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 -
Vibe shift?
I lost count of how many anglos, jews and anglo-jews on the center-left/left that, in the past days, had a "Conversion on the road to Damascus", openly admitting on Twitter that their views on the Left were utterly wrong and that they had no idea their side was so full of apologists for jew-slaughter. And I am talking about big figures, including some of the loudest neoliberal mouths, admitting grudgingly that the Right-wing view of academia had some points.
Let's say that this reckoning mood last more than two weeks and the inevitable Israeli reaction on Gaza; It is possible that we are beginning to see a realignement from the upper middle class on immigration in general and on inclusion and diversity in particular?
In my view, there are still some enormous obstacle to shift like these, primarly the enormous influence of academia on journalism and èlites policy and opinion-making in the west, and the machine of the anglo-left working in case of another menace from Trump, that can rapidly rebuild the ranks. Another interesting side of the discourse is what will happen in Europe, where it is true that there are way less Jews, but the Right has way more influence between young and important people. By tasting the environment, almost everyone apart from the aggravated minorities and feminists groups are very, very angry about all of this.
I do not know if it is ok to post this here or in the Gaza thread, if it is wrong I will move it there.
I've seen more and more complaining about the far-left on reddit, and more people upvoting/saying things like "X sucks for men", etc. on places like /r/neoliberal and /r/AskReddit . I think this has been increasing since around 2020.
I agree there has been an uptick recently (e.g. the top post on /r/neoliberal is complaining about a professor labeling students as colonizer or colonized) and the second highest post on /r/AskReddit is "What are some examples of body shaming towards men that go unnoticed?"), but society-wide vibes change over months and years, not days.
COVID and Floyd proved this wasn't true, as long as the right people were driving the change.
The immediate COVID changes in the society didn't stick, though. I started observing a definite vibe shift on societies wanting to walk the path to normality for good at the latest in the winter of 2021-2022, and remember that observing this got some pushback of the "no, it's going to be lockdowns and vaccine mandates and masks from here to eternity, they're never going to give up" variety. Jury's still out on the Floyd protest shift, though the actual results of the "defund the police" movement regarding the police budgets tended up to be shortlived, from what I've understood.
The policemen who got fed up with the nonsense, and retired, did not unretire. Laws that effectively allow you to loot a store, as long as what you steal is below a certain value are still in effect. Permissive, easy on crime prosecutors are still in office.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean that’s kind of the nature of the beast, isn’t it? Student activists don’t exactly listen to their elders even if they’re theoretically on the same side- you can’t keep them following orders forever.
It seems you can, as long as you're giving orders in a particular direction.
Well yeah, that’s the point- they don’t follow orders to heel and sooner or later they’ll break the leash.
But, and this is the but, anyone who’s ever owned an attack dog knows ‘break’ is an important command. And student activists are 20 yo dumbasses, they’re going to attack load bearing walls. George soros and the dnc or whoever else you hold responsible for these people don’t want that- they want to make society slightly shittier in some ways, but not to burn the whole thing down.
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
I've thought, several times, certainly this will be the vibe shift. And every time, somehow, normies go back to sleep. Some comforting narrative Xanax get's cooked up and shipped out.
I thought surely, the naked insanity on college campuses, that may have peeked with Evergreen and Bret Weinstein, will cause a vibe shift. And maybe a few people on the edges woke up, but most people went back to sleep with tales that it wasn't so bad, and also they deserved it.
I thought the nightly footage of BLM/Antifa burning down cities, sieging a federal courthouse, and occupying and then murdering people in CHAZ/CHOP would wake people up. And once again, a few did. Then Jan 6th happened and most people went back to sleep. They were told that was worse than all of the above combined, and they slept soundly.
I thought the government taking away people's children, sterilizing and mutilating them would surely wake people up. But if my in-laws are any indicator, it's a crime against humanity so horrifying to contemplate, and so mired in euphemisms like "trans health care for children", that they literally think it's impossible that doctors could be operating on children as young as 13, or prescribing permanently altering drugs to prepubescents. They think my wife and I are making it all up.
