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 -
An unknown assassin has attempted to kill President Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner tonight. One person is dead. President Trump is unharmed. The disposition of the assassin is unknown.
Naturally, they are celebrating the assassination attempt on Reddit. The leftists completely lost me once they started celebrating the deaths of people they don’t like; they obviously want society to break down completely.
The majority of everyone from the political center rightward was celebrating the repeated assassinations of Iranian leadership a month ago too, so I don't think the other camp gets to claim the moral high ground here.
(...and either way, denouncing assassination attempts against anyone whose job significantly involves dealing out death seems rather comical, in the "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the war room!" way.)
edit: Please stop with the arguments-as-soldiers responses. I shot down a bad argument; just because you agree with the thesis (that leftists are uniquely bad for celebrating assassination attempts on Trump), this is not sufficient grounds to stake your disagreement, unless you can specifically defend the argument (that it is so because they started celebrating the deaths of "people they don't like").
Come on now.
I can call for the assassination of Hitler during WWII and refuse the call for my neighbor Fred and be entirely moral and consistent.
The gap between Democratically elected Trump and a bunch of Authoritarian monsters who just finished killing tens of thousands of their own population and we are effectively at war with.....it's not quite as bad as Fred and Hitler but it is still significant.
First off, I think that assassination is generally a strategy with much lower human costs than war. If you can reach your objective by blowing up a leader instead of killing thousands in battle, that seems an improvement.
However, this is rarely given. Modern politics are unlike chess, defeating a leader will often not harm his cause much. Trump blowing up the Ayatollah did jackshit for driving Iran towards a more desirable policy -- in fact, it did exactly the opposite, turning an old sick man into a martyr and putting his vengeful son in charge. Nor would Iran blowing up Trump help them -- it would just manage to piss off all of DC. Perhaps Ukraine would profit from Putin getting offed, his regime seems a bit more personalistic.
The trick with killing Hitler is to do it before he starts WW2, obligatory xkcd. Georg Elser had the right idea, there.
The steel-man for assassinating Trump would come from taking his tweets serious. Famously, he threatened to permanently destroy Iranian civilization (pop. 92M) overnight. If you think he is a shrewd negotiator and thus does not make idle threats, you might conclude that he might order the the US military to glass Iran the next time he does not get what he wants in the negotiations, which is likely to happen.
It is hard for an outsider to judge how likely the US military would be to follow his orders. I would expect Hegseth to be at least as bloodthirsty as Trump and not push back (though he might quote a bible verse from the book of Tarantino for the occasion), and the Trump administration has certainly picked generals loyal to their cause. Nor does the military generally foster an attitude of questioning orders. Whomever killed the girls in that school certainly did not personally verify that there were IRGC members at the target coordinates, and would have gotten court-martialed if he tried. You get the order with coordinates and payload, you verify that they are genuine, and then you follow them. The US military might not have the personnel to murder a few million Iranians Einsatzgruppen-style through small arms, but I would not count on the crew of some airfield to mutiny against the USG rather than nuking Tehran. People with qualms about killing innocents do not become bomber pilots, after all.
When Elser tried to kill Hitler, Goering and Goebbels, they had not yet caused the deaths of millions. Likely, Elser used the heuristic of carefully listening to their public statements (including Mein Kampf) to form a model about their future behavior. History proved sadly that he did not underestimate the bloodthirst of the Nazis, which is why he is treated as a hero rather than a failed terrorist today.
Personally, my world model predicts that Trump is unlikely to actually order large scale nuclear strikes against the Iranian population, and that the chances are decent that someone would go Jaime Lannister on his ass rather than carry out his orders. And if there is a single elderly asshole who does not deserve to be turned into a martyr for his cause besides the late Ayatollah, it is Donald Trump. The assassination of Trump might just the jolt the decaying corpse of MAGA requires to keep shambling on into the 2028 elections, and I would much rather Trump clings on long past the point where normal people would be put into an assisted living facility and destroys his movement himself.
That being said, different people can form different world models from the same data. If someone wants to argue that the expected number of deaths from Trump ordering nuclear strikes is a million (e.g. a percent of the Iranian population, accounting for the fact that it is not very likely), they might decide that this overrides any concerns about the future of party politics in the US.
At this point I don’t think assassinating Trump would have the desired results you would want to achieve with assassinating Trump. I would compare him to Caesar in that they killed him too late at this point. Now we would lose the charismatic leader but it appears that we do have potential Octavians waiting in the wings. Vance, Rubio, maybe even Kushner. MAGA at this point it would seem likely a new leader would emerge but now more radical because of the assasination and many would argue these figures are more capable.
For general CW reasons, agreed. (Though I dearly hope that Trump is not like Caesar in that he did not change the political system permanently. I see him more like the Gracchi brothers, personally.)
My steelman hinged on two assumptions: (1) There is a non-trivial chance that Trump will nuke Iran (or some other country). (2) This is a personal characteristic of his, rather than a wider consequence of MAGA ideology, so that Vance or Rubio are substantially less likely to nuke someone. (To my knowledge, neither has tweeted about ending any civilizations overnight.)
Again, for the benefits of any feds reading, I should clarify that I do not subscribe to that. I think that Trump's tweets about the Iran war are a pathetic flailing around rather than a clear, consistent communication of intent.The only thing that can be learned from Trump's tweets is that his future behavior is not communicated by them. The way the Trump administration communicates what they are going to do next is by insider trading on prediction markets, instead.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link