site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 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.

6
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.

Obligatory reminder that one of the first actions Biden took upon taking office was rescinding Trump's executive order banning executive-branch training that makes these sorts of claims about white people.

Edit: It wasn't limited to white people, but it was widely understood that nobody with any real power in the executive branch wanted to run trainings that made similar claims about people of any other race.

Do you have further information for that?

My first thought is that it was performative deTrumpification—he did something, so it’s got to go. If it was clearing the path for anti-white training, I haven’t really seen the follow through.

It was this executive order, repealed on Biden's first day in office.

Here's Biden's 2023 follow-on 'whole of government' "Equity" EO: https://www.whitehouse.gov/equity/

It's chock-a-block with the government's plans to:

  • stuff every agency full of DEI commissars ("requir[ing] agencies to designate senior leaders accountable for implementing the equity mandate")

  • giving those commissars increased control and oversight over the agency's policymaking and enforcement decisions ("instruct[ing] agencies to consider bolstering the capacity of their civil rights offices");

  • directing the agencies to slant everything they do through DEI analysis ("direct[ing] agencies to produce Equity Action Plans annually and report to the public on their progress");

  • ensuring that resources will be allocated to the DEI commissars to carry out this new institutionalized and systemic racism/sexism/heterophobia ("direct[ing] the White House Office of Management and Budget to support agencies’ Equity Action Plans");

  • increasing the amount of racial, sexual, and gendered discrimination and graft in federal contracting ("formaliz[ing] the President’s goal of increasing the share of federal contracting dollars awarded to small disadvantaged business by 50 percent by 2025"); and

  • carefully pruning the collection and dissemination of federally-collected data and statistics so that these progressive DEI shibboleths can't be challenged ("focusing [agency OCR] efforts on emerging threats like algorithmic discrimination in automated technology" and "further promot[ing] data equity and transparency").

What do you mean? There's been reports of CRT training in the military since then.

I don’t honestly have a great handle on what constitutes CRT. I guess I’d believe that the military has picked it up; if they did, it was probably down to the executive.

In the defense industry, diversity training has remained fairly anodyne. The closest we got to Internet-activist talking points was “race-blind isn’t good enough.” I wanted to see Trump’s EO so I could tell whether that would have made it past.

In the defense industry, diversity training has remained fairly anodyne.

You keep saying this as if you don't want to admit what's happening. https://reason.com/2020/08/13/sandia-laboratory-nuclear-white-male-privilege-training/

And then when you're given evidence you forget all about it by next week. Is this deliberate?

I keep saying this because it matches my experience. No one was giving me this evidence last time I raised the subject. Or the other time which got a little sidetracked by some guy ranting about socialism. So no, it's not deliberate. I'm just clueless.

arjin's example was better, anyway. Coincidentally, it's the same workshop, same year, and the same smug journalist blowing the whistle.

I don’t honestly have a great handle on what constitutes CRT.

It never ceases to amaze me how precise people's confusion on critical theory is. But if anyone's curious, a one sentence summary would be: dividing society into oppressor races and oppressed races, and analyzing social problems through that lens.

Or if you want something more in-depth and from the horses mouth, you can read something like Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement.

In the defense industry, diversity training has remained fairly anodyne

Is this going to be like that time you asked someone for an example of segregation, I gave you a link to segregated housing, you went "holy shit, how is this legal", and promptly refused to change your mind about anything? I wouldn't call this anodyne but YMMV.

You've convinced me. I won't try to pretend that's anodyne. So yeah, I'm seriously unsettled, and I'm reevaluating whether I've been misreading the messaging at my company.

I really didn't believe we were getting stuff like that. Given the level of cross-pollination in defense, it's unlikely that we are much less woke than LockMart. I could believe that the messaging is very stratified, and that expensive, controversial workshops are only spent on the upper management. Or it's possible that I've just had my head in the sand.

For what it's worth, you convinced me that people are successfully bringing back segregated housing, too. I stood by my belief that Pynewacket was being hyperbolic, but I was naïve to assume that sort of project would be banned.