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'm increasingly fascinated by how counter-productive the current modus operandi of political discourse within the Left and Liberal wings of Western society has become.
When in a political discussion, I try to rarely make sloganeering arguments - very few buzzwords, no contentious examples, generally attempting to keep a big picture in mind, clearly distinguishing between what I believe to be a core principle and what I think could be a likely hypothesis, etc. Of course I sometimes take the bait or let spite and Schadenfreude get the better of me, but generally I think I'm pretty good at discussing politics and have been able to have nice and constructive conversations with people across the political spectrum : I think it's precisely because of the rather tentative way I go about defending or questioning ideas that the discussions almost always conclude on a cordial tone, completely irrespective of how close we are ideologically or if anyone involved was really convinced of the other's perspective.
It has long been remarked that the Left has an issue with both internal and external discourse, pushing for alienating purity tests and distorting supposedly open discussions into show trials the moment an unsavoury subtext or implication can be gleaned from the other's words - no matter how minor or semantic. From a Marxist-Leninist perspective, this makes some sense to me as an internal approach to maintain ideological unity - it has a martial aspect to it that places a very high value on cohesion and loyalty, exactly what you want from an organised Vanguard movement waiting to strike. As an external form of discussion geared towards convincing the public at large or gaining new recruits to your cause, it's obviously abysmal and essentially filters out normal people in record speed.
As a former Marxist-Leninist myself, who was in such a "Vanguard party" in my home of Austria way back during Obama's second term/Trump's first years in office (and who now, over a decade later, feels more sympathy for Mussolini than Lenin), it's been interesting to see how this internal form of discourse (which I guess we now would call wokeism or cancel culture) has also completely taken over any approach to external messaging and discussing. When I was in a Marxist org over a decade ago, we would go to worker's clubs, employee's strikes, union meetings and such in the hope of recruiting or latently indoctrinating the working-class there. The explicit modus operandi that we were taught and regularly coached on was to insist on opinions of theirs that were bauchlinks - "left-wing by gut feeling", essentially. Even though by the mid 2010's most working-class people in Austria outside of some flagship unions were already comfortably captured by the far-right, we spoke to them exclusively through the lens of what we could agree on, not what they were wrong about believing. Of course, this made for a lot of friendly conversations and momentary feelings of having made progress. But in the end, these actions had next to zero effect since most of the Marxist org members were bourgeois students slobs and therefore neither trusted nor taken seriously by the workers, and we really didn't have a good answer on immigration and the refugee crisis (since we were wrong on this issue, as the Left still is today).
Still, this approach to engaging a political conversation seemed to me productive and understanding of how politics functions - you need to get people on your side. That's easier when you make them feel like you and they already believe alot of the same things.
I won't belabour how much cancel culture et all has ruined the Left and tarnished its public image - we all know. What's more interesting to me is that even among less overtly woke or even moderate/conservative liberals, there is a growing attitude of guilt by association and implication - and a pleasure to brand someone as far-right, a nazi, a "populist", especially if said person has any kind of public presence and influence. We see this across the UK, Germany, Austria, especially when it comes to Trump or Ukraine. It's practical effect is essentially them saying "please see yourself as our political opposition and consider yourself excluded from our political project" - the exact opposite of what you want to achieve in a political discussion! Joe Rogan has of course become the archetypal example of this. The list of influential people who became right-wingers because one side of the political spectrum welcomed them with few strings attached and the other told them they were irredeemable and devoid of decency is long and growing.
What's the idea behind this kind of discourse? It seems so alien to any kind of strategic understanding of politics and campaigning to me, especially now when the liberal order is more vulnerable than ever. Are they still this oblivious to the disillusionment and loss of trust in institutions that is well entrenched in Western society today? Is it some kind of some kind of moral self-validation first and foremost? Where does this desire to grow your own political opposition come from?
Purity spirals are driven by individuals taking an opportunity to improve their own position.
Say there's somebody in your volunteer radical labour union who is an excellent organizer: he's likeable, outgoing, genuinely committed to the cause, and works a blue collar job where he actually puts into practice the organization's techniques and principles. (This is in direct contrast with most of the membership, who are grad students LARPing as workers.)
