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 -
You
poisonedderailed the discussion by leading with this. Almost no normies actually think communism is good, nor are they yearning for it to any great degree. At worst they have some uninformed ideas that, if you squint, can sort of seem communist-adjacent. Stuff like supporting price ceilings or floors in competitive industries. But even these aren't really doing much damage. Things like "building more housing leads to higher housing + rent prices" has been much more disruptive to a flourishing society, and it doesn't spring from anything related to communism, but rather from ignorance of basic economics.I put forward that normies think Nazism is bad. If you display a swastika, you are likely to suffer immediate social and possibly even legal consequences due to this belief.
What social and possibly even legal results do you observe from people displaying the hammer and sickle? If you observe a disparity, how large is that disparity? If it is indeed quite large, do you think it is perhaps too large, that the reaction to the hammer and sickle should conform more to that of the swastika? If so, what is the problem with describing this rectification as "teaching normies that communism is bad"?
I don't disagree that normies think Nazism is worse (often far worse) than Communism. That's mostly because of the Holocaust. Communism has some atrocities with higher death counts (e.g. perhaps Mao's Cultural Revolution), but the Holocaust's relatively high death toll + the deliberateness of the whole ordeal is what makes it really pop. If you squint, you can sort of see how many of the deaths in China were accidental. It's hard to do the same for death camps.
It's not that it's a bad to teach them this, it's that there's not really a point since the vast majority already believe it. Yet for some reason much of the motte thinks a huge chunk of the West still harbors Communist sympathies, so most of his answers were specifically addressing that point.
We have people who argue that on this very forum. Out yonder, in the broader universe, normies who believe whatever's on TV-that-isn't-H2, are not making informed studies of the holocaust to argue that it couldn't have been an accident. They're being told it was deliberate. The holocaust is just like evolution; people don't make up their minds after seeing evidence. They make up their minds on the basis of conformity and then seek out evidence to confirm it.
A huge chunk of the elites of society are informed by people who are actual literal out and out marxists who use falsified marxist postulates as inputs in their theorems. Very little of this has to do with support for command economics, and you can have non-marxist totalitarian command economies.
And we just had Tucker, who informs almost the entire Republican right, interviewing a Nazi with Elon Musk promoting it. Would you take that as evidence that anti-Nazi efforts in the US have failed and that we must now quintuple down on them?
Communism and Nazi sympathies are contrarianism born from negative partisanship, not genuine broad support for those ideologies.
Considering that interviewing a Nazi and promoting the interview aren't indicative of any sort of positive opinion on Nazism - in fact, both behaviors are pretty much orthogonal to one's support of or opposition to the ideology, or any ideology - I'm not sure how this could be claimed to be evidence of such a thing.
This idea only works if a person is seriously committed to exploring viewpoints on their own merits rather than using that as a shield to broadcast highly controversial views. Tucker and the people who watch him might not fully agree with Nazi viewpoints as they're espoused, but they probably agree with at least some of them, and more importantly wish they were in the Overton Window in order to make their own views more palatable.
Sure, but you have no credibility with which to make the judgment whether they're seriously committed to exploring viewpoints on their own merits or using it as a shield to broadcast highly controversial views that they want to pull into the Overton window. In general, very few people have that level of credibility when talking about other people's behaviors, and specifically, if those other people are people one disagrees with or dislikes, then they definitely have no credibility in determining such things. If I disagree with them, then regardless of the underlying reality, of course I'll convince myself that these bad people with bad ideas are dishonest cynics who are cynically being dishonest in order to sneak in their bad ideas to the mainstream, and as such, my conclusion that that's what they're doing carries no weight.
This is why, again, interviewing a Nazi or promoting such an interview tells us nothing about how anti- or pro-Nazi they are; it's some dimension other than the actual ground-level ideological/political beliefs that determines if someone believes that publicizing an interview with [ideological/political beliefs they disagree with] is bad. It's either ideological hubris or ideological authoritarianism or some combination of both that are the determinants.
We don't have to use mind-reading here to determine motives. Rather, we can see if he's done similar things to the other side to determine if he has a genuine interest in all sides of the discussion. Has Tucker had a good faith interview with a far left woke person before? As in, one where the goal wasn't to laugh at them or use them as a foil, but to explore their views as he's comfortable doing with Nazis? I highly doubt it, but feel free to prove me wrong.
If we refuse to do this, then we capitulate to grifters who eternally claim they're "just asking questions". It's bad to give JAQing off a pass.
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