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 -
Why Cross-Examination Is So Damn Great
There's an obvious solace within the written medium. You get to carve out a space safe from constraints and take as much as you need to fully express yourself. Words are neat! I mean, just look at the torrential avalanche I regularly shit out just on my own.
But still, I don't want people to forget about the benefits to real-time adversarial conversations, benefits which cannot be as easily replicated with writing. I recently wrote (ahem) about how humans have this nasty aversion to admitting error. You'll rarely ever get someone willing to outright say "I am a liar" and the roomy comfort that we all love so much about text also provides bad faith actors the ability to build up elaborate defensive ramparts in peace. Nevertheless, even in instances where a smoking gun confession is missing, I cite to a few examples to outline how you can still construct a damning indictment using only a few minor inference hops:
Of course, this gets way easier to accomplish in a real-time confrontation. Chalk it up to the stereotype but yes, I fucking love cross-examination and I want to explain why. Lessons From The Screenplay had a fantastic video analyzing the climactic cross-examination from the movie A Few Good Men while using the vocabulary normally reserved to discuss physical duels. The story's hook is watching the military lawyer protagonist (Kaffee) figure out how he can elicit an outright confession from a notoriously disciplined and experienced commander (Jessep) using only the 'weapons' found within a courtroom. The primary elegance of cross-examination as a weapon stems from the fact that, when done successfully, you can fabricate a solid cage for your opponents using only their own words as ingredients. Kaffee does exactly this by asking questions that appear superficially innocent but, when joined together, weld into a formidable trap Jessep is unable to escape.
I want to highlight a few other recent examples, running the gamut across the political spectrum. My aim here is not to ignite a debate about the specific issue that happens to be discussed (though a toe dip is inevitable) but rather to comment on the rhetorical maneuvers at play and see what lessons we can impart. And a strong word of caution is warranted here: It's true that some this veers dangerously close to mind-reading, which is obviously prone to confirmation bias and erroneous conclusions. With that in mind my goal is to ensure that any conclusion I reach is both solidly grounded within the available evidence and appropriately qualified (with any alternative explanations highlighted). I think the utility is worth the risk of error, and the harm can be mitigated by a commitment to acknowledging one's own mistakes.
First up is Nathan Robinson interviewing Christopher Rufo, specifically the part where they discuss whether the Founding Fathers were racist hypocrites — extolling the virtues of liberty while also owning slaves:
So Rufo finds himself in a bit of a pickle. He's fully aware that he can't say "Thomas Jefferson, the man who believed blacks were inferior and held 130 of them in bondage, was not a racist" with a straight face. But simultaneously he also expends a lot of acrobatic energy trying to dodge answering a straightforward question. The italicized portion of his statement above explains why. Although Rufo has made his career as a stalwart opponent of Critical Race Theory (however you define it) he reveals that he might accept one of its core tropes — that the United States is indelibly and irredeemably tainted by its original sin of racism. Notice that Robinson did not ask "Should we discredit Jefferson's work in advancing equality?" he simply asked if Jefferson was racist. But Rufo looks past Robinson's question and sees the warning beacons coming up on the horizon, and so he charges forward in an effort to preemptively maintain a defensive line on ideas he suspects would next be attacked.
According to his own words, Rufo divulges that he thinks racism is potentially grounds to have your accomplishments discredited. If you accept that framework then it makes sense why he would expend so much energy avoiding admitting that Jefferson was racist; the fear is that this concession would cause the rest of his favored structure to crumble. It's not likely we would've gotten this admission in writing; he had to be cornered by his own statements in real-time for this to slip.
I am going to now praise Tim Pool of all people. A few months ago he invited Lance/TheSerfsTV to his livestream to be grilled on a range of topics. On the abortion question, some of the more enthusiastic pro-choice activists have staked their position on legalizing elective abortion not just at the "viability" line (~22 weeks) but up until the millisecond the fetus exists the birth canal. Lance affirms this is his position, claiming that the mother should always maintain full and absolute autonomy over what happens with the pregnancy. But as the real-time discussion evinced, it's not clear if he actually believes this:
Such a spectacular reveal would not have made it through the cognitive filters had it not taken place in real time. If someone's position is that a pregnant woman can do whatever she wants with her body, up to and including terminating the life of the fetus, it logically follows that such an expansive authority would also include less fatal harms. But as Lance discloses in the moment, he doesn't believe that a pregnant woman has the right to take meth and so he offers a justification that is on its own eminently reasonable, but only after it's too late does he realize the self-inflicted rhetorical leg sweep he tripped into.
