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.
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Shaming.
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Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
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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.
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Notes -
This is a mod note on all of your posts in this thread, not just this one:
You are presenting an interesting argument in an interesting way: that's good.
You're being condescending, antagonistic, and posting a lot of responses that pattern-match to "troll": that's bad.
A lot of people have reported you for trolling. I am not sure whether you're just having a go at "rationalists" to see how worked up you can get them about gender, or if you are making a serious attempt to challenge "gender theory," but if your intention is to prompt a debate about whether gender is real, please stop presenting your arguments in the tone of a fictional time traveler from the far future who's already figured out that everyone who disagrees with him is an ignoramus. In other words, strive for good faith engagement. Right now, what you are posting does not look very much like good faith.
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