaled back before. If self_made_human, amadan, and netstack (or just zorba) say I have been too harsh I trust their judgement and I'm willing to say I was wrong. This has happened a few times. There have also been times where any of them have realized they are too close to an issue and have stepped back and asked other mods to step in and make a ruling. This is basically what I consider a normal process of modding here on themotte. If some mod was totally unwilling to admit fault and completely bull headed they would not last long as a mod.
Generally these moments are not highly publicized and catalogued. If that bothers you, then tough shit. Welcome to the world we live in. I'm not gonna ask any user to make a public flogging tour for every minor mistake they make. Consider any politician or public figure that you like and respect. Should they be forced to go on a public apology tour for every mistake they make? Or would you look at such a request through obvious culture war eyes and realize that your enemies are just trying to get one over on you?
You probably don't get dinged much because you don't post much. This is a problem we are aware of. For highly prolific users we are aware that there is a numbers issue, speak up too much and eventually you might run afoul of the rules. But we are also super forgiving of highly prolific users. As long as they don't violate very specific and enumerated requests we will let a lot of shit go. This is the case with steve, we had a very specific request that he not make these shitty "mods suck" type comments, and we tried to be as clear as possible that he needs to stop them, immediately.
He didn't.
So tell me, what the hell are we supposed to do when a user violates a clear, specific, minor, and reasonable request we have for them?
Common suggestions:
Steve has vocally been in favor of option 3 before.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is there evidence for this?
Isn't it more likely the FBI creates dozens of sock puppets to help the fedposters planning or present them with lady governor kidnapping plans?
If there was press coverage wouldn't lots of new users be likely?
Zorba has expressed a lack of interest in sacrificing his life and well-being for this place.
Personally, a media shitstorm, police investigation, etc would be enough for me to drop this place like a hot potato.
This place might continue to exist, but it will be different enough that it will be dead for many of the people that call it home.
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
To join the choir, initially I read the comment as being about culture, not violence. Entirely undeserved, in my opinion. It's not a quality comment as it doesn't speak plainly, but you inferred the worst possible meaning from it.
There is a soft rule to speak plainly, for this reason...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
FWIW I got this comment to rate and marked it as "neutral". You can read the suggestion of violence into it if you want but I think you have to bring that in yourself; there are other things that could just as well be referred to (culture, exit, self-segregation, etc)
More options
Context Copy link
Is there a way to express that some issues may not have satisfactory political solutions without being modded for fedposting?
Lean heavily into is rather than ought. Describe the specific mechanisms that you see driving people away from political solutions, how this driving works, how you see this process evolving over time. Analyze how it might be prevented, and why you think those efforts to prevent it are likely to fail, if that's your conclusion. Make rational predictions on the expectation you'll be held to them.
And if you really want to do it well, do what I do and before you start, take a couple minutes and contemplate your closest loved ones burned to charcoal, flesh shredded by bullets and shrapnel, their skulls shattered and evacuated brain matter fly-blown in the afternoon sun. Meditate on it, try to capture the sensory details, the texture and smell. Imagine yourself poor, hungry, maybe homeless, in a world that cares nothing for you, scrounging for food while your children sit starving and hollow-eyed at whatever itinerant shelter you're squatting at presently. Imagine fear, bone deep and omnipresent, defining every moment of the remainder of your life. That's what "no satisfactory political solutions" very likely looks like in reality: the rule of hatred, terror, malice and immiseration on a scale unprecedented in the experience of you or anyone you know, and the permanent end of every good thing you have ever known.
This still seems to me to be the most likely outcome, given our present trajectory, but I for one am in no hurry to reach the end of this particular rainbow.
This seems exaggerated. You had a literal civil war and it wasn’t this bad AFAIK. Obviously quite a lot of people died but ‘the end of all good things and a life of permanent misery and terror’ doesn’t seem like a good way of describing post-civil-war America.
We had a civil war back when "States" actually meant "independently governed polities", not "administrative prefectures of the single government", and people were pretty loyal to their states, and so despite some exceptions like West Virginia, the "War Between the States" was actually a war between (collections of) states. The front line was a mostly well-defined, somewhat-stable thing.
The most exceptional change to the geometry of the combat was probably Sherman's march to the sea, and it's not a coincidence that that's the main US Civil War example on Wikipedia's Scorched Earth page. If you're in a position where you have a locally small value of territory occupied relative to the length of frontage needed to defend it, then you don't want to sit on it and defend it. The best thing you can do defensively is to keep maneuvering until you're somewhere less dangerous, and the best thing you can do offensively is reduce the value of territory you maneuver through before the enemy takes it back. Scorch the earth.
What would the front line look like in a US Civil War II? Something roughly like the old maps of the "Hillary Archipelago" and "Trump's Ocean", to begin with. And that looks like an astonishingly high ratio of boundary to territory, doesn't it? That's not going to be what a somewhat-stable front line looks like. That's what the battle lines of a guerrilla war look like. If the war goes on a long time, those fractal boundaries are going to change into something more connected, and a lot of people in both the red areas being seized for connections and the blue areas that are too isolated to connect are going to be unhappy about the process.
