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 -
Look, I am not sure where this insistence on redefining (wrt my post) legitimacy to become functionality comes from. Even if everyone who ever used the word before me meant it this way, if you actually read what I wrote in its entirety, and think about it sufficiently, and maybe even ask AI if a reference is unknown to you, you will easily understand that I meant moral legitimacy. So it is pointless to respond as if I am wrong semantically.
But, that's granting you too much. The reality is a boatload of writers use legitimacy exactly how I used it! From Claude:
Some people use it descriptively, or try to bake in democratism to it, but a lot of people just mean it fulfills a normative obligation! Which is what I want to talk about! I write legitimacy, you read statehood. There's pre-existing writing on this. Why are you doing that?
And, FWIW, I am not playing a trick here. I genuinely understand legitimacy to mean something like an emotive result determining the moral rightness of an authority or a thing. For example: « Is this copyright media usage legitimate? ». It is close to asking if it's legal, but more abstract. It could be legitimate and illegal if it is justified and the law is morally flawed. « Is this bag legitimate? » means is it authentic, meaning is it lying about its provenance or not? This meaning is a little different, but close to a moral evaluation and not a question as to whether the bag exists or if you did in fact pay a lot of money for it. Applied to a state, it's not asking if the state is a functional bag, it's asking for its moral provenance. I think this is a completely reasonable embodied understanding of the term for a heavy reader to have. The discussion is massively weighed down by people who can't get past my usage of the term who insist that legitimacy must mean and can only mean whether a state is functional, aka mighty.
I mean your OP turned almost entirely on the definition of "legitimate" so yeah, people are going to argue the semantics of it. You seem to want to essentially merge legitimate with good in order to justify denying the legitimacy of states you don't like or all states for that matter. I, and many, find that to be kind of a silly word game. You can say Israel delenda est if you want. That's fine, a totally legitimate thing to believe. But playing some word game about what it really means to be legitimate is unimpressive. Legitimate usually refers to whether something is authentic and Israel seems pretty authentic from most lenses, at least as authenticate as almost any other state. Its origin and composition is relatively normal as far as states go. I don't see any reason to overload the concept of legitimacy with all this other baggage when you could just use another term, like is Israel a moral state? And cut out all the confusion. If you're just an anarchist and don't believe that any states are legitimate then we needn't confuse things by focusing on israel.
Maybe the first paragraph, but I think that's a mischaracterization of the entire post. I think most the replies make a boatload more sense if people stop after 1 to 3 paragraphs and write something up. Like I can see how they make sense if that's happening. I'm not sure what else is going on. I wrote:
Yeah, I read your post and answered the narrow question of legitimacy. I think this would all be much clearer and maybe lead to better discussion if you didn't pose legitimacy as the question you are asking. People are consistently telling you that legitimacy and morality are separate questions and you keep scolding them for not answering the question of morality. As if legitimate but bad weren't a valid combination of descriptors. If you were asking "is Israel an immoral state" then there's some meat there. I'd argue that it's immoral by western standards but above par by mid east standards. Can you explain why you're insisting on the word legitimate?
American Heritage Dictionary, first thing I see when DuckDuckGoing the word:
What law do states submit to but natural law? Justifiable (morally) is the sense I am using, that is definition 3. Based on logical reasoning may seem different but I also hold to the reason theory of justice/legitimacy. So again, the question is more why people are insisting that I can't use the word. It's not weird at all that I'm using it, it's weird that there is difficulty understanding what I mean.
As for whether the state is immoral, maybe. I think I mean something deeper though, that is, whether there is any moral authority, while whether a state is immoral might be seen as less fundamental; a state might have moral authority but be temporarily immoral. Like their King, Solomon. He was immoral but they think he had moral authority / legitimacy. I would like to argue whether he had any moral authority (legitimacy) at all.
Another example, over 200 years ago: legitimists. Somehow everyone understood what they meant when they said Napoleon was not legitimate. They had a specific theory of legitimacy, birth right based on another aristocratic law, which I disagree with but not on the basis that I literally cannot understand their that concept differs from might.
I think my definition fits all of those? It's like the "legitimate" business of a shady scrap salesman who does everything by the books but doesn't ask any more questions than required about where the copper wire the crack head brought him was sourced from. It's only really tricky because there are not widely agreed upon international "rules". So we're left with conventions, comparisons and recognition. It's hard to find some criteria in which Israel is not legitimate without knocking some other widely agreed to be legitimate state out of the category. It's recognize by other states, even ones that condemn it. It polices it's borders. It maintains rule of law and administers basic services to its constituents. The largest thing it's missing is defined borders because it got into the state it is now after a series of wars where it established control of areas of at the time attacking Egypt and Jordan but didn't annex those territories. These are just observations, and if I were to draw a line around the "legitimate states" I would find it difficult to justify a line that doesn't include Israel.
Whether a state is legitimate or not says to me something about its relationship to other states and the expectation of its citizens. Whether what a state does it moral seems to be the thing you're actually interrogating and it's getting hung up on this diction.
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