The rest of the conversation gets bogged down on the legality of certain drugs but to Lance's credit, he does eventually bite the bullet and concede that although he may not agree with the decision he still believes a pregnant woman has the right to take heroin. The eventual consistency is commendable, but the fact that he so reflexively resorted to the commanding ethos of "do not intentionally kill a child" should call into question how much he really believes in the "absolute dominion of the mother" position he insisted upon.
Lastly is our old friend Meghan Murphy again. I already wrote extensively about the numerous logical fallacies deployed in her conversation with Aella on the ethics of the sex industry. Murphy also discussed the same topic with professional debate bro Destiny and he describes the fundamental issue after she had walked out in frustration:
That's a fair question! If someone says they don't like X because of reasons A/B/C, and you get rid of A/B/C but they still don't like X, then it inevitably follows they have other reasons for disliking X they're not divulging. What Destiny has outlined here is an effective method to uncovering pretextual justifications — the false reasons someone provides as a bid to keep the true reasons hidden (likely because they're too unpalatable or unpersuasive to say out loud).
Destiny spends an agonizing amount of time trying to get Murphy to explain what her precise objections to the sex industry are and gets nowhere, and their final exchange illustrates why. They're discussing one of Murphy's argument that the sex trade is unethical because of women's particular vulnerability during penetrative sex:
Take note of the italicized responses; that kind of evasion is not a generally pervasive reaction for Murphy. She speaks for a living and within other moments in this debate and elsewhere, Murphy has demonstrated a clear ability to confidently answers questions with immediacy and relevancy. It can't be just a coincidence when acrobatics are prompted only by these vexing questions.
Murphy's responses make a lot more sense if you assume that her true objections to the sex industry are really borne out of an aesthetic or disgust aversion, and specifically only when men are the patrons. Murphy is evidently aware that this argument can't be spoken out loud because it's likely too vacant to be generally persuasive, so she instead cycles through a rolodex of pretextual (read: fake) arguments that she's willing to unhesitantly discard whenever they risk becoming a liability to her core thesis. That's why she dodges the male prostitute hypothetical to instead reiterate her dislike of men paying women for sex. That's why she laughs off the female client hypothetical as implausible instead of grappling with its implications.
I'm comfortable accusing Murphy of dishonesty here because her acrobatic evasions are selectively deployed in response to concrete threats to her position, rather than the result of random chance.
It's unfortunate that human beings sometimes lie, and it's too bad that they also refuse to admit mistakes. Such is life. Given the examples I outlined above, some generalizable heuristics is to be suspicious of anyone who refuses to answer straightforward questions (in writing or otherwise), or who refuses to engage in anything but the most sympathetic of conversations. A lot of our contentious interactions have and continue to migrate over towards asynchronous text exchanges, but hopefully I've made a case for why talking is still cool. Also I host The Bailey podcast and I'm always delighted to talk to people I vehemently disagree with, so reach out if you want to butt heads!
As a parting bonus, here's the journalist Beth Rigby interviewing Iain Anderson, chair of the LGBT organization Stonewall. It's quite the bloodbath.
Destiny's line of argument here sounds quite a lot to me like confusing the map for the territory. Murphy probably has 1000 reasons that sex work is bad, all of which add up to a belief that sex work in general is bad. Go after any one reason and prove that it doesn't apply to everyone, and that doesn't invalidate the other 999.
There's very rarely actually a principled reason why a word is always morally wrong in 100% of cases. You could do the same thing with things seen as straightforwardly bad, like rape. "The problem is lack of consent? So what if one person withdraws consent but the other has no way of knowing, is that wrong? So your problem isn't REALLY lack of consent then, is it?" The endless search for noncentral but epistemically pure hypotheticals detracts from the overall process of truth-finding. It's a rhetorical tool, nothing more.
In an ideal world people would admit this ("okay there are situations where sex work/racism/rape/abortion is moral") but then they lose ground. There is no incentive to do so, especially in the face of uncharitable questioning by a hostile interlocutor.
Can you name a single view, or thing, that has a thousand clearly distinguishable 'reasons', of approximately equal importance, that aren't (when considered properly) part of a broader and more relevant reason? I can't.
Why is welfare good? Because people can buy food, get electricity, not get sick, buy cars that help them get their own jobs, ... you could list a thousand things like this, but they all have something in common! A reason of "use money to improve peoples' material conditions, which is an end in itself" neatly sums it up.
Why do we have lines on freeways? There are a few reasons, but not 999. Why do humans have blood vessels? Well over thousand different things are transported, sure, but ... 'transporting stuff' sure does sum all of them up, and you'd say that in an argument, not listing every nutrient and waste product. Why do animals want to have sex with other animals? You could list every neuron, or every potential ancestor who didn't reproduce due to non-horniness, but ...