For that matter, a lot of people in the "red" (actually reddish-purple) and "blue" (actually bluish-purple) areas aren't going to be happy no matter what happens. Being so ideologically divided in a way that's so geographically diffuse makes it less likely for another civil war to happen, but also makes the consequences if one does happen much more dire.
More options
Context Copy link
War (sigh) has changed.
Motorization. Improvised explosives. Handheld automatic weapons. Radio. A small number of motivated individuals can deal a lot more damage today than they could during the March to the Sea.
Personally, I think a hypothetical U.S. balkanization would look more like the Troubles than the American Civil War. It’d be high-variance: some regions would see a bombing every week, and others would be left untouched up until the point a militia rolled into town. Even the best-off, though, would suffer compared to the globalist, interconnected society we have today.
Not everyone would see the outcomes FC described. But enough of them would, and then they’d take up arms and gouge back. And your children would never expect to have it as good as we did.
Right, this I think is mostly a reasonable prediction. Perhaps I’m wrong but I think that @FCfromSSC pushed a valid point a little too hard and made it look silly.
On a lighter note, your post reminds me of a scene from Black Books:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I observe a lot of civil wars do and have had these results. I note that more mild civil wars, like the English one and our own, happened a long time ago and under very different conditions.
If you think serious violence cannot happen here, I think you are badly mistaken. If you think that such violence can't get bad enough to kill the American economy or seriously compromise our national security, and possibly both, and possibly for the foreseeable future, well, you're much more optimistic than I am. It seems to me that there is a tipping point, past which gravity takes over and we are all along for the ride. Violence causes political instability, political instability crashes markets, market crashes create mass dysfunction, mass dysfunction begets more violence. Maybe I'm overestimating the feedback effect, but I observe that a lot of people are vocally enthusiastic about violence, and that this enthusiasm appears to directly result in actual violence being inflicted. I think it is the sort of thing people are really going to regret having not taken seriously when they had the chance.
I do appreciate the reality check, truly. But I just don’t see Europeans and Americans acting like Congolese warlords, or permanently destroying their country’s economics. There would be a significant amount of short term suffering, yes, but not as much as you are proposing and I don’t think the long-term effects would be so bad. Look at Spain, which had a reasonably modern Civil War and was basically okay.
Then it seems to me that you lack the necessary imagination and perspective.
The best estimate I've seen is that BLM killed ~8.5k black people, in addition to thousands more non-black people, in roughly four years. No one involved intended for that to happen, but it happened all the same. Most of the people involved will not be aiming to become Congolese warlords. I'm skeptical that their intentions will prevent the formation of lasting conditions where Congolese warlordism is an adaptive behavior.
From observation, violence > chaos > poverty > more violence is a self-perpetuating cycle, especially when the good people die or leave until those who remain are some form of bad person.
I am not arguing that American civil war means inevitable and eternal hell on earth. I am arguing that if you are contemplating a potential war, you are probably underweighting the likelihood and severity of the bad consequences, and you are probably not thinking about what it means if those bad consequences arrive for you, personally.
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
Rdrama mocks us for words, words, words, but it do be like that though, and it's a good thing.
Explain why a political solution won't work, explain what might work instead, try to keep a relatively morally neutral tone. It's not that hard, you can literally boogaloopost if you put enough effort.
You belive that had @Capital_Room explained his literal bullet solution or @WhiningCoil his outside the law and politics solution in a morally neutral tone they'd be grand?
Maybe one of them will edit their posts with your suggestions.
Yes, I've seen it done, and I've seen prominent posters (who used to be mods) clutching their pearls over it, and leaving in a huff about it, and no disciplinary action being taken.
You were a part of the discussion that happened two months ago that pointed out that the post cited in TW's Schism reasoning post which did not call for violence. And even the spicier FC post cited by others doesn't seem to be calling for violence either unless you interpret people saying that they hate and want others to die as being actual calls to violence which is not how I understand the term/phrase. I'm guessing you disagree or maybe didn't see the posts Nybbler made.
For me, saying you think that the only solution is killing people and saying that you hate these people and if they tried to destroy your home/city that you'd kill them is a far cry from the same thing. But no amount of words, words, words is going to make it acceptable for FC to have said that the right should just start shooting leftists because they are evil and not because they should defend their lives and property with violence and that they're indifferent to their own destruction because they believe they are evil.
I just want to make it clear that I really don't think calls of violence are allowed or tolerated,even if worded eloquently or verbosely. In fact, for the most part tiny posts like capital's or whining's are let slide far more often and mostly because it's assumed that we give charity to other posts. Capital's is pretty impossible to afford charity to but Whining's post is pretty easy to do so.
AvocadoPanic was asking "is there a way to express that some issues may not have satisfactory political solutions?", not "is there a way to directly call for violence?". The answer to the latter is obviously "no".
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
What Montgomery County did was pretty classically tyranny (remove the safety valve from a policy when it exposed the unpopularity of the policy) it shouldn't be a surprise that some people respond with the correct response to tyranny. Sic semper...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link