site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 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.

The ABC's called it: the Australian referendum to enshrine special Aboriginal representation in the Constitution has utterly failed. They needed a majority nationally and a majority in four of the six states; they've gotten at last count 41% (possibly less; pre-polls are counted last, and while I wasn't expecting it they seem to have more No than the on-the-day vote) of the national vote and have lost in all six of the states (again, I was expecting Tasmania and/or Victoria to buck the trend - Victoria being the most urbanised Australian state, with 75% of its population in the state capital of Melbourne, and Tasmania having a long tradition of hippie-ism and being the birthplace of the Greens; they were also polling the highest Yes).

Most of the Yes campaigners - at least, those the ABC talked to - seem to be going with the line of "the No campaign was misinformation and this doesn't count because they were tricked"*. That's wrong (there were a few people with crazy ideas, of course, but for the most part what the SJers are decrying as "misinformation" is true or plausible), but it's at least wrong about a dry fact and not nearly as divisive as going "this proves Australia's a racist country".

The result does seem to have emboldened people to actually stand up against SJ; Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was very hesitant to go with No (though he eventually did), but in his speech upon hearing the result he specifically said that this result was Australians rejecting activists' claims.

At-least-partial credit to @OliveTapenade, who said:

If No wins, I think it will be taken as evidence that the Australian people are deeply racist and ignorant (hence the need for Truth)

...the last time we discussed this on theMotte. They mostly seem to be leaning on "ignorant" rather than "racist", but yes, they're saying "this demonstrates need for Truth".

*NB: this doesn't, for the moment, include Prime Minister Anthony Albanese; all he's said on the matter of "why No" IIRC is that referenda never succeed without bipartisan support.

One of the things that was remarkable about this campaign was how overwhelming the Yes campaign's resources were. Over the course of the campaign I saw ads and billboards and people handing out pamphlets and even a choir promoting the Yes case. In comparison I saw exactly one (1) bumper sticker for No and nothing else. At the polling booth there were half a dozen volunteers for Yes and the whole fence was blanketed with their signage while No had one guy with one sign. And I've heard there were other polling places that didn't even have that.

I really wish people would learn that all this campaign paraphernalia is completely worthless, and arguably counterproductive. It was extremely clear the people with money and power wanted a Yes victory, but that doesn't actually convince anyone.

The proposal was the result of starting with the idea of putting Aboriginals in the constitution and then jerry-rigging it into an advisory body after people complained that they wanted something practical, but also trying not to do anything concrete or specific that could offend someone. It was a mess of an idea and really someone should have had the balls to stop this process before it got to this point instead of shunting off the responsibility of putting it down to the voting public.

I don't feel any joy in this result, though it's the outcome I voted for. We've had a bunch of angst and drama for no gain, and it seems clear no one is going to learn anything from the experience. All the talking heads are busy convincing themselves that the problem is somehow the sales job and not the product. No one is even thinking to ask if maybe it just wasn't a bit implausible that you needed a constitutional amendment to create an advisory committee, or that an advisory committee was going to somehow fix all the massive problems Aboriginal Australia faces. Maybe we just need to lecture people not to be racist harder next time. Yeah, that'll work.

...Australia allows campaigning at the polling place? That's an absolute no-no in Finland, you can't even walk in to vote wearing your preferred candidate's pin.

There's a 6 metre buffer zone outside the actual school hall/whatever that is being used as a polling place. So it's routine to run a gauntlet of campaigners trying to shove paper in your hand as you walk through the gate. It annoys a lot of people.

There's an old Chaser sketch exploring different ways to try to get through unscathed.

Only six meters? In Texas the electioneering exclusion zone is the same as the exclusion zone for guns, and people are regularly sent to the bathroom to turn political shirts inside out before being allowed to vote. Political action committees produce lists of endorsed candidates on unofficial letterhead(that is it doesn’t say ‘vote for real true conservatives’) so they can be carried into the polling booth.

Yeah, only six metres. And you're allowed to take party political material in with you - it's routine for parties to give out "how to vote" cards recommending an ordering of candidates (e.g. us first, our allies second, weirdos and fringe candidates in the middle, and our enemies at the bottom) to voters walking in.

We have ‘how to vote’ cards too, they’re just plain black and white with no letterheads or logos of a political party or advocacy group of any sort. It would be illegal to carry a flier into a poll booth but you can have a list to remind yourself.

(I know you specifically don't need to know this, but for non-Australians reading, I hope this is helpful.)

I'll add that the how-to-vote cards do have a practical function. Firstly, Australia's voting system is relatively complex compared to countries like the US, so having a little more advice on how to correctly fill out a ballot seems reasonable. Secondly, we have preferential voting, and one of the purposes of how-to-vote cards is to explain how the party would like you to vote.

