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 -
I've been reading Charles Murray book, Coming Apart and watched the interview he had with Reason TV. In the book and interview, Murray discusses white America, and the pulling away of social classes. Giving two towns for the reader to take into consideration: Belmont, MA. and Fishtown PA. In Belmont, people are college educated, get and stay married, lead healthier lives, and pass all of these things onto their children. Fishtown is the opposite: people have the typical jerry springer family filled with baby mama/daddys, they likely only graduated high school or less than that and they are unhealthy with a lower life expectancy. Another thing that i found fascinating is that apparently, Many men are simply not working at all, and this is seemingly concentrated amongst the less educated as well.The effects of this on the marriage market is well documented. '
One thing that has been on my personal mind lately is how to actually fix or help fish towns residents? A bit of personal background here: I am a child of immigrants who is a year away from a bachelors degree, I have a help desk job at a nice company, in my major (IT), with hopes of working in software development. (I will be the first in my family to obtain a BAS, I've been flirting with perusing a masters degree). I'm currently dating a women who's family is the typical Fishtown resident Murray describes (She herself is a lovely girl). Her family behaves poorly. Her sisters constantly engage in borderline prostitution. They have no work. No money outside of that which they receive from men. One has multiple children, none of them regularly attend school. They are beaten regularly by their frustrated mother. Their fathers are no where to be found or worse, are actively harmful (ie, taking the son to a drug house). Ive been blessed that both my parents are married and educated. (My mother studied nursing, My father actually had a degree in his home country that did not carry over to the US, and began studying real estate instead, he now has a real estate license, and CDL, we were actually upper-middle class until 2008 hit). She is attempting to make it out herself by studying finance, however one interesting data point that I've come across is that people who grew up poor tend to lag behind, even after obtaining the degree. Which is even more frustrating: even if a Fishtown resident somehow makes it out: they will not have as much of the funds as they had hoped. Perhaps this may because of the types of degrees they obtain (ie. someone from the hood obtains a degree in education, hoping to help and educate others who are in her same position.) Given that education correlates pretty highly with income, ive always felt as if fostering values around education and its importance would be a crucial first step and the environment many are in seems to make this highly difficult, even after obtaining such education. She herself has told me how awfully stubborn her mother is with her bad health habits. I want to preference this by saying im no elitist who wants to look down on such people: My heart is quite heavy with sorrow for them.
Murray sites an array of causes he believes are to blame: IQ, changing social norms, and the welfare state. Im not personally a fan of taking away welfare from those who may have fallen on hard times, even if that means that some one may potentially abuse it, and the cat seems to be out of the bag with many of the social norms, many of which changed due to technology (contraceptives changing sexual norms for example). I know many working class men personally who couldnt even bother with condoms, despite their mass availability, and who'd scoff at the idea of passing up a potential encounter or partner. I dont have deep enough knowledge of IQ to even begin to think of a solution, assuming this is a possible cause.
There is one thing ive personally have planned on: Being responsible. Ive always used condoms with my current partner. I do not want to have my children out of wedlock. I want to marry my wife and have children with her and only her. I want my kids to go to school, (a school in a high income neighborhood, where they can learn and thrive). And in-still hard work ethic in them to excel academically. Continue building my projects and studying leet code so that i can be a better programmer and get the software job that will pay for the house in said neighborhood. Which i suppose is all i can do. Control my own actions and hope that others see and follow my example.
Just some life advice, this is a very bad idea.
Interesting, Can you elaborate on your perspective? Others have commented on this, but id like your POV as well
Can I just tell you something about marriage that I heard, and has had a massive positive effect on it?
Something the Catholics get right is that young men are told, basically: you have two options for a job as a man. 1) You can be a priest (a spiritual father), or 2) you can be a husband and a father. Both of these are really difficult, at times you're going to hate them and at times you're going to feel like you fucked up.
But your job is to do them well. You chose the "be a husband and a father" route, and you have to look at this as your life's calling. Your wife, due to her background, will present you with some things that are going to be extremely difficult to endure, but you have to. Your marriage is your "burn the ships" moment, you do not have a choice.
