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 -
Excavation after 14 anomalies detected at former residential school site found no evidence of graves: Manitoba chief
Although these excavations were at a different residential school than Kamloops, the technology and methodology used to identify the "potential" mass graves, GPR analysis, were the same that motivated the Manitoba excavations. Similar to Kamloops, the GPR results were combined with rumors and witness testimonies of atrocities to formulate a belief in the existence of mass graves on the Manitoba site which did lead to a 4 week excavation...
From the beginning I strongly suspected we were never going to see excavations at Kamloops, because this would be the result. This is a familiar M.O when waging culture war. Hysterically allege an atrocity that didn't happen, base those sensational claims on very thin evidence combined with rumor and witness testimony, and then claim some religious or spiritual dispensation for minimum-standard scientific investigation of the alleged mass graves. Lastly, make sure to denounce everyone who demands excavations as a genocide denier:
Genocide deniers ask: Where are the bodies of the residential schoolchildren?
I suspect we will continue to see smaller-scale excavations elsewhere, because finding any remains at all anywhere would at least be able to provide some fuel to the Kamloops narrative. But the alleged site of the Kamloops mass grave will simply become a memorial where the alleged victims can wage racial-grievance politics for financial and political gain, and it will be sacrilege to be so hateful as to demand excavations to actually investigate the claims which have been made.
This has all happened before. When the skepticism gets too great they dig where a known cemetery is and trumpet the finding of bodies.
(and no, this does not mean the holocaust didn't happen)
I am feeling a little stupid here. But what’s the big deal with graves? Your telling me people born before the 19th century died?
Mass graves have a different connotation of a “bad” group killed a bunch of a now viewed “good” group and hence buried them all at the same time. The only accusations I’m seeing on mass deaths would be from western diseases killing a lot at once. Which isn’t exactly the Churches fault.
Surely they don’t mean Catholics machine gunned a bunch of 7 year olds resulting in mass graves.
I feel like the promoters of this want “mass graves” = holocaust, Russia executing Polish military officers etc. But I am not seeing that argument and at best accusations of schools being overcrowded.
Going by the furore here in Ireland over similar claims about mother and baby homes (places where women could go to have their illegitimate child), the train of thought runs something like this:
The graves, if any, are unmarked. This shows a lack of care and regard for the dead babies and the parents of those dead babies (now, there was a whole thing about burying unbaptised children whou would not get a funeral service or be buried in consecrated ground, but that's a different matter). The evil and wicked Church stigmatised women who were sexually active outside of marriage and who got pregnant outside of marriage. The illegitimate children who may have been orphans or snatched from their families and put into institutions like this were abused both passively, by neglect, and actively by the wicked and evil nuns.
That means not feeding them properly, not calling in doctors when they were sick, and not spending money on medicine or medical treatment for them. Because of this neglect, the death rates were higher than they should have been, and then to add insult to injury the bodies were dumped into mass graves with no markers or religious ceremonies or records or even notifying any family of the death. This was all done to stigmatise and punish the children for being bastards and the mothers for being unwed. Meanwhile, the religious orders took the money which should have gone to caring for the children and kept it to enrich themselves.
Because today we are much more sensitive around bereavement and death, this is completely unacceptable and the people responsible must be held accountable.
I imagine the Kamloops situation adds in racism, forced taking of children, and lack of burial by their tribal traditions and culture on top of all that.
Not machine gunned, but yeah - the general idea is that the wicked and evil nuns/brothers/priests/Church treated these children as inferior and sub-human, hated them, and didn't care about them so pretty much wanted them dead. That means neglecting, starving, beating, not giving them heat when needed, not treating illnesses, and not caring if they all died off, then dumping the bodies like rubbish.
The unmarked bit is something that is difficult, because I see old graveyards round here with unmarked graves, or only a stone to mark where a burial happened. The original wooden markers all rotted away over the years, or people couldn't afford to put up a gravestone, so over the years locations of 'who is buried where' have been lost. I could see that happening too with residential schools; temporary markers put up which were lost over the years.
