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 -
Every day is day of some great culture war battle, or anniversary of some great past battle.
And this day is no different.
This day is Tyrone Day. The Road King Day.
Tyrone always wanted to drive big car, but he couldn't, because he was born as poor Black man. This made Tyrone very very sad.
One day, when Tyrone was, as always, walking on foot while watching rich whites in luxury cars whizzing around, he had enough. Tyrone pulled his gun, carjacked Lamborghini from some white swine and went on joy ride.
The grand joy ride, the greatest ride in Tyrone's life. Tyrone revved up the car to the max, the pigs had no chance to catch him. Until Tyrone crashed the car and killed himself.
Everyone remembers Tyrone, everyone sees him as heroic freedom fighter against racism and oppression.
When every Black man becomes hero like Tyrone, the white pigs will pay for all their crimes and Black people will be finally free.
Yes. this uplifting story really happened. Even in the case it hadn't happened exactly as described here, it is real and will continue to inspire all of us.
Rest in power, Tyrone.
Shape rotating black guys with white guys doesn't really work since the two aren't the same. Which is highlighted by the obvious fictional nature used that denigrates Tyrone but then doesn't apply to Richard. Like being willing to violently confront and kill innocent people or being driven by malicious envy or vengeance.
In fact the actual story hits so hard since it's functionally the inverse of the Columbia style racist fiction that's been pushed on white America since the 60's. Where the assumption is that otherwise good and capable black people are being passed up because of their race, or in favor of a racial ideology that is malicious, wasteful and unfair to good people. It's practically the entire script.
But instead of a Hollywood happy ending where our hero inner city black lawyer is the only one who knows the racist nature of the criminal justice system well enough to be able to save a bigoted old white man who's been wrongfully charged, and then the bigot cries in the end for having been so evil racist and wrong his entire life, our hero just kills themselves. Because this isn't Hollywood and there are no magical negroes.
The actual negroes in their quest for racial justice are out there knocking white women out for sport, despite somehow having been arrested 9 times prior in a span of 34 months for various violent offenses including assault with a deadly weapon.
Please have a more Inclusive mindset when writing about a vulnerable group such as black people.
It’s not just white women, sometimes blacks also randomly hustle and bustle white men, plus Asian women and children, Asian men too.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is a bad post. Speak plainly and see if you can manage to include something other than “boo outgroup” next time.
Three day ban.
More options
Context Copy link
This is a dog bites man/man bites dog distinction, surely?
Black guys stealing cars happens basically every single day. Anyone at all stealing a plane is a much rarer event. And for it to all proceed so... almost peacefully? That's what captures people about it.
Strangely, I have much more sympathy for Sky King's sadness on a human level than I would if his stunt was in the service of, say, environmentalism. It's extremely... human, in a way. If Tyrone broke into a racetrack to run a few laps before self-deleting while expressing such sadness (with a reasonable level of articulation), I'd consider it noteworthy too.
More options
Context Copy link
The difference between SkyKing and CarKing is the difference between justice and injustice. SkyKing was actually discriminated against and was owed the chance to be a pilot. CarKing is not discriminated against and is not owed the right to take a fancy car. SkyKing protested against discrimination that impacted his career; CarKing wanted to own something fancy for status.
Your post is like saying, “the widow of an innocent man hanged maliciously is angry just like the widow of a guilty man hanged, therefore she must be in the wrong”. This doesn’t make sense. One is a matter of justice and the other is not.
I think some discrimination is positive for some high performers if ambitious. They know they have to actually work twice as hard to hit the same standard.
If I am looking at two employees who’ve been in corporate America and progressed rapidly through the ranks in the last ten years and one is a white male and the other is a protected class, I would generally expect the white male to be much more competent.
That’s much more likely due to selection effects though, not due to working harder as a compensatory mechanism against discrimination, as entertaining as it would be to flip that around to argue that we should discriminate against blacks for their own good, that it would be a positive for some ambitious blacks.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How was he actually discriminated against? You don't just apply to be a pilot and get put into company training. You need to get a pilot's license before you can even consider getting a job, and you have to start doing private jobs and work your way up to being an airline pilot. There is no evidence that this guy had a pilot's license, or indeed ever tried to take the first steps in becoming a pilot. And flight school isn't like Harvard; they'll accept anyone who pays.
I suppose you could consider The FAA's DEI Hiring Scandal as Bayesian evidence to get a sense of how the aviation industry might be thinking about DEI. That might make someone much less keen to start logging hours and spending dollars with a flight school.
More options
Context Copy link
If he had filed a lawsuit, it would surely would have been dismissed. Still, it's common knowledge that when it comes to most high status jobs in the United States, large institutions discriminate aggressively against whites in favor of blacks, Hispanics, etc.; and against men in favor of women.
Proponents of DEI frequently claim that this discrimination is just a very gentle nudge; a tie breaker when all other things are equal, but based on my experience I would say that this is a lie.
I certainly would agree that there's no way to know what would have happened in the hypothetical worlds where (1) this guy goes to flight school, does everything right, and applies for jobs in the face of anti-white discrimination; and (2) this guy goes to flight school, does everything right, and faces no discrimination at all.
