site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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.

13
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

In particular I think that when we think about the term grooming in the non-culture-war sense, we are generally discussing a close relationship between a particular adult and a particular minor, where that adult intends to form a sexual relationship or otherwise initiate sexual contact with that minor.

As I recall, that usage is itself somewhat recent. Kind of like how a bunch of people switched from "CP" to "CSAM" around the time of the discourse about Apple's cloud photo backup scanning.

20 years ago, the most salient meanings of "grooming" would've been, first apes picking bugs and leaves out of each other's hair, and second preparing an employee for a promotion, typically to an executive position or to replace someone soon to retire. I for one, applaud the anti-trans set for managing to make that incredibly goofy word verboten among Respectable People. (If only there were some way to sic them on "colorway" next...)

They way they use it is denotationally the succession thing, but teases at the pedo thing.

The motte is that there is a funnel that begins with a tumblr or tick-talk subculture, or a danger-haired middle school teacher fresh out of women's college (I know one), and ends with endocrine-disrupting drugs ordered from an internet pharmacy or supplied by an NGO such as planned parenthood, and the people along that funnel view transition as a desirable outcome. The bailey is that the people along it want a sexual relationship with the people sliding down it. (Probably not true in general, but if you run away to join a trans-girl group house, I refuse to believe it's a nunnery.)

When that is not present, we need to look more at what the nature of the information and motives behind it are. If you ask activists about their motives, you'll hear about reducing suicidality, encouraging people to express themselves and form healthy relationships, and so on. Often you'll hear something to the effect of "what I wish I'd heard / seen when I was growing up."

It's a stand-alone complex. The core beliefs motivating it are

  1. LGBT identities are common and an inherent character trait.

  2. LGBT identities can be discovered by introspection.

  3. Un-discovered LGBT identities are harmful.

You can imagine a similar stand-alone complex for pedophilic groomers. "I wish I knew how to make myself cum earlier growing up."

Overly empowering young people to make decisions about gender and sexuality that could have long term repercussions is a bad idea and minors need more supervision, guidance, and control than what is the current trend.

The way I would phrase it is more like...

It is terrifyingly easy to fall off the wagon, permanently. Just as the path to greatness in industry or academia begins in adolescence and is easily derailed, so does the path to spending many healthy years surrounded by loving family. The time a person has with their family begins with the birth of their first child, and ends with death. Therefore, you really want to avoid children getting taken in by subcultures that encourage self-sterilization or inceldom.

You're assuming that family is typically a loving, healthy experience. You're also assuming that a healthy family is more important than a healthy individual. I also kind of feel like you're making kids responsible for how their families treat them rather than a split responsibility.

Let's flip the script here. It's 2200 and pink haired feminists have completed their takeover. While some groups tolerate straightness, the majority of people think that being straight is wrong and possible even harmful to society as a whole.

Would you tell a straight kid to stop meeting with the straights rights group at school to avoid conflict with their family? Would you tell the kid that even though they might actually be straight, living that lifestyle might result in their family rejecting them and to just put up with it? Would you tell their school to stop teaching less-popular sexual identities?

Of course not! You'd call their family and tell them to stop letting their child's sexuality determine how well they treat their kid. You'd tell them to stop acting as though their kid is gay when they're clearly not. Put some responsibility on them - they're the adults, they need to figure out how to love the child they created and are responsible for regardless of their sexuality.

Perhaps I wasn't clear. I was talking about the individual becoming a parent with a healthy family of their own. This isn't possible if the individual's life course is derailed into HRT, inceldom, drug-addled homelessness, some kind of celibate religious order, etc. Furthermore, I believe healthy individuals and healthy families are, in almost all cases, synergistic, not things that trade off against one another.

Your hypothetical contradicts mammalian biology and results in total population collapse within single-digit generations, and hopefully re-establishment of civilization by the survivors or by whatever pockets of resistance managed to escape detection.