site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   36635 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I noticed there is a slow drible of talk about some of Trumps Executive Orders. I kinda wanted to talk about all of them as a package, and some of them more specifically. I would advise everyone to just go ahead and read all of the executive orders (there are about 50):

https://www.whitehouse.gov/news/

They are generally short, about a page long. The titles are descriptive of the goals, so you can even skip reading many of them. And you don't need to hear about them via a second hand source.

I got the general gist of all of them within an hour or two on Inauguration day (when they were posted).

My general impressions:

  1. I like the visibility and ease of reading these. Its nothing like most legislation that goes through congress that often require a law degree, and an in depth knowledge of regulations just to sort of understand them.
  2. I don't like this continuing tradition of using executive orders to run the government. From what I remember this started in earnest under Bush 2. But its also pretty clear that congress is increasingly non-functional and uninterested in their assigned role in the constitution. Congress has delegated away its power for almost 100 years at this point, granting law-making powers to bureaucracies that are run under the executive branch. So I don't like the executive order - ocracy, but it seems there is no alternative.
  3. I care less about the culture war type orders, like renaming things. I think it is probably good to have them in there from a strategy perspective. Let your enemies exhaust themselves on silly issues.
  4. My favorite Executive order: Restoring Accountability To Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce. Basically people in the bureaucracy are supposed to carry out the will and directive of the president / executive branch. If they sandbag or fail to do this, then that is grounds for dismissal. They don't have to agree with the president or be loyal, but none of this "resist" stuff. It was a little ridiculous that this EO needed to be issued in the first place.
  5. The one that I think will actually personally impact me the most: Return to In-Person Work. I live close enough to DC. Traffic is going to get worse.
  6. Two executive orders have me worried. One is about cost of living: Delivering Emergency Price Relief for American Families and Defeating the Cost-of-Living Crisis. The actual text mostly talks about getting rid of barriers and harmful regulations. I hope that is where it stops. But populist politicians have often resorted to price controls to "fight" inflation. I strongly hope they avoid that pitfall.
  7. The other EO that worries me is related to trade America First Trade Policy. The basic economics case against tariffs seems air tight to me. Tariffs seem like a classic policy failure to me. The costs are distributed among all US consumers, but the benefits are often concentrated within certain sectors, or even specific companies. I was also hoping to see an end to the Jones Act, but this EO seems like it thinks that legislation is great.

The basic economics case against tariffs seems air tight to me. Tariffs seem like a classic policy failure to me.

I shared this opinion, but Noah Smith blackpilled me on tariffs. The tariffs might be sold as economic policy to the base, but they are not. Its pure geopolitics.

Xi Jinping's economic policy has been very successful in deindustrializing other countries. He has paid dearly for it, and now sits on absurd industrial overcapacity in everything from steel to batteries. But that doesn't matter. The pay-off is huge - not only is half the world absolutely depended on China economically, in case of a conventional war, China could force a stale mate and then it can out-last and out-produce the entire rest of the world, combined.

And just like Xi paid dearly for this policy, maybe the west also needs to pay to counter it. Tariffs will be paid by all US consumers, and it's very possible they will get poorer for it. But that doesn't matter.

The pay-off is huge - not only is half the world absolutely depended on China economically, in case of a conventional war, China could force a stale mate and then it can out-last and out-produce the entire rest of the world, combined.

China is hugely dependent on foreign trade, which functionally stops as soon as they’re in a conventional war with the US. No merchant ship will risk going to China and no merchant insurance company will insure it if they have to risk the most powerful blue water navy on Earth sinking it. You thought the Houtis were bad for trade? Meet the USN. They’ll be reduced to land trade with Russia. How are they going to outproduce us then? China does not have the natural resources for autarky.

China may not have the natural resources, but the huge chunk of Asia they have access to almost assuredly does.

We have China surrounded on three sides with allies. Good luck getting your resources from Mongolia, Russia, and North Korea.

As well as the Stans and Persia.

Russia, the nation who is in the top 5 (mostly the top 2) of every mineral tracked by the USGS? That doesn't seem implausible, at all.

They got the minerals, but they don’t have the throughput to get China as much as they need by train. Overland trade is something like 5x more expensive than maritime trade.

Depends on which fraction of expenses is transportation. If for some good 0.1% is replaced by 0.5% it's not that much.

It’s not about expense it’s about throughout. A modern cargo train can carry about 13,000 tons of material. China imports 3 million tons of iron ore per day.

More comments

China is hugely dependent on foreign trade, which functionally stops as soon as they’re in a conventional war with the US.

The EU was arguing like that in favor of Russia for 30 years. But trade did not stop the Russians.

And for China, your points are true today, but Xi thinks in decades. At that time scale, it's all hypotheticals anyway.

  • It's possible that China gets its domestic consumption off the ground, making it less reliant on trade.
  • It's possible that the belt and road initiative leads to a massive increase in land access to trading partners.
  • It's possible that a variety of maritime drones, drone carriers and autonomous missile boats make aircraft carriers the battleship of the 21st century.
  • It's possible that the US turns inwards, and doesn't intervene in conflicts with Taiwan, or even in conflicts with Japan and India.

In all those cases, the US would want at least a strategic industrial base left at home for geopolitical reasons, and having it would out-weight the short-term loss that tariffs would bring today.

Even if China gets domestic consumption off the ground they're still reliant on imports for raw materials. China imports more than than 3 times as much oil is it produces, imports a little under three times as much iron ore as it produces, a little under 3 times as much copper ore as it produces, and produces less than 65% of their food domestically. They need global trade to keep their industry running and their people fed. You're not going to ship the 14 million barrels of oil, 3 million tons of iron ore, and the 161,000 tons of grain that China imports daily by train.

