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 -
Well, the problem is that if you simply go back to the top of the hill, all you can do is slide back down. If liberalism in general doesn’t work, you’re just going to end up exactly where we are now, except that it will be “the future” when it happens, and as you point out the demographics would be much worse than they are now. I am unusual here because after thinking about it, I think the “bad idea” might well have been the enlightenment itself, and certainly by th3 time you have birthright plebiscite you’re just going to speed run chewing through civilization to the bottom where the people who vote have no idea how anything works, no desire to learn, and no stake in making it all work.
I've heard this "liberalism doesn't work" idea before, but never really been convinced by it. Equality of opportunity doesn't need to be taken so literally that you toss it all away when one person is born with 1 IQ point less than another. Treat people equally before the law, and generally socially and culturally. Treat people according to the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Most of the "counterarguments" I've heard are that if people are born with different talent or even just different inherited wealth from their parents then this doesn't work because they don't really have equality of opportunity, but... so what? If people are born with different circumstances then equality of opportunity doesn't inevitably lead to equality of outcome and that's okay. Set up a society in which everyone has an opportunity to thrive and carve out a happy healthy life for themselves, and let them sort themselves out. Maybe the 70 IQ person have a small apartment and a job at a fast food place while the 130 IQ person lives in a fancy manor and works at Google. Let them. I don't see how liberalism or the enlightenment prevent this. Instead, it is the regression from this ideal that wokeism represents that is the problem. We went from "people of the same skin color should share the blame and credit for each other's actions" to "people should be treated according to their own actions" back to "people of the same skin color should share the blame and credit for each other's actions". Wokeism is explicitly illiberal, not a failing of liberalism.
And what happens when a hugely disproportionate percentage of the people ending up with unfavorable outcomes are part of the same racial/cultural population? The ones who also coordinate culturally and politically with each other, and who just happen to all be directly descended from the people who were enslaved, and then after that legally shut out of higher education and positions of power? When those people start to notice this, which they will, do you expect them to take “so what?” as a satisfactory answer as to why no illiberal measures need to be pursued in order to redress their grievances?
I'm not sure what the alternative is. It seems to me like all of the problems with liberalism amount to "what if people try to impose not-liberalism?" Which, sure, difficulty practically implementing a set of ideals is a form of criticism against it. We should try to uphold liberalism, and when people try to tear it down and create unfair and unequal laws and norms we should oppose them and maintain the liberal order. That's how you uphold any order. The solution to "people trying to stop liberalism" certainly isn't "voluntarily stop liberalism", that's just surrendering immediately.
And even if you make some other order, it doesn't escape "what if people complain" unless you suppress them somehow, like if the alternative is "uphold a brutal dictatorship where we genocide anyone who opposes our regime" which tries to prevent dissidents from organizing that way. But that seems like a bad society that I don't want to live in, even if the dictator happens to share my skin tone.
If it's not-liberalism, why does it have such a huge backing from people calling themselves liberals?
Because the entire tactical advantage of wokeism is that instead of the old style of racism, which everyone agrees is bad, it's racism which is really really really good at camouflaging itself. Which means pretending to be "liberals" while condemning the actual liberals who have existed for decades.
I'm afraid you'll step me through that one. What's so good about the camouflage? It seems to consist of saying blatantly racist things, and screaming until anyone who objects gets fired.
I thought it was something more like centuries?
I'm not entirely sure, I'm mostly making this claim on the basis of observation. A lot of people are convinced by it, therefore by definition it is very convincing. I don't think I fully understand it, but I think a large part of it is a mastery of Motte and Bailey tactics. There's a subset of aggressive lunatics who use fully woke ideas to cancel people and commit violence, a subset of humanities academics and mainstream media who are really good at manipulating language and public consensus who launder woke ideas as liberal ideas, a large subset of moderates who think mostly reasonable liberal thoughts but don't think very hard and believe the laundered ideas. And there's also a complementary set of classical racists and sexists who get outraged at all of the woke ideas but voice their outrage in very awful ways so the media have a scapegoat to point at. Whenever the woke do something outrageous the more principled liberals and the racists both get upset, and the media can just point at the latter as examples of people being upset at wokeism.
I'm not entirely sure why wokeism in particular is so good at this as opposed to any other movement in the present or past. Maybe it is a unique failing of liberalism that allows for this exploit. "Pretend to be tolerant and falsely portray your enemies as intolerant so you can justify your intolerance against them" only works in a society that values tolerance. But if we generalize it further, maybe it's not so unique. The camouflage of "Pretend to be X which is seen as good so you can tarnish your opponents as not-X and therefore evil, even if they're actually more X than you" is a strategy that has been tried and worked many times in the past. Inquisitions allowed evil and cruel people pretending to be good Christians to persecute and do very un-Christian things to people they didn't like. The Red Scare allowed people to accuse others of being communists do very authoritarian and un-American things to people they didn't like. The Pharisees pretended to be good Jewish followers of God and persecute people they didn't like. The esteem given to the Catholic Priesthood allowed pedophiles to slip in and molest children, relying on the high esteem to keep them above question. Any time you have a class of people generally considered "good", bad people will want to camoflage themselves under that label to avoid criticism for their misbehavior. So wokeism might just be the most recent example of this succeeding. But I call it really really good at it because unlike some examples (like the Catholic Priest one), it can get called out and noticed for what it's doing and still get away with it by opposing its detractors directly instead of merely relying on stealth alone. You can point out exactly what they're doing and how, a moderate but naive liberal can read literally everything I just wrote and still not really believe what's going on because it's complicated enough that they either don't understand or are not convinced by the evidence. For some reason. I'm don't fully understand it myself because from my perspective it's clear. But it's not merely a lack of intelligence, because lots of smart people are similarly unconvinced. Whatever the woke are doing, it works to convince lots of people, otherwise it would not have gotten away with so much for so long, it would have died shortly after people noticed.
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