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 recently saw a provocative bit of 4chan greentext concerning politics and gender. I'll reproduce it here as follow -
As far as analysis goes, this is obviously not especially sophisticated or historically grounded. However, it does pose an interesting problem, which is perhaps better framed in more general terms, since it applies as much to Red Tribe and Blue Tribe as it does men and women.
Imagine that the electorate of a democratic country (call it Exemplavania) comprises two political groups, A and B, constituting 40% and 60% of the electorate respectively. As a result, Exemplavania's government is run largely in accordance with the interests of group B. However, group A is significantly more powerful than group B in terms of its capacity for violence. Under what circumstances is this arrangement sustainable?
It seems to me that it's not trivial that it's unsustainable. In particular, a sustainable model might involve the following: (i) the ongoing costs to Group A of Exemplavania being run by Group B are low. (ii) the one-off costs of Group A enacting a violent revolution to enfranchise their own power are high. (iii) all members of the polity do some form of temporal discounting. In this case, members of Group A might rationally conclude that it's not worth the hassle of an uprising.
Nonetheless, I do worry a bit that political polarisation along gender lines is unsustainable. Notably, women's suffrage in most Western countries was not the result of women using violence to coerce men into accepting them as political equals. Rather, it was the result of successful ideological persuasion of male franchise-holders, achieved in no small part via the critical contributions of women to the collective industrial efforts in World War 1. Insofar as women's political tendencies remained broadly aligned with a large proportion of men (or powerful enough men), as they have done more or less until now, this arrangement seems pretty stable. However, if we see continued political polarisation along gender lines, as we've seen in South Korea for example, and this leads to political outcomes that are strongly disfavoured by a large majority of men, then at some point the decision to enfranchise women may be in jeopardy.
Curious what others think!
It's a poor analysis, as you say, because elections are not "proxies for war." Democracy wasn't invented as an alternative to war, and obviously democracies have not resulted in the end of war. Minorities having disproportionate electoral power is a problem in a lot of electoral systems; we've debated this here quite a lot. But the 4chan argument is just another iteration of the very unsophisticated premise we see repeated here all the time: "Women are weaker than men, therefore men should control women."
The increasing hostility between the sexes is certainly a problem, but to believe that the solution is for women to accept a subordinate role without political autonomy requires believing either (a) that women could be persuaded to accept this or (b) persuading men to revert to treating women as property. If we had an apocalypse or something it would undoubtedly be a pretty rough time for women (which is why @KulakRevolt is so popular with certain types of people), but short of that, you aren't going to persuade most men, and certainly not most women, that giving women rights was a mistake.
I don't foresee the South Korean government deciding that the solution to plummeting birth rates is to take away women's voting rights or institute some sort of YA dystopian regime. It's certainly not going to happen here. I think all the trads and redpillers predicting some sort of End of Feminism are wishcasting, and they are just as ridiculous as the feminists gloomcasting in the other direction by calling every pushback against feminism an attempt to implement the Handmaid's Tale.
Uh, the premise I usually see is pointing out the EVOLUTIONARY reasons women are weaker than men, and how that has massive implications about things like the ability to engage in abstract reasoning, to commit to true beliefs vs socially popular beliefs, and to make self-sacrificing decisions rather than those that provide short term personal benefits.
Which is more sophisticated than the idea that because Cave MEN could overpower Cave WOMEN that's why men should be in control.
Where are you seeing that argument promulgated around here?
My friend, Afghanistan is literally doing option (b) as we speak. All it took was the removal of the U.S. military to reassert the general status quo that women can't do much to unseat.
To think that it requires an apocalypse is a bit hyperbolic.
I don't actually see "Evolutionary psychology says women are irrational and neurotic and conformist and maybe not even actually sentient* so they shouldn't have rights" as being a lot more sophisticated than "Cave men stronger than cave women, therefore they shouldn't have rights."
Afghanistan has been Islamist for a long time, so the reversion under Taliban rule is not much of a change. Also, notably, this is not happening because men were feeling increasingly dissatisfied with the cultural domination of women or a more general hostility between the sexes.
Yes, I do think it would take something like an apocalypse (or perhaps an Islamist or Christian Dominionist revolution, which is maybe only a little less likely) for that to happen here.
* Yes, an argument that has been made here
Its certainly more valid when examined critically.
Especially when the best science and studies we can muster on the topic indicate that yeah, women are more neurotic, much more conformist, and have less overall awareness of or acceptance of opinions other than their own. This isn't a claim about any specific women, but its the sort of thing we'd look at when determining what sort of factors make the sexes different.
So if the reasons for that AREN'T evolutionary to some large degree, from whence do they come?
The argument also has to account for the fact that men have been the primary political and military leaders for literal millennia, and almost NO societies anywhere in history were governed by females.
And how that might impact our culture and social norms.
The U.S. didn't recognize the right of women to vote for the majority of its history. Most of the pro-female policy changes in this country were enacted post-WWII, and mostly since the '60's.
Surely it would only take like 1 generation at most to revert back, if there were an organized movement for it?
