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 -
In the trans debate, I encountered an argument the other day which to me reads like a textbook example of an unfalsifiable hypothesis. I would like to run it by you good people to see if there's something I'm missing.
My woke, far-left sister was complaining about a male person she knows who claims to be non-binary, and yet behaves in a manner entirely consistent with certain negative stereotypes about masculinity, specifically "mansplaining", the tendency of certain men to condescendingly talk down to women, even if the women in question are more knowledgeable about the topic in question than the man himself is. She said it was abundantly obvious from his demeanour that this person was a man, not something intermediate between male and female.
I thought to myself "wow, my sister's gotten redpilled somewhere along the way" and enthusiastically agreed with her, arguing that I think the concept of "gender identity" has essentially zero predictive power, and that self-declared trans people almost invariably behave in a manner more consistent with their natal sex then their claimed gender identity. The specific example I gave was that trans women are 6 times more likely than cis women to be convicted of a crime, and 18 times more likely to be convicted of a violent crime. Which is exactly what you'd expect on the basis of their sex, not their gender identity. If trans women are women trapped inside men's bodies, why do they commit crimes at the same rates as men?
My sister's rebuttal was that, even though trans women are women trapped inside men's bodies, they were still socialised to be male prior to their coming out as trans, which compels them to behave in a manner consistent with the masculine norm.
This strikes me as a perfect example of the adage "if a theory explains everything, it explains nothing". If a trans woman behaves in a manner consistent with how you'd expect a female person to behave, that demonstrates that she's really a woman. If a trans woman behaves in a manner consistent with how you'd expect a male person to behave, that demonstrates that she was socialised into behaving like a male person against her will. Under this framing, there is literally nothing a trans woman can do which can ever point away from her "really" being a woman.
What would it take to falsify this hypothesis? Is there some piece of the puzzle that I'm missing here? I'm sincerely looking for a steelman.
I think your sister's stated explanations are simply an attempt to rationalize her feelings. They're not a description of her actual underlying reasoning.
I think for a lot of everyday liberals who haven't thought carefully about this stuff, the reasoning goes like this: trans/NB people are oppressed, and oppressed people are good and virtuous. Therefore if someone (in my estimation) is not good and virtuous, then they are not "really" trans/NB.
You see this a lot. When a trans person is in the news doing something bad, then they're not really trans, they're faking it. Similarly, if a member of an oppressed minority group doesn't hold the right opinions or vote the right way, they're self-hating or not "really" an authentic member of their race, etc.
So there's a difference here between being 'not really' X, and being an unrepresentative example of X.
I think most people are not really aware of this difference on a level where they could talk about it coherently.
But it's very very often true that, when some member of a group has been shown in the public eye to be bad, with an implication that this demonstrates how members of that group are bad generally or how this group is bad for society, that this individual has been adversarially chosen and is in fact not representative of their group.
Think about brutal and criminal police held up as examples of ACAB and justifications for Defund. It would be entirely sensible to argue that these are not representative examples and don't justify the level of hostility towards the larger group that they are being used to engender.
Of course, with police, defenders don't have the option of claiming they're not 'real' police, because there is a central authoritative agency which objectively determines that fact (eg, they have a badge).
But in cases where there is no such objective metric and claims of being 'not a real X' are in fact possible and sensible, it's not surprising to me that people fall into this rhetoric when trying to express the intuition that this attempt to tar a group with a bad individual is unfair and dishonest.
It's not good rhetoric, but most people have no training in rhetoric and are bad at it; you will always be able to find examples of someone saying something stupid online.
My point is I think it's a bad attempt at conveying a good and true logical point about what is happening. And it's worth engaging with the point instead of the rhetoric where possible.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link