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 -
Does progressivism structurally perpetuate the very identity-based prejudice it's supposed to combat?
First off, I'm sure someone smarter has written about this hypothesis, though I'm fairly certain Scott's too polite to verbalize it. Here's my low-effort take.
Imagine you live in a midsized city and are one of about a dozen fashionable owners of a pink VW Beetle. One day, you're on the highway, and suddenly you see the traffic alert display an AMBER alert for a pink VW Beetle. Thankfully, the plate number is very distinct from yours, but you sure wish you had a generic white Camry or F-150 then.
Sadly, the missing child, who turns out to be a super adorable five year old girl with blond hair, remains missing 48 hours later and has captured the national attention. The only lead is an elderly neighbor who swears that she saw a pink VW Beetle leave the cul-de-sac. Friends tease you, and you even make a preemptive joke about your car at a drivethrough. One day after work, you find "pedo" keyed on your car door.
Unfortunately for you, you can't afford to trade in for a different car. Do you 1) pray that the feds catch the predator asap, or 2) organize with the other 11 pink VW Beetle owners to start an activist campaign to combat bigotry against something you have no control over?
It then turns out that your city has an obscure and highly peculiar ordinance that offers extremely strong privacy protection over car ownership. So even after cops find Ring footage that shows a pink VW Beetle did in fact leave the cul-de-sac at around the time of kidnapping, the authorities are powerless to subpoena the DMV for identities of the owners to investigate further. There is public outcry and the city council gathers for an emergency meeting. Do you go to the public hearing to protest the inequity of treating all pink VW Beetle owners as suspects, or do you support getting rid of the law to maximize the likelihood of catching the perp so your life can go back to normal?
I recognize this is an inelegant and reductionist analogy, but it seems to me that the result of progressive policy, broadly speaking, perpetuates all kinds of -isms and -phobias. Take two identical islands: on one, the legislators, cops, and DAs are extremely progressive and go all-in on decarceration and decriminalizing shoplifting etc.; on the other, it's the opposite, with stop and frisks and three strike mandatory sentencing etc. It seems to me that a pink VW Beetle owner who goes shopping or takes a stroll at night in the park on the first island would experience far more unspoken suspicion by fellow citizens than the same teen on the second island. Similarly, a minority new hire at a private company on island two would feel much less imposter syndrome or be treated like a token hire than one on island one (though to be fair, perhaps said minority wouldn't be hired in the first place on island two, with its lack of affirmative action).
Rationally, an actual child predator or shoplifter is incentivized to support laws and policies that make it harder to apprehend and incarcerate them. But shouldn't everyone else oppose them? The sooner the public can trust that all the pink VW Beetles on the road are proven to not be kidnappers, the better! All that gets accomplished by making my car's make/model/color into some kind of protected class is that a) we make it harder to apprehend the bad apples that give the rest of us a bad rep, and b) result in everyone who pays any attention to subtly but resolutely give us a wide berth, especially if they have young children.
What am I missing? Why don't strong majorities of non-predator pink VW Beetle owners vote for policies that make them, as a class, structurally understood to be good citizens?
And if I may put on a conspiracy hat, it seems to me that one of the best ways for the prejudiced white F-150s to ensure that there is a perpetual underclass of pink VW Beetles is to donate to city councilmen to preserve the peculiar privacy ordinance while paying activist white Camrys to sport bumper stickers that insist that they love pink VW Beetles.
Your analogy is missing details. In Island one, the media apparatus propagandizes that actually, no child was abducted. Anti-pedo conspiracy theorist rightwingers who don't shut up about pizza are shunned. The state investigates the keying of my car as a hate crime. I may or may not get a slap on the wrist once it comes out that I faked the hoax myself.
In case you didn't know: Scott has touched on how progressive policies can increase discrimination (by a rational actor). Ctrl + F "daycare" in Against Murderism
More options
Context Copy link
If progressive policies cause people to be more negatively inclined towards progressive favored "protected" groups, that doesn't mean that progressivism is perpetuating prejudice against such groups necessarily. AA would cause more suspicion bu ift people would be justifiably more suspicious of the quality of Affirmative Action hires, then that would be correct. Justifiable negativity is not prejudice. And unjustifiable positivity for one group would itself be unfair on other groups.
This force is in competition between progressivism cultivating irrational attitudes that are pro the groups benefiting from affirmative action. For example, if a group commits more crime but some people buy into a conspiracy theory that the cops and judges are just framing them, then progressivism benefits excessively this group actually. Distorting reality in its favor and at expense of other groups.
Additionally, if negativity is prejudice, then policies such as stop and frisk, are born of a society willing to be critical, suspicious and negative towards say blacks. Why isn't it prejudice then?
The prejudice against groups progressivism disfavors and in favor the groups it favors is the serious problem, and not progressivism inspiring bigotry against blacks. Actually, this idea of prioritizing the groups progressivism favors as victims of racism is part of the problem of progressivism and how it can be bigoted. Certainly it can inspire a backlashe, which if proportionate the backlash is actually the good thing and the bad thing is the problem that inspired it, and if disproprotionate, sure there might be something to criticize from that angle, focusing on the disproportionality. However, that shouldn't be the primary criticism of progressivism over it directly favoring certain groups too much, and being overly hostile towards other groups.