Let me give a specific example - here's a Labor how-to-vote card for the 2015 Canning by-election. For a vote in Australia to be valid, it has to number every box in order. If you just write a '1' in the box of your favourite candidate, your vote will not count. However, there are twelve candidates in Canning! Twelve! Is the average voter really going to research every one of them and rank them in order? The how-to-vote card tells you how the Labor Party would like you to rank all the candidates. If you already know you want to vote for Labor, why not follow their advice?

Canning is an extreme case - there usually aren't twelve candidates. But anecdotally, I find that in my electorate it is usually somewhere between five and seven, and that's still a lot. Thus every party gives out cards like this.

The better cards, in my opinion, also give a little bit of information on the candidate's or party's platform, but that's up to the party. Still, they do have a useful role in educating and streamlining the voting process.

That said one worthwhile sidenote is that because a lot of voters just follow the order that their preferred party says, the people who decide the orders on the how-to-vote cards can have a lot of influence - this is where so-called preference deals can have a big influence. Often the parties will negotiate with other behind the scenes a bit for their preferences, and it can have a significant impact.

Obviously none of this matters for a referendum, because there aren't any parties and a referendum is a straight Yes/No question, but it is an interesting quirk of the way the Australian electoral system works.

For a vote in Australia to be valid, it has to number every box in order. If you just write a '1' in the box of your favourite candidate, your vote will not count.

Whoa really? Where I live there have been occasional rumblings about switching to preference voting, and I've mostly been agnostic about it. But this part seems like a negative, to me. If it's clear who someone meant to vote for, the vote should count.

I'm curious what the reasoning is here? Is this specific to Australia? Something to do with mandatory voting?

That's just how it works in Australia. To my knowledge, when preferential voting is proposed overseas, as in the UK Alternative Vote referendum in 2011, the proposal has been for optional-preferential voting, rather than our mandatory full-preferential system. Likewise I believe New York uses optional-preferential rather than full.

As to why that's the way it works here, I don't know specifically.

We adopted preferential voting with the Commnowealth Electoral Act of 1918, after WWI - the intent was that, since politics of the day were a relatively unified Labor Party which would likely win a plurality vote every time against a gaggle of competing alternative parties, preferential voting was necessary to ensure fair representation. In 1918 the Nationalists were in power, and there had just been a by-election which Labor won with only a third of the vote, against two conservative candidates who split each other's vote. Preferential voting was intended to prevent travesties like that. Naturally Labor opposed it at the time, but today both major parties are solidly behind it.

(Interestingly, the general dynamic of Australian politics still mostly holds today, in that Labor is consistently the biggest individual party, and it's opposed by a rough coalition of not-Labor parties, which today are called the Coalition. The general structure of Australian politics has been the interests of labour, represented by the Labor party, against the interests of capital, represented by the National/Country/United Australia/Liberal/Whatever party. That said, this might be changing as over the last few decades, Labor have been increasingly losing touch with their earlier working-class and union base, and both major parties are seeing their primary votes collapse, as voters leave the big parties for more ideological alternatives.)

Anyway, I don't know why we chose full-preferential voting in 1918. For better or for worse, we did, and no one seems to want to risk touching the electoral system today. So it's likely to stay.

(We did not have mandatory voting in 1918 - that was introduced in 1924, after the 1922 election only had 60% turnout, which at the time was considered extraordinarily low, and indeed too low to give the government a real mandate. I realise that sounds quaint now with countries like the United States usually showing sub-60 turnout - I guess it just goes to show what a different time it was.)

I use the how-to-vote cards to triangulate minor parties' and independents' positions based on the patterns of how major parties rank them. I'm a relatively-high-information voter as regards the major parties' positions (for 2022, once my single-issue-voting plan failed due to hearing crickets from all parties, I went through all the online platforms - or at least, four of them, since I seem to recall the UAP not even having one, and I don't think I checked the Nats since for some reason Bendigo gets Libs), but minor parties and independents are harder and I usually don't bother.

One thing I will note about preference deals is this: there used to be a cordon sanitaire against preference deals with One Nation (I recall the Libs putting One Nation last under Howard), but it collapsed and the Liberals now preference One Nation second.

It is hilarious that preferential voting which was a Reddit fan favourite of 2010s and was surely going to herald true democracy…. ended up creating more backroom politics

What’s the problem with it though. In effect some uninformed voters voluntarily hand their preferred parties the power of their residual votes to use as they see fit, along with the main one. If the voter himself says : ‘I’ve seen all I wanted to see, go to the backroom’, it’s not really backroom politics.

It also succeeds at doing the thing it is meant to do - preventing vote-splitting from making third parties counterproductive.

E.g. the seat of Pumicestone in the 2017 Queensland election gave the most votes to the left wing Labor candidate (the amusingly named Michael Hoogwaerts), with 35%. The right wing vote was split between the Liberal National candidate with 30% and the even more right wing One Nation candidate with 23%.

