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 -
People on here have been commenting a lot about women not showing up for dates, which does sound frustrating, but apparently they're not showing up for each other either. I was reminded of this phenomenon by this Substack post, about women preparing home cooked meals for each other in their homes, then having people not show up last second. So my initial theory that maybe young women are scared of men from outside their social circle is not the main thing going on.
What's going on?
I tried going to a local ACX meetup, and it was fine, but after six people initially wanted to do it, only two besides myself ended up coming. Meanwhile, my daughter's pre-K teacher has invited herself to my house. She called today, and went on about a "mandatory home visit", next week, with highly inflexible weekday hours. I did not like it. She said she was going to drop off paperwork and meet my daughter. I said that I would rather bring my daughter to pick up the paperwork. We fought about it. I was perhaps more prickly than is altogether advisable when speaking to a child's teacher. I tried researching how this could be considered an appropriate thing to, not offer, not ask, but mandate. Something, something, building trust, Head Start, maybe the norms of black Americans? Clearly, they have the wrong order of things. If I trust you, I will invite you over. If I don't trust you, I will want to meet at your office. Even social workers know this. Is this related to parents not actually coming to their appointments somehow? It's juxtaposed in literature withattendance, more than understanding.
Also, meanwhile, my older daughter hasn't been invited to anyone's house. We haven't managed to invite anyone to our house. It seems terribly fraught somehow. I mostly do things with one or occasionally two other families with a stay at home mom and a mom who works two mornings a week, respectively.
Also, just because I found it odd, here's Keturah complaining about a situation where someone invited her into the hostess's home, and Keturah came, and then they judged each other for their stance on shoes, that Keturah wanted to keep them on, and the hostess wanted her to take them off.
I liked the culture of Georgians (Kartveli) and Albanians that homes are sacred, guests are from God, and that guests and hosts have important mutual roles and responsibilities.
What's the sociology here? Why are Americans like this, despite seeming deeply unhappy about it?
What the hell? No one gets to enter your home without an invitation (except maybe rent inspections that are highly regulated with advance notice or police with probable cause). Has this teacher appointed themselves as a child protection officer that MUST inspect the living conditions of each and every child? I'd tell them to go pound sand.
I'd frankly report her to the principal. This is completely unacceptable.
I read the public message from the state program, and it does indeed say there's a mandatory home visit, though I think in this teacher's case she was not delivering the news as intended, because the material goes on about cultural responsiveness and learning about the home culture of the child and building family connections and whatnot. She offered to have me talk to her "manager," whoever that is (she is the only licensed teacher, working in a daycare that is not like that), but I said to just send me an email for now while I consult about our schedule.
I could sort of imagine why it might be a thing, but, also, it is absolutely not culturally responsive to... American culture. And I am in America.
I’m with CertainlyWorse here — is this a mandatory program you have to send your children to for public education, or is this like a preschool with public subsidy or something?
I was in preschool before kindergarten, it was a white house run by a religious group. We played with blocks and there was naptime. No one did a welfare check on my parents’ house. Or if they did, my parents never mentioned it.
Edit: I looked it up, I guess this is a Head Start thing, and it’s mandatory for receiving the funding. It’s true that in America a teacher coming to your house is considered impolite, but the other thing about America is that surveillance of welfare recipients is normalized. There’s no “manager” who can override the home visit requirements. The Head Start program absolutely insists on it.
All the nonsense, as CertainlyWorse puts it, is obviously a welfare check figleaf, it’s transparently so. This isn’t a “black culture” difference thing, unless you count “being a recipient of federal social program funding” as a part of black culture.
What this particular thing sounds like is you’re accepting subsidized pre-K, which is oriented towards low-income families and designed to get children who might not make it to school at all to attend.
You don’t have to explain your financial situation, and I don’t judge anyone for taking advantage of resources in place. But I guess I’m a little surprised that you’re putting your kids in a program that my immediate mental association with, even before looking it up, was poor families while balking at the hoops that US welfare programs put poor families through, which suggests an unfamiliarity with the welfare system that Head Start hews close to. Is choosing a private program for pre-K not an option for you?
Edit 2: Is this actually a private pre-K after all? I’ve read some more and it’s possible that the pre-K you’re applying to also takes money from Head Start, and for reasons that I can presume rhyme with “equity” and “we did research on poor families and it helped”, some pre-Ks apply the same home visit rules to private pay families as to ones receiving the subsidy. That would explain the faintly ridiculous situation. But I don’t know that they’re going to bend it for you, even if that is the case.
It might be worthwhile to find another program, but I know childcare is scarce.
