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 -
Isn't this textbook Chinese Robbers Fallacy? There are a lot of humans. Even a relatively niche online subculture might have tens of thousands of members. A half-dozen violent criminals out of that number doesn't really prove anything, let alone provide sufficient grounds to condemn the subculture itself. The question, at that level, is not whether all mass shooters like speed skating, but how many speed skaters turn into school shooters.
That depends on whether you're trying to determine how to treat your friend the speed skater, or trying to stop school shootings. If most Ys are Xs, and you want to get rid of the Ys, it's generally a good idea to take a look at X to see whether you can make it lead to Y less often - whether or not Ys are a large fraction of Xs. This chain leads back to FtttG talking about how trans spaces ought to be given a spring cleaning of terrorist propaganda, not talking about how all the transsexuals are evil and must die.
A fair reply, but,
I still don't think that's been demonstrated, for multiple reasons.
First, the point of Chinese Robbers is not merely that you shouldn't discriminate against the Chinese as a whole just because they have a significant minority of robbers among them. The point is that it is a statistical illusion. There is not, in fact, a particular reason why so many Chinese become robbers - you would be mistaken to organize any interventions predicated on the notion that there is some specific reason why the Chinese are more likely to become robbers than anybody else, even if you avoid the most egregious mistake of treating any randomly-chosen Chinese person as meaningfully likely to become a robber. Whether popular Chinese media depict stealing in a positive light is irrelevant because there's nothing there to actually be explained. They're not more likely to become robbers than any other human beings; there's just way more Chinese than Belgians, so all else being equal you numerically end up with more Chinese than Belgian robbers worldwide. All that has been shown here is that there are a fair few trans shooters - but nobody has tried to show that it's a statistically significant number relative to the total number of shooters. I'm not claiming it's not statistically significant, but leaping from "there's been like, six of them!" to proposed interventions without actually running the numbers is just plain bad epistemics.
Second, it also hasn't been demonstrated that violent rhetoric in trans spaces is responsible. Insofar as disturbed individuals from varied backgrounds and ideologies converge on becoming school shooters, it seems fallacious to point to anything violence-related in a specific set of shooters' background and blame that. Compare "many mentally-disturbed young males become trans, some mentally-disturbed young males become shooters, some online trans spaces include violent rhetoric - is the violent rhetoric to blame?" to familiar moral panics like "many mentally-disturbed young males are gamers, some mentally-disturbed young males become shooters, some video games include violent content - are violent video games to blame?". Lots of people consume various forms of violent content, and it is a favorite trick of censors to lean on Chinese Robbers situations to blame whatever kinds of violent content they don't like by claiming that the correlation shows that this time the violent content directly led to real-world harm. Me, I'm skeptical of the entire framework. AFAIK basically no trans spaces encourage their members to go forth and kill random children to prove they're the übermensch. The Zizians' private Discord server, maybe, but come on, that's not the kind of "violent rhetoric" that's lurking on regular trans subreddits. If we were talking about an epidemic of Kirk-style killings I might find the argument more persuasive, but here you can only point at a much hazier blob of "violence", and I think that's a stretch.
Third, even if violent rhetoric in trans spaces were in some way causally responsible through normalization, it has not been demonstrated that this relationship is so direct as to make the peddlers of violent rhetoric legally responsible for the shootings to a degree that nullifies their First Amendment rights. How many people read this violent rhetoric without becoming school shooters? My guess is "an overwhelming majority". Stochastic terrorism might be an interesting thought experiment but I do not believe a country can simultaneously have free speech and legally recognize the concept - the slippery slope from "don't publish anything that could motivate the right crackpot out of millions to kill people" to "don't ever criticize anybody too harshly" is so steep it's a cliff-face.
I'm quite explicitly not demanding the arrest of anyone posting violent, hateful rhetoric in trans subreddits, nor claiming that anyone posting such content could be found criminally liable for incitement to violence. Innumerable subreddits have been banned over the years without any of the moderators or posters facing legal action. If Reddit decides to ban a subreddit which consists of nothing but people ranting about how much they despise "femoids" (or black people, or homosexuals, or Jews etc.) and openly fantasising about how much they'd like to assault and torture them, they should adopt the same standard when it comes to subreddits consisting of people ranting about how much they despise TERFs, "cis scum" or similar. Or we can do the modus ponens and say that if trans-identified males are allowed to share their creepy fantasies about murdering TERFs on Reddit, then incels, racists and homophobes should be allowed to as well.
I think you're constructing a strawman in an effort to make me sound like an authoritarian and an opponent of free speech (particularly laughable when I've racked up multiple QCs for loudly condemning the censorious approach adopted by several Western governments). I don't appreciate it.
I made this point at greater length in the linked post: if you think I'm getting too worked up about trans-inspired violence, that logically implies that Western governments are getting far too worked up about incel-inspired violence. Can't have it both ways.
That would be my view, yes. (As befitting a Mottizen, I should think, almost by definition.)
I didn't intend to, and apologize for giving that impression. I didn't refer to you by name and, indeed, wasn't directly replying to you at all, but to Maiq, himself replying to magicakittycat. My purpose was to pick apart the epistemics of the question; I wasn't trying to specifically condemn any one position, let alone any one poster.
Yes, as per the above, I would agree with that. Certainly, with respect to school shooters, I think it's such a specific behavior, shared by people from such disparate ideological backgrounds, and so far from what a vast majority of those ideologies would recommend even when they endorse some forms of terrorism (!), that trying to blame any particular movement for a given shooting is almost always a mistake.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And even that doesn't necessarily matter too much! Mass shooters are extremely rare, so even a statistically significant difference between populations often goes from extremely rare to extremely rare but slightly less so.
Like I can't imagine anyone has preregistered the belief that .05% of a group = acceptable shooter rate but .09% = unacceptable and needs a crackdown.
More options
Context Copy link
Mostly decent points; I was largely criticising the structure of your argument, not particularly taking a firm position on the issue, and I did think of some of these questions myself.
I will note that, uh... not trans spaces specifically, but some SJ spaces can get pretty bad. When I said "terrorist propaganda" I wasn't being hyperbolic; I was talking about the shit I've seen, which is if anything worse than the stuff mentioned in that Unherd article (I hadn't actually read it until writing this post). I was talking about literal calls to do terrorism, and advice about how to avoid being arrested for violent crime. I'm pretty libertine when it comes to speech, but "don't literally urge people to riot and assassinate" is probably like #2 on the list of exceptions everyone makes (#1 being the most blatant forms of harmful sensation, like pointing a concert-rated speaker into someone's bedroom at night). You're right that mass shootings specifically have some mental-illness issues, but I do think there's cause to crack down on the places that start to function as insurgent communications infrastructure and that doing so might ease some of the rioting in the medium-term.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link