The iconic scene from the Unite the Right rally of "Jews will not replace us" is being repeated by diverse crowds in every major city in America in support of Hamas. If the handful of losers in Charlottesville, dwarfed by the counterprotest, were hung around Trump's neck for 4 years and considered the most significant threat to America, what do we make of the current explicit shows of support for Hamas' terrorism and antisemitism from the radical left that dwarf Unite the Right by several orders of magnitude?
I'd like to think people will wake up. But I've thought that before. It's impossible. They'll just tune into MSNBC, fiending for more narrative Xanax. They'll be told to stay off Twitter, everything you see there is misinformation. It's not so bad. Also the Republicans are still worse. The ADL says so, and they'd know. They're the authority on antisemitism after all. Just goto sleep.
Peeking and naked insanity? Sounds more like Harvey Weinstein.
Anyway, I don't think that this is a huge disastrous moment for wokery or anything like that, but things like perceptions of antisemitism on the left can make a difference. It was one of the things that hurt UK Labour in the latter Jeremy Corbyn years, culminating in Corbyn being successfully persecuted by the centre left and UK Labour in general doing a massive turnaround in many ways within several years, with a lot of Blairism and Blairites being rehabilitated.
In the US, where Islam and pro-Palestinian sentiment are less important on the left, I don't see the Hamas attacks having as much significance. At most, elements of the far left will acquire a lower reputation among everyday Obama-loving Democrats.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not seeing a real vibe shift here. The pro-establishment left in the US has always been pro-Israel (anti-Israel views are the only left-wing views people were ever cancelled for in establishment institutions, with Steven Salaita the most famous example) and the anti-establishment left has always been anti-Israel, and often rabidly so. The pro-establishment left have always despised the anti-establishment left with the same level of vitriol and for the same reasons that the pro-establishment right despise the MAGA right, and anti-anti-Semitism is used to enforce the left edge of the Overton window in the same way that anti-racism is used to enforce the right edge. It's just that they kept quiet about it for a while after the George Floyd asphyxiation because they were afraid of being called racist.
"The left are cheering Hamas" on your social media dashboard because the people you follow are signal-boosting a small number of idiots, some of whom are tenured academics or leaders of usual-suspects lefty student groups, but most of whom are randos. This is the usual suspects coming out in force - anyone on the pro-establishment left who are surprised by this is an idiot, and I suspect most of the pro-establishment lefties claiming to be surprised are faking it.
The number of Democratic office-holders, university administrators at Dean/Deputy Provost level or above, NYT journalists, or woke corporate executives who are saying these things is negligible. I'm sure that Jewish-American elites don't like the fact that the Squad have called for de-escalation and said that the US should not fund Israeli war crimes in Gaza, but this is the kind of milquetoast stuff that anti-establishment figures who are testing the edges of the Overton window say, not "The left are cheering Hamas". Rashida Tlaib has gone further than the rest because she is Palestinian - again the fact that she is rabidly anti-Israel should surprise zero people who are paying attention.
In Western Europe, normies ran out of sympathy for both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict decades ago. Everyone except the usual suspects on the anti-establishment left is lining up to condemn the latest round of Hamas atrocities because they are unusually barbaric, but in a month's time we are going to be back to "Hundreds dead in Middle East. Bear shat in woods. Football scores to follow." I can't tell Arabs from Europeans in the dark, but the pro-Hamas protest outside the Israeli embassy in London looked like it was majority south Asian Muslim.
There's a somewhat stronger pro-Israel reaction on Finnish social media than I've seen previously, but that might be because the Ukraine war has made it easier to associate Russia with all manner of "anti-West" political forces, including Palestinian militants in this case.
I am definitely seeing pro-Ukrainian forces trying to spin up a Russia/Iran/NK/Hamas axis of evil meme. This has the advantage relative to the Bush-era axis of evil that the countries in the alleged axis are actually allies, whereas the Bush-era axis of evil, while evil, was about as far from being an axis as it is possible to be.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't really understand how this paragraph connects to the first paragraph. "I am surprised by how some prominent people on the left are willing to excuse atrocities committed by Hamas, therefore immigration and DEI are bad." How does the premise connect to the conclusion? I don't think most left-ish people's support for immigration or DEI are premised on whether or not certain other leftists will excuse atrocities committed by Hamas.
