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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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Are you going to link the article this is from? It appears to be a comment on this article.

Edit: clarity

Just like the last alt used to (“motteposter”). I think he decided to move on to the next one, he isn’t maintaining kayfabe, this is far from his usual pearl-clutching progressive persona. Witness this, DR doubters, @coffee_enjoyer , @FirmWeird , so at least your priors will be in the right place when the next game begins.

edit: Might want to rethink what you thought you knew more generally. If you fell for this, it could be that most of the arguments you thought you won decisively was just one of your own letting you win to boost your confidence. Your ideology should pay for deceiving you and others by projecting this fake image.

DR doubters? Dissident right? I mentioned previously that it was an open question, and it was given that people were actually talking about it and discussing it. Here he just straightforwardly includes "we" when talking about white nationalists which really gives the game away and closes the question, but it isn't like this is particularly surprising. The main argument I had in my head against him being a troll was just that he was particularly bad at it (if I was going to troll under the name "JewDefender" I'd just be an incredibly obnoxious pro-Israel partisan with insanely obvious double standards, and who makes arguments with big glaring flaws that strengthen the WN cause when defeated).

I'm not rethinking what I know generally because I followed the rules and mores on this forum about assuming hidden intentions on the part of other people. You also don't seem to know what my ideology is or who counts as "one of my own" - I'm only an antisemite in the sense that I don't support Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and think that a lot of the things they've done are utterly heinous (white phosphorus usage in civilian areas is something I will very consistently condemn). That said, most of my arguments on here tend to be on the topics of Trump, environmentalism and EROEI more than anything else.

If you think I won any arguments because the other side let me win to boost my confidence, please let me know and point these arguments out - I don't have my profile locked down, you're free to go looking through my history to find instances of this happening... and I'm going to expect you to actually do so if you're making an accusation like that.

“You were potentially deceived by a poster trying to manipulate the forum, therefore it was your ideology that deceived you” is an impressively silly thought.

I don’t know what’s going on with the OP poster. The world’s worst crypto- white supremacist? The opposite, attempting to get the topic banned? Someone doing “intelligence gathering” on users who agree with this or that? Whatever it is, it’s obviously annoying. Maybe mods should start using AI to check posting styles and ban the next alts.

He did it for your ideology, so yes, your ideology did it to you. If you valued the truth more than your ideology, you’d make it pay. But more important to me than the relative worth of random ideologies is: if we all counted his dishonesty as a demerit against his WN ideology, he would finally shut the fuck up (since his motivation is to make it look good).

if we all counted his dishonesty as a demerit against his WN ideology, he would finally shut the fuck up

But you'd be throwing the baby out with the bathwater - this approach is bad and leads to bad outcomes even when people aren't actively fucking with it. You're giving random bad faith actors an opening that grants them astonishing amount of power and influence over what you believe.

If you disagree, let me know - "fuckduck9000defender" seems to be an available account, and if you think people acting like shitheads in support of one particular ideology is a mark against that ideology, you're going to be changing your mind on everything real soon.

This itself opens up an obvious attack vector.

We’ll cross that vector when we reach that plane. He has successfully promoted his ideology by abusing the sub’s charity so far. We are way out of balance, too trusting, and he has been defecting at zero cost. Of course if you let in a defector in a theoretically curated always-cooperate club he’s going to make bank. We don’t need to condemn his ideology all equally and unequivocally for it, it would be enough if we imposed enough costs that he would be unsure whether his actions help or harm his ideology.

This is non-sequitur and nonsensical. Ideologies are true or false completely independent of any random bad actors on random forums. Someone “doing something for your ideology” does not negate an ideology, not even 0.0001% of its validity or lack thereof.

if we all counted his dishonesty as a demerit against his WN ideology

And what makes you think he isn’t anticipating this?

his motivation is to make it look good

So far he has only succeeded in annoying the user base, making them more reluctant to post and engage in anything WN-related. If he were actually invested in promoting WN he would immediately stop posting and just upvote SS or something.

I'm not talking about some alabaman WN who’s never heard of him, I'm talking about you, reader of this forum. Your view is shaped, in this case corrupted, by what you read here.

And what makes you think he isn’t anticipating this?

Because it isn’t what happened the previous eight thousand times he did this.

If you fell for this, it could be that most of the arguments you thought you won decisively was just one of your own letting you win to boost your confidence. Your ideology should pay for deceiving you and others by projecting this fake image.

Where are the people arguing against (white) nationalism?

There seems to be a general refusal to ever defend multiculturalism as the Western world spends billions refereeing border disputes between people one can hardly tell apart.

