site banner
ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35190 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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.

33
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The war between the future Italian Government and the EU is beginning.

After a question by a student, the Commission President von Der Leyen, said that the EU will use "all their instruments, as happened against Hungary and Poland" against Italy in the case of "democratic backsliding".

As always, after this, accusation from every part came, with the Left defending it and the Right attacking it. Notice that von Der Leyen is part of the CDU(PPE), but their policies have always been center-left.

Apart from this phrase (von Der Leyen is not new at speaking too much with the wrong words at the wrong time), it will be noteworthy to see what will happen if Italy enter the bad boy group with Poland and Hungary, especially when also Sweden and Spain will probably see governments with the hard-right inside or at the helm.

The instrument of "follow liberal human rights or sanctions" can work against Warsaw and Budapest, but against all these countries?

What will happen will define how democracy will function in the EU, and if parties that are not part of the PPE-PSE-Liberal-Green megagroup will bow and assimilate to the center-right, or will follow the Orban line.

For now, it looks like the Italian Goverment will follow a moderate line, considering that economic recession is behind the corner and the debt is exploding again.

Does the EU have an American-like deep state bureaucracy that is going to push for its own identity-politics left-of-center thing regardless of who is elected or appointed to what office? If so, is this bureaucracy in sync with much of the elite media so that going against it gets you labeled as basically evil and stupid?

It's not even 'deep-state'. It's basically just how the EU functions. The European Commission is made up almost entirely of career bureaucrats (who are largely social left-of-centre neoliberal types). The Commissioners themselves are basically unelected appointees from the member states, and while nominally they're subjected to an approval vote from the European Parliament, it's really just rubberstamping.

So it's "deep-state" by design and without pretense.

The EU has a bureaucracy that makes no bones about openly pushing for the "ever closer Union", ie. federalization of EU; that is the true ideological quest of the Eurocrats, not identity-politics or left-of-center politics as such. The federalization project has tended to be evolve at a snail's pace, though. We'll see if the coming years speed it up.

I am personally undecided what balance of EU-beuracratic following of American progressivism is an artifact of American cultural influence versus federalist designs. Eurocrats absolutely have their own sort of internal messaging programs and strategies to try and build public support, but while one part of that is pro-Europe, another is the teardown of prior loyalties, especially nationalist inclinations. Identity-politics as framed by the US- white versus black- is a meaningful alternative framing to European 'identities,' as it homogenizes European diversity into a collective that the EU can claim to represent as Europeans, as opposed to national identities that object to EU-centralization on national grounds.

For the lack of / failure to create a European nationalism despite significant effort, diluting the rest works almost as well.

I don't think it's very useful to look at EU messaging and such through the lens of how well it fits American progressivism. If you look at, for example, the Twitter accounts of European Commission and European Parliament, it is generally vaguely progressive/technocratic, but the common themes include:

  • EU as a climate leader (absolutely more central here than climate/environmental issues are in US Dem messaging, for instance; even Biden's major climate act had to be called Inflation Reduction Act, lol)

  • EU as a global actor, currently particularly in the sense of EU supporting Ukraine (Europeans have never exactly needed American progressives to tell them to fear Russia and oppose Russian expansion)

  • EU as an innovation leader (businesslike technocratic appeal of the EU)

  • European unity (connected to the above, at the moment)

These are all quite similar to the main arguments of local Europhiles, and they're fairly consistent with messaging the EU has pushed out for a long time. Race/gender/sexuality messaging is not nearly as prominent, apart from some appeals to "women's achievements" style basic feminism.

Race/gender/sexuality messaging is not nearly as prominent

It's becoming more and more prominent such as the European Commission's Anti-Racism Action Plan 2020-2025. Feminism/"gender equality" has always been a core component of EU social messaging.

It is partially an importation of American progressivism, albeit adapted to local conditions.

Again, I'm not arguing that there isn't a progressive element to EU messaging - rather that the EU messaging is quite different from current American progressive messaging, where race/sexuality/gender messaging often seems to be front and center, not something that usually takes a back seat compared to the issues I mentioned.

Yes, and I'm saying it is becoming more and more prominent and is on track to becoming front and centre.

I'd say yes with a high degree of confidence.

A few figures that might help contextualise discussion.

(1) Italy's population is 60 million, Hungary's population is 10 million

(2) Italy has a total GDP (nominal) of 1.9 trillion USD, Hungary of 155 billion USD.

(3) Italy is a net contributor to the EU to the tune of 7 billion USD per year. Hungary is a net recipient of approximately 5 billion USD per year.

Any sane organisation has ample reason to treat the two countries very differently.

