site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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.

8
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

This is the first time a single topic has so completely taken over my Twitter feed that I've been driven off it because of how annoying and never ending the discussion has become. Every other Tweet is about Indians or H1B visas, and very little of substance is being said. It's just a lot of anger and dumb takes. One side is mostly just being blatantly racist while the other is getting really pissed off and gloating about the superiority of immigrants. It's incredibly boring.

I would be interested in a conversation about actually improving immigration policy. I find it ridiculous that the US has elements of randomness to its system and isn't blind to national origins.

I'd be curious to know more technical details about Canada's system. There has clearly been a huge drop in the quality of immigrants. I used to think that they just lowered the points threshold for permanent residency in order to raise the immigration rate, but I learned recently that they actually introduced or expanded some different immigration streams that just require employer sponsorships in specific industries which take people directly from community colleges and they actually targeted India first to start with. Apparently, this is being abused with basically fake college programs and sometimes even fake jobs. I'd love to know more about what happened here.

This is the same thing that’s been happening for the last 30 years, but now it affects Silicon Valley eggheads so it actually matters. Much like how nobody cared about automation taking jobs until it started threatening terminally online artists.

It's affected SV people for years too. None of these arguments are new at all.

The only thing that has changed is that the faction that demands less immigration has been emboldened by recent successes and feels like it can win the argument without being crushed under a regime that allows it to play out.