More options
Context Copy link
The opposite of "intentionally allowing criminal activity" isn't "stop and frisks and three strike mandatory sentencing"
Opposite Island would probably look more like "publicly torturing the criminal after a same-day trial and hanging their mutilated body in the town square to rot, with a sign saying what they did"
(For real crimes like rape and murder of course, the little stuff they'd probably just take the criminal to the town square and whip them a few times, or put them in the stocks for the afternoon, etc)
More options
Context Copy link
What if the authorities had a track record of previously discriminating against pink VW Beetle owners, would you still expect the owners to trust the authorities to use their powers for good? Perhaps they were only allowed to live among other pink VW Beetle owners and prior to that Pink VW Beetle drivers were forced to entertain people by re-enacting a pinker version of Herbie the Love Bug without recompense for many years. And those that fled were apprehended, returned, and perhaps even had their Beetle destroyed. They also had to drive their Beetles in parades in order to claim rights other car owners already had. Sure, maybe they would use their power to only arrest the pedo pink VW Beetle driver, but how sure would you feel that it would never be turned against the rest?
Perhaps you could combat this by enacting policies to recruit pink VW Beetle owners into positions of power, to give them more of a say in governance, and success but non pink VW drivers may think this is favoritism, and some other pink VW Beetle owners may think those taking this opportunity have sold out, and are now working for big Mercedes.
We can draw this across to gun control too, many 2A people I know say that even if there was an idea they think might be useful (say around mental health checks and guns being taken while being carried out, as most gunnies in rural PA seem to have some story of someone they know shooting themselves), they couldn't trust the government to not use this power to simply try and confiscate guns more broadly as part of a ratcheting approach.
In other words you can't evaluate the responses to what might seem like perfectly sensible laws, without looking at the history, because people are not perfectly optimized decision making machines, they decide on feelings and those are informed by what has gone before, and what they have personally experienced. If your grandfather was arrested for parking his pink VW Beetle in a blue Camry only spot, would you really feel confident that new laws targeting Pink VW Beetle drivers would be fair?
More options
Context Copy link
I think it actually creates the problems it’s intended to solve simply by causing people to hyper focus on the issues of unchanging traits like race gender and sexuality and gender rather than looking to solving the problems. The problem of police brutality in general is much more solvable if it’s not seen through the lens of which race is being targeted. Economic growth in the ghettos and focusing on education will do more to fix the problems in that community than all the rest of the efforts of trying to fix things by focusing on race.
More options
Context Copy link
If I understand the analogy correctly this is an important question. I think part of the answer is that it's a tragedy if the commons. You pay a personal cost for combating wokeness, but your individual vote, campaigning, etc. is unlikely to have a discernable effect: if policy is going to change it is going to be the work of thousands or millions of people a d will happen with or without your effort. Even taking the time and effort to show up at the voting booth on election day incurs a personal cost with no personal gain.
The same thing is true of as a soldier in battle, of sticking your head up over the sandbags to fire a shot at the enemy. The war will be won or lost no matter what you do, but you risk getting shot when you engage with the enemy. Your motive is one of principle one, while the risk is a material one. When enough people withdraw from honor and principle and cling to the material, nothing else can happen but what we are seeing.
More options
Context Copy link
See though, the reason political compasses are a (imperfect but) useful thing is that they allow you to do some disambiguation that's important here. There's actually a few not necessarily linked concepts in play here. You've got the notion of privacy as a right vs "I have nothing to hide"; you have an education-first justice philosophy vs a punishment-first one; you have a low-government approach vs a heavy-handed one; you have default community trust model vs a default suspicion model; and probably at least one other axis. Reducing the two islands to vague caricatures of culture-war "sides" isn't just inelegant, it's not representative of true opinion diversity and groupings in the population. For example, I often like to harp on the Pew Political Typology all the time which indicates that yes, divisions exist, but no, the broad groupings aren't rock solid on all issues. For crime specifically, a good third of the Dem voter base are not fully on board with progressive ideas (more or less depending on how you slice it or which aspect comes up). And it's not that each nonstandard opinion is clustered by individual. No, the chances are good that any specific given voter holds a nonstandard view on at least one if not more major, major party planks. Ditto for GOP voters.
Also, as clarification, do you mean that Pink VW Owner on island 1 is the recipient of more suspicion generally, including unspoken, or just unspoken suspicion? Is the implication that Island 2 trusts the police more thus has no reason to voice suspicion, or just that they have the same suspicion just are more vocal about it, or some other conclusion that I didn't specify?
Anyways. Frankly, I think the whole idea that criminals vote to make crime not pay is irrelevant both in scale and actual real-world practice. Career criminals, and even most casual ones, don't vote as often as citizens who, by definition, buy into the system more. See for example abysmal voting rates from prisons even in states where felons can vote.
I also think it's important to note that although you're coming at this whole thing from a sort of abstract, political theory kind of angle, that's not actually very compatible with the actual US situation. Because there's a lot of context and history that needs to be addressed. Liberals in aggregate like affirmative action because there was actual harm done historically to certain minority groups. And that value to some extent resonates with similar values and also partisan voting trends. But it's not because, broadly speaking, there's a fundamental philosophical harmony with other liberal values. See the commenter above w/r/t blank slatism who probably put it better.
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, but two comments:
I have no doubt one can develop a model in which affirmative action works to equalize groups and they will not equalize in the absence of it. But I am very doubtful the assumptions of such a model hold in real life.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link