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 -
There's a certain point where you go from being wrong to being consistently wrong, and while I agree that 'loony' is dismissive and demeaning (along with sounding too much like 'insane' in a clinical, which I don't mean to imply), it's kinda hard to avoid that problem once someone's gotten that untethered from the bit.
Some of that's the more general problem where you look into the abyss too long and the abyss goes nuts -- he's pretty clearly managing to attract and focus on the wackiest people and then end up in wars with them, the 'wacky' parts are pretty bad, and they're also using inappropriate tools to try to shut him up. But come on: puppy play means that someone's an actual dog-fucker that's going to move onto child abuse? Anime is for child abusers? Sexual deviance as the first step into morphing into psychopathy? Random allegations aimed at specific people?
I don't think it's an organic delusion or a disorder in the clinical sense, but it's got enough overlap with the massive prediction errors without any possibility of disproof to match.
To be fair all you need to do is click ninja02's profile there to see a furry going
And then one click away from that you have they/them/foxself posting Minor Attracted Person Pride Flags
And a click away from that there's zoophile callout posts from a guy who was a "furry daddy" for a 15 year old boy he was chatting about sex with(wtf, how the hell is this not open grooming that would never be tolerated if a straight man did it. How do these people have infinite license to break the law and every social standard?)
The guy may be seeing patterns in gibberish, but you can't dip a paw in furry fandom without turning up zoophile groomers (and it's not because of the art you want banned).
Something really bad happened since I stopped paying attention to furries, and the batshit political radicalization is a tiny part of it. I 100% cannot blame that guy going a bit loony from digging into it, and feel bad my first post sounded unsympathetic.
Holy fuck. Today I not alone had to learn that there's a 'Pride flag' for paedophiles, they are also trying to get AAM (Adult-Attracted Minor) identified as an orientation so that they can claim underage kids totally can be sexually attracted to, and consent to sexual relationships with, older people.
Snopes says this is false and debunked, which makes me think there might be something to it, after all. I mean, if the joke meme about the OK sign has now become a genuine symbol that gets you into trouble, why shouldn't a joke Pride flag be used by genuine paedophiles? Snopes itself said it was "unproven" that this Republican senator was using a "white power sign" (when it seems clear that it is meant to be "three") so why are they so positive that there isn't a paedophile flag out there?
Because that's how "fact checking" sites distort facts--not by outright saying things aren't factual when they are or vice versa, but by having differing standards for edge cases.
More options
Context Copy link
There are lots of little cues when you look at a twitter bio, but obviously they only apply to people who are "out". "Pro Contact" or "Pro-C" is obvious, and they get in fights with the "virpeds" over the whole "yes look, no touch" thing. That reddit admin who got fired a while back was part of that circle IIRC, and Vice is starting to peddle humanizing bios of them.
But the real problem in these communities isn't mostly harmless weirdos like that, who if you read their tweet history are usually like "housebound fibromyalgia sufferer on state benefits." The ones you have to watch out for say things like "furry conventions/smash tournaments are totally safe for kids, why don't you come and room with a totally safe adult like me tee hee."
But yeah, if you look it up there's a big normalization push coming from groups like Prostasia, which Snopes will continue to call an imaginary conspiracy right up until it's Just Basic Human Decency Bigot.
I don't really have a dog in the fight, but the gaslighting infuriates me.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
... which ninja02 is pretty specifically and clearly criticizing. Again, there are a lot of problems in the furry fandom. I'm not saying that there aren't!
But if your detector pings for everything, it's not a useful detector. You can't defend "this person is on the pathway to child abuse because they like anime fox girls with honking hooters" by seguing to "this entirely different person that the first guy hates 'came out' as a dog-fucker". Well, I mean, you can, demonstrably, since that seems to be something he’s tried, but it's not very persuasive. If he was focusing or prioritizing his criticisms on the latter cases, I'd not be making this complaint, but as it is he seems more likely to be making random free-association than even attempting to distinguish specific bad actors, and that's not limited to the furries.
Mu?
Uh, wasn't that the whole thing with the Burned Furs? "Just because we like furry art and are furries, we're not yiffers"? Several years back, I was online acquainted for a while with a guy who felt he had been driven out of main furrydom precisely because he wasn't interested in the overtly sexual stuff.
And then there's the babyfurs thing which I don't understand and don't want to get into discussing, because it seems much too convoluted.
The Burned Furs thing is complicated, especially looking with hindsight. The originating manifesto wasn't against porn so much as a grab bag of annoyances (not even all sexual or even really furry-specific: she was frustrated by the vegan annoyances). Its author would go on to be a pretty big name in not-furry monsterfucker porn comics. On the other hand, the guy who drew that flaming paw symbol went on to make some surprisingly good and sympathetic SFW webcomics, and also be really against even the blandest les shipping along other Orson Scott Cardisms. And the actual forums had twice as many standards as actual posters.
There are and remain a lot of conflicts about the appropriate roles and accessibility of adult content, along with a lot of frustrations and contradictions for artists and writers who even weakly brush against that line (eg: Rick Griffin is one of the single most-feted furry artists there is, with well over a decade of a SFW content behind him... and a lot of discomfort when he did decide he wanted to do occasional adult pieces, and conversely a lot of people get frustrated when engagement drops off a cliff when they go from NSFW -> SFW content and, unless they create whole new accounts, have a hell of a time doing any promotion).
But while I'm sure someone in the Burned Furs sphere thought "the guy lusting after big honking boobs must be a child and animal abuser", the median and typical arguments were more about things being bad (or, uh, obnoxious, in the case of the vegans) in themselves, or because of immediate connections to addressable and directly resultant harms (even if not all of them were spelled out). While not all of the Burned Fur objections were well-formed, a number were and some of those were internalized in most of the fandom -- they weren't the only people to push for better segregation of adult content even in explicitly adult-only venues, but it helped reduce repeats of incidents like the Gaylaxicon fiasco (cw: nsfw, The Daily Show).
Again, if this fellow's position were that someone was bad, or that something was bad, there'd be space for discussion, and on some matters I might even agree! But I don't think he's at that stage, or even the level a lot of the trolls in the Burned Furs were.
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