site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25859 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 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
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Health, Fitness, Obesity, and Politics

Something that’s been bouncing around in my head for quite some time is how people relate their politics to their personal health. This story from The Daily Beast on Wisconsin Senate candidate Eric Hovde has resurfaced this for me by providing a clear illustration of what I perceive as a current difference between the American left and right on this issue:

“Look, we have an explosion of Type 2 diabetes right now. Explosion. Obesity is off the charts. You know, we’re removing people from being responsible for their own health,” Hovde said.

“If they all of a sudden started to realize that they’re going to pay more for their health care by consuming, you know, by consuming massive amounts of soda every day or fatty foods and not exercising, maybe they would change their behavioral patterns.”

Hovde then claimed obesity was a “personal choice.”

“It’s a personal choice,” he said, “but there should be consequences to those personal choices. Fine, you want to do that, you become obese, your health care is going to cost more. Or, the quality—or not the quality, but the amount of health care may go down, because you may not have the money to afford it.

“You have to force personal responsibility back to people, and also make them smart consumers.”

The Daily Beast helpfully loops in a putative expert on the matter, a professor at NYU:

Jay said that Hovde’s comments singling out obesity as something that should raise people’s insurance rates reveals that “either you’re not understanding or you’re really discriminating against people who have a chronic disease.”

“It’s assuming that obesity is some sort of moral failing that people need to be punished for,” she said. “That’s not true.

She added: “It’s a pretty awful and dangerous thing to say.”

This is the latest spat about these sorts of things and probably lays the dichotomous beliefs out about as clearly as possible. There is a policy angle (some people think insurance should be risk-based, some don’t), but that is comparatively dry relative to the beliefs in personal responsibility and how those views extend into political beliefs. There was an old throwaway post from the dissident right blog Dividuals that stuck with me a decade later because of how clearly it captured something that I felt when I read the left-leaning positions:

One realistic way to parodize liberals / lefties / Progressives / feminists / SJWs etc. would be to present them as narcissistic, solipsistic, self-absorbed people with huge and fragile egos who demand that everything should revolve around themselves.

…

The simple fact that feminists tend to be fat would only make, in itself, a weak joke. But when you find they run around parading their fatness, and make it a political goal to make men somehow adore it – imagine it, human beings making it a political goal that other should have a positive opinion of their own personal fsckups! “I have crap for character, now praise me for it, oppressor!” Imagine programmers making it a political goal to convince people that bugs are actually good!

At the time, I wasn’t particularly right-aligned, so this wasn’t really an ingroup-outgroup thing, but an articulation of a growing frustration I had with people on the left, this absolute refusal to ever tell people to own up to their situations, take responsibility for where they are in life, and fix it. Everything, always, forever is just contingent on circumstances, completely outside of their control. While I could understand the arguments about this sort of thing when it comes to wealth accumulation or crime, to be so extreme as to not grant that people have agency over what they eat was the kind of thing that was just steadily pushing me away from having any inclination to share goals with the economic left.

Since then, there has been a steady (if not particularly large) genre of articles characterizing fitness as a right-wing phenomenon. Some of these are really silly things about how gyms are gateways to far-right extremism, but let’s look at one example that’s a little more self-serious and not obviously ridiculous:

The study found a significant correlation between those men who were heavier and stronger and the belief that some social groups should dominate others. These men were also less likely to support the redistribution of wealth, a typically left wing principle.

Specifically, the researchers found a specific correlation between the number of hours spent in the gym and having less egalitarian socioeconomic beliefs.

Dr Michael Price, a senior lecturer in psychology at the university and the lead author of the study, suggested the findings could come down to three things: The result of the men “calibrating their egalitarianism to their own formidability”, that less egalitarian men strive to become more muscular or there could be a third variable at play.

“Our results suggest that wealthier men who are more formidable physically are more likely to oppose redistribution of wealth,” he said. “Essentially, they seem more motivated to defend their resources. But less wealthy men who are still physically formidable don’t seem more inclined to support redistribution either. They’re not demanding a share of the wealth.

Vice covers the same thing, but with an oddly smug glee:

To all you gym-bro haters amongst us, come, be seated. This one's for you. Science—objective, empirically tested science, the science that tells us that the ice caps are melting—has confirmed what many of us have long suspected: Gym bros are right-wing jerks.

