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Is a volunteer at an animal rescue center a slave to injured puppies? "Should" and "must" are different words, and you're somehow managing to miss the entire concept of morality - indeed, the entire concept of kindness and helpfulness - by confusing them. There are such things as supererogatory moral goods. There are, too, such things as moral duties which it is incumbent on every man to fulfill but which for various practical reasons always go wrong if you try to mandate them by law. Saying "all human beings deserve happiness" is not the same statement as "you have a duty to wear yourself down to the bone to make all human beings happy" and it is a completely different statement from "the state should be an unconstrained human-happiness-maximizer". "Charity is good" is not a call for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Is the taxpayer, whose earnings are confiscated to pay for it?
My concern is that WhiningCoil does not recognize that all else being equal it is always good, rather than neutral, for sentient beings to have nice things. What trade-offs one is prepared to countenance in the name of acquiring nice things to give to sentient beings is an entirely different question and not the topic of this thread. Many libertarians take the line of "yes, it is good to give to the poor, it's just that it's also wrong to steal, and one doesn't cancel out the other" and I have no beef with that.
Does heroin qualify as a nice thing? Most of the people addicted to it would probably say so.
One reason most people don't think the state should subsidise people's heroin addictions is because consistent heroin use will inevitably kill the user, or at the minimum destroy their life in every meaningful sense.
Once you accept that it's wrong to subsidise someone else's independent decision to destroy their own life with drugs (perhaps because they're too stupid, through no fault of their own, to know better), it follows that the specific drug they use to do so is almost beside the point. Why would paying someone to kill themselves with heroin not be acceptable, but paying them to kill themselves with alcohol would be A-OK? Why not alcohol, but fast food? Why not fast food, but gambling? Why not gambling, but prostitutes?
That giving poor people money so that they can feed, house and clothe themselves and be fruitful and multiply is the kind, decent thing to do sounds sensible enough on paper. The trouble is that it's remarkably difficult to ensure they will use the money to ensure those needs are met, rather than using it to satisfy base urges which will kill them or destroy their lives.
I can respect that line of argument! But I think you're giving WhiningCoil too much credit. What he said (in a mocking, ironic way) was "the moral thing to do is to feed, clothe and house them". I don't think there is any non-strained reading of his post that rounds out to "it would of course be good to actually feed, clothe and house them, the problem is that programs meant to achieve these things will instead have various unintended negative consequences".
I don't want to put words in @WhiningCoil's mouth. I, for one, would be more than happy to house, feed, clothe etc. poor people in the post-Singularity, post-scarcity gay luxury space communism future that surely awaits us. That society being, of course, the only society in which your policy proposal would actually work, and which wouldn't impose horrific externalities and create perverse incentives for every inhabitant therein.
If I had to parse @WhiningCoil's comment, he was scoffing at the idea that feeding, housing, clothing etc. poor people is the moral thing to do in our universe, with all of its attendant restrictions, limitations and trade-offs. I know that you think the correct approach is to imagine what the right thing to do would be if there were no constraints, and then try to get as close to that target as possible, given the constraints placed upon us. I know because you explicitly told me:
Fair enough. But the thing is: imagining what the right thing to do would be in a universe with no constraints really isn't that hard. Utopias are a dime a dozen, specifically because they skip over all those difficult problems that real life imposes upon us. In light of this, most people (myself included) prefer to just skip the imagining-what-to-do-in-a-universe-without-constraints step, and instead focus on trying to decide the best course of action in our universe, with the constraints we are operating under. But you seem convinced that unless we go through the motions of announcing "this is what the right thing to do would be [in the counterfactual universe with no constraints, limitations or trade-offs]... however, given that we live in a universe with constraints, limitations or trade-offs-"
Dude. We KNOW we live in a universe with constraints, limitations and trade-offs. That's why we're discussing optimal solutions in light of those constraints, rather than wasting our time with navel-gazing on what the right thing to do would be without them. I'm sure I can't be alone in thinking this insistence that we go through the motions of determining what the right thing to do would be in a counterfactual universe with no constraints seems sort of... performative? Do we have to say grace before eating our dinner? Must we do the land acknowledgement before we discuss optimal property tax rates? Do we have to listen to the elevator pitch for your fantasy novel before we can talk about whether or not performing a double mastectomy on a teenage girl is a good idea?*
I know, I know, I know: if we don't reflexively go through the motions of imagining a utopia, we won't notice when we've accidentally created a dystopia. Or as you put it:
But frankly, I don't think anyone here is at risk for advocating the latter position; some of the most moral and decent people I've ever met have been those most acutely aware of the very real trade-offs and constraints life places upon us (while some of the most selfish and inconsiderate were those who spent much of their waking life in hypothetical utopias); and I think your belief that imagining hypothetical utopias is the thing that prevents you from endorsing the democide of starving Ethiopians is both untrue from a psychological perspective and tremendously self-serving.
