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?
-- Gambling. I thought when my state legalized gambling, what's the big deal? It's legal in Atlantic City and Vegas, plenty of people travel there to gamble, and everyone knows someone with a poker game or buddies who keep a pool of NFL bets going. Why not keep that revenue in the state? I miss the old equilibrium. When one had to take, at least, a two hour trip to Atlantic City to gamble, there was at least a certain occasion to it, now there are guys gambling away their paychecks to a video poker machine in the back of a truck stop. And don't even get me started on phone gambling. The idea of people losing huge sums of money without ever leaving their house or talking to anyone is horrifying to me. All the old forms of gambling that lead me to view it as harmless had strong social elements: your local poker night was really everyone hanging out together, the office super bowl pool was a bonding experience, even the casino in Atlantic City had the advantage of travel and adventure and glamour. Legalizing it in every state removes the glamour of the destination gambling trip, and turns it into just a straight suck of money from the foolish to the pockets of casinos. If we're going to have sports gambling, we should just make it a state monopoly like the lottery, and shuffle all the profits into the education system.
-- Aging. When I was a teenager I bought into the Sex and the City-era framing for how the first half of your life path was supposed to go: a series of romantic adventures, serial "serious" monogamous relationships, and then at 30-35 getting "serious" about settling down. Plenty of time! People getting married later was treated as an unalloyed good in the media, and I should note that my own parents married late and had me late. Now, a few days from 33, great Odin's raven how did no one tell us how fast we were going to get old? The number of single friends I have who got unbelievably fat or have aged out of their looks! I talk to my friends, and especially my wife's friends, and they have these romantic problems, and the sad grainy truth is that they should have made hay while the sun shined and hooked someone ten years ago when they were still hot. There are girls we went to college with, and they were reasonably in the same league as my wife at the time, and now they're completely unfuckable, to the point where effort will never get you back where you were.
And it's blackpilling, because there's no advice to give them on their relationship strategies that doesn't run back up against that cold hard fact: you're fat now and there's nothing you can do that will deliver what I would consider good results for them at this point. And I knew that there would be some point where that would be true, but I thought it was 40 or 50 or after the third kid. Not 32. It hits women harder, but hits men too, the curves that online dating sites show men getting more attractive only in relative terms. The media told us at 32 we'd just be hitting the peak of our hotness, not that better than half would have fallen off.
Somebody needs to warn the youth, we need to be sending our freshmen to college this fall with a copy of Princeton Mom as required reading. In media I felt like the point at which one really aged, in the sense of looks, was at least 40. Certainly, though I wouldn't watch the show until after I was married it was just in the air at the time culturally, Sex and the City's girls dealt with the idea of aging in their 30s and 40s, but they didn't even have friends or side characters who got fat, or were completely aged out of attractiveness in dating. There's a huge number of women, and a decent number of men, in my social circle where I look at them and I'm like wow you've already missed the window. It's not "over" for them, after all they might find each other, but their championship window has closed and that's indescribably sad for me. I can't imagine not being hot at your own wedding, that should be near the hottest you've ever been, and some of the weddings I've been to lately it's a joke. And these people are only in their early 30s! You have a narrow window to really maximize your talents in looks, narrower if you don't take care of yourself. Pick ye rosebuds while ye may!
-- Donald Trump (on foreign policy). I voted for him in the 2016 primary after he got up at the debate and said that Iraq was a big fat mistake. While I'm a bit more of an internationalist, I bought into his America First isolationism as at least reasonably peaceful. In office he mostly got captured or railroaded by neocons in his administration, or turned out to lack the temperament for peace. Continued most of the bad policies of his predecessors, while adding a few new ones of his own, and reducing the reliability of the USA as a global partner around the world.
-- Dress shoes are dead, and my decade of resistance has been pointless. No one wears them anymore.
-- Church. I sort of thought church would always be there. That I could wander in and out of religion as I chose, and there would always be other people who kept the place going while I figured my shit out. Now we're seeing churches die out in my town and it's dawned on me that I, me, personally, I'm responsible for maintaining these things. That if I don't do it no one will. I'm back at my church, but even then it makes me sad seeing the parking lot at the historic lutheran church near my house and knowing that they're dying. And it's not like I can do anything for two churches at once. There's got to be a German word for the sadness at seeing things that you didn't like die out? These assumed bedrocks of our lives just aren't as secure as we thought they were.
