site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28474 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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.

9
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

It's one thing to say that, for example, watching MCU movies because they're "in" at the moment doesn't mean you endorse the idea of capitalism, it's quite another to say that your very deliberate modding choices don't at the very least say something about where your lines are.

Sure, those are two different things, but the important thing is that they're both true. Deliberate modding choices don't tell us anything about where your lines are, except strictly within the realm of deliberate modding choices. To extend any implications outward to something else, like one's political opinions or personal ethics or whatever, is something that needs actual external empirical support. One doesn't get to project one's own worldview onto others and then demand that they be held to that standard.

Sure, we can certainly discuss what it says and how we would go about proving it and so on and so forth. What I reject is that idea that it doesn't say anything about you.

Edit: to more directly address your point, I do not believe that people's modding preferences are so obviously segregated from the rest of their views. In the context of Stardew Valley, I'll afford any person who wants it charity when they say they downloaded a mod that only made the only black person white because they didn't like his art or whatever, but I'll conclude that this person is more likely to be a racist than not.

Anecdotal evidence: there are several mods for Darkest Dungeon that are lewd. I don't believe that people who use them, including me, are misogynists, but I do think people using them aren't opposed to all objectification of people.

What I reject is that idea that it doesn't say anything about you.

In the literal sense, nobody takes the other side of this, though. Trivially, if I make deliberate modding choices, then that tells the world that I made those deliberate modding choices. I think so few non-schizophrenic people would disagree with this as to be irrelevant. So claiming that it says something about me is meaningless: of course it does, because every choice I make trivially tells the world that I made that choice.

The point of contention is on the specific claims about what else these choices imply about me or any other generic choice-maker. E.g. if someone modded Stardew Valley to transform some brown pixels to beige ones, it's entirely possible that such a decision was motivated by the modder's deeply held philosophical/political/personal/etc. views which are bigoted, hateful, or whatever, but that can only be supported by additional external information. And merely knowing that this person made such a mod doesn't actually add any information or give us any data from which to construct the truth about that modder's motivations or beliefs or where their lines are. Again, with the exception of the trivial truth that it tells us a lot about the modder's desire to transform certain pixels.

In the literal sense, nobody takes the other side of this, though. Trivially, if I make deliberate modding choices, then that tells the world that I made those deliberate modding choices.

The OP is clearly saying you cannot infer anything about their beliefs or worldview on the basis of the mods they play. That is what I don't agree with. Those are not trivial things.

if someone modded Stardew Valley to transform some brown pixels to beige ones, it's entirely possible that such a decision was motivated by the modder's deeply held philosophical/political/personal/etc. views which are bigoted, hateful, or whatever, but that can only be supported by additional external information.

Not every possible explanation is equally possible. I don't think people are missing the fact that the mod they were downloading, in the SV example, was explicitly about making a black character white. That context matters. Is it by itself enough to say a person is racist? Maybe not. But it does make it more likely.

Not every possible explanation is equally possible. I don't think people are missing the fact that the mod they were downloading, in the SV example, was explicitly about making a black character white. That context matters. Is it by itself enough to say a person is racist? Maybe not. But it does make it more likely.

I will absolutely sign on that race bending established characters is a good sign you are racist. Are you sure you've thought fully through who the racist are as a result of that?

I just said context matters. Why are you trying to get me to say that it doesn't?

Depends. Does your context boil down to "It's only bad when white people do it to black characters"?

Edit: Not a rhetorical question BTW. I'm too used to people using ambiguous claims of "context" to justify blatant double standards. I'm not sure if this is what your invocation is, or if you are agreeing with me that the relentless racebending, genderbending and sexuality bending of established characters is a pretty solid sign of hatred.

My context boils down to why and where someone is doing something. I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with, for example, adapting the Hindu story of how Ram and Hanuman worked to defeat Ravana and his kingdom in Lanka for a non-Hindu audience. Spreading the story while retaining the messaging isn't inherently offensive. I don't share the idea that anything capitalism touches is tainted.

If someone made a Universal Character Customizer mod that allowed for an all-white Stardew Valley, I don't see any racism in either creation or downloading. If someone makes a mod explicitly for making the only black people white in that game, I'm going to conclude that either someone is trying to facilitate the creation of an all-white rural town that exists in reality, doesn't like the art for those black characters but can't make better art in the same "race", or they're being racist.

As I said, I'll be charitable to whatever reason someone gives me if they play with an all-white town. I ultimately don't give a fuck if the reason is straight up racism - it's your game, your experience, and no one has the right to tell you how you should be allowed to play it. But I'm not going to pretend there's no coherence to criticism of the mods themselves.

