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 -
The Chris Kaba verdict is in, and it's exactly what everyone expected.
https://news.sky.com/story/met-police-officer-who-shot-chris-kaba-cleared-of-murder-13234639
The jury reportedly took only 3 hours to decide on the verdict, indicating that it isn't exactly what you'd call a tough case. Meanwhile, the initial CPS prosecution decision iirc took nearly a full 6 months to be cleared to go ahead, indicating that there was immense deliberation on whether it should go ahead at all in the first place.
So why did it go ahead? Well, the answer is probably somewhat obvious. Now, it's normal in the UK for every police firearms discharge to result in an investigation, but to actually go to court on such shaky grounds... I can only imagine that it was to head off "community tensions".
Activists in the UK have been desperate to ape the BLM movement over here, to have their very own moment where they could take to the streets and... do whatever it is they planned on doing. We had copycat protests during 2020, with brave activists shouting "hands up don't shoot" at entirely unarmed average British police officers. This case seems to be what most of them pinned their hopes on as the trigger point; you can see from the article above that those hopes still burn brightly despite this should-be fatal blow.
So, to head off inevitable riots if they didn't prosecute, CPS decided to put an innocent man through the justice system, costing time and taxpayer money on a prosecution that was doomed from the start, in order to try and appease a community that was itching for a reason to get heated and acquire some new Nikes. Truly, to my mind there is no better representation of the utter spinelessness of our leaders and elites in the face of accusations of racism and threats of violent protest than this prosecution.
Britain and their restrictive culture around weapons. Next thing you know, they’ll require a license for operating a car.
Something I find interesting is how coverage emphasizes the “outrage” amongst firearms officers. This is the first I’ve heard of it, so I figured it was as manufactured as the charges, but apparently several hundred opted out of carrying their weapons in protest. Not very reassuring. It’s obviously in their interest to secure as many protections against misconduct as they can, and it’s obviously in the public interest to keep them on a tight leash…so long as they offer them respect. At a certain point such an adversarial relationship results in no one wanting the job. I don’t know how to design a process that doesn’t incentive both to claw for more power.
At a certain point such low pay relative to perceived risk results in no one wanting the job. If your paramilitary members (which, make no mistake, is what these particular cops are) have to risk that for every criminal/enemy combatant they kill as part of their job, they're risking sociofinancial execution, it better be paying ludicrous sums. That sum can be social wealth, that can be financial wealth, or they can be a mix (exhibit A: veteran's discount), but they must be paid regardless.
Progressives can never pay them properly because their preferred version of the paramilitary/police are the criminals that the paramilitary is supposed to be shooting, and their core revealed preference is that they just want to force men [and increasingly, the women who work like men] to labor and risk for free (just like Traditionalists reveal preference for free female childbirth and risk) which means they're incapable of fixing that.
Liberalism was that process, but we are unwilling or unable to afford it any more (which resulted in people being able to claw for more power, and ripped it apart in the process).
Replacing gynosupremacy (current regime) with androsupremacy (ancien regime) is known to fix a security problem in the short term (which is why the Traditionalists feel, correctly, that they can fix this by "retvrning") but at the cost of everything above Security on Maslow's hirerarchy (which stops being a problem when the average man is priced out of everything above it anyway).
So yes, that means that the rough men will use the fact everyone else requires their protection to angle for more power (or must become rough men themselves, which is a victory for the rough men). If the ruling party is unable or unwilling to negotiate they get Battle of Baghdad'd (and the soldiers protesting here is a nano-scale version of that) as the soldiers throw down their tools and cheer for the Taliban... because the Taliban will give those men the power over women that the former society could or would not and every soldier or potential soldier knew it.
I think they probably cared less about power over women and more about power over their abusers. Ending the practice of bacha bazi was a prominent selling point for the Taliban the last two times it took power in Afghanistan. Maybe we should have considered not covering up such practices by our "allies", but ensuring first-world LGBT people aren't smeared as pedophiles is apparently more important than preventing child sexual abuse.
It seems more likely that we wanted to destroy the Taliban because they harbored Osama Bin Laden after 9/11; cobbled together a messy coalition of liberals, tribal traditionalists, and the plain corrupt; and then looked the other way for the sake of maintaining coalition politics than it is we supported child rape at the behest of domestic LGBT politics.
Yes and no. Not raising a stink about it when we encountered it was "maintaining coalition politics". Classifying the investigation into the practice and the resulting report on it was for domestic politics.
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