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 -
I think about this a lot lately. I've been religiously watching Caleb Hammer's Financial Audit this year. Apparently this year in particular older fans of the show have complained that it's devolved into Caleb Springer, and all the dysfunction of humanity is paraded in front of the camera with a thin veneer of "Lets look at you finances" after 60 minutes of discovering what a low functioning member of society they are across the board.
That said, the same themes keep coming up again and again. Employment has gone totally fucky, and you need to SEO your resume and tailor it to each job application, probably using AI to save time. Because everyone is getting spammed with thousands of AI generated resumes for even entry level positions, so git gud. I'm not sure this is a state of affairs we should accept for mid-wit level career opportunities.
The second is that feeding yourself is fucked. Generational knowledge of how to make thrifty healthy meals has been lost, and low functioning individuals constantly struggle with the impulse to door dash poison, and finance it to boot. That said, cheap staples like beans, rice, etc are still widely available. So it's not totally impossible, and it helps if you were raised right.
The third is that there are arrays of predatory credit vehicles that would blow your damned mind. I knew about how terrible it was to run a credit card balance, and I knew payday loans were predatory to a point of exciting legal scrutiny. I had no idea there was a whole world of credit apps build directly into shopping apps. Pay in four, Klarna, other crap I'm probably not spelling correctly because somehow I've never actually been exposed to it personally. And seemingly the prevailing wisdom is at 18 you get a credit card, max it out because it's "free money" and then pay the minimums your entire life. Sounds like a fair trade, a few months of zero impulse control, followed by paying only a few hundred a month forever. I'd say it's just the show, but then I think back to my 20's and all the people I knew, even educated professionals, who did exactly that and were digging their way back out from it. Nobody balances a checkbook anymore, and cash isn't physical so that when you are out you are out. It's all imaginary numbers and notices you can ignore.
And I mean, that's a complexity disease that has hit the three main areas of your life, employment, feeding yourself, and money. It makes me think a lot about how the bar has risen to meet some minimum standard to meaningfully navigate society.
I mean, to be clear, we have a kludge for credit(that’s what a credit score is). Information on how to feed yourself is widely available and you can usually tell when someone uses it. Employment I’ll grant you is harder, but still.
That you need a credit score to function in society as a whole should be illegal.
Yes, yes, I know, I know. I'm very well aware of how and why credit score functions. I get it.
I was still very well put out when I had to go purchase a new car unexpectedly, only to have the guy who went to check my finances come out and stare at me like I was some lost crytpid and blurt out 'You have no credit score.'
Yes, because I grew up around adults who abused credit cards and paid the consequences and who had no desire to go down that road, thank you very much. Only to find out late that, gee whillickers, if you want to function as an adult in society for some things, you actually need a credit score, and for that, you need a credit card.
Why, yes, I'm still salty about that. How could you tell?
(And before you ask, all my previous vehicles were old, used, family hand-me-downs.)
Credit cards are truly evil. I mean, I use them. I've used them for 20+ years and never had a single finance charge or fee ever, while accruing thousands of dollars in cash back rewards. They paid for my Switch 2 in fact.
But they're still evil. The yawning gaping pit they represent, which I have to balance on the edge of every time I run up their balance each month (within my budget) and then pay off in full is nightmarish. Because there is nothing stopping me, besides 20 years of inflexible habit and discipline, from just YOLOing with the nearly $40k of available credit they make available to me.
I watch some of these Financial Audits, and people's minimums on all their cards is over the amount I manage to save each month. I'll watch someone my same age, my same income, and they are looking at 5-10 years of aggressively budgeting and paying off debt to get back to zero. Meanwhile my assets appreciated more than my annual salary the last few years. But in another timeline, with only slightly different choices early on, I could have been them.
Half these people, when asked about a specific credit account, just go "I don't know, they just gave me that card when I bought X". X could be a car, a new roof, a large plumbing job, etc, etc. Like in my driveway story below, fucking everything is trying to get you to sign up for a new credit card now. People unthinkingly just take them. "Yeah, more free money" they think.
As I've gotten older, my arrogance at being part of the Credit Card Master Race has waned. Fuck them.
Once in a while The Motte ditches culture war and sounds admirably left populist...
As one of the ostensible leftists on here this just makes sense. Left wing populism is personally advantageous for everyone who does not have so much wealth they never need to work again. Wealth inequality is so high it is damaging almost every aspect of western societies and the conflict between the upper classes is at the heart of a vast number of culture war issues. The usual consensus here on a lot of issues, like whether we should import an infinite amount of indians to drive programming/IT wages as close to zero as possible, is actually isomorphic to the left populist position (i.e. infinity indians is not a good idea).
This is straightforwardly not true. State owned businesses perform poorly. Europe which has much more left populist crap is a decaying retirement home. Like most populism leftwing populism is very specifically selected for what scratches the grievance hindbrain of the most people listening to just so stories about how homelessness is really caused by the fact that Bezos has a really big yatch.
I'm talking about Labour movements and politics (i.e. how the modern day Anglosphere Labour parties got started). Left wing populism gave us the 8 hour workday and 5 day workweek, and I'm personally glad that I don't work the 12-hour shifts and 6-7 day alternating workweek that private industry would prefer. As for state owned businesses I don't think that you can really say they all perform poorly - there are plenty of them that do incredibly well. Singtel has done so well that it has actually bought and acquired a decent portion of the private cell companies in other countries, for instance. And as for Bezos, isn't a large portion of his workforce reliant on welfare to survive anyway? Amazon is the worst of all worlds - the public purse is subsidising all their expenses in exchange for no return at all.
I don't really buy this framing. I know unions love to claim credit for it and maybe they have some path dependent reason for why compensation grew in that particular shape rather than 9 hours and higher pay, but firms were always going to have to compete for labor as capital built up and this necessarily leads to higher compensation one way or the other.
And no one ever seems to talk about the other end of the ledger for these special interest lobby groups we call unions. They don't represent the interests of everyone, only their members and do so almost always at the cost of everyone else. They hollowed out the competitiveness of our auto industry and after doing so simply banned outside competition so they could collect rents from everyone who wants a car. Through the Jones act they've killed our ability to ship things between our ports effectively so despite having an incredible gift of natural waterways we send things over land inefficiently. They've prevented port automation raising the cost of all import and exports. The unions are one of several big factors in retarding out ability to build the housing and infrastructure we need as they lobby to pork up bills with guarantees to use over priced union labor in contracts.
Behold Europe and it's pathetic nongrowth for a vision of what a union dominated society looks like.
I looked into this because I'm always curious for these examples and Singtel is just simply not a state run company. The government does own a lot of it's shares but this isn't really what people mean when they talk about state owned companies. This is literally just a publicly traded company that the state owns a lot of shares in and doesn't have any real impact on whether it would succeed or fail.
There is no support the state can give to the people that can't be categorized indirectly as subsidizing employers. If you want to redistribute income to people who's labor isn't very valuable, and I do support doing this, then you're inescapably subsidizing the firms they are employed by, no way out of it. Hell same for the higher paid employees.
you mean besides the tax revenue of course.
And all of this is just distribution blame for the past, take a look at Mamdani for a vision of what leftist populism actually looks like with Charlie brown lining up for the 80th attempt at kicking the football of rent control and subsidized housing in the hopes that this time they'll prove the economists wrong.
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