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 -
Directly related to one of the top line comments from last week is an opinion piece by David French - non-paywalled link.
Half of it is snark. The title and lede are designed to get the pearls clutched. A paragraph later, French gives up the sarcasm and goes on at length about how "akshually, Men can be real meanies!"
The complete dodge of any real intellectual engagement with the original Helen Andrews piece is, sadly, totally on brand for what passes as journalistic "editorials" these days. Sohrab Amari previously called out French for being a conserva-cuck. His conclusions remain unchallenged.
And that's the culture war angle I'm actually interested in. The latest battles in the Gender War were pretty well covered in the thread from last week (linked above). Any new insights are welcome on that front, however, my focus is on what I see as an intra-male conflict between boomer conservatives and the Young Right. Now that I think about it, this also links to the "Nasty Republican Group Chat" thread. I am too lazy, now, to link to it.
David French, and many boomer conservatives like him, despised Trump all the way back in 2016 and haven't changed their tune one bit. They do hold some bedrock right/conservative views; taxes shouldn't be so high, gun rights (to an extent), free speech even if it makes people feel icky, pro defense in a broad yet milquetoast sort of way. I suppose they are, at their most "extreme", still committed neo-cons of the Bush 2 era.
And they're all still living in The Matrix. They all believe that we can go back to that perfect little period when ole Ronny was in the White House and everyone was getting rich and you could come home to a steak dinner with the little lady - who, of course, had a degree from Radcliffe and was totally smart and independent but just so happened to truly want to be a stay at home mom. The insane conceit of the BoomerCons is that their worldview rests on a stone foundation of traditionalism establish, through blood, but the Greatest Generation. Where the BoomerCon looks at women in the military without too much worry - well, maybe not in the infantry - the Greatest Generation Grandpa laughs, saying, "I can't imagine a broad landing in Normandy". Where the BoomerCon rolls his eyes at political correctness yet makes sure to use the appropriate terminology ("Dude, Chinaman is not the appropriate nomenclature"), the Greatest Generation Grandpa, that one Thanksgiving, "couldn't believe the number of Spaniards at the grocery store!". Where the BoomerCon pinched his nose during the 2008 bank bailouts - "It's a systemic issue, we have to act!", the Greatest Generation Grandpa laughs "Oh, The Bank lost all your money?! Yeah, I remember the 30s!"
The Young Right is a kind of double-bounced mirror image if the Greatest Generation in terms of their hard-bitten suspicion of the world. Coming of age in the late 2000s, they saw a financial collapse in the middle of an expeditionary war of questionable strategic import. The young men, especially, then had their place in society not changed but neutered starting in about 2013 (the first "cultural appropriation" fracas at Yale). On a larger scale, any economically aware young person sees how the Boomers have systematically rigged the system against them; social security, Medicare/aid, and the home mortgage ponzi scheme. It's intergenerational theft plain and simple.
But the David French's of the world want to, you know, guys, c'mon, pump the breaks. Turn down the temperature. Feminization of American is totally fine...actually, let me tell you about the summer of 1969, oh man, I was at this Grateful Dead show and....
But there is no going back to that. The damage is done and now it's a rebuilding effort in the middle of a hot (culture) war.
From French's article:
It's always this line of thought that leftists use against the right. They were poorer in the past, sure. But they also had more functional governance. People knew how to build things in the 1950s and 1960s, they didn't sit around in committees all day umming and ahhing about boxticking and getting permission from stakeholders. They had superheavy spacelift capability we're still struggling to replicate.
Crime was lower in the 1950s, it just was. Despite a younger, poorer population and police with less forensics and CCTV, despite doctors less capable of turning 'murder' into 'grievous bodily harm', Western countries had a more stable social system. Not all aspects of the 1950s should be copied (after all, we ended up where we are today), only the useful parts. Denying that anything was ever better in the past than today is ahistorical, literally Orwellian too.
And French never even justifies his theory that the justice system we have today is peak justice, he mentions Jim Crow and ignores the staggering level of black-on-white crime the US enjoys today. The black jurors statistically favouring their own race, this ridiculous 'he deserves a thirty-second chance' de facto jurisprudence, this incredible homage going to Emmett Till while random black thugs go around shooting white kids for zero reason and never get any kind of serious scrutiny beyond a fairly small part of twitter...
Why would French need to justify it when he enjoys this huge framing advantage, where all the schools (not just in America but around the world) teach his historical narratives, assert the vibes he relies on? He can just wave the magic wand of 'Jim Crow' and that's good enough, no further logical argumentation is needed. Truly the only way to fully oppose this is to deny the whole frame, 'no French, your fantasy world does not exist and never has, it has been debunked by me and mine. The facts are mine, I have chosen them and only I get to decide what is important and relevant. The narrative is mine, the premises and vibes are mine. Your books are not reliable sources, you are spouting pseudoscience.'
To be fair and kind to the modern struggle, Apollo spent around three times as much (inflation-adjusted, as are all of the numbers below) as we're spending to replicate it, considering "we" to mean the Constellation + Orion + SLS + ground systems + public HLS expenses. We have higher-quality tools to make work cheaper these days, but quantity has a quality all its own; also, salaries these days have to be at least somewhat competitive with modern private tech salaries, and people cost more than tools.
To be fair and somewhat unkind to the modern struggle, you can already see some of its cracks just by looking at that brief description. Constellation (around $13B sunk cost, starting in 2004) was cancelled for being over budget and behind schedule, after estimates suggesting that continuing it would have taken more like two thirds of the Apollo budget. We have to separately consider Orion (around $25B, mostly complete except the heat shield is a little iffy, development started 2006), SLS (roughly $35B for "Block 1", plus a marginal cost that makes "Block 2" look increasingly unlikely, development 2011), and HLS ($8B public, for two landers, starting work in 2021 and 2022) as three programs, because it's really hard to call something a single coherent program if you spend ten years building a super-heavy launcher for lunar exploration and then realize you probably want to start working on some sort of lander to go with it. Oh, and also the primary lander comes with its own super-heavy launch system, whose development will either fail (in which case we have at least a three year delay with nothing to do but fly around the Moon while waiting for the backup lander), partly work (in which case it's twice as powerful as the one we spent nine times as much on, sending five or ten times as much payload cislunar, in a spacecraft better than the one we spent another six times as much on, for half the marginal cost), or work to design (in which case make that a twentieth of the marginal cost and twenty times the embarrassment, as we realize that from the beginning we should have been struggling to surpass Apollo, not replicate it).
I thought the Saturn V was just outright cheaper and more powerful than SLS (at least the SLS in current condition)? I guess it's more complicated if you consider the Apollo project as a whole but on the other hand, there would also be cost savings from experience going to the Moon and doing all that stuff for the second time and not the first time. $35 Billion for the project and a billion per launch, inflation adjusted, for Saturn V, whereas SLS 1 has already cost just as much to develop and is more expensive to launch, while providing less lift.
Sounds like an epic case of grifting and laziness on behalf of trad aerospace companies. Then again, I'm not really a space guy so there may well be more to it.
You've got the right of it. There's more, sure, but "more" really just boils down to the meta-boondoggle that was the space shuttle, the latest fruit of which is another iteration of
graftboondoggle that is the SLS and its shuttle-derived solid rocket boosters and engines. If anything, calling that epic grifting sells it a little short, I think!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