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 -
Women in the military
I'm watching Avatar: The Last Airbender: that kid show from 2005 featuring the bald boy with a Reddit downvote on his face. I'm sure you've seen the memes.
It's a mostly tolerable show from a culture war perspective, the early 00s being a more innocent time, except for extreme girlboss feminism. Every few episodes, the writers repeat the trope where a male warrior says it's inappropriate and against the precepts to train women to fight — always in the most sniveling, dismissive, chauvinistic way possible — then he proceeds to get his butt kicked by a girl. Said male warrior, embarrassed, learns his lesson that gender roles are bad, m'kay.
Am I the only one who finds this line of thinking incredibly dumb?
And no, I'm not talking about women strength or endurance or bone fragility or whatever. Let's ignore that. That's not the issue here.
Let's concede, for the purposes of argument, that women and men have equal potential for different tasks, such as soldiering. Or, to steelman progressives, that a meaningful fraction of women are equal to men, and so those ones should be trained. (This is probably more plausible in a universe where 1% of the population has magical combat powers, like Avatar-land, but whatever.) I don't think it's true even in the real world, with firearms, but let's concede it.
The main reason to direct men to become soldiers, not women, does not lie there.
Soldiers, like every other job, work for the health of society. Soldiering does not exist for the self-actualization of the soldier. Neither is soldiering an end in itself. We have armies for the security and continuation of the country.
But the career of a soldier coincides with the fertility window of a female. If she is getting married, becoming pregnant, and having kids — things that are necessary for both the health of society and the self-actualization of the woman — her soldiering and child-rearing will come into conflict, even in peacetime. In wartime, however, her dying in battle will prevent a new generation from being born, and leave her orphaned children psychologically crippled.
The reality is that men are fairly expendable. Society can afford for 30% of young men to die in the trenches and recover fairly quickly; their widows receive help from the community to raise children, and later they marry older widowers. Meanwhile, if 30% of young women die, the population pyramid of the next generation will crater, and society will be burdened by orphans with lifelong mental problems due to attachment disorders, triggered by loss of mothers during infancy.
The only reason, I think, our society doesn't see this is that we haven't had a war with existential stakes since women joined the military in any appreciable numbers. Even during the most rigorous war in recent memory, Vietnam, the US army was <1% female, and most of them nurses.
Then again, a lot of my arguments could also apply against training women to be medical doctors and other all-consuming vocations. We do that. So maybe our society really is insane enough to send millions of 20yo women to get mowed down by drones in WW3.
I think it was CovfefeAnon who stated "The most radical position you can hold in modern politics is believing people before the 1960s were sane and had rational motivations for doing what they did." Well, I think armies throughout history were perfectly sane for not sending women to combat, even in roles where women could have been effective.
No. I’ve essentially thought the same thing forever.
I think it was Mike Huckabee who said when he was on the debate stage years ago, “… the military isn’t a social experiment. The military’s job is to kill people and break things…”
When you’re a society as affluent as the US is, you can afford to have your head deep in your own ass and believe all kinds of absurd nonsense like this when you have no real problems to deal with. People in third world countries don’t have time for this shit, so they get real logical and strait laced about the correct attitudes much easier when their daily bread and way of life is under threat.
I used to sometimes teeter around a bit in how I should view this. On the one hand they should be kept out of combat roles. On the other hand, if you’re stupid enough to sign up for the front lines, natural selection will fix the problem for you by eliminating people who think this way and it’ll strengthen future generations with less of those people anyway. So long-term it’s a win/win. Nature will beat you over the head with the correct answer whether you like it or not.
Militarily women have no business being a front line soldier. That’s a suicidal death sentence.
Third world countries tend to be third world countries because the people there have absolutely retarded attitudes about the world and society. There's a happy medium between following the examples of western progressivism and those of societies where people live in caves and use goats as a medium of exchange.
On the other hand, goats have actual uses beyond 'Alice will give me useful stuff in exchange for this because Bob will give her useful stuff in exchange for it because Carol will give him useful stuff in exchange for it because Dave will give her useful stuff in exchange for it because....'; they'll clear out overgrown vegetation, fuel themselves in doing so, and are delicious!
(I still don't get how people can be like 'USD is only valuable because people think it is, but gold has real value.'; they both derive their value from that same endless loop.)
The drawbacks outweigh the benefits. Goats are not fungible (no two goats are exactly alike), goats are not durable (they die after a decade or two), goats are cumbersome to move and transfer, etc. Money is simply a tool to make exchange easy; it is the goods and services of an economy that are valuable.
Apart from being a Schelling point (gold has been used around the world for thousands of years while the fiat dollar has only been around since 1971, 54 years ago) The big difference is that you can't fuck with the supply of gold the way you can with USD. Gold exists in limited quantities and more gold can only be mined from the Earth with great effort (equivalent to crypto's proof of work).
To some people this is gold's great advantage, the only way to enforce a modicum of discipline on governments, and all economies since we departed from the gold standard are a house of cards. To other people, this is gold's great weakness, and you cannot have a modern economy without fiat currency. I don't have the economic chops to have a firm opinion one way or the other. But I do recommend Extra History's excellent "History of Paper Money" (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, & 6).
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