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 -
If those issues are so unimportant, then why don’t you just… give them up? Why not just capitulate and become anti-trans and anti-immigration so there will be nothing more to talk about, and we can get onto important issues like economics and corruption?
The fact that you resolutely will not do that under any circumstances shows that those issues are, in fact, important and worth talking about.
For two reasons:
First, because our reasons are important. If A supports P for reason X, and B opposes P for reason Y, it is entirely reasonable for A to accuse B of exploiting trivialities while refusing to concede on the matter, if X is more important than Y.
In the specific case of transgender and immigration, X = alleviating the actual suffering of actual human beings, who have suffered more than enough already. This leads into the second reason:
Because We Do Not Do That. It is a central tenet among many on the left, that throwing a few people, especially marginalised people, under the bus, for some nebulous notion of The Greater Good, is a thing that is simply Not Done.
It is the philosophy of Ana Thurmond from UNSONG:
It is the philosophy of House Pelekai from Lilo & Stitch (or if you were watching Netflix some years ago, Igor from Young Frankenstein):
It is the philosophy from the Talmud:
What sort of response would you like to the above? What sort of conversation are you hoping to generate?
If you were describing yourself, I could conceive of this being accurate; I'd be very skeptical that you yourself were such a paragon, but it's not completely impossible. But you are not describing yourself, you are describing your group. I do not know the precise boundaries of "your group"; perhaps you collectively really are the truest Scotsmen to ever Scot by virtue of some vigorous and arcane vetting process aimed at drawing a line around the set of "actually nice and unfailingly virtuous Blues who never have or would do wrong, whose every thought is tender and mild, and who are blissfully unaware of all inconvenient facts". But in the first place, I've never observed a group like that to actually exist, and in the second place human capacity for self-delusion is formidable, and in the third place, you haven't even attempted to sketch such a line or demonstrated that you understand why one might be necessary.
What you appear to be doing is describing Blues generally, and that description is.... unsupportable, given the facts. It is absolutely trivial to demonstrate ways in which "many on the left" are hostile to the idea of universal salvation, how they are absolutely willing to leave people behind (or to square the circle by simply denying humanity to those they disfavor), how their Universal Love comes with its own majority-dark-matter of caveats and carve-outs. A supermajority of leftists are absolutely willing to write people off, and frequently do so with bloodthirsty relish. I know this. You ought to know this, but then if you did, why write the above in the way you have?
So again, how do you want this conversation to go? Should we look at examples of "Many Leftists" failing basic humanity checks with moblike uniformity? Should we look at examples of toxic "compassion" applied to the direct harm of those being "sympathized" with? Should we look at examples of compassion inversion, where people find endless compassion for serial rapists and murderers while calling for the execution or murder of serious villains, ie their political opponents?
Or is the idea that we're just supposed to take your word for it, smile and nod?
My moral assessment of leftists, roughly translated to leftist-speak, would be "nazi". You are the lynch mob, the men in masks armed with clubs beating peaceful protestors while the cops and the judges look the other way or even prosecute the victims. You are the murderers of civil rights activists, and you are the bigoted public who mutter to each other that the victims had it coming. You are the redliners, the restrictive covenanters, the discriminators, the ones who build their identity around hatred of the Other. And if we should be generous, you are also the cowardly, the ones who simply go along, following the crowd, perhaps with a slightly worried expression and a few whispered objections, but never more than a half-step out of sync. That is my view of "Many on the Left", based on what they have done in the real world, and what those I have interacted with here have stood for in their arguments.
I am not going to smile and nod while you award yourself the "super nicest person ever" gold medal. You are, in my view, directly complicit in vast evil.
More options
Context Copy link
If you don't think my reasons are important, why should I think yours are?
More options
Context Copy link
This sounds like you're doing the meme, unless you are actually a follower of the Talmud. ("doing the meme" doesn't seem to be searchable slang, so here)
The odds that someone who is not a believer in X is able to correctly figure out that X supports his political point are pretty much zero. If what you were saying was correct, there would be a lot of Orthodox Jews who happened to believe that trans people's suffering is alleviated here, and would be pro-trans. There aren't, so it isn't correct.
