site banner

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
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I think there could be some interesting conversations in the general sense, about what extent each particular matter requires intervention, if any, and what those interventions would be. I'd argue that there are some that I think are unusual enough that they should require intervention -- even if "I'm going to rape you" was an outdated Dragon Ball Z Abridged joke, and contextually I'm pretty skeptical that it was, it's the sorta thing you at least need to mark down so you know if the kid's learning when to stop -- but I probably could be persuaded a lot on what extent that intervention needs to take, especially.

I don't think it's relevant for discussion at this stage. None of the current OCR complaints are about punishing the students. Regardless of when the ALCU or OCR should be deciding things, both the ACLU-PA and the teacher on site believed that these incidents were enough to justify federal investigation, and indeed investigation about insufficient response to this bullying. Even if the ACLU and teacher wrongly believed a strong and immediate intervention necessary, it's valuable to notice that they weren't consistently behaving as if they believed that.

I'd argue that there are some that I think are unusual enough that they should require intervention

I agree. But it seems they're pushing it to the point where everything requires intervention.

There's definitely a line and rape threats are past it; even if it's trolling, joking, whatever... And that's something kids should be taught. But a federal investigation?

Perhaps that shock causing me to miss the nuance of all this...