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 -
CNBC is reporting that
Notably
The USA's GDP is $20 trillion, so a cost of $220 billion is about 1% of the USA's GDP, which should immediately raise some red flags. Now that something smells fishy, we can look up Qatar's GDP and realize that CNBC is claiming that Qatar has spent at least 120% of their GDP on the World Cup.
Unsurprisingly, we can count on Reuters to set the record straight.
Some Googling also gets us news.sky.com being more explicit
I think it's fair to say that reporting all infrastructure spending in the last decade as "spending on the World Cup infrastructure" is pants-on-fire misleading, particularly when comparing it to the costs other countries paid.
The New York Times does it with a bit more plausible deniability.
Although their tweet is more suspect
But what about that $45 billion stadium (which, incidentally, is greater than Qatar's annual government spending)?
That also seems implausible. No source is cited but, for comparison, Yankee Stadium has 12,000 seats (vs Lusail's 9,000) and cost $2.3 billion (or 5% the alleged cost of Lusail). Also sportingnews.com, while also guilty of running that $220 billion number, helpfully lists the costs of each of the new stadiums and claims Lusail Stadium cost $767 million.
Rough order-of-magnitude verification of numbers is a valuable skill. If I tell you the deepest part of the ocean is 500 miles deep you should really be able to know that I'm wrong (the USA is ~2500 miles wide). You should know if the government spends $1 billion or $50 million on something. Reporting that a country spent $200 billion on a sporting event instantly raise a red flag.
Go play Wits & Wagers.
I find it most interesting that Qatar is being treated like Russia in 2018. The west fought a war against Iraq in 1991 to save the Gulf states. If anything the west has ignored the anti-woke nature of the Gulf states and seen it as cool place for finance, tourism and futurism. It seems like the view of these countries have massively swung in a few years to becoming fairly hostile.
Is it their cozying up to China? Is it that these countries are becoming big and influential enough to have too much free will? Is it that the hypocrisy of being liberal in the west yet doing business in Dubai has become too much?
Then you are either with us or against us attitude of elite class westerners is increasingly putting more of the world in the against us category. They aren't going to give half the world the Iran/Russia treatment and if they do the other half of the world is going to do fairly fine under an alternative system.
It's entirely because they have the World Cup. You don't see anyone really going after the likes of Kuwait or the UAE.
Yes, and because for the past few years FIFA has waded quite heavily into moralizing politics (mostly as a cover for their own corruption). If FIFA had spent the years of the lead-up to Russia endlessly promoting the inviolable sovereignty of nations, people would have been more critical of the location in 2018. Well FIFA has been vocally supportive of LGBT rights leading up to this World Cup. The hypocrisy is so readily apparent that it even offends people who don't normally wade into these kind of culture war issues.
Perhaps they've been vocally supportive precisely because they're going to Qatar?
They were criticized for it, obviously. Of course, if they said nothing they'd be criticized too so they took some face-saving measures.
This is essentially the same dynamic going on with the teams that wanted the "OneLove" armband: everyone knew they were complicit and supporting an anti-LGBT regime in practice so, in true performative fashion, they wanted some nice iconography to wash away this sin. But Qatar wouldn't even let them have that.
I mean, this isn't new.
They basically appropriated the theme of love from Christianity, ignoring literally everything else in the faith (including just why love is important*) that is inimical to their worldview
Why wouldn't they do it to Bob Marley too?
* It's not about hedonism or even freedom to choose romantic relationships...
? I'm pretty sure Christianity didn't invent love or ever have any rightful monopoly on it.
Christianity invented very few things, once you actually start digging into it. But it popularized plenty.
Philosophy schools were opposed to the infanticide found in the ancient world, like the Christians. But who would argue that we owe the disgust of this (to the point where the easiest way to lose an abortion debate is to bite the bullet on "why a fetus but not a newborn baby? They're both not particularly sapient...") to some philosophy school and not the Church?
Monogamy might have been a practice somewhere, but it certainly owes a debt to Paul.
The idea of agape, love-as-central is very Christian. A central idea of Christianity is summed up in John 3:16, one of the most famous verses in the Bible, the Gospel in a nutshell: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son": Divine love is made manifest in the incarnation and the death of God to save us from sin, that's how much he allegedly loves everyone.
"God is love", for example, is something I hear a lot in the West. I tend to hear a lot of progressive policies pushed in the name of "Jesus loved everyone" and "love is love" and so on, so they're very aware of the perception.
IIRC Christian philosophers like Swinburne even make arguments defending other central elements of Christianity via the concern for love: e.g. a loving God would be a Trinity since that is a "'perfect love" - a singular God has no mutual love, a dual pair can be selfish since they'll only focus on one another (don't ask me to defend this, I find everything about the Trinity dubious). Suffice it to say, this is the sort of argument that doesn't occur to the other sons of Abraham.
In my religious education -as a Muslim- love was not specifically emphasized as a value uber alles . Similarly, nobody went around arguing for anti-Islamic things because "Mohammed loved everyone" but I notice that progressive Muslims raised in the West often speak in similar tones to the Christians. If Muslims, why not people who aren't recent transplants?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link