The things we do and use are mostly purposeful, encapsulation and patterns makes them easier to understand and use, whether you're a human or the blind idiot god of evolution, and as a result the ways they interact or go wrong are usually relatively simple to describe, at a high level. At the very least things have a clear hierarchy to them. Why does too-high temperature damage humans, or why does water damage a phone? There are a thousand low-level reasons ... but the high level reason of 'changing temperature changes a lot of chemistry, and humans depend on a lot of chemistry, and natural selection operated in a certain temperature range' works quite well.
The closest example of something that has 'many equal importance causes' are the output bits of a hash algorithm - which exists precisely because it's impossible to understand what parts of the input cause any particular bit to be set!
Also, in practice OP just makes excuses for a gish gallop. How can we ever come to any conclusions if you can have 999 good reasons for something? At a minute each, thats' 16 hours...
The broader and more relevant reason in this case is just "sex work harms those who engage in it." I never claimed that all 1000 reasons are of equal importance or cannot be summed up, but that finding an example where 1 reason does not apply does not invalidate the other 999.
Your hypothetical begs the question. In a debate there's no way someone waits for you to rattle off all 999 reasons. They will engage with the first few, then come up with a few more general counterarguments of their own. If your first few claims are easily defeated, then it stands to reason the other few hundred are of similar or inferior quality. Finding exceptions to any one claim though doesn't actually defeat that claim.
"Use money to improve people's material conditions, which is an end in itself" is not actually the part of welfare that people disagree with. Same with lines on freeways, blood vessels, etc. All of those examples are very unlike the debate being had here, because people generally agree with your phrasings of them. A better example would be something like "is drinking alcohol unethical." It makes people more abusive, it makes them waste money, it causes drunk driving, etc. but are any of those an actual principle making alcohol immoral? There are certainly exceptions to all of them. In reality, most people's genuinely held ethical positions are simply agglomerations of more fundamental principles. If something is bad enough often enough then it's simply unethical.
I expect this is Murphy's actual position. Sex work can be OK, but only under circumstances rare enough that it's much easier and better to ban it altogether than to give the bad actors a pretext for their less virtuous actions. I don't think Murphy is as intelligent as people on here seem to think (especially @ymeskhout, who's referenced her like 10 times) and I doubt she (or her interlocutors, to be fair) are capable of actually recognizing this. So how would you suggest they go about conducting this debate, if not by directly engaging with (rather than finding rare and unrepresentative exceptions to) a few of her claims about the supposed harm sex work causes to sex workers?
The idea is that - if you're making an argument, the onus is on you to present the broadest and most convincing reasons up front. If the first reason you present is one of the smaller reasons, only responsible for .5% of your belief - why even mention it? Mention one of the big 'classes of reasons' (which is itself a "reason").
I mean, that's three things, and they're all broadly within "alcohol makes people behave badly". There's another important factor, which is "alcohol is physically unhealthy". So that's two large-scale reasons, each of which have three to six big more specific reasons within them. That's reasonable. It works with my above comment, and isn't a gish gallop.
A debate with that would go like: Maybe Megan first mentions abuse, destiny says "okay what if it didn't cause abuse", megan mentions wasting money and drunk driving. Destiny now notices the grouping, and says "okay, it looks like you think alcohol clouds peoples' judgement and lets out their worst instincts. What if it didn't do that, would you still oppose it". Megan now says yes, and says "because it makes you fat and harms your liver". Destiny now asks "okay, what if it didn't cloud your judgement and didn't have health effects, would you oppose it"? Now Megan says "I guess not." Now Destiny understands megan's position better, and we can figure out if each component is true or not!
Tbh I spent most of the comment trying to come up with a reason I believed for "why don't some things have 1000 different reasons", because it seemed true but I wasn't sure why, as opposed to thinking about arguments.
That's only true now because people broadly agree with welfare, it's popular, and widely implemented. Some (including me, to an extent) do disagree with that.
Sure, but on any specific topic those principles are, at a high level, relatively simple, there aren't a few thousand of them. I think this is true about sex work, too! For some people the 'one reason' is that God or Traditional Values said NO. For others the reason is sex is for reproduction and porn isn't reproduction. For others (feminists) it's bad because it exploits women and propagates social values that exploit women, or something. For even more all three of these, and one or two more, mix together.
I basically agree with Destiny and ymes that megan's both a bad debater and doesn't have a coherent source for her points of view.
Part of why Megan responded poorly to destiny's approach is she's not a systematic thinker and is a normal person who doesn't like having her ideas 'attacked'.