*My God, imagine if every profession was like this:
Oncologist: In an ideal world, your husband would never have developed prostate cancer. But in our world, he has, and here are your treatment options.
Police officer: In an ideal world, your wife would never have been murdered. But in our world, she has been, and we have a good idea of who did it.
Engineer: In an ideal world, this bridge would never have collapsed. But in our world, it has, and forty-six people are believed to have been killed.
First of all, I do want thank you for the elaborate reply, and especially for quoting past posts of mine. Maybe it's strange to thank someone for remembering past points you made just so that they can continue to disagree with them but I do find it earnestly validating, and a credit to this forum as a discussion space, to be able to have a debate with that level of engagement, without having to start every argument from scratch.
Well, what can I say? This started with WhiningCoil deriding the very idea of clothing, feeding and housing the disadvantaged, with no caveats. For all your attempts to justify and soften his statement, that fact does not fill me with the same confidence. By no means do I think such people - "ghouls" in my fanciful terminology above - are a majority here, even among the more far-right posters. But they do exist. I know this because they frequently boast about their ghoulishness, sneering about universalist altruism being a pathological, contemptible, or just literally incomprehensible impulse whenever the opportunity arises. I'm not trying to start a witch-hunt - when you say that's not where you stand I'm happy to believe you! I'm just gesturing at all the people wearing big conspicuous pointy hats and handing out entry vouchers for the next satanic mass.
I think perhaps you've slightly misunderstood what I was advocating. I didn't mean that in any given dilemma you should literally stop and ask yourself "what would
Jesusmy omnipotent transhuman future self with infinite resources do?". I think the Utopia-designing is a useful implementation of the kind of abstract thinking you have to do to formulate principles - to create a framework of moral philosophy, coin a system of values, whatever you want to call it. Indeed, the post you linked clarifies that I think this is something you should do when engaged in formulating principles, not what you should do every time you want to solve a specific policy question. Arguments I participate in on this forum just keep coming back to this kind of thought experiment partly because I don't have the benefit of an already-established share moral framework with the people I argue with even when we're talking about policy; and partly because a lot of those arguments are questions of moral philosophy where we fight about principles, not pragmatic policy debates, owing to us all being a bunch of geeks who enjoy abstract thinking in our off-time, not policy wonks with actual object-level debates to really sink our teeth into in a systematic way.I would also object strongly to the claim that it's "self-serving". I have found this kind of thinking a useful steering mechanism for my conscience, and it has driven me on many occasions to do good in the world in material ways that cost me, but which, looking back, I'm proud of. That doesn't preclude you thinking that I'm an anomaly and the average person shouldn't do it because they'll get lost in their pie-in-the-sky utopias at the expense of actually doing good - but (for what it's worth to say it on an anonymous forum with no verifiability) I am not a champagne socialist cooped up in my ivory tower.
Well, that's an outright lie right there, and you know it. What he said was:
That is a very explicit caveat. As he said to you himself, finish the sentence. There's a world of difference between
and
Your refusal to acknowledge this shows the weakness of your hand, you're making a straw man of @WhiningCoil's point, and you should knock it off.
This space is based in large part around the principle of charity: one of the top-line rules literally flagged in the description of this very thread is "Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said." When @WhiningCoil very clearly and explicitly says that feeding, clothing and housing poor people with no strings attached forever is a bad idea specifically because resources aren't infinite, and you immediately jump to the conclusion that he's making a dog-whistle statement and he would be equally opposed to this even in the counterfactual world where resources are infinite — well, that doesn't strike me as a very charitable interpretation of what he said, and I think you would resent having words put in your mouth in this fashion.
In that case, why when @WhiningCoil pointed out that feeding, clothing, housing etc. poor people with no strings attached is a bad idea specifically because resources aren't infinite, did you immediately retort something to the effect that it wouldn't be a bad idea if resources were infinite? How is that a productive contribution to the discussion, when @WhiningCoil had already made the delineations of the point he was making perfectly clear? Again, it just strikes me as self-serving, like you want to give yourself a pat on the back for explicitly stating your belief that, in the counterfactual world where X, we should do Y, and the fact that @WhiningCoil didn't go to the trouble proves that he's a doubleplusungood badthinker.
