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 -
This is going too far into culture-warring and boo-outgrouping. When you are describing your outgroup and what they "clearly" do or don't care about, if you can't describe them in terms they would recognize or agree with, you are not describing, you are projecting. "Left-wingers clearly don't care about child abuse (because they disagree with me politically)" is just a cheap accusation that "My enemies are evil and lie about not being evil."
You may actually believe that-- we've had this conversation many times, with many people, and clearly many people do sincerely believe that left-wingers are uniformly evil and hate children. I'm sure it is not news to you that many left-wingers think similarly vile things about right-wingers. And if a left-winger came here and said "Right-wingers clearly don't care about laws or democracy or child-rape because (insert a random scrape of social media)," I am sure you'd expect us to tell him that such generalizations are not acceptable here. Even if you really believe your enemies are all cartoon villains.
You're already on our radar as a likely troll and/or alt, so if you're testing the waters, consider them tested, and you as well.
I'm just making inferences from facts.
Saying 'pest-control operators do not care about the well-being of rodents or they wouldn't be laying traps to kill them' is not boo-outgrouping.
In my opinion, killing somebody or supporting their killing is a demonstration that you do not care about their well-being. Maybe I'm wrong, some ecological arguments could be made along the lines of prey/predator balance, maybe we do need to kill [some of] the humans to solve climate change...
This is something that can be debated.
'Children are precious and should be protected' is actually a political value that is not universal. Even to this day we have people protesting for example Columbus Day, because they disagree that the human sacrifice stopping was good, actually.
Or people supporting an American woman who confessed to killing her own children.
I'm not strawmanning people as evil, this is real beliefs that they tell us about.
Some people do want to kill children in the womb, this is a fact, and my claim is that this means they do not care for their well-being.
Well if somebody wants to come up and claim that Ramaswamy and his supporters support child-rape because of his recent campaign statements, substantiating the argument with evidence, shouldn't they be able to do so?
How should I present my arguments in a way that is palatable to you?
Read the rules. I will not indulge your bad faith justifications.
I have. I don't understand what is bad faith in saying that people who support the killing of children, human offspring, human beings, in at least some circumstances (before birth) are demonstrably not maximally concerned about the well-being of children. What qualifiers do I need to add to that statement not to make it offensive to you?
There is clearly a segment of the population which prioritizes the well-being or perhaps the mental health of a woman over that of her children in the womb for abortion supporters, or outside of the womb for Lindsay Clancy supporters.
I'm not offended. I just don't believe that you are unable to comprehend that if you asked a pro-choice person if they care about the well-being of children, that they would not say "No, I don't care about the well-being of children." Just as you are aware that people who protest Columbus Day are not doing so because they think Aztec human sacrifices were good.
Arguments can be made (and have been made) about revealed preferences, willful ignorance, mistake theory versus conflict theory, etc. But you aren't making those arguments. You are just asserting a priori that a maximally uncharitable interpretation of your outgroup is in fact what they really believe, regardless of what they say.
Therefore, based on that and your previous posts, I infer that you are making bad faith arguments to smear your outgroup. The rules apply to everyone's outgroup, right or left.
My understanding is that the underlying belief is that it was wrong to conquer and replace the Aztecs and other Pre-Columbian nations. Why was it wrong to replace the Aztecs? Because they had a culture that was worthy of celebration, which is also why it is important to do land acknowledgments to that culture. Was human sacrifice / child-killing not part of that culture? Is it not implicit that if you celebrate a culture that includes human sacrifice / child-killing that you think these customs are worthy of celebration?
If I asked a pro-choice person if it's acceptable to kill a child in the womb, would they say 'no'? I thought that was the pro-choice position. Therefore pro-choice people find it acceptable to sometimes kill a child. That's a logical interpretation of their belief. Is that compatible with caring about the well-being of that child in the womb?
Perhaps, that's an argument to make. My personal opinion is that the ones supporting the abortion - perhaps out of some eugenics concerns that being born out of wedlock, to an insane or impoverished mother is a fate worse than death- do not care in the same way about the well-being of the child put to death as the ones opposing abortion. It's debatable who 'cares more about well-being' as they drive the knife through the baby's body, but I don't see how that makes my argument 'bad faith'.
My own belief is that America is currently over-policing parents, over-regulating the behavior of being a parent, out of various concerns, some of them 'child safety', and this contributes to a drop in birth rates.
Safety has been co-opted as a concept by progressive movements, and only works in one direction.
Safety demands that children and employees get vaccinated for access to essential services or activities, but it does not demand that high-risk recreational activities be curtailed to suppress different epidemics such as formerly-named monkeypox or GRID.
Safety means responsible teenagers should not cross state lines with a weapon or be able to use a weapon for self-defense, but it does not mean that gang members should be prevented from entering the country for illegal activities.
Another example of this trend is that some corporations now offer to cover the travel of their female employees to states that allow abortion, as it is obviously beneficial to keep their employees sterile out of convenience for the running of their business. It seems to me that profits and employee retention matter more than the well-being of children in the womb. Same reason that led to the woman 'abandoning' her children to a care of a teenager, corporate pressure on working-age people to always be available to perform.
I'm not debating the particulars of individual examples with you. You understand my point and pedantically pretending not to will not earn you any extra slack.
Which words in these 4 sentences do you disagree with, or are in 'bad faith'?
That one. Abortion, as standardly practised and as it is in most people's heads, is killing a small and non-sapient lump of flesh. It may one day turn into something that we regard as a 'person' but it isn't one yet. Personhood is either assigned to it in anticipation of what it will someday be, or because of church doctrine that holds that personhood is about ensoulment rather than sapience and that ensoulment happens at conception.
Naturally, if you alter the passage to distinguish fetuses from children it stops making sense:
I'm not asking you to agree with that distinction, only to recognise that many others do.
A much more exaggerated version would be "If you use disinfectants, you kill millions of living things on your kitchen top. Therefore you do not care about the wellbeing of those living things, and there are living things whose well-being you don't care about that much. Therefore, it is possible that we should could exterminate the more inconvenient races in our country. You've already shown you're okay with exterminating living things."
I'm not aiming this at you, necessarily, but while I have some sympathy with the anti-abortion movement they have a strong tendency to refuse to acknowledge any difference between an early fetus and a small child. It seems to me to mirror the refusal of left-wingers to admit any difference between genociding a group by hacking them apart with carving knives and 'genociding' them by forbidding their ancestral practice of gory human sacrifice. What is sometimes called the non-central fallacy. It increases the passion of their movement, and makes debate futile in ways that can be advantageous, but it still seems disingenuous and it makes it harder for people to understand each other.
(I am in no way saying that the pro-abortion movement is devoid of rhetorical dirty-tricks. Faaaaaar from it.)
EDIT: I see this comment wasn't aimed at me. Downside of reading from the comments feed.
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