…

Price's findings? That rich muscle dudes are the worst! Under those rock-hard abs lie the rock-hard souls of men who doesn't believe in spreading their riches around. "It's basically your tolerance to the idea that wealth shouldn't be redistributed," Dr. Price explains. "Some people thought it was horrible; some people thought it was fine."

If there was ever a line that called for a YesChad.jpg response, it’s that one. While I am not a particularly big guy, I will self-report that I do believe my work as an endurance athlete has substantially shifted my views against egalitarian perspectives and more towards personal responsibility. Rather than modeling that as being about domination and aggression, I would propose that the mechanism is the personal sense of accomplishment and mastery coupled with knowing how much of it is a direct product of your internal locus of control. I’m not decently fast because of some random freak accident of nature - I wasn’t fast when I started running, I’m much faster now, and I keep getting faster in almost perfect concert with how much work I put into the sport. Others will fare better with less work, such is life, but we all have a great deal of control over our outcomes. So, yeah, I am inclined to believe that pursuing fitness as a hobby will tend to lead one to the right of their current positions.

The belief that fitness is a right-wing thing doesn’t stop with this sort of relatively modest claim about egalitarian tendencies though. The Society for Cultural Anthropology has a weird writeup on Gym Fascism. To go nutpicking a bit, the Manitoba University newspaper has Fitness culture and fatphobia are fascistic - Our obsession with looking the same is culling joy and body diversity:

Prof. Brian Pronger points out that almost everything that we stress about physical education centres around maximizing the body’s performance. It’s the way that we are all expected to structure our lives around our fitness regimens, and those five days a week when we’re supposed to work out must be in service to making ourselves as strong as possible.

Fitness fanaticism constipates our personal growth. Think about what it means to “work on yourself.” It often means to work out, as if your character is tied to your physical strength and muscle tone.

OK, too much nutpicking. Back to a serious journalistic outlet, Time magazine. Just before the New Year, Time published a story that might dissuade people from making an ill-advised resolutions for 2023 titled The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness:

It was super interesting reading the reflections of fitness enthusiasts in the early 20th century. They said we should get rid of corsets, corsets are an assault on women’s form, and that women should be lifting weights and gaining strength. At first, you feel like this is so progressive.

Then you keep reading, and they’re saying white women should start building up their strength because we need more white babies. They’re writing during an incredible amount of immigration, soon after enslaved people have been emancipated. This is totally part of a white supremacy project. So that was a real “holy crap” moment as a historian, where deep archival research really reveals the contradictions of this moment.

Oh dear.

Anyway, to return to that Hovde story that kicked things off, I find it pretty interesting to think about how these things play with different crowds. Something that’s kind of obvious is that Red Tribe America is not actually very fit at all, while Blue Tribe power centers consistently have quite a few fitness-minded individuals. Nonetheless, when Hovde says that fat people are responsible for their own bodies, it seems to me that most Red Tribers basically agree and accept that they’re fat because they like burgers and beer a little too much, while the Blue Tribers recoil at the suggestion that people are responsible for eating themselves into Type 2 diabetes. This reminds me of how discussions of marriage and morality play out as well - educated elites, regardless of political persuasion, stay married at very high rates and seem to be well aware that this is the correct way to live, but are hesitant to say this about the underclass. They hold standards for themselves that they believe don’t apply to others. As far as electoral politics goes, I doubt this little newscycle item means much of anything, but it does provide a fun case study and litmus test for perspectives on the topic.

Having agency is right-wing.

Much of the core messaging on the right is explicitly 'anti-agency,' for lack of a better word. You're unemployed because the government shipped your jobs overseas, you're addicted to fentanyl because of corrupt doctors and politicians in bed with Chinese companies flooding the country, men are depressed and committing suicide because of feminism/hostile society/subversion of traditional gender roles, you're poor because immigrants are driving down your wages.

When is the last time a politician or right-wing influencer told someone from West Virginia that they have the power to improve their life by relocating, retraining or abstaining from drugs? I can accept that even if they did believe that, saying so publicly would be political suicide...but do you think that they believe it? Do you yourself believe that, or do you agree with most of the statements I made above?

