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Last Friday, Bret Deveraux of ACOUP waded deeper into the Culture War than usual by writing about the anti-ICE protests, and insurgencies and non-violent resistance in general.
What unites both strategies is that the difference in power between the state and the dissidents is very large, so large that both conventional military operations and even a protracted war are not an option for the weaker party.
If you can not face your enemy in the field, and can not even hope to sap his strength through a thousand papercuts until you can face him, what can you do?
As a military theorist, Deveraux naturally uses Clausewitz to identify three factors which can limit the escalation of force and thus be employed by the weaker side to hamper the stronger side.
Friction (the natural tendency of stuff to break, things not going according to plan, your forces not being where you would want them to be) is a bit of a sideshow. If you are able to weaken your enemy sufficiently through friction, you are fighting a protracted war, not a terrorist insurgency.
Will means the emotional backing of the conflict by the politically relevant part of the population, which might be the body of citizens or some elites, depending on the system. This is a prime target in these highly asymetrical conflicts.
The third limiting factor is the political object of the enemy leadership. Unlike the population, which is modelled as being emotional, the leadership is modelled as rational. The idea here is that if you can inflict sufficient costs on the enemy, they might decide that it is no longer worth it to enforce their goal.
Will is the central point to attack for the weaker party:
For terrorist insurgencies, this means that the main goal of their attacks is actually sending signals. So the point is not to weaken the enemy's military by blowing up their troops and materiel, but rather to message audiences on both sides of the conflict (as well as these in between) that their cause is viable. If you could convince everyone that your victory is inevitable, that would be a great boon to your side. In practice, this means that terrorists favor flashy targets to military relevant ones. 9/11 is a prime example.
A key strategy is to bait your enemy into striking against you while you are hiding among the civilian population, thereby causing civilian deaths which result both in local dissatisfaction as well as in winning a propaganda victory -- which is the kind of victory which brings you closer to your objective. The main dilemma for the insurgent is that they need gruesome violence to further their cause, but that such violence may also serve to alienate the local population and strengthen the resolve of the enemy. While 9/11 was great for making Al Qaeda a household name, it was ultimately bad for the Jihadist cause.
Deveraux then contrasts this with a deliberate strategy of nonviolence, which does not have that dilemma. He is actually rather realist about why movements employ non-violence:
Of course, non-violent protest does not mean staying on the sidewalks:
If your protest can be simply ignored, it is likely that it will be ignored, so you do not get the desired escalation and attention. This means that you will have to commit transgressions to goad the enemy into strikes against you which will be terrible PR for them.
Bret talks about the Nashville campaign during the Civil Rights Movement, where Blacks would organize sit-ins on segregated lunch counters. This caused violent repercussions, which eventually eroded popular support of the segregationist side.
He also concedes that there are regimes which are impervious to non-violent protests, where the political relevant parts of the population are very willing to employ and support violence, but argues that societies which are running on violence are very inefficient.
Finally, he talks about the anti-ICE movement, of which he seems sympathetic.
He continues:
He points out that mass media help the protests a lot, as their position has gained massively in popularity over a relatively short time span (compared to the Civil Rights Movement).
I think that the gist is that the median American voter -- like the median Motte poster -- is very willing to vote for Trump's anti-immigrant platform, but unlike the median Motte poster they are totally unwilling to tolerate the Pretti shooting as a natural consequence of enforcement actions. Of course, the Trump administration did not help itself by reflexively claiming that the shooting was justified instead of spinning it as a sad mistake.
Deveraux:
When he was posting this, the decision to pull the DHS forces out of Minneapolis was already made, but it would hardly have been surprising from his point of view. At the end of the day, the only political idea Trump truly believes from the bottom of his heart is that he should be president. Toughness on immigration (spouses excluded) so far was of instrumental value for him because it gained him a lot of support, but if it no longer delivers the votes for him, I expect him to change policy.
The thing about Bret Devereaux, at least for me, is that he has a degree of genuine scholarship, but he's also way too online, too interested in arguing with strawmen or weak men, and willing to compromise his own commitment to truth for the sake of the latter. He does represent some useful insights to the public, but he's also wildly uncharitable to people he doesn't like.
Probably the best example of this is his series on Sparta, which is grossly ignorant of the latest academic writing on Sparta, is aimed primarily at owning 'Sparta bros' on Twitter, and by his own admission advances positions that he thinks are historically weak or less likely in order to more effectively win internet arguments.
Take, for instance, this post, in which he admits that the Hodkinson position is more plausible and better supported by evidence than the Cartledge position, but says that he made his case based on Cartledge position because "the Cartledge position is clearly the more efficacious tool for reaching people who are not already convinced of the authority of modern scholars on these points". When someone admits to making an argument based on a weaker position purely for the sake of winning a debate, I think it is reasonable to conclude that that person is disingenuous.
I expect somebody with a reputation as a scholar to make only arguments that he himself believes to be strong or true. Some simplification for the public can be reasonable, especially when one is trying to educate children or undergraduates, but even so, I expect a scholar to as much as possible prioritise what is true over what can be used to persuade.
