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 -
You know what, my first comment was excessive, I apologize, but let me also clear some things up.
I don't want nobody to have candles. I want a candle too! But I've spend the last 40 years of my life paying for candles for other people, and bafflingly, have been unable to afford one myself.
Lets drop the candle metaphor for one minute.
I didn't become a home owner until damned near 40. I didn't qualify for any assistance, I had to go it the slow way, saving as much as I could. Savings that got diminished year after year to inflation because the government keeps driving up the national debt on wars and welfare. Meanwhile, the government also subsidized home buying for the needy more and more. Not for me, I can go fuck myself, but for everyone else. Driving prices further and further out of my reach.
One year I asked for, and got, a big honking raise, saved enough in a desperate push to put me over the finish line, and bought a home with a 75 minute (one way) commute.
I wanted my children to grow up in a community like I did, where effectively nobody is ever murdered. Unfortunately, in the name of being heckin' nice people and making sure everyone (except me) is happy, governments keep losing their damned minds and viewing it as some sort of moral imperative to keep insane violent felons on the streets as much as possible. Their happiness and my happiness is truly zero sum.
I wanted my children to get the same sort of education I did, with relatively good and safe schools. Unfortunately, in the name of being heckin' nice people, that went right out the window. We invited the entire third world, with gangs and drugs and the occasional dismemberment murder into our school districts whole sale. They are "sanctuaries" now. You couldn't pay me enough to subject my child to that environment. So I'm effectively taxed again finding alternative arrangements. It's causing me to have less children than I would like.
So here I am, deeply struggling to maintain a standard of living I grew up with, every public institutions inhospitable to me, every public good denied me, and then people tell me "Well, we should still give as much as is actually possible". Fuck, I've had enough stolen from me as is and you want more? How many more years of my life do I need to waste chasing a moving goalpost while others just get it handed to them? How many more children will I give up bringing into this world because so much has been taken from me and given to others than I can't afford them, while others just thoughtless pound them out and then ask me to support their kids? Like I wouldn't like kids of my own that will need support.
You can only call me a ghoul, because you have no idea how much has already been stolen.
I think this is misconstruing the candle metaphor as I used it. "Buying a candle" isn't "buying housing/shelter/food/etc.", it's "helping people". The candles-smell-nice insight I am trying to communicate is that I want people to be helped, it's something I enjoy, something I want more of in my experience-of-the-world. It is a positive good that I essentially purchase by giving my time or money to those in need, and this is something which I feel was absent from your framing, the sense of "good things happening to other people" being something you want, for their own sake.
(Mark that I am not talking about a Catholic-indulgences-style purchase of personal self-respect through the act of self-sacrifice. I mean that the knowledge that somewhere out there some people are better off than they were before is itself an experience I value, one which I would value in much the same way whether the improvement in their circumstances is my own costly doing, or something that spontaneously happened to them without my input. It's just that sometimes, if you want something done…)
What I called ghoulishness was specifically the absence of such a 'conscience-sense': a state of mind where you don't care whether Tiny Tim lives or dies; where being told that Tiny Tim has made a miraculous recovery would be no different for you than hearing he's just croaked. I think a non-ghoul wants Tiny Tim to live in a positive sense; that they will be disappointed if they conclude that they can't afford to make that happen, or that there's nothing they can do. I want a world with happy non-dead Tiny Tims in it, in very much the same way that I want to live in a luxurious mansion and I want to make love to the girl of my dreams and I want my grandpa to not be dead. (Some of these are more achievable than others.)
People vary in how they'll handle trade-offs between those wants, of course. But most conventionally "selfish" people simply have a tendency to put their personal wants over their universal wants (i.e. non-subject-dependent preferences about world-states i.e. moral values) as opposed to lacking universal wants altogether. Ghoulishness is a somewhat different thing, a unilateral absence rather than an imbalance. I'm not actually sure whether you're ghoulish! When I spoke about a "nagging suspicion", I wasn't being euphemistic or sarcastic.
I wish I had a more helpful reply to the personal venting than the following, because I truly appreciate you stepping back and unburdening yourself of all that background. Ultimately I can only give you sympathy and tell you that as far as I'm concerned your suffering is valid and should be a genuine concern for people with decision-making power. I don't consider what you and your local community have endured to be some sort of acceptable sacrifice in the name of improving the life circumstances of others; I think that's a very dangerous game to play with lives other than your own, particularly if you happen to be a government. I want you to be safe and housed and happy, and evidently you're only hitting 1/3.
And… that's bad. We might disagree, separately from all these value questions, on what policies would be best to resolve this - we might disagree on the extent to which the government should be willing to hurt people you regard as foreign back again in order to make it up to you if that should turn out to be necessary (though I don't think it would be!). But I do agree that it's bad.
I fully sympathize with your sense of outrage at the country having been so badly mismanaged that it got to the point where people have life-experiences like yours. I just don't think "including a term for doing-good-for-other-people-for-its-own-sake in the budget" is where the mistake is.
More options
Context Copy link
This is a really heartfelt and genuine post, thank you for sharing it.
I largely align with what WandererintheWilderness has been saying on a high level, but I am going to be thinking about this post for the rest of my evening. You have made some excellent points. I'm a bit younger than you, and am experiencing many of the same struggles.
I can only give this advice, and this is buried deep enough, and so few people will see it, I'm going to drag out some real-ish numbers.
Last year I paid over $36,000 in taxes. I saved less than $8000 post taxes, and the government shutdown drove the company I worked for out of business. I have an offer on the table already, and maybe a better one coming soon, fingers crossed. So you know, I'll be alright. Just sayin' though.
Over the course of my life, because I've kept meticulous notes, I've saved about $165,000. That's about 20 years of post-tax savings. Some years were better, some years were terrible. My best year I saved about $32,000 (that was a mad dash year). My worst year I only saved about $2,500.
The year I bought my house, I put down nearly everything I had that wasn't in my 401k, brokerage or crypto. I think it was nearly half of everything I had liquid. It was probably the single scariest financial decision I ever made in my life.
That was almost 5 years ago now. I'm in my 40's now. My wife just turned 40. My accounts have done tremendously well. The balance barely reflects the amounts I mentioned up above. It's borderline "Fuck you" money. It also bares little resemblance to my income which continues to just barely cover my essentials, plus one emergency per year, plus a little net savings. I consider myself profoundly lucky I found not just one but two 10x or more investments. In another life I'd have 1/10th of what I actually do.
But we still lost out on our youth. We're having one last kid. That makes a grand total of two, and this last one is a squeaker. For years my heart broke that I aged out of having as many kids as I wanted, while I was struggling to achieve the material necessities I felt I needed to do right by them. I still don't have as many kids as I wanted, but I suppose two will have to suffice.
Reminder: A not-insignificant number of people browse this website with the "firehose" all-comments view, so security by obscurity is far from assured.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link