-- Marijuana, from the opposite direction. I didn't use weed until I was married, and I didn't get it, I was a straight edge teen. Legalized marijuana has been a Good Thing. Notwithstanding my immense dorkiness, when I was a teenager, I could get pot more easily than I could get alcohol. I knew guys who dealt pot from the Boy Scouts or from basketball or from debate club, it was normal to know someone who sold pot. Because the marijuana distribution system was already illegal and underground, so they weren't exactly checking IDs, and a teenage could go buy a half pound and chop it up and sell it, where alcohol had to be stolen from an adult or a store. Now, marijuana is mostly distributed through legal channels, so you equally need a 21 year old willing to get you weed or beer, and fewer teenagers can swing that. And we've seen that decline in youth drug use. See attached image. Youth drug and alcohol use has continued to drop during the process of marijuana legalization. The kids are, by that standard, alright. Further, traffic deaths have not correlated with weed legalization driving high is probably bad, but it's not as bad as driving drunk so we see a replacement effect.
In general, Marijuana is and was normalized already, even before legalization. And I'm of the opinion that there is a deleterious impact on civic fabric from ordinary, law abiding citizens being anti-cop, in the sense of breaking the law and hoping not to get caught by the police. The policeman should never be the enemy of the citizen, the citizen should always see the policeman's presence as a positive. That's why I'm also in favor of more reasonable drinking age laws. There should only be laws against things that the average person would find morally blameworthy. Laws that over-reach and criminalize the conduct of ordinary citizens set up a conflict between the state and the citizen.
And, for that matter, I use thc these days, and I think done right it is the conservative family drug. The effects are, in context, ideal for relaxing after a hard day with people you love. Alcohol leads people to get into fights with their family, to sleep with people they shouldn't. Marijuana leads to hanging out with people who annoy you and just laughing it off, it makes sex with your spouse better but sex with anyone else unthinkable.
/images/17262286826661794.webp
Re: Aging, I find it very odd to attribute ballooning in weight to "aging". It's not aging doing that, it's eating.
Now in some sense that's true of most things, because being alive longer is more time for things to go wrong. If everyone played brutal high-intensity sports all their lives to the point where they accumulated new permanent injuries each year, then one could believe that it's normal to become functionally immobile by your mid-20s. But I still wouldn't attribute that to age. Even if all aging is accumulated damage/entropy, I think there's some sense of "reasonable wear and tear" which should apply.
Not arguing against your main point which seems decent enough, although "lock it down early so you can then bloat into a cave troll" seems unfair to your partner. I don't think there's any shortcut that lets you avoid taking care of your body, especially since you're the one who's stuck inhabiting it.
Speaking of that, the biggest take-away I noticed is that people diverge a ton they get older. Two eight year olds will have a lot in common just because they haven't had much time to accumulate the effects of their good and bad choices, genes, injuries, luck, etc. The gulf can be massive.
That is basically the dynamic of aging and weight gain because (pre ozempic) essentially no one loses weight in a significant way. So if every year there's a certain chance one gets fat, then every five years multiples that chance, and it catches most people eventually unless they're working to minimize it.
Maybe this is idiosyncratic to me, but in my mind being in a good relationship is encouragement and support to avoid bloating into a cave troll. My wife and I encourage each other to work out and stay in shape, both directly and indirectly. We hold each other accountable, we teach each other things, I go with my wife to get her an exercise bike off Craigslist. And because my wife is hot, I feel like I have to keep it tight if I want to keep her.
While I see a lot of bad relationships take a very crabs in a bucket mentality. One of my best friends from college got a little fat, started dating a guy who was a little fat. Now every time she tries to work on basic diet and exercise, her boyfriend (now husband) talks shit on her and sabotages her. And they've both only gotten fatter.
It’s also heavily weighted by social class and region. Among rich people in Manhattan being fat is unusual (especially for women, but also men) well into one’s forties and fifties, sometimes later. Obviously many of the women have some work done, but many haven’t and obvious TV license accounted for the cast of SATC broadly reflect the average hotness of many single women in that age and class bracket in NYC then; arguably it’s better now as subtle facelift and filler techniques have improved since the early 00s, see eg. Anne Hathaway at 41. By contrast it seems like in parts of the Midwest and South people give up almost universally at 25, the men usually after they stop playing sports after college, and the women when they get married or have their first child.
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