Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
In the spirit of Buzzfeed and Murray's Coming Apart quiz on how thick your bubble is, what're your best questions for assessing Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe American membership accurately. I've thought of a few, wandering what everyone would add. I'm aiming more for questions that get at the cultural attitudes and feelings that underly tribal membership, rather than political positions questions, which I feel are more vulnerable to lies. So far I've got for examples and formatting, I'm setting Red as Positive and Blue as Negative, the higher your score the Redder you are:
Do you drive a car with a V8 engine?
Yes (+2), No (0), Yes but it's not my daily driver (+4), I don't know (-8), I don't drive (-2)
How often do you go to church?
About as often as I'd like (+1), less often than I'd like (+4), more often than I'd like (-4)
What is the biggest reason you prefer to buy things made in America?
They are higher quality (+4), workers are paid a fair wage (+1), it's important that we make as much as possible at home (+2), I don't prefer things made in America (-2)
How large a raise would you need to be offered to do your job in a foreign country for two years, assuming that your standard of living would remain more or less the same while you were there?
50% or more (+4), 25-50% (+2), 0-25% (-2), I would do it for less than I'm making now (-4)
‘How many goals do you use for a pickup basketball game?’- red tribers play on half a court, blue tribers play on a full one.
‘Your biggest role model is_?’ Red tribers are more likely to name a parent or grandparent, blues a public figure.
‘Should people not their parents treat older teens more as adults or children?’ Red tribers would tend towards the former, blues the latter.
‘What should schools teach, but don’t?’ Red tribe answers might be vocational skills, home ec, or shop, but are more likely to be ‘civics so people don’t let the government oppress them’, blues might answer something culture warsy like sex Ed or the age of the earth(and few schools in America actually have a YEC curriculum), but I would point to STEM as probably a more common answer.
‘Is racism or a bad culture the biggest problem facing the black community?’ Self explanatory(true HBD is a fringe position in the red tribe).
I like this one, but I think in more detail it could go
What is the best way to uplift black communities?
Increase funding for education (-2), Increase funding for police (+2), decrease funding for police (-4), increase attendance at churches (+6)
The black church is not always viewed as positively among cultural conservatives as the evangelical church, or the white Catholic or orthodox churches. Part of that is politics but part of it is quite literally that liberal views on sexual morality are not viewed as being compatible with helping the black community fixing its broken culture, because that broken culture is viewed as being downstream of promiscuity and poor family values.
I remember my mother- red tribe leftist- saying ‘black kids don’t have dads because their churches put women as heads of household’. Liberal views about family, gender, and sexuality are probably more of a mainline Protestant thing, but their existence in the black church takes a lot of the blame for black dysfunction in the broader red tribe.
Interesting! I've never heard that critique, possibly because I'm less into the Protestant infighting.
Still, I'd contend that it's much more likely that a person who says that inner cities need more religion would still say that despite that critique of existing black churches, they would simply say they need more proper churches.
Probably, yes. And there are distinctively black socially conservative religious movements, such as NOI and the black Hebrew Israelites. For some reason these groups are no more popular with the religious right than with anyone else, despite being sociologically pretty similar. On the other hand black KJV-onlyists seem popular with their evangelical counterparts despite predictable voting differences.
I would be very interested in examinations of the outcomes of kids born in these groups.
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