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 -
There’s nothing I can add other than to reiterate @Corvos and @orthoxerox’s replies. Because classical systems still involve effective, consistent multigenerational meritocracy (ie social mobility), they effectively offer almost the same competence with a huge reduction in unnecessary make-work. Kids studying for 5 hours a day after school is worse for society than them spending that time digging ditches and filling them in; the latter at least involves exercise. Yes, you are impatient, but that is more about you than it is about society.
As for me, I have one correction to make. I’m not old money! I’ve said this before, but I was born upper middle class; my parents became truly rich only in my teens. My mother’s family were a mix of middle class for many decades. My father’s family were a mix of shtetl dwellers and Italian Jews who mostly arrived between the 1820s (early for Ashkenazim) and 1890s (with a few later outliers), and who went on to make and lose several fortunes, but who were at the time of his birth as middle class as you can get (think a small town accountant or government worker).
The other thing I want to point out- and I see myself as more expanding on your point than making a different one- is that in developed countries, thé effective floor for functioning people is just not bad enough to complain about. The people who manually harvest crops for twelve hours a day for subsistence wages are foreigners whose children will work in a warehouse, and their children will work for the utility company, and their children will work in offices. Everyone except the fruit picker is doing fine. I use this example not to make a point about immigration, but because there simply are not large numbers of native poor who are functional enough to run this cycle.
@self_made_human does not come from this society. Rapid upward mobility whatever the cost makes a lot more sense if your country has a large class of subsistence farmers. We do not live in a country where working in a sweatshop is aspirational, we live in a country where a mediocre suburban middle class life only requires that one be… mediocre. This is why I’m so hard on ‘accommodations’ in academia, or on the oriental grindset. Your kid having less than perfect grades will not sentence them to decades of subsistence level poverty. It’s ok to be bad at school because the only thing you need to do to have an OK life in America is to… not fuck up. Literally, look up the research on the success sequence.
This is so well said. I should print it out and put it in my office for students to read.
I wonder how much of the culture war can be charitably phrased as: On the one side we have people striving to try to make themselves/America better and on the other side people worrying that this striving is going to fuck things up. (It's not too hard to find examples that work with both red/blue as either side.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Hi, can you expand on this point? My position is that there's obviously marginal utility in increasing/decreasing schooling duration/homework, but then that's a very individual thing where some need more and some need less. This individuality expresses itself in extra tutoring (some people need more time than the average to get something) or special classes (some people need less time than the average to get something and is ready for the next thing). Since society most often rule in averages*, then yes an arbitrary fiat of extra 5 hours system-wide is probably going to be bad, probably just as bad if kids spend 5 hours digging. I suppose what I am trying to get at is do you have a different more clarifying example of your position?
* It's been said before but the dream for education is obviously personalized individual study plan suitable for the person. AI and tech seems to be 1 or 2 years from being able to offer this.
First homework is stupid. Even worse it is pointless. It takes the most valuable time of your life for some absolutely marginal advancement in academic performance. If someone can't grok quadratic equations - solving 200 more at home will help? Making them suffer trough war and peace or crime and punishment will make them appreciate literature? That somehow staring at the physics handbook will make them understand relativity?
We treat knowledge as goal not as a tool. Tell the little ones that at the end of the course they will know how to make total synthesis of cocaine and you will have the most attentive chemistry class in the history of the world. And they will do their homework without even being assigned.
This sounds like a hack Michelle Pfeiffer would try to educate inner city children.
What would actually happen is that the kids would think you're cool but the minute they had to apply any of the things you said in a more boring, sterile environment (and of course they must) a bunch would get tired and move on to something significantly more stimulating. I don't know what schools you went to but plenty of kids are fucking lazy and need the tripwire of mandatory homework. Plenty of kids would be hooked on every word in one class and then not care about another.
You may have been particularly intelligent and conscientious, most aren't. Unless we're talking purely about schools that cut those people out, kids need to be forced to push through their boredom because work will be boring.
More options
Context Copy link
@quiet_NaN this is interesting to me because I feel like high-school level homework (and to some extent college level) was actually helpful for me.
Doing the readings in history and typing up notes really helped me remember history better Doing problem sets in Calc I-III and professional exams helped me remember concepts better than I would've otherwise (though I still forgot most of them within a few years) Doing coding assignments in CS 101 really helped me be able to code.
Maybe it's more about elementary and middle school homework?
More options
Context Copy link
I think that math class is probably the worst offender for pointless busywork.
Case in point: Polynomial long division. 100% "we make you learn an algorithm as a proxy for intelligence", 0% "something you will need to know as a prerequisite for understanding something else." The correct place for it would be "Having just discussed the properties of polynomial rings in general, here is as a curiosity a technique of dividing polynomials. You know that it will not be relevant for you exam because it involves just playing an algorithm (possibly even with concrete quantities)."
Instead you get tasks like "one of the factors of x^3+5x^2+7x-3 is (x+3). Factorize x".
