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 WEF rhetoric from the right is simply the latest example of the right getting upset about the PR billionaires do to make themselves seem normal, instead of the actual objectionable things they do.
Example : Jeff Bezos is a criminal, and he should be in jail. The Sherman Act is a criminal statute. Amazon is a horrendous anti-trust serial offender, at his direction. Amazon has a terrible worker safety track record, and tries very hard to churn through as many employees as possible in order to ensure nobody forms a union or demands higher wages. Jeff Bezos is rich beyond the wildest imagination of the common man, and he utilizes that wealth for his own private benefit, and to the active detriment of the working class.
Are there any calls on the right to confiscate Jeff Bezos wealth? To nationalize Amazon? To give more of the profits of the enterprise to the workers?
No, it's the political programme of the right to minimize the taxes that Amazon and Bezos pay. To prevent his employees from unionizing. Not to require him to give sick pay, or benefits, or raises, or paid time off. Bezos should have unlimited ability to donate to politicans too - it's his free speech right, after all.
But he's not making the right noises about (immigrants/trans/culture_war_issue_here) says the right. That's what's objectionable. Not acting like Smaug whilst people suffer for his treasure. Look here, Amazon has a pride flag on their twitter! Amazon is a gay rights lobby! That's what's wrong with Jeff Bezos.
I'd be interested in you elaborating why jeff bezos should be in jail, or why the sherman act is criminal, if only because some left-wing rants would counterbalance the right-wing ones!
To register the standard objections,
Jeff Bezos's supposed criminality is incidental to his commercial empire. Nothing about delivery drivers, warehouses, online shops, or server farms essentially require crime, or even mild ethical lapses, like a few hundred extra workers dying. We can compare this to Uber - a company that, from its inception, blatantly broke local regulations across the country and trashed $X00M in value of taxi medallions, who survived only by pressuring politicians to ignore the law. As you'd expect, they systematically and intentionally deceived law enforcement, and the CEO was forced out over sexual harassment and discrimination, and had internal tools tracking users' live locations. Nationalize Uber! e: nice article about taxi medallion situation
Yet Uber lets me hail a car in 30 seconds in a random city, from one app, with no hassle and a live map. It nuked rent-seeking guilds that restricted supply and drove price up. The gain for consumers was comparable to 'having taxis in the first place'. The lawbreaking was necessary (legalizing it in a single city via the 'normal process' before the app was popular would be a pain, then try a hundred jurisdictions). And the CEO's misconduct, while sometimes significant, is more than made up for in aggregate by the millions of enabled cab rides. Crime or misconduct is not bad in a total sense - one has to, and does in practice, compare it to the other consequences. Uber (maybe) caused five taxi driver suicides, and destroyed countless livelihoods, but it should still exist.
The same goes for amazon. Pioneering usable cloud computing, and easy, centralized shopping and delivery to a billion people, is a massive boon to any participant of industrial society, both satisfying boring consumer desires and enabling many kinds of productive activity. I can order a bag of rice, a laptop, a battery-powered screwdriver, socks, or a hundred a1.xlarge instances on ec2. This is great! Creating such a company is an amazing feat of politics, logistics, connections, and execution. Worker mistreatment and union suppression are universal in business, and killing or nationalizing amazon over it only puts a small dent in the overall practice. And if those are necessary sacrifices to get amazon, anyone would take amazon - but since they aren't, targeted regulation is much better than putting him in jail. A lot of his wealth goes to charity - and given how competition pushes profits down, any economic quantification of consumer and producer surplu will find consumers gain much more from amazon existing than bezos does. Jailing bezos over that would massively discourage founding new large corporations - jack ma's position is less appealing now than it was in 2020.
The 'woke corporations' bit is dumb, of course.
Against all that - a lot of what amazon sells, constitutive of its business, is useless shit - fashion, cosmetics, "As Seen On TV" tier products, crap tv shows, and amazon (and every other corporation) aggressively markets them. I'd love state, or any, action against that, although I'm mostly alone there.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link