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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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W.H, liberal morality, and why co-existence is undesirable

A little while ago, I read a story of a recent scandal which I think conclusively shows that the Dems have finally gone too far. You see, the state legislature of Massachusetts passed a prisoner rehabilitation weekend pass program, in which prisoners with good behavior could obtain leave to spend time unsupervised in society and then return to serve their sentences. Unfortunately they forgot to exclude first degree murderers serving life without parole sentences who, for obvious reasons, could not be trusted to return. As such, the court said they must be allowed to participate unless the legislature specifically excluded them. The legislature passed a new bill to do so, but the Massachusetts governor vetoed the bill.

Enter inmate W.H, who with his 2 friends got bored robbing a cooperative teenage clerk, so they stabbed him 18 times and threw him in a dumpster. Sentenced to life without parole, he was furloughed from prison and escaped. But normal life was of course boring. So predictably, he broke into a woman's home with a pistol, tied up her boyfriend, stabbed him, and then raped her in front of him.

Perceptive readers will have guessed by now that by recent, I mean 36 years ago. You see W.H is Willie Horton, the governor was Michael Dukakis and this was the scandal that helped sink his campaign for president. or as the Times covered it back then:

"Foes accuse Bush campaign of inflamming racial tension": https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%253A//www.nytimes.com/1988/10/24/us/foes-accuse-bush-campaign-of-inflaming-racial-tension.html#site-content

Now, as much as i'd like to dunk on the Times they didn't cherrypick random nobodies. Their sources for the accusation of "inflaming the nation's racial fears", Dukakis' running mate, Jesse Jackson and the future DNC chair, Dona Brazille. And of course, if you look up Willie Horton today, basically every non-conservative source including your high school teacher will tell you about the "infamous"... ad, which unlike unleashing rape and murder on your innocent citizens violates the sacred values of our Democracy or something. Some degree of deliberate unrestricted warfare is going on here, but I don't think this fully explains it. I'm reminded of Amy Biel who went to South Africa to fight apartheid, only to be pulled out a car by a black mob which slaughtered her despite the protests of her black friends that she was on their side. And then her parents flew into the country to testify a the "truth and reconciliation committee" in favor of releasing her murderers. They then started a foundation and hired these murderers.

Hlynka, I'm sure, will find a way to call them hypocrites. Moldbug will ask, 'but don't these elves eat great food'? As for me, I neither desire nor expect cooperation with these people, whatever their thought process or culinary habits. I wanna see the conservative movement* draw a clear unambiguous moral line between us and them, accept those that will cross over, and to crush the opposition permanently and with the same concern they feel for their pets' victims.

Added:

*Of course they are more concerned with saving the enemies' feti.

Added:

Here are the two ads Bush ran on the issue.

Willie Horton ad https://youtube.com/watch?v=Io9KMSSEZ0Y

Revolving door ad https://youtube.com/watch?v=Io9KMSSEZ0Y Note how in the second one, the campaign goes out of it's way to find white criminals for it's footage.

This is it.


WELL THIS IS IT BOYS. I've been Permabanned. I appeal to the other mods not for "a second chance" but for an outright acquittal, as I believe this charge to be a travesty. Paging @naraburns, @ZorbaTHut, @TracingWoodgrains

Commenters who are tempted to draw conclusions from this ban should... do exactly that. Seriously, read @Amadan's rationale and try to defend his integrity. There are people who place no value on your life, and others who, whatever their pretensions to the open discussion of ideas and others who find pointing this out intolerable. The outer party lives on, laundering gross atrocities into respectability by demanding that you not be outraged by them. And so, in this eternal re-run of the scene from "politics and the english language" releasing monsters to slaughter innocents becomes, "a policy that resulted in a criminal doing some crime." Depicting the criminal becomes "racialized imagery", and the promise of open discussion becomes, "I'm not sure how you'd make it relevant today without being pure "boo Democrats,"...

  • -19

I think you could make posts identical to this with regard to almost any ideological leaning. So for every conservative that would cite released criminals murdering again, so could someone else cite the various cases of suicide after DWP withdrew their benefits of the depravity of their enemies, or Trump's pardoning of war criminals etc. etc.

I'm reminded of Amy Biel who went to South Africa to fight apartheid, only to be pulled out a car by a black mob which slaughtered her despite the protests of her black friends that she was on their side. And then her parents flew into the country to testify a the "truth and reconciliation committee" in favour of releasing her murderers. They then started a foundation and hired these murderers.

It's not like Truth and Reconciliation was entirely one-sided though, see for instance Brian Mitchell.

Not giving someone welfare isn't the same as releasing criminals from prison (let alone when they're clearly a career criminal). Having your soldiers kill the wrong people overseas in fundamentally ill-conceived ventures is also very bad but ties into a large and complex problem with thoughtless foreign policy.

US cities have many crazy homeless people who go around harassing and sometimes killing random people. For example: https://abc7ny.com/woman-killed-subway-push-times-square-man-arrested/11471944/

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-suspect-arrested-fatal-stabbing-penn-station-20211206-j6fdh4kjjvg2laq5hilh7dgfay-story.html

Whenever we have a public transport related post, it gets filled with Americans who will refuse to give any ground to an energetically efficient, compact and economical transport system because in their experience, train stations are where drug addicts go to enjoy drugs and harass other people. In my experience outside America, train stations are for catching trains. There are many large costs with having your very rich cities filled with these problem people, breaking into cars and houses, killing people, encouraging emigration. How much immensely valuable real estate is rendered uninhabitable by this 'urban decline'?

