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.

You know things are bad when even liberals are despairing at DeSantis' poor performance. I think her analysis is mostly correct. Voters don't really care about issues so much as who is the strong candidate. Trump is funny but also strong. DeSantis is neither - despite being the actual principled conservative by comparison.

Given Kamala's own exposure as a weak air-head, it seems almost inevitable to me that we will see Biden vs Trump once again in 2024. I try not to be ageist but American politics is really becoming a gerontocracy. The refusal of Dianne Feinstein to step down is par for the course.

That said, while I believe the author is right about the primal nature of Trump's appeal, it's probably a mistake to ascribe his popularity entirely to it. I suspect many in the media still haven't understood that he rose as a consequence of structural changes that will outlast him. Seeing the GOP as the more anti-war party would never have crossed my mind during the Bush era when accusations of insufficient liberal patriotism was rife. Now it appears to me that the veneration of the CIA, Pentagon and FBI are all highly liberal-coded.

Why is Trump a stronger candidate than DeSantis? It seems to just be a matter of charisma.

Trump can't make things happen. Even if he wanted to, which is dubious, he doesn't have the ability to manipulate the organs of state and get things done. DeSantis does. DeSantis is younger, smarter and more capable. DeSantis just isn't so exciting. For example, I could get behind this policy platform from Trump: https://twitter.com/loganclarkhall/status/1631725952395878416

  1. use federal land to build new cities
  1. develop flying cars
  1. revitalize rural industries
  1. launch a baby boom with bonuses for young parents
  1. beautification campaign, get rid of ugly buildings

But I know that he doesn't have the ability to implement it. Consider that in the first part of his presidency they had both parts of the legislature and executive. He got nothing done with all that! He tried and failed to build a border wall. He succeeded in lowering taxes and assisting Israeli foreign policy goals. He failed to win culture war battles or break the power of the US administrative machine. It looks much more likely that the deep state is going to break him.

Tangent on those policy proposals -

New cities: Maybe a good idea, but the goodness leans very heavily on details and execution. And explicitly bypassing whatever issues current big cities have, and whatever prevents smaller cities from growing a bit. There's also the perception-reflexivity effect - to make a new big city work in a very short period of time, you need to get a lot of people to invest in an uncertain project. Not that any of that is impossible or even 'hard', every country has done it many times. But I'm not a planning expert, so the first sentence means I can't say much of use about it.

Flying cars: multiple existing companies already sell flying cars, they're just not useful for anything other than a gimmick. Having the same components transform from car-form to plane-form and function to standards in both is just unnecessarily costly. Drive your car to a small plane or helicopter and get in it. And even then, few people use small planes or helicopters, they're just not that useful. I'm not sure if the VTOL startups went anywhere, but that's plausible in a way flying cars isn't.

Rural industries: The words 'revitalize' and 'industry' don't suddenly create industries. Which industries? How? Would that correspond to a significant price increase for normal consumers because they can't buy chinese/vietnamese clothing/chips/trinkets anymore?

Baby bonuses: Just aren't that effective in terms of cost/benefit. And compare to the increase of this, which happened under biden. (Just like welfare, baby bonuses incentivize lower income people more, necessarily)

Beautification campaign: Despite appreciating the 'modern building bad. ancient building good. truth, beauty, wonder. our civilization is in decay' more than a bit, I'm not sure anyone will notice. One reason so much effort went into statues and buildings and paintings, historically, is that there wasn't much else to look at. But now that we have pictures and movies and computers, the interestingness of building aesthetics correspondingly declines. I'm not too familiar with the aesthetic motivations behind modern art and architecture, but I believe that was deeply related. Plus, there are just a ton of buildings, and replacing 1 in 10k core buildings with new ornate architecture won't really change the actual 'feel' of cities as people walk through them very much. A more effective path might be a combination of the YIMBY making building, generally, much easier/more common, and then somehow have most of the new buildings be 'nice'. I'm not sure what the curve of 'ornate tradness' vs cost looks like, but I'd expect costs to be significant, given that labor and material costs of construction are still high (hence it resisting automation), and how much of past cost reductions are in the specific materials and techniques used. Of course, a rich and advanced society could 'pay the cost' and allocate 2% more of its population to making buildings look pretty if we wanted.

Precisely, all of these things are ambitious goals and the devil is in the details. Does anyone trust that Trump can make them happen?

You should check out 'where's my flying car?', he makes a good case for why flying cars would be useful in letting people live much further from workplaces and reducing commuting time. He lays the blame on ridiculous, luddite regulatory systems for suppressing the technology. But he also goes off into all kinds of other tangents, it's not a well-structured book.

I think it's not just that they're ambitious goals with tricky details, it's also that I'm not even sure we want them, due to opportunity costs.

New cities: what's wrong with the current ones, and why can we expect the new ones to be better? I don't see why this wouldn't just be a big waste of resources.

Flying cars: What is wrong with the current system? Proliferation of private flying cars, if they can be made to work, seem like they could be pretty dangerous, both to the people in it, anyone else in the air, and the people on the ground. Is there a reason that wouldn't be true? I suppose also the numbers would have to be run on how much development costs vs. benefits could be expected to behave.

Rural industries: This will require some care as to what exactly "revitalize rural industries" means. If they are doing economically worse than they should because of government regulations or due to externalities, that's great. But if the market is the cause in an unbiased way, then aiding them is at the cost of better use that that money could be put to elsewhere in the country. Subsidies and similar seem dangerous.

Baby bonuses: this one might be worth it, but the numbers would have to be run.

Beautification campaign: the previous comment was good about there being a somewhat lesser value to ornateness now, although I agree it is uglier. But improving everything would be expensive, and I would imagine it would have to be done judiciously to be worth it. So I suppose here it is more clearly an example of the devil being in the details.

New cities could be a way to expand with new forms of government, and let people that have different political opinions from mainstream big cities see if their ideas work.

As the US spread West this type of city formation driven political change was crucial. It kept eastern US societies more stable as well since there was a place to send the misfits.