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 -
It's who whom the whole way down. Unless my memory fails me entirely, which it may, I can barely tell half of you semi-anonymous handles apart, TracingWoodgrains fed LibsOfTiktok false info once upon a time to in an effort to delegitimize her as well.
He did, and went to consider it justified, since the fake furry school worksheets included reference to My Little Pony, which, according to TW, LoTT should have spotted and should have tipped her off they are fake. To me a weak argument, since MLP isn't something people outside the very online niche are familiar with, and even if it is referenced it doesn't mean the worksheet is fake, since a teacher referencing some media for children, to make it more relatable, isn't outside the realm of possibility.
But since he has established a pattern of pointing of dishonesty, even by people who politically 90% agree with him, I see him as force for Truth.
Maybe. Maybe not. You either wage information war to humiliate, alienate and discredit your political opponents, or you don't. TracingWoodgrains may be of a different quantity than David Gerard, but he's proven he isn't of a different type.
That's your takeaway from the whole saga? It's far more reasonable to conclude that LibsofTikTok is the equivalent of David Gerard. She's a culture warrior to whom truthfulness matters not one whit through and through but unlike Hanania doesn't have the intelligence and social grace to present as respectable. I support her name being dragged through the mud for the same reason I support Gerard's name being dragged through it.
Do you think Trace would have published if the attempt to scam LoTT had failed? Or perhaps chosen a progressive target if the conservative ones proved less gullible than he hoped?
If a test is only allowed one result, it's not exactly a good example of truthfulness or nonpartisanship.
In the end this is the same issue LoTT has. Nutpicking is extraordinarily powerful--anyone can find thousands of terrible examples of people in the outgroup doing despicable things. Whether you're finding these examples, or creating them yourself, if you only target one side you're going to create a slanted, biased perspective of that side for anyone who follows you.
Trace's journalism since then has been significantly better, and he's also criticized his own side somewhat. While I have serious complaints about how this was handled it was still in the end a criticism of extreme leftists, meaning that while his most dedicated attempts at criticism may still be reserved for the right, there is still at least some degree of evenhandedness, more than I have come to expect from virtually any journalist.
Taking a look at LoTT's current front page (1, 2, 3, 4) I see a lot of partisanship, but much less nutpicking--most of the things being highlighted are more "look at large ongoing events progressives explicitly say they support" than "look at random isolated events which I claim are the inevitable result of progressive policies."
As I've said before, I don't mind the LoTT takedown. But, looking at the two accounts nowadays, it's unclear which is actually the better source of truth. Trace seems to be extremely honest about the facts of the case, really digging into the details, but will spin the broader picture/takeaway to such an extent that I have a hard time believing anything he says without verifying it myself. I've seen him say things that to me are nearly "the sky is never blue" level. LoTT seems broadly more interested in partisanship and less interested in the truth, but I have never seen it tell such whoppers as "[The FAA case] is not a fundamentally partisan issue".
I follow Trace, and don't follow LoTT, but they're really not so different as you make them out to be.
Well, given that Trace has spent a ton of time documenting the FAA hiring scandal which made the progressives look terrible, I conclude that he is actually interested in the truth rather than a partisan for a side in the culture war.
I concur with you sentiment that the FAA thing is fundamentally partisan. The 'equality of outcomes' demand which set the bad incentives which resulted in officials doing what they did was very much a demand of the progressive side, not bipartisan.
Personally, I think the test cheating is a direct consequence of the law making unrealistic, contradictory demands. "You have to hire based on merit, but you also have to hire enough black people, otherwise you are a dirty racist" is not a consistent goal in a world where black people are on average less qualified for whatever reasons -- something has got to give. So yes, I fully blame the progressive 'equality of outcome' laws for that.
The left-wing media shares my sentiment, because they elected mostly not to cover that story at all for what I assume are partisan reasons.
Suppose party X got rid of all restrictions on gun ownership and all public funding for mental health. Then some psychotic person buys an auto rifle and shoots up some mall. For some weird reason, Trace is the only one to report on it. He also says something like (changed words in italic):
We should give Trace 100 truth points for covering the issue. We can debate if we should deduct a point for also calling it "not a fundamentally partisan issue" or if that was taken out of context, but either way, his credentials as someone who is willing to hurt progressive causes in the name of the truth are established.