If that had been the only example of that philosophy I had given, you might have had something within a few hundred light-years of a point. However, I gave three examples of that concept being expressed, because I was not making an argument from authority; I was attempting to point to a cluster in idea-space.
If it's significant enough that you're going to use it at all, it's significant enough that refuting it weakens your point.
"I said it, but it's not load bearing so I can ignore when you refute it" is a recipe for Gish gallops.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And it is the easily observable truth that some people are beyond salvation, that infinite resources can be wasted on attempting their salvation, and that societies can ruin themselves in that attempt. And even short of that, some acts of salvation are so laughably cost-inefficient and self-destructive that the society performing them permanently degrades its ability to save anyone.
Maximalist principles like the ones you espouse there work in fiction. In real life they're the good intentions paving the road to hell.
Yes, I'm sure you can pattern-match it to the 'Naïve Idealistic Youth versus the Hard-Nosed Adult Laying Down Reality' trope; could this be what the Son Of Man meant by "Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.", with right-wing paganism being the latter, and a compassionate Christianity being the former?
Put your cards on the table for a moment - are you actually a devout and faithful Christian?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Because Dem primary voters aren't just out of step with the country as a whole. They're out of step with democrats as a whole.
More options
Context Copy link
I've argued with people on the sports thing many times. They believe sports is a salami-slicing strategy the right is using towards the end goal of criminalizing being trans. Thus they believe the appropriate response is to push back hard on the first slice and give the right no leverage. Well, that and to be precise, Dems have never claimed "protecting trans people/immigrants" is unimportant, just [insert scenario involving trans people] is unimportant.
"I'd agree to this if I could trust you" is a respectable sentiment, but it's never uttered so I don't think the "salami-slicing" argument is what they actually believe.
That's fine, but still means they should concede the issue around that specific scenario (sans the salami-slicing excuse).
Depends on A) who you're talking to and B) what you mean by "actually believe." I generally see three arguments from the left on sports, not always from the same people:
Athletic ability isn't fair anyway, so it doesn't matter if trans people compete.
Hormones reduce MTF athletic ability to the level of women
Let the sports bodies decide.
Only a subset of the pro-sports even bother to argue 1 and 2, but pretty much all of them use point 3. They will never concede the argument because they think 3 is the true neutral option given their deference to science (specifically the science that confirms what they want to believe). The other part is that I don't think the left is entirely wrong about the right wanting to criminalize being trans, in that there are is a spectrum of resistance from "I'll use pronouns but internally I think this is kinda silly" to "Hell yes I want to criminalize being trans." The left, in keeping with their tendency to catastrophize, just treats the end of the spectrum as the norm. In keeping with that, they are genuine in believing the salami-slicing argument.
An increasing number of sports bodies, at least at the world level, are adopting genotype-based eligibility rules, maybe with some theoretical exceptions that are probably impossible in practice.
I've seen at least a few people argue "let the sports bodies decide", only to change course once those bodies disagreed with them, but maybe many have quietly accepted those decisions.
My favorite trivia along these lines is that the 3 top finishers in the Women's 800 metres at the 2016 Summer Olympics all had the 46,XY karyotype and produced levels of testosterone in the male range.
Worth noting that, AFAIK, none of them consider themselves "trans" either: the eligibility rules here don't purely exist to handle transgender athletes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I love the graph of "should states decide their own laws on gay marriage?" and how it completely flips as soon as the Supreme Court weighs in.
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 think the most charitable answer to this question is that (1) there is a small core of True Believers in the Democratic party which would freak out and sabotage things if the Party adopted the popular positions on trans issues and immigration; and (2) the Democrats genuinely and in good faith believe that if they get into power, the True Believers won't actually get to set the agenda. Therefore, from the Democrat perspective these issues are moot and irrelevant.
But to me, this is one of those partisan politics kind of things where partisan hacks from both sides engage in total and shameless hypocrisy. Democratic Party supporters don't hesitate for a millisecond to seize upon any issue which can be used to gain a political advantage, regardless of the overall importance of the issue and whether it's being used as a distraction. So it's hard to take this sort of complaint seriously.
(2). I think the most active Democrats in power believe they will just do the things they want after winning the election. Right side of history beliefs. So toning down and lying during the election is fine. (1) lie about your position (2). Do the thing (3) everyone likes the thing once it exists (4) continue winning elections.
