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 -
[[I have no clue who Tim Pool is or what his deal is, so this might not match what "Tim Pool" would say at all]]
Every political goal is and must be downstream of winning. Anything that isn't winning isn't, in the short term, politics; it is speculation, philosophy, academics. Now, short term loss can turn into long term triumph, political philosophy isn't valueless, but it is at core a separate domain from politics. Letting the one infect the other poisons both.
So when we talk about "The Black Vote" we are talking about the behaviors of voters with identifiable characteristics. That those characteristics correlate at a rate of over 80% with voting behavior does not reify the idea that all Black folk act or think alike. But it is a fact you need to grapple with if you want to win elections. If you want to win elections without thinking about voters in demographic groups, you won't win, and if you don't win you don't achieve anything at all. Deontology is fine, if you have a principled religious objection to labeling groups that's great, go be a Shaker or a Jain and leave the real world alone. We're out here trying to win elections, not ask how many angels dance on the head of a pin or tell the axe murderer where our friend is hiding.
Talking about the Black vote doesn't elevate or deny Black agency, any more than looking for tall players on a Basketball team or fast soccer players is denying short slow people their humanity.
So, to turn it around, what does Kanye hope to achieve by going Death Con 3 on the Jews in the media industry? What does his ideal media universe look like? Would it be strictly representational by race, by religion, by social class? Would it be meritocratic, and in what ways is our current system less meritocratic than it should be? What needs to change, say it out loud, don't hide it behind vague ideas of representation.
{I'll note personally that I have basically skipped any "literary" work with a 20th century Jewish protagonist, particularly one who lives in the Northeast USA, for a few years now. I just got sick of so many of the tropes. And I find it funny that so many critics of Big Mouth decry its lack of Black voices, while failing to notice that it has only a single white Christian (inevitably, a comic-relief flaming homosexual) in a sea of NYC-metro Jews. I've also reduced consumption of anything related to WWII, movies books histories etc; I find that our culture overemphasizes WWII to the detriment of learning about literally anything else in history. So I do see some room for expanding our set of literary and cultural tropes by expanding the representation of creators. But that has to be accompanied by genuine quality and audience enjoyment, not by politically correct dictates}
The war part of WWII is absolutely unbeatable, no other war can compete. I dare you as an autistic man to not enjoy this 29-hour, 41-part series on the Battle of Stalingrad told via map.
What about Alexander? Cannae? Austerlitz? De Bello Gallico? Tamerlane? Valley Forge? Sherman's march to the sea? Plassey? Lepanto? Sobieski at Vienna?
WWII is fascinating, but when the only analogy you have is WWII everyone gets cast as Hitler, Chamberlain, Stalin or Churchill.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, it is our origin story, at least for the current incarnation of the United States as a globe-spanning empire with interests and soldiers everywhere. Without WWII as the central part of that story, without Hitler as the stand-in for Satan and the ensuing rise of the Soviet Union as a permanent threat, the rest of the story looks pretty weird. We have 55,000 soldiers in Japan, 36,000 in Germany, a few thousand in Spain and Italy, hundreds in places that most people don't even know exist (what the hell is Diego Garcia?). Everything that comes after WWII is justified by WWII and the new role of the Greater American Empire in which nearly every country on Earth is an American protectorate or an American adversary.
I don't think maintaining buy-in for the modern American civic religion would be possible without centering the 20th century's triumphant struggle for the primacy and legitimacy of Democracy^tm above all other systems.
That is exactly why I object to centering it so strongly in our popular understanding of history. I find the American imperial project abhorrent both to much of the world {Remember Allende and the day before, before the army came} and to the interests of the American people.
Historical analogy, consider the quip*: Athens recovered quickly from its defeat in the Peloponnesian War, Sparta never recovered from its victory. Sparta would never be the Sparta of Lycurgus, in a pure decline until their defeat against Antipater snuffed them out forever as a real power, they became a mocking footnote in Alexanders memorials "These victories were won by all the Greeks, except the Lacedaemonians." Athens would become a center of learning, prominent into the days of Julian the Apostate, our modern framing of Athens descends as much from the later period under Roman rule as from the Athenian Golden Age. Most of what we remember about Sparta was mythmaking by Athenians playing up their great rivals as models or as villains.
I fear that it might be the same for the USA; we may never recover from winning WWII and the Cold War.
*I can never remember where I first heard it or who to attribute it to.
Oh, I'm in a distressing amount of agreement. The initial American project was unstable for all of the reasons that culminated in the Civil War, but the post-Reconstruction nation really seems to me like it could have stayed as a hemispheric superpower indefinitely. The post-WWII arrangement strikes me as being on its last legs, with some major realignment approaching quickly.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link