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 -
The Coordinating Mechanism for Woke
From the early 2010s until roughly 2023, the prevalence of woke coded speech on the internet was constantly on the rise. There has been endless debate over the origins of it, but everyone here is likely familiar with the terms, tone, and intent of such speech. And then, suddenly, in the last 2 years, it basically vanished. Sure there are small, insular corners of the media landscape that still openly discuss such ideas. But on almost all mainstream sites, media outlets, shows, newsletters, etc, the prevalence of woke coded language has decreased by an order of magnitude.
The political reasons for this should be obvious at this point, but what I find puzzling is the speed at which this marked drop was coordinated across all types of media. I'm not enough of a conspiracy theorist to believe there is any shadowy cabal actually orchestrating this. But in the absence of any other coordination mechanism, I have a hard time understanding what has caused this. You would expect a movement that built momentum and followers steadily over a number of years to take an equal amount of time to slow down. Indeed, most other social trends follow that pattern. But in this case, the halt was sudden and ubiquitous. So, as the title implies, my question is really about how this has happened.
If I were to speculate, I'd say that any mass coordination across disparate elements of society, without any authority dictating it, has all the hallmarks of the invisible hand. And if it were only news institutions and media outlets I would give more credence to this theory. But just looking at social media postings, there has been a huge drop in people using this type of language. Attending free activities and events, this rhetoric is less prevalent. And since I have a very hard time accepting that the beliefs themselves are gone, I can't come up with a convincing explanation.
Woke was never more widespread than ten or fifteen percent of the population. They just control the federal bureaucracy, academia, the billions of NGOs with their trillions of billionaire bribes and taxpayer cash, the legal profession, the intelligence agencies and through those mechanisms, the tech platforms.
This is always a temporary state, this happened in the Seventies and Nineties too. People don't like being lectured by hectoring feminist church ladies any more than christian ones. Once the backlash built sufficiently, the left exposed their complete intellectual and moral inversions during Covid, and Elon broke their biggest silo, the whole thing started to slide. It wasn't fast, it took five years and still isn't complete.
Furthermore, it hasn't gone away. Just like PC followed Days of Rage, and Woke followed PC, set your watches. The next one is coming in ten or fifteen years. You'll start hearing about it in five to seven years. All those people still hold all those same basic hatreds, they aren't going to be fired in any real numbers, and this whole thing will happen again and again and again. Not even Sulla can stop it. Hatred of the (western) nation and its population is the basic building block of lefty ideology.
Hear me now, believe me later. The next one will be even more stupid, and even more hateful.
I mean it seems like the basic difference here is that a much larger percentage of the population thinks the latter has some sort of moral authority to make lectures, even if those lectures are often unpleasant and they’re not going to change their behavior.
I'd say there's a variation. Let's take BLM for example. Some guy dies after a cop puts a knee on his neck for several minutes and he's asking for help. This has enough scandalous accusations in it to generate discourse. So somewhere between 15 and 26 million people protest. There are a range of views someone might hold regarding police in America. Here are some:
Police in America rarely face consequences when they commit bad behavior.
Police in America often commit bad behavior.
When one police officer commits bad behavior, others protect him from punishment.
This bad behavior disproportionately affects minorities.
Police in America are racist, often intentionally so.
All structures in America are racist
America requires radical transformation to resolve racist structures.
...and so on.
Where I'm going with this is there are clearly escalating claims being made. But what happened to George Floyd and people's general beliefs are such that a lot of the populace believes at least some of these claims. And the amount of outrage was enough that people were willing to tolerate or overlook the stronger claims (especially with a friendly media) because they wanted to see some sort of reform when it comes to police accountability.
I think you can repeat that with a lot of progressive arguments. The general public is probably sympathetic to the weaker, saner versions of progressive arguments. And that's enough for the left to get by, usually. However, some cracks appear. When it comes to trans issues for instance, the Overton window is probably centered around the point of, "I don't really think trans women are women, but if I'm just casually talking with someone and not sleeping with them, I don't want the other person to be unhappy and it's no big deal to say "she" instead of "he." " But the progressive activist is only happy with that status quo to the extent that they think there's enough goodwill to push it further. But what if there isn't enough goodwill there? The activist has to keep pushing, but the public is tired of being pushed. Combine that with a Biden administration that seemed to care more about student loan forgiveness than raising inflation, and you get Trump.
