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 -
Whenever we think about super-broad generalizations about nation-scale or civilization scale events, we should think of them as being one approximate model, that is one part of a big stack of different models being superimposed over each other. "The Sun has enormous gravity that pulls all objects into the solar system toward it" is a true generalization. But then you notice Jupiter doesn't appear to be being pulled into the sun, the moon rotates around the Earth rather than being pulled in toward the sun, etc. And the answer is, they are being pulled in, but inertia, momentum, and other forces are more powerful at the moment and thus obscuring the particular model.
So "strong men create good times, good times create weak men" is a pattern in history, but it does not always happen, and other forces are at play as well. I think it is basically true with the Rome and the Goths, but it took centuries of good times before the inertial power of the Roman Empire had slowed down enough. And when comparing African versus European races, northern Europeans are still benefiting from thousands of years of being bred to survive the harsh northern climates and a thunderdome of martial competition at the crossroads of empires. A few decades of chaos in Somalia is not yet enough to counteract this.
There are also lots of exceptions and caveats. Certain kinds of hard times just produce even weaker men, particularly I think times of disease and of total anarchy. Hard times can be so hard they just kill everyone off.
America 1600 to 1900 is interesting in that it has "good times" in the sense of so much resource wealth, lumber, soil, navigable rivers, etc, but those things required a lot of work in order to turn into wealth. It wasn't like the "good times" of a late-stage imperial capital where you eat imported bread and wine and go watch shows all day long. And "strong men" bred by centuries of competition in the harsh conditions of Europe were able to take advantage of this great resource bounty and create the most powerful empire in history. America also had a healthy dose of hard times in the form of the threat of Indian Wars, but the Indians were never strong enough to just wipe out the settlers entirely or be so hostile so as to prevent them from developing, as arguable, was the case in Europe where the areas under greater threat from Mongol invasion developed the least, because those invasions could be so destructive.
It's... complicated. The solar gravity on Luna is actually greater than the terran gravity, so that Luna's orbit around Sol is convex (it does not curve away from Sol when it's between Sol and Terra at a new moon, the way that the Jovian or Martian moons do).
Inertia and momentum aren't forces. The mistake is related to inertia, though, and specifically due to the fact that human intuition expects attractive forces to result in collisions due to the nonconservative forces of air resistance and friction which prevent stable orbits; those forces (mostly) don't exist in space, so gravity attracting things doesn't usually result in a collision.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link