When the government takes half your paycheck and gives it to a swarm of party-aligned parasites that live off grant money, the government is denying you agency.
When politicians coordinate with megacorporations to enrich themselves by impoverishing american workers, they are denying you agency.
When your child isn't allowed to take algebra in school because a leftist "education consultant" got paid $5000/hr to call math racist while sending her children to a private school, they are denying you agency.
When those same politicians order the secret police to monitor anyone who complains about it, they are denying you agency.
Noticing this and talking about it does not make you "anti-agency," it makes you correct.

This is not denying one's own agency as in "whiteness existing makes it impossible for me to show up to work on time." It is simply pointing out that a powerful and malicious agent is stronger than you are.

When the government takes half your paycheck and gives it to a swarm of party-aligned parasites that live off grant money, the government is denying you agency.

Hey man, I don't like that the government is subsidizing traditionally red tribe occupations either, but you should really pressure your elected officials if you want it to stop.

Not to mention the income tax rate tops out at 37%, so it's not half your paycheck, and even if you are in the top tax bracket...you really don't have anything to be complaining about because you're making over half a mil per year.

When politicians coordinate with megacorporations to enrich themselves by impoverishing american workers, they are denying you agency.

Based. How do you want to bust the megacorps, comrade?

When your child isn't allowed to take algebra in school because a leftist "education consultant" got paid $5000/hr to call math racist while sending her children to a private school, they are denying you agency.

That's an impressive 10,000,000$ per year. Do you have any idea how I could become an education consultant?

Anyways, I'll ask you the same question as last time. I largely agree with you about the problems in the country. Do you have any realistic, well-thought out plans to address them? We could zero out budgets for all the education consultants, all the minority-owned business subsidies, most of the other stuff you complain about as woke, and your buddy would still be struggling to feed his family stocking shelves. If you want to cut taxes, we probably need to cut medicare and social security (I'm assuming you don't want to touch the military), so your shelf-stocking friend will age into being a senior who both can't afford healthcare and has to keep stocking shelves until he keels over and dies.

But seriously, I'm listening. I'm open to having my mind changed. What do you actually want? What's your positive vision for the future?

you're poor because immigrants are driving down your wages

So let's build a wall says the right-winger.

No you can't do that says the left-winger, you just can't. You really can't says the left-winger, so the right-winger says, ok we'll jan6 then, and then the left-winger says no, no, no, you really, really, really, can't.

You're afraid to start a business or do anything because of crime?

So let's gather all the gang-members says the El Salvadoran President. But at what cost??? Asks the NYT.

When is the last time a politician or right-wing influencer told someone from West Virginia that they have the power to improve their life by relocating, retraining or abstaining from drugs?

How's 'relocating' working as a strategy generally? Plenty of 'relocated' Americans homeless on the streets of blue cities, not sure what good it does them.

Why is this never a solution to the mysterious problem of 'food deserts' that seems to plague African-Americans, completely unrelated to the spontaneous combustion of businesses in their neighborhoods when Republicans get in power?

Why is this never offered as a solution to racism? There are plenty of countries with way fewer oppressive white people.

I've seen right-wingers advise journalists to learn to code, does that count?

abstaining from drugs

Does the so-called 'War on Drugs' count? I'm all for going Duterte on drugs.

So let's build a wall says the right-winger.

No you can't do that says the left-winger, you just can't. You really can't says the left-winger, so the right-winger says, ok we'll jan6 then

You mean the wall I was promised Mexico would pay for (oops), the wall that was actually built by Trump after refusing compromises offered by Democrats and instead built by appropriating funds from the military? The wall that, as far as I can tell, has had virtually no effect on the number of illegal immigrants showing up at the border? That wall?

Leaving aside the fact that your implied definition of 'having agency' means 'getting whatever policy you want at the federal level.' By that definition, you're denying me agency every time you vote for a Republican. Nobody has agency.

So let's gather all the gang-members says the El Salvadoran President. But at what cost??? Asks the NYT.

Sure, we could crack down on crime in the US as well if we instituted a police state. This is diametrically opposed to what most conservatives want. When is the last time you saw a conservative cheering on NSA wiretappings or the FBI?

How's 'relocating' working as a strategy generally? Plenty of 'relocated' Americans homeless on the streets of blue cities, not sure what good it does them.