But even so, knowing that DEI exists tends to be very demoralizing for large numbers of young white men. The simple knowledge that your group is the victim of a general injustice is painful, even if you yourself haven't been victimized at an individual level.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It takes temendous skill and knowledge to even get a plane off the ground. Most people have the monetary means to at least become a recreational pilot but not the the commitment to learn. Meanwhile anyone with a screwdriver can steal a car. Tyrone joyrides happen every day and usually end in lots of collateral damage.
Doing a barrel roll with a passenger plane has likely never been done before, and likely never will ever again. Like it or not, this is a moment that all aviation enthusiasts around the world will take notice of. Meanwhile tyrome has done nothing that hasn't already been done by yesterday's tyrone.
If tyrome steals a car and sets a world record lap time or something, I think we'd all be impressed.
Tex Johnson had him beat by the entire history of passenger plane production.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ra_khhzuFlE
The balls on that guy!
The 707 wasn't the first passenger plane; it wasn't even the first passenger jet. In 1932, an airshow performer named Harold Johnson was rolling a Ford Trimotor, a very early passenger plane.
Sorry I meant jumbo jet passenger plane.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I beg to differ
More options
Context Copy link
No it doesn't. Flying a plane is Nintendo-hard; the hard part isn't the actual flying but all the stuff built around it to make it more difficult to keep the number of pilots down. Learning arcane radio and airspace procedures, memorizing a few thousand checklists, reading 1950s telex-style aviation weather reports, etc. And dealing with the risk that if you get any of those arcane radio and airspace procedures wrong, you end up getting a number to call which connects you to an angry FAA guy who demands to know why he should let you keep your license, and there's only one attitude which works. And instructors, of course, who won't teach students who don't seem like they can display that attitude. Actually taking off... not that hard. I've heard twin-engine is actually harder... but I've heard it from the same people who swear flying a single-engine is hard when I know damn well a 9 year old tall enough to reach the controls can do it.
A fair number of old pilots did stuff like that when they knew their license was toast anyway. There's also FedEx 705, where the first officer inverted a DC-10 to foil a hijacking. As others mentioned, test pilot Tex Johnson rolled a prototype 707, twice.
ETA: Incidentally, Richard Russell himself never attended flight school and claimed he learned to fly from video games.
It's not that flying is particularly difficult or dangerous but rather that as the old quote goes "to an even greater degree than the sea, it is unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect."
A barrel roll is a simple 1g maneuver if executed correctly but that "if" is load-bearing.
As much as modern aircraft may effecively fly themselves it is still in the interests of everyone both in the air and on the ground that those who are less diligent be kept out of the cockpit. You may not like it, but there is a clear rationale to the FAA's rules.
Even that isn't credible. The pilot can die and an airplane can fly for hours before it crashes. The existence of Aeroflot and various third-world airlines demonstrates while you can certainly get yourself killed in the air, it's not nearly so unforgiving as that statement would indicate.
Yes, to keep the sky an exclusive club. And to reduce the number of people the FAA has to ride herd on, and the amount of air traffic.
Conversly you can accidentally kill yourself and 66 others by entering an incorrect barometer setting.
And a single wrong turn (off a cliff) can lead to the death of an entire busload, too. That doesn't make driving a bus particularly unforgiving.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The FAA is a good example of regulatory capture. How is it that, in the land where healthcare is private, ATC is socialized and easily shut downs when the government does? They literally only have one ATC training academy in Oklahoma, there are no other options if you want to be an ATC. Predictably, this regulatory gatekeeping contributes to a shortage of ATC and pilots.
ATC and pilots are two different things. ATC was definitely held back by DEI considerations. Pilots are mostly not government employees. But the FAA's mandate is to keep the flying buses -- airliners -- safe. And they do, and part of that is discouraging use of the sky by anyone else. This suits commercial pilots fine; they hold private pilots in disdain. And it mostly suits private pilots who are "in the club" fine.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Put the average person in a plane and he won't even be able to figure out how to turn it on. For a car all you need to do is find the start button. Sure, anyone can learn how to do it with enough practice and instruction but that doesn't make it easy. In the times I've played with a flight sim game (to be fair not that many times), every takeoff and landing usually resulted in blowing up, and a flight sim game is easier than the real thing, it's literally a game.
That's because there's no market pressure to make airplanes easier to fly. Put the average person in a Ford Model T and he won't even be able to figure out how to turn it on.
More options
Context Copy link
It follows then that you are less qualified than a tall-enough 9-years-old.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
"Tex" Johnson somewhat famously did a barrel roll in a test demo for the Boeing 707. There is video of that event. Bob Hoover was also famous for doing aerobatics in business aircraft at airshows, to say nothing of the time he escaped a German POW camp and stole a German plane to fly home.
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, it wasn't while it had paying passengers on it, but...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
o7 Beebo
More options
Context Copy link
In case other people were unfamiliar with the actual story, the link is to a tweet about Richard Russell, a white guy who worked as a ground service agent at an airport. In 2018 he stole an airplane and flew around in it for a while before eventually fatally crashing.