Why not both? The way I see it, partisanship and truth-seeking are only somewhat contradictory. A pure truth-seeker is probably a mathematician or philosopher, and a pure partisan will lie, cheat, and steal to get what they want, but there are infinite combinations of the two qualities between those extremes.
The average reasonable person is aware of status games and plays them to at least some extent. Being a truth-seeker will earn you status in most circles. Being left-liberal will earn you status in most circles. When choosing what to cover there are tradeoffs between the two. I see the FAA scandal as such a good scoop that it was worth being somewhat critical of far-left extremists, and losing Progressive Points, because in this case the exchange rate for Truth Points is very good. The LoTT piece was pretty much the same but in reverse, losing some Truth Points in exchange for plenty of Progressive Points.
A rational person will pursue all such opportunities and gradually gain status in their circles in both respects. A partisan will perhaps ignore Truth Points entirely. I don't think Trace is a partisan, and I think he's chosen a reasonably Truth-slanted exchange rate between the two currencies, though of course I wish he were more on my side.
I strongly disagree with this. If the motivation for the FAA's actions was solely to obey seemingly contradictory laws, it would have followed the lead of all the other departments that are not in trouble. Or just done what it has always done, which didn't get it in trouble.
You're telling me that an organization which was not breaking any laws, in a time where its actions weren't being litigated anywhere, went way out of its way to secretly adopt new questionably legal policies, out of a desire to obey the law? Do you really think, if they thought their actions were legal, they would have hid them as they did? Surely if their motivation was to obey the law better, and they thought their policies were less likely to be litigated than the previous ones, they would trumpet the policy from every rooftop in order to ensure everyone knew about the new, safer, more legal policy.
No, that's just ridiculous. Equality of outcome laws had virtually nothing to do with these policies. The leaders wanted a racial spoils system, knew it probably wouldn't be legal, and implemented it anyways, out of pure ideological fervor.
This would hit a lot harder if there were prominent Republicans directly advocating for school/mall shootings, the way there are prominent Democrats directly advocating for reparations and other similar programs.
A better example would be abortion. Let's say X gets raped and tries to get an abortion but can't, because in her state abortion is banned even in cases of rape and incest. There are (a few, I think) prominent Republicans who advocate for these sorts of laws. In this case if Trace had said
then I would say the same thing--no! Obviously not! Plenty of people do want to defend that situation, but are smart enough not to do so in public, knowing it's outside of the current Overton window. And it's extremely partisan, because the people who made those laws are still in power and haven't apologized or otherwise expressed any regret at all, nor have any of their supporters condemned them for this. It's not a policy failure, it's a policy success, and the partisans whose policies worked as intended are still writing up new similar policies. (To bring the analogy full circle, Pete Buttigieg and co. are still appointing similar people to positions of power).
As far as I'm concerned Trace is better than any other journalist that I can think of, and deserves praise for that, but it's an amazingly low bar. I often visit the Fox News website rather than CNN's, not because I like it more or because it's more honest (CNN wins on both counts for me) but because its lies are far clumsier and more transparent. Trace takes this a step further, keeping every detail honest, but skillfully crafting the narrative such that if you're not paying attention you'll be led to the exact opposite of the correct conclusion, even with all of the relevant facts in hand. In the FAA case, one might conclude that the whole mess was just a bunch of innocent nonpartisan officials struggling to fulfill the law, rather than hyperpartisan officials fighting to secretly ignore the will of the people and enact their preferred agendas instead.
I don't think this is fair to me at all. This is the final paragraph of my article.
That's not a claim of struggling to fulfill the law--it's a claim that people did terrible things, got exposed as being terrible things, and have left a black eye on institutions that people have failed to pay attention to for partisan reasons.
I said, and will continue to say, that it is not fundamentally partisan. When I speak with partisans involved in it about the specific details, including ones with ties to the institutions in question, people are outraged. People certainly respond to it in partisan ways, but inflaming it as an issue where the people whose laps it got dumped in have no way to save face, where they're either conquered or they stick to their guns and win, does not actually help the issue get solved.