You do understand that homeless make up a minute portion of a state's population (~90k for New York out of a population of 19 million), and the number of them that were shipped there from red states is a fraction of them? Meanwhile, there are plenty of kids who leave West Virginia for college, work, etc and never come back - and they do just fine. People typically refer to this as a negative as the talented are leaving West Virginia, exacerbating the problem. Any hard data on the subject would suffer from selection effects as well, so maybe it isn't a solution for someone with a high school degree or less, who knows.

Doesn't really matter though. You seem more interested in 'zingers' and waging the culture war, right?

Do you yourself believe that, or do you agree with most of the statements I made above?

Those are not exclusive! It's entirely possible to have the deck stacked against you along some axes, but not to such an extent that it cannot be overcome by agency.

That said, I don't believe a bunch of those:

1.Sure, a bunch of jobs have moved overseas, but the unemployment rate is pretty low. If you can't find a job, that shouldn't be blamed on companies (not the government, of course) moving jobs overseas.

2.Sure, immigrants may drive down wages in specific sectors, but they should increase prosperity overall.

Others I agree with more, but think you should still take agency:

3.Being addicted to fentanyl probably is related in some cases to doctors prescribing opiates without sufficient caution. Doesn't mean you shouldn't get up and try to go through rehab programs and take steps to get rid of the problem instead of throwing away your life.

I have no comment to make on the suicide point.

But I agree with @Primaprimaprima that I see more pro-agency messaging on the right, even if there is plenty of victimhood messaging too.

Being addicted to fentanyl probably is related in some cases to doctors prescribing opiates without sufficient caution.

It seems like "is related" is kind of sweeping some stuff under the rug in that sentence. My understanding is that there is good evidence that over prescription leads to more drugs available on the black market, but that it is in fact extremely rare for someone to develop an addiction stemming from their own prescription. The vast majority of addicts started on other people's prescriptions. (Let me know if you have a different understanding of this.)

If that's the case, it's not really relevant to the agency that the addicts had in becoming addicted to say that the drugs were prescribed too carelessly in the first place.

That was not my impression, but I have nothing at hand to back me up, and am not at all certain.

Much of the core messaging on the right is explicitly 'anti-agency,' for lack of a better word.

What you are noticing is the difference between actual political philosophy and the advertising used to sell grifters who are nominally aligned with a given philosophy to retards. The two are only related inasmuch as they need to be for the grifters to successfully associate their grift with a tribal affiliation.

I can't claim this is particularly rigorous, but I have noticed a broad pattern in which traditional or right-wing ideologies tend to include a strong belief in the power of individual agency to shape the world, whereas progressive or left-wing ones don't. If you look at arguably the most traditional belief system there is, Animism, it attributes agency to absolutely everything down to trees, rocks, rivers and clouds, which are perceived as conscious beings that act with deliberate intent. Even something as simple as it raining is thought of as the deliberate act of a god.

On the other hand, far-left ideologies such as Marxism tend to stress the role of socioeconomic forces larger than any one man in shaping history. It's believed communism's victory is inevitable because the material conditions will shift and make capitalism obsolete. Class conflict is portrayed as inevitable, with the capital class effectively incapable of not exploiting the labour class to the greatest extent they can due to the way the system is set up. I believe there's also a parallel here with progressive beliefs about how white people are incapable of not perpetuating racism due to their position in society.

Great Man Theory, too, is right-coded and stresses the role of individual agency in historical change, where leftists prefer to believe that structural forces play a larger role; conservatives speak of the importance of personal responsibility while progressives emphasise the effect of environmental influences on a person's choices, and consequently cons tend to believe strict punishment of criminals is just as they are ultimately responsible for their choices, where progs favour leniency as they believe a person may have had little choice but to turn to crime.

I would even argue that the reason rightists seem to be more likely to give credence to conspiracy theories is that they align with the idea of a small number of individual agents acting with deliberate intent to change the world, something more plausible to the right-wing worldview than the systemic explanations the left favour, which suppose people perpetuate systems of oppression without necessarily having conscious intent to.

