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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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While you may be right, I'd quibble with considerably. Moving from Reddit is going to do that regardless because Reddit's rules make a place more left wing because they restrict what you can talk about to begin with. And you lose people that would prefer Reddit over other places and they'd probably be more left wing just going by the idea that: 1) someone using reddit at all is more likely to be left wing. 2) people leaving reddit for another site are more likely to be right wing. The entire idea that the motte leave reddit at all is explicitly right wing coded. Discussing HBD is right wing coded. Discussing trans issues is right wing coded (I say that because discussing means there's more than one view represented). In my experience discussing issues at all is right wing coded. Most of the people I know and most of the people I encounter are left wing and have no interest at all in talking about anything to do with actual issues, they have their stance they've taken and if you talk about it deeper you're a racist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe, shitty person. Unless you're dedicated to proving right wing people wrong in every situation you're simply a bad person. I've heard this many times. And I suppose it's mostly a confluence of most people being left wing and most people really being unable to tolerate content they disagree with and being almost wholly uncurious. But all that being said, it's like IG-111, we're here because we're witches and they allow witches here. The 1000 witches problem is never really going to go away.

I do think that you're posting this in bad faith, however. Considering your examples of most upvoted comments are sitting at 7, 10, and 18 votes and your summary of each being both inaccurate and uncharitable. Why did no one respond to your HBD post about white suffering, because almost no one cares about HBD anymore. The idea that HBD has been talked about to death has been talked about to death, here. But you made it very clear in your post that you didn't believe what you wrote, it wasn't a trick like that post about one movie destroying a child's brain. Do you believe that no one read your disclaimer or that no one here respects steelmanning an argument they don't believe? Is that why you didn't bother to link to it? You brought up none of those rebuttals yourself but instead make a top level post calling people out who actually had the courage to make a post about something they believe and you're mad because they got a marginal amount of internet points and that nobody brought up your own points. It's hard enough to have the energy to argue your own thoughts, now you want us to argue yours as well.

"In my experience discussing issues at all is right wing coded."

Again, as I said downthread, this is only true if the only issues you care about are right-wing.

So yes, it'll seem left-leaning people aren't interested in talking about 'issues' if the issues you're concerned about are proving specific racial groups are less intelligent so we can spend as little on them as possible and make it OK to discriminate them again as been stated by multiple people here, how best to limit women so their only option is to have babies as multiple people have stated here, how everyone who doesn't believe the election was stolen from Trump is part of the Deep State, a RINO, or some other insultincluding Trump-appointed judges or people in the Trump WH who supported him 100% until the 2020 election, with perfect right-wing opinions otherwise, or how transgender people are discussed here, which is a lot of the basic "issues" brought up here, then yeah, you're not going to get a lot of arguments from even normie centrist people - they'll just think you're a weirdo.

Honestly, this is the reverse of some of the very left-wing friends who think 90% of the American population is fascist because they don't want to abolish all police, start bombing Israel (and I say that as somebody who wouldn't mind actually sanctioning Israel), banning cars, stopping fossil fuel extraction, and so on.

You're assuming I'm right wing because I have that opinion. Call me self-deluded if you want but most of my opinions are far left of anyone here. Though I read your union and abortion til birth opinions sound pretty normal left wing to me but I admit I live in a bubble. Most people I know are all or nothing and don't really care about nuance about things, if they believe in unions they believe in every aspect of unions if they think abortion should be legal they make no distinctions on it about how it should be practiced at all. I know it's because they mostly don't care about meting or puzzling out complexity but I also think even if you sat them down and made them think about it there's only a small proportion of people who would be moved to make specific lines about how much of their belief should be used in government mandates/laws. But I live in southern California, maybe that paints my life different.

But I didn't mean to suggest that right wing people are the only ones that will talk, I mean to suggest that it's right coded right now, because they're not in power, because they're the minority, because they will let the discussion touch ends they don't like or want possibly or probably because of those reasons.

Left wing people, in my experience, limited as it may be, will shut down conversations with insults or insults by proxy the moment it becomes even close to being about something they don't like. I've had right wing people talk to me about deep state stuff and it starts off with "I know you think I'm crazy but this is what I believe..." and when I question it they get excited that I'm interested and tell me more like the more they say the more I'll believe. And when I questioned the Steele Dossier's accuracy I had someone switch their tone of voice to the way you talk to a very small child and question my mental fitness and this was just a mild like "I don't know it seems kinda far-fetched..." And that's from people I know, people I don't will just respond with things like "oh so you're a shitty person" or more likely use the originator of a claim or opinion or the biggest name espousing it and then call them a piece of shit so they don't have to call you one. I'm sure they'd be perfectly happy and cordial to talk about a discussion where I was in full agreement with them, but I don't know that I'd consider that a discussion.

Again, as I said downthread, this is only true if the only issues you care about are right-wing.

I don't know if an issue can even be left or right wing, rather than there being a left or right position on each issue. But even accepting your framing, I don't see how this is accurate. Take something like the trans stuff, for years it was progressives pushing it, and it is only now starting to get some organized pushback, so if issues can have sides, that one's definitely theirs. Are they any more open to debating it? Not from my experience, you get banned on sight on any left leaning forum if you stray from the orthodoxy. Same was true for BLM, same was true for MeToo, same was true for COVID. Where is all this vibrant left-wimg debate you're talking about?