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 -
ongoing shooting in lewiston, maine
reportedly 22+ dead, 60+ shot. shooter is rumored to be an ex army guy. perhaps shaping up to be the next las vegas massacre. stay safe and prepare for the gun control debate to be revved up full force tomorrow
So basically two weeks worth of murders in Chicago. I want to live in a world where these events are not news and the constant drumbeat of urban violence is.
This is how news works. Obviously if this was actually a one-off freak occurrence then I agree it would be relatively unimportant, but it stands as a particularly stark example of a broader problem which actually is important - which is to say America's gun problem. You could make this criticism of almost any famous event. 9/11 has already been mentioned, but for a different example take the murder of Samuel Paty. That was only one man killed (plus the perpetrator), but it even became a famous event outside of France as it gained a symbolic relevance surrounding the general issues of Islamic extremism and integration.
I think this is revealing. Is the problem guns or is it murders? Because these mass shootings are a very small percent of overall murders.
If you listen to the news, they seem to think it's very important to stop these mass shootings. But there is little talk about the huge increase in murders in nearly all major cities. Progressive news outlets are not concerned with actual murder numbers, they just want to stop gun nuts (the outgroup) from having guns.
Well it's both. Guns contribute to the murder problem (not just mass shootings but generally), but also to suicide, overall levels of violence etc.
Lazy and uncharitable. Even if you reject them, there are reasonable, and to my mind persuasive, genuine public safety rationale behind restricting gun ownership, so why not talk about those instead of navel-gazing about how much your own outgroup are out to get theirs'.
As a blue tribe urbanite, I am not a gun owner, nor are any of my family or close friends.
My point is that, if you care about people dying, then why not focus on the things that kill orders of magnitude more people than mass shootings? To name a few: Heart disease, diabetes, urban violence?
I agree with this. And in fact, I support greater enforcement against people who carry unlicensed guns. Putting people who have illegal guns behind bars would greatly reduce gun violence, more than any legislative action. Here in Seattle, people who commit multiple felonies and are caught with illegal guns are often put back onto the streets with charges dismissed. As a result, 2023 will set the record for the most murders ever committed in the city.
As to banning guns entirely, the second amendment is my mind prevents that.
Well guns are part of the urban violence, for one. In terms of other issues, maybe there are more important things (but consider what policy response you would propose for obesity etc. - are there any ones which would both have a shred of support and make a big difference)? However guns are certainly a sufficiently important problem to be worthy of some national debate. The West ought to talk about traffic deaths and heart disease more, but in America ideally at the expense of culture war fluff like trans issues rather than something genuinely important like guns.
True, but so would many conventional gun control measures like ERPOs, and indeed just reducing the overall ownership of guns. American should be doing all of these.
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
What you're calling 'the constant drumbeat of urban violence' is just the normal stochastic process of people who know and interact with each other sometimes being violent towards each other (plus a semantic fence drawn around a part of that phenomenon for rhetorical reasons).
We can talk about whether those rates are too high or too low, and what policies could change that number, sure.
But it's not really newsworthy because it's mostly normal stuff that happens everywhere (at different rates) in one form or another. And people know how it works, what their risks are like and where teh danger comes from, how to avoid it, etc..
Incidents like this are newsworthy because they're unusual, unexpected, spectacular, and can happen out of nowhere to just about anyone simply going about their day.
I guess that's my point.
These mass shootings are not newsworthy. They are neither high impact (heart disease / urban violence). Nor are they novel (9-11 / space shuttle blowing up).
Imagine if every time a person was shot in South Chicago we made a national news story out of it and decried the left-wing politicians in Chicago who enable this violence. That's what's happening with these mass shootings. It's mostly political noise.
I dunno, I would agree that they're blown out of proportion, but I'd also argue they're at least somewhat newsworthy.
Again, it's really really salient to me that I can control my diet and exercise to avoid heart disease and I can not associate with mentally unstable people with guns and not drive drunk/always drive defensively and etc. to protect myself from a lot of known risks that kill a lot more people than this every year. Generally speaking, anything where there's clear and well-known methods I can look up to limit my risk, I fee may be very important, but not newsworthy.
