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 -
In the hypothetical scenario you talk about, it sounds like you only ever considered voting or lawing your way into banning the fucking machine from acting according to their design, and you did not consider to vote or law your way out of letting the fucking machines into schools at all. Why? Alternatively, do schools have some mystical property that gradually converts their staff into fucking machines?
If what you are perceiving is anything close to consensus reality, then surely it should be possible to persuade other people to vote with you, either to kick the fucking machines out, or to shut down schools altogether, or to dedicate significant effort into figuring out if there is a way to change the mystical property mentioned earlier. Do other voters in your country agree about what is going on, but just strongly feel that on the balance it is imperative to continue forcing your kids into the care of fucking machines for 8 hours a day? Then you probably shouldn't want to coexist with them in a democracy, and the obvious solution for you is to legally exercise your still rather generous right to exit to go somewhere where you can live among the like-minded. Do they not see the f(ucking machine)nords like you do? Is there no way to legally make them see?
Nothing about your post suggests that you are interested in exploring serious alternatives and exhaustively searching the space of "political or legal solutions" - you sketch the failure of one fanciful "political or legal solution", declare that its expected failure means there are no viable ones at all, and use this to set up an emotional account of your hardships in coping with this conclusion while also trying to retest the boundaries of anti-fedposting enforcement. At that point, your situation really starts looking like you are reasoning backwards from a specific scenario you wish were real - either you live as part of a free, just and democratic USA that finally recognises the evil of fucking machines at schools and unites to gloriously smite them and restore propriety, or you go out in a blaze of violent resistance against the insanity of the world (or, well, spend your time fantasising about it on an internet forum vaguely hoping that somebody else will light the spark so that following it into the blaze will feel natural and effortless).
This is of course certainly a way to live, and sometimes the "my utopia or exit" approach yields surprising results in politics, but it's worth noting that the successful political movements of the last decades if not beyond generally did this in ways that involved plenty of compromise, "selling out" and delaying gratification. The acolytes of the US Left had to put their signatures on hiring many a competent white male CEO during their Long March through the Institutions, even from their point of view that might have well amounted to complicity in putting a Fucking Machine in charge of their kids (PoCs).
More options
Context Copy link