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 -
Essentially, if you were a social conservative considering a career in family or teen therapy, for almost a decade and a half, it's been open and common knowledge that these laws were present, informed a variety of professional accreditation bodies, and would be used as evaluation criteria during training and mentorship programs. The prospective therapist would be faced with patients who would want advise, the therapist want to give what they believed to be correct advise, and they would be required to give what they believed to be wrong advise or risk their entire future professional career. Depending on area of focus, local demographics, workload, and specific philosophy, a rough Fermi estimate gives a monthly or every-other-month basis?
((Assume 20 scheduled slots a week, an average of two clients per slot, gives 160 patients per month; demographic estimates for LGBT from 2012 was 3%, so five LGBT clients a month, but presumably not all of them will be having issues related to sexual orientation, and not all of those issues will be solved by 'calm down on the gay/gender' stuff even by the most social conservative perspective. The rate's a lot faster if you filter for specific fields or use more recent demographic numbers.))
Because there's a long training pipeline and a large monetary investment for therapists - Colorado requires a Master's degree and two thousand hours of post-graduate training for at least some categories - that can't be readily transferred, these incentives push people away very early in their career. There's a wide variety of other problems behind the pipeline issues, but it's still a cause for some of the pipeline issues, and many of them feed on themselves such that each marginal restriction makes the next more capable of dissuading potential outsiders.
More options
Context Copy link