Edit: to address your edit, I think that race-bending is not inherently bad. So saying its widespread means nothing to me. I am more interested in why it may be happening, as that is where judgment can be passed.

Let me lay my cards fully on the table then.

I think what's good the goose is good for the gander. I've seen too many creators give nice, polite, explanation about how their choices to make cis white hetero characters anything but are driven by a affinity for diversity. Then I see their Twitter feeds, and it's obvious it's driven by a visceral hatred of cis white people with all the deranged anti-white nonsense they felt comfortable spewing when they thought nobody was looking, and nobody with any institutional power would call them to task for it.

So no, I no longer extend charity in the form of assuming gender/race/sexuality bending cis white characters is out of affinity for one rather than hatred for the other.

But I don't write the rules, and they get to launder their hatred as affinity through nearly every institutional organ. So who am I to judge the reasons why someone decides Stelaris should have a 100% European space humanity? Maybe they don't hate anybody and just really have an affinity for Europeans. They deserve at least as much charity as the overt racist I've seen in the industry on Twitter.

More comments

The OP is clearly saying you cannot infer anything about their beliefs or worldview on the basis of the mods they play. That is what I don't agree with. Those are not trivial things.

Indeed, and I agree with the OP and disagree with you. "Anything about their beliefs or worldview" is different from "anything [at all]." The deliberate choices one makes when modding falls into the latter category but not in the former category. E.g. if someone decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, it tells us that that person decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, which falls into the latter, but not the former. I doubt the OP would disagree with the notion that a modder deciding to change some pixels from brown to beige tells us that the modder decided to change those pixels from brown to beige, but he can speak for himself, I suppose.

Not every possible explanation is equally possible. I don't think people are missing the fact that the mod they were downloading, in the SV example, was explicitly about making a black character white. That context matters. Is it by itself enough to say a person is racist? Maybe not. But it does make it more likely.

Does it? It's possible that it does, but I dispute that you can believe with any meaningful level of confidence that it does make it more likely. This is the kind of nice-sounding narrative that intuitively makes sense and sounds plausible, and as such, if we believe it without doing the hard empirical work to check that it's true, then we should be highly suspicious that our belief in it is due to how plausible it sounds and how much it is in concordance with our intuitions, rather than how true it is. Again, in that SV example, it is, by itself, absolutely not enough to say the person is racist. Is it enough to imply that that modder is more likely to be racist than the typical SV modder or player? It might be, and it might not be, and we haven't done the hard empirical work to figure out which.

if someone decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, it tells us that that person decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, which falls into the latter, but not the former.

Man, if I killed someone with a gun, I'd love to have you as my defense attorney. "My client didn't intend to kill someone, your honor, he just pulled a piece of metal/plastic on a product he owned while it was aimed at a person for two minutes straight!"

Seriously, what kind of argument even is this? How far do you take this idea that the only thing you can infer from what mods a person downloads is that they downloaded it? By this logic, I could download a mod that changed "white" to "cracker" or "cracker-colored" and no one should assume I'm being racist.

Again, in that SV example, it is, by itself, absolutely not enough to say the person is racist. Is it enough to imply that that modder is more likely to be racist than the typical SV modder or player? It might be, and it might not be, and we haven't done the hard empirical work to figure out which.

So great to hear you agree with me!

Man, if I killed someone with a gun, I'd love to have you as my defense attorney. "My client didn't intend to kill someone, your honor, he just pulled a piece of metal/plastic on a product he owned while it was aimed at a person for two minutes straight!"

This is, to be frank, an insane comparison. Pointing a loaded gun at someone and pulling the trigger is the literal physical act of killing someone, or at least causing injury with the high likelihood of killing. This has no comparison to how changing some pixels - or anything else - for a virtual game relates to racism. There is no physical reality that connects the playing of a game with racism the same way physical reality connects shooting a gun at someone with murder. Many people believe that the contents of a modded game can exacerbate racism, but this is by no means a well-supported view, and is certainly a far less consensus view than "shooting someone with a gun has a high likelihood of kill them," and the leap from "I personally think this mod could exacerbate racism" to "therefore, this modder, even if possibly subconsciously, had racist motivations in creating this mod" is unjustified.

By this logic, I could download a mod that changed "white" to "cracker" or "cracker-colored" and no one should assume I'm being racist.

Absolutely. I would 100% not assume you were a racist and I would defend you as being a non-racist, at least on the basis of this one decision. This would remain just as strong even if, say, you modded Doom to change all demons to cis white men and the player character to an amalgamation of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. The only conclusion we could draw is that you wanted to make a Doom mod with these properties, and any sort of speculation about your personal beliefs about the politics surrounding people like Kendi, DiAngelo, and cis white men would be just that, speculation, and you would be responsible for exactly none of the speculation that many people could (and would likely) speculate about your principles and beliefs that motivated you to create such a mod.

