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 -
I take the opposite stance, regardless of mental health outcomes banning people from transitioning is wrong. The discussion isn't just about trans people, but the underlying thought processes involving the role of government and restrictions to "save people from themselves". And those thought processes have real consequences.
The FDA is already really bad for this, the US government takes an approach that everything is basically banned until "proven" safe. Our default is that you are a moron who can't be trusted to take any risk. And this means small stuff like why you can't buy good sunscreen, to more serious issues like why it's difficult for terminally ill patients to try new risky procedures, or as this ACX post has gone over before, why your child might have died because they couldn't get European fish oil.
And it delays medical and scientific advances a lot! Look at this estimate putting the COVID vaccine by 2033. Thank god for operation warp speed allowing us to bypass tedious bullshit (or at least do them simultaneously) and get it out in less than a year. Imagine if other medicine could come out so quickly like the GLP1s! Imagine how many lives could be saved or improved if not for the nanny state "protecting" us.
The we must protect morons from themselves stance inevitably means treating you as a moron too. You must be kept safe from the sunscreen that is widely used in Asia and Europe. You must be kept safe from experimental treatments before you die. You must be kept safe from saving your kid. You must be kept safe from deciding that you're happier with cross sex hormones. You must be kept safe from scientific advancements. You are a moron, you do not get to make your own choices, the central bureaucrats simply know better.
We don't stop this by engaging in more banning. We have to throw away the entire concept in the trash, and accept that yes morons will sometimes make moronic decisions that hurt themselves but restrictive government just means treating everyone as a moron. I don't see myself as a moron. Does anyone here think differently of themselves?
The alternative is clearly worse. Because what sucks more than not having Euro sunscreen? Giving someone money for a jar of "SPF50 coconut oil" and burning lobster red. Giving somebody money for bootleg Asian sunscreen and getting a batch contaminated with benzene (carcinogenic in California, and everywhere else). Both happened. Both are worse than having a small selection of reliable sunscreen.
And sure, I can do the research myself. But I don't want to do that every time I go shopping. I also don't trust 90% of the population to do it right, especially not against hostile advertising. And sure, both sunscreen brands can be sued under some libertarian arbitration scheme. But I like not having skin cancer more than a 7 figure settlement (or getting nothing besides the privilege of watching my opponent go bankrupt). I can see the argument for experimental drugs for terminally ill patients. But terminally ill people are desperate, and absolutely need some form of protection - at least against financial exploitation.
And don't get me wrong, the FDA isn't really doing a good job here. But it's a job that needs to be done, and probably to a standard that's not so far removed from what is done today. Regulations are written in blood, ect.
That's called fraud. We can enforce against fraud without requiring genuine suppliers to pay tens or hundreds of millions of dollars "proving safety" of something widely used around the world without issue. People lying about the contents of a product or what it can do is a different category than "here's product A, it's used as a sunscreen in Countries X, Y and Z"
Some do get written in blood sure, but tons of regulations are just made up. Lots of regulations are even made just to make it more difficult for competition to exist, like why does being a barber in NC require almost 1600 school hours plus a 12 month apprenticeship? Do we genuinely think that this is because there was a bunch of wild barbers out there chopping people's ears off like they're Sweeney Todd? No. It's to make it more difficult for haircutting alternatives and drive up prices.
In the US, the FDA defines what "SPF50" even means. They have norms and test protocols to ensure this significance. Without the FDA, coconut oil has SPF50 for all intents and purposes. Could some other industry committee define "SPF", and sue cosmetic companies that use it wrongly? Sure. But I have to think for a long time until I can think of the first product at a supermarket that has an industry-defined label I respect (in fact, I can only think of greenwashing labels I don't trust ("fair trade", "organic") and technical standards I trust unconditionally ("USB-C" is a very reliable label, even on AliExpress).
Can we? Sunscreen is like the lowest common denominator, and it already gets tricky. Someone has to check for efficacy and side effects. The age of mineral-based UV filters is long past, today sunscreen often contains organic UV filters. A common conspiracy theory is that those organic rings are more harmful than sunburn itself - so someone better check side effects. And, sure enough, the organic UV filters from the 80s easily end up in detectable doses in blood, urine and breast milk of people who use them, and sure enough, they interact (weakly) with estrogen, androgen, or thyroid hormone receptors. Should this be allowed? Is this still acceptable? And should we really let sun screen producers answer those questions for us? (Ironically, those old aromatics are still in use today in US sun screen, most other countries have moved on to newer, larger and better organic filters, which the FDA hasn't evaluated yet and which pass through the skin much less readily)
Yes, without doubt. I'm not actually all that pro regulations. But that doesn't mean we can just remove them all, Chesterton’s Fence is there for a reason - maybe not a good reason, but I like my food and my drugs well tested. My barber may be held to lower standards.