FPTP would have given the seat to Labor, despite most voters voting for a right wing candidate. Instead, the Liberal National won it on preferences.

More comments

For what it's worth I do think preferential voting is superior to first-past-the-post, but you're right that it does not end or remove backroom deals. I don't believe there's any form of democracy, or even of government entirely, that's immune to scheming and dealing behind the scenes.

In this specific case, alternative vote (i.e. not requiring every box be filled) would be an alternative to Australia's mandatory full preferential voting that would significantly weaken the power of preference deals.

One of the things that was remarkable about this campaign was how overwhelming the Yes campaign's resources were.

The amount of resources there are behind progressive politics is pretty much always immense, basically every influential institution was supporting Yes. At the entrance of my train station, there were Yes campaigners outside for days, handing out flyers to people. Even bodies that should strictly be impartial such as local governments (City of Sydney) were putting up advertisements all over the place telling people to support the Voice, which is frankly inappropriate and clearly overstepping the bounds of their ambit. As you note, it ended up being very clear that this was not some grassroots campaign for change, but a well-funded, dominant group filled with people who have an overwhelming influence over what the public gets to hear and see.

It's also very clear that the well-funded progressive elite, the people who populate the opinion-setting parts of the media, academia, and various other institutions, have hugely lost touch with the rest of the country and simply don't care to listen to them. Then every single time people turn against their policies, there always seems to be such a great amount of surprise and dismay that people would disagree with them, and a knee-jerk assumption that the reason for lack of support can simply be chalked up to stupidity or racism. Perhaps some of it is performative, but I do think that they really believe it.

It's also very clear that the well-funded progressive elite, the people who populate the opinion-setting parts of the media, academia, and various other institutions, have hugely lost touch with the rest of the country and simply don't care to listen to them.

From the descriptions of the amount of resources thrown behind the yes campaign(eg people handing out fliers in train stations for days) it almost sounds more like it was people who don’t have day jobs.

and simply don't care to listen to them.

Well, why should they listen to the opinions of a mass of inferior peasants, if they "really believe" those opinions are driven by stupidity and racism? If you have power, why not enforce the objectively correct and moral position over the objections of the ignorant and the wicked?

The issue is that this kind of rhetoric and behaviour only really helps you gain status within a peer group that already agrees with you, it doesn't help get people on board. It may be fashionable to dehumanise your outgroup and form representations of them as evil and stupid that justify not listening to them or trying to sympathise with their concerns. But the reality is that if you fail to try and properly understand the rest of the country, and form caricatures of them that simply do not align with how they really think and act, you're almost certainly not going to be able to convince them nor will you be able to convert people to be in favour of your policy proposals.

The entire Yes campaign has seemed to believe that the morality of an indigenous Voice is so self-evident that they don't even need to try and form much of a coherent argument in favour of why it's a good decision (well, outside of empty sympathy-mongering, sloganeering and other such tactics that attempt to substitute actual argument for emotional appeal, I believe @OliveTapenade has covered that topic in detail in this thread and in previous ones too).

One of the main arguments I see in favour of the Voice is that Indigenous outcomes are poor, it's the fault of whites and therefore Something Needs To Be Done. But even accepting the premise that the Indigenous deserve something, it doesn't answer the question of why what they deserve is a constitutionally mandated lobbying group that exists to promote their interests and their interests alone (especially considering the failure of ATSIC to solve these problems and how it became a corrupt, mismanaged fuckfest). Australia pumps lots of money into Indigenous causes all the time, does this not already constitute help? It's also unclear why providing help even requires any amount of differential treatment based on race at all (if the Indigenous are disproportionately poor, any policy focusing on socioeconomic status instead of ethnicity will also disproportionately help the Indigenous while also not neglecting other Australians in need). The woke arguments simply have not addressed these issues and do not stand up to this kind of scrutiny. Regurgitating empty platitudes about "listening to people affected" are not arguments, they are slogans, and not particularly convincing ones either.

The reality is that it's not as clear cut as they think, and their failure to make sensible arguments in favour of the policy or properly acknowledge the arguments of their opponents drives home to people just how intellectually vacuous the argument in favour of the proposal is and has always been. It really seems like Yes just can't conceive of reasons why one would vote No, and instead of actually dealing with the core-level issues inherent to the proposal they are supporting it mainly on vibes alone.

This is what I mean when I say they have "hugely lost touch with the rest of the country". Of course, I won't interrupt my enemies in the middle of making a mistake.

it doesn't help get people on board.

you're almost certainly not going to be able to convince them nor will you be able to convert people to be in favour of your policy proposals.

