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 -
She will probably not 'discover' that unless her parents guide her into culture war foxhole where believing that is part of the price of admission. That is not in fact the conclusion that the majority of people come to when they are just allowed to explore their culture naturally.
Teen mental health certainly is at a bad point, pandemic is a pretty obvious recent factor and social media plus never going outside seems to account for a lot of it. That's not at all the same thing as the culture war argument being leveled here.
I think your first sentence is mostly true but entirely contingent on the word "she" as opposed to "he". I think that if you took a top-10 of movies and TV from each year you would definitely find at least a few "men suck lol" speeches in each of those lists, in a way that I don't think I've even seen for "whites suck lol" (though of course social media has quite a bit of the latter).
I mean yeah everyone is going to encounter some number of cultural artifacts saying that men suck, that women suck, that white people suck, that black people suck, etc. With varying levels of directness and specificity.
That's one artist showing one perspective in one piece of art, not evidence that 'your country hates you'.
You've landed quite a large number of borderline comments into the mod queue lately, and I think the pattern I would describe them as following is "low effort. In this case, the "low effort" approach is "contradicting people without bringing anything valuable to the conversation." Essentially, a slightly more eloquent "nuh uh!" This is a way of making low-effort points (even when you put effort into the word count).
On one hand, there's probably some value in interrogating the idea that a large number of people are "out to get you," individually. But "this is just one instance" is an especially frustrating form of low-effort objection, since every concrete example anyone can give is always just "one instance." But concrete examples are every bit as important a form of evidence as aggregated statistics (at least arguably, concrete examples may often be better evidence, despite what anyone rhetorically says about "anecdata").
You've also made some good posts in your brief time here so I don't want to discourage those! But being offhandedly or insultingly dismissive of the claims others make is not really something we allow here.
More options
Context Copy link
I think you would in fact have a much harder time finding "blacks suck" and "women suck" speeches; the rate's not zero, but in big-budget productions you will find those exclusively portrayed negatively (either in the mouth of a villain, or explicitly retracted by end of episode).
The two live-action Western 2022 things I've seen are Wednesday and The Batman. Wednesday has at least one time when the eponymous heroine accuses someone of "mansplaining" (despite how weird that word sounds coming out of the generally-old-fashioned Wednesday's mouth) and this is presented as correct (IIRC there are other examples of "men suck" in there, but it's been 9 months and I don't think I watched the whole thing); The Batman has Catwoman lay into Batman for his "privilege", although I forget exactly which attributes she picked on out of rich/white/male (Catwoman is black in that film), and we're clearly supposed to agree with her.
Now, technically I did watch one other 2022 Western thing in the form of one episode of Rick & Morty. But 2/3 chosen at complete random is enough for me to start seeing a pattern.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link