Sure, and that's not wrong either. But the over-reaction at the time had me shaking my head, and that was before I recently saw a video from the time where - gold-plated coffin? what is to all intents and purposes a state funeral? the mayor kneeling and weeping as if at the tomb of a martyred saint? What the hell???
That's way more than "let's have a national conversation about the police and if they do get too much leeway".
Eh. OTOH, the widespread adoption of body-worn cameras has been a nearly unalloyed good (a rare culture-war thing!). It's reduced excessive force, it's vindicated cases w/ justified use of force and it's shed light that neither totalizing view was remotely correct.
I'm not sure we would have gotten them in an alternate timeline without that national conversation.
But the conversation would still have been possible without the deification of Floyd, who - whatever sort of death he suffered - was indeed a petty criminal engaging in fraud at the time of his death. I am not saying he deserved to die or that any one should be treated in that way, but the over-reaction afterwards was indeed like he was some martyr for religion. He wasn't a good guy. Bad guys also have human rights and shouldn't be killed by ignorance or malice, but the immediate emotional reaction was something like the death of Princess Diana where the real person got lost in this persona built up by a lot of hysteria and neediness, and has collapsed in the same way (Floyd's worship much faster than Diana's worship).
And worship is indeed the only word that I can find to fit - the mayor weeping while kneeling before the coffin, touching it like it's a relic? That's the kind of display that would have drawn the attention of Thomas Cromwell and invited a visitation from his commissioners about superstition and idolatry.
I'm not sure that conversation would have been possible at a policy level without the (largely, I agree, bullshit) personal angle. American politics doesn't seem to work at such a wonkish level. Without being too cynical, it seems at least possible that it just never happened otherwise.
The parallels to Trump are also interesting: would it have been possible to get conservative politics and a retreat of the worst of the LGBT (not that I want to roll back some level of acceptance, but surely high school locker rooms were a bridge way too far) without the personal angle of a thrice-married adulterer?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think it's a bit early to say that. Haven't a lot of places been starting to struggle with poor police recruitment on a similar timeline to rolling out body cameras?
It could be that the loss of privacy from body cameras isn't relevant to the recruitment problems. Body cameras could even be helping recruitment by reducing officer concern over false accusations. But until someone identifies and fixes the cause of the recruitment problems I'd be reluctant to conclude body cameras aren't relevant.
Personally, I think I'd find it quite unpleasant to have a camera and microphone active for most of the time I spend at work. Especially when those recordings could be released to the public.
The cops wanted the body cameras because they thought it would clear up false accusations/spurious complaints. Police recruitment problems have to do with hollowing out of the native working class male population through brain drain and low fertility and the need for police recruits to be super squeaky clean goody-goody two shoes- driving problems, drug tests, gambling debt(it's thought to cause susceptibility to bribery), MIPs exclude a huge portion of the population that finds police work appealing.
At least that's what my police officer friends tell me.
That doesn't match what I remember. Why did it take a national conversation to get body cameras in place if both police officers and reform advocates wanted them? Who else could have been getting in the way?
Additionally, unions in multiple large cities have demanded raises for wearing body cameras. This would be a very strange move by the unions if officers in these locations wanted body cameras.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah... you don't think the social movement to demonize the police might be more relevant here? Especially since it was the same movement that demanded the body cams, and thus explaining the timing?
Indeed, the prevalence of body cam footage has undermined the demonize-the-police movement considerably.
More options
Context Copy link
Possibly! If we fix that problem, keep the body cameras, and the recruitment crisis goes away then the body cameras were probably an unalloyed good.
But as all three happened around the same time it's hard to untangle how much each of the former two contribute to the latter. Police certainly don't seem to have all-positive opinions of body cameras and I can see a number of reasons why even a good cop would hate wearing one.
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