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 -
I'm committing a major faux-pas by posting a second consecutive top-level comment, but it's been 12 hours and people need to post more. (Seriously, post a top level comment. Do it now.)
What's something that you were wrong about?
I'll start. I was wrong about marijuana legalization. It was a bad idea and we never should have done it. Marijuana is, contra urban legend, actually pretty addictive. And it makes productive people into unproductive people. The benefits, such as they are, are best enjoyed in moderation. But legalization has resulted in a whole new class of junkies that wouldn't have existed otherwise. Also, weed culture is gross.
Scott, as always, says it best:
In any case, what were you wrong about?
As a resident of the same state as @FiveHourMarathon, I'm going to have to semi-agree on gambling. As a resident of the western part of the state, though, I might be able to add some additional perspective. In 2001 West Virginia legalized traditional slot and video poker machines at racetracks. "Video lottery machines" had been legal at racetracks for some time, but they weren't particularly popular. Now that they had traditional slot machines, these tracks began constructing large casinos around them. 2 of the 4 racetracks in the state happen to be in the Northern Panhandle, practically an exurb of Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania had been talking about legalizing gambling for a while, most notably through various riverboat gambling proposals in the '90s, but these never went anywhere. It soon became obvious that everyone was simply driving to West Virginia to play slots, and local news outlets regularly did stories where they'd go to Mountaineer or Wheeling Island and point to all the PA plates in the parking lot and interview the owners, who invariably said that they'd go to casinos in their home state if they were only legal. Whatever their objections were before, state lawmakers couldn't ignore the amount of money that PA residents were taking to West Virginia, and the push was renewed.
One thing lawmakers were initially cautious about, however, was that they didn't want to actually become West Virginia. Once slots were legalized, a number of sketchy "hot spots" started opening up around the state. These were usually bars, tobacco shops, and the like that had a room with 4 or 5 slot machines. Gambling wasn't merely legal there, but unavoidable, and Pennsylvania didn't want the state to have casinos popping up everywhere. So gaming licenses were initially limited to existing racetracks and four stand-alone casinos, one of which had to go in Pittsburgh and two of which had to go in Philadelphia. (It should be noted that at the time, Pittsburgh was effectively getting two casinos, as The Meadows racetrack is less than an hour south, and there was no comparable facility in the Philadelphia area at the time.) The gaming commission was also going through a comprehensive review process to ensure that only the best candidates were awarded licenses. They also announced that the casinos would have table games, at which point the same news stations went back to West Virginia and interviewed their resident casino patrons, who invariably said that they would drive to Pittsburgh (or The Meadows) to play them. West Virginia soon amended their law accordingly.
The system actually worked pretty well for about a decade. Then, the US Supreme Court ruled that sports betting could be legalized in any state. PA legislators rushed back to Harrisburg in the wake of the decision. But while they were there they did a couple of other things. They also legalized online gaming, removed restrictions on resort licenses (around a while but always a minor player), and created a new category of "mini-casinos". I was always in favor of legalized gambling, but this just seems like a bridge too far. I know that going to a casino is no real barrier for a true gambling addict, but there's something disconcerting about the idea that you can blow your life's savings while lying in bed. As another user noted, legalized sports betting has made sports media even more unbearable than it already was.
I play in a couple fantasy football leagues, but I've always found fantasy sports programming useless at best and agonizing at worst (I can only care so much about the fantasy performance of players who aren't on my team, and there's nothing more annoying than watching a game for one guy). Now we've added betting programming to that, and it's become almost completely impossible. Does anybody watch sports purely for pleasure anymore? Some people's lives are apparently so boring that they need to gamble on games they wouldn't otherwise care about to make watching them more interesting. I have a slightly different perspective. Last Friday, I found myself watching the Eagles Packers game with two guys who had parlayed the spread with a bunch of prop bets. Normally I wouldn't care who won, but after listening to the vocal commentary about every play, ref call, etc. that had any impact on their wager, I became very invested in these guys losing their shirts.
Anyway, the situation in PA got even worse after various courts ruled that certain games that I don't entirely understand are actually skill games and thus exempt from gaming laws. I doubt these games involve skill to the extent that one can get good enough at them to win consistently, but they've been popping up in seedy convenience stores all over the state. There are also these virtual horse racing and football game things that I've seen in family friendly bar/restaurant type places, but I don't really understand these either. In 20 years we've gone from the lottery, illegal slots in dive bars, and the small stakes stuff that's allowed in private clubs to gambling seemingly being everywhere. You can't get through a news broadcast now without them playing an annoying ad for Rivers online where a jingle that sounds suspiciously like the diarrhea song from elementary school literally boasts that their app allows you to gamble while lying in bed.
The other thing @FiveHourMarathon mentioned that I might as well address while I'm here is aging. I'm a few years older than him and, honestly, make hay while the sun shines is bad advice. Most women who age terribly tend to do so in their late 20s or maybe early 30s. If they make it any longer they're usually stable for the long haul. I'd rather pick one up on the safe side of the divide than marry a girl right out of college without knowing that this nubile cutie has a ticking time bomb hidden away, that all of the sudden she's going to bloat out into something grotesque, like an self-inflating raft from which the pin has been yanked.
Also the rise of social casinos/sweepstakes site are an additional layer of hilarity in that they circumvent the actual laws around online gambling and they're available in far more states consequentially.