On the other hand, it could be argued that belief in HBD or in certain individuals being chosen by God to rule is anti-agency, and some right-wing ideologies do seek to greatly restrict agency for certain classes of people (e.g. women) or sometimes the population at large, whereas left-wing ones can seek to greatly expand the agency of groups previously denied it (again, women). Perhaps that's not so counter-intuitive though; if you think individual agency is powerful you might logically seek to restrict who can wield it, whereas if you think it doesn't matter so much, why not let everyone have it?

I can't claim this is particularly rigorous, but I have noticed a broad pattern in which traditional or right-wing ideologies tend to include a strong belief in the power of individual agency to shape the world, whereas progressive or left-wing ones don't.

And this is obviously adaptive, for the simple reason that even if you can’t affect the world very much, behaving better can affect it at least a little bit, and probably make life better for you as well. Traditional ideologies have an upper limit to how maladaptive they can be because they have by definition been around long enough to weed out the worst ones.

On the other hand novel or progressive ideologies have no such upper limit; the failures of communism are the obvious example, but there’s thousands of others. Lobotomies, alcohol prohibition, these things died out because they turned out to be bad ideas. That’s not to say absolutely everything new is going to kill millions of people; that’s to say most ideas which go on to kill millions of people are new-ish at the time they’re tried.

So we should generally expect traditional ideologies to tend towards adaptive beliefs, and novel ideologies to have no particular tendency, irrespective of truth value in any which way. And that being said, while adaptive beliefs encourage adaptive behavior, they don’t necessitate it. Most people have at least some disconnect between their actions and beliefs, and we should expect adaptive behavior to be more associated with adaptive ends.

That is, I think, what the thread notes.

When is the last time a politician or right-wing influencer told someone from West Virginia that they have the power to improve their life by relocating, retraining or abstaining from drugs?

JD Vance seems like a good example:

Alongside his personal history, Vance raises questions such as the responsibility of his family and people for their own misfortune. Vance blames hillbilly culture and its supposed encouragement of social rot. Comparatively, he feels that economic insecurity plays a much lesser role. To lend credence to his argument, Vance regularly relies on personal experience. As a grocery store checkout cashier, he watched welfare recipients talk on cell phones although the working Vance could not afford one. His resentment of those who seemed to profit from poor behavior while he struggled, especially combined with his values of personal responsibility and tough love, is presented as a microcosm of the reason for Appalachia's overall political swing from strong Democratic Party to strong Republican affiliations. Likewise, he recounts stories intended to showcase a lack of work ethic including the story of a man who quit after expressing dislike over his job's hours and posted to social media about the "Obama economy", as well as a co-worker, with a pregnant girlfriend, who would skip work.[1]

Of course, Vance also has Senate policy positions and rhetoric that takes on the more populist tone, but I don't think he's scared to tell individuals to get their shit together. There's always going to be some degree of tension for anyone that's thinking carefully - obviously the material conditions and culture of a society, a locale, or a nation are going to matter and meaningfully impact the behavior and outcomes for the individuals there. Nonetheless, the best advice for individuals will still be to focus on what is within their control; in the United States, the things that are under one's own control are so plentiful that making endless excuses is going to be much more destructive than generating agency.

I don't know that Vance is the best example. While he called out hillbillies (and I use that term loosely because the Rust Belt white trash he's describing in Ohio are decidedly different from Appalachian white trash) in his book, his actual politics started veering into the "lack of agency" lane as soon as Trump's success made it a veritable requirement for him to do it. I can't tell you how many times I heard from conservatives that nobody owes you anything, stop whining, buck up and take that menial job because you aren't above working at McDonalds just because you have a college degree, nobody wants to work anymore, etc. (not to me personally, but the sentiment). One night I was at the bar and a bunch of them were bitching about immigration. They weren't white trash, but obviously successful guys from a wealthy suburb. My view on immigration are complicated, to say the least, but when they started about Mexicans taking jobs from Americans it pissed me off so I turned it around on them: "Why do we owe them jobs? Why should I pay more for stuff because some whiny American doesn't want to work for what I'm willing to pay. Those Mexicans are damn glad to get my money, and besides, they do the work and don't complain. Besides, they're the only ones who seem to want to work anymore." Or something along those lines. It didn't work, of course, because as soon as anyone brings up market forces to a conservative in an argument about immigration, they just do a u-turn and talk about welfare instead, not realizing the inherently contradictory nature of those arguments. And, as a putative conservative, I couldn't really argue back.