I've said before that I think evpsych is broadly, generally correct about a lot of things, but I also think it's frequently overfitted to a particular answer that someone wants (e.g., "Why women shouldn't be allowed to vote"). Even if we accept that women are farther on the bell curve towards the neurotic and conformist axes, that's not enough to convince me they are unfit to make political decisions or have personal autonomy.
Sure, but also not really a convincing argument. We didn't have democracy for literal millennia, therefore democracy is bad! (Insert all the yeschad.jpgs you like.) More seriously, political power today is not the same as political power in an era of tyrants and might makes right being the only governing philosophy.
This is not to say I believe in "government by females." But you have to do more than spin some evpsych arguments to convince me that Dread Jim or Islam is Right About Women.
Perhaps, but as we've seen, it's a lot harder to remove a right than to grant one. I don't see any movement that doesn't involve what would essentially be some sort of coup or radical (probably violent) transformation of our political system stripping away anyone's voting rights. So "Could we undergo a Cultural Revolution" or the equivalent? Yes, but that seems much worse to me than women being allowed to vote.
I’ll steelman this.
When you’re talking about large classes of people, you have to make generalizations to draw an arbitrary line somewhere. We already do this, uncontroversially, about voting- you can, if you want to, go out and find a sixteen year old with 18+ levels of maturity. It’ll take you maybe a couple of days.
The law doesn’t care because regulating the rights and duties of different classes of people is a task for which it is of necessity a blunt instrument.
So you have the propositions 1) women are much more neurotic and conformist than men(I’ll add risk aversion because no one disputes that) 2) very neurotic, conformist, and risk averse people should not be allowed to vote 3) women should not be allowed to vote.
The disconnect isn’t actually at 2->3. It’s at 1->2. And if we do agree that sufficiently neurotic, conformist, and risk averse people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, then the most obvious question becomes ‘where is the threshold and how far is the median woman from it’. If the median woman is on the other side such that only a minority would be able to vote in the presence of an objective test for neuroticism, conformity, and risk aversion, then it is no more unjust to categorically deny women the vote than it is to categorically deny teenagers the vote- our hypothetical objective test doesn’t exist, can’t exist, and would probably be cost prohibitive if it did exist.
Steelman over- to be clear, I think at that point you’re arguing for the average woman being mentally ill, at least if you consider this a strong enough argument to stand on its own. At that point you’re arguing for women’s independence to be rolled back in toto, with things like guardianship laws. To be clear, my opposition to women’s suffrage stems from old-school views on gender roles and family in society, similar to the original anti-suffragettes. But I would sign on to a much weaker form of the above as a minor supporting argument; making decisions about groups as a class is a normal way to govern society, and it’s not normally seen as unjust.
I like the thought you’ve started but I don’t think you’ve really thought it through - or else have a deeply skewed and inaccurate view of where women are on the scale and the underlying distribution.
What you describe has an entire math background. For example, it’s highly related to logistic regression and analysis of classification/cutoff rules. Basically any time you make a cutoff, you produce a square with false positives, false negatives, etc. Analysis of whether this array of outcomes, mathematically fixed based on the underlying distribution as well as the cutoff point itself (you can also slide the cutoff point around a little bit in numerical contexts but gender spectrum stuff aside we can’t here) relies on some sort of subjective judgement about if the trade off is acceptable or not (or, considering alternative trade offs). In this context, a false positive might be “we took away the vote when really it would have been fine”, you get the idea. When your only choice of cutoff is “you are a man or woman” the numbers don’t produce anything other than a horror story for accuracy. That’s just the math of the situation. When your cutoff is numeric like age, you can actually produce a set of outcomes that are morally acceptable and practically feasible.
All this to say that again, unless you have some deeply disturbed and unrealistic idea about the actual distribution of eg female neuroticism, or simply don’t care about unnecessarily disenfranchising half the population, this idea is completely untenable. Especially if we consider the right to some degree of say in governance to be a human right of thinking people, which I do.
Well yeah, that's what the second to last paragraph was about. I understand algebra and statistics on a basic level but I lack the ability to truly model this, so I didn't try. Is the difference between the average(adult) man and woman similar to the difference between the average 16 year old and the average adult? It probably isn't that big- women don't on the whole seem to be as bad at managing their own lives as teenagers are. As I got to, arguing that the average woman is incapable of voting isn't actually an argument for American gender roles in 1910; that wasn't the argument in use against women's suffrage at the time, and American law and gender roles at the time gave women more independence than that attitude would suggest(which would be norms more similar to Saudi Arabia before the recent liberalization). Factually Iran gives women's suffrage while maintaining guardianship laws(don't know much about how they work out in practice).
Instead a western argument against women's suffrage has, of necessity, to be rooted in arguments about how individuals should interface with society- either as members of a household or on their own. And enfranchising landless males seems like it set the anti-suffragette position up for defeat on the grounds of household voting being good, except possibly for heavy reliance on gender roles. Which is what we lost on.
Being genuinely reactionary, the issue with expansion of the franchise dates back to the introduction of universal male suffrage, which made truly universal suffrage inevitable.
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