I think it's likely more, "I am surprised by how the same set of ideals that led me to support what I support (i.e. immigration and DEI in this particular case, which are also two of the most prominent issues broadly supported by the people of this ideological cluster) also led others to support things I find heinous by my own values (i.e. excusing atrocities committed by Hamas in this particular case). This leads me to question how much and how well I understood these ideals; perhaps I ought to analyze them more carefully, in a way that leaves me genuinely open to changing my mind such that I no longer support things that I support now (i.e. such as immigration or DEI)."
I personally experienced a (likely much more minor) version of this around 10 years ago, in observing the justification of blatant and bald-faced lies done by some of the more extreme (though relative to me at the time, these people were barely extreme) people on my end of the political spectrum. This wasn't some "EUREKA!" moment where I cast off my previous beliefs in one fell swoop, but I was compelled to analyze the empirical, logical, and philosophical bases of my ideology at the time, resulting in me, over time, learning to throw away some (many? Most? That might be too optimistic) of the more absurd policy positions that I used to support before.
So I know it's possible, but I honestly doubt that this will or would cause any sort of meaningful shift at the national level. Not because of the control that the left has over academia and journalism, but mainly because people just don't really tend to think things through like that. There will likely be some people who go through something similar to what I did, but there will also likely be some people who become more sold on the correctness of the ideology because they enjoy and admire the bloodthirstiness openly displayed by the slaughter-apologists, and it's pretty much impossible to tell which number will be higher, or who will be in which category.
Personally I expect the views of a lot of people on the far left to have shifted about specifically, narrowly, Palestinian culture and its current capacity for peaceful statehood. I expect it to become somewhat less fashionable on the left to justify brutality by Palestinian militants against Israel and the general sympathy toward it among the Palestinian populace, even for people who consider Israel an obviously bad settler colonialist apartheid state on the wrong side of history.
Do I expect that shift to translate into a proportional priors update on related issues domestically? Not really. I think it's too easy to rationalize away as, no, that's them, that's unique, it's a regrettable but isolated case, the situation over here isn't like the situation over there, and the people we're talking about over here aren't like the people over there.
I'm an American thinking about the response from the American far left about American immigration policy and culture issues, though. The needle movement elsewhere on domestic issues may be more dramatic.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
OP might be speaking from a german perspective. Germany has recently gained a large population of arab/muslim immigrants, whose views on Israel (open celebration of the Hamas attacks) have now opened a new conversation on "do we really want people like that in our country?" The issue has given a clear example of what can be bad about unrestricted immigration, disqualfying unrestricted immigration optimism and validating the points of the right.
It being about antisemitism also means that the normal oppression hierarchy doesn't apply, and that it's harder to dismiss the critics as Nazis, which helps the topic along.
More options
Context Copy link
The premise is supposed to be "I've noticed that the people who keep banging on about equality and justice and nonviolence are actually just as bloodthirsty and vile as they paint their enemies to be, maybe that means they're lying about other things as well" but in practice it doesn't really work like that at all as the second half of that never comes into play.
I'm not saying no one has ever changed their minds on account of discovering that some of their co-partisans were extremists, but it's not common. If anything, it's more typical to find people doubling down and insisting the criticism is a vicious smear and further proof of their adversaries' derangement.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I wonder how Jewish academics are going to handle this. Will they update their believes about their woke colleagues and students, and if so will they work to change hiring and admissions policies?
Many Jewish academics I know are very anti-Israel. I knew one who specifically asked, "Where can I find a pro-Palestinian synagogue?"
Will that not be reevaluated with Hamas being revealed to be the savages the IDF always said they were?
For my part: Islamist Jihadists are assholes, who knew? Sure, kill them, whatever. I don't care.
The collective punishment by a superior force on a group that are not allowed to leave seems bad though.
Do I have suggestions? No. Do I care about that? Also no.
All I can do is point at the latest "collateral damage'd" picture of some western journalist that stopped a stray bullet with their forehead in an empty field or the latest video of a settler executing a Palestinian family while the IDF watches and say "Less of that please".
More options
Context Copy link
What "revealed"? Hamas never hid it. The apologetics ranged from "But Israel was worse", "Israel made them do it by oppressing the Palestinians", "Israel had it coming because they oppress the Palestinians", "But what about the settlements?", "mumble mumble Irgun" to "Israel is a sovereign nation and should be held to higher standards", "Israel is a US ally and should be held to higher standards", "Israel is a strong country and should be able to solve all the problems unilaterally without actually using that strength, Hamas is weak and must do what they have to" etc.
