site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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.

12
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

IMO Jones' prominence is not any sort of big mystery. Despite (or due to) opposition to lockdowns being tarred with the label of conspiracy theory, in practice to support lockdowns oft requires conspiracy theory. Especially when it comes to Florida. The outcome of DeSantis running a relatively lax policy of restrictions surrounding covid, which his opponents insisted would cause megadeath, was instead a middling outcome. The empirical results are in: lockdowns don't reduce covid deaths. But the entire political legitimacy of blue tribe now rests upon those restrictions serving to stop something that they did not, in fact, stop. So you need an explanation for Florida's middling outcome. Enter stage left, Jones, with a conspiracy theory about DeSantis covering up deaths, playing both into your biases and your need to have some way to soothe over the monstrous crimes blue-state governments did under the guise of stopping covid.

She is merely filling a gap in the market for conspiracy theories that she was best-placed to exploit.

Jones aside (I am in her district and she's...interesting.) there is some fishiness involving Florida's Covid reporting in particular. They haven't supplied data to the CDC, for example, for a few weeks: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#county-view?list_select_state=Florida&data-type=CommunityLevels (there are NOT zero cases or deaths). The state surgeon general, Joseph Lapado, also has a...questionable record of statements and actions during the pandemic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Ladapo.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but DeSantis loves Lapado playing down Covid for tourism reasons and attracting the kinds of residents who feel the same way. No one in FL is interested in lockdowns, but playing down vaccination and failure to encourage vaccination in a state full of old people is just poor leadership. Failure to update Covid data with the CDC makes it difficult for residents to determine risk. And there have been issues with Florida's leadership throughout the pandemic.

Florida updates it's data every two weeks. Demanding daily updates for number of cases of one particular virus, indefinitely, seems like an unusual demand for rigour: Nowhere pre-2020 was this demand expected. Nor is it clear what purpose such data would serve to individuals in determining risk. Case numbers are largely a product of testing, unlike inherently delayed random sampling. And this is even if we believe that the CDC is something that is respectable enough to be worthy of being supplied data by anyone.

Ladapo's questionable statements like... Supporting informed consent, as any medical professional should? Acknowledging that there's no empirical evidence for masks?

Florida's vaccination was done on the basis of oldest first. This seems obvious enough to me as a strategy, but apparently many US states decided to vaccinate "essential workers" including people in their 20s at negligible risk first? Do you think that a strategy other than by age is more effective?

But the entire political legitimacy of blue tribe now rests upon those restrictions

At this moment pretty much no-one's political legacy rests on anything Covid-related. Poof, two years of high weirdness gone from public memory.