I think the right move if you're trying to convince her is to try to meet megan where she's at right now, and try to come up with a narrative for her points of view that she'll agree with but is fairly concrete, and even show sympathy for and agree with parts of it - and hopefully she'll feel positive about you at that point - and then try to show its inadequacies by exploring some of the consequences for it, trying to connect it to other beliefs she has or experiences she's had.
Even if you don't want to do that, and more want to own her for an audience, I think destiny's approach isn't ideal, it seems a bit autistic, and Destiny and most people here probably know the good anti-porn arguments better than Megan does so making her awkwardly spell them out in response to hypotheticals isn't really necessary other than to own her.
I don't get why we're still talking about this. I agree with you here. Meghan also did this and then was later asked to clarify her position, which was when she got into the specifics. It was there that Destiny looked for exceptions rather than engaging with the examples provided.
I don't think the whole "penetrative sex" excerpt is representative of the whole debate, but even in reference to just that section, this comparison still isn't very accurate. A better comparison would be something like:
Meghan: "I dislike alcohol due to its negative effects on people."
Destiny: "Like what?"
Meghan: "Like abuse."
Destiny: "What about women drinking alcohol? They can't abuse men."
Meghan: "Yes they can, especially on alcohol."
Destiny: "What about female children?"
Meghan: "How many alcoholic little girls have you heard of? Besides, I think it's bad for them to be alcoholics too."
Destiny: "So there we go, abuse has nothing to do with why you actually think alcohol is bad. I still have no idea why you think it's unethical."
You can see why this whole tactic is disingenuous, right? Meghan's a bad debater, yeah, but Destiny is outright dishonest.
At this point she could have brought up a separate reason why it's bad for little girls to be alcoholics, but then she'd cede the ground about how abusive alcoholics aren't a big issue. She could have talked about the noncentral fallacy, but I doubt she's even heard of that, and she'd already tried to do so a few times with her references to talking about a "fantasy world" vs reality. So instead she quit.
Yes, and at a high level, Meghan articulated her main belief, which was that the porn/prostitution industries enable quite a lot of exploitation. Destiny dug into that and started getting into hyperspecifics, so it's unfair to blame Meghan for coming up with answers to his questions about those specifics. It's totally fair to have a thousand reasons for why porn causes harm, and for the very first reason cited to not cover literally 100% of possible cases.
Agreed, but I think a bigger part is that he was just being disingenuous. He kept coming up with extreme exceptions ("you don't think a girl selling foot pics is the same as a 9-year old getting gangraped, do you?") and then getting upset when she objected to his characterization of her point, because if she refuses to engage with his noncentral examples then her central examples must be dodging the question. He really wanted to equate the overall porn industry with the most milquetoast parts of it, and any attempts by her to steer the conversation towards central examples such as pornhub were met by derision and accusations of bad faith.
If I were trying to change her mind, I'd have attacked the Nordic model she favors. The thing about her position is that it is in essence a criticism of the status quo. You can't really debate that without defending the status quo, which really does have many issues. So the thing to focus on would be "how would you fix things" and then discuss the weaknesses with that. This is more rhetorically powerful, more direct, more likely to actually change her mind, and much more productive.
Rewatched this part of the debate - this was directly in response to (compressed)
Destiny's using a lot of hyperbole, but it's not really dishonest, as it's in response to Megan unreasonably conflating porn and prostitution while arguing they're bad due to risk of exploitation. It'd be more dishonest if it was unprompted, because he'd be implying megan was conflating them - but she kinda was!
==
His first hypothetical is a direct question of: "if there was a company with no exploitation, would you be fine with i?t", in response to her bringing up exploitation in the past. She waffles on this question. He then explains he's asking because he's heard her claim she wants almost all pornography outlawed - and he believes quite a bit (i'd guess >25-50% from his statements) of existing online sexual content weighted by revenue is currently not exploitative, so her arguments don't justify the claims she's made elsewhere.
Then
I think this is also reasonable from Destiny. He's trying to figure out what the shape of her view is - how much does the 'woman' part really contribute? It's not implied that 'if she thinks prostitution/porn is bad, she must think it's bad for men', as it kinda is in your hypothetical - she's free to take either direction in the fork.
You could argue this is somewhat dishonest - maybe she thinks female matters a bit but there are other factors too - even so, it's a more reasonable claim than every inference Megan has made in the past five minutes of the debate. But it's not dishonest in the context of a broader claim that he's making, and has explicitly said - even if he wins on every factual argument Megan makes, she'll keep jumping from argument to argument (as she has) because she isn't in this due to arguments.