Italian political establishment is set up in a way that allows for enormous EU influence through various channels, such as the ECB, Italian senate, presidency, judiciary and media. Any Italian leader planning to take on the EU needs to have a massive and dedicated supporter base, extreme political cunning, a lot of luck and balls of steel. Otherwise it’s very easy for the EU to get them Berlusconied in a matter of months and install yet another technocratic government until the people decide to vote the right way the next time. As the EU keeps doing this for many decades at this point, the rebellion movements in Italy are subject to vicious natural selection. Gone are the futuristic optimistic appeal of the five star. Or even the bumbling Salvini. Melon Iooks like she is quite real in her determination to fight. If she fails, someone even more fiery will take her place.

Hungary (and somewhat Poland) is such a hate object because the EU doesn’t have almost any control over it’s political establishment apart from cutting fiscal transfers. And that’s a very blunt instrument which would spook a lot of people.

Does the EU bully Poland into following its social policy successfully? I’m aware Hungary is more or less a special case, but what about Poland?

No, of course not, and Hungary isn't even a special case(why would it be?). Mostly, countries that only make a social fuss and don't fuck with the money get left alone other than posturing for domestic political points. In all of the EU, really, talk is cheap, and paying attention to words rather than actions is a bad idea.

Hungary did recently yield to EU demands on something or other, can’t remember if it was social policy or not.

That was a demand regarding corruption and fraud, which doesn't really skew left or rightwards no.

The QE program has been keeping the politics of default-likely countries in a very uneasy suspense for 10 years at this point. Even the most radical anti establishment parties such as Syriza or five star had to quickly back down when faced with the consequences of rocking the boat on the QE ship.

I strongly feel we are heading for a catastrophic breaking point soon as the inflation and devaluation pressures on the ECB will finally break the ridiculously unsustainable QE arrangements and the populist politics won’t be constrained by that dam anymore.

I don't think this is very relevant. The fiscal policy of the euro states is decided by the ECB's constraints. Whether a government has a populist stance or not usually changes absolutely nothing with regard to how much they spend. At most they can make a rhetorical show out of it.

I have actually read some of Varoufakis' books. He is insufferable as a person but also has a very clear grasp of naked power relations behind all the technical jargon of economics. According to himself, what he tried to do as the finance minister was to use the Greek bankruptcy in order to blackmail the EU into giving him a better deal since a Greek bankruptcy would likely bring down the entire euro with chain bankruptcies of exposed German/France/Dutch banks. He posits that his cabined and PM were cowards and not capable of committing to what they started. The threat of Italian bankruptcy is absolutely nuclear when compared to tiny Greece. If an Italian leader is willing to actually use it (with the credibility to follow through), this would open up a whole new dimension of crazy.

My prediction: Those rightwing governments will fail in many ways, like all governments do, but unlike others each mistake of theirs will be shouted from the rooftops and all their members will have their failings highlighted in minute detail by the media, until either these governments collapse under the stress or the voters learn to vote correctly next time.

This surge of rightwing election successes is a backlash to recent issues of immigration, covid hysteria and the usual culture war topics getting more attention - it will wane as the rightwing governments are discredited, but the aforementioned issues will continue unabated.

The EU will win this one thanks to having most media on their side.

Italy is definitely, absolutely, entirely not a nation where the media is on the side of the EU. And neither is Hungary's or Poland's, for that matter.

I meant not to imply that they were pro-EU but that the larger part are opposed to the rightwing governments and are helped by networking and signal boosting via their allies in other countries.

You'd be wrong to imply such a thing, because the media in those countries doesn't do that.

Fair enough, you may easily know it better than I.

I keep noticing people using the word "democratic" in place of "socially left". E.g.: if a middle eastern country, after elections and with parliamentary majority, passes a law forcing women to wear hijabs or whatever, that is democratic. If Slovenia votes in 3 separate referendums that they don't want gay marriage, and it still legalized, that is undemocratic. Yet people use the opposite labels to describe such events.

Another examples is when the supreme court overturned Roe vs Wade. People were saying it was undemocratic even though all it did was return the power to regulate abortion from the unelected court to elected officials.

I don't like Roe and am glad it was overturned, but it seems legitimate to call its reversal undemocratic because overturning Roe was unpopular according to polls.

(It is also fine to call Roe itself undemocratic for the reason you give. This is no more contradictory, in theory, than when Congress wants to defer its authority to Executive Department bureaucrats.)

In my experience, undemocratic is only used for its literal meaning, but it's also only used to show negative valence and primarily used by the left, so undemocratic right wing moves get called "undemocratic" but undemocratic left wing moves don't get that descriptor applied.

This is a roundabout way of saying that the grandparent to this comment doesn't match my experience. The media would portray the Slovenian Court decision positively, but it wouldn't call the decision "democratic".