The whole thing is absurd at any rate because it is only an exercise in trying to defeat people he doesn't like on Twitter, exemplified by the weak man of Steven Pressfield.
I'm not sure what I can say here beyond, "Grow up, Bret."
The problem is that, using Sparta as an example, Devereaux is ignorant of the most recent scholarship, and misrepresents by omission the scholarship that he is aware of, in order to own a small, ignorant, and possibly imaginary audience.
This is not a serious thinker.
And if he's like that on classical Greece, which I've bothered to look into, why would I trust him on anything else?
He does sometimes convey useful insights in his other series, but in general I would caution people to always look up and independently research anything Devereaux tells you. He's clearly intelligent and well-read, but he is not a trustworthy source. He has a tendency to lump together periods centuries apart, for all that he criticises 'Sparta bros' he is something of a 'classical Rome bro' himself, he has a tendency to unhelpful political asides, and he tends to always be maximally uncharitable to people with whom he disagrees. I do not recommend ACOUP, if you want to learn about military history or the classical world.
I think you're misrepresenting Devereaux here.
He does not concede that Cartledge is an implausible position nor does he leave out the Hodkinson position entirely. If he thinks that there's two positions, both of which are reasonable positions to hold, I don't see it as disingenuous to use the more convincing one where appropriate to argue against a third position that he thinks is not reasonable to hold.
I can't really think of a more charitable way to interpret this, I'm afraid:
(emphasis original)
I take that as an explicit admission that he premised his argument on positions that he himself thinks are in dispute, but which he believes are instrumentally useful for persuasion. He himself says that is prioritising persuasion!
It might be one thing if he had prefaced those earlier Sparta posts with a note that there are several schools of thought, he find several of them plausible, and for the following he's going to proceed on the assumption that the Cartledge school is correct - but he does not do that. It sounds to me like he thinks that such an admission of uncertainty would give the 'Sparta bros' an excuse to dismiss what he says.
(Not that I think that's necessary, because a dedicated 'Sparta bro' is going to ignore him anyway. Devereaux's Sparta series is not a serious attempt to persuade, but rather a performative dunking, done for an audience already inclined to cheer him on. I understand that persuading third parties, rather than your actual interlocutor, is usually the goal of public debate, but surely even that would be enhanced by presenting your case in the most comprehensive and intellectually honest way possible.)
I think this is standard science explainer practice, for reasons that can be completely orthogonal to the political, that has the propensity to sound bad to laypeople who have an incorrect model of how the scientist's notion of "truth" works. I will, with apologies, admit that I have the sketch of a post to the effect of "newsflash: physicists and even mathematicians 'lie' to you in the exact same way all of the time" in mind but do not have the energy or time to produce it.
Instead, for a different argument that is more related to the political dimension of this specific issue, I think that his way of explaining it just stems from a broader sense of distrust that the engaged lay public insists in every public-facing academic entirely through its own fault. If you do quantum computing, it is almost impossible to even mention superposition unless you want to wind up being quoted in a procession of powerpoints about the possibilities of doing multiple computations simultaneously forever; and if you do neurobiology, even as much as acknowledging that something quantum might have something to do with chemistry including chemistry that happens in the brain will forever be used as ammunition by "due to their quantum souls capable of seeing every outcome simultaneously, humans will never be replaced by machines" type people even if you started your popsci career hoping to get the public acquainted with the mechanistic understanding of the brain. This doesn't have to happen to you or someone you know many times for you to start seeing the public as the epistemic enemy, and conclude that the best thing you can do is feeding them information selectively so that they arrive at the least wrong conclusion rather than feeding them information freely so that they motivatedly reason themselves into something much worse (here, probably, any acknowledgement of controversy would just put "Sparta bros" into "300 is a valid scientific theory" mode). Of course this sucks for those of your readers who can actually hold differentiated views and deal with uncertainty, but they can always read the literature. Besides, the ones who protest the loudest tend to turn out to be exactly those motivated reasoners upon cursory inspection all too often. (Similar to the fun "spot the Scientologist" game whenever public-facing criticism of psychiatry is involved.)
But this is where you are in great danger of throwing away your soul and admitting you are not a scientist or a teacher but a shepherd of men.
Saying, 'the plum pudding model is less accurate than other models which I will explain later but I am using this now because the best model needs to be taken in bite-size chunks' is one thing. Similarly, avoiding hot-button words like quantum in favour of something equally descriptive when talking to people can be wise for the reasons you give: I have sat in on interviews where the beleaguered interviewer has twenty minutes to try and fish something out of the firehose of words coming from a professor and produces something obviously insane based on the word 'quantum'. But this is in aid of greater comprehension.
This is not epistemics.
This. Is. DIDACTIIIIICS!
(couldn't resist)
In all seriousness, the above is not a matter of being correct or incorrect about the facts. It's the author using scholarship which he suspects to be wrong ("old, if not busted") in service of the author's moral, political goal. And that, as someone intimately familiar with the difficulties of scientific explanation, strikes me as a very different ball game. Being less than 100% open and honest with people for the sake of their own edification slides so easily and neatly into being less than honest because it serves your own goals that it's really really dangerous to get into the habit of doing it. I'm not joking when I say this is how senior academics lose their souls.
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