Those exact arguments where used in the case of Russia. They were far from autark before they attacked Ukraine, but that doesn't matter. If you have your propaganda dialed in, your population is sufficiently willing to go along, you can deal with embargoes and even blockades for years.

Yes, the deficit would explode, quality of life would decrease. There would be rationing, followed by an inefficient adaption of domestic production.

China needs far less ore if they stop being the worlds factory floor. They can mitigate the missing oil by continuing electrification, by relying on Russia to break the embargo and by starting coal liquefaction if they really have to. They have more than enough arable land to feed their population.

They do not have enough arable land to feed their population.

Despite its place as the third largest nation in the world, China falls behind other major food producing countries in terms of the availability of arable land (figure 1). Rapid urbanization, pollution, and uses of land for other purposes have all contributed to a rapid decline of agricultural land in China. The total pollution rate in China’s farmland soil is estimated at 10 percent, and about 2.5 percent of that land cannot be cultivated due to excessive contamination with heavy metals. As a result, it is estimated that the country has a domestic planting area shortage of 90 million hectares. This cropland shortage is expected to worsen and will further undermine China’s goals for food self-sufficiency.

https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/July-August-2022/Critelli/

And if you can survive by drastically reducing your industrial output then you can’t use that industrial output to win a war with the US.

It's not even local imports from e.g. Indonesia either, it's majority trans-oceanic. Grain from Brazil, iron and coal from Canada and Australia, etc.
They can't try what Japan did with the co-prosperity sphere, even if they could cordon off the Pacific as far as Burma.

I wonder if they'll try to develop their domestic iron more. A thousand km over land from Liaoning to where the coal is in Shanxi, wonder how that competes with shipping from Australia.

Edit: woah, they're hauling in a ton of coking coal by rail from Mongolia now. , and they've actually succeeded in weaning themselves off Australian imports.

China is hugely dependent on foreign trade, which functionally stops as soon as they’re in a conventional war with the US. No merchant ship will risk going to China and no merchant insurance company will insure it if they have to risk the most powerful blue water navy on Earth sinking it.

This hinges on your belief that the modern American political system would be willing to sustain a total naval warfare sinking neutral nation shipping in the face of both domestic and international blowback. Consider me less than convinced.

And it's not like you can't ship the more valuable stuff to India or Russia via rail, and whitewash it.

Frankly if you could achieve that it would be considerably beneficial- the volume differences are just that much- but I have a hard time believing that the Americans would want (a) a Russian kinetic entry into the war on the side of China, or (b) attack Indian vessels.

Rather than 'war will end trade between opposing sides,' a lesson of the Ukraine War should probably be the opposite- that vast amounts of trade will continue. The Russians lost a naval blockade to a country with no navy from a far greater position, and second-party smuggling was such that sanction-restrictions really amount to an cost-increase rather than cutoff of contraband goods.

India likes us and hates China and in a conventional war scenario we will be putting pressure on them to cut off any trade into China. Ukraine doesn’t have anywhere close to the power to do that. You can’t compare what happens to trade when a minor power with no allies is in a war to what would happen to trade when the world hegemon goes to war.

This is what people said about sanctioning Russia. History shows that America putting pressure on people to cut off their trade for American geopolitical reasons is a pretty big driver of anti-American sentiment and disentangling from American trade systems.

If we are in a shooting war with China we will be bringing significantly more pressure on our friends and allies not to trade with China than we did for Ukraine. If China and the US are at war than this is WWIII and every country on Earth is going to be asking themselves the question: whose side do I want to be on? The US or the Chinese? I can't imagine India choosing China. China, the bellicose country that keeps trying to push the border with India. China, the country that killed 20 Indian soldiers as recently as 2020. China, the country that has been arming and allying with Pakistan against India. China, the country that keeps building dams in Tibet across the headwaters of major Indian rivers. China, the country Indians have a 67% unfavorable view of (in contrast, 70% of Indians view the US favorably).

If China is going to war with the US then India will be the first to stick a knife in their side.

EDIT: Also, of course they resisted Russian sanctions: they like Russia! They've been great friends with Russia since the 40s, back when it was the USSR. They like the Russians more than they like us, Russia sells them a lot of weapons, they and the Russians go way back. We should not expect India to treat China anything like they treated Russia recently.

More comments

Hasn't Chinese civilization been basically an autarky for most of its history?

For most of its history China would stand no chance against the modern US in a conventional war. The China we’re concerned may stand a chance against us hasn’t been an autarky in half a century.

Except that China makes a good chunk of our (and everyone else’s) goods. They make everything and therefore going to war with them has a huge cost. We no longer have a big clothing or shoes industry. Or auto parts. Etc. we can’t go to war with them for long because we are dependent on their factories for basic materials. Europe was using Russia for electricity, and the6 very quickly found out what a choke point that is.

"We" (or rather the US) can fight a war without clothes, shoes and auto parts. China receives 60-80% of its oil through the Malacca strait. The US has worked for decades to make almost every nation in East Asia an ally in a possible war with China and has stationed a tremendous amount of troops, naval and air assets in that region.
Here's a decently detailed video if you want to learn more about the situation there.

We" (or rather the US) can fight a war without clothes

Somehow I think naked soldiers on the front will have pretty bad optics.

I don't think optics are made from cloth, and anyway they can always fall back to iron sights.

But they'll be on the front, because the oil-powered vehicles will have carried them there.

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