This guy is accused of mild sexual misconduct. Is the organization best served by a. immediately expelling him, b. investigating the incident then deciding what to do, or c. trying to find a compromise that ensures he can continue to do his good work?
Answer: what's best for the organization is totally irrelevant. Somebody is going to take position A. They're going to win, because the organization has no defenses against it - this is a question of good and evil, not of tradeoffs. Anybody on side A wins and gains a crumb of status and maybe power; anybody on side B or C loses.
Part of the reason that the radical left is so susceptible to this is that everybody has the authority to start this process, but there is often nobody with the authority to say "we're not doing that".
In an actual blue collar environment, this kind of accusation would merit a 'so what?' and the opportunist advocating for A would wind up with egg on his face. But grad students upset they don't make as much as a panda express manager are different.
More options
Context Copy link
The people who actively push for position A may be doing so for cynical status jockeying reasons, but I think the organizational response that enables their success is an understandable, if unfortunate, reaction to decades of people using position C to argue for no consequences for immoral behavior ever. When people hear that Comrade Bob was accused of sexual misconduct, they immediately think of Harvey Weinstein and Father Jim, panic, and do whatever they can to avoid accusations of conducting their own cover-up. In that context, arguing for nuance is typically going to fail. Now, as those scandals fade into the background, there may be a chance to successfully push for position B. It seems to me that this is starting to happen, though that is admittedly just a gut impression.
That reminds me of something I was reading last week. There was a student athlete at Stanford who committed suicide, which is sad and terrible. The reason? She was due for a disciplinary hearing: bad Stanford, I guess. News articles then went into what happened, and they usually framed it as she was facing the hearing because she spilled a cup of coffee on someone.
Hmm. Digging deeper, she had thrown a hot cup of coffee onto another student's face. Okay, this is getting juicy. Maybe he deserved it? What did he do? Well, the news articles breathlessly reported he had been accused of sexually assaulting someone.
Finally, I find out the root cause: he had kissed one of her team members without consent.
These are all obvious questions to ask, and the actual story is pretty straightforward, a series of banal student hijinks that ended in tragedy. But the sheer unwillingness for any news articles to simply tell the story is a result of the dynamics you mention. No one wants to be the bad guy and say "well actually, Stanford didn't brutally murder an innocent girl to help cover up a rapist's crimes," because if you do, you're all of a sudden part of the rape cult, opening you to attack and hurting your career advancement.
More options
Context Copy link
Often the offense is something less consequential, like "is not fully up-to-date with pronoun etiquette" or "works with fossil fuels".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You expel from the organization everyone that takes position A with the "Everyone that doesn't believe in due process is not someone we want here"
That might work if the organization was sovereign. It almost certainly isn't.
The government has a huge say in how things like sexual harassment is dealt with because it determines if the organization has taken all reasonable steps to avoid a hostile environment. If Obama says that sexual harassment is a violation of rights of female students and creates a hostile environment you have a strong incentive to take all claims seriously.
It will not look good come the lawsuit if you've been firing the very sorts of people who will be zealous about preventing said harassment and assault, even at the cost of a few good people.
More options
Context Copy link
Who is "you"?
SJ is very trigger-happy and has weak leadership; there is for the most part no "you" that actually has the security in power to take the locally-disincentivised action and actually make the mob follow along (rather than simply being replaced).
More options
Context Copy link
Sufficiently decayed institutions will have kangaroo courts as part of their statutes. Given enough time, A becomes "due process".
The whole fights in the FOSS community about CoC enabled entryism were about just this.
More options
Context Copy link
In this specific sort of example, the cheat code that people discovered was claiming that due process that includes things like trying to figure out the facts of the matter based on evidence was misogynistic when applied to women accusing men of bad sexual behavior. This, I think, was an instantiation of the larger principle that "lived experiences" described by people who were categorized as "oppressed" were incontrovertible. It seems to me that more and more people are growing wise to this vulnerability, which makes me wonder what the next cheat code will be, to circumvent inconvenient things like the sort of due process you're talking about.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link