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 -
Texas Politics Lurches Right
Yesterday, for those of you who don't know, was super Tuesday(goodbye Nikki Hailey). Trump's victory in all of the states except one was obviously foreseeable and, while the NYT claimed a Trump-Biden rematch was inevitable in their morning brief, with all due respect to the paper of record, that's kind of been obvious for a while.
More interestingly, Texas's elected republicans in both federal and state politics are assured to be much farther right on average than they were this time last year. https://www.texastribune.org/2024/03/06/texas-primaries-gop-incumbents-defeated/ I apologize for using a snarl-words filled source, but it's both reasonably comprehensive and not-paywalled.
They're leaving out that Trump made a set of endorsements of his own, mostly aligning with Ken Paxton's.
Those appeals court candidates benefited majorly from Trump endorsements, and so did several of Greg Abbott's challengers. Now, Ken Paxton has a 5-4 minority of the appeals court supporting his authority to prosecute voter fraud directly, instead of an 8-1 minority. It's... I wouldn't say probable, but certainly within the realm of possibility, for Paxton to get another judge to switch giving him 5-4 the authority to prosecute voter fraud without the cooperation of a district attorney. But it's worth noting that Greg Abbott's endorsements far outperformed Paxton's(https://twitter.com/bradj_TX/status/1765263680210342343) where they conflicted. Turns out getting into a confrontation with the federal government and looking like a winner pays off, to the point of getting majority support from young voters(https://www.newsweek.com/greg-abbott-won-over-gen-z-millennials-1871679).
The other big primary news is that the grassroots conservatives in the Texas house now have at least 10 votes(https://twitter.com/bradj_TX/status/1765400527993540690) in their anti-establishment block. That's not just an arbitrary milestone; 10 challengers to a ruling of the speaker subjects that ruling to a floor vote, which gives Shelley Luther- yes, the one that got arrested for operating a salon during lockdown- the power to potentially force concessions. This group could expand significantly with runoffs. Either way, the Texas state government will assuredly have a much more conservative direction in 2025.
Federally, the democrats decided that Collin Allred, currently the US representative for a nice part of Dallas, will have the honor of losing to Ted Cruz in November. I'm mildly curious as to the odds; will he spend more or less than $100 million to lose? For US house primaries,
Brandon Herrera is a firearms influencer on social media as a day job.
School vouchers address a problem at a much lower level than necessary. Firstly, they allow Hispanics, Muslims, other minorities to run their own schools, destroying any future hope of even partial assimilation (this is a growing issue in Western Europe cf the UK, it’s hard to see vouchers as a win in this context in any case). Evangelical Christian schools will mostly still be only mildly Christian (for reasons expanded upon below), but Muslim schools are going to be really Muslim.
Secondly, they fail to address the fact that most teachers are still fundamentally progressive. Even conservative Catholic (or Baptist, or Orthodox Jewish) schools often have liberal/progressive teachers because that’s who studies education. Your based and trad voucher-taking school will set up operations, look to hire teachers, and find that….there is no magic well of right-wing teachers out there. Sure, in some ultra-conservative communities you can get some of the way by hiring/training older married women, but most still prefer to be homemakers, or have jobs of their own, or don’t want to work as teachers in any case*.
* Muslim schools get around this latter problem by being able to rely on first-generation overseas staff from conservative Islamic countries. Evangelical Christian schools, unless they start hiring Ugandans, have to make do with American staff.
And how do you propose places like Texas address this instead? What does addressing the problem at a "higher level" look like?
Pass laws that affirmatively teach whatever it is they think kids should know, then pay what and train who is necessary to alter the majority ideology among teachers.
Except, as we've seen in Florida, this doesn't work. It gets characterized as "right-wing cancel culture," "don't say 'gay,'" "'whitewashing' history," and so on. And, as a number of teachers and union representatives have asserted, they're not going to obey. I've seen invocations of the Scopes trial — 'it didn't matter how many laws the backwards creationists passed to forbid it, we never let those stop us from teaching the truth of Darwinian evolution; and similarly, it doesn't matter how many laws the stupid right-wing bigots pass trying to mandate we teach lies about America's racist history, LGBT+ identities, or whatever, we will keep on providing children with the Truth!' Personnel is policy, and there's a general dearth of enforcement mechanisms when the entire profession is ideologically captured and in opposition. Which gets to the next part.
The only way to do that is to fire pretty much all the existing teachers and replace them with new ones that aren't beholden to the current ideology. So, first, how long would it take to train enough new teachers to replace the over 400,000 teachers and administrators Texas currently has. Second, this would require replacing the current ideologically-captured system of teacher-training, which would pretty much require the wholesale purging and replacement of American academia, at which point one gets into the domain of coup-complete problems.
It all goes back to the universities. All methods of recruiting skilled workers except credentialism were made de facto illegal in the 60s, and then the left took over the institution that issues credentials. What more do they need? Personnel will always be in their favor. Everything in American history since has been an endgame where checkmate is guaranteed for the right unless the left bungles its moves, allowing a stalemate; in other words, an ending where both sides lose.
Texas can have their own state run teacher's training programs separate from the research universities. They probably do. Nearby states do, along with alternative licensure that doesn't require a teaching degree. Community colleges aren't even all that leftist for the most part, just kind of pragmatic.
Edit: removed some stuff.
I contend that if Texas made serious strides towards a parallel credentialing infrastructure, it would come under attack by selective enforcement of disparate impact — disparate impacts in the existing mainstream universities notwithstanding. If it didn't succumb to entryists first. Outright conservative credentialers for knowledge jobs are tolerated so long as they remain in the JV league (eg Liberty University).
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