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 don’t know if this is too post worthy, but many black activists have called the cancellation of Jason Arday and the resulting suicide a lynching. It makes me believe they don’t understand why many people found lynching to be bad.
The classic case is Emmet Till. He was accused of raping a white woman but didn’t. Less people would be worried about the irregular justice of lynch mobs if they accurately hung rapists and Till wouldn’t be martyr if he actually raped the white woman. It was his innocence that really made the lynching galling.
In the Arday context, no one argues he isn’t guilty of the charges. Instead, they claim accurately castigating Arday repeatedly for his crime is a modern day lynching. So either they believe any criticism of blacks is per se illegitimate and blacks are naturally innocent regardless of their actions or they are trying to use powerful iconography to prevent criticism of blacks. But that’s destroying their seed capital.
Even back then, the media would selectively highlight certain events to make the public pattern-match for a narrative that doesn’t exist. They arbitrarily created a negative valence around “White racism”, which naturally resulted in negative valence around White people and their civilization. This is the sort of thing you can easily prove in a lab: gather a bunch of people to read something every day for a week, and variably present them with stories such that when they see the word X it is often immediately associated with something aversive or else it predicts something aversive. The former is called evaluative conditioning and it’s resilient to counter-conditioning; when the progressive college student in 2020 would scroll headlines and quickly read “White cop shoots Black woman in Chicago”, “why White privilege is worse than you think”, I mean the headlines were so over-the-top I can’t even recreate them with skill, they were essentially being brainwashed in a scientifically predictable fashion. Staats & Staats (1958) trivially conditioned positive and negative emotions onto nationality words in this way (which probably used evaluative conditioning more than Pavlovian conditioning). The problem was heightened when people trusted the news and entered a trance state when consuming the news. It’s simply that the wrong people were in charge of the media, which is effectively a conditioning device for the masses, and whoever was controlling the media really wanted to instill a reflexive dislike of White people and their things. Virtually all of the problems are downstream from media conditioning (academics also really like absorbing media and are perhaps a bit more gullible than the average bear).
[Just regarding Till specifically: if you were to go into the hood and grab the hand of someone’s girlfriend (not even wife), and then chase her to grab her waist, there’s a good chance you will be shot and killed. This was always a non-story, and note that the media would never report on the phenomena that nearly all cross-race rapes between Whites and Blacks involve a White female victim. This is because they’re not interested in telling you a horrible fact of reality, they are trying to condition you in a certain manner.]
Note that this may simply be because rapists do, in fact, want to have sex with their victims- and white women are generally vastly more attractive than black women. It doesn't necessarily mean that blacks are more violent(there is another set of statistics you'd need to use to make that argument).
Dating website stats (like OkCupid's stats from a decade or so ago) also suggest that black women would be far more willing to have sex with a white man than white women would be willing to with a black man.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link