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 -
CTRL-F
"Antidiscrimination law" 0 results
CTRL-F
"Payment processors" 0 results
.
Woke is driven by exactly 2 things:
Federal Antidiscrimination law making it a crime, subject to forfeit of hundreds of millions, for any corporation, educational institute, government department, digital platform, or small business to be anti-woke.
Payment processors and financial institutions being legally allowed and encouraged to withdraw services to the politically disfavored despite not being private free-market companies but effective monopolies and oligopolies created by the regulatory state.
.
We know what a true free market produces: It produces the 19th century and the full spectrum of partisan outlets, and robber barons free to not only speak but enact their social vision within their businesses.
Woke is entirely a fucntion of the regulatory state claiming the power to control individual interactions, ideological statements, and financial transactions by private enterpirses.
Unless you are actually willing to say "NO the state should not get to control companies speech even if it is racist" or "No banking monopolies should not be able to refuse any customer until they have been convicted of a crime"... then you fully support the organs of woke power, you just think it should confine itself to eating people ever so far to the right of you.
laughs continually until asphyxiation This is why I have grown to dislike sweeping conclusions about the present drawn from superficial readings of history; the history being used to justify the conclusion is usually incredibly wrong. The 19th century business environment was anything but free - the market was massively distorted by, e.g., massively corrupt government dealings in land, right-of-ways, and transportation contracting. Further, there was cartelization and collusive rate-setting in the various transportation sectors, as well as a vast range of financial shenanigans including insider- and self-dealing, organized manipulation of prices and market-cornering, etc. And don't forget the massive debates over monetary policy, free silver/bimetallism, etc.
Further, it strikes me as unusual that you would be on the side of Mark Hanna et. al. against the Grangers and prairie populists. I would have thought that those beleaguered yeomen would have been your historical forebears, given some of the other positions I've seen you take.
Insider trading is part of a free market, as is market cornering, price manipulation etc. It is only state intervention that can make these schemes stable. If the milk cartels in Canada had been only private unenforceable agreements they would have collapsed decades ago.
As for corrupt government land dealings, etc. ... why yes the 5-10 areas of economics the state already touched back then were entirely corrupt... who would have thought. Thank god now the state infects every aspect of the economy and none of it is... oh wait.
.
In the 19th century people like Edison and the Wright brothers could invent in their garages and call their workers racial or sexual slurs if they wanted... now all research is regulated, all corporate speech, and all private speech by anyone employed is strictly regulated by the state with 100 million dollar settlements if an employer is insufficiently hawkish about firing employees for speech infractions, and there is not a single sector of the economy that is remotely free and we are slaves.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think the legal standards matter to some extent, but I'd caution against seeing it as the whole or the core of the problem. There are countless other legal standards, sometimes with stricter theoretical penalties, which nonetheless might as well be phantoms with how poorly they're obeyed (affirmative action bans, anti-political-discrimination laws, , all for specifically Californian rules that stop counting when the target is right).
THe thing is as soon as you have real protections of free speech woke is outcompeted.
What's the law of the internet: Every unmoderated forum inevitably become right wing?
Genuinely free communication norms without backdoor payment processors removal or state pressured "inclusion" inevitably becomes the 2000s era internet.
The institutional punishments are what drives woke... its not an ideology that can exist without institutional punishment... the current brand of it started on campus in the 2010s because the federal government preassured universities to change their enforcement of sexual harassment codes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link