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 -
Something that's getting frustrating to me around the discussion of Charlie Kirk's assassination (man it feels weird to say that) is that conservatives are being told to eat the Paul Pelosi attack as a right wing thing.
But the attacker (David Depape), was, if he was even capable of holding any sort of political position at all, not even remotely right wing, at least not in any way that any right winger would identify as a bedfellow.
The guy lived in a bus in Berkley, CA doing drugs in a polyamorous sex cult. He clearly went completely insane, then attacked Paul Pelosi. This is the type of thing that conservatives are trying to stop. This event is neutral at best, and more realistically just left-wing cities eating themselves. The opening paragraph from a sfchronicle article about his daughter is one of the craziest I've ever seen:
I'm also getting sick of hearing that the right wing is supposed to eat January 6th. We've had every single right wing politician "disavowing" this for the last 5 years, despite the fact that the only person killed on this day was a right wing woman.
January 6th was one day of protesting which followed months of protesting by left wingers.
Generally my frustration is this idea that right wing and left wing politics and expressions of those politics are equals, or just different poles of an ideology. They're not. One of my favorite articles: https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/woke-wont-debate-you-heres-why/ expands on what I mean.
(No the woke won't debate you, here's why - required reading around here imo)
These two ideologies, western liberal democracy, which the conservatives are still, maybe stupidly, trying to work inside of, and some bastard form of revolutionary marxism, are not two sides fighting over territory. There's no compromise where we meet in the middle. It's winner take all - either we remain a western liberal democracy, or we don't.
I think people are waking up to this, which is good. Sam Hyde's video today about this was pretty good: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_czBvLB-DwY (watch the first 5 minutes at least, please. It's good.)
JD's video was also really good (a slightly normie version of the same message): https://youtube.com/watch?v=ngofqx9EfcM
His own defence attorney literally said it was because he passionately believed in far right theories. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67372363
They said this to fight charges against kidnapping a federal official (which requires it to be directly because of her official duties as a member of Congress and not outside motivations such as those far right theories). The goal was to present him as a crazy nutjob who took Qanon, 2020 being stolen, and other far right ideas spread online seriously rather than a targeted attack triggered by any official action.
He himself testified to this
What better evidence could there be than him and his defense literally saying it?
If it was disavowed, why did people who stabbed, tasered, threw bombs at, or otherwise attacked cops get pardoned? The idea that only murder is violence (and she herself was shot at by a cop as she refused to listen to a lawful order and continued illegal behavior so I guess you're saying police brutality is more of an issue than violence against police is) seems weak. All of those things are violence!
In fact here's something interesting, I asked chatgpt to run some numbers. "Per participant, was Jan 6th or BLM more violent towards cops?"
Of course it doesn't matter, at the end of the day everyone is an individual and should be judged as an individual. Whether you attended BLM or Jan 6th, if you didn't assault a cop then you don't deserve blame for it. But it is quite interesting to see. Even if we change it to say, 40,000 (a medium estimate of the total Jan 6th protestors and not just those who entered the capitol), it's still about 1 in 400 or so.
Edit: You know there's also an interesting thing to consider in right vs left violence discussions. The gender gap!
Men make up 80% of violent crimes (and some specific ones like mass shootings like 97%). Thus statistically a group composed of men should have more violent people than an equal sized group of women. And violence is typically a thing done most by youth, so the group with younger men should presumably have more than the group with younger women.
Combine this with
And it would make sense if right wing violence was a bit more common, just because it has more men.
Suppose I hate cops.
I hold a protest, 100 people attend, and in the chaos one cop gets shot. That is a protesters-to-cops-shot ratio of .01.
I hold a protest the next day. Thanks to the news coverage, a thousand cop-hating people show up, and five cops get shot. that is a PTCS ratio of .005.
I hold a protest the next day. Again thanks to the news coverage, ten thousand cop-hating people show up, and 25 cops get shot. That is a PTCS ratio of .0025.
Your explicit argument is that these three protests are getting less violent over time. Normally I would phrase this as a question, but you are the one who made this into a math problem; it doesn't seem to me that there is much room for ambiguity here. It is true, in the most disingenuous, dishonest way possible, that the more townspeople attend a lynching, the "less violent" the lynching becomes. It does not follow that we should be less concerned by a lynching attended by a thousand people than one attended by ten. Such an argument, I argue, is isomorphic to what you have stated above. If you disagree, I would be fascinated to see where I've got it wrong.
This is by no means the only problem with your various recent defenses of the organized left-wing violence Americans have lately suffered; your data is garbage and your arguments are obviously constructed for maximum partisan convenience with what appears to be intentional amnesia of previous context, but it's a reasonable place to start.
Huh, a user with an account from June who consistently presents arguments constructed for maximum partisan convenience. I'm sure that couldn't be a former user known for that kind of argumentation back under a new name.
Do you hint vaguely towards the idea that all people who advance convenient partisan arguments are actually infamous disgruntled ban evaders, or only the liberal/left leaning ones?
Edit: as someone who was also accused of being this individual previously, it is quite annoying that any liberal dissent from the mainstream here immediately garners accusations that we must be This One Person. I suppose it is a rare thing on this forum, but it only becomes rarer with this sort of selective hyper analysis.
I have hinted vaguely exactly once. You are free to review comment histories just as I did. The shift in a month from "I'm a classical liberal 20something who wants to engage with ideas" to "presenting arguments constructed for maximum partisan convenience" is the kind of thing that gets detectors pinging.
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