There's an idea that life is suffering, and the only way to endure that suffering is to find a meaning to makes it worthwhile. Your marriage is that meaning.
Your wife, and by extension your family, is your life's work. Be good at it.
Meanwhile, I'm sitting here, unsuited for one and unable to become the other.
Agreed. Now try finding that meaning when you're a 43-year-old unemployed man who's never managed to go on a date and lacks the capacity for religious belief.
If you simply edit your /etc/hosts file you can add the following lines:
127.0.0.1 www.reddit.com
127.0.0.1 old.reddit.com
127.0.0.1 reddit.com
And the problem will likely go away after a short time.
Okay but joking aside, what do you mean by this? You don't have the capacity for religious belief? Do you believe that you are the most powerful creature in the universe? Surely not.
Your purpose is to fix this. Are you sure there's nothing else you could be doing to improve your standing with regards to these problems? Truly nothing?
Gotta be frank. If he's going to be Catholic, he can't marry divorced women,
or any non-Catholic(EDIT: you can get bishop permission), and the lower end of his strike zone is about 32 as of today. It may be joever for the married vocation.There are plenty of desperate 30 something single women in Catholic circles.
Single, and honest-to-God never married despite being Catholic all that time? Huh. I suppose I'll believe you, but it seems wild. My thoughts were that @Capital_Room's best bet would be to date a secular woman marrying late, then either convert or get special permission. But given he's not actually Catholic I suppose these concerns are moot.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, that's a big point I have to keep reiterating and try to get people to understand, whenever they come at me with the "you're a man, you're never biologically too old to become a father the way a woman ends up being" bit.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I am an atheist materialist. There is no God, no "soul," no afterlife; just spacetime, quantum fields, etc. And none of the apologetics I've read, nor religious people I've talked to, have ever convinced me otherwise. I'm saying I'm not capable of perceiving the universe in any other way.
Kind of rules out any religion I've ever heard of, no?
This is something I've gone over in this forum plenty of times, and I'm sure the regulars are all pretty tired of it.
If you want you can try Bostromian Simulation Argument big-tent syncretism: 'your God is a shadow of the Supreme Being, the true creator of our universe'. It's not really a religion, since it has no significant moral teachings. But it does bring a lot of intellectual firepower to the Deist side of things.
Even more ridiculous than classical theism, and more useless than classical Deism, which, IIRC, a number of 18-19th century thinkers pointed out was a sort of "gateway religion" to outright atheism (because a god who doesn't answer prayers might as well not exist).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Unfortunately, your beliefs are wrong. There's probably nothing I can do to convince you, except to say I have direct experiential evidence that I cannot square with nonexistence of god.
I did get to this point starting from agnostic materialism. Assume there are no souls. Assume there is nothing special about human brains. You're having an experience right now, how does that work? As far as I can tell, something to do with information processing... why would that be unique to human brains? What is it like to be a bat? Why unique to brains at all? What is it like to be a tree? What is it like to be an interconnected global financial system? Connect two or more "conscious" information systems, is the resulting system conscious? What if you connect ALL information systems?
Impossible to know. We cannot ever know the experience of being any sort of thing other than our particular selves.
The only known "conscious" information systems are human minds, and there's no real way to "connect" them — except imperfect channels like language — such as to form a "resulting system."
And none of this undermines materialism or points to the existence of any kind of higher power, nor any kind of afterlife.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is there anything stopping you from passably faking a Christian reawakening?
Well, first, it would need to be a "Christian awakening" that I'd need to fake, not a "reawakening."
But more directly, the same thing that kept me from passably faking being left-wing, no matter how much it might have improved various prospects in my life — being too much on the autism spectrum to believably fake feelings and conceal my true beliefs. That and integrity, like @KingOfTheBailey says.
More options
Context Copy link
I think my mind runs in similar grooves, and the answer is: integrity. Integrity matters: would you want to date or marry someone who is lying about something so fundamental? Would you want to carry a lie like that for years, knowing what would happen if the secret got out?
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
More options
Context Copy link