site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33036 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 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.

8
Top Bottom New Old Controversial
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

"Ay! Darnell! DeAndre! Get yo' asses out here! It's time to go! Ay, who you is? Where my brothers at? Where dey at? Ay! Yo, I'm talkin' to you nigga!"

I have a hard time imagining a world in which you wrote that without expecting to eat a ban for it.

Optimize for light, not heat. User banned for three days.

I don’t think this should be considered inflammatory. If a black comedian had these lines in their act it would be a non-issue.

The argument was that there’s a communication style among black folks that can be jarring and intimidating to people not used to it, and this was a not even very egregious example.

If a white person gave such an example in Polite Society they might very well lose their job over it, but we are supposed to be able to violate those kinds of norms here.

If a black comedian had these lines in their act it would be a non-issue.

This is not a comedy forum, though. This is a discussion forum. I'd like to say our standards are "higher" than the average comedy club's, but... let's say instead that they are at least quite different.

The argument was that there’s a communication style among black folks that can be jarring and intimidating to people not used to it, and this was a not even very egregious example.

...phrased in an inflammatory way, and attributing it (as you've done) to "black folks" instead of to specific individuals or even specific groups.

If a white person gave such an example in Polite Society they might very well lose their job over it, but we are supposed to be able to violate those kinds of norms here.

Only to the extent necessary to optimize for light. Just because you're allowed to express your views about racial differences does not mean you are allowed to express them in ways that are unnecessarily inflammatory, uncharitable, etc.

Seems excessive.

Amazing. He was completely accurate in his depiction. The hot-air trying to politely talk around this fact is the heat, not his shining a light at the facts on the ground.

Was he? My experience with blacks had been that they’re more polite in a neutral interaction(like trying to pick their brothers up).

In my proposed dialogue, he thinks he's calling out to his brothers initially (and it is quite likely that his brothers were at a fellow black person's house and so he thinks everyone in the scenario is going to be black), setting his more casual tone (worrying as much about who else might be listening to what you're loudly saying also seems to be a less common black communicative habit). This maybe causes Lester to evince hostile or evasive behavior upon hearing it, causing Yarl to react similarly (or perhaps he's just unable to code switch so quickly between his "politely talking to White people" voice and his "talking to closer in age black brothers" voice).

Of course, to be fair, not all black people even bother using the "politely talking to White people" voice, especially nowadays. And some others also do use it more liberally, almost always when they feel there might be mixed company. But again, as far as I know (as I added to my original post, though only now as I was banned, as it originally got lost in an editing sweep when it was supposed to be moved to the end), maybe Yarl is Carlton Banks from The Fresh Prince. Statistically that's unlikely of course.

In any case it could be a factor. I want to hear the full and true story before I condemn. I was fooled initially by George Floyd, even though I should have known better post-Trayvon. Not again.

For reference, can you demonstrate how one would communicate the same idea in a less heated manner? Or is this a case where the poster should have linked to a few /ActualPublicFreakous videos or the like to provide multiple pro-active examples of the vocal phenomenon in question?

can you demonstrate how one would communicate the same idea in a less heated manner?

Sure thing.

If he is doing this, do you think it sounds like "Excuse me sir, I am expecting to be at address X and...?" Or do you think it is more likely that he was making demands in a loud, plausibly aggressive tone of voice that could easily be misinterpreted before he's even properly reached the door? I've seen people do this.

In my experience, there are cultures of people who communicate anything they want in a direct, loud, demanding, and repetitive fashion, even when they have no ill intentions, and can make others uneasy even during actually fairly neutral interactions with them, much less an 84 year old man.

I've had plenty of interactions with people who have wrongfully assumed that they needed/wanted something from me or vice versa based on various mistakes of fact, and while many of these have ended in a non-threatening "Oh, my bad" (though sometimes they also just like to immediately disengage and walk away without comment, almost like weird primitive AI agents, once they realize you're not the droid they're looking for), getting there is usually still an uneasy process as they just do not seem to practice the habits of clearly confirming and socially negotiating their presence and intent nearly as much as I am used to.

This of course is not malicious behavior in their book. They have no problems yelling at each other repetitively until one side's shouting wins. But if you aren't used to it I can see why it might seem hostile.

I did not write a loquacious ban message because it seemed unnecessary to do so, but the rule requiring posts to be about specific rather than general groups, to the extent possible, absolutely applies here. @WhiningCoil's response, which I am tempted to moderate as well, illustrates the problem. I have met many black people. I have met some who behaved in the ways described above; I have met many who did not. I have also had entirely too many encounters, in my life, with white people who behaved in the ways described above.

This is--obviously--a high-heat discussion topic. That is not an excuse; it is a reason to work even harder to live up to the rules.

Have you never met a real black person?

Have you? I have, and based on my experience the GGP is still making an extraordinarily inflammatory claim (that the interaction with a generic black youth would likely have looked like that) that requires extraordinary evidence (well in excess of either invoking stereotypes or linking an anecdotal video from the internet hate machine).

If the thesis is actually "members of culture X habitually communicate in the described way (litany of attributes considered negative in our culture, anecdotal transcription optimised for disgust response)", then I'd expect something on the level of scientific papers on the interpersonal value differences and the prevalence of intercultural misunderstandings induced by the different communication style supposedly illustrated by the example. Even then, I would drop the example; if that way of speaking actually induces a negative emotional response in members of our culture. then we should keep it out of the discussion lest we are made more irrational by our own emotional response.

