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 -
Because we don't argue to change minds or win here we argue to understand. It's right there at the top of the page.
"Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds." "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."
And I would say that the realization is probably my fundamental takeaway from being part of the political culture war for near decades. Much of what is believed about how people operate and how politics and the culture war operate is untrue. The influence of academia and the media is vastly over-stated and the influence of the society and family is vastly under-stated. That people rationalize almost all their beliefs based upon their pre-existing feelings and that this leads to the fact that people very rarely can be argued out of or into a belief set. That our societies are much more bottom up than top down, and that people complaining about politicians, academia and the like are mistaken, because as long as we are as we are, we will get the academia and politicians we deserve. Trying to get better politicians or better academics is a fools errand, because what you really need is better people in general. That much of our academics (social sciences at least) is generated from the spontaneous transmission of belief sets at the bottom up level that then gets rationalized through academic thought.
So again yes I would suggest that those ideas would in fact have spread absent academia, because race particularly is a fundamental issue within America. The tension between slavery and America's founding mythos inevitably led to the Civil War, the abolishment of slavery, white guilt, which leads to white privilege which leads to affirmative action and so on and so forth. None of that needs academia in anyway. Jefferson was able to predict it was going to be America's albatross. The idea that previous oppression leads to guilt, leads to the simple concept that interactions today can be influenced by history does not need academia. I do indeed submit that even without academia, very little would have changed as to wokism and the like.
People look at the history of slavery in the US, look at their founding mythos, look at the Civil War, look at Jim Crow and segregation and feel bad and sad that their nation, the shining city on the hill did such things. So guilt. Guilt creates an impulse to make things right, to do better, so that you can feel better. You can't undo the past so you must impact the present. So that means black people now must get something. If you're cynical that clashes with peoples own selfishness, so instead of giving up large amounts of status and money they think about it every time they interact with a black person and so on and so forth and it makes you feel more guilty. You notice that your retail workers are almost exclusively black. That your neighbors are almost exclusively white. You notice. You absolutely do not need a high status institution for this. It's noticed because it is true. Previous actions have in fact shaped the present. It doesn't require high brow thinking to realise.
Now to be sure this isn't everyone in America clearly. But it is a throughline through Blue Tribe thought, academia or no. You're correct that not everyone would develop this spontaneously. They wouldn't need to, because their neighbor would, or their parents. Social mores were transmitted and taught and punished well before we had academia. There is no reason to think it is necessary at all.
I don't think I am going to change many people's minds, if any at all. But I enjoy the back and forth and sometimes I do learn new things from new people. If people think I am wrong that is more than ok.
Absent academia those ideas look more like the Black Panthers and Nation of Islam, and less like Robin Diangelo and other NYT bestsellers.
To borrow from an esteemed set of cultural artifacts, the psychic energy would be the same 35 foot 600 pound twinkie, but wouldn't select the same form of the destroyer.
It takes a certain kind of mind that didn't exist before to think maybe people shouldn't be policed or punished based on race.
Letting people die for "health equity" is so high brow it's left the head entirely.
Not at all. If you have a certain amount of resources you have to decide who is going to get them and who is going to get them first. That kind of thinking is centuries old (if not older!) The presentation might be new but it's exactly the same sort of decision you have to make when deciding to build a hospital in London or Bradford. Do you put it in a poor area or a rich one?
Choosing it to place it where health outcomes are worst is taking into account health equity. Again the term may be new but the reality that you have to allocate scarce resources and who should get them is old. Probably as old as deciding if you should give food to the old toothless elder who may die any day or to the hunters in your tribe.
I don't expect us to come to agree on much of anything but I always appreciate your input.
This particular example enrages me because it was much more direct than what I think you're suggesting- it was about withholding vaccines from older, high-risk populations and distributing them to young, low-risk populations by virtue of race. I think the people that suggested this should've been first in line to Seven Pounds for health equity, if they believed it so strongly.
So maybe because I've worked in public health this is not particularly bothersome. We already trade off deaths vs other values. Increased speed limits leads to economic gain but more deaths. Another hospital in an urban area will save more lives than funding one in a rural area. Deaths simply are a trade off at a population level. People here argued we should have allowed more Covid deaths in older populations in order to preserve the economy and rights of free movement et al.
Having said that, from the point of view of vaccines, they have two purposes, protect the individual who takes the vaccine and try to achieve herd immunity (or at least reduced spread). Black communities were among those worst at taking up the vaccine (for a few reasons). With increased obesity and other health conditions, even low risk black age groups are at higher risk than similar white (or asian) age groups.
"In people 65 years and older, Blacks are nearly 5 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than Whites. This increased risk of COVID-19 mortality in Blacks is even worse in younger populations—up to a 10-times greater risk in adults 35 to 64 years old. In fact, younger Blacks are dying from COVID-19 at a rate greater than older Whites. For example, Blacks 55 to 64 years old are dying from COVID-19 at rate two-times greater than Whites a decade older."
So their community is less likely to have protective levels of vaccination, more likely to get sicker than an equivalent white person and more likely to die. They're also disproportionately more likely to work in a customer service or retail role and therefore get exposed. Are you sure that it would be the wrong decision to push more vaccines that way, even if all we were looking at was deaths prevented?
