site banner
ZorbaTHut  3yr ago (text post)   32801 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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.

16
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I agree that the idea that the CCP planning decades ahead is not what they are doing (see: disastrous one child policy), but:

I am not so sure that Chinese mythology is a meaningful source for assessing tendencies of the CCP

I don’t see any myths straight out of any of the three links given? From your response I was expecting a story about Yu the Great or something, not a lecture by Mao, a wiki article about the Long March, and a bunch of quotations about communism. All of those seem, uh, relevant to the CCP.

Am I missing something here?

It's a problem I seem to be having a lot of lately around here lately. I used the term founding mythology in an off-hand sort of way to refer to The Long March and the concept of People's War; in the same way that Lexington and Concord form a founding mythology of warfare in the USA. I agree with Dase that The Long March is a myth in the sense both that (Like L and C) it didn't really happen that way, and in the sense that it doesn't reflect some deep seated tendency in the national ethnos.

Deng said of one of the climactic moments of the March:

Well, that's the way it's presented in our propaganda. We needed that to express the fighting spirit of our forces. In fact, it was a very easy military operation. There wasn't really much to it. The other side were just some troops of the warlord who were armed with old muskets and it really wasn't that much of a feat, but we felt we had to dramatize it.

Many have claimed Chiang Kai-Shek made a deal with Mao and more or less escorted the Long March as a kind of Kabuki civil war, which would itself have been a fascinating kind of spiritual Long March for Mao to engage in to preserve ChiCom forces until the eventual success of the revolution. But regardless it does mean something that generations of chinese were taught from the time they could read:

"If you find it hard," they were told: think of the Long March; if you feel tired, think of our revolutionary forebears. The message has been drilled into us so that we can accomplish any goal set before us by the party because nothing compares in difficulty with what they did. Decades after the historical one, we have been spurred on to ever more Long Marches – to industrialize China, to feed the largest population in the world, to catch up with the West, to reform the socialist economy, to send men into space, to engage with the 21st century.

I was mostly just pointing to China as an alternative suspect under the cui bono investigative method, to demonstrate the hollowness of the theory that "The US benefits, so the US probably did it." Conspiratorial traps that require your opponent to make an active move to fall into it, as the culmination of a multi-year plan involving numerous unreliable moving parts, don't seem credible.

You're not, there's nothing to it. 5HM decided to call it mythology and I agree that it is just that – reframing of disparate Chinese historical events into a tendentious interpretation, a national myth about perseverance and wise long-term strategy of the Party that is instrumental to the survival, empowerment and palingenesis of the Han people. And on the other side of the pond – appropriating the same stuff for the purposes of Pengaton budget inflation, with the Orientalist tinge of Yellow Peril and Fu Manchu moustache. That's a myth, like Jerry Nadler says. They have prospered, to the extent that they have, through genetic HBD and market economics mechanics, and likewise they are failing for generic reasons of authoritarianism, middle income trap and getting on the bad side of Atlanticists. There was no 4D strategy, no long-term plan to it, only winging it through the tenures of several Paramount Leaders, survivorship bias and gauchy PR. Were commies defeated in their time, nobody would even talk about their cunning.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats