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 -
To whence shall we roll back the clock?
We joke about the glory years, the years when Things Were Better, which just so happen to coincide with people's younger years. You get me to say what years I would like to roll back the clock to and live, I would probably say somewhere around the 90s-late 00s. I am an outlier, as far as I know. Virtually no one I know would like to roll back the clock to spitting distance from two thousand and fucking-eight.
Back when the most lefty thing on the internet was a girl telling people that she didn't appreciate being propositioned for sex on an elevator. Pre-tiktok, the era of old forums. The iphone still a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye. The era when Google and Microsoft weren't the undisputed emperors of your lives.
Actually, forget that. We all know there's nowhere to roll back to, we can only roll forward, embracing the aesthetics of what we imagined the past to be. I, for one, am glad that I am not eternally inundated with "WOW DAE PARENTS ARE BOOORIIINNG????" ads. You can pull my 70-lb tub of legos accumulated over more than twenty years out of my cold, dead hands, NSA. And it's probably true that in the next 30-40 years that democracy and republicanism-as-we-know it will no longer exist.
No seriously, whence come the true techno-king? Who are the contenders for the first immortal god-king of humanity. I joke in the phrasing, but it is not exactly an incorrect joke now, is it? It is very probable that we will have the first actual trillionaire human in the next thirty years. The first effectively-emperors of mankind.
The only reason companies don't do governance of humans is that they're shit at it, actually, and Democracy is surprisingly efficient over long timescales. But assume for the sake of thought experiment, that the singularity happens, and we have our first crowned god-emperor of humanity thanks to the creation of AGI. Who are our contenders?
Personally, I should expect them to:
As such, pick your top 5 most likely individuals to become humanity's first true techno-kings, and why. Do you have any you think are sleepers?
I'll hold back my top-fivers for a couple days or so.
As a social conservative, I don't want to turn back the clock, at least not to any point in my memory. There's been some meaningful backwards steps (gay marriage, the rising popularity of transgenderism, etc), but there's also been some positive developments that have gotten less attention.
Pornography is widely accessible on the internet yes, but a side effect of this is that there's much less economic incentive to pollute popular media with T&A. So it is a lot easier to actually raise kids without being bombarded by sexual imagery. These days the fact that Oppenheimer included a sex scene is notable, a couple of decades back that sort of thing was de rigueur.
Relatedly, teenage sex is declining. Partly this is because of competition from porn and porn is also bad, sure. But there's network effects. Horny teenage boys directing their sexual appetites towards real life girls creates social pressure and expectation for those otherwise wouldn't want to partake in such a sexualised culture. And of course, whatever the flaws of porn, at least it causes a lot less pregnancy out of wedlock than teenage sex does.
I think that AI porn will soon outcompete real pornstars for the most part. Again, that's a mixed blessing, but it has the benefit that girls will be less drawn financially to a lifestyle that is very damaging to them. The damage to the women involved is hardly the only problem with pornography, but it's a significant one and mitigation in that area is good.
Paedophilia is far less accepted and far more rigorously guarded against these days. It wasn't so long ago that a Michel Foucault could openly advocate for lowering the age of consent to 13 and stay in good standing (unsurprisingly he turned out to have been abusing boys much younger than that). It seems likely to me that whatever issues todays kids are growing up with, many fewer of them are having to deal with the particular trauma of sex abuse.
"Me Too" may have had its overreaches, but it's bad when women are sexually coerced in the workplace. It's bad when false accusations destroy an innocent man's life, but it's also bad when a woman is genuinely taken advantage of. The balance of type 1 errors to type 2 errors has shifted - and while I'm not sure it's worse to be a female victim than a falsely accused man, I would expect that the deterred male misconduct is much greater in frequency than the corresponding rise in female misconduct. Similarly, many jurisdictions have consciously made it easier to convict men for rape - and again, while this is a double edged sword, the fact that more bad guys are getting punished and others are being deterred from doing bad things is good. Additionally, the type of conduct that is not rape but may result in an increased likelihood of being accused of rape is conduct that I think is bad - so even if it sometimes gets punished unfairly harshly, I don't mind men being disincentivized from e.g. getting women drunk to make them more pliable.
Abortion continues to be prevalent and bad, but the overturning of Roe v Wade in America is a significant step in turning back the tide, and it has the potential to help create a new cultural reality. I firmly feel that there is a feedback effect where people who have abortions (or are involved with the decision to have one) end up more invested in ideologically supporting it. They subconsciously resist the idea that abortion is bad because they do not want to feel like they are bad people. And even though the left is eager to campaign on abortion rights and see it as a good issue for them, it's clearly not such a good issue that it will prevent the right from continuing to win elections. So I expect that strict abortion restrictions will be durable in large red states like Florida and Texas, and this will help create a polity of people who have grown up without the expectation of abortion always being an option, who have the personal experience of a pro-life regime to compare to rhetorical claims, and who are not invested in justifying the practice because of their own actions. Meanwhile the US will continue to get richer and richer and the economic difficulty of raising an unexpected child will become more and more manageable as a result, medical technology will get better and better, and careless sex will continue to become less common - all reducing the practical reasons for abortion supporters to prioritize the issue. There's a long, long way to go, but America is a country of great cultural influence and if the pro-life cause can ultimately win there, that belief in the protection of early life can spread across the world.
I think there's been a lot of pro-social behavior that's been thrown out with the bathwater, though. The proportion of people meeting their partners at work has dived off a cliff, and like that's generally good sort of assortative mating that produces solid outcomes for everybody. I don't think you can just purely say it's 'falsely accused men versus molested women' when there's a ton of social behavior that has been modified.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link