And, needless to say, in neither your example nor mine, would you actually be being racist, since there's no one to actually be racist towards in a situation where you're just writing some code in a computer and offering other people the choice to download and use that code.

Pointing a loaded gun at someone and pulling the trigger is the literal physical act of killing someone, or at least causing injury with the high likelihood of killing. This has no comparison to how changing some pixels - or anything else - for a virtual game relates to racism.

Why did someone make or install this mod? It clearly didn't come into existence because particles randomly happened to generate the mod. If the reason was one we would call racist, then yes, we can reasonably infer that someone at the very least made something racist that may indicate their own racial prejudice. Sure, we can't prove racism totally. But I think it is entirely reasonable to be at least somewhat more convinced that the creator is racist.

Absolutely. I would 100% not assume you were a racist and I would defend you as being a non-racist, at least on the basis of this one decision.

You either believe in an overly strict chain of causality and inference, or you are trying to establish a principled stance that you don't actually uphold in real life.

since there's no one to actually be racist towards in a situation where you're just writing some code in a computer and offering other people the choice to download and use that code.

Okay, but we're asking if the person holds racist views, not whether they were racist to anybody.

Why did someone make or install this mod? It clearly didn't come into existence because particles randomly happened to generate the mod. If the reason was one we would call racist, then yes, we can reasonably infer that someone at the very least made something racist that may indicate their own racial prejudice. Sure, we can't prove racism totally. But I think it is entirely reasonable to be at least somewhat more convinced that the creator is racist.

You jump from "why" to "it's entirely reasonable to be at least somewhat more convinced [of a conclusion]." I disagree with this. I think the entirely reasonable thing is to say "We don't know," and being convinced, somewhat or otherwise, of the creator's racism or other beliefs sans external independent evidence, is unreasonable. Yes, if the reason the creator made the mod were one that we would call racist, then it's entirely reasonable to say that the creator is a racist racist who racistly created a racist mod in order to spread his racism. That's a big if, one that can't really be checked by observers only from looking at the mod.

You either believe in an overly strict chain of causality and inference, or you are trying to establish a principled stance that you don't actually uphold in real life.

??? I don't see what's overly strict about this chain of causality, and I don't see on what basis you get to claim that I don't uphold this in real life. To me, it appears like you're doing here to me the same thing that I'm accusing you of doing with this mod theoretical to the modder, which is projecting your own biases onto the situation and asserting that someone else must be (somewhat more likely to be) acting in a certain way because of how your projected biases relate to their observed behavior. To me, it feels like an overly restrictive and closed view of the diversity and idiosyncracies of humanity to believe that one can just simply conclude from "He changed all the black heroes to white heroes" or "He changed all the demonic enemies to cis white people, to be murdered by the POC champion protagonist" that "He did this out of his sociopolitical beliefs that are in accordance with the direct, straight-up pattern-matching against this mod (i.e. that if I modify a work of fiction to more glorify white/black characters at the expense of black/white characters, that implies I hold some sort of belief or bias in favor white/black people and against black/white people IRL)."

More comments

And, needless to say, in neither your example nor mine, would you actually be being racist, since there's no one to actually be racist towards in a situation where you're just writing some code in a computer and offering other people the choice to download and use that code.

If I wake up each morning, retreat to the privacy of my closet, and spend ten minutes meditating on how awful black people are and how much I hate them, would that actually be being racist, given that there's no black people there to be racist to? Is racism necessarily interpersonal, requiring some form of direct interaction/exchange?

This is an interesting definitional question. I would say No to both questions, though it's almost a Yes for the latter one. Racism is necessarily interpersonal, but it doesn't require some form of direct interaction/exchange. But it does need to play out in some form of interaction/exchange, even if theoretical or intended. If I go to a bunch of other Korean-Americans like myself and tell them to go out and shoot up a bunch of Slavs because Slavs deserve to be shot or whatever, I'm not directly being interacting with Slavs to be racist towards them, but I'm clearly setting up a chain of events meant to create a direct interaction between members of different races to act in racist ways towards each other.

If you spend 10 minutes meditating on how much you hate black people, but then that meditation doesn't affect how you treat black people or how you tell others to treat black people during the other 23 hours and 50 minutes of the day, then I don't see how it could possibly be racist.

If the answer is yes (which my reading of current race relations suggests is true for some people, if not 07mk) a further question - say it's 300 years in the future and 95% of humanity has been wiped out by covid-9001 - including all black people - and I retreat to my closet every morning to meditate on how awful black people were, is that racist?

Not a joke question potential yes responders, I am genuinely interested in the answer.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats