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 -
Following on from the defeat of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice referendum (seriously can we just include Torres Strait Islanders in the definition of "Aboriginal"? The whole phrase is too many words) Aboriginal leaders declared a week of silence to mourn the result.
Alas, all good things must come to an end, and the silence is now over. The leaders of the Yes campaign have published an open letter to the Parliament, and it is salty. So salty that reportedly some people refused to sign on to it - and perhaps that is why it appears without any names attached.
It opens by describing Australia's decision to vote no as "appalling and mean-spirited". It asserts that "It is the legitimacy of the non-Indigenous occupation in this country that requires recognition, not the other way around." It says that "the majority of Australians have committed a shameful act". So on and so forth.
In short, it is very much filled with the sort of resentment and hostility that turns people off, hard. Even on the normally far left /r/australia subreddit, posters are tearing strips off it.
This is of course a terrible time for the Yes campaigners to be acting in this way. With the failure of the Voice, indigenous policy is in a state of flux. The government is licking its wounds and weighing how to respond. These activists could not have made a better argument for why they should be sidelined in those deliberations.
The letter says that there was a lot of misinformation/disinformation about the referendum and the mainstream media was complicit in this by showing both sides. Is Australia's media really like this?
I mean I have no doubt that there's probably a lot of partisan media but I'm wondering how true this is because my exposure has usually left me thinking that media there is about as left-leaning as America's.
Anyway, it's probably a good thing they went for that invective though if you don't want the pending disinformation bill to pass. I'd bet if that letter was a lot softer they could convince a lot more people that "a 'false sense of balance' over facts." needs some agency to force the media to make rules to be policed.
No, Australia's media is not like this. It's similar to America in terms of its partisan split (a large centre-left blob with some right wing counter-outlets), but less extreme and much more responsible in terms of the accuracy of its reporting. Most of the complaints about "misinformation" in the voice referendum refer to arguments like "this will divide us by race" - e.g. David Speers tried to nail down Julian Leeser on the Insiders program to "admit" that this was misinformation. But of course it's an entirely reasonable argument.
And of course the Yes campaign engaged in plenty of misinformation of their own, for example by touting that 80% of indigenous voters were in favour of the voice - relying on out of date polls from January-March while recent ones found the numbers were more like 59%.
As far as I know, both sets of polls are sampling bias all the way down.
Graphs of the vote by locality show that places where you expect Aboriginals to live went pretty heavily "yes". Hard to tell how to translate that into a percentage-of-aboriginals, but 80% wouldn't surprise me. More importantly, this method is disproportionately sensitive to the votes of outback Aboriginals, which means it undercuts the idea that only city-dwelling elite Aboriginals supported the Voice.
I think the remote mobile teams in Lingiari are the most reliable indicators of outback Aboriginal votes, and they were indeed pretty high for Yes - around 73% on average. But of course outback Aborigines are a small minority of total Aborigines - and while they're the ones that we're most concerned about from a policy standpoint, that's tangential to the question of polling accuracy.
So I do think the evidence suggests that white Aborigines voted No more heavily than remote Aborigines did. That doesn't really surprise me - while the elite Aborigines are white, most white Aborigines are poor and working class. It can be simultaneously true that remote outback Aborigines and white urban Aborigines are very different from each other, and that the elite activist class is different from both of them.
I had to look up Lingiari to see that it was an electoral division. It’s huge, and yet the least populated division? I can’t believe that the middle of your continent is so…empty.
Yeah the Northern Territory is about 150k people and electorates are supposed to be about 120k people. So it can either be one overpopulated electorate or 2 underpopulated ones. They went with two, and one of them is basically just Darwin. Lingiari is everything else.
It's incredibly sparse in the interior. Durack is the biggest electorate, covering a huge chunk of Western Australia. It would be in the top 20 largest countries in the world if it were a country, bigger than Peru or South Africa. And it has less than 120k people.
I grew up in the outback, and unless you've lived there you just can't understand it. You have to do pretty much everything for yourself, because there's so few people around you to trade with to do it for you. Our closest neighbour was 40km away, the nearest town was 60km (and was just a few hundred people). Even the mailbox at our front gate was a 10km drive. Our farm was 2.5x the size of Manhattan, and it was one of the smaller ones in the area. The distances are just vast.
Question- do you tend to have large extended families on the farm, with maybe a hired laborer or two, or is it a one nuclear family plus a ranch hand operation?
It seems like this is set up for sons to live at home with their mail order brides well into adulthood, but it also seems like Australia has a culture not-particularly conducive to that.
One nuclear family, no employees, and the kids move to the city when they grow up.
What that means of course is that an incredibly empty part of the country is steadily becoming even emptier. For example this region of South Australia, more than double the size of Italy, with just 2573 people, and losing about 3% of their population each year.
Edit: Last year this property larger than Palestine sold for $34 million, or about $21 million in US dollars.
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