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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the culture wars to me is that I repeatedly see attacks on principles so fundamental we don't even have explicit definitions for them, and then the battle lines that get drawn up are nowhere near that critical issue. Examples:

  • Censorship: in every HN thread people immediately start arguing about whether tech companies should be regulated to allow all speech, or whether private companies can do whatever they want and only the government is prevented from infringing on freedom of speech. Admittedly there is a "freedom of speech" principle at play here that does have a name, but everyone seems to have forgotten that it meant we were supposed to be tolerant of opinions that we don't agree with, which has almost nothing at all to do with terms of service on huge tech platforms. I think Scott is one of the few people I've ever seen address that directly (both in tolerating the outgroup and another article more directly about free speech). But there's a second issue even more central to censorship by big tech platforms: they all claimed to be huge proponents of free speech, gave soaring speeches during the Arab Spring about their high minded principles. Abandoning that is something that should cause us to withdraw a lot of trust and goodwill, even if we agree with their new policies. (Also, suspiciously, the two options people argue about both involve giving government and corporations more power: regulate big tech, or give up on free speech as a general principle. Don't get me started on astroturfing.)

  • Downthread there's a discussion about diversity casting in TV and movies. The most common argument I hear against it is that it's not appropriate for the setting, and the most common argument I see in favor is that people should be able to see characters that look like them. Those both sound fine to me, as far as they go. The deeper issue here only clicked for me when my facebook friend said to a Mermaid-traditionalist "if you're arguing that a Black little mermaid doesn't seem to fit the role, are you going to say the same thing when a Black woman applies to a job?" And I realized, right, the original claim was that Hollywood (mostly implicitly or systemically, less-so explicitly) racistly excluded people who weren't white and pretty. Which sure looks true - I was blown away when I started noticing how many things failed the Bechdel Test. But now we've replaced that with explicit, proudly-advertised activism, yet the battle lines are drawn such that we've just flip-flopped on who's wearing the fig-leaf of "[white/black/gay/trans] Ariel seemed like the appropriate artistic choice". Meanwhile we've damaged two deeper principles: keeping politics out of where it doesn't belong, and actually meaning it when we said that we wanted race not to matter.

  • Also downthread is a debate about whether it's okay to spell out racial slurs here. And I remember the wave of renamings that started with what seemed like a ridiculous objection to "master/slave" used in the context of IDE hard drives, and ended a few years later with those terms actually being renamed in a lot of technical contexts. In both cases the battle lines are drawn along "these words hurt people / replacing them causes more harm than gain". But the deeper issues to me are about injecting politics into places it shouldn't be (same with fast food joints becoming politically loaded), and the notion that we shouldn't taboo words at all. There was a brief period a few years ago when atheism was winning and we were all proud of the fact that we could say curse-words and anything else we wanted without the sky-fairy torturing us forever. Now we've flipped sides on that too.

Ultimately this boils down to two problems I worry a lot about. One is that the whole idea of having principles at all seems to have much less support than it should; people simply don't notice or care as much as they should about flip-flops or even expecting anyone to state or stand by a consistent set of principles at all. And while this isn't a place with obvious battle lines, I've noticed people quietly excusing it here and there. It's not immediately obvious why it matters to have principles! And I think this is why it's easy for people to discard. But it's really important! Principles are what let us be predictable agents, able to work with others who aren't part of our tribe and don't share all our values. That seems, like, utterly critical to any kind of functioning society, but I had to re-derive it for myself because nobody seems to talk about it.

The other is that the principles that people are discarding are so fundamental, so dyed in the wool for civilization, that we don't have explicit names for them or standard answers as to why they should be preserved. I noticed this when I saw JBP proclaim "tell the truth" as one of his 12 rules for life -- it was like, oh, right, that's really important, isn't it? How did I lose sight of that? Things like "words shouldn't be redefined by political fiat", "leaders should be held to high standards of personal integrity", "you should be prepared to explain yourself and lose status when you abandon a principle you endorsed", "don't inject politics into non-political contexts". All those seem to me like load-bearing walls for civilization, and we shouldn't dismantle them just to get an advantage in some other debate.

To end on a positive note, I do think this is an addressable problem. But we have to be quicker to look past the officially endorsed battle lines, find the valuable nameless things that are being sacrificed, contemplate them long enough to describe why they're important, and then defend them directly. That's actually been a silver lining for me: now there are a bunch of load-bearing pillars of civilization I've actually noticed and contemplated. I just wish it wasn't because someone was trying to burn them down.

