site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 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.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Obviously one side of this is just that the alt-right contains multitudes.

Beyond that I do think there is a shift where up until 2016ish the grey tribe still basically agreed with the blue tribe in terms of end goals/reality, but mostly was breaking off/frustrated by SJW/WOKE cultural stuff. They did not want trad wives, where totally convinced that racism was wrong and evil, would consider themselves true LGBT allies, and where broadly in favor of hedonistic modernity. It seems to me that there has specifically been a shift in this group, where, as they became more contrarian and more ostracized by society for not getting with the program they gradually started to question a lot of these core assumption. The liberal framework that 99% of grey tribe people grew up with, that reality had a liberal bias, is mostly gone now and a lot of what we are seeing is the breakdown of that veneer of scientific authority. Ultimately, people change, and to me the online-alt-right looks like a reaction to excesses on the part of the left more than anything.

I’m as grey tribe as they come and to me the pendulum has swung firmly the other way. I’ve come from being sympathetic to the right in ‘16, to seeing it as my complete ideological opponent. I started as an edgy online atheist watching Creationism Debunked videos, got into the Intellectual Dark Web, cheered when the libs lost in ‘16, only to realise that maybe the so-called SJWs might have had a point when the hardcore Christian Right took over the movement.

The latter were the same people I was opposed to at the start of my political journey; anti-science, anti-intellectual, dogmatic theocrats who want to suppress anything that doesn’t agree with their outdated religious views. They’ve just repackaged the old stodgy pearl-clutching views we used to mock in the Bush era as somehow “based and redpilled”. They just stole the colours of the cool, rebellious counter-culture to make the grey tribe forget they used to be their ideological opponent.