No, not really.
For context, I live in New Mexico, which is full of poor people and oil revenue. I had forgotten until I looked it up just now that it produces more than four times as much oil as Alaska, though still half as much as Texas. Unlike Alaska, which gives people money directly, New Mexico invests in various forms of welfare for all, so median income families qualify for pregnancy and early childhood medicaid with no fuss (I was shocked, this is worth tens of thousands of dollars per baby, and I just uploaded a couple of forms, and in the cases of the babies, the hospital uploaded the forms for me). They have a bunch of nice hispanic American ladies (many from the days when the territory literally belonged to Spain) who run nice warm daycares. All the normal daycares are now state funded (with no copay as of a year or so ago), and they have the pre-K program as an optional add-on with more curriculum, or they'll instead pay for regular daycare for four year olds, whatever the individual place decides on doing, which has also been, in my experience, fine. Finding daycare for a 1 year old and a 4 year old at the same time and the same establishment is the main impediment, which has worked out surprisingly well.
This situation has resulted in having a third child, where in another state we probably wouldn't have. As a member of the lower middle class, I like it a lot. If someone institutes low fuss UBI, it will probably be here. And it's democratic without being all that progressive, on account of all the influential people who's parents or grandparents were ranchers, so in general I like it. Also, I didn't save for a house at all, or even think of owning a house, and then a nice local organization said that, yes, we can buy a house, and just led us through exactly how to do that, then sent a non-commissioned realtor who also got up on our roof to show us how to fix the swamp cooler and stuck his hand down the food processor to fish out some broken glass that was inside.
I was more caught off guard by being called up suddenly, out of the blue.
People do often seem to say that crime is pretty high in New Mexico, though, especially around the large towns and cities (and especially around Albuquerque). Are you very rural?
Crime varies a lot from place to place even within Albuquerque. It is relatively bad as a whole, but apparently these days it's not as bad as Gallup (which doesn't surprise me) or Santa Fe (which does). Check out the interactive map here, bearing in mind that lower-population-area results are pretty noisy.
The neighborhood where I grew up gets an "F" today, though StreetView says the only neighbor with bars on their windows is the one who installed them after a break-in decades ago. The worst areas are around the airport, probably because anybody who could afford to live somewhere with less airplane noise did and then the selection effects snowballed from there. There are some high speed roads to get through those areas to the national labs where all the PhDs work, but I know one ex-Albuquerque scientist who left the state after his wife got carjacked, so "just drive past the crime" isn't a foolproof option.
I still have family there, at least in the better areas of town. I don't worry too much about them being victimized and I'd bet @Gaashk will be fine too. Albuquerque's homicide rate is atrocious but it's still better than around 3 dozen other large US cities, the ones you'd expect but also a bunch you wouldn't think twice about unless/until the Eye Of Vince Gilligan turns its pitiless gaze their way.
These charts comparing cities in the Southwest are the ones that stuck in my mind. 2023-24 data, so things might have changed since then, but ABQ is pretty bad. I'd note, though, that the comparison doesn't include Bakersfield, which ABQ recently surpassed for most car thefts per capita and is by all accounts a dreadful place.
Edit: and I'll have to look on a computer later, but everything I'm finding on a quick phone search is saying ABQ still has almost double the crime rates of SF.
I wonder how much that is influenced by locality / microenvironmental factors that aren't shown in the statistics. Eg. Finland used to have a fairly high homicide rate (compared to peer countries) while actually being a very safe place to live as long as you weren't a middle aged unemployed alcoholic male drinking with your buddies.
More options
Context Copy link
It's not completely random that Breaking Bad took place there, I will be very concerned and possibly move if my kids seem interested in drugs.
More options
Context Copy link
There's a lot of variance from year to year, especially since Covid (Wiki's list is mostly 2021 data, in which Las Vegas "beat" Albuquerque by a couple homicides-per-100k, but both rates have dropped drastically since), but the Southwest is pretty free from the worst violence hotspots on the whole. After Vegas and Albuquerque the worst time-averaged homicide rate might be Denver, and it's way down the list for cities of its size.
I wouldn't be surprised. SF has had some really high-profile but limited problems (We stopped bothering to prosecute car break-ins and for some inexplicable reason there was a long rash of car break-ins! After we figured out that crime is just caused by poverty, did anyone remember to tell the criminals?) but even bad enforcement has to do a lot of work to cancel out a selection effect as strong as "being able to afford to live in SF".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, I've heard that. I've heard it about parts of Chicago as well, and in both places, I don't drive with the windows down or leave my car for large stretches of time or walk alone, and so on.
