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 -
A tangent.
I keep gravitating back towards my own null hypothesis - public welfare is a bad idea through and through, and no matter how many epicycles its proponents attach in attempts to sanewash it, it will never be a better system than not having public welfare. I know this means that I effectively espouse the need to pay out the ass for private insurance, and that there will be a very large parts of the population near the bottom end of the socioeconomic spectrum that will look very disagreeable even to my middle class sensibilities. A low-wage class, a serf class, a dehumanized mass of barely viable specimens, or outright unviable ones kept alive by their barely viable associates, or unviable ones in the process of honest-to-god starving on the streets. But what will the world look like with another few centuries of public welfare and, I assume, no eugenics? The same low-viable population, only grown unchecked by economic pressure thanks to welfare always bailing them out at significant cost to the productive elements of society.
I keep being told that this is baseless, that the unproductive poor will be elevated by education, or that they will naturally stop breeding, or that each subsequent generation is a blank slate and those non-viable traits will not persist over long timeframes. Or, of course, that AI will fix everything for everyone anyways. Or that there's no point in worrying because the planet is doomed and we may at least die in solidarity and upholding basic standards of living and human dignity for everyone on the way.
But I don't see it. I just don't. What I see is ever-growing burdens placed on those who create value, to the benefit of an ever-growing proportion of those who do not. I'd call it injustice if that made sense to anyone nowadays, when "justice" means that those who don't work are sustained by those who do, forever, no strings attached. Until society as a whole produces nothing but parasites and their sustenance - and then either collapses or finally puts a stop to these dynamics, much later and more grievously than had it been done earlier.
"Do you want to see people dying in the streets?", one might ask me. No I don't. Of course not. But it strikes me as quite possibly the lesser evil, in the long run.
I actually warmed up to welfare over the years, though I strongly disagree with it's unconditional dispensation. In my ideal model any healthy male would need to enroll into boot-camp or equivalent conditions to get a pay-check. The conditions could be relaxed depending on one's health, but essentially, you'd have to break some sweat before you get anything. UBI and other unconditional schemes, or even the "pure formality" conditional ones, are the ultimate evil.
More options
Context Copy link
Yes. Of course, Ayn Rand expressed the same thing in Atlas Shrugged, and all it got her is infamy and some really terrible movies.
The idea that there should be some sort of social insurance for construction workers who lose their legs doesn't seem too unreasonable, even if I might oppose it. When that extends to disability payments for the congenitally lazy or "who made poor life choices to some degree"... well, shit. I don't want to work either, and I didn't get the benefit of those poor life choices the other people made, so why the hell should I be paying for them? Thing is, there seems to be a slippery slope from the reasonable to the unreasonable, and no one with any power is interested in building a fence across it.
More options
Context Copy link
I think I agree Theres a bit of a moral hazard in too much welfare, especially uncoupled from the need to push people to do what they can, and to avoid bad behavior. If someone is generally capable of working, I don’t think they should starve. That’s insane. But if the person is clearly making bad, antisocial decisions, cutting off the gibs would force them to behave. Or for that matter force them to make their kids behave, attend school and do their homework. They should contribute as they are able, and they should be making sure their kids get a decent education. And staying out of crime, drugs, and so on. If you’re doing those kinds of things, im perfectly willing to pay to keep them from starving. If they’re sitting home on gibs, doing drugs, not making sure their kids are getting educated and not getting into trouble, they don’t get the gibs. It should be a hand up to hopefully being self sufficient, not a hand out to keep them comfortable doing nothing.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not sure why this would be the null hypothesis. Coercively funded public welfare has been around since time immemorial, the consequences of abolishing it have been politically unacceptable even in poorer and harsher times, and members of the manual labour class who can no longer work hard enough to hold down a job due to old age have almost always been seen as the most deserving cases.
Poor relief through the Church in medieval Europe was not voluntary charity - it was institutionalised welfare funded by State-endorsed coercion. In England the system largely operated through the monasteries and there was a combination of real secular coercion (tithes were a compulsory levy which could ultimately be collected by force, and impropriation of rectories by monasteries basically meant that tithes beyond what was needed for the support of the parish priest were diverted to monastic "charity") and spiritual coercion (in a society where people actually believe in a religion which incorporates justification by works, "you will go to hell if you do not leave a reasonable percentage of your net worth to the local monastery" is coercive). In the middle of the 16th century the dissolution of the monasteries and the Reformation mean that this system stops working, and the resulting increase in visible destitution is as politically destabilising as the present-day street-shitting crisis in San Francisco. Eventually England gets a comprehensive system of tax-funded secular poor relief in 1601. The Malthusian turn in the 19th century doesn't change the principle - the workhouses were harsh but they weren't cheap. And "don't put the infirm elderly in the workhouse" was the first demand of left-populists and one of the top five demands of right-populists for most of the next century.
What did change, probably for the worse, was the shift from a poor relief system where who gets what was ultimately at the discretion of local elites who could rely on their own knowledge to distinguish between deserving and undeserving poor to a bureaucratised system. And that change was made by the workhouse-mongers who thought that the local elites were too soft - something that is still an issue in the UK in the present day, where governments of all stripes keep trying to centralise eligibility assessment for disability benefits because patients' own NHS GPs (in the late 20th century, the archetypal local elite) are too soft, particularly in high-unemployment post-industrial areas like the Welsh valleys.
Not the. Just mine.
Fair points on your part. I won't argue against your historical analysis. That said, I still don't think situational barely-subsistence welfare at the discretion of local elites in pre-modern societies corresponds very exactly to universal high-standard-of-living welfare administered by nationally uniform buerocracies in terms of long-term demographic dysgenics.
Disability is not exactly a high standard of living.
Compared to pre-modern people who received any sort of public welfare?
While fair, the actual homeless receive a higher standard of living than the average person in 1800 by some measures(they probably eat a better diet, for example); ‘premodern charity cases’ are a dumb comparison.
Disability cases have a standard of living that’s pretty low by North American standards. There’s probably some room to cut it, but asking them to live like homeless tramps from the Middle Ages isn’t something our society is prepared to do- of anyone.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
SSDI abusers are generally past prime reproductive age, so the impact on long-term demographic dysgenics is nearly zero.
The decision to treat never-married single mothers as deserving poor was, in the UK at least, both conceptually and temporally separate from the decision to bureaucratise poor relief. I agree with you that it hasn't produced good outcomes.
Under the Old Poor Law, the deserving poor were generally understood to be:
Wounded or disabled veterans were increasingly considered deserving poor over the course of the 18th century, although they were not legally treated as such by the Poor Law system so if they didn't qualify for the Royal Hospitals at Chelsea (for the Army) or Greenwich (for the Navy) then they often ended up on the streets or in the workhouse.
True. Which is why I prefaced this entire tangent as such; an excuse to ride my hobby horse of the more general public welfare topic.
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