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 -
The Rightful Caliph has blogged over at ACX that The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs.
He is arguing that while tariffs are an "idiosyncratic obsession of Trump’s" which are not a load-bearing part of the MAGA platform, the fact that he can push through them is a consequence of his cult of personality and him being surrounded by yes-men who will not risk his anger by telling him an idea of his is terrible. So the tariffs in particular point to a broader failure mode of right-wing populism, which he contrasts with the ideological capture of institutions by the left.
He is then saying that he prefers to salvage institutions captured by the left to Trump's approach of starting without institutional knowledge and just see how things go.
As usually, this is compellingly written. It did not make me update a lot on Scott's politics -- he had explicitly endorsed anyone-but-Trump for the presidential election, and extrapolating that he would not be a fan of the tariffs was not exactly hard. I like how Scott took this issue which has been discussed to the death on the object level, then took a step back and asked "but what is the deeper truth about that political system beyond the object level stupidity?"
As usual for Scott blogs about CW-adjacent topic, there is a lot of discussion going on at ACX.
The trouble is that left-wing/centrist wrecking of the economy is totally normalized and proceeds in boring administrative steps. Biden initiated an inflationary spending plan to invest in inefficient energy production (the Green New Deal), he continued along with costly DEI programs. Trump has launched an inflationary and chaotic tariff agenda. Both things can be bad but one is more spectacular and novel than the other.
In Australia there's been all kinds of discussion and criticism over Trump's tariffs despite the fact that we sell the US very little. Meanwhile the government's been inflating a massively fraudulent disability program. Costs are growing about $5 billion a year on a $40 billion base, it's about the size of Australia's defence budget. Providers are eagerly sucking on the teat of the government, creating imaginary disabilities and getting the government to pay for them. It's institutionalizing and subsidizing deliberate incapacity, if children have trouble at school there are ways to find that they're disabled whereupon they get special accommodations and help.
I have no doubt that similar levels of fraud and wasteful largesse are happening in America, albeit scaled up massively. Huge numbers of New Yorkers are paid as carers for family. Do they actually need that care? Nobody knows and there's no way to find out without making lots of people very angry, going to the media with sob stories, real or imaginary. And because of that it's all shrouded in euphemisms. There's endless discourse about getting costs under control. Costs aren't actually brought under control of course, we might go from galloping bureaucracy to a gentle canter. And nobody would dare to dispute the pressing need to guarantee boomers as many subsidies and entitlements as the state can afford, if not more. That's what they have in the UK, with the 'triple lock' where pensions are decreed to grow with the highest of inflation, wages or 2.5%.
All this redistribution constrains investment. We know how to grow prosperity and improve quality of life. R&D + capital deepening. But you can't do much of that if you're busy extracting as much wealth as you can from the productive economy to bribe huge swathes of the electorate.
However, tariffs make almost nobody better off so everyone can freely declare that they're retarded and thus it seems like Trump's policies are especially harmful when they're only especially stupid and the true balance of harm is yet to be seen.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link