The same thing applies more directly to employers. There's one older guy I know we call "Pappy". He's big in the whitewater community arouind here and is an excellent boater, and teaches free lessons at the park and cheap roll lessons at a scum pond on his property (only charging to cover the insurance). He's very generous with his time, especially considering these lessons are always 8-hour marathons. Not so much with his money. He owns a garage and auto body shop and refuses to pay his employees. He also constantly bitches about the quality of the help he gets. I once couldn't help but comment that maybe if he paid more than ten bucks an hour he'd find decent people. I knew this would get him fired up, because he was great at going on these kinds of rants; "Hell, when I started out I made 2 bucks an hour and was glad to get it. When I opened this place you couldn't ask no god damned bank for any money because they wouldn't give it to you. I had to save my money to buy all this and earned all of it. These people don't want to work, they just want to sit on their asses and collect a check. And you lawyers are half the problem. When my wife and I bought our first house the mortgage was one page. One. When I took out a loan last year it was a god damned book. And it's all because you lawyers found lazy fucks who didn't want to pay and tried to weasel out of it, and now the banks have to make sure that you can't."

I wasn't thrown by the change of tack because he never missed an opportunity to dunk on my profession. I would note that my brother was an inspector for a major industrial company that does global business and they had him paint some equipment. The quality steadily deteriorated over the years to the point they had to cancel a very lucrative contract because nothing he did would pass. I've known a few people who took their cars to him for work and now aren't on speaking terms after the work was so bad they had to withhold payment. His intransigence is literally costing him money, but he won't budge on principle.

I bring up these examples because they're evidence of this mentality not among the white trash that Vance talks about, but among normal, successful people. As for Vance himself, he plays into the same ethos wholeheartedly, and doesn't seem to understand the contradiction with the argument that gave him fame. If he continued in the Reagan mold of bold free market principles, or took the opposite tack of siding with the lefties in "What's the Matter with Kansas?" sense, I could take him at face-value. But instead he's latched onto the same victimization worldview of those he previously complained about. He was once a moderate and anti-Trumper; now his "National Republicanism" is just an amalgamation of the worst protectionist ideas Trump had to offer. Maybe it's a cynical response to give him more political credibility, I don't know. But it's certainly a contradiction with what he used to be.

I'm not really getting your point here.

Why should I pay more for stuff because some whiny American doesn't want to work for what I'm willing to pay. Those Mexicans are damn glad to get my money, and besides, they do the work and don't complain.

He owns a garage and auto body shop and refuses to pay his employees.

Should he go recruit a bunch of qualified workers in Honduras then? How would you feel if Guatemalans (or Indians, or Poles, or AI...) started offering lawyer services at one half of your rate and you started losing customers?

Would you be upset at your former customers if they told you 'Why should I pay more for stuff because some whiny American doesn't want to work for what I'm willing to pay'?

I'm not a conservative so I don't worry about these things. As for them, I don't expect them to do anything other than stop bitching about people who need handouts and then asking the government to set policies that are basically handouts for them. And if you want AI to do legal services, be my guest; I'll make more money undoing the mess...

Hypothetically speaking, you're in the state of Washington. They vote in some progressives who decide that established lawyers have to hire assistants in order to train them for the bar exam bypass. The new hypothetical regulation leads to lower profit per case for you, with the same or additional work. Additionally they vote in some new taxes just for the stuff you like to buy.

Do you just take it, give up on some stuff? Do you move to another state and have to leave family and friends behind? Do you retrain for a completely different career that you can still live decently from? Do you complain in a bar with a bunch of your lawyer buddies until you decide that you will take some kind of action to lobby against the new regulations?

Also would actions like jan6, starting a border patrolling militia or targeting open-borders-supporting politicians qualify as 'having agency' for somebody complaining about economic stress from immigration?

On the other hand, I'd say forming a union definitely counts as having agency for (left-wing) workers who feel unfairly treated by their employers.

I raise my fees to cover the cost of the assistants. There's not even a competitive disadvantage to that since the laws apply to everyone.

More comments

This is why people talk about luxury beliefs. AI can't do legal services at half your rate. New immigrants, especially illegals, can't either. You can be rest assured that your ability to sell legal services depends on a bar exam, many years of education, and a lot of overhead costs such as opening an office. It's not possible for someone to undercut you because he's willing to live in poverty, forcing you to live in poverty in order to compete.

