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 -
Here is the list of the topic of top level posts in this thread since the viral ICE shooting.
Seven out of Eleven posts and they're by far the largest threads. It's probably too late at this point but I'd like to suggest that in the future mods should exercise some judgement and make a megathread on events like this that are likely to generate a ton of back and forth discussion with an expectation of new information coming out over the course of days/weeks. Both because it is more convenient for the reader to be able to check a dedicated thread and because it makes it much easier to find the more general discussion for those of us who find the interesting angles of the subject to have already basically been exhausted.
Minneapolis isn’t an obvious megathread. It’s not dominating my twitter algo. It’s something weird here that is causing a massive amount of posts. This lady dying is one of like 5-10 news items currently and from what I can tell barely mattering nationally.
A good board now would be 60% Venezuela (it matters), 20% Iran, 10% Minneapolis, 10% random. Venezuela has interesting discussions on whether we bribed people or we have some really cool new tech. Iran what I could tell from Israeli actions something like 90% of their administration are on Mossad payrolls. This should be geopolitics week.
There’s frustratingly little information available about what’s going on in Venezuela or Iran right now which dampens in depth discussion outside of speculation. There’s a lot of information about Ukraine but that’s been going for four years so everyone other than me is bored with it.
There is a cool story on this:
https://www.zerohedge.com/military/white-house-amplified-shocking-claims-us-super-soldiers-deployed-maduro-raid
Big if true. If not it’s good propaganda. Scares China on our capabilities.
It definitely sounds somewhere between "it's not that we're incompetent, they were just too advanced" defensiveness and "this'll make a great story to sell to the media" opportunism, but yeah: why would the US government try to correct stories about "their troops were super-humanly accurate and their equipment was space-age advanced"? 😁 You really expect the DoD to come out with a correction "No, that's not the case at all! Our guys are just regular, some of 'em barely competent, and our kit is standard average like every other country's military!"
Venezuela may be incompetent. But I still expect country with 30 million people and some legacy wealth has a bunker or secure facility for their President to sleep in. And that he sleeps in said place when the USA is threatening to kidnap him. The men with guns protecting him have good places to shoot from versus guys landing in helicopters.
I am thinking about my condo building I sleep in. It’s a large building with 2 stairwells and 2 elevator shafts. It does have a 40th floor balcony. In order to get to me you either need to:
Of course you could fairly easily kill me. Just drop a bomb on my condo building. But we didn’t do that.
It does appear to me the US either bribed a lot of people or we have some technology that knocked guys out guarding choke points.
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