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 -
Its often impossible for us to tell whether they are trolls or sincere users. I'm of the opinion that it doesn't really matter. If someone posts low effort crap because they are dumb, or because they are smart and running a 4d chess trolling, the end result is the same: there is low effort crap to be cleaned up.
There is very little you can do as a user. The volunteer system is still a thing, and that does help us a bit. Acting as community police can sometimes backfire, because it starts fights rather than ends them. Also I wouldn't be a huge fan of white nationalists policing each other's views and getting into a purity spiral on here.
If you want this forum to stay interesting and healthy I would suggest you cultivate other interests that are relevant here on the culture war threads. Then whenever you come to the culture war thread if you see that a race based topic has already been started you should post about your other interest instead. If you implement this advice and suddenly start to think "hey some idiot wasted my chance to have interesting discussion on the race topic by posting some low quality crap" then you will understand why we try to moderate low effort posts.
I've found that most people that have a single topic of interest have a real blind spot to other people's level of toleration for that topic. If you only like that one topic, you might be fine with 90% of the conversation being around that topic. If you hate that topic then you might feel that even 10% of the conversation spent on that topic is too much. And having interesting conversations with people is the limiting resource on this forum, so don't be surprised when even non-moderators complain about you stinking up the commons. Whatever your preferred amount of discussion about race is, everyone else who doesn't want to talk about it thinks that number is way too high.
I was a moderator over at slatestarcodex when we did the topic ban on race discussions. I recommended against it then, and I'd recommend against any topic bans right now. Based on my general sense from the other mods we are very very unlikely to ever to do a topic ban. The exception to that will probably be if encounter legal issues. But we also aren't going to ban people from saying 'jeez this topic is talked about way too much, we're really beating a dead horse here'. There is a certain amount of community policing that tends to arise on its own for over-done topics. And as I mentioned above, community policing often creates more fights than it ends. This is why I suggest having other interests. If the community heat level on the race topics starts getting too high, switch to your other interest. Without that ability to switch you just become part of a feedback loop.
More options
Context Copy link