site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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.

10
Top Bottom New Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Here's a starter. We have the largest increase in the homicide rate ever recorded, immediately following one of the largest social and political interventions into our law enforcement system in living memory, an intervention that directly interfered with the function of law enforcement nation-wide and repeatedly created "cop free zones" with massively-elevated murder rates.

Now, to be fair, it's true that we can't actually prove that the attempted deconstruction of our entire street-level law enforcement apparatus has anything to do with the historically novel murder rate. After all, the NYT hasn't declared it so, and if the NYT doesn't say it, it isn't true. One can merely point out that this exact consequence was predicted from the beginning of the intervention and before, because similar interventions at smaller scale had similar effects.

...Perhaps the point should be made with less snark.

We talk about policy a lot here. Generally, the pattern is that an intervention is proposed, carried out, and then we discuss the outcomes. Usually in the field of public policy, the outcomes of a policy are subtle and difficult to detect, and so we get a lively debate back and forth over whether the intervention worked or not, whether it was worth the cost or not. Does increasing black representation in TV shows increase metric [x]? Inquiring minds want to know.

BLM was a significant social and political intervention, one of the most massive and abrupt in recent memory. Its interventions coincided with an immediate and unprecedentedly massive increase in violent crime and murder, which has not relented in the two years since. This increase in violent crime is the largest ever recorded. A massive increase in violent crime was predicted by conservatives from the start of BLM, myself included. The increase in murders was immediately visible following the start of George Floyd riots, in the blocks surrounding where he died. Thousands of extra black people are currently being killed every year, for real and not merely in the imaginations of Blue Tribe.

I assert that the linkage between the BLM movement and its activism and the increase in the murder rate, particularly for black men, is the clearest, most obvious linkage in social science in the last generation, and possibly since the invention of the discipline. To the extent that you or others think that the evidence for this linkage is insufficient, I think it bears examining why, and whether such skepticism applies to claims more amenable to one's tribe.

Thank you.

I will admit that I was unaware of the magnitude, and thought you were alluding to COVID policy rather than violent crime. But yes, the rate of gun homicides has jumped by quite a bit in the last few years.

It’s hard to tell exactly when it started without tick marks. I tried to verify with FBI stats, but for some reason they stop with 2017, 2018, 2019. These numbers suggest that black Americans were victims in about 50% of gun homicides even as the total number decreased. Simultaneously, around 42% of victims were white.

The final point in your graph gives ~57 bgh/100k. Scaling by relative population sizes, we’d expect something like 12 wgh/100k. Given that the white homicide rate didn’t get nearly that high, something clearly happened in black communities.

Rioting and reduced police presence are clear candidates. Opponents note that lots of murders happened in red-tribe areas, rather than just the cities, and did not correlate with defunding. This is however compatible with demotivating. At the very least, BLM obviously failed to make anything better.

I will admit that I was unaware of the magnitude, and thought you were alluding to COVID policy rather than violent crime. But yes, the rate of gun homicides has jumped by quite a bit in the last few years.

Does this seem like a fact that you should be unaware of, given your basic assumptions and expectations of how society operates? Like, if I had claimed last week that the murder rate could do what it did, and you'd be completely unaware of it for years after the fact, would you have thought, "yeah, that seems like an accurate description of how the world works", or would you think I was booing my outgroup or waging the culture war?

...At some point, it seems to me that Gell-Man Amnesia stops being a curiosity, and needs to actually be engaged with. I think this conversation demonstrates a fundamental disconnect between fact and perception that is pervasive and lasting, and that should pretty clearly have decisive consequences for everything relating to the culture war.

Opponents note that lots of murders happened in red-tribe areas, rather than just the cities, and did not correlate with defunding.

That's a pretty bad cite. Most of the sub-cites are pay-walled, but I'd seen the NYT one with the city-to-city comparisons before and it was bullshit. Their list of cities was "arbitrary"; no real rhyme or reason, but it included cherry-picked tier-3 cities with Republican mayors just so they could play dishonest games with percentages (This small R city went from 4 murders to 8. That's a 100% increase! Much worse than D megacity that went from 500 to 800, which is only 60%.). I ended up just taking the wiki list of top 50 cities in the US and looking at the before and after murder count for the Republican and Democrat mayored cities. R cities definitely had a large increase, but it was still significantly smaller than the D increase.

Then the first article that isn't paywalled keeps trying to compare San Francisco to Jacksonville. The degree of point-missing is almost an art. They take a rich, white city criticized for the crimes/ills of drugs, homelessness, shoplifting and burglary, with a dash of random hate crimes against Asians for seasoning, and compare it to a much blacker city, and act like it some sort of gotcha that one has a higher murder rate. Same deal with the comparisons of states. All those "Red" states are also the ones with much higher rates of black people. And when the claim in question is something like "Racial(ist) backlash against policing of black people has increased the costs and reduced the incentive for policing black people, and this has resulted in a bloodbath", it's hard to imagine this coming from a place with any good faith.

Or maybe the reliably left-wing, pro-police reform Brennan Center is just trying to deflect blame for their own promoting of this exact situation.

Now, to be fair, it's true that we can't actually prove that the attempted deconstruction of our entire street-level law enforcement apparatus has anything to do with the historically novel murder rate. After all, the NYT hasn't declared it so, and if the NYT doesn't say it, it isn't true. One can merely point out that this exact consequence was predicted from the beginning of the intervention and before, because similar interventions at smaller scale had similar effects.

