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 -
Not everyone is aware of the distinction, though.
This gives rise to speculations that the condemned was tortured the death, or not killed at all. Both are bad.
Actually, at least in England, the post-enlightenment period lead to the "Bloody Code" and a rise in executions, which were often public and treated as a spectacle.
This is a false equivalency and you know it, or should know it.
Please quantify this statement and back it up with polling numbers or another citation.
It's curious how one could get such a perspective. Certainly not from reading American novelists (such as Tom Clancy), or American scholars (such as Lawrence Wright) or American journalists (such as John Hersey) or American combatants (like Ian Fritz) or interacting with American Mottizens (we have GWOT vets on here, and I've never gotten that impression from them at all; rather the opposite.)
Repeating something doesn't make it true.
It is rational to punish traitors because the harm of their actions erodes trust, and as I think you know, a lower-trust society is a worse one.
The guy is a Palestinian Muslim who just so happened to be born in the US. His actions are reflective of someone who is a Palestinian Muslim jihadist, not of an American schizo. Why didn't he just go shoot up a school or something? It's because he's a Middle Eastern terrorist.
He's not a Middle Eastern terrorist. We can say that he behaved like a Middle Eastern terrorist, or that he shared their sympathies. We can argue that this is true in some spiritual sense, if we want.
But ultimately he was born as an American citizen to American immigrants who naturalized, and despite this he found that his sympathies lay elsewhere, to the degree that he was willing to kill his fellow soldiers out of misplaced affinity towards a group of people who were never really his own.
To claim that he is Middle Eastern is to deflect scrutiny from how he came to be radicalized.
This is just ethnicity denialism.
"Middle Eastern" is not an ethnicity.
I called him a Palestinian, which is a type of Middle Easterner, just like a German is a type of European.
I agree that "German" is a type of European, and "Germans" refer to people live in Germany, or it can refer to an ethnic group of Germans, typically of German linear genetic descent who live in Germany or in German enclaves or who otherwise have a cultural affinity to Germany, or it could simply refer to a German genetic line. The problem with using the last definition is that it often makes little sense to refer to people who are of one genetic group but another cultural-political group as belonging to the genetic group. For instance, referring to Fred Trump as a German causes more confusion than clarification.
And "Palestinian" has similar issues when used here.
If we're focusing on genetic lineage, it might be more precise to refer to Hasan as Arab or perhaps Palestinian Arab (since there are a few non-Arab Palestinians). If we're focusing on ethnicity in the cultural sense, I am not sure it makes much sense to refer to him as Palestinian - he can't speak Arabic, and as far as I know spent little if any time abroad. From what I've seen, he himself might have used the term "Arab" instead of "Palestinian" if you asked him to describe his ethnic or genetic background.
From what I can tell, whatever feelings towards Palestine or Palestinian identity he may have seen in himself did not play much if any role in the shooting - he saw himself as acting to defend Islam and the Taliban (which obviously are geographically and ethnically distinct from any Palestinians he might have sympathies with), not Palestine.
I think it's fine to say that he is of Palestinian descent, or that his ethnic background is Palestinian or Arab, or what have you. You can describe him accurately. But describing him as a Palestinian terrorist causes more confusion than clarification. It would cause similar confusion if you referred to Donald Trump a European political leader (even though Donald Trump is ethnically 100% European).
To describe him as an American causes even more confusion because Americans basically never shoot American soldiers for the cause of Islam and the Taliban. Middle Easterners, on the other hand, sometimes do. When you say that an American became an Islamic radical and shot up a military base, it buries the lede. If he were a black guy or a white guy or even a Mexican-American who had converted to Islam and done this, sure, that's an American guy who became an Islamic terrorist. But his actions were clearly that of someone from an unintegrated Middle Eastern background who happened to be born in the United States. I don't think you can just normatively decree that anyone with an American citizenship is American and you have to call them as such out of an ideological dedication to a civic nationalist project. It obscures much more than it clarifies, it's kind of an abuse of language.
If a Transylvanian Hungarian killed a bunch of Romanians for anti-Romanian reasons, it doesn't really make any sense to insist that the perpetrator is actually Romanian even though he's a Romanian citizen from Romania. Clearly such a person wouldn't belong to the national community even if they were unambiguously legally Romanian. It's the same thing with Hasan. Yes, he was born in America and an American citizen but if he wasn't from an essentially foreign Muslim family he never would have acted the way he did, like I said above maybe he would have been mentally disturbed in a normal American way and just shot up a school.
No, actually, saying precisely this draws attention to what happened. Saying he was a Middle Easterner, as you point out, is not to say anything unusual. It turns off the brain, or at most makes people think "who let him into the country?" or "how did a Middle Easterner join the military?" when in fact he was born here. Whereas as you say, Americans rarely shoot American soldiers for the cause of Islam and the Taliban. You can actually just say "Nidal Hasan was an American Muslim of Middle Eastern ancestry who joined the U.S. Army. Inspired by his radical Islamist beliefs, he carried out a mass shooting on a military base." If you substitute out "American Muslim of Middle Eastern ancestry" with "Middle Easterner" you make the sentence substantially less informative.
It seems to me that if a black, white, Mexican-American or Arab American shoot up an American military base for the cause of Islam, their actions are all about equal. Hasan's might strike one as less unusual because his familial background was Muslim, but if a white guy attacked a bunch of US soldiers in the name of Islam, he's not somehow acting less like an Islamic terrorist because of his skin tone.
The guy is American by the legal definition of such. If we can normatively decree anything it's that we should respect definitions. And he wasn't even an anchor baby, so there's really no wiggle room to insist he came through on a loophole.
It actually does! If a guy is Romanian, he's Romanian. If a white person kills a bunch of white people for anti-white reasons (which is certainly conceivable) it still makes sense to call him white, too.
Do these sorts of "if a person was a completely different person they would act like they were a completely different person" counterfactuals really clarify these questions? Yes, if Hasan had been a different person, he likely would have done a different thing, I agree. But if your position is that only people from Muslim backgrounds become Islamic radicals, you're wrong about that.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link