site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25732 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

On an article on viewpoint diversity in the Law at the University of Chicago. Sunstein Viewpoint Diversity

Growing up I believed according to American mythology that the law is blind. Everyone knows of the Blind Justice Statue of the Roman Goddess Justitia. This always implied to me (perhaps being an engineer) that the law was like math 2+2 =4. Word x+y has meaning Z. The whole idea that adding a bunch of words together lacks a definable meaning to me makes no sense. Law shouldn’t have theory. It should be math especially if it is going to be blind and not swayed by public opinion. There should be no theory involved. I guess this makes me a textualists. But it turns out at places like UC that you have 10-20 smart clusters of people who all have different solutions to 2+2 = 4.

Law being like math I believe should definitely apply to judges. Legal theory can be useful for a lawyer who works for a Senator who is writing legislation. Then legal theory has a purpose of designing the equations to get a law that does what you want.

One thing that came out of UC was applying economics to law. This again I have no problem with adding economics to new legislation you create. But from my understanding of legal history judges began adding economic tests to old law. To me this is like discovering that 2+2 had a different answer than the 4 that was a correct answer.

Once I realized the law as practiced is not mathematics I switched my judicial philosophy from some form of originalism to Ketanji Brown theory. I just want a judge who votes the way I want her to and do not care if she’s worse at arguing her theory than another guy. The best I can tell from history is that when public opinion on an issue changes the legal theorists of the smart guy at UC becomes the theory everyone else begins to quote. I prefer to just pick judges who back the policy I want in the current legal environment.

Pragmatically the law has never been blind. The criminal justice system has always judged poor dumb kids differently than rich smart kids. The same crime committed by an urban youth versus a Kennedy kid has never been punished the same way. A big reason for this is the court had a reasonable expectations that the Kennedy’s had the resources to deal with the behavior internally and society didn’t need to spend resources to make sure the crime didn’t happen again.

An important thing to keep in mind about Law:

PDF: The Law is a Fractal: The Attempt to Anticipate Everything

For instance, we might consider a municipal park for which a city had adopted the rule, “no vehicles are allowed in the park.” We could treat “Point 1” on the number line as representing the act of driving a car through the park and “Point 2” as representing refraining from driving a car through the park. The rule would assign the label of “illegal” to Point 1 and “legal” to Point 2. ^5

As has been famously pointed out,^6 these two points and the rule itself are insufficient to cover all the specific factual situations that might arise involving vehicles in a park. At least they are insufficient in any reasonable rule system.^7 What if, for example, a police vehicle has to enter the park on an emergency call? If we want an appropriate, specific rule, we would need another point, between Points 1 and 2, corresponding to the factual scenario, “A police vehicle entering the park.” Point 1.5, let’s call it, to which we would assign, like Point 2, the label “legal.” But what if the driver of the car were a thief who had stolen it from the police? That specific scenario would fall between Points 1 and 1.5, perhaps 1.2, and would be assigned the label “illegal.”^8

And so on. Given the numberless potential variations, foreseeable and unforeseeable, in “vehicles,” motives, and circumstances, there can, provably,^9 be no end to the possible specific scenarios—and thus no limit on the number of rules that would result from trying to write an appropriate one for each possible, distinct fact situation.^10

If the Law is not clear then who gets to decide the rule? I don’t think it’s clear that Courts get to. Thinking about the 14th Amendment I don’t think it’s clear the SC gets to make the decision. Jurisdiction has meaning and I don’t see why the SC gets to choose the meaning. Reasonable people can have different meanings.

Ideally the legislature would clarify. I am not sure how this would work with an Amendment. Could a simple bill make the decision or do you need to amend the amendment for clarification? I definitely think the legislature gets first crack at it but I am not sure what process is necessary a bill or amendment to clarify an amendment. If it’s only a bill then you could to limited extent be modify the Constitution whenever the legislature changes.

If the legislature does nothing then who gets to decide the meaning of “Jurisdiction”. I don’t believe the courts should do anything that would be creating policy. The definition of jurisdiction isn’t in the amendment. They have nothing to base a decision.

Absent legislative action then I guess the executive branch gets to define the word and citizenship status is just an executive order. And if your born 2 min before a GOP POTUS leaves you are a non-citizen for life and if your born minutes later your a citizen for life. Legislative or Executive Action each are more Democratic when bills are passed that lack clarity on meaning.

But I do think in most situations you can write legislation that solves 90-95% of cases in footnotes to legislation. A lot of legislation is written very poorly.

Courts are the entities that our system designated to resolve legal ambiguities. Largely for reasons of expediency. Court interpretations of statutes or the constitution can be overridden by the legislature or by amendment but, in the moment, we need someone to decide.

These questions come up in the context of pending cases. Take the example of Wickard below. Whether he was in violation of federal law and must pay a penalty turned on whether his growing wheat was "interstate commerce." If judges are not empowered to answer this question, what does this case look like? Is it put on hold until Congress passes a law? The constitution is amended? Can anyone get their federal prosecution deferred by finding an ambiguity (according to who?) that would require a statutory or constitutional amendment to clarify?

I don’t believe it is clear at all that the courts have the ability to make law on ambiguous texts. In fact courts have recognized this as vague laws are generally not considered constitutional such as the Logan Act.

Historically they have thrown out convictions based on vague laws. In the case of a vague amendment it would seem the power to me would go to the most Democratic branch of government for clarification which would be congress followed by the Executive if Congress does nothing. But yes in this case it would seem to be a sort of constitutional crisis on who has the power.

In the case of the 14th I think they need to punt the case and make it an executive decision otherwise they are overstepping their authority. If the administration violates something that is clear then the SC can claim authority.