You don’t see many naive defenses of multiculturalism or calling anything to the left of stalin, nazi, here, but one side’s specific argument being absent or even proven incorrect, does not make white nationalism, as advocated by DR-aligned posters, correct. You see a lot of hypocrisy type arguments here ‘if oppressed identity politics are legitimate, then so are white/oppressor identity politics’, which, yeah, I more or less agree with. But after that, they start to resort to the same postmodern tricks as their opposition, calling whites’ ‘false consciousness’ the result of manipulation by (((elites))), or of some inherent mysterious quality of whiteness, which somehow makes them both flawed and superior.

Anyway that’s not the point: if your worldview, whatever it might be, has been corrupted by deception, then when the deception is uncovered, your worldview should be corrected, even over-corrected (to account for as yet undiscovered deceptions), back to an original pristine state.

Anyway that’s not the point: if your worldview, whatever it might be, has been corrupted by deception, then when the deception is uncovered, your worldview should be corrected, even over-corrected (to account for as yet undiscovered deceptions), back to an original pristine state.

What does that even mean? What is the original pristine state?

I don't think anybody actually formulates a worldview based on null hypothesis or something like 'out of all Y arguments, X have been disproved, therefore I only retain as true Z until disproven'.

What do you even mean by deception? Is the socratic method deception?

calling whites’ ‘false consciousness’ the result of manipulation by (((elites))), or of some inherent mysterious quality of whiteness, which somehow makes them both flawed and superior.

I have met plenty of white nationalists but I don't think I've met a supremacist. While some will argue that white people are superior due to X, Y, Z, they usually concede that they are not flawless, that they are currently as a people on the backfoot of history, a shadow of their former glory. Hence the need to organize as a group 'white people' or whatever other denomination they may give themselves.

They usually look to the past (RETVRN), to some previous state of existence of 'white people' as a group that was superior to what it is now. Plenty of them are also able to acknowledge virtue in members of other groups, whether they call them 'honorary aryans' or 'one of the good ones', or even acknowledge an entire group (ie Jared Taylor is fluent in Japanese and has cordial discussions with Japanese people who agree with him that huwyte people should be able to live in homogeneous groups if they so choose).

It's kind of a flavor thing, some people like vanilla over chocolate, does not mean vanilla or chocolate are objectively superior.

What does that even mean? What do you even mean by deception?

What do you think we are we talking about? "jewdefender"'s lies. He manufactured hundreds of fake, low-quality debates here that were designed to look like the WN side won. If you bought into this, took this as evidence of the quality of WN arguments, you have been deceived. He also tricked you into reading way more WN lit than you would have if he’d been honest. The original pristine state is when your opinions come from observing real debates and reading stuff organically. We all heavily rely on the honesty of others to form an accurate view of the world. Socratic questioning does not impair this process, JD's lies do.

He manufactured hundreds of fake, low-quality debates here that were designed to look like the WN side won.

He didn't really manufacture anything as from what I recall he never really bothered replying to comments. Somebody who only drops links or excerpts of other people's opinions with one line of 'what do you guys think of this literally-who-WN I just fished, aren't WN bad?' strikes me as prime 'low effort' posting. As far as I know, the guy hasn't even expressed a single opinion. Just noise. What's interesting is when people who put a little bit of effort reacted to the material, but there's not much to go from.

The original pristine state is when your opinions come from observing real debates and reading stuff organically.

Where are the real debates including white nationalists? Where are the lie-free sources?

It seems to me that democracy is about caring about what the billionaires who own the media tell us to care about, and to rubberstamp these billionaires' point-of-views.

There is no pristine state in such an environment.

He didn't really manufacture anything as from what I recall he never really bothered replying to comments

I saw him get into an extended conversation with SecureSignals. You can't verify that though, because he was deleting all his comments after a day or so. Not something typically done by low-effort but well-intentioned posters, if you ask me.

I suppose I missed that. Still primarily a low-effort poster, that plus the systematic comment deletion should be enough to mod before getting into games of 'being authentic' or not.

I think it would help if we could identify users with a private profile and habitual post deleters without having to click into their profile.

If he linked the original post his game would be a little too obvious even for the quokkas on the mod team.

Without this guy, even though (as many, not just you, have noted) he’s a troll, we’d be back to the usual conversations about trans bathrooms, abortion, guns and childhood transition making up 70% of regular threads, and those were in many ways played out discussion topics by the end of the last Bush administration.

It's not like we can't talk about other things, we just don't as much.

This is why I'd like a BLR back, maybe just with those topics outright banned, as more seeds for discussion on a variety of topics.

There's also the perennial Motte favorite of a person coming in to whine and consensus build about how things are going to shit and we have to do <blah blah blah> or else the evil political opponents will destroy us all, worded in such a way as to just barely slip past the site's moderation standards.

I know that there is a tendency for some topics, in some weeks, to dominate, but I fail to understand this critique.

I'm frequently impressed with the depth, breadth and back and forth of some of the discussion I've seen here. Even on familiar topics, some of the ideas are frame breaking enough they lead me to question some unexamined prior.

