site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

He insisted that all of his ideological opponents, whether they be Rationalists, woke progressives, fascists, or anything in between, were all really "the same" underneath

From the perspective of a space alien from another galaxy, all us 4-limbed Earth critters are alike. From my perspective, I barely comprehend why Trotskyist communists disagree with mainline communists, or what the substantive differences between the different Interantionals were. And there's absolutely a strain of conservatism that views all of us here as the spawn of the Enlightenment, and of a particularly virulent offshoot at that. We love defining, categorizing, systematizing, and playing games with Venn diagrams and 4-quadrant memes. We like reasoned and clear argumentation, we want evidence, and objective evidence at that, but all we really get is words words words. And even when we don't care about evidence, we pretend that we do.

We're the type of people who have a bunch of different ethical philosophies, but they all boil down to different varieties of consequentalism, clever hacks to work around the problem that we can't directly comprehend consequences, and so we've called these hacks by a salad of different names. But (and this is just a metaphor) when we encounter someone who's not actually a consequentialist, we don't even have the words to describe what that means, because we've used "non-consequentialist" to refer to other varieties of consequentialism.

He could be pulling this out of his rear, but the shouldn't the Mottely response to that not be to insist on the primacy of our nice little distinctions, but instead to question why he thinks he's so different? Maybe he can't put that in words, in a way that we can understand. Maybe we can't parse his binary blob*, but at least we can stick a wrapper around it and say "this dude has a Thing about politics that we don't understand". And maybe some of us conclude that there's no "there" there, that he's failed at constructing a perfectly rational system of the world from the bottom up, and that his views are fundamentally incoherent. But wasn't part of the problem that we don't want people claiming that they know what's going on in other people's heads, and ascribing views to the other people that the other people explicitly disclaim?

  • Yeah, yeah, "ATM machine".