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 -
I work for the government, I have no problem sending 5 bullets to my manager every week (I've been doing that every week since I joined in various ways). My team is small and we do quite a bit that sounds good in a bullet point. The issue is sending information about a whole lot of my work (unclassified but I work with private corporate data) is very restricted and some of those restrictions are on disclosing processes and operations outside of my agency. So it's trivial to write 5 bullet points to my boss or his boss or the director if I need to, but when they are going aoutside my agency it's much trickier. I have a bunch of laws I need to follow to make sure that nothing I summarize could be construed as a disclosure that violates on of the many laws meant to protect the information corporations trust us to use legally. If I report over 3 weeks that I met with the corporation to discuss a change and then that the resolution of that change have I disclosed enough of a business operation or process to violate the law? I'm not an attorney, I have no idea, but but if that resolution takes 10% of my week, and solved problems that a dozen people have been asking me to fix for the last month, I can be pretty proud of getting that fixed internally. And if there's a fuck up I face criminal penalties.
Further, OPM doesn't have an agreement with my agency to protect the information we share with them, so I also have to consider that if a competitor FOIAs something that includes the data in my bullet points, have I given away anything that could aggregate to being competitive information. We can laugh and deny the attempt but OPM doesn't have to.
There are a ton of things that have to be considered when sending information outside an agency because we're bound by various laws and legal agreements on what we can do but the other agency isn't. That's not a great result but the alternative is something where every agency is forced to play under the most restrictive rules of all agencies and that's much much worse.
I'm not bitching about this on /r/fednews I wouldn't post there or any of the other fed reddits, but it's not as simple a request as it seems like it should be.
More options
Context Copy link