Essentially the model being that if you deposit into Chumba Casino (Billions of USD a year in revenue), you're buying coins which can then be used on slot games and then at the end of play you swap those back into real money. Which circumvents the whole structure around 'real money' gaming, which is an insane loophole even as an industry participant.
More options
Context Copy link
Legalised sports betting through Draftkings and the like seems to be the ultimate backdoor for financial fuckups. The emotional attachment, conscious or otherwise, people have for their faves and the now daily timescale refresh optimized for daily expensive dopamine hits. Its not possible to martingale an out even if the bets arent capped, because of the changing meta and emotional investment. Draftkings is evil, and I think it portends great ill for sportsball in the US.
As for the spirit of the thread, I was wrong on charisma. I used to think stacking int and str was what got you far in life, thanks to fucking biowares icewind dale and charisma being an utterly useless stat IRL. With social interactions mediated by common interests as kids, charisma seemed utterly unimportant and being socially adept seemed to be for losers striving for the approval of strangers.
Turns out being an obnoxious creep bragging about PRs and grades makes one unable to deal with the social meta. Making friends isn't the problem, navigating hostile social agents is the problem. Getting socially crippled with no awareness of it happening or recourse is not necessarily a better tradeoff compared to the eternal performance for approval.
See that’s your problem right there: you have to cast the int to a str before concatenating them, or else you’ll get a ValueError
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You got it backwards. I'm advising that a lot of people delay getting serious about getting married until they, themselves, are past-ripe. Until the raft is inflating, or the hair is receding, or the skin is leathery from years of tanning beds and cigarettes, etc. The thing is that...
is mostly a choice. No one has to pull the pin.
Exactly. Which is why if you make a conscious effort to take care of yourself, you don't have to worry about being past-ripe. You can't do anything about the receding hairline, but as a balding guy, that's honestly not a big deal. I look much better with a #1 buzz than I ever did with hair, and the upkeep is much simpler. Not exactly a "make hay" story but there was this girl who turned me down in middle school who I hadn't paid much attention to in high school and completely lost contact with afterward. When I was about 24 I was in my local neighborhood dive bar and I hear my name and turn to face an unfamiliar blimp. She said her name and I was completely speechless. She looked like a shipping hazard. She told me I looked different (I had long-ish hair at the time) and I was tempted to say "speak for yourself" but wisely held my tongue. Not that a middle school girlfriend would have turned into a lifelong steady, or that 24 is the age when this happens, but man, the possibility is always there, and I felt like I had somehow dodged a bullet a decade earlier.
I had something similar happen to me. Hit on a cute girl in high school and got knocked back. She got BIG and thought I was a sure thing at a party in my 20's. Nope, nope nope.
More options
Context Copy link
I was taking my grandmother to a Perkins pancakes last year and ran into someone, maybe, who I knew. I thought maybe I knew him, but I couldn't be sure. Because it looked like the quarterback from our high school football team, who was also the star pitcher on the baseball team, who I hadn't seen since high school, but holy shit he's a balloon. It's unbelievable. I kept stealing glances at him, but I'm not certain enough to walk over and say Hi Casey, it's FiveHour.
So I went home and had my wife look him up on facebook, and whaddyaknow, it was him.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You’ve just described 80% of “thicc Latinas”. The natural life cycle of a Mexican woman is to turn into a potato after having her first child and to stay like that for the rest of her life.
There are notable exceptions.
Salma Hayek’s ancestry appears to include no indigenous/Amerindian genetics, which is probably the reason why she has defied the Mexican curse.
Salma Hayek has Lebanese descent too, which has Arab thighmelt potential. I'll invite other brave souls to share any observations on cellulite/body fat distribution differentiation between races, since my casual observance maps too cleanly onto racialised beauty meta for me to suspect subconscious bias.
In any case, to see what a girl will look like in future just do a cute activity like compare family photos and look at the elders. Thats the easiest way to see the genetic destiny. An excess of surgery and vanity in said photos might allow a discerning individual to parse wealth outcomes too, so there is further useful info to be gleaned there.
It’s hardly new advice to take a good, hard look at your mother-in-law, since that’s what your wife will look like in 30 years. Physical appearance isn’t everything in a relationship, but it isn’t nothing either.
More options
Context Copy link
To defend @2D3D’s approach from the perspective of someone who does strongly value interpersonal compatibility and love, the point he’s making is that you need to consider: Will I still love this person in 25 years? If we’re going to get married, I should at least consider whether, down the line, she is going to look so radically different from how she looks now that the things about her that attracted me in an erotic/sexual sense - the things that made me want to make her my romantic partner instead of just a female friend/acquaintance - will have disappeared. Is it fair to her to put her in a position where your marriage could fall apart because you start having to fake attraction, and she begins to hate herself? I don’t know if these questions should be disqualifying, but it’s tough to say that they’re not worth considering.
(There are, of course, other perfectly salutary reasons to care about these matters, but I don’t think they’re incompatible with an approach that still centers interpersonal love.)
I actually did this 'family photo' thing to figure out the girls family dynamic and understand what her relationship modalities are. Physical commonalities among the elder generations gave a preview of what the likely attractiveness would be going forward, but I myself underprioritized that because matchstick leg + pot belly chinatown uncle is my own fate so I know my place.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link