Ha! My wife recently took up knitting. She googled something like 'knitting community – problems' hoping to find a forum discussing things like problems with 'casting on' and dropped stitches. Instead she got this: the 'culture wars' in a nutshell. Two very different takes on a controversy in the unlikely world of internet knitting forums. One from from left-leaning Vox website and one (including links to previous related stories) from conservative and 'libertarian' website Quillette (sorry Andrew: and yes, they do seem obsessed with this sort of thing)...
...as I am in danger of appearing. I do find this stuff gruesomely fascinating, as is probably clear. It makes me glad I'm not on social media, apart from my 40 odd FB friends. But I'm just going to leave this here, then I promise I'll get a different obsession. Maybe not knitting though!
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2...tagram-stories
https://quillette.com/2019/07/28/kni...at-yarningham/
The problem is the polarisation of how and where this stuff is reported, the tribalism, it seems to me. The second website, whose take on this I agree with, is clearly a conservative one, which really rankles with me. Because then the messenger, rather than the topic, becomes the focus, as with my argument with Andrew S about Julius Eastman. Is there nobody writing on the left who thinks that these social media witch hunts are no longer just laughable but bullying and damaging? Or are they in fact perceived as morally righteous and justified?