For clarity's sake: so there were occasions on which you were debating what action to take, you imagined what the hypothetical version of you in a universe with infinite resources would do, and that motivated you to take a particular action? I'm not asking you to doxx yourself, but you could be a little bit more specific? I'm genuinely curious.
I believe you, sincerely.
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I think that your 'ghouls' are often (not always, psychopaths do exist but they are quite rare) simply people who have been subjected to the 'hostage puppy' attack so many times, they are tired of empathizing. There's a great thread about it here if you're on twitter:
https://x.com/goblinodds/status/2010954724544074194?s=20
This essentially forces people to either lose, or accept being an asshole. Progressives have been using this tactic to great effect for centuries now. Many on the right are simply done folding to this sort of empathy attack.
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Finish the sentence.
Well, do you think that giving them as much as actually possible in our world with finite resources would be all fine and dandy? Somehow I didn't get that impression, and that makes the hyperbole a petty snipe irrelevant to the argument.
Actually possible still just rounds off to everything. Give me a limiting principle besides "Gosh, I'm a heckin' nice person and I don't understand why you are being so cruel."
Let me put it like this. You seem set on never ever buying nice scented candles. Indeed, you seem to think that scented candles are a plague upon mankind, no one should buy them, and their manufacturing should be banned.
And when I query you on why you dislike candles so much, you cry out: "oh, so I should spend $3600 a month on candles, should I? I should let my family starve because all I buy is candles? I should act as though I have an unlimited bank account to be spent on candles, is that it?!"
"Well, no," I reply. "I'm not asking you to spend everything you've got on candles, let alone more than you've got. I just find the extent of your opposition to candles worrying. It'd be one thing to say that, having limited resources, there are other things you'd rather spend your money on instead; but you remain unwilling to address why it would seem so outrageous to you for a person to purchase even a couple of candles; why you think the very act makes them the unknowing slaves of Big Candle."
"Then give me a cold hard figure!" you say again. "Tell me exactly how many candles you think I should make room in my budget for! Or there's no point in engaging with you"
This is where we are now. So please try to understand: I am not arguing for a particular policy on candle-buying, here. I am trying to get to the bottom of your absolute hostility to candles as a concept. I am chasing down a nagging feeling that maybe there's something odd about your nose that makes you find the smell of scented candles disgusting rather than pleasant and soothing. The amount of candles bought is not in question. I know you claim that it is, because you argue "my opposition to candles is just a perfectly rational wariness of the slippery slope where if I start buying one candle a year, pretty soon I'll be bankrupting myself with unlimited candle purchases", but this is not how someone with a normal reaction to the smell of candles - someone who recognized that all else being equal a scented candle is a nice thing to have - would think about that question at all, even one who ultimately decides against that particular expense in a given situation.
I think "wanting everyone on Earth, regardless of their personal characteristics, to have basic safety and comfort" is a normal human preference to have, similar to "scented candles smell nice", and that a person who is not a ghoul is interested in making room in their budget for getting us closer to that as a matter of course. I think leftists like me would be prepared to have all sorts of grown-up conversations about trade-offs and practicalities with people who share that basic desire to do good for its own sake as one of their values (not, I repeat, necessarily the only thing they value), but that this is rendered more difficult by the nagging suspicion that some of the people trying to work their way into those conversations on the pretense that they're talking about the practicalities of trading various goals against one another are, in fact, ghouls.
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It seems to me more likely that they recognize that all else is, in fact, never equal, never has been, and likely never will be.
Solzhenitsyn figured out how to be happy in a death camp. Some Ukrainians in the Holodomor figured out how to be happy while they and their families were intentionally starved to death. These apparent historical facts appear to me to support @WhiningCoil's model of happiness, and undermine the one you are presenting.
Manic people are often happy as they're starving to death too. But being happy while being subject to genocide isn't the default state, that isn't just postulating a hedonic treadmill, it's setting it to overdrive mode in reverse.
Naming a few intellectuals isn't a very strong argument.
The point is that happiness does not derive from material circumstances, in opposition to the underpinnings of the argument that all people "deserve to be happy", contrasted with "every person deserves to be as happy and safe as they can accomplish themselves". I'm not sure the latter is the precise wording I'd nail my flag to, but the former seems profoundly untrustworthy and dangerous.
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