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 -
Eric Reinhart, a "public health & safety research who has spent a decade working as an ethnographer on Chicago's South and West Sides," had a very long Twitter thread about crime, punishment, and public safety. The thread generally advances the view that policing and incarceration are not effective for reducing violent crime, and, in some sense, it is myopic to focus on violent crime in the first place. Without using the term specifically, he appears to be gesturing at the idea of social murder as being a more pressing problem than, and potentially a leading cause of, literal murder. Some quotes from the thread:
(source)
(source)
(source).
When debating things with friends of mine who have very different politics from me, one of the points that I always find myself trying to make is that the state has limited resources to bring to bear on any problem--limited fiscal and physical resources of course, but also that mere attention to/awareness of a problem is a limited resource. Thus, focusing on any one society-wide problem necessarily comes at the cost of not focusing on some other(s), and, consequently, we have a duty to focus on the largest problems first.
Now, I tend to think that violent crime is a pretty big problem. But what if my focus on violent crime is self-contradictory? After all, Eric points out that there are problems that are many times bigger than murder that I don't care too much to solve.
Ultimately, I think that Eric and I agree that we ought be trying to support happiness and well-being, but that we disagree about what constitutes well-being and therefore also about what things pose the most important threats thereto. In my mind, Eric's view is unrealistically holistic--I think he weights as evenly important to well-being things which I would claim ought be weighted very disparately. For example, if two processes (e.g. murder and air pollution) were both to reduce life expectancy by exactly x years, I think he would weight them as equally important. I think they are not equally important because I claim that life-expectancy is merely a mesa-objective for happiness and well-being, and that being or knowing someone who is a victim of murder affects happiness and well-being directly in ways unrelated to and much larger than murder's effect on life expectancy.
I'm interested to know to what extent people agree that (a) the goal of society should be to increase happiness, and that (b) for that goal, achieving a very low level of violent crime and holding it there is probably more important than tackling air pollution, even if air pollution kills many more people.
I guess one way to assess this is to ask: would you rather live in (1) a society where your life expectancy is 80, but your lifetime risk of being murdered, mugged, or raped is 90%, or (2) a society where your life expectancy is 70, but your lifetime risk of being murdered, mugged, or raped is 10%? (As one data point, a 1987 article from the Bureau of Justice Statistics entitled "Lifetime Likelihood of Victimization" reported that the average American had an 83% chance of being a victim of violent crime at some time in their life. There is some debate about the methodology but tbh I did not spend any time trying to figure it out).
P.S. I have sometimes seen top-level posters criticized for not engaging with responses. I don't get notifications and sometimes only come here every few days, so I apologize in advance if I'm unresponsive.
From a twin study on crime:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25936380/
Heritability of crime is high. The main benefit of locking people up is that it prevents people with outlier poor mental traits from reproducing. Criminals tend to be psychopathic, lack impulse control, and be low in intelligence. Keeping men with outlier levels of those traits far away from women between 18-and 45 makes sense. The studies he cites are too short term, they don't take multigeneration effects into account.
As for air pollution, reducing crime is an effective way to combat it. Public transit, walkable cities and bicycle commuting become more attractive the fewer criminals are on the streets. If people don't have to live way outside the city to be in an area with low crime, fewer people will drive. Fewer people walk and bicycle and more people will be fat. Crime is a cause of many of the other problems because it creates a low trust society in which people atomize. Cartel-controlled parts of Mexico are not going to have fantastic universities, infrastructure or other institutions since some much energy gets soaked into cartel-wars and their fallout. A well functioning society requires trust, it requires people to feel a sense of common good and to cooperate. Crime and corruption undermine that. A cop taking a bribe is far more damaging than the direct damage caused by the cop not doing his job.
Indeed. The claim that crime is in large part or even entirely socially determined has always struck me as very insulting to the many working class people who are not criminals. It almost seems to imply that the only difference between them and a bank robber is a lost job, which seems profoundly dismissive of their values and scruples. Acknowledging a degree of essentialism is more respectful in my mind.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link