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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Two leftist policies where I can understand the power dynamics but not the attitude: open borders for military-aged third-world men, relaxed (or none at all) prosecution on criminals, especially military-aged minorities who commit brazen acts of murder/assault/robbery.

As is always the case, these policies exist because a lot of parties benefit. Open borders is supported by capital, homeowners (keeps housing prices pumping), and leftists who gain the patronage of the newcomers. Criminals also help various parties. They drive out right-wingers (i.e. families). They use a huge amount of services that employ leftists. Like immigrants they become patrons to the left, to some degree.

I can see why these things are allowed to continue, but the above analysis is missing the source of intense passion that these issues receive. I don't think Amazon ever pushed for open borders, they just didn't complain end enjoyed the cheap labour. Homeowners don't go to open borders rallies because they want another point of appreciation. Chesa Boudin wants prisoners released because it's strategic. On these two issues specifically, there is only one source of intense passion: single, college-educated women.

This is confusing. Women are more risk-averse and place a higher value on safety, but at the same time they are advocating for violent criminals and random foreigners. There is also a strong element of hatred towards their own countrymen present in this, which makes sense given the policy but does not make sense given that they're ladies. It's similar to the pit bull owner thing. What's up with this? I've seen the meme around pseudopregnancy before and it fits OK, but it's not clear why criminals and foreigners would be the subject of this affection over anything else.

Maybe if a women feel rejected by or reject their own tribe themselves, they attempt to undermine it in the hopes of getting conquered by a different tribe? That seems overly complicated though, the answer to this should feel simple because it's emotional. Help me out here.

Maybe if a women feel rejected by or reject their own tribe themselves, they attempt to undermine it in the hopes of getting conquered by a different tribe? That seems overly complicated though, the answer to this should feel simple because it's emotional. Help me out here.

If you actually believe that then Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be. Otherwise consider being kind and charitable rather than tarring an entire group.

What evidence would you expect there to be, for or against, for that idea? If he’s alleging such an idea, in order to get evidence he would need to be employed as the head of a social science lab. Otherwise, he has to rely on the research already down, but that doesn’t exist on this topic. Requiring him to supply evidence for this kind of idea is saying he can never have the idea at all.

If there's no evidence to back the idea, why is it worth posting about? It's trivial to generate an arbitrary number of unfalsifiable, ugly hypotheses against one's outgroup, but that's not what this space is for.

We have social norms and rules against saying shitty things about groups because there are costs to saying them. I like diverse opinions and I like evidence-based arguments, and these are ostensibly the goal of this site. People going on bitter tirades against women and leftists and PMCs goes against that goal.

If you want to say shitty things about people you should bring evidence. If you have no evidence then don't say shitty things.

It's true that this makes it more difficult to levy true accusations. But the point of these norms is to craft asymmetric weapons to guide us to the truth, and part of that is having standards before you're allowed to say that black people are inherently violent or that Jews secretly want to sacrifice Christian girls to the devil or that women secretly want to be conquered by the Turks.

What exactly in this analysis is "shitty"? It looks to me only like people using power to further their goals.

Moreover this kind of analysis is so routinely done publically for groups that are acceptable to criticize it seems at best unprincipled to refuse to engage with it because it's impolite.

Your norms are quite literally manufactured to pick winners and losers.

Leave the rest of the internet at the door. "People other places talk about how bad my in-group is all the time, so I'm allowed to do the same thing here" is supposedly not allowed here.

The shitty part would be the implication -- present here and more explicit downthread -- that women support immigration and lenient crime policies because they want to be raped. That's a shitty thing to say about people. It doubles as both an uncharitable imputation of an unsympathetic motive and as an implicit threat. It might as well be custom-designed for heat rather than light. There are good reasons to deprecate it, above and beyond other kinds of largely-unsupported speculative edgeposting.

The norms around here about not going out of your way to impute inflammatory, unsupported motives to your outgroup also apply to outgroups that it might be "acceptable to criticize" in other contexts. Just because it's acceptable in other places doesn't mean it should be acceptable here.

That wasn't the implication. Sometimes women make demands in the hopes they are refused. Consider a lame husband with a nagging wife. She would much prefer that he stands up to her and asserts himself, to her and also in a broader context.

"Women secretly want to be conquered" is marginally less inflammatory than "women secretly want to be raped," but this isn't saying much. I remain unimpressed.

If a professor in a relevant field were to attempt to answer this question, in what journal would it be published? And what would be the expected half life of their job?