site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 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.

6
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

You make an excellent point about wokeness creating an incoherent narrative in the first half. I think this is because there's multiple competing perspectives in wokeness- first off, you've got the people who just hate whites because they are racist. Then you have people who hate anything that led to the west's success, for whatever reason, and call it "whiteness" and "white culture", because that attitude is rooted in AADOS social dysfunction which uses "acting white" as a cudgel/accusation against the tall poppy. You've got people who don't care about skin color and associated things, but hate the nuclear family and want to disassemble it- and either think ghetto blacks are a role model to aspire to, or have inaccurate ideas about indigenous societies. There's insane gender abolitionists and gay weirdness advocates. There's people who hate Christianity because they blame its ideas about sexual morality for whatever problem, and just want to adopt some kind of narrative that lets them bash it. Etc, etc. And a lot of these people, absent some kind of unifying narrative, don't get along. That's why explicitly left wing spaces are the way they are, I think- wokeness is just a system for trying to get all these ideas(most of which are stupid or delusional) into the same boat, and it can be weaved together with unfalsifiable assumptions that also make the narrative incoherent.

From that view of wokeness, of course they're going to hate on Israel; the anti-whites don't like the light skinned Jews(and are usually misinformed about what Levantine Arabs look like), the people who hate success don't like them because they're rich, and a lot of not-particularly-religious left wingers don't always distinguish between Christianity and conservative/Orthodox Judaism very well because they're both first world, nuclear family religions with conservative attitudes about sexuality. And since wokeness isn't coherent, and it's not intended to be, it doesn't matter whether the accusations make sense.

To recap my main thesis again, none of this makes any sense unless you incorporate the ideological component that needs Palestinians to remain stuck where they are, playing their role as the downtrodden in this grand theatrical production, all to ensure the jihadi casus belli against the Jews is maintained. This is what makes this conflict so perverse, so many people are just fucking pawns. Had Gaza been re-absorbed and became assimilated as just another governorate of Egypt, or had the share of Jordanians with Palestinian descent continued to increase beyond the estimated 50% it already is today, what remaining grievances would be worth the self-immolation remedy?

It seems completely plausible that Egypt and Jordan don't want to take the palestinians in not because they want the palestinians to keep shitting up the Israeli borderlands but because they want the palestinians to continue not shitting up Egypt and Jordan, and they have a long record of shitting up their host countries. Neither Egypt nor Jordan are retarded on the level of government policy, nor are any of them maintaining a particularly hostile relationship towards Israel by regional standards. Egypt isn't allowing the Gazans into Egypt while their homes are getting demolished and they're at war with Israel; we can probably assume that this is not because Al-Sisi wants the Gazans to keep fighting Israel, but rather because he doesn't want them to become Egypt's problem.