Revealed means ‘denial becomes much more difficult verging on impossible’. Agree that the information was always there, but now you don’t need to listen to icky red tribers to hear it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Hard to say. I have noticed that a lot of "peace" movement people have already started dealing with cognitive dissonance on this point by amping up their focus on Israel's actions.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No. Because what I'm seeing happening on twitter is that these people who are having these revelations are only admitting fault in this one, narrow, blinkered way, and immediately Gell-Mann Amnesia-ing when it comes to everything else the left loves. So the guy who admits "okay, maybe the right were correct that BLM were a scummy group" will still then turn around and support open borders and DEI completely uncritically. One facet of the edifice falling does not cause questioning of the whole structure; rather, the internalised rationalisation is "wow, those guys were REALLY GOOD at concealing how shitty they were" and not "wow, I really blinded myself to how obviously shitty those guys are". It saves more ego to believe you were deceived by someone else, than to admit actual fault on your part. The right being correct about the issue is treated as a rare fluke, a broken clock moment, instead of a reason to re-examine all your existing beliefs. Because doing that is hard and painful.
Most ideological shifts I've seen - to any direction - have worked by someone first radically changing their views on some particular issue, for whatever reason, which then creates contradictions with their other views, with those contradictions then being dialectically slowly worked through until they lead to other view changes. However, that rarely happens in an instant, and the process might always not be particularly clear (and generally doesn't lead to a complete 180 shift in views). You wouldn't expect it to happen in an instant or for the same way for everyone, and you would probably not witness the results at a societal level expect in retrospect.
A lot of right-wingers seem to simultaneously believe that the right-wing ideals are obviously logically more correct and obvious than left-wing ones, yet are also suspicious that left-wingers would ever actually shed their views due dramatical events, unless it's the instant rare complete "Road to Damascus" conversion to a right-wing cause (which would probably come off as suspicious and opportunistic to me). That's even though we have a well-known historical process to compare to - the slow delegitimization of pro-Soviet Communism, and Communism in general, in the West, and the associated general loss of credibility for state socialism and the general acceptance of (regulated) market economy by almost all corners of Western political thought.
More options
Context Copy link
My first thought when reading the start of this sentence was that this reminds me of the Internet or the Titanic, in the way it has protections against the whole thing catastrophically going down just from one major part going down (the Titanic itself obviously went down, due to more compartments getting breached than it was designed for, but the principle stands). And in the realm of the self-proclaimed progressive left or the "woke" or the SocJus or the like, I think one of the strongest forms of protection it has is its outright rejection of logic, reasoning, and empirical evidence as tools to learn true things about the world as concepts invented by oppressors in order to oppress. By freeing themselves from the constraints of logic, they can observe one part of their ideology getting utterly crushed and then completely ignore that the very same thing that crushed one part will also crush other parts.
Combine that with plain old Gell-Mann Amnesia, and yeah, I think predictions of any sort of "vibe shift" are hugely premature at this point. I mean, it's not out of the question, but I feel like I've observed these sorts of "pre-vibe-shift" signs dozens of times in the past decade, and I'm not sure I can recall it ever leading to anything other than doubling down.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah. The big BLM organization - Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation - is probably grifting or at least enriching the pocketbooks of its members a good deal more than is customary for nonprofits. It's possible that they might simply be unsophisticated n00bs and thus not all that good at being corrupt and grifting successfully, and you never hear about the really good or even just decent grifter nonprofits. Grifting aside, I still think that BLM is unfortunately too divisive - it stokes racial tension. Of course, Martin Luther King did the same, as did Malcolm X; the difference here is that they managed to effect lasting societal change and had a clear endgame. They also referenced the shared humanity of Black people, rather than painting police brutality as an issue that only or mostly affects Black people...yes, there IS some disproportionate impact. Yes, there IS bias, it's very real, some of it is due to cops being pigs and some of it is due to the vicious cycles that stereotypes enable. On the other hand, I think that painting it as being just a "black problem" is the wrong tactic to take as it stokes racial and political tension in order to resolve a black issue rather than a human issue...I've heard that cops in redneck rural areas are just as much of assholes as cops in the 'hood. It'd be nice if BLM was able to join forces with rednecks against police brutality. Maybe they could find themselves some sympathetic white Boy Scout that got gunned down by asshole cops or something.