The massive difference between Destiny's argument and your example is - his hypotheticals are in direct response to claims Megan has made. In your dialogue, Destiny brings in the 'female' and 'children' distinctions - in the above dialogue, Megan introduces the 'vulnerable' and 'female' distinctions.
About then she ragequits.
I mean, you're not entirely wrong. Destiny's approach here isn't actually going to tease out why Megan dislikes porn, it's just going to make her look stupid. It's probably better to assume she means 'female vulnerability makes a bad situation worse', even if that is a steelman, and debate that instead (while still mentioning that you're doing that). I think you can do that while still making her look stupid, although idk if my video would blow up like his did!
I think I would have, instead of going all logic-bro, told detail-rich stories about the kind of solo-content only onlyfans model destiny mentions, or boyfriend and girlfriend who make content with themselves and threesomes, and then gotten her to directly denounce those, and then explored the tension between her claims of exploitation and the stories.
==
Aside from that last sentence, this is a funny discussion because neither of us care about the object-level issue of 'was destiny slightly dishonest in the debate', unlike CW questions, it's just exploring a very mild disagreement out of technical interest in the disagreement.
Yeah I think we're on the same page, or close enough anyways. Still, I do have a few quibbles.
Well what she says is that selling sex is selling sex. His immediate response is to bring up porn which isn't selling sex. You could look at this as an attempt to pinpoint her position, but to me it seems more like a disingenuous argumentative tactic. At this point in the discussion he knows what her central point is, and is choosing to call her out on these little details rather than engaging with it at all.
I think her claims make a lot more sense in the context of her original claim, which was that the porn industry has a lot of exploitation. That is the most important reason porn is unethical, as she has stated, and he goes looking for another one as if she hasn't provided one already.
She comes up with reasons porn is bad, he finds exceptions, rinse and repeat. I'd have more charity towards him if he engaged with any of her points rather than finding exceptions to all of them. Of course, she can defend herself (well, she can't, but it's her job to) and if she were competent she could have called him out on that better.
In the end this terrible muddled mess is kind of what they both asked for though. They both make money stirring up controversy, not discovering truth, and in that they're both experts regardless of their skill at debate.
I'm fascinated at how much you and @curious_straight_ca dissected this exchange. I'll repost a relevant comment I made elsewhere that also includes how I would construct an "honest" version of Murphy's objections:
The lead up to this particular exchange is relevant because Murphy was first arguing that sex work is bad because it's coercive, and it's by definition coercive because it involves someone having sex they wouldn't otherwise have were it not for the money offered. Destiny offers the obvious rejoinder that if you accept that premise, then ALL jobs are also "by definition coercive" as well. There's some anti-capitalists that actually agree with this premise but Murphy doesn't and so she finds herself having to add yet another qualifier to her argument, this time about how women are much more vulnerable during sex. Similarly, there are radical feminists that actually believe that ALL heterosexual sex is "by definition coercive" because it's penetrative and occurs within a patriarchal system where consent is impossible. Murphy has to be aware of these arguments, but as an unapologetic heterosexual woman, she doesn't want to concede that. At this point my impression is she quit because she ran out of pivots.
There's a pattern here. She just moves on to another, then another, then another etc. all without any acknowledgement. It's hard to tell what she actually believes in because she just keeps mechanistically cycling through her repertoire! The "coercive because money" argument got immediately thrown out without any acknowledgement and never made a re-appearance, and that's because Murphy knew she'd have to admit that all jobs are coercive. We didn't get much of an epilogue for the "coercive because sex" argument, but I'm guessing she realized she'd have to admit that hetero sex is at least somewhat rapey. I also gather that after already confirming she believes males engaging in sex work is also unethical, she realized she wouldn't be able to offer a reason for that position (I can't think of one based on what she said, but maybe you can?).
If I had to construct an honest form of the basic tenets of her argument, it might be something like this:
"Wage work has an element of coercion, because you're doing work you would otherwise refuse to do freely. Sex also has an element of violence and coercion for women in particular, given how much more vulnerable they are. Taken individually, neither is necessarily a problem because of [reasons]. But there's a symbiotic magnification of the harms that occurs when these two aspects are combined together into what we know as the sex trade. This crosses a line over what we should deem as ethical and acceptable behavior."
I may not agree with the conclusion but I think the argument is perfectly reasonable! If I had to guess, the reason Murphy doesn't adopt this framework is because it would necessarily require her to curtail some of her overall position. For example it would require her to concede at least some scenarios where the sex trade is not unethical (e.g. male prostitutes, OF model playing with toys, etc.).
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link