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 -
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.
More options
Context Copy link