site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   29533 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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.

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Recently, I've been subjected to several posts on Twitter about Peter Singer. Singer posits a compelling argument: Society accepts a certain concept, A, yet its variant A', which along many relevant dimensions is similar to A but should be less objectionable, is met with taboo. Here is Singer's post, although I don't want to get into the the details because I'm thinking not about the argument itself but the prevalent reaction to it. The most common response to Singer's points is not an intellectual rebuttal but rather an expression of shock and outrage. The taboo around A' is like an emotional firewall, preventing any rational discourse.

This pattern of reaction is disconcerting. We live in a world of complex issues that demand thoughtful consideration, yet it appears that a significant portion of discourse is reduced to emotional outbursts. It's really hard for me not to feel disheartened or even adopt a misanthropic view when I see things like this.

So, is this emotional explosiveness truly representative of the general populace, or is it just that on Twitter, the most extreme views gain the most traction? Moreover, how can we, as individuals seeking constructive dialogue, navigate this landscape without succumbing to frustration or misanthropy?

I'm genuinely interested in understanding whether these reactions are as pervasive as they seem and what strategies we might employ to foster more meaningful, thought-provoking conversations, especially in a world dominated by emotional responses.

Besides being obvious sneerclub bait, this post is kind of ridiculous because you can sum it up as "Why does the Motte exist?", but I just want to know if there is any way to bring more people into the Motte's style of discourse or how serious a problem it is that some people are seemingly unpersuadable.

I think in the specific case, it makes perfect sense that society developed a taboo against goat-fucking and not goat-eating. Widespread goat-eating is harmless, even beneficial if you lack other food sources; widespread goat-fucking leads to novel zoonotic diseases appearing. Social taboos don't develop as some representation of a society's shared ethical considerations, they develop as a mechanism to control the behavior of members of society. They don't need to be rational, they need to be effective in encouraging prosocial behavior and discouraging antisocial behavior.

I'm pretty sure the risk of zoonotic disease can be dropped to near zero by the use of a condom. Given that they were first made out of sheep intestines, there's a poetic way it comes full circle.

There are plenty of taboos that have no empirical justification, such as burning widows alive after their husbands died, which was a common practice in India till the Brits stamped it out. The fully-generalized-counterargument that is consideration of Chesterton's fences sometimes requires a bulldozer.

And I think the fully-generalized-counterargument to tearing down any Chesterton's fence that's starting to emerge is that if you allow even one fence to be torn down even with good reason, its tearing down will be used as a fully-generalized-argument to tear down every fence.

The example I can think of being gay acceptance/rights/marriage. There are good reasons I think to believe the fence that were holding them back was obsolete: wealth and technology is such a force multiplier that our societies are no longer in a demographic race against their neighbors, so we can afford to let off the natalism and hostility to pairings that don't lead to births. But that opening was then used to argue that ANY social objection to any orientation, sexual identity, etc... is Wrong and Bigoted.

Honestly I'm at a loss as for what to do. I guess the solution is to personally calmly keep evaluating fences and not let myself be influenced by the whims of the era, but I admit I do understand why conservatism-minded people are worried about cedeing any ground at all anymore; each time they do the bulldozers go on a rampage.

The demographic race against one's neighbours has never (except, maybe, for very brief periods of time when both populations were decimated by some calamity) been contained by reproduction, but constrained by carrying capacity of territory (as evidenced by the fact that starvation were common in all parts of the world until the 1800s).

If Adam and Bob had zero children together, when they would previously have had X in expectation, it just meant that Charlie and Delilah had X more children survive to adulthood.

The flip side to that by focusing on holding up a generic fence, you undermine the strength of the stronger taboos where there are arguments better than holding back bulldozers. There were a lot of other problems in the early 1970s-era gay rights movement that allowed NAMLBA-types to get a foothold, but one of them was that California law brought a number of extremely sympathetic cases of seventeen-year-olds boinking each other.

@Meriadoc has a post here that's very interesting, but it's also quite plausible to read it as using the same principles to prohibit daikamura (pillows) and sex robots by its text, and there are other people using the same principles to argue against porn or sex toys. I think there's a way to square the circle, here, and actually find that bad things are bad without finding good or at least boring things bad too, but if you don't do so quite a large portion of the voting populace with reasonably expect you to be coming after them, eventually.

daikamura (pillows)

Are you sure you've got that right? I don't know Japanese, but everything I've seen from anime fandom suggests you mean "dakimakura".

Yeah, that's the right spelling, sorry.

Just be careful not to get ahegao and ahoge confused. They'll lead you towards very different things.

I agree, there are lots of vestigial taboos/practices in many (most?) cultures that don't necessarily make sense any longer and could be usefully re-examined. Some perhaps never made any sense; I'd be curious to learn how a practice like widow burning ever came about. But that old saying "you can't reason a man out of a position he didn't reason himself into" seems to apply here.

I am amused at the idea of the future society that looks back at current bestiality with disgust because our sheep shaggers aren't using protection.

Much the same reason as Pharaohs and other kings/warlords entombed their wives, concubines, servants and slaves with them when they died.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_(practice)

It has origins before recorded history, but went out of fashion for a while before a resurgence in the colonial era:

Sati practice resumed during the colonial era, particularly in significant numbers in colonial Bengal Presidency.[55] Three factors may have contributed this revival: sati was believed to be supported by Hindu scriptures by the 19th century; sati was encouraged by unscrupulous neighbours as it was a means of property annexation from a widow who had the right to inherit her dead husband's property under Hindu law, and sati helped eliminate the inheritor; poverty was so extreme during the 19th century that sati was a means of escape for a woman with no means or hope of survival. Furthermore, the practice of jauhar by noblewomen, which emerged during the period of Islamic invasions as a means of escaping rape and torture at the hands of captors after their husbands were killed in battle; raised the status of women who refused to be dishonoured after their husbands' death.

Basically, widows were often fucked, unless they had sympathetic children or family, and were often pressured into killing themselves ritually, or often did so themselves, because they had no social safety net. The ban of sati was about the same time that advocacy successfully had legislation passed to allow widows to remarry.

Maybe proto-Indian males were killing each other a lot in order to marry the victim's widow?

Not a claim I've ever heard made, let alone with evidence to support it.

Some things are just bad for no particular good reason. Now that sati is a thing of the past, not even the most hardcore trad Hindutva activist expects their wife to climb on the pyre after they pass.

Social taboos don't develop as some representation of a society's shared ethical considerations, they develop as a mechanism to control the behavior of members of society.

That's contradictory. If there are shared ethical considerations, by definition they are controlling people, because people place serious weight on following one's moral values.

I don't see the contradiction. Seems like another way of making the same point is that that taboos aren't passed down as the conclusions of a blue-ribbon commission on ethics, but rather they survive because the behaviors they encourage are pro-social, and therefore groups that adopt certain taboos are more likely themselves to survive and pass their taboos to the next generation. Do you disagree with that?

I mean, it's not that they couldn't have been the conclusions of a blue-ribbon commission on ethics, it's just that their origin doesn't really matter as much as their effect on group survival.

The fact that taboos can and do die is proof enough that this objection is insufficient, since someone/some people had to convince a society to stop holding it.

If you see a clearly maladaptive trait or behavior in the wild, your priors are not particularly swayed by such considerations.

I acknowledge that Chesterton had a point about his Fence, my issue is with people who turn them into castle walls with spikes.

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