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 -
Some thoughts about online political ads:
For the last couple months pretty much all of the ads I get on YouTube have been political. I figure this time of year must be a ripe harvest for Google in terms of ad revenue. Maybe it can buoy them through the recent drop in tech stocks.
Interestingly enough, every single ad I've gotten that mention abortion has been strongly pro-choice. I've strongly pro-life myself, and for most of these ads the effect is that I now know who to vote for (namely, the person they're warning me against). This is a very useful service because all the Republican candidates are keeping their stance on abortion on the down low. It often isn't even listed as an issue on their official campaign website, I have to google around until I can find some interview where they were asked about it in order to learn their stance. The Democrats are definitely making this an abortion centered campaign, and the Republicans are trying to keep their heads down. For someone like myself, who will not vote for a pro-choice candidate, it means I have to do a lot more legwork.
Also interesting is that I saw the same ad more than a dozen times (which is normal) when I suddenly realized that the names in the ad were different every time. Turns out they are cycling through every Republican running for the state legislature, slotting each name in for "If X gets elected, women will have to travel out of state to access reproductive healthcare." It occurred to me that online it can be difficult to tell what district a viewer is in, so I guess you have to have a shotgun approach.
Though for all the abortion focused ads, I did notice none of them actually say the word "abortion": it's always "reproductive rights" or "women's health." The most notable euphemism I heard also happened to be the only time I think I've seen genuine "dog whistle" in the wild: a candidate declared (along a list of other issues) that they would preserve our "constitutional privacy rights". Excellently manufactured so that anyone who cares about the abortion debate will hear "I am pro-choice" while the average voter who doesn't care about abortion doesn't hear it at all. So, ads are big on abortion but mostly wants to talk to the base.
Which is the other odd thing: ads like this are meant for pro-choice voters. It does nothing good for them for a staunch pro-lifer like me to see them. Yet I did see one openly pro-life online ad this election season, and it was on my wife's computer! My wife, who is much more moderate on the issue than I am. Even curiouser, this ad was on a probably-not-quite-legal manga scan-lation site. How and why are pro-life ads ending up on a manga website? Don't manga readers skew female? Doesn't YouTube's audience skew male? I had assumed I was only getting pro-choice ads because most people online lean left, but now I'm not so sure.
I always have to ask... in this day and age, why do people volunatarily still watch ads on YouTube? While it has given you fodder for an interesting post, simply using UBlock, or Brave, or any one of the dozens of other ways to block Youtube ads is a really easy way to upgrade your quality of life to a surprising degree.
iOS has no on-device ability to block ads. Yes, you can do it if you set up a custom VPN, but that's work and added expense.
Android has several, including NewPipe and the fact that Firefox actually runs natively there (and as such uBlock works), but their devices are twice as expensive, get vanishingly few updates, and their top-end processors are 4 years behind what is available in an iPhone for half the price.
So you're stuck with an expensive boat-anchor or a nice device with ads; I don't begrudge the latter their choice.
I suspect that most people don't need a flagship phone, though. And if you're just using your phone to browse the Web, well, $250 gets you an Android 6a, which is about on-par with an iPhone 10 and also you can block ads.
Frequent updates, too, you're just wrong about that one.
I'm honestly not sure what "better processors" really gets you in a phone, outside of using it for phone games (which generally trend towards being light-weight in terms of computational cost anyways, I suspect, or at least being not-so-reliant on high, stable framerates/tickrates) or maybe some fancy gimmick like Apple's face-tracking (making things like the iPhone X desired by some VTubers for the genuinely amazing face-tracking it provides), but even that is probably more down to algorithms/software than raw hardware power.
You get better battery life from the same size of device and pages/apps are, all else being equal, going to render faster (especially if they're using a JS framework adapted to mobile to cut development costs). iOS has always had the edge on Android in terms of UI responsiveness, too; managed languages are a bit of a handicap right out of the gate, and Google has never really been one to emphasize UI polish (much like post-2012 Microsoft, for that matter).
Really, though, iPhones aren't necessarily the most advanced in terms of specific features- it's true that Android has some real interesting things going on with its support for foldable screens (2 apps at the same time with a screen that folds up actually is a big deal- make it 250 dollars so I don't have to worry about it inevitably breaking, and I'll probably buy one). But it works pretty damn well, and you can walk into any repair shop in the world and get parts for it.
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