So what? So long as you have your fellow elites on board, you can just use your power as elites to force what you want on the powerless peasant masses. You don't need to "convince" or "convert" the peasant masses, just find ways to punish them for being ignorant bigots and voting wrong until enough of them eventually vote your way — assuming that, as it seems to be in this case, that you can't just impose your goals through the permanent bureaucracy, courts, academic consensus, or other such powerful institutions more insulated from democratic feedback.

"Democracy" is, and always has been, more of a sham than a reality. Society is always ruled by a small elite, and that elite always ends up getting their way, and the masses are pretty much always just powerless peasants who can do nothing but submit. Why should lords, with their superior breeding and wisdom, bother to listen to the ignorant opinions of dirty, stupid peasants, as opposed to just whipping the low-born curs into compliance?

So long as you have your fellow elites on board, you can just use your power as elites to force what you want on the powerless peasant masses.

Probably the wrong time to be making this claim, seeing as the powerless peasant masses just beat the elites handily.

The issue is that this kind of rhetoric and behaviour only really helps you gain status within a peer group that already agrees with you, it doesn't help get people on board.

Does the evidence pan out there? The impulse to avoid shame and being seen as part of a low-status group seems quite strong (e.g. I'd consider it the finisher of old school internet atheism, "in this moment, I'm ecstatic" or how that one went), and I don't know if the current Moral Majority was ever particularly more conciliatory on the path to its present degree of mass support. (If you do accept them as the descendants of the hippies of yore, they were already calling their outgroup fascists back in the late sixties!)

A lot probably depends on how many members of their remaining opposition still subscribe to their status hierarchy, and either side has a correct feel for this figure.

If you do accept them as the descendants of the hippies of yore, they were already calling their outgroup fascists back in the late sixties

I remember once watching a rerun of an episode of Dragnet — which ran back in the 50s — with a couple of proto-hippy California college students calling Joe Friday a "fascist pig."

A lot probably depends on how many members of their remaining opposition still subscribe to their status hierarchy, and either side has a correct feel for this figure.

Or how many notables among their remaining opposition can be subjected to sufficient negative consequences as to make others among the opposition switch sides out of fear of the same — "Kill the chicken to scare the monkey" and such.

But even accepting the premise that the Indigenous deserve something, it doesn't answer the question of why what they deserve is a constitutionally mandated lobbying group that exists to promote their interests and their interests alone (especially considering the failure of ATSIC to solve these problems and how it became a corrupt, mismanaged fuckfest). Australia pumps lots of money into Indigenous causes all the time, does this not already constitute help?

The standard reply to this was, "This is what they asked for."

If you suggest that a legislated Voice would do, the reply is to note that the Uluru Statement asks for 'a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution'. To counter with any other suggestion would be patronising and even racist, whitefellas once again failing to listen and telling Aboriginals what's good for them.

You might ask the question whether or not the Uluru Statement actually reflects the desires of most indigenous people. You might also argue that democracy is inherently a process of deliberation and compromise between different interest groups and there is nothing clearly racist about replying to a suggestion with, "We don't think that's practical at the time, but here are some alternatives that meet you halfway." However, I think the Yes campaign was very hung up on the idea that this is definitely the one thing that Aboriginal people asked for, and that it is so fundamentally reasonable that no one could possibly object to it. Both those ideas seem blinkered to me.

Ironically, at the time in 2017, Malcolm Turnbull's response was to say that "the government does not believe such a radical change to our constitution’s representative institutions has any realistic prospect of being supported by a majority of Australians in a majority of states". Despite being roundly criticised for that at the time, six years on it appears that he was entirely correct. Perhaps the drafters of the Uluru Statement might have done better to do some listening of their own, and consider what Turnbull - a sympathetic politician - was telling them was practically possible.

The standard reply to this was, "This is what they asked for."

I'd add that what people deserve is a matter that is able to be litigated, not a matter that is unilaterally decided by the beneficiary and that everyone else is obligated to blindly agree with. Making "what people asked for" the basis for one's reasoning is untenable, as even in a situation where someone has been wronged and everyone agrees they deserve compensation there are indeed requests that can be made which are unreasonable or disproportionate or just plain impractical. Just because you deserve something doesn't necessarily mean you deserve to get what you want. And these are holes that can be poked even after one has assumed that the progressive framing of poor Indigenous outcomes is correct, and I don't.

Are we sure this is not due to some Russian trickery with the elections?

As we know, it's not real democracy if the people vote for the opposite of what the establishment want them to.

Surely Trump/MAGA/QAnon must be involved somehow! 😀

The Sydney Morning Herald helpfully reports:

Anti-Voice rallies organised by pro-Putin conspiracy theorist

Putin strikes again.

I wish I was ten percent as competent as the left believes Putin is.

I wish I was ten percent as competent as the left believes Putin is.

So does Putin.