If the Law is not clear then who gets to decide the rule?

The jury of one's peers. You can't trace the border of the Mandelbrot set, but you can pick a specific point and, with arbitrarily high probability, decide whether it belongs to it or not.

The jury of one’s peers in our system does not decide the rules. The judge gives juries instructions on the rules. And I don’t believe the judge either gets to “make up the rules” or atleast they shouldn’t. The rules come from the legislator. The question is how interpretive do judges get to be on the “rules” and who actually gets to be the rule maker.

The jury makes deterministic decisions on the the evidence in the case and whether the “rules” given to them were broken. When juries make up the “rules” we call that jury nullification which happens but I am not sure we consider that allowed.

we call that jury nullification which happens but I am not sure we consider that allowed.

It varies for different definitions of "we", "that", and "allowed".

Perhaps the strongest case for "not allowed" is that juries are given explicit contrary instructions. Perhaps the strongest case for "allowed" is that there's very few other good reasons to conscript a bunch of random unqualified jackasses off the street to make judgement calls about a trial when there's already a highly trained person, literally titled "judge", right there. The "of their peers" bit isn't added to "jury" because legal types hate concision, it's because that part is critical to nullification protecting against laws that seem good to upper class judges but not to the class of people affected.

(Of course, the strongest case for "shouldn't be allowed" is that often upper class people are just more correct about what's good. E.g. it's much harder to protect unpopular rights if anyone criminally retaliating against their exercise might get let off by a jury nullifying the crime, or at least might be impossible to prosecute in the face of hung juries with some members nullifying the crime.)

But I don't have twelve peers. Guess that means I'm the law!

It would seem like we could have a hierarchy of laws. If No Vehicles in the park is a rank 4 law and police may proceed on any available path or road in an emergency with their sirens and lights operating is a rank 3 law then both can coexist because a rank 3 exception supercedes a rank 4 law.

Isn't that part of what the common law system does? A practical hierarchy is created and citations refer back to prior precedent in applying the unwritten hierarchy.

Okay but what about say a wheel chair? It is a vehicle. Maybe you have ADA so perhaps that trumps.

What about stroller?

In law school I asked, "what about shoes?" The professors liked it I suppose.

"what about shoes?"

Does the posted 10mph speed limit on the paved multi-use path apply to Sabastian Sawe out for a morning jog at 13mph?

Maybe you jest, but there was a ministorm in my country where foreign media reported it as Slovak government banned running by limiting limit for pedestrians to 6km/h.

Of course all they did was that they defined the value of "walking speed" in the law, but that speed only applies to vehicles, especially electric bikes or scooters who are driving on the sidewalks among pedestrian traffic.

By the way it was a funny thing as many people in Slovakia scratched their heads and saw first hand how sensationalist many "respectable" media were. It was Gell-Mann Amnesia effect on large scale, as domestically it was considered a good law or at least good intent aimed at a real problem of people driving around on the sidewalks with scooters going 40km/h.

Great little quiz/game about this https://novehiclesinthepark.com/

It's just in general really difficult to come up with a rule that is

  1. Simple to track and consistently enforce

  2. Covers all potential cases, including adversarial readings.

  3. Doesn't confuse a good number of people with legitimate arguments to how it can be interpreted.

And the fact that nobody's actually able to hold a legislator to account for intentionally writing laws that fail any (or all) of those three conditions; a few laws are clearly designed the way they were to intentionally provoke adversarial readings for power reasons.

Which might not be the point the game's necessarily intending for you to notice, but it is something I feel is pretty apparent- I'd say someone who came up with a law like that while failing to even define terms is incompetent at best, and is the reason anti-social women (and men, but mostly women) feel as entitled as they do to call the cops on someone "driving" an R/C car in the park.

I got 100% on the quiz. Seemed straightforward to me.

My experience as a moderator has definitely colored my opinions on the law and rules. I think the intention and purpose of a law are very important. And the letter of the law is not very important. Also people can violate rules and the authorities can decide 'no punishment'. Thus police car and ambulance are violation of the rule, but not necessarily a punishable violation.

The spirit of a law may be more important than the letter, but nobody bothered writing the spirit down. It's floating around in the ether, formless and powerless. The letter's all we've got.

We wrote down the spirit of the rules in the sidebar here. Many laws are often proceeded by a section dedicated to the purpose of the law.

Some laws are handled in spirit rather than just the letter. Murder is an example. We do not ban all the ways in which you can commit murder.

Honestly I took it and scored 93% in the majority. So the rule seems clear to me.

96% here, and my exception A non-functional vehicle is still a vehicle, a tank is a vehicle, and it still counts when it's part of a monument would have been covered by other permitting and planning work anyways.

Same as me! Actual laws like this usually say "motorized vehicles" which makes almost all of the other quiz questions non-ambiguous, but I guess there'd still be some ambiguity about the tank depending on exactly how it was deactivated.

That does resolve a lot of questions, although different types of bikes available today might leave a few questions: fully electric push-to-go bikes are clearly "motorized"; old-school, er, acoustic bikes aren't, but the case of e-assist bikes, which require pedaling to ride, still seems unclear to me.

By the letter of the law, e-bikes would definitely count -- vehicle (check) with a motor (check). (those scooter things can fuck off too)

The trouble is, boomers and environmentalists like them, and they are running the place!

Then there's bikes with "electronic" (electromechanical) shifting but no non-human motive power. I'm waiting for the day some anti-bike cop busts someone for an e-bike violation over this, and the court (being a "the cop is always right" traffic court) accepts it.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats