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.

So any time you engage in conflict, you should probably go for broke and try to completely eliminate the opponent from the gene pool

You don't need to kill all of them, you just need to thoroughly assimilate them (although this usually involves killing a lot of them). This could be thought of as removing them from the meme pool, I suppose. Modern French people are mostly descended from Gauls who were massacred and enslaved by the Romans, yet Napoleon's armies proudly fought beneath the Roman eagle and he adopted the titles of Consul and Emperor for himself. The same goes for Arab nationalists from Egypt, or Italian and German nationalists from any of the dozens of formerly independent states that once occupied the modern territory of those countries.

And of course if the progressive dream of "browning America" were to succeed and we became a completely ethnically and racially homogenous society (a surprisingly trad vision of the future if you think about it), then it would be impossible for any one group to pay reparations to another because we would all be descended from both the perpetrators and the victims of whatever historical atrocity was being adjudicated. Not that I expect us to get much farther than Latin America along the path of race-mixing, and they still have distinguishable groups with lingering grievances.