site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 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.

14
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Really look at that chart. I love it because it really does paint the American occupation in such a good light. Look at how much those deaths decreased after the US established greater control around 2008-2011 and spiked in the years following, due to the withdrawal of US forces.

All the data in that table (which I assume you are talking about, as I don't see a chart) is still after the US initially invaded and plunged the country into chaos. "We invaded and caused lots of civilians to die, then after a while for three years we briefly tried to do a better job and had somewhat fewer civilians die, and then got tired of doing a better job and had lots of civilians die again" hardly paints the occupation in a good light, any more than a domestically violent spouse being nice to their spouse for a while and taking them to Disneyland paints their marriage in a good light. In terms of a comparison to the hypothetical where the US did not invade, the 1 million excess deaths figure from the introductory paragraph seems more indicative, since those presumably would have been calculated relative to demographic trends identified before the invasion.

Blaming every civilian death on the US isn't really reasonable to me (nor would I blame every civilian death in Ukraine on Russia).

I mean, I agree, but how many do you blame on the US and Russia respectively? I'm suspicious of reasoning that amounts to "the situation is not so clear-cut, so by gut feeling and some non-quantitative reasoning, the ingroup is probably not as guilty as the outgroup is".