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That's not everything. The last 2 are the same thing (the economy). All of these things can be (crudely) controlled.
It's kind of the paradox. Not that mind-boggling of a belief tho. There are very smart people out there who think that a computer program answering cues can 'become intelligent' and take over the world as well.
Why would not-very-competent people who have a lot of power not use the technology of the day that actually works decently at modelling complicated phenomena to push for certain outcomes?
Do you genuinely believe the covid psy-op was organic? That the blm reversal 'actually you can go outside for police brutality protests' was genuine? That the pivot to Ukraine when the covid thing became too embarrassing was pure coincidence? That the pivot to Israel was also pure coincidence?
Or do you wonder why all these powerful people lied so much? With lies growing larger as time goes?
I don't know what it is to be honest. Were they trying to take out Trump because he really was threatening their system despite their mostly-successful blocking of his policies? Was it a way to cover up the last 30-50 years of failed foreign policy in the Middle-East, or just some kind of test, to see if people were ready to accept 'government says you can't enter this building at this time, thank you for your obedience'?
There is a paradox of competency. Clearly letting in millions of Central and South-Americans is not going to improve the general competency of the country. Planes are gonna start falling off the sky, bridges collapsing, trains derailing, towers getting smashed into...
Who could have predicted that sending gender studies majors to teach Afghans not to be sexist would not work? To be fair, with a few billion dollars and another couple decades I think it would have worked. In the mean time that's a nice way to secure employment for party-loyalists.
Since those "pivots" had their timing fixed by Putin's invasion date and Hamas' massacre date, and since I'm very confident the US Deep State or whoever isn't collaborating with them, I'm going to have to go with OF COURSE. Putin's "de-Nazification" excuses were a cover for "I want conquest", not "I want to do Biden a solid".
Good luck to you. I'm as big a Deus Ex fan as the next guy, but actual paranoid theorizing about how the world is controlled by a giant conspiracy against you is a really hard epistemic failure to break out of. Meds can help, but of course that's what They would want you to do...
I would cautiously agree with you on that, contradicting evidence may come forward in the next few decades. I wouldn't say that about the previous conflicts with ISIS or Al-Qaida. What TPTB control is the media coverage, the foreign policy...
The previous EU and US response to conflicts on Russia's borders was not as dramatic.
It actually gives you some decent heuristics.
Is it? Was there like a multi-year media blitz to have people take meds or something? Schizos would have you believe that governments can just shut down borders and make you stay home and make you lose your job if you don't take the meds, but we all know it's impossible to ever close borders, and nobody would ever be able to coordinate such things.
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There's a difference between "coincidence" and engineered, just like there's a difference between "elites try to shape the narrative" and "TPTB can make everyone turn on a dime overnight." So short answer, yes, I think these things are more organic than not. I think "TPTB" would like to do the things you ascribe to them, but there's too much evidence of failure to believe they can just pick winners and move the zeitgeist on command.
So it's not a coincidence right?
EDIT: nevermind you did write you thought these things were more 'organic'. What kind of evidence would you need to believe that something is not 'organic', but rather 'fake and gay'?
The problem is that we don't know what exactly the goals are and what a 'failure' looks like, what we do see is large organized actions toward certain apparent goals, and they only seem to get bigger. What we may think of a failure may just be another possible path. Perhaps making all the boomers go MAGA was just one more way to get more people dependent on online socialization...
I gave you an example of 'TPTB' influencing various thing such as 'pandemics', 'social unrest', 'wars', which imo passes the bar of 'the idea that "TPTB" can control literally everything'.
But to you it's not valid because it's not 'TPTB can make everyone turn on a dime overnight.' I didn't claim that. They have a measure of control.
Most people don't say 'meteorologists can't predict the weather' because predictions after 5 weeks are generally meaningless. There is a certain level of prediction going on.
I'd say this is analogous to a boulder. If the boulder is big enough, no matter how hard I push it will not budge. If not, I can probably make it nudge forward and backward a little bit. If the boulder is uphill and I try really hard I can probably make it roll down the hill.
Am I able to roll the boulder back uphill? No. Am I able to send that boulder wherever I want? No. Can I make all boulders roll downhill? No.
I do believe that there are people that TPTB can make turn on a dime overnight. Journalists. It only took a few weeks for the coverage to go from 'It's racist to close borders to prevent Asians from bringing him a nothingburger of a cold' to 'Orange man bad for not doing enough to stop the spread of the Black Plague 2.0'.
Obviously the people in charge of these schemes are somewhat competent, but the moving parts are not necessarily. My understanding of those who are made to be 'flexible' in their beliefs is that there is some kind of underlying cognitive weakness. I don't expect these people to make good long-term decisions aside from professionally 'doing what TPTB say to stay on their good side'.
For the ones in charge, I would say the problem is their 'out-of-touchness'. It's hard to tell what being 'in-touch' means, but being a multi-faced sociopath 24/7 probably doesn't help introspection and relating to the common man. Especially if most of your interactions are with lackeys who are only thinking and saying whatever they think you expect them to.
What kind of psychology is at work behind the concurrent media coverage of : 'Glorious underdog desperately needs our support to fight back to the last man in urban guerilla against evil invader'
vs 'Glorious topdog desperately needs out support to invade and suppress evil terrorists fighting to the last man in urban guerilla' ?
No, you claimed they do that.
If you embrace a belief in "shadowy gray cardinals " sitting in a room somewhere deciding what will happen this month, you can make everything fit that theory.
Well that's the point of beliefs, that they fit the observed world. It'd be weird to have a belief that does not adequately address what actually happens.
