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 -
Well, when you thought the week was boring...
Charlie Kirk was just shot at an event, shooter in custody. There's apparently a video going around of the attack, but I haven't a desire to see it. People who have seen it are suggesting he was shot center mass in the neck, and is likely dead. That makes this the second time that a shooter targeted a conservative political figure at a political event in two years. If Trump hadn't moved his head at the last second, it would've been him, too.
I've never followed the young conservative influencers much, but Kirk always seemed like the moderate, respectable sort -- it's wild that he would be the victim of political violence and not someone like Fuentes.
I fear this is what happens when the culture war is at a fever pitch. Political violence in the US is at heights not seen since the 1970s, from riots in the 2010s and especially 2020 over police-involved shootings, to the capitol riot in 2021, to the attempted assassination of Trump in Pennsylvania, to the United Healthcare killing, to finally this murder of a political influencer. I fear for my country when I look at how divided we are, and how immanently we seem to be sliding into violence.
I guess I just find politics tiring nowadays. I vote for a Democrat and they do stupid things that conspicuously harm the outgroup. I vote for a Republican and they do stupid things that conspicuously harm the outgroup. Whether J.D. Vance or Gavin Newsom wins in 28, there will be no future in which Americans look each other eye to eye.
I actually believe things are much better in this country than people think: our economy is surprisingly resilient, we've never suffered under the kind of austerity that's defined post-colonial European governance, our infrastructure, while declining, actually functions in a way that most of the world isn't blessed with, our medical system is mired in governmental and insurance red tape yet the standard of care and state of medical research is world-class, our capacity to innovate technologically is still real and still compelling, and one of our most pressing political issues, illegal immigration, exists solely because people are willing to climb over rocks and drift on rafts simply to try and live here.
We have real problems. And intense escalations on the part of our political tribes are absolutely in the top five. We also have a severe problem with social atomization -- and these two things are related -- which has led to our intimate relationship and loneliness crisis, the rapid decline in social capital, and the technological solitary confinement of the smartphone screen which dehumanizes people like real solitary confinement while confining them to the most intense narrative possible. "If it bleeds, it leads" means that many will be led into bleeding.
I don't know how we rebuild the world, or come to a point where Americans of different views can view each other as well-intentioned. But Kirk is just the latest victim of a crisis that I don't know if there's any way to solve.
Given how many guns there are in private hands in the US, given how politically polarized the US is, given how many people have mental health problems, and given how extremely rare assassinations are, I am surprised that this kind of thing does not happen much more often.
Those who use such incidents to either make calls for revenge against their out-group or to celebrate the success of their in-group, both of which I am seeing a lot of on social media right now, expose themselves as likely having longed for violence to begin with - an impulse which then gets an opportunity to make itself public when something like this happens.
If one genuinely wishes to quell the rise of political violence, one would do well to realize that incidents like this are a statistical inevitability given the current mix of guns + political polarization + mental health issues. The only way to actually reduce the violence, as opposed to increasing it, is to reduce one or more of the three factors: guns, political polarization, and mental health issues.
Unlike with street crime, improved policing cannot significantly affect the issue. People who are willing to attempt assassinations are generally willing to get arrested or die in the process, so are simply not nearly as deterred by the prospect of encountering police as ordinary street criminals are. Would-be assassins are also less likely to have a track record of serious crime than the typical street murderer is, so are less likely to have been put away by policing before they attempt an assassination.
As far as I can tell, there is no other way besides reducing one or more of guns, political polarization, and mental health issues. Neither side of the political divide is powerful enough to suppress the other to the point that the other cannot attempt assassinations basically whenever one of its members finds the will to give it a try. Not without a massive civil war, at least. And a civil war, of course, would increase the violence by a factor of thousands, not reduce it, and would leave the country extremely damaged no matter which side won.
If you reduce political polarization, the crazies will just go back to shooting up other targets.
To stop crazies killing people, you need to stop crazies having access to guns. Empirically you can't do this in a society where randos have access to guns - multiple countries have tried, some of them quite hard. This is the fundamental trade-off behind long gun control (handguns are different because they are used in orders of magnitude more homicides). Given how rare psychos shooting people actually is, I think the case for long guns being broadly legal is strong. But if the opponents of gun control are all "Yeah - it's a tradeoff. Thoughts and prayers" when other people's kids are the victims, and "We can't allow 'them' to carry on doing this - when do we start the purges?" when the victim is a sympathetic politician, then I am not going to take them seriously.
If the person who did this turns out to be a sane Democrat or someone with a history of organised far-left activity, then this is very bad news. But right now the way to bet is "psycho with a gun".
This sounds intuitively right to me... but I'm not sure it actually is? There's at least a narrative that shootings (as a form of terrorism directed at the general public) weren't really a thing before Columbine, which was a failed bombing.
(I tried to verify this and was immediately stymied by the fact that, apparently, no one can be bothered to track mass shootings of the public terrorism sort. Both the DOJ and the (anti-gun nonprofit) GVA use definitions that obviously track gang violence, not what most people mean when they say 'mass shooting.' And, anyway, this shooting, while I think similar in intention, wouldn't meet their definition as only one person was shot. Is there better data available anywhere?)
To expand a bit, the narrative is that these sorts of incidents are social contagions of a kind; America before '99 had plenty of guns (more, even, given the Assault Weapons Ban) and plenty of crazies, but the mass shooting meme hadn't yet taken root, so that insanity expressed itself in different, (mostly) less anti-social ways.
Some countries without readily available guns don't have mass killing memes at all, while others (like the UK and I think China?) have much less deadly knife spree memes. On the other hand, truck attacks (France and Germany, primarily) are about as deadly as mass shootings and suicide bombing (much of the Middle East) is substantially worse.
(Bombs are definitely worse than guns, and I understand it's much harder to ban everything that could be used to make a homemade bomb, but actually making a working bomb without blowing yourself up might be beyond most crazies? I understand suicide bombers are rarely lone wolves.)
And so, goes this narrative, there really is a simple solution to these events: stop talking about them. Kill the meme and you kill the behavior. This obviously wouldn't be easy, between press incentives and an open internet, but I'm confident it would be easier than seizing hundreds of millions of guns.
(Separately, I more or less agree that these incidents affect such a small number of people that it's likely not worth taking drastic action to prevent them. But would it work?)
I agree that this would work, and won't happen. The US has an unusually strong free speech culture as well as an unusually strong gun culture, so I don't think it is necessary easier than keeping guns away from crazies.
Switzerland and Canada both have broadly available long guns, but they don't seem to have many spree killings. I don't know if that this is because they are not exposed to the same mimetic contagion (unlikely in the case of Canada) or if their gun culture is healthier in some way which means that fewer guns are stored in ways where crazies have access to them. (Most school shooters use Dad's insecurely stored gun).
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