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 Republican party is generally claimed to be the party of fiscal responsibility. Note the term "claimed" here; I do not think the record of Republican governance proves this claim at all well, but nonetheless the default expectation seems persistent. When I was younger, this was certainly a selling-point of the party to me, and I voted for Bush II in the hope that he'd get government spending under control. Then 9/11 happened, and he wasted trillions wandering our military through the middle east.
Now the debt is very bad, and people are once more raising the banner of Fiscal Responsibility. Is it in Republicans' interest to enforce "fiscal responsibility", and if so, how? If we were to seriously cut spending and raise taxes, as people claim the fiscal situation demands, this would almost certainly cost us the next election. In the best possible case that I can see, we would be expending our political power to create stable economic conditions for our opponents to then rule. The more likely case would be us expending our political power to ameliorate spending that our opponents increase to gain power for themselves, resulting in a much shakier economy and our complete political irrelevance.
Why not offer the Fiscal Responsibility mantel to the Democrats? The economy is very complicated after all, and they are at this point clearly the party of Expert Opinion: who better to determine and implement the hard-nosed measures necessary to right our economic vessel? When I was younger, the obvious rejoinder would have been that they would do a bad job of it and disaster would result, but it seems to me that we have not done all that much better, and disaster seems likely in any case. If disaster cannot be meaningfully avoided, then why expend limited resources demanded by a serious political conflict on an unfixable resource-sink of a problem? What's the actual plan, here?
You're only looking federally (and even then I'd say the GOP still has a slight edge because they're less willing to waste money on patently obviously useless spending like trans operas in Latin America etc.). But at the state and local levels, the GOP is clearly the party of fiscal responsibility, as can be seen by comparing debt levels (absolute and per capita) between various strongly blue vs strongly red states and cities.
The case that trans operas in Latin America are useless to American interests has not been made. Whatever you think of trans operas in the abstract, it seems quite likely that transing a neutral country will bring it culturally closer to the American universal culture fold. This makes it less likely that it will randomly kick out or tax American businesses, thumb its nose at American products, back Russia or China in some international affairs matter or even host a Chinese military base. The trans operas might well be the by far most cost-effective way to reap those benefits, and it's not even clear if they benefit the trans agenda at home all that much.
If South Korea had a nationalist faction that opposed k-drama on aesthetic grounds, would it make sense for it to prioritise going after its foreign distribution?
Transing Afghans didn't exactly work out. Seems like bringing in lgbt and feminism just made them hate us more.
Uniquely, the Afghans saw the American Empire's cultural exports as the net-negative that they are (the bombs themselves didn't help either), were in a very unique position to reject them, so they did.
Transing other countries very observably makes them weaker, and as such doing so is generally in the US' interests. That this also applies to the US itself is not as much a concern.
I think that the narrative that LGBT makes the US weak while rejecting LGBT is what makes the Taliban strong rings even less true than the usual version of the Fremen mirage. The US has the Taliban beaten by a mile on every civilizational and capability index I care about, GPD/person, infant mortality, education attainment, military capabilities, freedom of speech, etc pp. The Taliban clearly beat the US in TFR, but that is not all that hard to do if you are willing to subjugate half of your population and ban non-reproductive sex. "Don't sell your 15 yo daughter to some man twice her age who will breed her continuously for her fertile lifespan" is not a trans agenda. It is not even a feminist agenda, unless your definition of feminism is something wholeheartedly embraced by 95-99% of the US population.
I will not claim that transpersons will make superior frontline soldiers, having gone through male puberty and then continuing to produce male sex hormones is clearly advantageous physically, but I do not think that a few percent of trans people matter. Look, the obesity rate in the US is 40%, and even that is not an insurmountable difficulty for military capabilities. The US army tooth to tail ratio in Iraq was 1:8.1. Think about it as a pyramid. At the base, you have a ton of taxpayers. Then, you have people working in arms manufacturing, writing software for guided missiles and all that. Then, you have eight actual members of the military who are supporting one frontline soldier. Obviously you want that person to be fit, where your gender-neutral criteria may end up excluding many cis-males and almost all of the people who are not cis-males for the job, depending on the specifics (a commando has likely different requirements than a tank commander). But below this, your care for raw strength drops rapidly. Perhaps the person driving the supply truck is a cis-woman. And the guy operating the drone from 50km away is wheelchair-bound. And the person who wrote the software for controlling the drone is a trans-woman and so on.
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