site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 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.

9
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Back to aliens again- I haven’t seen this posted yet. https://abc7.com/amp/mexico-aliens-corpses-ufos/13776957/

Tdlr is Mexico’s congress has what are claimed to be mummified alien bodies ‘with eggs inside’ which is a significant escalation if you assume they’re copying the US congress.

Now obviously I don’t believe in aliens, and it’s going to take a bit more effort than that to convince me. But one government is pushing an aliens narrative, and now a different government which has a lot of official tensions with it is pushing an aliens narrative. There’s got to be some reason governments would do aliens.

My question is why? Is it something that just makes sense to government officials?

When you say you obviously don’t believe in aliens do you mean you don’t believe aliens exist, that they visited earth, or that Mexico has their remains?

Three overlapping claims count as Ayys. Here are my thoughts on all three, add yours.

  1. Life somewhere else in the universe: Very likely, it's quite possible primitive life even exists elsewhere in the solar system.

  2. Intelligent life somewhere else in the universe: Moderately likely, FERMI paradox can be resolved in a number of satisfactory ways.

  3. Intelligent life that has deliberately visited earth, in person, regularly since the middle of the 20th century: Very unlikely.

1: Agreed on "very likely," as a minimum. Would upgrade this to "virtually certain". Happily an unproveable question for all forseeable circumstances.

2: Would upgrade this to virtually certain as well. On a cosmic scale, I would say the chances of extraterrestrial life and said life being intelligent are approximately the same (ie discovering a million non-intelligent species for every one intelligent species puts us at roughly the same ratio as Earth). Also the Fermi Paradox really doesnt hold any water for me, space is really, really big, and its perfectly reasonable to assume that any intelligent species with the capability of sending and recieving interstellar communications doesnt just blast those signals in a maximally inefficient manner on the off chance they might be picked up by another as of yet uncontacted species. 3. Agreed, with the possible exception of things postulated in works such as "Roadside Picnic" where our encounters with extraterrestrials were mutually incomprehensible ones, such as some the of the many gamma-ray bursts we detect being alien communications that we are totally unable to decipher, not having gamma ray based coms.