I've posted this before here, and it bears reposting here, with some edits meant as improvement:
This whole thing reminds me of the news stories about the children's mass grave in Tuam, Ireland, and of supposed mass graves in Tulsa, Oklahoma where racist mass-murdering demons buried the victims of the 1921 "race massacre", or so we're told.
When I try looking at these affairs without bias and prejudice, I try putting myself in the shoes of the average Western middle-class suburban white normie NPC, and frankly I realize that, unless some heretic specifically makes an effort to educate me on this, I'll probably have zero understanding of the following hard facts about the bygone days of the West:
1/ It was normal to bury people in unmarked individual paupers' graves, or even in unmarked mass paupers' graves (in the case of, say, an epidemic or some similar catastrophe) if nobody claimed the corpse, or if the relatives were too poor to, or unwilling to, afford a proper burial. This, in fact, was not rare.
2/ Back when national economies were yet too undeveloped to produce a surplus to be spent on, frankly, luxuries, there was exactly zero public support for spending tax money* to improve the material conditions of single mothers so that they have the same prospects in life as married wives**.
*Keep in mind, please, that, unlike today, milking the impregnators for child support under the threat of imprisonment wasn't an option either in most cases, because they were either dead, or already in prison/workhouse, or too poor to be milked for money.
**Again, let's be clear about this: back in the days of benighted Papist Ireland, or in any similar patriarchal society, I can assure you there were probably zero housewives willing to tolerate the spectre of the government basically confiscating a given % of her husband's income and giving it to unwed mothers in the form of state handouts. The extent to which Christian societies in such economic conditions were willing to go to look after the downtrodden was basically to shove them onto the Church and leave them to hold the bag. In the same way, the Church was basically expected to sweep up a portion of single men and women that were unmarriageable for whatever reason and train them to be monks, priests and nuns, so that they were no longer a problematic pain in the butt to their own families.
3/ Also, a society that poor is also unable to pay for lavishly equipped, professional, extensive police forces. This means extrajudicial punishment, communal vigilantism and mob justice was seen as normal and necessary by most people, at least to a certain extent.
4/ Stray dogs were normally slaughtered and their cadavers/bones were used for producing animal glue and other similar products, because you could be sure absolutely nobody was going to contribute material resources to founding and running comfy dog shelters. (I know this has nothing to do with these manufactured scandals, but I included it because we know that white liberals just love dogs.)
This is one of the things that I find utterly weird about our moment in history. We just have no concept of how much of what we have is a product of simply having abundance. We can afford to put people in jail being completely unproductive for years and even decades and still feed them for all that. We can afford to pay people who cannot (and often will not) do anything productive. We can afford to tolerate a great deal of deviant behavior and ideologies. And I’ve always strongly suspected that most of not all of our “enlightened ways” come down to us being wealthy enough to be enlightened.
And I think when the surplus goes away (either because of space colonization or collapse) we’ll have to go back to the unenlightened ways of our ancestors. When you not doing productive work means a lack of food, or your deviant behavior puts others at risk or consumes too many resources, other people aren’t going to put up with that for long. If your “transition” in whatever form it takes, costs too many medical resources and you live in a place where medical care isn’t easy to come by, that by itself harms people. The blood used for your top surgery means a shortage of blood for people having accidents or something, or maybe a shortage of antibiotics as well, people aren’t going along with that because they understand that it means they might not get medical care.
Indeed. Just to provide one example off the top of my head, pencil lengtheners were routinely used in public education, especially primary schools, pretty much everywhere in the world until, say, the middle of the 20th century. Just think about it. Even though pencils were mass-produced as the cheapest writing instruments in existence, just buying the necessary number of pencils, even the cheapest ones, was considered by the average family an expense large enough that there was widespread demand for a dirt-cheap instrument that had no purpose other than lengthening the service life of a pencil. I's unfathomable when we look back to that.
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