If ethnicity impacts outcomes then logically it should be at least a factor when looking at policy. How much of a factor depends on what you're trying to achieve.
I considered it for a time, but was put off by many prevailing attitudes. I regret that now; I should've went into the field to try and counterweight the worst of those attitudes. I didn't and don't have the thirst for attention to do so, though.
This would be one of those times where how you discuss a problem is incredibly relevant even if the downstream effects are approximately the same, and I should've quoted the offensiveness instead of leaving it (for once!) unquoted.
So I would like to say you have convinced me there is a way that the different prioritization is actually defensible. I can see why one might, especially early on, distribute vaccines in a racially biased manner. As is so often the case, the pseudonymous rando is a much better advocate for a given cause than the credentialed experts cited in the Paper of Record.
Unfortunately, that is not the way the credentialed experts in the Paper of Record described it and so, I present the source of my everlasting hatred for them:
What a putrid soul it must take to think and speak that way.
Their goal is, as they stated themselves, not to save lives. It is to "reduce health equities." In the way of that equity cartoon, you can hand the short man a ladder or machete the tall man at the knees. Their choice is to machete the tall man at the knees, and for that they should be condemned. They are the primary reason I have an immediate and vehement distrust of anyone using the phrase "health equity."
I see no viable defense and, frankly, have no interest in a defense of such people, any more than I would have interest in a defense of King Leopold's actions in the Congo. For better and worse, people rarely receive the fate they deserve.
For what it's worth, the article taken as a whole is interesting, and the author was clearly deliberate in positioning the back and forth of good argumentation versus abject horrors.
So obviously you feel strongly about it and I don't want to rile you up. But I don't see too much objectionable here. Levelling the playing field is about taking into account the differences here. He even says it, the white populations are healthier so they live longer, so if you just take into account age, you will miss out on morbidity increasing factors which in the United States are drawn heavily along racial lines because your underclass is heavily skewed black. Likewise with teachers, middle class white people with degrees are likely to suffer from fewer health issues than non-middle class, non white, non degree holders. All of this appears to be factual information.
I think that equity phrase/cartoon is hijacking your perception a little here. The equity cartoon isn't a one to one description of how equity would work in the real world when carried out by real people, nor do people always mean the same thing when they say equity. The actual positions they were advocating are nowhere similar to taking a machete to a tall person. They are actually advocating for something closer to the original equality cartoon, with vaccines instead of boxes. The tall people are still going to be tall. The healthier groups are still going to be healthier, they would have to be making the healthier group intrinsically less healthy in the name of equity for the machete to apply. Like putting immuno-suppressants in the water, so that the death rates were equalized with the worse off populations or something by making them worse (a al Harrison Bergeron).
Rather than giving something to the worse off populations to reduce their death rates to similar to the taller population. That's the definition of the ladder analogy really. They advocate to make the short person taller (healthier) rather than make the tall person shorter (unhealthier). The latter would be equity as described by the (I agree) objectionable cartoon. If they were recommending making white people more vulnerable to the disease, so that they died in rough equity with black people, I completely agree that would be very objectionable! That would be taking a machete to the legs of the tall. But that's not the recommendation they are making. The vaccine is the boxes or ladders. If you didn't give them to anybody, the tall person would still be tall and the short person would still be short.
Which isn't to say they don't have objectionable views in general, or that they are definitely correct. I'd want to take a much deeper dive into specific proposals and trade offs, and confirm numbers and the like, but I don't think they show much sign of being outright evil monsters. At worst they believe the boxes version of equity, while you believe the machete version of equity.
Note: The Equality vs Equity cartoon a woke person is likely to point to doesn't involve any machetes at all. It just shows shifting one box from the tall man (equality) to the short man (equity) so the short man has two and the tall man has zero. But I've gone with the (more critical of equity) version you describe to keep the analogy rolling along.
https://pressbooks.openedmb.ca/app/uploads/sites/52/2023/01/image1.jpeg
That's one way of putting it, but another way of putting it is that such a distribution is effectively punishing white people for being too healthy.
Essentially, "you're not dying enough, so you can't have a vaccine". The underlying problem that the machete version of the cartoon is trying to point out is that attempting to compensate for different base health by race is in practice going to mean depriving people from healthier groups of care that they would receive in a colour-blind society, until and unless they start dying at an equitable rate.
Absolutely. And that is a reasonable critique of the position. Especially if you pointed out significant parts of the poor health is behavioural! I'm not saying they are correct, I am saying its a reasonable non evil position to hold. With scarce resources some people are not going to be treated. But note that is also the basic decision we came to with age. Younger people had to wait to get vaccinated. So were we punishing young people for being too healthy? Or is it simply the pragmatic choice to try and equalize death rates between different age groups? We did deprive young people of care they would have got in an age blind society then presumably. Is that ok but race skewing isn't? Or are neither ok?
Like I said in the other thread its not just about race, its also age, and class and job role. Should you vaccinate a farmer or a barista? The farmer is likely to be more important to food security, but a barista is likely to be exposed to and expose many more people. Depending on your goals/priorities you can make a reasonable case for either.
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
More options
Context Copy link