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 -
Yesterday marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Harambe.
The White House has remarked on the occasion.
How much credence do you put on the idea that Harambe represented an actual sea change in American culture? At the time, it felt like a joke, but in hindsight, it feels like the first time that internet memeing bled over into real space. A lot of the people making jokes about a gorilla ended up making jokes about a former real estate developer and steak salesman that propelled him into the public eye. Was Harambe a watershed event, or just one where we look back and project meaning?
Anyone remember the affair of Cecil the Lion that was also around that time (seems like about a year before the affair of Harambe)? I recalled that it caused a bunch of drama online similar to Harambe, and then suddenly no one ever talked about it again. I'm always reminded of it when I run into Jimmy Kimmel on the news or social media, because he famously shed tears on his show while talking about the affair. I think these and Kony, referenced in another comment, stick to memories for being some of the earlier examples of social media hot flashes that tore through the internets and then went away, which became very common and even the default in the past decade.
With 2014 online drama being defined by the affair of reproductively viable worker ants, I wonder if future historians will think we just had a really strange animal-loving phase in the mid-2010s.
What I remember about Cecil is the doctor who shot him totally being dragged for it, but a few people interviewed some Africans and they were like "Lions? They suck, dude. They eat my friends. Americans will kill them and pay us for the privilege? Cool!" (OK, not in those exact words)
According to the Wikipedia article, it seems that there was a "Cecil Effect" in Zimbabwe after the affair, where westerners hunting lions there became less common than otherwise would have been expected, resulting in less pleasant lives for the locals due to more lions and less money. I don't know much about the trophy hunting business, but what little I know about it from podcasts and radio shows makes me not surprised; it always seemed to me that westerners paying huge sums of money to hunt exotic animals in Africa was almost an unalloyed good, with the only significant downsides being for the individual animals themselves and other westerners who care more about optics or suffering of animals than about the suffering of other humans. The "I consent! I consent! I don't!" meme comes to mind.
Trophy hunting big five animals costs the equivalent of over a decade's labour in local salaries and employs far more local servants than you'd expect- in the west trophy hunting would usually be limited to guides and taxidermists(the guide field dresses), but lower African labour costs also justify skinning teams, personal servants, etc etc.
Add to that that subsistence farmers generally do not like charismatic megafauna very much, including apex predators(which eat their stock and occasionally them). Rural folk in the US hate wolves too(and would probably hate mammoth if they still existed), but lions are much more likely to hunt both livestock and humans.
Yes - when done responsibly, it's both wildlife management and local economic injection. But a lot of people cannot conceive of hunting as being anything other than cruel and harmful. Probably part of a general idea of humans being "outside of nature", part "exploitation of poor minorities in 3rd world countries", part "hating anyone rich enough to do so", and part "poaching in Africa is what Victorian British people did".
In Cecil's case, the lion was "critically wounded" with an arrow and survived another 12 hours before finally being killed. 12 hours of pain and suffering with a critical wound sounds pretty cruel to me.
Hm, perhaps the trophy hunting business could be improved with a sort of minimum caliber/destructiveness requirement on all weapons used for the hunting.
Can't wait for big game hunting with FPV drones.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link