It would be cool if the Supreme Court had the ability to initiate national referendums on court cases or to convene citizens' assemblies via sortition.

That one was just farcical. I can only guess that people just call SC decisions they don't like "undemocratic" on a knee jerk reflex, and didn't bother to actually think this one through. I'm not sure how else you can call that decision "undemocratic" without deliberately misusing the word for propaganda purposes.

I’m following your Slovene example, but not the hijab one. It seems to be both democratic and socially right-wing. It’s not at all a cause adopted by the American right, but mandatory dress standards are pretty classically conservative.

deleted

the soft bigotry of low expectations -- it's minimally acceptable for Muslims to mandate the hijab because they're a poor oppressed group and they don't expect much from them, but if Europeans try the littlest of little socially conservative policies it's terrible, because they should know better.

Sometimes it feels to me like a perceived lack of agency is one of the biggest prizes that can be had. Not so good if it's real, but then again, people are people, and I have my doubts about how much agency can truly vary among (healthy) humans. If it isn't real/is exaggerated, then in extremis it amounts to permission to do whatever you want and everybody just has to accommodate you, because you don't have a choice how to behave.

But that presumes sympathy on the part of the accommodators, which is probably the real prize, in which case this is just one way it manifests.

I do want to chime in and point out that the exact same people who pitch a fit about religious institutions expecting basic modesty standards if those institutions are Christian are happy to rant about the need to accommodate Islamic dress codes. So definitely a double standard, probably from pure tribalism.

It's a pretty easy thing to bitch about when there's negligible amounts of muslims around, yeah. Leftists who try that shit in places muslims actually migrated to confine themselves to (rightful) perpetual electoral doom.

Mandated hijab wearing is still something American liberals are not entirely ok with. It was one of the things played up back during the invasion of Afghanistan. American liberals generally support the protests in Iran right now over the woman who died in custody for a hijab violation. On the other hand they will overwhelming support the wearing of it if it's framed as empowering the woman from her choice rather than mandated upon her. Sort of like Asians and White privilege.

deleted

One could argue that there exists a leftist case for school uniforms, namely that they prevents rich kids from showing off.

Also widely practiced for exactly that reason in socialist/communist countries. Used to be mandatory in socialist Hungary too.

Furthermore, "uniforms: yes or no" isn't the main dividing line, but what the uniform's goal is, what it expresses and represents. The classic conservative (aristocratic etc.) uniforms would express one's social standing and position in the social hierarchy. The leftist, communist uniforms had the opposite goal, to erase those old class markers and make everyone look like an equal comrade.

That's not a "one could argue". That's a very popular argument, which I heard from pretty much every school uniform supporter I talked to. Whether they were leftist or not is another matter.

Like "liberal" it is one of those words that have lost all inherent meaning and can only be employed contextually.

In practice and in mouths such as VDL's both of these (sometimes together) mean friend, as opposed to enemy, of the Globalist American Empire.

Poland is a very firm ally of the GAE and functionally the enforcement arm in Eastern Europe- and they’re still being referred to as undemocratic for not being onboard with the gays.

Yeah, Warsaw hoped that, being the eastern vanguard and one of the biggest spenders-helpers on Ukraine they would receive something in exchange from Bruxelles-Washington

Nothing happened, and Bruxelles continued to go on

Gays are more important than NATO.

EU's (formal) line has always been that it's problem is the rule of law in Poland, such as the Polish government's court-packing plan. The gays and abortion stuff might be culture-war grist for the media mills, but it has never directly been the main onus of EU's viewpoint against Poland.

As such, if EU decided to now do a volte-face explicitly due to Polish militancy against Russia, it would just make EU's entire position hollow and destabilize the Union; "no, we don't care about that rule-of-the-law stuff after all, we explicitly just care about how zealous we are about the other things" (and, indeed, the Polish position regarding Russia is probably not all that aligned with EU's general line but is rather far more militant and aggressive than what Germany and France, for instance, are ready to countenance.)

Are they? I had the sense that since Ukraine started, all the focus (at least in the German press) on their internal politics evaporated, and generally Hungary (whose ruler is flirting with Russia or at least trying to dangle the spectre of it for concessions) is being singled out now. Of course this could be simply a stroke of opportunity, as Poland may have stopped playing tag team with Hungary and deadlocking the "all-versus-one" punishment mechanisms in the EU - perhaps as punishment for the Russia-flirting, demonstrating conversely that at least for Poland, NATO is more important than not-Gays.

Thing is, the "Bruxelles-Washington" can afford both the NATO and the gays in Poland, they aren’t really forced to choose

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats