site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32052 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 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.

24
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Collectivization of Suffering

Disclaimer: This might be better for the Fun Thread, as there's no deep point here, just an observation.

I've become aware of a vibe among my circle of professional peers: collectivization of suffering.

Look, for example, at this comment to an article about decreasing worker productivity on hackernews, a news aggregator site that's popular among techies, especially US ones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33468735

When did it become popular to upload your emotions to a shared cloud? How does that even work? Like, when I eat a donut or stub my toe, does the collective feel a pang of pleasure or pain? This commenter and others in that thread bring up war, the pandemic, social upheavals, etc. It's like they're trying to say that these things affect them deeply... despite 99.99% of them being completely uninvolved. It sounds... preposterous: that most likely a tech worker that's most likely situated in the US of A is somehow suffering as much as a Ukrainian soldier in the Donbas or a woman protester in Iran.

This reminds me of a great collectivist, Hegel, who picked up Rousseau's idea of the national spirit, and molded it around the idea of the state. People who declaim being part of a great collectivized suffering sound to me like folks that are yearning to become ants in a great colony, extensions of a single organism, like what fingers are to a person.

I worry that people like this are ripe for exploitation. They just need an ideology to forge them into something violent--the poster writes as much: "I believe we are on the edge of a massive social upheaval".

Look at this Politico piece about the rift in the Democratic Party between the young(ish) people pushing for the left agenda:

He is the kind of person who, midway into his first cocktail, says, “I don’t want to sound insufferable, but I wake up every morning thinking about how I can reduce poverty, how I can reduce suffering.”

And of course it makes him sound insufferable, pompous, and up his own backside (the piece does some lovely stiletto in the back moments like this throughout).

These people do have privilege, which they have learned is bad. They are uneasily aware that they are The Enemy, as all their political thinking has informed them they must be, but they personally don't feel like The Enemy - they're not racist or sexist or transphobic! But they have both a privileged position, according to the Oppression Totem Pole, and they can't do anything about it - activism is all very well, but they're not in a position to make the decisions that lead to real change, because they don't have political or financial clout.

But what they can do, in order to relieve this sense of pressure about being part of the problem but not part of the solution, is to participate in it. They are suffering too! They are thinking about poverty and injustice and feeling bad! They share all this to reassure each other, and be reassured, that they are in fact not the bad guys, they're one of the good ones.

“Everybody wants politics to be this really inspiring thing,” Shor said as the sun set on Suffolk Street. “But politics in the real world is an endless series of terrible, emotionally unsatisfying tradeoffs.”

“And if you pretend it’s not,” he said, “then you are going to make bad choices, and when you make bad choices, children go hungry. I don’t want to be extreme, but I think all of us who work in politics, we’re all so privileged to do this, to have people pay us to do stuff we care about, and they are doing it because they hope we help the outcomes. Those hungry kids are counting on us to make the right fucking choices, and so we shouldn’t get drunk on self-expression.”

He took a swig of his cocktail.

It is our fate to live in an age where this is how journalists write, if you give them half a chance.

Harlequin5942 said, taking a puff from his 1962 Cuban cigar.

How the fuck did thinkers and writers this awful wind up the professional caste of writers?

Reminds me of the popes who owned brothels... institutions actively selecting for the worst possible candidate.

I hope some crazed video essayist literally devours him... not figuratively. Literally. Let one instant in his life be poetic

Oh, they all write like that since the New Journalism, because it's human interest donchaknow, it makes it bright and newsy and relatable and gives people a hook to emotionally attach to the story.

Ordinarily this annoys me, because I want "just the facts, ma'am" and I don't care if blonde 42 year old Doris was sipping her morning coffee as she looked out her kitchen window and saw the car crash, I want to know "there was a car crash? where?"

But in this case it doesn't matter, since it's not reporting as such, it's a colour piece about a bunch of insufferable youngish leftyish Democrats chewing one another's faces off over who gets to steer the party, vaguely realising that if they want to win seats they need to have policies that appeal to normal people, and tripping over themselves not to use the word "populist" since they have succeeded in making that a dirty word, but also realising that damn it, they need to be populist.

So the pretentious twats in both camps being described as sipping their cocktails as they have their 'happy hour' parties and watch and rewatch videos of old election debates are perfectly suited for this style. In this case, I do want to know if they look like 'inflated eight year olds' (oooh, that one was sharp) and what kind of nonsense they indulge in, thinking this makes them cool and mysterious when it just makes them look like prats to the adults in the room.

I mean, a guy who can say with a straight face that "hungry kids are counting on us" should be mocked soundly, roundly and often by having someone write in excruciating detail what his sad little drinking group are like as they fool themselves that they matter, they're relevant, hey AOC swung by one of our dos a couple years back!

The photos, oh my God the photos. They look exactly as you imagine they'd look.

Friends and former colleagues say they persuaded him to cultivate the air of a young prodigy, that if he appeared at meetings with stuffy political types wearing a black T-shirt and didn’t say much, that it helped create a mysterious aura around him and gave their ideas more heft.

Imagine being a Democratic party operative who has worked in politics for donkey's years, and this twenty year old infant strolls in wearing a black T-shirt and saying nothing because he wants to look cool. Do you, grown-up politics person, think "Wow I should let myself be said and led by this wunderkind" or do you go "Holy crap, is this what the party has come to? Okay, we'll let the nerds do the number-crunching in the back while we do the real work of the campaign"?

Imagine being so clueless you take the advice of people around you to wear black and say nothing, you'll be cool and mysterious, you'll have that rock-star vibe (meanwhile, to anyone over the age of thirty, it's abundantly clear you only started shaving two years ago).

The black t-shirt, eh whatever, but you've got to admit that "say nothing" is powerfully good advice in context. "Mouth shut, ears open" is something every novice usually doesn't hear enough.

Good points. Perhaps by accident, it's useful information in this article, rather than just a thin sickly familiar in the form of Hunter S. Thompson.

I couldn't tell if this article was supposed to be a hit piece, and if so which side it was trying to hit.

For once, I enjoyed a Politico piece, because it's pretty clear the writer was fed-up with both sets of pretentious wannabes. The writer is "David Freedlander is a veteran New York City-based journalist. He writes long-form features about politics and the arts, people and ideas, and has appeared in New York Magazine, Bloomberg, Rolling Stone, ArtNews, The Daily Beast, Newsweek and a host of other publications."

So he's older than this bunch of 20-30 year olds, I think maybe in his mid-forties, and he's probably been around long enough to no longer be impressed by this kind of guff.

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