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 -
The gender ideology movement sort of feels out of the news cycle where I live, but remains very top of mind for me.
As I see it, the whole umbrella is actually multiple, almost unrelated strands, queerying category activists, social engineering progressives, AGPs, internet cults, all underpinned by unthinking legal activism and of course corporate profiteering. Did I mention an overtly political and enabling media environment bereft of any journalistic values?
I am fascinated by all these things but mainly I want to talk about the social mania aspect. I'm very interested in how smart people, who would inevitably class themselves as above-average in rationality and morality, are able to brush off child-safeguarding concerns, discarding the previous medical ethics consensus (first do no harm, evidence based medicine) in favour of ideas that barely existed even 15-20 years ago.
I have been looking into previous social manias such as the satanic panic and the child care workers given wrongful convictions and it's shocking how difficult it is to reverse the tide of mania once it's begun. Parents, police, the justice system, and media all fall into lockstep and condemn innocent people to terrible fates they and their families bear in almost total isolation, with only a few supporters able to parse the information in front of them and figure out what is going on.
I mean this is just human behaviour - we make movies about the Salem witch trials, we are modern people and have access to perspectives of humans across evolutionary time. Is it really true that people still don't know who we are, how we behave in herds?
I understand apathy, I understand things moving out of the news cycles, but I can't understand how people can maintain a neutral view on unnecessary surgeries on minors. When institutions such as medical bodies fail in their basic safeguarding responsibilities, suppressing dissent within their ranks, it is not hard to work out what is going on. How many manias does history need to present before people learn what we are?
A failure of courage I understand in any given context but the neutral middle doesn't even seem curious in private.
Can anybody enlighten me why people aren't more curious, why they're happy for children to be groomed into lifelong medicalisation, with their life choices pre-emptively narrowed before they even understand what consent means? The true-believers I understand, it's supposedly smart, moral people that aren't engaged that I'm confused about. Are they secretly true believers but just don't want to say?
Plain old cognitive dissonance?
This book which I read some time ago seemed quite convincing in arguing that the most notable daycare abuse convictions were based far more on actual physical signs of abuse than lurid stories about ritual abuse and that the narrative of innocent adults just being hounded by witch-hunting media for no reason at all was in itself created by media on thin grounds.
Looked up the author of that book and he is not a disinterested party:
Recovered memories are a morass; the issue has gone from "it's Science, we must believe it" to "a tangle of fake and implanted" and all points in between. You've read the book so you're better informed on it than I am, but if he's relying recovered memories as evidence that "it's all, or in the majority, true" then it's very shaky.
And as pointed out, the Satanic Panic as distinct from sexual and physical abuse was extremely elaborate and became fantastical, yet the authorities were convinced of its truth because of the 'expert witnesses' promoting it. If you look at the cases in Britain, for instance: there's at least a few where the social worker/instigator of the investigation was moved on to another area and started the same thing up again. Some set themselves up as specialists in ritual abuse and advised local councils, police forces and the likes about how to recognise cases of Satanic Ritual Abuse.
The Rochdale case:
The Orkney case:
And a list of other such cases here.
In the same way that the Salem Witch Trials kicked off because of allegations by children and young women about persecution by witches, which we now take to be untrue, allegations by children were taken as evidence of witchcraft and Satanism. Human nature hasn't really changed over the centuries.
Though there are real sexual abusers out there, who use the trappings of cults in order to coerce and entrap their victims. Speaking of the "should a dying 13 year old be able to hire a prostitutes for sex before their death?" poll, here is why sex with adults isn't generally a good idea, and the whole notion of "child prostitutes" (even for the dying 13 year old) isn't feasible with regard to consent or free decision to sell sex:
It's not. If I remember correctly, recovered memory doesn't feature in the actual book at all, and at least a quick search on "recovered" prompted no hits. Satanic ritual abuse doesn't really feature either, other than Chait stating that most notable cases actually don't involve ritual abuse or actual allegations of ritual abuse at all, though in some cases there were allegations that media represented as ritual abuse allegations even though they were about something else. The book is about American cases, I don't know how the British examples relate to that.
He also doesn't claim, of course, that all the claimed day care abuse cases were valid and doesn't make final claims even to the ones that he investigates. Like I said, it's been some time since I read the book, but the argument is that the most notable American cases had at least some concrete evidence that abuse had happened (ie. physical evidence and non-coaxed, non-fantastical child testimonies that were consistent with physical evidence) and that even in the most controversial one, McMartin case, even though most defendants were almost certainly not guilty and the case got out of hand with the tunnel allegations etc., the specific case against Ray Buckey was much stronger than commonly now understood and thus the entire case cannot be simply be seen as a "witch-hunt", ie. the implication being that everything was concoted out of thin air and resulting solely from a moral panic.
Cheit's specific point is that he's of course not claiming guilt on parties that are currently innocent in the eyes of the law (ie. like the McMartin defendants) but rather stating that there were credible reasons why jurors might have considered them guilty, and that particularly many of the "lesser" cases outside of McMartin, where the courts issued guilty verdicts and have upheld them, are based on very solid evidence but have still been mentioned in books like Satan's Silence as examples of a national witch-hunt based on nothing.
I still get the strong impression that Cheit was trying to defend the reality of sex abuse cases, because of course they do happen, but was strongly motivated by "I am a survivor of child sex abuse and now with the backlash against the Satanic Panic a lot of people are doubting all allegations of child sex abuse, and I'm going to go to the other side of 'well some of the Satanic Panic cases were true!' in order to make sure allegations are taken seriously".
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