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 -
Robert Moses, Ronan Farrow, and the Role of the Dilettante in Society
TLDR: Dilettantes, independently wealthy men who do important work not because they need money but for personal satisfaction, are sometimes uniquely situated to achieve goals that careerists are incapable of reaching. We should be encouraging wealthy dilettantes in our society to do something cool with all that freedom they can afford, rather than trying to get them to grind away at 9-7s that anyone else with their IQ could do.
Two of the best non-fiction works I've read recently have been Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow and The Power Broker by Robert Caro. On their face, they couldn't be more different. One is a weekend beach read of an autobiographical journalism book, a Nancy Drew mystery of the intrepid reporter who tracks the lurid scandals of Hollywood despite the personal risks, a year-end bestseller. The other is a multi-volume monstrosity that goes into minute detail on the legislative process of getting parks legislation passed in the early 1900s, covering the life story of a man so ingeniously powerful that FDR at the peak of his strength couldn't dislodge him, widely considered one of the greatest non-fiction works of all time.
Yet there are a strong similarities between the two Farrow and Moses: both men came from wealthy families and attended Yale, Oxford, and had obvious nepotistic and parental support that allowed them to bounce around jobs in their 20s. Family money and connections meant that they didn't worry about supporting themselves like ordinary men, instead they caught the big fish.
Moses would try to take on a job rewriting the civil service rules for New York City, lose the ensuing political battles with Tammany Hall politicians who used the civil service jobs as patronage to maintain power, was forced to move out of state to find any job at all. Moses wouldn't find a "real" job until 1927 when he was 29 years old, he wouldn't support his own family financially until he was in his 40s, relying on support from his mother to make his (rather fancy) ends meet. Rather than major (or even take a minor) in making money, Moses focused single-mindedly on accumulating power. He took unpaid or poorly paid jobs, and attacked them with all the energy and creativity of a small-business owner or a start-up founder, worked like his life depended on it, harder than anyone. Where typical political appointees to these low paying jobs either treated them as the part-time work they were paid as, or used the powers of the position to make money selling contracts and jobs; Moses used the powers of the office purely to accumulate more power to the office. He bootstrapped the authorities into funding and bond juggernauts, dominated NYC construction, built bridges and parks, decided the course of Long Island development, all well into the 1950s. But none of that would have been possible if he had been forced to compromise his vision in the 1920s and the early 1930s so that he could feed his family.
Farrow, meanwhile, attended Yale Law and briefly practiced at a corporate firm, but found he didn't enjoy law and quit. Right there, the vast majority of law school grads cannot afford to simply decide to skip out on law, but for Farrow it was just a hobby. From there he worked in the Obama administration state department for a few years in various big-title sinecures for Yale grads with famous names, stuff like "Special Adviser for Humanitarian and NGO Affairs in the Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan." Farrow left government service at the same time as Hillary Clinton, his patron, and moved right into hosting his own show on MSNBC for just one season; Farrow would say that more people would come up to him at parties after it was canceled and say they loved it than ever actually watched the show. From there Farrow would get a job producing features for Today, which would lead to him and his partner stumbling on the Weinstein story.
What's clear in the work, and from the way that Weinstein accusations would come up over and over in media, is that journalists would regularly stumble over the Weinstein story and be scared off. And boy, howdy, did they ever try to scare this ol' boy Farrow off. NBC tells him to drop the story, repeatedly, he ultimately is forced to leave his NBC job to pursue the story. No one will take his calls, none of his stories will get published in any outlet on any topic. Hillary Clinton won't talk to him and dodges their planned interview for a totally unrelated book. Israeli spies hired by Weinstein* begin tracking Farrow, trailing him, and in multiple cases posing as representatives of non-profit Feminist organizations interested in his work on Weinstein and asking to have him in to talk about what he has on Weinstein. Farrow's partner drops out early on, citing his family and his career. It is unclear at times if Farrow will be able to get any job in journalism if this doesn't play out, and it isn't clear if Farrow will be able to produce anything publishable as sources disappear or clam up under pressure from Weinstein's goons. Professional journalists dropped out under this pressure, which is the logical response to the threat of having the career by which you define yourself, by which you feed your family. Farrow don't care. For Farrow journalism is a lark, a distraction after Yale Law School, between the State Department and before the PhD from Oxford. Tell him he'll never work in Journalism again, fine, he'll move on to some other rich-kid sinecure.
And it makes me think, there's a lot of value in having men like that in the world, in our society. Men who can pursue a goal without concern for day to day things. Think of Darwin and all the gentlemen scientists of yore, the Royal Societies, men who wanted to advance knowledge with no concern for tenure or for monetizing their discoveries. Farrow and Moses needed nepotism and family support to get where they got. But they just as easily could have done nothing interesting with that family help. They could have wasted away as party boys, done nothing useful with it. They could have done something uninteresting with it, become bankers or corporate lawyers and added to their family's wealth and produced a bunch of kids who would follow them to Yale and produce more bankers and lawyers. But instead, they chose to do spectacular things. To leverage their intelligence and their freedom to do what they dreamed of, to change the world.** It's admirable, we should encourage our privileged rich kids to do more fun stuff, and less "steal a billion dollars from investors in the magic beans business" stuff.
*Hired for Weinstein by Liberal-Hero Super-Lawyer David Boies; keep this fact in mind whenever the Dershowitz-Boies saga comes up. Another Weinstein ally in going after Farrow was Matt Lauer. It's all molesters all the way down.
** Depending on your opinion of Moses, maybe not for the better. Farrow probably deserves some demerits as well for whatever the hell he was supposedly doing with youth in Afghanistan and Syria when he was with the state department, but to be honest I doubt he did much of anything while he was there.
Damn called me out. I do have spurts of intense motivation for certain things, I've just never had it last very long.
Yeah, same. Usually once the mystery is figured out and the end is in sight I lose interest in actually doing the job of finishing it and put it aside because that now feels like busywork.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link