If a progressive had claimed 'large-scale black leftist resistance will lead to a racist backlash by cops and society, which will lead to more dead black people' before BLM, that doesn't make them correct, even though there were protests and there were more dead blacks. Similarly, the right making a claim, and then the outcome happening, doesn't make their claim about how true.

To the extent that you or others think that the evidence for this linkage is insufficient, I think it bears examining why, and whether such skepticism applies to claims more amenable to one's tribe.

We all get the 'ur biased towards ur team' thing, that doesn't make it unimportant to establish causation! It's not implausible, just not proven at all.

What would proof actually look like? A detailed look at the experience of the criminals/victims/observers whom the homicide rate increased dramatically, establishing the ways in which cop pullback - maybe - led to less fear of starting fights openly, or in places with more people, leading to more homicides.

I assert that the linkage between the BLM movement and its activism and the increase in the murder rate, particularly for black men, is the clearest, most obvious linkage in social science in the last generation, and possibly since the invention of the discipline.

Surely the obvious counterpoint is that the BLM movement utterly failed at the ballot box, with multiple major cities having elections resulting in the side pushing for increased police funding winning (or not even having a serious candidate pushing for any kind of police reform).

But I'm guessing your claim is that the protests themselves discouraged the police from doing their jobs, leading to less effective policing (per officer/dollar spent). Which seems to just prove BLM's point that the current way we do public safety / law enforcement is bad for black people.

But I'm guessing your claim is that the protests themselves discouraged the police from doing their jobs, leading to less effective policing (per officer/dollar spent). Which seems to just prove BLM's point that the current way we do public safety / law enforcement is bad for black people.

I'm having a hard time understanding this argument. I assume that you accept that less police attention = more black people getting murdered. How does this mean that policing is bad for black people?

If the system can just arbitrarily decide to not protect them, that seems like pretty good evidence it's not acting in their interests.

The BLM movement's main issue is that they believe police-as-we-know-it is a bad (and in particular systematically racist) way to handle public safety / law enforcement and that those issues should be handled by different organizations than what we currently call "police" (or at least that the current police should play a smaller role). The police murdering black people directly and the police deciding to do nothing about others murdering black people are both reasons for black people to not like the police.

If the system can just arbitrarily decide to not protect them, that seems like pretty good evidence it's not acting in their interests.

The system did not "arbitrarily decide to not protect them". The loudest section of the Black Community, and the much louder social groups that blacks allow to speak for them, demanded that police stop protecting them, and enforced these demands with overwhelming social and physical compulsion.

The BLM movement's main issue is that they believe police-as-we-know-it is a bad (and in particular systematically racist) way to handle public safety / law enforcement and that those issues should be handled by different organizations than what we currently call "police" (or at least that the current police should play a smaller role).

There are no shortage of deep-blue cities and even states where such a policy could be implemented exactly as Blues might wish it, completely unconstrained by Red interference. No such system has ever been demonstrated. If such a system were indeed possible, probably it should have been developed and deployed and its efficacy demonstrated, rather than gutting the existing system with no replacement on-deck.

But hey, no rush. As demonstrated in this thread, most people aren't even aware that any of this has happened. The people who believed, falsely, that thousands of unarmed, innocent blacks were being killed by a racist police force are blissfully unaware that the murder rate among blacks is currently a line going straight up, because the people who sold them the former lie have declined to enlighten them to the later reality. After all, it's just thousands of extra dead Black people per year for the indefinite future, the annihilation of three decades of social engineering nation-wide. Obviously more important issues obtain, and will continue to until memories grow foggy enough to allow this entire fracas to be blamed on racist Reds.

There are no shortage of deep-blue cities and even states where such a policy could be implemented exactly as Blues might wish it, completely unconstrained by Red interference.

I think the elections since the George Floyd protests show pretty clearly that this isn't a straight-forward Blue vs. Red issue. Portland, about as deep-blue as it gets, re-elected Ted Wheeler, for instance. I recall police reform not going over well in the NYC mayor election either.

While writing "Black Lives Matter" on things may be popular among the Blue Tribe, implementing their policy proposals seems to consistently lose at the ballot box.

BLM's specific argument (if one should exist) was that cops were engaged in 'open season' on black people - that it was their actual presence making life hard for the downtrodden.

You cannot pretzel that back to a vague, generalized, 'reasonable' complaint about 'failures of modern law enforcement practices, therefore BLM is on to something' without appearing dishonest or suspect.

BLM wanted less police-as-we-know-it, not less money/effort put towards public safety and law enforcement. One of their commonly repeated complaints is that the militarization of police is expensive leading to less money to hire actual people who they believe would be more effective than expensive equipment at improving public safety.

See Campaign Zero, for instance, which lists:

  1. Public Safety Beyond Policing: "Campaign Zero builds and sustains efforts that support communities to redefine public safety and create solutions that do not involve police."
  1. Shrink the Reliance and Power of the Police: "Diminishing the power of police requires a targeted and multi-faceted approach. This involves reducing when law enforcement can be deployed, what actions they can take when interacting with individuals, and defining when and how they are permitted to take those actions."

as their first two policy goals.

(EDIT: That list formats correctly as "1." and "2." in the preview, but not in the post...)

Both of those bullet points are completely compatible with reducing cop presence. Or if not presence, cop interactions - to diminish the overall surface area where police and black Americans interface with each other. The second point in particular gestures towards this.

Yes, the policy proposals I listed because they relate to reducing police presence both are compatible with reducing police presence. They both explicitly talk about reducing the number of police in exchange for increasing the number of people working in public safety.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats