site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 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.

13
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I watched the bulk of this hearing and two things stuck out to me. The first was when Rep. Burchett entered this document into the record: Advanced Space Propulsion Based оп Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering. I found this interesting as it implies that the Congressman was lead to believe for whatever reason that energy for propulsion can be gathered from the vacuum of space. So either he has more info and this is relevant or he is buying a line of malarkey, but at least this document gives something to work off of to determine if it is malarkey.

The second was when Rep. Gaetz remarked after he had been informed of a UAP sighting from a source at Elgin AFB:

We were not afforded access to all of the flight crew, and initially, we were not afforded access to images and to radar. Thereafter, we had bit of a discussion about how authorities flow in the United States of America, and we did see the image, and we did meet with one member of the flight crew who took the image. The image was of something that I am not able to attach to any human capability, either from the United States or from any of our adversaries.

This indicates that (as long as one believes that Congress isn't in on a psyop), at minimum, powers within the DOD are trying to keep Congress out of the loop as much as possible when it comes to the UAP stuff.

I'll also note that members of the committee made it seem that they wanted to clear a path for commercial pilots to be able to report these phenomena without fear of any negative consequences; after hearing this I couldn't help but scour PPRuNe.org to see if any pilots had anonymously reported such phenomena, and didn't find much of anything before the past year (and the stuff from the past year appears to be sightings of flares from Starlink constellations).

There are perfectly good reasons not to let civilians examine radar on an airfield that have nothing to do with aliens.

There's a difference between your average civilian and one of the 59 people who are a sitting member of the House Armed Services Committee. Personally, I'm agnostic on the aliens explanation, but when parts of the military feel free to deny access to individuals responsible for its oversight, then something is not as it appears. Maybe civilian control of the military isn't as clear cut as it seems.

He’s still a civilian who is not trained in radar, has no idea how anything works and wouldn’t be able to tell what he’s looking at. I wouldn’t want him looking at radar either.

Advanced Space Propulsion Based оп Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering

Now I want to trawl your posts for more random non-Latin letters and find out what kind of secret messages you've been putting in there.