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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The ongoing French riots bring into sharp relief the fantasy that if we just don't talk about race or religion, the issue will disappear. To be clear, I still prefer the French approach because if you don't measure something you can't really do much about it. The main beneficiary of France suddenly going the US/UK route of meticulously collecting racial and religious statistics wouldn't be the far-right but rather the far-left. Racial and possibly religious quotas would soon follow with official state-sanctioned discrimination as the end result.
Yet the rioters clearly view themselves as apart from French society. Even genteel liberal journalists concede as much.
What are the long-term effects going to be? Perhaps I am cynical but I suspect nothing much. France had these kinds of riots in 2005 and they changed nothing.
I remembering reading a lot about Islam and immigration in the 2010-2012 time period, during which many UK conservative personalities were praising the French approach of "aggressive assimiliationism" as opposed to the supposedly feeble multiculturalist approach preferred by the UK. It seems to me that there's no functional difference. The UK had its own riots in 2011. One could plausibly make the case that the BLM riots in the US during 2014 and then 2020 fall under the same rubric.
Whatever the system, these periodic events happen in diverse societies and then they are forgotten until the next outbreak. The system isn't strong enough to overcome racial and religious differences completely but it's also much stronger than many right-wing doomers seem to think. After the kerfuffle everyone moves on. There's no reason to think it will be different this time.
I've wondered the last few years ago, regarding China's treatment of the Uighurs, if there was a geopolitical rhetorical function to that treatment.
Basically, or so the argument would go, the number of states that would consider using concentration camps or muscular ethnic reshaping or even cleansing policies on their undesirable internal demographics is almost certainly much, MUCH higher than the number of states that are willing to publicly acknowledge it or actually overtly enact it as long as American unipolar hegemony is the order of the day. And so letting their own internal demographics shift in undesirable ways while forswearing certain ugly policy choices that they would prefer to use is a specific cost of accepting American hegemony.
In such a world, China blatantly engaging in, say, the use of concentration camps, and then suffering no meaningful consequences for it, could be an intentional, provocative signal of weakening American power, as well as an invitation to other countries to pull away from the current American led order and shift towards a multipolar international order where states can more aggressively manage their own internal ethnic demographics exactly as China does, all with China benevolently claiming "China promotes a world where state sovereignty is respected and the internal affairs of states are their own business".
I'm not saying I believe this, exactly, but I can see a certain logic to it.
(You could imagine an alternate history version of "Russia blitzkriegs Ukraine in 2022, grabs a bunch of territory, and then winds the SMO down" serving a similar provocative international signaling function about the diminished role of American power and a new era of states militarily contesting old borders, but the history we're currently in a much messier and more ambiguous than that)
When I was reading Tony Judt's "Postwar", about Europe after World War 2, one of the points he made is that (though no one wants to admit it because it is so uncomfortable to admit) Hitler to some extent got at least some of what he wanted in Europe, at least for a time; in the Europe that came out of World War 2, there was generally much more ethnic coherence in nations than there had been before World War 2, largely because of mass population displacement and ethnic cleansing. The role of that shift in the general (all things considered) European peace that followed and the rise of solidarity-based welfare states is, again, a seriously uncomfortable topic. See also Robert Putnam and the costs of multi-culturalism on social trust.
When has the United States ever had the power to impose its will on the internal behavior of another great power? Did the Soviet Union suffer meaningful consequences for operating the gulags?
They specifically talk about "American unipolar hegemony", so I think they're specifically thinking about 1991-now (or whenever you want to argue that American hegemony breaks down).
Specifically, the dynamic is different because pre-1991, countries could get away with things the US didn't like as long as they were willing to suck up to the USSR.
The opposite is also true, states that sucked up enough to the US did get away with committing such atrocities, for instance Pakistan's genocide in Bangladesh.
That doesn't seem like something the US didn't like. It seems like something the US didn't care too much about, and Pakistan was useful during the Cold War.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link