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 -
Fresh Moms For Liberty Scandal Just Dropped
From what I can gather from reading the newspaper on the topic, she appeared to be running the local Party House. Police reports state that they had been called to her house for underage drinking multiple times in prior weeks. She threw a birthday party for her daughter, perhaps larger than usual?, and things got a little out of hand. Schillinger and her boyfriend provided both liquor and beer. Schillinger drank with the teens, including playing beer pong and pouring shots. Schillinger and her boyfriend, separately, punched different teens while trying to restrain them from leaving the party. Schillinger supposedly yelled "THE ONLY THING I ASK IS THAT YOU DON'T LEAVE."
While underage drinking, and providing minors with alcohol as an adult, is of course illegal in the United States, Schillinger appears to have been attempting to do so responsibly. She wanted her kids to drink at her house, under supervision, and to keep them there until the morning when they had sobered up to avoid drunk driving. Kids drinking under parental supervision are obviously safer than kids drinking in the woods or in an empty house. Kids who drink and don't drive home are safer than kids who drive. The altercations alleged seem more like (politically motivated?) throw ins than serious assaults, no allegations of serious injuries, more like horseplay than violence.
This comes after an earlier scandal involving an OG founder of the group and her husband, the president of the Florida GOP:
The Ziegler's confirmed in interviews that the pair had a prior history of group sex with the woman involved, but Mr. Ziegler (obviously) denied any wrongdoing. Ziegler was, however, at the woman's apartment at the time alleged. The prior history reduces, though obviously does not eliminate, the odds that this is a politically motivated hit-job. More likely to be a case of sex being a full contact sport, with some degree of hazy consent violation in there. The bigger story than the alleged sexual assault in the papers has been the confirmed threesomes.
Thoughts? Some of mine, disorganized:
-- Everyone, regardless of their politics and their opinions of alcohol or group sex, needs to recognize that this is why laws and social customs that pry into people's personal lives are bad. If Ziegler committed assault, prosecute him, but various New York headlines about the sex lives of a middle aged Floridian couple are gauche at best. When we pass laws that allow people to be prosecuted for actions in their personal lives, we open political dissidents (of all stripes) to these kinds of criminal prosecution attacks. I don't really know any details of this particular case, but rape laws that make proving innocence essentially impossible open political avenues of criminal attack that are indefensibly broad. We've already seen this happen to Assange, where it is physically impossible for him to prove that he used a condom and it remained on throughout the sexual act, and that was leveraged to force him into hiding. Irrational underage drinking laws make criminals of normal, normatively moral American teenagers, and criminalizing "furnishing minors" makes felons out of parents who are trying to engage in harm reduction. Ordinary Americans should not have an adversarial relationship with the cops, where we find that ordinary Americans have an adversarial relationship with the cops it is the law that is wrong.
-- This does bring to mind my general joke about the Moms For Liberty and adjacent content police in public schools: if anybody wants to remove or ban a piece of media from the public school library, their own child first needs to come in for an interview. If it is found that their child knows what "bussy lmao" means or the lyrics to WAP, the book can't be banned. Physician, heal thyself! If you aren't protecting your child in your home from all these "dangerous" things, why should anyone else care about it?
-- On the other hand, it strikes me that both women were engaging in libertine behavior in what is "generally" a responsible and rational way. Schillinger tried to protect the teens, who were probably going to drink anyway, by supervising them and making sure they didn't drive. Ziegler was engaging in non-monogamy, but in the context of a committed marriage. Maybe the MFL types really do believe that these things are a-ok for consenting adults, but not for minors. Maybe they really do want to teach kids about fraught topics in their own way, rather than by rote in school? Just this possibilty makes me infinitely more sympathetic and amenable to MFL.
-- Does the median Moms For Liberty donor care about this? Is this behavior seen as hypocritical by the people who support MFL, or merely by liberals who are confused about their actual values? Is MFL low-key a Vulgar Wave organization, advocating for tits-and-beer 90s liberalism once kids are of age? Or is this a hypocritical look behind the curtain? Does the personal behavior of the organizers matter if they are doing good work?
-- The fact that the conservatives seem to be publicly having more fun than liberals seems meaningful doesn't it? I'm not sure how, but it does.
-- On an apolitical note, prominence in literally any field is once again proven to get you fresh trim. Someone commented to me after seeing the movie that it was weird to them that Oppenheimer, a probably-autistic physics professor, was able to have a wife and a mistress. I replied that he was brilliant and recognized as brilliant and prominent by those around him. That made him sexy. We see that over and over with people like Kissinger, Oppy, Falwell Jr. Even being prominent for advocating a return to moral conservatism will get women to engage in wild sex with you, despite the obvious factors.
Sadly the GMC frowns on self-prescription, or you bet I would.
I agree that this all appears to be a motivated hit job, I don't know why Americans are still so anal about underage drinking under adult supervision, but god knows that trying to stop drunk teens from leaving your house till they sober up shouldn't be a criminal offense.
And I find it dubious that a man (and wife) who had a regular tryst with another woman is likely to have committed rape, but since said woman is the one filing the report, I remain in a state of withholding judgement.