The average Dem voter might believe they won’t do the thing when in power, but people who are more involved in politics are to the left of their voters.
More options
Context Copy link
Support for "victim" groups like trans and illegals is inseperable from leftist ideology. Low information voters may disagree with the object level but ideological believers and thinkers are overrepresented in the party power structure
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not following. If it's a small number of True Believers, and they wouldn't get to set the agenda, why not just openly oppose them and ignore their little freak-out?
To be clear, I'm not saying that they definitely wouldn't get to set the agenda, just that the mainstream Democrats sincerely believe that they won't.
But anyway, to answer your question, the primary issue I see is that major candidates need to have an organization supporting their candidacy. These organizations are staffed heavily with low paid and volunteer campaign workers, who tend to come heavily from the ranks of True Believers. So that if a candidate went against the True Believers on a hot button culture war issue, there would be a serious chance of a mutiny, sabotage, mass-quitting, etc. And the person's campaign would be in deep trouble even if the candidate's overall appeal to voters on the issues had improved.
Even putting aside the issue of campaign organizations, provoking a sense of betrayal among the True Believers could result in a lot of damage in obvious ways.
By contrast, once the candidate is elected, appeasing the campaign workers and other True Believers is less of a concern. And the agenda of the True Believers can be stalled in ways that are not overtly confrontational, for example if the candidate, having been elected, votes for some progressive bill but the Democratic party doesn't make an aggressive effort to get the bill through.
By the way, I'm not an expert on this issue but what really stuck in my mind was the most recent presidential election. Kamala Harris and other Democrats desperately needed support from male voters but were largely unable to release the kind of advertisements which would have resonated with male voters. And they were unable to release an ad countering Trump's infamous "they/them" ad. What I attribute this to is the campaign worker problem.
More options
Context Copy link
They can play kingmakers or saboteurs
So purge them, what's the issue?
They're sufficiently entrenched now it's very hard to purge them
Ok, but then trying to tell people that an issue that will throw your entrenched establishment into active rebellion is "unimportant" feels just a tad dishonest.
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 don't think that logic holds water. If A and B disagree on many things, A cares deeply about X, and X is largely indifferent to B, it may well be that B pretends to be extremely worked up about X to fight A. In fact, there is a clear strategic advantage in doing so: as long as B is attacking A about X, A will have to sink energy into defending X that it could be using to defend other things, but if A ever decisively wins the battle over X, B, who never actually cared, won't actually have lost anything it cared about, so it's all upside.
This could be true if contesting X costs B less than A, but that's certainly not true here: trans issues are losers at the ballot box for democrats and everyone knows it. 'Kamala supports free gender-affirming care for illegal immigrant convicts' was disastrous for her campaign. She certainly didn't bait right wingers into attack her on that point as some devious stratagem to waste their efforts, they dug and dug to find a statement that could be interpreted in that way because they knew it was a winning issue for them. She, very simply, would obviously have been better off giving the issue up -- her especially, given she skipped right over the primary.
"A cares a lot about X" needn't mean "X is a vote-winner for A"; it could mean that A's elites are sincerely morally committed to X, that a Harris couldn't sleep at night if she won a cynical victory by throwing her trans immigrant sisters under the bus. Though I don't think it's trivial that she "would obviously have been better off giving the issue up" even cynically; it may very well be the case that she was stuck in a catch-22 where abandoning trans issues would have alienated as many leftists as endorsing them did moderates. (Obviously the far leftists weren't ever going to turn red, but they could have abstained, and, even more importantly, the activists cadre could have turned on the campaign in a very damaging way.)
Er, isn't Harris supposed to B? @Primaprimaprima asked @magicalkittycat why they were unwilling to give up their (leftist) perspective on trans issues if they don't actually matter. My point is that
Could certainly be the case, but her cynically playing up trans issues she doesn't really care about so the republicans waste their time on a meaningless battlefront doesn't make sense, because that 'meaningless' battlefront hurt her chances in the election. It could well be that republican politicians don't really care about trans issues and they only push them to win elections, but that wasn't what I thought you were suggesting.