Now, this isn't one of the US's biggest problems. Bad diet is probably worse, in terms of general social harm. But this is an egregious and easy-to-solve program. All the US security forces have to do is get rid of the open-air drug encampments, they only have to outwit and overcome mentally ill homeless people! You can put them in an institution, you can enforce higher standards of behaviour by beating them up if they disrupt the public (Singapore doesn't have these problems), or you can shoot the problem people rather than letting them rack up lengthy criminal records. Drug dealers (by which I mean fentanyl and the like) are a net malus for society, they have only a very small chance of making positive contributions and have many bad effects. They should be killed.

Things tend to reach an equilibrium. If you don't maintain your garden, it gets filled with weeds. The problems compound on eachother and it gets much harder to do anything about them. Much better to solve problems while they're small. Imagine if the US was genuinely tough on crime, if they made a serious effort to kill or detain serious criminals, permanently remove them from circulation. Take a leaf out of Bukele's book and arrest all the people with obvious gang tattoos. There's an immediate cost but a long-term gain from not having these people running around causing problems.

If people simply appeal to the 'better ten guilty go free than one innocent be imprisoned' platitude forever, what is to stop the richest cities in the world turning into uncivilized eyesores? What is the point of the legal system, what is the point of our principles if they lead us here? Murder should be very low - the US is a very rich country. Medicine is very good now. There are cameras and drones and sniffer dogs and forensics and so much more! And yet it's going up: https://abcnews.go.com/US/12-major-us-cities-top-annual-homicide-records/story?id=81466453

You say that murder should be very low but at the same time you are calling for murder. For example, you are calling for the murder of some people who sell products that others want to put in their bodies. You are calling for murdering the "problem people" even though of course some of those so-called "problem people" will actually be innocent.

I guess what is probably going on is that you think that the kind of murders that you favor happening are not actually murders, they are something quite different.

You also have not mentioned any of the almost inevitable downsides of the sort of authoritarianism that would be required to implement your preferred policies. Is it that you did not bother to mention any, or is it that you do not see them as downsides?

I mean, can't we maybe... do a better job of preventing murders and rapes and so on without turning into an authoritarian shithole? I do not see why it would be impossible to have both strong liberalism and low violent crime. That the United States is not doing a good job of it does not mean that it is not possible.

For example, you are calling for the murder of some people who sell products that others want to put in their bodies.

This subset of the population has very negative externalities. If you don't do anything about them, they undermine the whole country. See Mexico or other narco-states. And they commit a hell of a lot of violence as well.

You are calling for murdering the "problem people" even though of course some of those so-called "problem people" will actually be innocent.

Yes, mistakes happen. In the long run, fewer innocent people will die. If we don't get rid of the problem people, they'll keep killing harassing and immiserating innocent people.

I mean, can't we maybe... do a better job of preventing murders and rapes and so on without turning into an authoritarian shithole?

How would you do this? Would you have 24/7 surveillance on everyone, as opposed to focusing just on the bad people? Put police everywhere? Give the homeless people houses (creating the mother of all perverse incentives, amongst other things)? Would you take a leaf out of Britain's book and confiscate all the weapons until they're stabbing people with knives (and then try to get rid of the knives)?

The US is already an authoritarian shithole. They've got hardware level surveillance on every modern processor and I'm willing to bet Windows 10 is riddled with spyware. People are getting their lives wrecked because they dared to have sex with a friend at work, there's a government-legislated apparatus that exists to suppress these people. Another government apparatus does the same thing, siccing lawyers on anyone who says anything negative about favoured groups like blacks or women: https://betonit.substack.com/p/lawsuits-are-the-deep-state

What downside of authoritarianism isn't yet present? It's already very difficult to recruit for US police because they're so jumpy and nervous. I've seen videos where they just randomly shoot people, one guy who popped his head out of an overturned vehicle. There's already persecution of whistleblowers of aforementioned thoughtless wars, there's already suppression of political dissidents like Trump. Payment processors are encouraged to suppress people in a coordinated fashion, presumably by some govt-coordinated mechanism.

If you're going to be an authoritarian shithole, you might at least reduce crime.

This subset of the population has very negative externalities. If you don't do anything about them, they undermine the whole country. See Mexico or other narco-states. And they commit a hell of a lot of violence as well.

A lot of this results from the fact that these drugs being illegal causes them to be tremendously profitable to manufacture and distribute. There are no cartels fighting each other in the streets over the right to distribute alcohol.

...the rest of your comment...

Yes, the US is already authoritarian in many ways but it is also extremely free in many ways. For example, on the one hand a person can go to jail just for manufacturing LSD. That's really authoritarian. On the other hand, the US has the world's finest free speech protections as far as I can tell. That's really liberal.

The US would become significantly more authoritarian if we followed your ideas about how to reduce crime.

The approach that I favor is to significantly increase police funding and to use the money to improve the standards of police work. For example, I would pay police more so that I could hire a higher standard of person and so that the hires would be more incentivized to do things right rather than to cut corners. At the same time, I would completely legalize all recreational drugs except maybe a few rare ones like fentanyl that are so concentrated that they can essentially be used as weapons. This would free up police resources - maybe not immediately, since there would likely be a spike of drug-fueled asocial behavior following legalization - but eventually, as those drug users who truly could not handle their shit without being asocial would get taken off the streets. I would have more cops patrolling the streets. I would also create special tent city areas for homeless people on the peripheries of cities and provide them with police and medical services, while at the same time using police to crack down on stuff like aggressive panhandling and making a mess on the sidewalk everywhere else.