I think HBD is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this: the people who left Europe had a genetic predilection to have problems with vices (you only get a stick up your ass about alcohol in 2 circumstances- either your God tells you it's bad, or you can't handle it yourself and have the opportunity to leave for a land where there isn't any), and the natives never evolved the genes that down-regulate alcohol addiction. Mix them together and you get a temperance movement strong enough to enshrine itself into the toughest law in the nation to change.
Americans also have a general hatred of the underaged for some reason and I haven't fully managed to figure out why that is yet- maybe a combination of parents being worried about the above effects in their children, a genetic predilection to overreact to anything risky/fun (Puritanism), and being fans of Old Testament-style property rights over children due to the dominant religion espousing them for most of the country's history?
“Predilection to have problems with vices” isn’t the most complex idea that I’ve seen attributed to genes, but it’s got to be close.
What advantage does this explanation have over boring old culture?
Eh, susceptibility to addiction was something I heard was partially genetic, which seems not crazy—any genes affecting the neurological reward system would presumably matter? It would of course have substantial behavioral effects, and so could easily be selected for or against.
That said, I see no reason to believe this hypothesis.
The puritans weren't "I hate the risky/fun", they were more, "your life should be ordered, in its entirety, towards God's will." Of course, in practice, that still meant they were opposed to an extreme number of things. In general, uprooting one's life is a high-risk endeavor, so any selection would be the opposite way.
I'm led to understand opposition to alcohol was a 19th-20th century thing, due to a relatively serious problem with drunkenness. Note that anti-alcohol stances are usually associated with Baptists, who became popular later, rather than the earlier puritans, presbyterians, episcopalians, etc.
More options
Context Copy link
"Vices" is maybe too vague to be productive but physiological addiction is something we have to some extent genetically tracked. Here's a government link suggesting that half of alcoholism is genetic (https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/alcohol-use-disorder/genetics-alcohol-use-disorder). Some estimates suggest higher numbers.
Unlike "I like math" or "I'm a nervous person" which both may be genetic but are much more complicated, addiction tends to be associated with clearer markers for things like genes that increase or decrease metabolism for something, or established enhanced response from such and such neurotransmitter.
Addiction is (slowly) starting to move into the realm of personalized medicine where we give people recommendations like "you need more vitamin B6" or "this chemotherapy drug/psychotropic/blood pressure medication is going to work worse for you."
That's not to say I agree with OP however, I figure cultural tendencies (see: Irish drinking stereotypes) are doing just as much or more of the work.
I find bias towards alcoholism (or addiction, or whatever) plausible. I don’t think there’s such good evidence that it applies to Puritans, let alone caused the teetotaler movement. There are several obvious candidates for a cultural mechanism, but the OP just kind of skims over them in favor of an HBD explanation.
Yeah again saying I don't really agree with OP, but I do find it very plausible that American culture is significantly informed by immigrant communities that had a problematic relationship with addiction (ex: Irish, Borderers, Puritans (in the sense they hated that shit, would need evidence that such things were for cause)) and that generated and informed our toxic attitudes.
As an example, American pain and discomfort tolerance is overall pretty low with respect to seeking pharmacological intervention (notoriously noted in the opioid crisis but you can also see it with our OTC pain killer usage).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Even if so, it's no point against it.
It holds between families within the same culture.
It’d be more compelling if it held between families without the same culture, no?
And I’d say complexity is a point against it. East Asian diets don’t contain much dairy, but I wouldn’t say this reflects a predilection against raising cattle. There’s an easier explanation.
Edit: I’m realizing that the OP might be arguing for a white European predilection towards alcoholism, rather than against vice. I think that would be a more credible mechanism. But I also don’t see that it’s supported by the historical record, in which European settlers are not the ones collapsing into alcoholism.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Seems unlikely. People drank a lot in colonial America, something like three times as much as moderns. My understanding is that the Puritanesque turn against alcohol was a reaction against that, and was carried along by one of America's regular religious revivals.
More options
Context Copy link
Perpetual youthfulness is highly valued in the US. Actual youth are a reminder of how us olds fall short. Envy is therefore a simple answer.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think HBD is a good explanation here. A hangover from Puritan culture seems far more likely, what with the countries that White settlers came from being far more more liberal with their dispensation of alcohol today.
In fact, the US seems more anal about it than it has ever been since the Prohibition days, I doubt anyone would have gotten into trouble for serving drinks to teens in a private domicile more than a decade or two back. I'm under the impression that if teenage drinking was curtailed, it was mostly in the context of them throwing their own parties or trying to order drinks outside while underage.
You'd also expect HBD, if appropriate, to cause a general aversion to drinking for adults too, and the average American is no stranger to drink.
In fact, it's postulated that the Asian Flush is attributable to evolutionary pressures to reduce alcohol consumption, with how easy and abundant rice wine was. Yet they still make drinking a primary form of recreation in China, Korea and Japan, for all that they find it hard to handle their liquor.
And the Natives are an utterly minuscule sliver of the population, and I doubt they have been a primary concern of general temperance movements since the 1800s. I attribute it more to the general erosion of freedoms for American teens in the past few decades, as is true for younger children who were once expected to roam the neighborhood freely even when absolute crime rates were much higher.
I’ll go further; the electronic leash specifically makes underaged drinking harder the same way it does every other form of ‘bad’ behavior. If I cared about underaged drinking I would think this a good thing(I don’t).
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