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 -
Not posting in the Gaza/Israel thread since this is more generic, IMO.
In the most recent Sam Harris podcast, he elevates the problem with Hamas to the more general problem of jihadi terrorism. The episode is here and there's also a transcript here.
In this, he paints a picture of Hamas being a jihadi terrorist organization that's beyond reasoning with in terms of any reasoning we'd consider compatible with liberal western civilized order. He reads this quote from a member of a different jihadi group that had just finished slaughtering young children:
He makes the point that atheists have a lot of trouble understanding how utterly fanatical and unreasonable jihadis can be. People of Christian or Jewish faith know, because they know how powerful their own faith is in their lives. But atheists are eager to attribute this kind of proclivity towards sadism and murder as a reflection of terrible conditions that they must be living under. That people living in a utopia would never succumb to such depravity. Sam argues that Muslims of faith are just as destructive outside of Israel and disputed Israeli territories.
For more concrete stats, I found this from Google generative results
The culmination of this episode is Sam practically condemning belief in Islam entirely. Almost bordering on saying that every Palestinian is a mope in the Muslim Matrix who could become inhabited by a jihadi Agent Smith at any time. He argues that unlike Jesus, or Buddha, the central most beloved figure in Islam is Muhammed, and he was not anything like a saint:
What I hear from this is that there are no "good" Muslims, or if they are good it's an aberration, or that they're Muslim in name only.
How does one operationalize such a belief? Is Sam arguing that accepting Muslim refugees is a mistake, full stop, and that the only way to deal with jihadis is the grant them their wish: death, because there's nothing else in the world we could offer them? Is that even enough to cure the problem?
There are two billion Muslims in the world. If bringing them capitalism and the pleasures of modernity (everyone gets Starlink, Steam deck, dirt cheap halal KFC and Chil Fil-A, etc as a poster recently suggested for pacifying the Palestinians) does not innoculate against jihadi mind viruses, what would?
It took Europe about 1000 years for their culture to develop antibodies to dogmatic below-the-sanity-waterline Christian crusader ideology, and Christianity's deck was not nearly as stacked against it (its central figure was still practically a hippie). Will we have to wait this long for Islam to do the same? Sam sounds like he's advocating a form of genocide by another name.
Blasphemy. That’s how we got the christians to calm down. Certainly not by respecting their beliefs and community, or by celebrating their historical accomplishments. Islam’s stupidity and failures should be constantly rubbed in the face of its believers. Of course all muslim immigration to the west should be stopped on purely practical grounds, the insult is just a bonus.
Usually free speech can deal with those superstitions. The problem is that Islam has a built-in counter-strategy, death for apostates and critics. As sheikh qaradawi says, if not for the death penalty for apostates, Islam would not have survived to this day. This is the mechanism islamophobes need to target first, because it’s utterly poisonous to free expression. Free speech of muslims should be curtailed on that point, anyone preaching that doctrine should be deported or imprisoned. Apostates and critics should always be protected by the full force of the state, and get into a sort of witness protection program if they so desire.
Israel should bulldoze al-aqsa on live TV while ceremoniously asking Allah to do something about it. Muslims should be given the chance to reflect more often on their impotent rage and impotent god. Spurn the symbol and spare the man.
I largely agree that mockery and blasphemy are good routes to undermining any religion.
But I also think that it's easier for that project to start in places like the US that already have relatively a lot of free speech, and which export a lot of culture globally.
And the primary thing stopping that from happening here is folks on the right linking hatred and mockery of Islam with hatred and legal restrictions on Muslims. Elite thought-leaders, Hollywood content creators, and rabid social media teens are never going to get on board with the project as long as it's synonymous with right-wing shibboleths like that.
If the rhetoric switched from 'Islam sucks so all Muslims are dangerous and we shouldn't let them immigrate' to 'Islam sucks so we should let Muslims escape its grasp by coming here to learn our ways instead,' you'd still get some number of lefties complaining about that stance on social media, sure, but you'd get a lot more leeway to attack the religion on its own merits.
And you'd also recruit a lot more westernized Muslims to the cause, which would help it spread back to the homelands.
How does that work? “We can’t accept one true claim before you withdraw another claim that sounds low-status right-wing”? Why would I be bound by the confines of their self-imposed ideological prison? Like Harris, I think low-class christians, because they believe, have a much better understanding of why muslims do what they do than progressive elites.
They themselves hate, and support legal restrictions on, groups of people they dislike (“oppressors”, men, whites, right-wingers) . And unlike my dislike of muslims, which is rooted in a choice those believers made, some of the categories progressives dislike & want legally suppressed are biological.
"I won't choose to use my cultural and political influence on pursuits that will lead to outcomes I disagree with".
It's not just about those beliefs being low-status because of who currently expresses them. The political alignment between anti-Islam sentiment and anti-Muslim politics is strong enough that effectively attacking Islam will actually, consequentially, assist anti-Muslim policy proposals and cultural pundits.
You can caveat every statement you ever make on the topic with 'This is not anti-Muslim, just anti-Islam." But caveats rarely work. The average reader will not be able to completely disassociate those in your head, and will end up with stronger anti-Muslim priors after reading it. And anti-Muslim groups will quote sections of your anti-Islam arguments out of context and with no caveats in sight to support their anti-Muslim arguments.
Political narratives and alliances are real, consequential things. You decide to unilaterally ignore them for yourself, but you can't unilaterally force the rest of the world not to be influenced by them when they are interpreting and reacting to your content.
This is why we can't have nice things. Using such consequentialist logic, I can't support the woke even when they are doing and saying things I agree with. This is really the best way to polarize an open society into two groups who hate each other and will support their team whether they are right or wrong.
I don't think wokes are the only people who choose their political rhetoric based on consequentialist aims.
Just for example, I think the average use of the word 'woke' by a politician or pundit on the right is aimed at a consequentialist goal (rallying the base, pushing a narrative) rather than it being a meaningful term used carefully and precisely to optimal describe a situation.
People get involved with industries that are trying to change the world because they care about the state of the world. This is true on all sides of every issue.
Asking people who care about the state of the world and want to change it, to not be consequentialist when considering their rhetoric and actions, is sort of definitionally a losing fight.
This is false. The group in question objects to this word, has object to all the other words in the past, and will object to all future words that refer to them and have caught on, because they do not wish to be identified by outsiders.
More options
Context Copy link
They have to call them something. I can offer ‘progressives’, or ‘PC left’(that one aptly suggests the outsized importance they place on ‘political rhetoric’), or any other term that’s sufficiently neutral. The negative valence opponents assign to whatever term they use is unavoidable, simply a function of their alignment.
To be clear, strictly speaking I am a consequentialist myself, I just don’t think their calculation of consequences is correct. “Your policy results in two groups incapable of finding the truth, who hate each other and cannot compromise” is consequentialist reasoning.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link