Unfortunately I'm not aware of a website that tracks media lies over time to reliably be able to provide receipts for what I consider as evidence in this case.
One such example would be for example the response to the Steele dossier. My understanding is that a number of media outlets all came together with claims of leaks from US/Western officials of a mysterious dossier circulating among the 'experts' in intelligence that would implicate candidate Trump in nefarious immoral or anti-American acts. Such media reports were riddled with quotes from 'anonymous sources' and such.
Another example would be the coverage of the Jan6 protests. For example the NYT made the incorrect claim that a police officer was killed by protesters:
I saw recently somebody claim online that these protesters killed a policeman, which shows that the strategy of 'lie loudly then quietly retract' had the intended effect of priming the mind of people who don't pay attention.
A third example would be the reaction to the NYPost article detailing their finding of Hunter Biden's laptop containing materials implicating him in at best in highly promiscuous activities with many connected socialites and at worst in international corruption, influence peddling, potential incestuous pedophilia... The reaction was of course to censor, dismiss, diminish as much as possible, using the same previously discredited 'anonymous intelligence' sources as for the Steele dossier, or the WMD in Iraq story... Why'd they stop using the same gimmick when it still works?
I believe that there are 2 underlying facts behind these examples:
Does this involve "shadowy gray cardinals"? I suppose you could call the people in charge of media companies that, as well as the government officials they interact with, as well as the coordinators at the social media company level. Can the room be an email chain? Or a zoom meeting?
Perhaps when they wipe the servers they use to communicate confidential information on, they do not use acid, and Hillary does not personally smash them with a hammer.
Is it still a conspiracy if they're not literally wearing capes and bathing in blood?
How does your theory fit the facts better than my theory, which is "The media is very liberal and captured by woke nowadays, and thus needs to no cabal to push a particular narrative; nonetheless, they do not have the organization or unity or control to just make everyone do what they want"?
I think it's somewhat semantic.
Well obviously we're not all doing everything that they want, but it appears preposterous to me to think that suppressing stories, shutting down online dissent, jailing people, using fake intelligence to start/amplify conflicts etc, is not exerting some kind of control over the world.
What is the difference between 'cabal' and 'captured by woke'?
What if the media was just a bunch of nazis all acting in concert with what Adolf Hitler decided? Is that a cabal or just 'being captured' by nazis?
Moreover, it's more than 'the media'. It's also social media companies (still the media perhaps but different people), it's gaming media companies, it's video game making companies. It's also government agencies.
There's a lawsuit right now:
Perhaps evidence will come out from this law suit that support my hypothesis over yours. Remember, a conspiracy theorist is just a guy who is right early.
Other components of this conspiracy I would add are the non-profits crying wolf about various 'hate' crimes (to distinguish from love crimes), to push social media companies, schools, businesses to censor/cancel dissidents. And the internet infrastructure as well.
So I would say that at the minimum the components are the following :
If it were just the media they would not be able to suppress competition.
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If The Powers that Be had this much control over human affairs and don't want Trump in office, it invites the obvious question of how he was able to secure even one term.
Well that was a mistake. I believe the ideas that Trump support are generally pretty popular.
Most people want their country to keep looking the way it did when they were children and not have 10% new different faces injected + a constant rhetoric that the way they've been living so far is abjectly immoral and they need to change NOW or they're EVIL. It should be a walk in the park for a generally well-presenting, competent-looking man to get ~60% of votes if he signals support toward a program that would support that worldview.
Usually the Republicans end up fielding the least-reptilian-looking investment firm manager who was able to curry enough favors from all the lobbyists to be eligible.
Then the voters say 'Well he probably laughs at plebs like me with his billionaire buddies but at least the country is going to descend into hell 20% slower than the other guy who outright laughs at me and blame me on TV for the country's problems'.
So the Democrats for whatever reason picked Hillary Clinton as replacement for golden goose Obama, and perhaps they had the idea that she was an utterly unlikable candidate so they had to go the extra mile to 'save the election'.
Here there's one measure of incompetency, picking HRC, and then there's one measure of competency, still trying to salvage it. They decided that in order to crush the Republicans, they would throw their entire media machine's support behind the goofiest, least-competent, most ridiculous showbusiness candidate this side of the Atlantic.
Plus they had to let the frustrated voters fantasize a little bit about getting what they want. Isn't that what democracy is for? You field some kooky guy who claims he wants to get you what you want, but he ends up losing to a more 'serious' candidate who has to compromise into getting you nothing that you want or the adults in the media or at the UN - or wherever people think adults are- will get you in trouble.
Then of course you use the worst possible version of the presentation of these ideas to discredit them 'oh yes we tried this in 2016 but that guy was just too goofy, serious people don't believe these things'.
That sounded like a good idea at the time, and the media kept laughing and scoffing that 'nobody is voting for Trump'. That was the plan. Who in their right mind would vote for a clown over serious girlboss HRC?
Then when it didn't work out they cooked up increasingly desperate counter-measures from the media to intelligence agencies, to the Science and health agencies... for a hot fix.
I wonder what the future is even going to look like. Because if you let people like Trump run the trouble is that they can get elected. We want to keep the song and dance of democracy going. And it's been going on pretty nicely with a nice continuity. Nobody's ever using the President's powers for anything that could disturb the general plan. Trump was ultimately the product of that small window in time in which the Internet was still letting unfiltered opinions through and the majority of voters started using the Internet. I'd say the Internet died in 2020 when governments found a reason to swing their weight around.
I think American democracy is going to get harder to maintain and the measures will get even more desperate than now - attempting to lock up top political opponents right before elections - like in these African countries where people vote along tribal lines, and voters risk machete attacks to cast their votes.
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