What are under-appreciated values you see that routinely get sacrificed to Moloch in the culture war?

Do I really need to beat my usual drum again. Is the elephant in the room going to be unaddressed. Okay then...

Remember when governments across the formerly liberal democratic west put their entire populations under home imprisonment? Shut schools, workplaces, international travel, recreation, and places of workship? Brutally attacked even the most mild-mannered of protests? Implemented sophisticated schemes to segregate the population by whether they have taken a series of injections assigned to them by the government? Whipped up hatred of those who disagreed with any of this? Conspired with big tech to censor voiced dissent online, when they didn't just go straight to arresting people for facebook posts instead?

The three things you've listed above are rounding errors compared to this.

Don't imprison the entire population was a principle so fundamental that, at least in the Anglosphere, it dates back to the middle ages with Habeas Corpus. The load-bearing walls for civilization have already been dismantled. Detente in the culture war is over. Liberal democracy has been replaced with "the government makes you wear a seatbelt, so it can do whatever the fuck it wants, and beat the shit out of anyone who disagrees". I don't see a path to putting the walls back up at present, because it's hardly like our current leaders are ever going to admit to committing crimes against humanity and rebuke their past policy as the unthinkable actions they were.

Don't imprison the entire population was a principle so fundamental that...

Was it? I think the principle debate here would be over whether it is ever acceptable for the government to restrict movement in the interest of safety. Would you bite the bullet and say that it is never okay, even if doing so would avert a dire outcome?

"Those who would give up essential Liberty".. etc?

I would literally say never and it is worth spending millions if not billions of lives to make sure the answer is never.

This is what we claimed to fight for in all those wars... freedom. If the state sets itself up against the freedom of the citizenry then it has abandoned every charge it ever held, betrayed all our dead, declared itself an enemy of the human race as it seeks to reduce the human to merely an expendable resource of the regime... and unlimited violence is justified to bring about its end as such.

A free person responds to those who'd chain them with violence. A feral animal has this much dignity. one who wouldn't is neither free, is surrendering their personhood, and is barely even an animal anymore, they have accepted being a mere symbiote, a cell, of an alien entity who cares not for them.

Conversely, I've always interpreted coordination around medical emergencies, such as lockdowns, as one of the basic reasons to have a government to begin with.

Covid was not an emergency and protecting us from mentally ill people dragging the rest of society along with their weird agenda, no matter the cost, is one of the core functions of government under the current iteration of the social contract. If the government instead acquiesced to these weirdos then the social contract is violated and the government has forfeited the Mandate of Heaven.

Covid was not an emergency

What about hospitals overflowing, not enough ventilators, etc.?

These were fake news items. Hospitals didn’t go over capacity and ventilators were known not to be the best treatment option.

Maybe in India and Brazil, not AFAIK in the US, certainly not in Europe.

There was always talk of these things as being just around the next corner, happening any minute now, if we do not pull all the stops and do everything now. Same narrative as with climate change. Problems first exaggerated and then extrapolated to justify maximalist demands for whatever measures. Not necessarily because anyone likes the measures, but these things seem to take on dynamics of their own in interactions between public, politics and media.

There was also the argument "people don't understand exponential growth. If it goes to half capacity it could easily go to full capacity tomorrow".

Turns out that people did understand exponential growth.

Those who proclaim "live free or die" should really decide which one they are, because at this moment most of them are neither dead nor free, not in the "you are only free when you can choose anything, not just anything that conveniently aligned with what the state is fine with you doing" meaning.

Otherwise what is this, a quantum superposition "until observed by the state" or something?

It's posturing or signalling. Useful to rally like-minded people to yourself, but not literally the intended course of action. But your question was rhetorical, wasn't it?

Oh it's simple, I'm just not going to obey.

I'll do whatever a free man does and if the State obstructs me I'll take any means of circumventing their tyranny up and including destroying the State if that's expedient.

But most of the time, forgery, piracy and contraband are enough. Killing the agents of tyranny is fun to boast about but it's never been a reliable means of securing freedom unless you have overwhelming firepower.

I'm just not going to obey. To the death.

Is that hypothetical or have you actually been doing any of these things?

Nice try feds.