I could say the same thing about any American, though. Believing the United States should restrict trade and immigration is a luxury belief for Americans, almost all of whom have jobs and live decent lives compared to people in say, Guatemala or Venezuela. We all have the luxury of being born in a country where a shitty job at a convenience store pays well above what most of the world is making.

More comments

Alongside his personal history, Vance raises questions such as the responsibility of his family and people for their own misfortune. Vance blames hillbilly culture and its supposed encouragement of social rot.

In retrospect, it's wild to me that someone with a law degree from Yale and who worked as a tech VC with Peter Thiel got elected to the senate with that message. But yes, I'll grant you that one.

He did worse than Republicans in his state in general, if I remember correctly.

I'd also point to pro-police, anti-privacy, and anti-drug policy positions adopted by the political right. Really the entire Law and Order branch of right wing policies is totally antithetical to a politics that supposedly centers on personal agency.

Maybe a better way to rephrase is with the old line about racists: Not all Right wingers have an internal locus of control, but most people with an internal locus of control are right wingers?

I'm not a fan of the law-n-order branch, but it's not antithetical to personal agency at all. Do the crime, go to jail; it's your choice whether to do the crime.

It seems very incompatible with the idea that a right winger is high in personal efficacy to say that tax dollars need to be spent, and civil rights abrogated, in order to pay people to "protect" you from scary things.

The police exist as the enforcement arm of the state in order to hold up the state's half of the bargain in their monopoly on force.

We are making a deal with the state. We give up some things, most notably the right to use violence to enforce our will and of course our money in the form of taxes. In return the state acts as the "unincentivized incentivizer" to solve Molochian coordination problems and arbitrate disputes up to and including using force on our behalf to bring those disputes to a satisfactory close. The police are part of the terms of the contract, so to speak.

It is not a violation of one's autonomy to enter into a contract. Right wingers acknowledge that the state and its monopoly on violence is helpful and necessary (necessary in order to avoid the state of nature, the Hobbesian "war of all against all"), they aren't anarchists.

I think that difference in internal/external locus of control between the Left and Right is better thought of as a side effect of the difference between right and left wing thought, not the source of it. The primary philosophical disagreement from which all others flow is the Hobbes/Rousseau split, which is basically how you would answer, "if we stopped controlling everything and completely took our hands off the wheel, would things be good or bad?" or, "are people inherently good and learn to become evil, or inherently evil and learn to become good?" I think there are a fairly strong selection effects in that people with high personal agency tend to gravitate towards right wing politics, but it's not the cause.

We are happy to abolish the police and handle their functions ourselves, individually and as a group. The police are a peace treaty with the rest of you, who prefer to avoid the realities of that arrangement.

I disagree, I don't think this is an accurate description of what most right wingers believe. IMO Rightists tend to recognize the necessity/benefit of the Leviathan, so long as the state is fulfilling its half of the bargain. You're right that an average RW, high agency person is more likely to be capable of solving problems with violence, but I think they also tend to be more aware of the what the costs of doing so are (especially on a societal scale) and therefore are more likely to prefer the existence of the state/police.

IMO Rightists tend to recognize the necessity/benefit of the Leviathan, so long as the state is fulfilling its half of the bargain.

That's not the Leviathan. With the Leviathan, once you (or your forebears) have made the deal to surrender your sovereignty (whether voluntarily or at swordpoint), you're bound to it forever. Hobbes's second "OF THE RIGHTS OF SOVERAIGNES BY INSTITUTION" is "Soveraigne Power Cannot Be Forfeited".

Secondly, Because the Right of bearing the Person of them all, is given to him they make Soveraigne, by Covenant onely of one to another, and not of him to any of them; there can happen no breach of Covenant on the part of the Soveraigne; and consequently none of his Subjects, by any pretence of forfeiture, can be freed from his Subjection.

More comments

I don't actually disagree with your disagreement. My point is that the police don't exist to "protect right wingers from scary things". Right wingers can and will do that on their own. The police exist to provide that protection in a codified, formalized, legible, purportedly neutral fashion.

No, personal agency does not require anarchy. Personal agency is vitiated by insulating people from the consequences of their own actions, not by insulating them from the consequences of the actions of others.

