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 -
Mangione's Twitter (wonder if they'll scrub it) makes him seem like a centrist techlib quoting Harari and Haidt, maybe centre-right since he also reposts some right-wing stuff about immigration and so on. Basically the furthest thing from either anprim or populist one can imagine. An ACX poster, maybe even a Motte poster. Quoting Ted Kaczynski would then be more in the "look at this interesting and radical way of thinking" sense than an expression of any true agreement.
Yeah, he really does seem like a Mottizen. He is definitely not some Reddit-tier intellect who thinks that killing scapegoats is how you affect change.
https://x.com/wesyang/status/1866199181326463467
For someone with this mindset to go on to execute some random CEO shows a potential break with reality. Apparently, his socials seem to indicate he had cut off contact with some of his loved ones for a few months prior to the incident.
Stay safe out there people, and don't do drugs.
Do you not figure some Mottizens could believe that what he did was an optimal action while in their normal state of mind? There are reasons to assume that related positions, if they are present, would be underdefended in the discourse here: after all, a defense would involve a lot of needle-threading to get dinged by mods and the community for fedposting, nor trip any possible actual fed-operated web crawlers that may have been deployed for early threat identification. (Internet lore certainly includes tales of excessive post-election Twitter posturing resulting in unexpected Secret Service home visits.)
Oh, I'm sure some Mottizens could.
But the Twitter screenshot I shared demonstrates that the killer had a nuanced view of societal problems that disavows scapegoatism. So for him to go and execute a scapegoat seems like a pretty extreme pivot.
I'm inching closer to the pitfalls I just described myself by going there, but executing such a "scapegoat" has effects that go beyond "the scapegoat is now dead", and therefore "saying that any or all problems are but-for causally due to the existence of the evil CEO is facile and wrong" and "it is a good intervention to unalive the CEO" are compatible viewpoints.
Someone could believe that this should be done pour encourager les autres, and the intervention will leave every actor that is involved in this complex system second-guessing how far they can go until some Luigi chooses to throw a koopa shell at them, and perhaps choose to exercise restraint; they could believe, in an Assangian way, that just the necessity of hiring more and fancier security details will raise transaction costs for similar enterprises in a way that will make them just a bit less sustainable; they could even anticipate the approximate shape of the popular reaction that we actually got and conclude that the society-wide soul searching and increased salience of the system that the scapegoat figureheaded alone will cause beneficial changes as a side effect, outweighing any negative ones. What impact do you figure this event had on the probability that a startup pitching "reform medical insurance" gets funded a month from now?
Between Brian Thompson and Shinzo Abe, we seem to be developing a worrying new meta of assassinations in which they can be used to martyr the assassin and move the world ideologically against the target, rather than the reverse.
Communists were already doing that a hundred years ago, it's a common trick. They even used to play themselves up as victims when the czar pardoned them for trying to assassinate his family, and it worked on the intelligencia because they are universally retarded and easily molded by any propaganda delivered with enough repetition and chutzpah.
Just one of those little moldbuggian "isn't that weird" quirks of history you only notice examining it from a critical perspective.
Anarchists, not communists. Random assassinations of public figures are a chaotic evil act, not a lawful evil one.
More options
Context Copy link
You have to balance this against assassination targets like Lincoln and JFK, though, who I think definitely got cast in a sympathetic light post-assassination.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link