Actually reducing the thesis to "different cultures communicate differently" would be a massive motte-and-bailey shifting of goalposts to a thesis that is so general as to be uncontroversial.

If your feelings on the matter are actually something like "but black people are really this bad, how do we deal with this unfair standard that makes it impossible to prove that in conversation", then maybe it helps to flip the scenario to get another setting in which the required level of evidence and careful wording would at least form a lower bound: imagine a white cook got fired from a prestigious cooking school. People think it's because he's white and there is a pervasive prejudice that white people have no cuisine to speak of. Would you accept someone making the argument with personal anecdotes about being fed canned Campbell's soup, Uncle Roger shorts and Twitter memes about US supermarket toast bread and mayo, or is there a higher standard of evidence you could think of demanding?

Joking aside, I appreciate the thorough response; it's exactly what I hoped for and better than I expected or deserve.

No, thank you for engaging earnestly - I was admittedly bristling somewhat after getting the sense that people were overly quick to jump to the defense of their ingroup, and your question was more than fair.

Now this part is a fascinating point because it ignores both why there might be a negative response and the usefulness of that negative response. It is not immediately self-evident that we are made more rational by ignoring available information.

Well, to be clear, the alternative we're comparing to would not be saying nothing at all but more something like clinical statement along the lines of "the speech mannerisms and conventions of black people often register as threatening by members of other cultures", which would arguably convey the same information only at the expense of conveying directly some of what it would be like for the reader to actually be in that hypothetical situation. You could have a separate argument about whether it is better or worse to have the emotional reaction as an elderly guy who just had someone turn up at the door - that is, would a mandatory speech-mannerism babelfish that filters out emotionally salient cultural differences be beneficial or detrimental on average? - but here we are not actually trying to deal with interlopers who may or may not threaten us, nor even give personal recommendations to people who are, but instead trying to foster an environment in which we can discuss societal effects and abstract principles in a detached manner.

When I say the anecdote makes us irrational, I mean that it's hard to "shut up and multiply" the magnitude of one's emotional response to something; and for many people including myself emotions seem to come with a builtin self-reinforcement drive where they also motivate us to seek out more emotional stimulus that reinforces them and shun input that induces emotions in conflict. This complicates the "shutting up and multiplying" of a rational weighing process even further, as now we find ourselves actively trying to increase the first term we found and avoiding exploration of others. That (/whether) this is a problem worth fixing is a separate debate that is largely orthogonal to the circumstance that this is a problem that exists; susceptibility to drug addiction would also be nice to overcome but "start by binging on some drugs and then see if you can avoid getting addicted" is rarely good advice for the individual.

To illustrate the problem of calculating with emotions further, in this particular case, what would even be a counterweight that would allow us to weigh the potential emotional terror of the old man (conditioned on the interaction actually having occurred as OP hypothesized) in the context of the correct consequences to draw as a society? Shouldn't we also take into the account the potential emotional consequences for everyone else - such as the putative addition to the terror a black youth may experience about the prospect of accidentally going to the wrong porch? I don't see anecdotes conveying each of the emotions coexisting and being traded off against each other in a discussion without their respective proponents just getting angered and trying to shoot the other messenger.

When I saw Joe Rogan in Baltimore, a fight broke out in the parking garage because someone wouldn't let someone else back out into the line. It was two cars behind us. The entire 60 minutes we were slowly emptying out of that subterranean edifice, dude was hanging out his window shouting at the guy in front of him more or less exactly like that. Baltimore being Baltimore, my wife was anxious actual violence was about to break out the entire time.

Where I used to live, we'd have to get my infant off the neighborhood playground as soon as the highschool let out, because a bunch of 13 year old black kids in the "mixed income" utopian dystopian development we were renting would take it over and begin speaking exactly like that.

Now granted, in a professional setting, I've never heard a black person speak like that. But literally 75% of the street encounters I've had with black teenagers, they were.

Some black people speak like that, Yes. But in peer to peer interactions mostly.

Virtually all of the black kids I know call any adults Mr/Miss/Mrs Firstname very politely and get a clip round their ear (or worse) from their parents if they do not. And that's including the ones literally from the ghetto. Where even the adults in their 30's are very likely to call me "Boss" or Mr SSCReader as an older man and be more deferential towards me than each other. For a black kid going up to knock on an adult's door they do not know well (given they didn't get the address right) it seems more likely they would be saying "Miss Talia, my mom sent me to pick up my brothers" than stereotypical ebonics even if he were a literal hood kid. Because if he didn't his mum was going to be told about his disrespect and so would her friends.

There is a lot in common with more southern politeness norms in black communities. And to be fair also in regards to levels of violence/threat. It is very similar to my Ulster-Scots brethren, where there are a lot of norms around politeness but also lots of fights/aggression. Which is perhaps why despite being in some of the worst ghetto neighborhoods as one of the whitest white men who have ever walked the earth, I've never encountered any problems. And it's usually pretty easy to see who has had in depth interactions within these communities and who hasn't. You were comparing people in an argument in the street and kids playing basketball (both where trash talking is likely) to a kid going up to ring a doorbell and collect his siblings from an adult. Why would you assume they would be similar interactions? Those are very different social situations. Codeswitching is a huge thing in the black community as you acknowledge later about professional settings and it is also very relevant to interactions like this.

And that's before we even get into the discussion of whether this kid was from a community where he is likely to use that language anyway in the first place.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats