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 -
Turning to some good news:
Article link
This is a WSJ article about the rise in justified homicides in the US in recent years. Much of it is about "Stand Your Ground Laws." I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of the more lawyer-brained Mottizens on those kind of laws and their proliferation over the past decade or so.
On the culture war angle, this article is maybe the starkest example of "erosion of trust in society" that I've come across. A few of the anecdotes are pretty hair raising. They're cherry picked, I know, but the idea that a kid loses his father over an argument about a a fence and a property line made me sad. The "road range" incident they cover in detail seems like it was unfortunate but when one guy levels a gun at another, there's only one reasonable reaction.
Violence must be tightly controlled for a society to function. This is something that's bone deep in humans. We've developed methods of conflict resolution that fall short of violence for our entire existence as a species. Even within the context of violence, there are various ways of controlling it. Duels and so forth. Even informal ones; basic Bro code dictates that when one guy falls down in a fight, the other one backs off.
But this article hints at the idea that people are zooming past any of that to full lethality. It's impossible to compile the stats to determine if that's actually the case or not, but the larger point remains; in a society with plunging basic trust, you're going to see levels of interpersonal violence spike. How should state laws governing violence respond to this? Stand Your Ground is something I generally still support, but my mind could be changed if simple Bad Neigbor fights end up with more orphans.
... this article is written with similar quality and accuracy as a South Park joke. Compare:
[several paragraphs later...]
Contrast:
Well, that's just a one-off, and it's not technically a lie (and they could argue that this 'must' have been sourced from Ruesch's testimony... if they actually reported it, and found more than a couple pieces of profanity from the nurse they quote).
Compare:
Contrast:
And, for the money shot:
I will bet cash money that this is not the full and honest conversation, or even a remotely accurate summary. Forget the question of whether Baxley was asked Porth's hypothetical and responded like that -- you shouldn't take advice from politicians or funeral home owners, but you don't need to be a lawyer to know Porth's hypothetical is wildly illegal in Florida -- does anyone believe that it's anything other than clipping unrelated conversations, and not even presenting the full argument from the side it doesn't like?
Because if they do, I've got a bridge to sell them.
The only one that I can't find on-the-ground details that they're clearly eliding or outright misleading on is the Mathew Dugger shooting. Maybe because there's almost no coverage of the case on the open internet, maybe because their editors decided one out of three wasn't half bad. Except then it ends in:
But in addition to the actual criminal being a literal coke fiend (still illegal to carry while drugged up!) and thus unlikely to have only carried a firearm or tried to shoot someone in an argument because of the state SYG law, it's absolutely not an SYG case -- you are not required to flee before trying to prevent someone from murdering a downed innocent woman.
There's some interesting deeper things that could be said about the wider state of self-defense law (although the FBI numbers are kinda sus if you look at them too hard) and the WSJ analysis is less actual analysis and more looking at a CSV and hitting the filter until you get a chart you like. There's some fun questions about the general state of courts and prosecutions where despite an increasingly-online constant-surveillance panopticon world, we somehow manage to know less and less about these Big Things.
But this news story isn't it, and that people from WSJ to Giffords to Bloomberg can't actually make that story about self-defense shootings... well, it's not strong evidence, because these people are also incompetent liars anyway, but evidence nonetheless.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link