People whose skill is to pass 'math' class in high school do not need to worry about being replaced by LLMs, because they were presumably replaced by WolframAlpha in 2011.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You were probably member of temporarily impoverished upper class. I have seen many such examples as my country transitioned from socialism to capitalism after 1989. Optically your family may have been lower class as your peers in school during socialism, but your father/grandpa was a former math professor or successful entrepreneur who's whole property was expropriated by commies, and who was forced to become janitor or stoker/boilerman (a popular punishment by the party for people with wrong pedigree for some reason). You still had access to better homeschooling style education, you probably read books since you were 4 or 5, and you were bored at school thanks to access to huge library, you probably know how to play an instrument or two, and you know how to speak multiple languages - and all that despite barely having enough to eat. Nevertheless, you are in fact genetically upper middle class, that is your potential.
I think that especially people in US have distorted view of what true class means with huge number of immigrants, who often flee political persecution completely broke, and who are such temporarily impoverished upper class people. It is different from permanently poor chav/white trash lower class of people who are there for centuries, often due to their genetic issues. And I mean it literally - some of the most fucked up populations suffer from centuries of first-cousin inbreeding with huge accumulated genetic load.
In Paul Fussell's nomenclature, the class of a math professor is definitely the 'upper-middle' class, not the upper class. Math is much too useful to appeal to the upper class (except perhaps as an eccentricity signal 'I am feeling so confident in my place in society that I can pick a subject used by people who need to think to earn a living, because nobody could possibly mistake me for them').
It is NOW, but back in G. H. Hardy's day...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
upper class? hahahahahahaha
More options
Context Copy link
Makes me think of Hasan Piker, who appears to think that he grew up basically working class because his family was briefly of such diminished means that he was reduced to hiring the services of a second rate riding instructor.
More options
Context Copy link
It's additionally confused when the immigrant/native thing gets treated as the only marker of class and/or is seized upon by first/2nd gens as a tool of giving them greater privilege. The amount of times I've had interactions with people talking about bias and classism in the West when they're top 5% in their country of origin and have been the beneficiary and performer of 1000-fold the oppressive activity on their own Untermensch.
Can we create a name for this?
The Pedro?
As in Pedro Pascal.
More options
Context Copy link
Many such cases. You reminded me of the Claudine Gay - the recently axed first black woman Harvard president. Apparently her family were magnates from Haiti who owned a concrete plant in Haiti, with various shenanigans especially with regards to reconstruction after earthquake with Haitian politicians having shares in the company for some reason.
But yeah, she is marginalized person who needs affirmative action.
My law school class was full of black students who recieved explicit LSAT score adjustments in admissions and a frankly obscene amount of scholarship money/free resources by both the university and the law firms trying to pump up their diversity numbers. Not a single one came from an "underprivileged" background. They were the children of bankers and lawyers. One was a literal European aristocrat on their mother's side. It's a really radicalizing experience to be lectured to about oppression by someone who went to boarding school when you're the one two weeks behind because your student loan check hasn't come in yet and you can't buy books.
I think that a case could be made that what made SJ so appealing to the upper-middle (and middle) class was that by denying class, it made them free to be as classist. Before SJP, expressing contempt of the working class would have gone badly in mostly left-leaning academic circles.
Now, it is totally permissible, because being working class does not make you oppressed. After all, with blank-slatism, everyone who does not manage to earn a degree in grievance studies despite not belonging to an oppressed group is clearly just lazy.
So if you are a white woman whose daddy paid for your college so you could work in HR, you a free to feel vastly superior to the proletariat in a way which would have utterly embarrassed any upper-middle person in the 50s. Just take care to refer to them as "deplorables" or "MAGA base" who can not even bother to educate themselves about what is really the secret handshakes of your class membership (like the updates to the pride flag, pronouns, or knowing when you are supposed to do a land acknowledgement) but what you conveniently pretend is the basis of being a decent person.
Which is why the same people also deny sex, which made them free to be as sexist; and deny race, which made them free to be as racist.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There's obviously no way to figure this out, but I truly wonder what race relations would be like if all racial agitating was treated like the N-word and limited to American descendants of slaves (and Injuns and railway workers)
It has to be infuriating to hear this shit from not just from ethnic groups that are richer than the white median, but from people like Ilhan Omar who ran cause they fucked up their countries.
More options
Context Copy link
>Some Brahmin whose family had literal slaves in India and was driven to private school in a Rolls lumping himself in with impoverished lead-poisoned African-Americans in Flint, MI as part of the BIPOC struggle.
>"You and I are the same because a teenager once told me my lunch smelled weird."
Or the whole Apu thing when I'd argue the Simpsons targeted the Scottish (Willie) and generic Germanic central European (Uter) more directly with lazy negative stereotyping
More options
Context Copy link
“BIPOC” explicitly excludes dot Indians.
Life can uh, find a way, though.
More options
Context Copy link
We weren't really rich (more middle class) and being black they probably blended in better, but apparently my sister's friends got a bit weird when they realized she was slumming it. Which...I kinda get. We found it frustrating too.
Was it a phase? How did she turn out?
Her run-ins with the law and rampant rebelliousness in high school appear to have been a phase. The damage that phase did to her life prospects (like missing out on college) seems to be more permanent.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Most people are lying scumbags who'll try to get away with precisely as much bullshit as people are likely to let them get away with.
We have gone farther than this. Being the lying scumbag would not have been a thing in the small town I grew up in.
Now you basically need to be a lying scumbag to just get average opportunity, so everyone does it.
It reminds me a lot of the steroid era and Barry Bonds. He was already a HOF, but everyone else was doing steroids because it had tacit permission from Bud Selig. So he started doing steroids to be on an equal footing.
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