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 -
Not sure if this has been discussed elsewhere and I missed it, but Scott recently wrote an essay on prison and crime. I did not love the essay, it seemed very similar to his homelessness essay, where he presents an adversarial system where people have worked very hard to make it expensive/difficult for our society to do something, then he throws up his hands and says given the cost benefit analyses (at the current, inflated prices) it is impossible to do the solution that really sounds like it would work. So I guess we need to do something else (that I just happen to like more).
At least, that is what it felt like to me. I actually wanted to focus on something else though. In the essay he reviews three meta-analyses of the situation, and presents their biases. While it goes unstated (or I missed it), the impression I got was that he was also supposed to be a 'neutral' voice, just looking at the data. However, he got in a bit of an X spat with Cremieux over one aspect of the essay, and in the back and the forth, he said the following,
Which is interesting, because it is bringing in a component that goes totally unanalyzed in the original essay, and yet seems profoundly important to his moral and ethical understanding of the question. Am I reading this wrong, or does Scott think that putting people in prison is the moral equivalent of torturing children?
In the original essay he did drop something that sounded weird to me, but I mostly overlooked it on my first reading,
Which seems to present the modal criminal receiving a lengthy prison sentence as a married father of 2.5 children with a stable career in the tech industry who one day randomly tripped and fell into a ten year felony conviction. Not only does it seem wildly at odds with reality, it also seems at odds with the quote above, where he seems to be saying that the average prisoner is basically retarded.
Is he just saying whatever he thinks will be most convincing depending on the context to arrive at the conclusion he has already decided is morally correct?
I do not read ACX that frequently any more, but this and the homelessness essay, both feel like pieces that 2014 Scott would have torn apart, whither Tartaria indeed.
Surprised to see less coverage of these points from the article:
Part of me wants to take some time to dunk here on the Defund The Police movement. The really do hate the most at risk communities. But, that's probably mostly fruitless, especially on the Motte.
The fact remains that Scott's article points to the fact that one of the most cost effective ways to reduce the occurrence of all crimes (leaving aside incarceration and rehabilitation dilemmas) is to have more cops all over the play. In one of Roland Fryer's papers, I seem to remember a similar conclusion.
The culture war angle to this is that, as long as I can remember, Cops have been the victims of cultural denigration on the left. This can range from the goofy-humorous (Chief Wiggum on the Simpsons, the trope of donuts, Sooper Troopers and smiliar movies) to the naked hostile; ACAB, Fuck Tha Police, 90s gangster rap that clearly identifies street cops as the primary bad guy in the hood (not the, you know, murderous criminals that kill the friends of the protagonist). Even more nuance depictions of cops often share tropes of personal failings and issues with leadership and corruption - Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant, Matthew McCanaughey and Woody Harrelson in True Detective. The biggest pop culture cop show is probably Law an Order and its many spinoffs. Most of the cops here are pretty immaculate in their personal conduct, with the primary conflict in each episode generally being the dramatic discovery of a smoking gun or other key piece of information. Still, it being a drama, many episodes feature a less than comforting ending where a bad person goes to prison, but the victim is still victim-itized and has an implied hard life after the credits role. Law and Order: SVU had a rolling subplot about the emotional toll of those cases on the lead detectives.
Suffice it to say; the Culture War isn't great for cops. So, if one of the best solutions to crime is to have lots more cops, and we assume some sort of political minor miracle wherein we all agree on this and fund it, I worry about our ability to fill the ranks. Interestingly, this kind of dovetails with the other big thread this week on fertility collapse and population issues - women don't have good incentive to be Moms and we ought to improve the status of motherhood. Id argue that the status of cops - an implicitly male and patriarchal role - is also quite low and in need of some rehabilitation.
The unpersoning of Roland Fryer is quite telling. The whiff of possibility that the US 'carceral state' is not actually a product of systemic racism is so antithetical to the dominant intellectual theme that it must be quashed lest any doubt fester and spread to other 'systemic' narratives.
To recap, Roland Fryer is a black academic at Harvard who focused on racial disparities in minority vs white outcomes. He lead a successful minority-focused program (Opportunity NYC) that had positive ROI in terms of dollar spend to material outcomes. He is most controversially known for his 2016 paper on statistical encounters between police and minorities. Unlike the vast, VAST majority of black and minority studies academics, Fryer concluded that police encounters resulting in shootings or incarceration of minorities is statistically identical (if not actually less harsh) than white encounters when factoring in weapon possession, prior arrests, cooperation or other material factors.
https://jimgeschke.substack.com/p/the-rise-fall-and-redemption-of-roland
He was tarred and feathered by multiple academics subsequently, and a Title IX complaint against him resulted in his exile from academy.
The intense backlash against a successful black intellectual is quite fascinating, and identical to the contempt expressed towards any black man who explicitly rejects grievances. Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas and John McWorther. The common thread all these men have is that they do not accept that the USA is foundationally racist and that blacks failures are due to external societal factors.
The reason for costs spiralling in the USA for government spending is this externalization of responsibility: the state must prove that the disparate outcome is NOT due to the state failing an unspecified deliverable. The existence of the disparate outcome is taken as proof that the state - as the legal responsible entity of last resort - has failed in its responsibility and therefore must invest even more resources into whatever is required by these champions of the dispossessed. And when these proposed solutions - prison furloughs, death penalty appeals, welfare enhancements that differ by state, special treatment for self declared medical (including mental) conditions, redress of human right violations - fail to change recidivism rates, then it is taken as further proof that even more must be done.
The only way to break this cycle is for a criminal to accept their own responsibility and cooperate with the justice system. But with increasing resources afforded to the noncooperative, why would anyone consider cooperating? There is unlimited incentive to costlessly defect, and minimal incentive to cooperate. The prisoners dilemma fails in real life game theory because iterated games punish defectors in the next round. If there is no punishment now or forever for defecting, and the calculation is performed by do-gooder externals, then dr robotniks pressing that defect button with the biggest smile on his face.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link