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 -
What is the Zionist model of antisemitism*?
Matt Yglesias posted what turned out to be a surprisingly hot take that the downturn in public opinion of Israel is a result of Israeli actions, and that the best way for Israel to fix its public relations problem is to change its actions vis-a-vis the Palestinian issue and foreign policy.
I was surprised at the pushback. This seems straightforwardly true. There was a great chart I saw a few days ago, which I am unfortunately unable to find, which showed that public opinion of Israel has been approximately this low before. It was in 1982 with the invasion of Lebanon and the notoriously brutal siege of Beirut.
Most of the alternative theories fell into two camps.
It’s hard to tell how religious the people in 2. are, but my general impression is, “quite a bit”. Many of them seem to speak of antisemitism as if it were a spiritual fault, another manifestation of the platonic ideal of pure evil. Seen as a spiritual problem, the correct response is to become even more aggressively Jewish. This has the rather large problem of being counterproductive when, e.g. smashing idols goes wrong.
*By “antisemitism” in this post I almost exclusively mean “antizionism”. I use the term to maintain consistency with the pro-Israel literature I am engaging with, not as an endorsement that antizionism = antisemitism.
Like any other form of bias, it both affects how people interpret events and is affected by events themselves. Compare to political partisanship: the public's interpretation of political scandals (of varying levels of real or fake) is obviously enormously affected by both their personal political views and the political views of the media sources and social circles they trust. You can probably think of plenty of cases where very similar actions have been interpreted differently by partisans and biased organizations depending on which party they're associated with. At the same time it's not completely detached from reality, not everyone is maximally partisan so there really are actions you can take to make your political party more or less popular.
That doesn't mean being generically "likable" is the best strategy either, you can also do things like decrease the influence of your political enemies or do things that have a real-world impact that people like even if they don't like the policy in abstract. If Trump successfully changed the political leanings of mainstream media institutions, or Israel successfully helped the Iranian protestors take over the government, then that would help their popularity more than it pissed people off so long as it didn't require doing anything really unpopular like mass-arresting journalists or using nuclear weapons. Conversely if Israel made all palestinians citizens that would make the population of Israel a lot more anti-jewish despite it being "likable". Anti-white bias has had a recent surge in influence via the growth of the social-justice movement despite sustaining itself on stuff like "police are allowed to defend themselves and sometimes make mistakes" and "the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till", sometimes an influential ideology really does hate you enough that you'll make more progress by trying to fight that ideology than by playing nice. Anti-Israel bias isn't as detached from their recent actions, at least not in the west, but it's a reminder that determining the net impact of an action long-term is more complicated than checking popularity polls.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link