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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
As @SSCReader and others observe above, It's arguably a testament to strength of and prosperity the existing local order that so many people are effectively able to live their entire lives within it without ever having to interface with the ugly realities. Consider for a moment that it wasn't all that long ago (75 years or so) that having Chicken for dinner involved buying a live chicken and killing/butchering it yourself. If you wanted beef or pork you went to your local butcher where you would be able to smell the blood on the floor. But today thanks to the wide-spread availability of refrigeration, meat is now something that just auto-magically appears in styrene flat-packs on supermarket shelves completely divorced from the mechanisms of its production. Where killing and harvesting your own food used to be a practical necessity it is now a life-style choice. In theory this is progress, but it's hard for me to shake the feeling that something of value has been lost here.
As Lee Harris argues in the opening to Civilization and its Enemies, prosperity breeds forgetfulness. The more prosperous a society becomes the less connected its people are to the underlying machinery of this prosperity. People forget that there was ever a time when they had to worry about whether the crops would come in, or whether their children would be sold into slavery by a conquering army. In short, they begin to forget that there is (or ever was) a world outside their prosperous society.
I would argue that the breakdown in communication between conservatives and liberals is almost entirely downstream of this apparent blindness or disconnect from empirical reality. I would argue that the reason liberals have difficulty understanding why conservatives act the way do because they seem to view prosperity as some sort of inevitable end point rather than something that has to be actively cultivated and maintained.
There is talk elsewhere in this thread about how we as a society "failed Jordan Neely" but to the conservative mind this sort of rhetoric raises an obvious question; Is this "failure" not what everyone who voted to "Defund the Police" and "Decriminalize drug use" was voting for? How can you claim that "we failed" when this is ostensibly what you wanted?
You can see a similar dynamic in the recent controversies surrounding retail theft. Liberal Officials in places like Boston, Chicago, and San Fransisco chose to stop prosecuting shop-lifters only to be shocked when Walgreens starts shuttering locations and Target starts keeping underwear under lock-and-key.
This apparent unwillingness or inability to grasp what to me (and many others) seems like obvious cause and effect is why I say there is a massive "hole" or "blind spot" in liberal thinking. Furthermore, I believe that much of the breakdown in communications is a product of this blind spot. "Can you not see it?" the conservative asks; "See what?" the liberal replies.
Practical refrigerator railcars have existed since the 1880's. If you were wealthy and lived in a major city you got your meat in, well, not a styrofoam package but neatly wrapped in butcher paper from a store with no hint of where the meat came from since before living memory.
"The Joy of Cooking" was published in the 30s; my edition is mid-50s IIRC and retains material on drawing and plucking poultry. This seems to fit well with "75 years or so ago" -- supermarkets were a thing, but it seems like a whole chicken with feathers on it would be something a home cook might reasonably expect to encounter at this time?
More options
Context Copy link
If "you were wealthy and lived in a major city" is the key distinction here, up through the early 1900s the primary use of refrigeration was to manufacture and transport ice for use in unpowered ice-boxes. It's not until the 30 and 40s that it really starts to transition from being an expensive luxury to standard practice, and it's not till the mid 50s that we arrive at the current status quo of freezers and refrigerators being standard equipment in every home and grocery store.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link