They won't, because police incompetence on that level is actually quite rare. There will be plenty of sympathetic white Boy Scouts that were merely harassed by cops, maybe even roughed up a little, but approximately zero that were actually shot for no reason at all. This is the same pattern that emerges with black people in cities - many have stories of being pointlessly harassed for no good reason and many of these stories are true, fewer have stories of being roughed up for no good reason and some of these are true, but basically no one just gets shot while they're minding their own business.
Adding to the list, there's Robert Ethan Saylor, who had Down's syndrome and suffocated after being forcibly restrained by authorities. His crime was slipping back into a theatre to watch the same movie twice. A pretty similar situation to George Floyd, except one was a career criminal on meth, and one was mentally disabled. But we know which one got the national outrage. (To be clear, both just seem like unfortunate, preventable-in-hindsight accidents to me. It's just the hypocrisy that I hate.)
More options
Context Copy link
Counterpoint: swat teams raiding the wrong address and killing the residents. Which from my memories of reading Reason years ago is a somewhat regular occurrence.
Link, for the curious. There are other swat-related articles in there, but many are about bad warrants of one form or another.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There have been a number of incidents of police misuse of force in the last few years that have largely dropped out of the public eye. Admittedly not of white Boy Scouts, but not necessarily obvious villains either. There was a couple shot in Houston (the Harding Street Raid in 2019) on what turned out to be a falsified no-knock warrant, or the 2015 biker shootout in Waco that ultimately saw all charges dropped, despite nine deaths (IMO most likely that the police started the shooting). I'm sure there are other examples.
More options
Context Copy link
Wasnt there that white kid who was also kneeled on, died, and then the cops were aquitted? Had an alliterative name, i think.
Tony Timpa. Somewhat similar story, crazy guy that the cops were trying to subdue, they did it too roughly and behaved callously. He died. It's pretty terrible and I think they should face justice (as I thought Floyd's killer should have).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah. You've got Daniel Shaver's death; he pointed something that looked like a real rifle out of a hotel window, then got shot by a trigger-happy incompetent asshole cop. Same thing's true for police harassment. Maybe in our fathers' or grandfathers' time there were drop guns and people being shot in the back for running from cops. It might still happen now, but not all that often and if it does the police departments are at least competent in covering this up. Asshole cops can definitely make people very clumsy indeed because they "look like criminals" or something like that. Sometimes the cops are beating up people they really think are criminals but can't prove anything.
More options
Context Copy link
Robert Dotson would have a bone to pick with you, but for certain reasons his widow would have to do it for him. And it's not like this is new : Ken Ballew managed to be a short-lived cause celebre among a certain type of gun owner, but Andrew Scott's a good intermediate version that you've never heard of.
Duncan Lemp was floating around the same time that George Floyd was, and tbf he was a bit of a paranoid nutcase (though there is a fun question of whether he was paranoid enough), but so were a number of BLM high-profile examples.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
When I look at Instagram, I’d say it seems less pronounced. The hardcore StandWithUs (Sheldon Adelson’s group) types are obviously sharing all the gory videos and posting reports about beheaded babies, but then again they were the same people cheering loudly when Trump moved the embassy and I know for a fact a substantial number voted for Trump, they’re Florida/Vegas/Long Island right or right-adjacent Jews and so hardly the median Jewish American. The outright radical leftists are either fully unrepentant or, in the case where presumably they have relatives there, or would feel / have felt the wrath of friends and family, post a both sides message but make clear that ultimate responsibility rests with Israeli apartheid or whatever. Generic progressives seem to just repost tweets or stories that say “supporting Hamas is antisemitic” or “murdering children isn’t liberation” or something, but they’re not going full bloodlust or demanding the bombing of Gaza either, that’s just the StandWithUs types.
If the Gazans get starved or large numbers of civilians die, all but the first group will start posting stories calling on the Israeli government to stop, and/or calling them genocidal eventually.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link