Accidental double post
More options
Context Copy link
Chicago was strongly affected by red-lining. Anecdotally, most of the non-petty crime is strictly limited to the south and west sides of the city. There is very little chance you will just "wander" into the bad neighborhoods unless you are completely oblivious, deliberately or otherwise, to the changing neighborhood affluence markers. It's literally a gradient from good -> bad. The only real exception to this rule is the area around Hyde Park, which is the purview of the University of Chicago. It's smack dab deep in the ghetto, the metra stop for Hyde Park is very rough, but the actual neighborhood itself is super nice, until you cross the street boundary.
I was living on the South Side, and kept going to places like the DMV, or the grocery store, or some cool little fried shrimp place on a bridge, or a nature preserve, and my father in law kept giving me startling strong opinions about the places I had to drive through to get to them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
One of my swim coaches was stabbed to death in West Mesa. For some reason, despite being a not great neighborhood, West Mesa also had the best pool complex in Albuquerque.
Worst that happened to my family directly I think was a tandem bike getting stolen.
I think the real trouble is in most cities the crime is segregated by neighborhood much more clearly than in Albuquerque, where you can have really great and well-kept infrastructure in an area of town who's name gets Google Autocompleted to "West Mesa Murders."
I'm sorry to hear that! There are occasionally people murdering each other in my area (village/exurb), but only if they get involved in some kind of family feud, or possibly drugs. Drugs are bad in general, but the entire Southwest has bad cartel activity and car thieves.
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
Things must be pretty bad for them to mandate something like that. I'd be curious to investigate how this mandatory visit came to be. Is the state program voluntary?
This sounds like complete nonsense made to be a figleaf for a welfare check. I can't see a teacher flipping out over the importance of 'learning about the home culture of the child' and deciding to die on that hill. They could figure that out over a half hour parent and teacher discussion in their office.
I don't clearly remember how things went down with my previous child, but I think they suggested meeting at my house, I suggested meeting at the school, and she pretty much immediately agreed.
The program itself is voluntary, and my older daughter liked it, so I figured to do it again. They have a bit more curriculum than the regular preschool, which is also completely state funded and exists in the same building. I'm not sure how much more, actually, since the regular program is also run by a large national daycare chain and has official stations and activities. I think it's somewhat based on Head Start, which specialized in teaching poor children with parents who would give excuses about not having transportation to parent teacher conferences or something. I'm not sure about the welfare check side of things, I think it's illegal to enter a home under false pretenses, but maybe they do try to get more district resources by finding all the potential IEP kids or families who want extra services or something. The public pre-Ks here do turn some families away, but are explicitly required to accept all children with disabilities.
Perhaps I'll make the appointment. I was mostly put off by how she kept arguing with me about how extremely REQUIRED it was in an annoying and unwelcoming way, and the short notice.
Yeah, it sounds like it was how the approach was made, which I completely understand. This reminds me of something that happened to me recently. Weird slice of life story incoming..
I rent and had the real estate agent ring me midweek at 5pm saying that the owner wanted to come over to fix a light at 9am the next day. I obviously denied that request, but knowing the owner is literally probably around 60-70 IQ and wasn't being malicious (I've met him before and he basically needs his wife to manage his life for him) I agreed to allow him over the day after.
The Real Estate Agent apologised and we had a bit of a chuckle over it in the end. We've both had to deal with all sorts of strange antics from the owner in the past (not helped by the fact that his Filipino wife is a financially ruthless would-be slumlord and has to be reminded of the tenant laws in our first world country), and they're more on my side rather than the owner's. They consider the couple more trouble than they're worth as clients and have threatened to drop them more than once.
The owner did actually come over to fix the light, but he came with a middle aged friend (which is his usual modus operandi; I've never seen him unescorted). They had to go to the hardware store to get the supplies they needed and the whole drama took up more of my time than I would have liked, as I wasn't going to let them wander around my home without keeping an eye on them.
At the end of the whole thing, the friend asked me how I was at home on a weekday and what I did for a living. My first instinct was to tell him it was none of his fucking business how I spend my time, as he seemed to have presumed that I was unemployed (probably because I hadn't mowed the front lawn in a while). I told him I worked from home in a professional role and he seemed genuinely surprised.
Anyway, I was glad to see the back of them. I was a bit cranky until my girlfriend calmed me down, pointing out the guy's age. I just didn't like people coming into my home and making judgments on how I live my life, no matter how old they are. The PTSD from this incident probably makes me upset on your behalf haha.
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