(But of course republican politicians aren't telling people trans issues are an irrelevant distraction from the things that matter, even if that's what they truly believe; they're trying their absolute hardest to keep the focus on them, because they help win elections.)
OK, 'not trivial' I'll grant. It's not impossible things would have played out that way. But I still kind of doubt it. I said just 'giving up' the issues, not coming out with a full-throated denouncement (which might or might not have helped, but would have been a lot more risky). If she just mouthed platitudes about human rights and categorically refused to allow herself to get pinned down to any particular policy proposal, it's hard to see how that could have hurt. There are some issues you can't afford to shrug at, but while trans activists are surprisingly influential pound-for-pound, they never had that much reach. Did anyone even know she voiced tepid support for free gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrant convicts before republicans dug it up? I don't think it won her many votes at all, even in the form of solidly blue voters who would have otherwise stayed home.
No, at least not in my mind; I intended A to be Blues for whom disavowing trans ideology is categorically unacceptable, and B to be Reds who don't actually care half as much as they've been pretending to ever since they discovered that grilling Blues on the normie-unfriendly aspects of trans ideology is a surefire way to make them look bad to which the Blues have still never found a genuinely popular antidote.
I thought the point was that @magicalkittycat was saying "the Republicans don't actually care about trans; they only pretend to so they can distract the Democrats from talking about the economy", and @Primaprimaprima countered that if the Democrats believed that they could simply stop caring about trans so that the Republicans' cynical attacks would lose their raison d'etre. So I was arguing that the Republicans' attacks could still, in principle, be opportunistic and insincere even if the Democrats' support is sincere and immutable.
(I will stress again that I don't think this model is true; I believe most Republicans are in fact sincere in their opposition to trans, not opportunistic. I was only disputing the faulty epistemology of "if the Democrats genuinely believed the Republicans were being opportunistically insincere, we should expect to see them giving up on trans; therefore, if they don't give up on trans, they must not really believe the Republicans are faking their opposition" as a bit of reasoning.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well in that case, it wouldn't really make logical sense for B to argue that A's beating the drum on issue X is just an attempt to distract from some more important issue. Both sides are taking the position that issue X is important. Ok, so B is being dishonest and hypocritical, but so what?
More options
Context Copy link
Tell me which issue you want me to vocally support or oppose in return for vocally opposing immigration and transgenderism in progressive spaces, and I'm pretty sure I will give it to you.
More options
Context Copy link
If you think Reds are "largely indifferent" to trans ideology and its integration into taxpayer-funded schools, I think you will find the real world a very surprising place going forward.
I can't actually think of a single real-world example where this pattern plays out. A similar pattern, I think, is the one where objectively-small-potatoes policies are seen as a test of control, and so have massive resources dedicated to them, because both sides understand the power of precedent and control of the default.
This is in Texas. Trans ideology is illegal in government schools.
Now that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, but it does mean that at a government policy level, the sort of thing that might be changed by a single election(and if democrats win a trifecta in Texas then they've probably also won the power to override vetos in the federal government and will simply pass whatever they want) is a thing that the reds have decisively won.
I don't believe this, and I don't understand why you would claim it. Undocumented immigration is illegal. Affirmative action is illegal. Weed smoking is illegal, or was until very recently. The Constitution itself offers ironclad protections to free speech and the right to keep and bear arms, in a purely hypothetical way that has no actual impact anywhere Blues win political power.
Laws that can't and won't be enforced should not be referenced as reassurance that the things the law bans aren't a problem worth worrying about. Show me the people in jail for breaking the law, and then we can talk.
Because the red tribe already has the policy victories that would be forestalled by dem governance?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
(tried to belatedly edit the following into the first post - here it is as a reply)
I'm not saying that in this case the right's opposition to trans rights or immigration is displaying this kind of hypocrisy. But I don't think the left's refusal to concede those points proves otherwise. Lawfare is a good example: the Left may keep suing Trump over January 6th without actually caring about it half as much as they pretend, because they already maximally hate Trump whether or not he really tried to do a coup - but whether Trump himself wants to be seen as a guy who attempted to do a coup is a completely different question and it would be hugely damaging for him if he conceded "yeah, whatever, I confess, I tried to become dictator-for-life" in some bizarre effort to prove his accusers don't actually care about that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link