Even the HBD and white nationalism stuff has merit in uncovering widely held views and pointing to the critique of liberalism moment we are in.

Also, as a majority single issue focus poster, it's called culture war and I resent people telling me to move on just because they have reached their peace. I'm sure you have issues that stir you and there's a gate-keepy flavour with pointing out topics that are 'overdone' that triggers me back to days of college, where no-one at parties wanted to talk philosophy with me...

I recognise some stuff gets repeated and may feel overdone, but it's easy to minimise main threads. I think even in frequently posted issues, there can be new levels of analysis/synthesis that evolve over time.

The variety of posts both down thread and last week would suggest otherwise.

Hard nope.

SecureSignals is getting modded for one issue posting, this guy is doing the exact same thing, except dishonestly. Ban for life.

Concretely, I thought the Aporia article he posted was a perfectly reasonable thing to post.

The mods take an extreme light touch with SS, he’s still here years later and still largely single-issue posting, just not exclusively in top-level threads. And the main reason he gets modded is that he makes the same arguments in every Holocaust denial thread but when actually interrogated always disappears when Stefferi or whoever effortposts a quality rebuttal to his arguments and allusions.

This guy, by contrast, is more ‘just asking questions’ rather than making an argument. Obviously it’s still trolling in a particular direction, there’s no doubt about it, but it’s a less objectionable grift than posting propaganda and running away when a decent counterargument presents itself.

I'm not criticizing the mods, I think SS should bite the bullet and post about literally anything else, every once in a while, and if there's no other subject in the world that makes him tick as a human, he should probably take that as a cue to think about his life long and hard.

I'm criticizing you for encouraging JD, when all he's doing is being a dishonest version of SS.

I'm not criticizing the mods,

I will.

Situations like this are what ultimately lead to my falling out with Zorba and Trace and they don't seem to have learned anything in the interim. We kept getting into arguments in modmail where they'd be like; You can't just assume that "u/ArgleBargle456 is ban evading because he showed up the morning after /u/ArgleBargle123 got banned." and "Yes /u/soandso is very obviously pushing an agenda and consistently bringing the quality of the conversation down but that's not a reason to take action against them" and I finally ran out of patience. If blatant ban evasion and clearly violating the foundations of the sub are not reasons to mod someone, what is even the point of moderating anyone?

Like you say, this guy's just a less honest version of SS. and as @fuckduck9000 points out, keeping him around is effectively the worst of both worlds.

There's something to be said for "beyond reasonable doubt" when it comes to banning, but posters should err on the side of not feeding trolls, even if that results in some false positives.

Maybe, but at the risk of rehashing that whole argument again, I do not think that "beyond reasonable doubt" is a remotely workable standard in a pseudonymous environment where someone can spin up a new account in less time than it takes the moderator to ban their old one.

I suppose part of me is curious whether all our replies to JD/motteposter/other alts are going to end up on SneerClub one day, or whether it’s some other kind of troll.

The comment in question presents white nationalism are benign and free association as harmless, but that strikes me as wrong.

Why do you think it's wrong? I mean, I agree that it is wrong, but this place isn't for saying what is, it's for exploring why what is, is. Surely you have some starting conception of why white nationalism is not benign and free association can be harmful, so start there and follow the chain of logic.

I seem to recall that you've asked questions similar to this of me directly a couple times, I gave what I thought were good replies, and you never responded. In fact, I don't recall you ever responding to people giving good rebuttals of WN ideas you've brought up, of which it seems to me there have been many. If you genuinely cannot generate good arguments against WN ideas yourself and are posting those arguments here in hopes of finding such arguments, it seems to me that at some point, you would either comment to express thanks for having such arguments provided, or conversely point out why the arguments provided aren't good enough. You don't though, do you? You only ever seem to Just Ask Questions.

Don't be low effort? I guess you have tried but figured that white nationalism is basically correct. You're here to either explore the chance your wrong with people who are willing to put in more effort, or much more likely you're doing 4D chess because you find your own ideas on the matter compelling. You've basically been outed as bad faith, and that is the issue at hand. The other option is you're here to steelman the best arguments against your ideas so you can work away in private to dismantle them rhetorically.

I think you may have some strange meta personality such that you are the person who has the visceral hatred.

Why don't you just speak in the first person about your own ideas in a direct way?

If you’re genuinely not trolling (likelihood: 5%) then maybe reach out to the mods privately and see if you can verify your identity semi-anonymously (prove that your IP is real and non-VPN? Something like that)

Yeah, if you want diverse content, just allow low-effort tops. If you want honesty, let SS and co be. Tolerating this guy is the worst of all worlds. Litters the sub with low-quality fake dogpiling arguments about a subject the mods apparently don’t want to see.