site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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.

13
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

"Save" might be a bit of an excessive claim, but circa 1991 the local balance of power certainly suggested that Iraq could have made attempts to annex all or part of other adjacent states. Before the Gulf War, Iraq had the world's fourth largest army and relatively modern equipment. That the war would end in a curbstomp in hours was not a foregone conclusion beforehand.

Qatar is a peninsula, Bahrein is an island. Speaking of those two realistically, they are only reachable from Iraq's direction through a seaborne invasion. Did the Iraqis ever have the capability to do that?

Iraq was getting the best of Iran just a few years earlier, but not by enough to prevent them from accepting a ceasefire with little permanent gain, and not by such a large margin that you'd think they were an existential threat to the whole region.

I can't blame anyone for treating them like an existential threat anyway. "Murderous dictator builds rapidly-expanding war machine and uses weak revanchist excuses to start salami-slicing his neighbors" was an uncomfortably familiar story, and "everybody just sits back and hopes that he'll be satisfied after a few slices and stop and reform" was no longer considered to be a safe way to bring it to a conclusion.

Sure, but if Kuwait didn’t have oil- and hadn’t been very firmly willing to play nice with the West about its sale- the reaction wouldn’t have been military intervention, it would’ve been an angsty op Ed in the NYT and a strongly worded letter submitted to the UN, which would then approve it.