I will absolutely own up to framing my articles in ways that make people more likely to listen to them, but I think it's a grave misreading to take it as me absolving anyone of responsibility or treating it anything as other than a blatantly corrupt institutional failure on all levels.
My central claim is that the lawsuit was not built on bad decisions. Every decision taken was calculated and intentional, and if they hadn't been caught it would have provided precisely the outcome they were aiming for. It's clear from the context that you meant "bad" as in "misguided but with good intentions" when the reality is the exact opposite. The proper functioning of the FAA wasn't "broken", it was purposefully subverted. Much of your language throughout the piece aims to paint the actions taken by the FAA as a series of mistakes rather than what they actually were, a series of hyperpartisan stratagems driven by extremists.
The people who did this were not making mistakes. They were rationally pursuing their goals, which I happen to vehemently disagree with. The only "mistake" they made was getting caught. They weren't pressured into it either, they actively pursued these policies, doing their best to hide them from the public eye. Keep in mind that the FAA funded the studies whose proposals it adopted.
Or, let me be more clear here. The FAA is clearly, obviously, subject to more pressure from the voters and the pilot schools than from random black pilot organizations. If they were under pressure from the NBCFAE, they must have been under at least a hundred times that much from other organizations, yet it was the former they "caved" to. Is it really so surprising to you that leftist officials, put in place by higher-up leftists, under a leftist administration, would prefer "caving" to extreme leftist policies than to what you describe as "nonpartisan" ones? No, they were obviously actively pursuing the agenda they loudly claimed to be pursuing, even if it took a bit of agency laundering to nominally place the blame on an external activist organization.
When I mentioned that, I was responding to this:
from @quiet_NaN. That said, when you describe predecessors' behavior as happening because they were "between a rock and a hard place in the impossible task of avoiding disparate impact while preserving objective standards", I think that's pretty straightforwardly a claim that they were struggling to fulfill the law, yeah.
I know plenty of partisans who would fully support the FAA's actions here. I know of partisans too--namely the ones who perpetrated the whole thing. Now that the jig is up the smart ones obviously won't defend it, but they will deny and deflect, arguing that nobody in the FAA knew it was happening, or that only a few people knew but were rogue elements, or maybe the whole FAA knew but not Pete, or maybe Pete knew too but now he has to defend his predecessors' actions or he gets, as you put it, "conquered."
You don't strike me as partisan but your framing of this situation certainly makes me doubt that judgement. If rogue elements in the FAA did this (as has been established), that's evidence that higher-ups supported it or were at least fine with it. This has been established too--the internal review decided that the "rogue elements" had done nothing wrong. If the higher-ups supported it, that's evidence that the FAA as a whole, and people such as the secretary of transportation, were also fine with this behavior and/or actively supported it. Your behavior seems to be to report the facts accurately, then fight viciously to deny any possibility that higher-ups actually knew what was going on or had any role in it. Whether they did or not, they appointed the people who did this. That alone merits an enormous reckoning, and in my opinion straight-up disqualifies such people from serving at any position in the government, let alone such a high one.
Honestly I don't even know what you mean by "fundamentally partisan." The definition of the word is "prejudiced in favor of a particular cause." Do you really think the people that did this weren't partisan? Do you think sufficiently partisan people wouldn't support this? "Nonpartisan" generally indicates something everyone can agree on, but if everyone could agree that this was bad then it wouldn't have happened in the first place.
I think this is our main disagreement. You seem to genuinely believe the higher-ups at the FAA weren't in on this. I think it's obvious they were, and this whole scheme was intentional. If the law hadn't been passed they'd still be doing it today, if they hadn't graduated to a more subtle method of accomplishing the same thing.
As I said in my original comment:
I don't think you're actively trying to mislead people, but in this case you seem to have been so charitable to the entire edifice, denying agency at every possible step, that whatever your intentions, people have been misled. You saw (I hope) the comment I was responding to chalking the whole thing up to tension between laws. If an intelligent, conservative guy walks away from your article with that takeaway, I don't understand how you can claim with a straight face that you were clearly calling it a "blatantly corrupt institutional failure."
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
More options
Context Copy link