Supposedly people online called him the hashtag-SkyKing at the time, both because he displayed a surprising level of proficiency with the aircraft and because he became some kind of right-wing/white-nationalist talking point.
The theft appears to have been nonviolent; Russell had access to airplanes as part of his job. So personally I'd compare this to something more like a valet taking a customer's car for a joyride than a carjacking.
The reason it became a talking point (more among memers I think, more than the online right generally and certainly not the white/ethnats) was that he did a barrel roll, and when ATC suggested he might be able to get a piloting job after landing the plane, Richard replied "Nah, I'm a white guy". The fact that he was interested in seeing whales and crashing the plane away from people to hurt also meant his actions didn't get tainted by public safety or terrorism discussions like GP's hypothetical Tyrone example would have. Instead, he came across more like a sad guy with a screw loose rather than a resentful loser, a normal-ish guy ground down by life (and to at least some extent DEI), and a member of the lost generation Compact Magazine wrote about in its description of a different industry.
I'll caveat that the ATC discussion there should be treated in the same way that someone trying to talk down a suicidal person would be: well-intended, but not necessarily honest. Post-Colgan Air, people are routinely excluded from commercial aviation and sometimes even package transport careers after flubbing a couple checkrides. And while some of that's unfounded, events like Pinnacle Airlines 3701 have increasingly pressured mainstream aviation companies and even test flight services away from cowboy pilots.
There's a steelman that getting genuinely into paid aviation pilot work is either for the rich or the lucky: without a scholarship or increasingly unavailable courier work, you're looking around 5k USD for your private pilot's license and 100k USD to get to your ATP, at the low end, and the ATP doesn't guarantee even competent pilots will get an aviation career at all. If HR is looking for something separate from capability, that gets to some dark places quick.
But it doesn't help this guy.
That is likely a true characterization of ATC's motives on the radio, but if anything I think it makes Richard's response more damning. If the path to pilothood is as stacked as the path to ATC was, I could see why he'd say "nah I'm a white guy" and be correct to do so.
It's hard to prove a negative, but at minimum, the DEI scandals for Delta and United were a lot more subtle than the cut-and-dry 'guess my password' that Shelton Snow used. The FAA had a single chokepoint and had more direct command, so it's plausible that the discrimination there is the spikiest form and most aggressive, rather than merely the best-documented.
(Although "more direct" is not as clear a dividing line as the org charts would suggest or the progressives would like you to believe: the FAA's got a ton of methods to enforce control from the biggest companies down to single-airport flight schools. The DPE crunch alone let the FAA pick and choose what businesses got some easy money and which ones got to pay their competitors, and was clearly executed with little regard for need or capability.)
Alaska Air, which owns Horizon, does have lots of DEI programs open to non-white-guys. Which Russell likely knew about. But there's no evidence Russell actually made the attempt.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Any kind of paid aviation work has to be a certain degree of lucky as they will screen out people who can't see and such, but for folks with good eyesight and general aptitude every single branch of the US military (except for maybe Space Force?) will pay you to get good at flying, and then you can take those skills into the private world with (hopefully) a solid track record (although based on what I've heard that in recent years the prime airlines may be trying to hire fewer military pilots, so it might be less of an EZ career path now than in the past.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I remember a similar reaction to the "Sky King" 20 years ago to the Killdozer guy, though, who caused quite a bit of damage.
To corrupt politicians' property. It's hard to be mad at that. It's like when lefties were vandalizing, and celebrating the vandalization of random Teslas, but if the cars were the personal property of Elon Musk.
Or so goes the story.
It's been a while since I saw the story, but at worst all you can say it was people he had some sort of a grudge against. Their properties were quite separated, and he targetted them specifically. It wasn't a random rampage.
I'll push back a bit further. My libertarian instincts predispose me toward any anti-Kelo-style actions, but there's a reason he's the unstated and undesired punchline for this piece. He went after the buildings of people he had a grudge after, but his grudges involved every dispute he'd ever had on topics ranging from enemies of his defunct newsletter to the widow of a mayor he'd fought with to people who'd just approved construction of a business he didn't like. Even for property rights perspectives, he's a shaky exemplar: one day willing to sell his entire business and the next citing a lack of assistance on a utilities line as a deep violation.
The revisionist take has its own faults -- there's a big effort to portray his firearms collection and attempt to hit propane tanks as murderous rage, and neither really holds up to serious examination -- but the pop history portrays him as a lot less schizophrenic than the deeper discussion.
More options
Context Copy link
Fair enough. I'm just wary of framing the victims of vandalism as uniquely deserving. That's just a story that's told and accepted too readily in many places.
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
I’m fairly certain though that Black men who hijack luxury cars, to the extent that such a phenomenon exists, are usually violent criminals with a long record and do not believe that DEI policies are keeping them from having a career as car drivers. This doesn’t apply to Russell.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I am genuinely kind of angry at you right now because I had actually was thinking about writing a post about about this myself, I just hadn't figured out what my thesis was going to be, and having finished reading your post I still do not know what yours is.
Speak planely dammit.
In this case, it is especially important to speak planely, and not carly.
And don't you dare speak trainly.
Carful training ensures plane speech and prevents carlessness. Carless speech can get you boaten up.
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