A government organization could still exist to define things in a certain way and charge people for fraud if they make the false claim to fit the government set definition when they don't, without having to also ban access to anything and everything that doesn't fit. If the government wants to define ice cream as a certain x% butterfat then so be it, as long as I'm still allowed to buy things that aren't at that percentage.
It is not ironic that the market has already moved into safer and better filters while the central bureaucracy at the FDA has failed to keep up. It is a major part of my complaint. It's not just that paternalism treats us like morons, it's that paternalism is also done by morons whose priorities and definitions don't align with everyone else. People want those better filters, but isn't there someone you forgot to ask?
There should also be good reason when regulations are put up too. And just because it's "safety coded" doesn't even mean it makes an impact. Look at the push for single stair reform for instance, the two means of egress model not only costs way more money but an actual irony here, can end up hurting people more due to the other design decisions forced by such choices.
Regulations can hurt people a lot. Like why don't many apartments have elevators? Over regulation on the size, maintenance and labor requirements wildly drive up prices so they no longer pencil in for many new developments. How many people suffer trying to haul furniture up multiple flights of stairs because of this? I have a friend who was injured moving a dresser once, that could have been prevented if it wasn't for regulation blocking elevators.
More options
Context Copy link
Top Tier gasoline (1 2) comes to mind.
Huh, interesting. That one was firmly on the long list of labels I was fairly confident to be complete garbage. I never buy that stuff, and my last three cars made it well past 200k without a single instance of engine troubles. "Gunk" in the engine itself sounds like such a 1970's problem, I haven't ever heard of anybody having trouble with that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why not have “FDA approved” products but still allow other products? You can buy FDA approved sunscreen and know it’s not coconut oil or benzene.
Since that "FDA approved" label on the box is likely to cost millions (maybe billions) of dollars, I don't think you can make it optional. The price discrimination would be too large, and many products categories would stop entirely having new products FDA approved, leaving us only with the "legacy FDA" products already in the market.
It doesn’t have to. What if, instead of companies applying, the FDA seeks out products that meets its standards, and/or creates its own approved baseline?
Products that don’t get FDA approval (unless the FDA allows them to pay for the necessary tests themselves) are disadvantaged, but it’s better than today where they’re outlawed.
To preserve any kind of quality, this means multi-stage trials and double blind studies. That's where the cost is. Don't get me wrong, I don't think the current system is good. But it is extremely difficult to improve it.
Better start small: I think FDA exemptions for terminally ill patients with informed consent should be fast-tracked and default-approved. Maybe add some profit limit to prevent exploitation of the desperate.
Or a larger step: identify international partner organizations with adequate quality control. If something has been legal in Japan or the EU for five years, strongly accelerated approval should be possible.
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
I'm often pretty moronic. That doesn't make me more in favor of restrictive government, though. The average representative there seems to be even dumber than me, and we may be unable to choose better ones, because the median voter seems to be even dumber than them! I'll take my chances with my own decisions, thanks.
More options
Context Copy link
A fine stance to have, but it runs into difficulties with children and minors and the question of whether they can, or should be allowed to, provide consent.
That's a similar issue of how much more controlling we have gotten about children as well. My parents are old enough that as children they would go out biking around the neighborhoods miles away without supervision, without cell phones, and without much worry from my grandparents. In fact it was expected that you would go out and play for the most of the day and come home for dinner. This was the norm.
I wasn't allowed very far, but I could bike around the neighborhood some, go to neighbors houses to hang with the kids there, go down to the local pool. Maybe get dropped off at the mall as a teen and hang out there or whatever.
Now, 11 year olds aren't trusted to go to a different aisle in the grocery store. A different aisle in the same store.
We have decided that modern kids are morons in ways that they weren't for the entire rest of history. And we've culturally decided that too, where parents who don't engage in hysteria get CPS called on them constantly and some parents have ended up arrested. Which means even I have to be cautious in the freedoms I give my own kids, not even the same ones I had growing up yet alone those of my parents. Not by choice, but because government enforcers decided my kids are apparently too stupid to walk down to a nearby store or something.
Modern society coddles our children and trains them to be immature and incapable in their teens. But not too long ago, a good bit of those teenagers would have been off from their families working jobs as squires or farmhands or "youngsters" midshipmen or something else speaking of ships, a cabin boy or an apprenticeship for the local blacksmith/tailor/etc or whatever else. The world wasn't rich enough to coddle older children and teens from serious work and serious decisions, so the teens were capable. They had to be.
Which is another important point. Coddling makes us weaker. When government treats us like morons, we slowly become morons even when we are capable of more. We are lobotomized by paternalist attitudes.
