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 agree, but I think the word "internal" is doing ~all of the work. What I was trying to gesture at with the "whatever he died of" paraphrase wasn't merely the "statement of the obvious" that you interpreted it as, but the line of argument that kicks the can on whether it was murder or not and says, "who cares if he was choked or died of a self-inflicted overdose, he was such a scumbag that Chauvin would have been doing everyone a favor even if it was murder and we should all look the other way". I see a fair bit of this among online rightists, including on the Motte, and I don't think it's unfair to parse it as tantamount to celebrating the alleged murder, even if its proponents carefully avoid endorsing the claim that it was murder, keeping their approval safely tethered to hypotheticals.
My view, therefore, is that expressing that sentiment publicly is unethical for the same consequentialist reason that loudly cheering on a political assassination is unethical. In either case, the problem is that it creates a climate in which potential future murderers are given reason to believe that they'll be hailed as heroes if they commit extrajudicial killings, just so long as the targets are sufficiently bad guys in the eyes of the public. I think this would very much apply to a hypothetical Jimmy Savile murderer. We might shed no tears for Savile as a person, knowing that he really was a child-raping monster; but we do not want to give trigger-happy would-be-heroes the impression that gunning down celebrities that they're totally sure are secretly pedophiles is something society approves of. For, uh, obvious reasons.
Celebrating Kirk's death could still have this effect even if he had been a privately horrible man whose widow was glad to be rid of him; celebrating Floyd's ostensible murder could have this effect whether or not Floyd was a victim of circumstances vs. an unrepentant bastard, and indeed, whether or not Chauvin actually, as a matter of fact, killed him. The only valid moral question to ask about people dancing on their respective graves is whether that celebration might motivate some other guy to take a shot at another politician; might motivate some other cop to finish off some other lowlife whom he feels is definitely irredeemable scum.
(But, as stated, although it's an important question to bear in mind in terms of how individuals choose to act, I don't think it's one whose impact could ever so great or direct as to make the grave-dancers 'as bad as the killers'/culpable for the deaths themselves in any meaningful sense.)
More options
Context Copy link