site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 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.

9
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Yes, that's what I meant by a better city. I'd like events like this to get her to move to a nice Midwestern city after learning about what qualities in a politician make their new home a good place and leave NYC to the Subway psychos and bike hasslers.

NYC has (and has had ever since the Giuliani era - the de Blasio murder spike was part of a nationwide phenomenon) unusually low crime for US medium-large cities. Non-NYC cities make it easier for a white middle-class hospital employee to personally avoid the crime by commuting by car from their home in one all-white suburb to their job in another all-white suburb, but the core city of the "nice Midwestern city" is going to be somewhere between St Louis and Detroit.

To check numbers, Indianapolis is the reddest big city in the midwest, and has 24 murders and 871 violent crimes (per the FBI definition) per 100,000 residents per year. The Bronx is the worst borough of NYC, and has about 6 murders and 650 violent crimes per 100,000 per year. Jacksonville FL, which recently voted out a Republican mayor for failure to control crime, was a red city in a mostly red state and also far more violent than the Bronx.

One of the problems with the crime discourse (and the problem predates the internet) is that there is tonnes of medium crime in a big city - even a low-crime one like Zurich. So anyone with a megaphone can create the impression that crime is out of control using summer-of-the-shark techniques. Very Online red tribers do this for NYC because performatively hating on NYC is part of red tribe identity politics. They are helped by NYC-based media doing the same thing because it sells newspapers. But that doesn't change the fact that "America can't police big cities the way Europe and 1st-world Asia can" is a nationwide problem, not a partisan one, and that NYC is in fact an island of minimally competent policing in a cesspool of dysfunction.