Whereas things that just kill you out of the blue for no reasons as you're going about your day, or especially that kill a lot of people at once, feel newsworthy to me as an unexplored risk that I don't have much control over mitigating for myself. It feels to me like that makes it more of a topic of public conversation and public policy because I can't reasonably take personal responsibility to avoid it.
You probably just have different intuitions about what makes something newsworthy, which is totally fine. I'm just saying how it feels to me, I don't know how generalizable it is.
I don't think "I can't control this, but I can control those things" actually works here.
You can not drive drunk and always drive defensively, but you can't always stop the drunk person blasting through the red light from T-boning you unless you stay off the roads altogether. You may say you can control your diet and exercise, but how well do you, and what do the actuarial tables say about your actual risk of heart attack?
If you want to reduce your chance of being killed by a spree killer, it's not like there's nothing you can do. You can carry a firearm and train with it. You can avoid "gun free zones" that can't actually enforce their self identification. You can come up with plans for escape/counter ambush in case of a spree shooting. You can wear body armor, and avoid the kinds of large gatherings where these things happen. There's a lot you could do, it's just not always convenient to reduce risk, and you can never reduce risk to exactly zero.
Your theory would make sense if it were concealed carriers who were freaking out about spree shooting, having already taken steps to mitigate risk and being in relatively less control of their remaining risk. What I tend to find though is that it's people who are opposed to concealed carry who tend to be more concerned about spree shootings, and that points more to "don't want to have to consider doing the things necessary in order to mitigate this risk" as the actual driver of this concern.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
9/11 was basically a month's worth of traffic fatalities, and yet I find it hard to credit the idea that it shouldn't have been newsworthy.
Why is no one talking about this?
State-backed violence is scalable in a way that traffic accidents or random homicides isn't - if an empire takes one of your state's villages, it's going to take more unless can you fight back - whereas if an earthquake takes one of your villages ... that sucks, but it's just nature, being angry about it doesn't accomplish anything. So 9/11 is noteworthy and worth harshly responding to in a way that traffic fatalities aren't. However, the response to 9/11 was absolutely overdone and poorly thought through in no small part due to the awakening of previously-suppressed national passions and desire for war it caused, and thus could be described as 'too newsworthy'.
"Insane people doing mass shootings" doesn't have the same scaling issue, though. There are already sufficiently strong incentives against doing it that it just doesn't happen that much, and those who do it are mostly insane or stupid. "Mass shootings" and "school shootings" get way more attention than they should by any reasonable metric.
And, yes, the mainstream media does talk about urban violence. What grandparent was pointing to, though, is that they don't emphasize it as much as mass shootings or racism violence, and that they're very resistant to the kinds of solutions that'd actually solve urban violence, such as expanding and empowering police and active and paternalistic intervention to change culture.
More options
Context Copy link
Sure, but 9/11 only happened once and involved flying planes into a building. That's new and shocking.
Another news story about a crazy dude shooting 20 people? Big whoop. I officially don't care.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The difference is that people don’t really care when gang members in Chicago kill each other, they do care when people uninvolved in crime who live in middle class or wealthy places get killed randomly.
The vast majority of homicides in the US are things you don’t need to worry about as the average middle class white or asian person. Mass shootings of this kind (or school shootings, or the Las Vegas thing, or Islamist terror attacks on office buildings or a marathon finish line or whatever) trigger a fear and panic response because the people affected are not the kind of people who are the victims of regular violent crime very often.
I bet the homicide rate for white Chicagoans who make more than $100,000 a year is not high enough to be concerning.
I understand this is as a valid reason for why the average middle class American should be more concerned by a mass shooting of this nature rather than gun violence, but in terms of warranted magnitude of concern, I concur with @jeroboam that it rounds out to about zilch.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think that explains it entirely. Middle class white Americans need to be worried about heart disease, not mass shootings.
These shootings won't take 0.01 years off my life span.
It's the sensationalist aspect combined with the ability to push a left wing narrative about "gun nuts" and "America bad" that makes these stories run. Personally, I'll continue to mash the "don't care" button hard.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link