I think we're all negotiating on price. Like, to give the obvious example, do you think kids should be allowed to kill themselves? Hell, do you think they should be allowed to apply for euthanasia if they get depression? I'd say no, and I'd say that on the grounds that most kids disallowed from killing themselves will, on reflection (and usually not that long a reflection!) be glad that they were stopped; their coherent extrapolated volition is to be disallowed from something that stupid. Hell, I've attempted suicide three times and am glad I was stopped the latter two (the first one I wasn't actually stopped; I just failed by myself).
Medical transition is not as serious as literal suicide. It's also far more serious than essentially everything else on the list of things the fun police don't want to let kids do with maybe the exception of some drugs. Kids playing by themselves without supervision are very unlikely to be maimed for life. Kids medically transitioning will with near-certainty. So one can consistently support free range kids and still oppose transitioning kids, at least as long as one doesn't take "free range kids" to the psychotic extreme of "deliberately let the kids jump off cliffs!".
It's not illegal for a kid to try to kill themselves. Most kids don't commit suicide for the simple reason that they don't want to kill themselves and of those kids who do, it is not the law that serves to prevent their deaths. No suicidal child says "I was gonna jump off the roof but 5(b) makes it a criminal charge with a two year probation if caught".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I heavily agree with this post and the one up above about allowing medical procedures.
There is a frustrating modern tendency to either have allowed and encouraged, or discouraged and forbidden.
I'm libertarian and I'd like drugs, gambling, prostitution, plastic surgery, porn, etc to be legal and discouraged.
Seeing them legal and encouraged has really strained my principles here. If I'm absolutely forced to choose between the two realistic options ... I'd pick legal for everything to deny the state the capacity. But if they already have the capacity, I'd be picking illegal for some things. Gender reassignment is probably one of them.
Well do keep in mind that there's also illegal and encouraged. People will just ignore the law and at some point you're stuck fighting a losing battle trying to actually enforce it too much. You haven't actually stopped it, you're just harassing people every once in a while.
Traffic enforcement is at constant odds with this issue, no one wants speeders in their neighborhood but everyone wants to speed in other neighborhoods. People even get pissed at you if you don't speed. We all accept it as technically against the law, but there's no winning the fight here. You can't even automate the process because no one wants it. We will not stop the speeders, so we just give everyone a x% chance of being unlucky and paying a fine each time they drive.
It's the same thing with a lot of drugs, and prostitution and gambling. There's just only so much you can do, because lots of people want it and they want it very much. And enforcing against it can just make them pissed. Joe Rogan famously smokes weed on his podcast despite being in Texas. Will Texas authorities ever go after him? No. Actually enforcing Texas's marijuana laws like that is unpopular and they know it.
You can change a fair bit with law, and you can harass random people every once in a while like we do with traffic enforcement and prostitution stings but in general if people want it they'll just do it anyway. The people who really want to gamble will find a way to gamble. The people who really want a prostitute will find some sort of escort loophole. The people who really want drugs will get it. And the markets will respond, the demand pulls in more supply. There's a reason why Trump's drone strikes on traffickers hasn't done much, because markets. If supply goes down then price goes up and there's more reward to providing new supply. Even Singapore struggles.
And likewise people who really want to transition will find a way. People manage it in Russia of all countries, they will handle it here.
I deleted a section on kids, that I think would have completed my post.
Snoop Dogg is effectively allowed to encourage people to smoke weed as a matter of free speech.
Your average school teacher is effectively prevented from doing so as a matter of job security.
I'd probably be fine with gender reassignment surgery being in the same legal category as weed currently is. Some more liberal states allow it. Some require basically a fake doctors note. Everyone agrees to keep it should generally be kept away from children, even if some 16 year olds manage to get access. Cops won't arrest you for it. Banks won't take money from businesses that engage in it. (By the way I'm not saying that I think weed is treated appropriately, I'd prefer it be treated more like alcohol)
I'm not a paternalist, and I was much more not a paternalist when I wasn't an actual father. The way the legal landscape and public school works these days means that I want transition soft banned so schools can't advocate for it and do it behind my back. You might think I'm crazy to be worried about such a thing, the only place that sort of craziness occurs is in like two counties in northern Virginia that keep making national news over those issues ... well I live in one of those counties. And I have three daughters, and one of them already insists on calling herself a boy and she isn't even in kindergarten. So I have worries about how that kid and the school system will interact.
I'm at a stage in life where a lot of my legal preferences are highly selfish. I really don't care if a stranger gets a transition and ruins their life and looks, or fulfills their lifelong dream and never experiences hardship again. I just don't want my daughter being talked into it by an ideologically captured teacher that only feels fulfillment in their life by acting out the most extreme forms of progressive activism. So I want it softly illegal. If I can't get that, at least make motorcycles illegal (guess which daughter really wants to ride one of those).
Let your daughter be a tomboy, by the time she's old enough to ride a motorcycle she may no longer want to 😊
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