Much of the core messaging on the right is explicitly 'anti-agency,'

As opposed to... the core pro-agency messaging of the left?

Obviously no one believes that individuals can act completely unconstrained by external factors. Whatever "pro-agency" ultimately means, it doesn't mean that.

I can see how you might construe the right's general fatalism regarding inequality as being anti-agency, but as has been painstakingly reiterated numerous times on this forum, HBD itself is policy-neutral. Recognizing the reality of genetic limitations is no different from recognizing gravity: it's a fact, and it doesn't care about your feelings, so you may as well get used to it. You're welcome to try to circumvent it anyway, and you might end up inventing the airplane in the process. But don't be shocked if you fail.

When is the last time a politician or right-wing influencer told someone from West Virginia that they have the power to improve their life by relocating, retraining or abstaining from drugs?

I can't think of any explicit instances to cite right now (except maybe some old JBP "clean your room" lectures), but I'm certainly happy to say it for them: poor people from West Virginia have the power to improve their lives by relocating, retraining, and abstaining from drugs. If they don't/can't do those things then that's on them.

Republicans obviously aren't immune to blaming the outgroup for their woes, but they are still consistently more likely to endorse the bootstrap perspective. While not a politician, Oliver Anthony was widely feted by them as well as the rank and file. Relevant line from his song:

But God, if you're five foot three and you're three hundred pounds

Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds

That's a pretty harsh way to talk about your ingroup, but they gobbled it up (so to speak).

you're addicted to fentanyl because of corrupt doctors and politicians in bed with Chinese companies flooding the country

Having just looked it up, I (a non-American) am surprised that needle exchange programs enjoy the level of support among Republicans that they do, but it's still almost twice as high among Democrats, and Republican states are far more likely to ban them. To be sure, this isn't a perfect proxy for embracing personal responsibility; it sets the bar below that. But the difference is still clear: Republicans are less likely to endorse policies that amount to buying people the opportunity to remain mired in their self-induced problems.

Taking a step back, you can believe in people's (qualified) agency without being a full-blown existentialist. All the conservative takes you list are accurate to some extent; if China stopped exporting fentanyl to the US, there would in fact be fewer addicts. It's a difference of degree.

When is the last time a politician or right-wing influencer told someone from West Virginia that they have the power to improve their life by relocating, retraining or abstaining from drugs?

There's Cernovich, or Bronze Age Pervert, or dozens of smaller accounts. Maybe you're thinking of Ben Shapiro and Cadence Owens and Hanania types. Beyond them, there is an overwhelming surplus of righties telling kids to buckle up, lift weights, learn to cook, invest, mew, code, read, write, train, work, learn, mog. If you step outside academic credential and op-ed circles, it's hard to find right-wingers who aren't talking about such things.

Hanania's definitely pro-agency. On this particular topic, see him talking (well, until a paywall) about his becoming not fat due to willpower, and encouraging the same.

I can't think of any reasonable way to draw the lines which would lump Richard Hanania in with Ben Shapiro or Candace Owens. They're almost polar opposites.

There's Cernovich, or Bronze Age Pervert, or dozens of smaller accounts.

Fair enough, I confess to not reading BAP and I've never heard of Cernovich. I'm surprised you wouldn't mention Joe Rogan or JD Vance, but I know the phenotype you're referring to.

Maybe you're thinking of Ben Shapiro and Cadence Owens and Hanania types

Well, also the vast majority of the Trump administration, people like Steve Bannon, Alex Jones (I guess he hawks his supplements) and other conservative talk radio hosts, red coded media (fox news, OANN, Breitbart), most of the local commentariat, most any public figure on the right whose schtick isn't self-help/redpill/MGTOW style. You know the rhetoric I'm referring to, right?

Sure, Trump isn't telling people to lift weights. What generalization do you want to make? That makes all the difference. The GOP isn't running on a platform of gym access and diet subsidies. If that's what you mean, I agree with you. But there are plenty of influential right-wingers with millions of followers -- BAP, Cernovich, lots of the guys Rogan brings on -- who are talking about these things.

Hanania tells them to buckle up. But since Trump’s ascension in 2015 this has been the minority position.

I guess. He's not really telling people to lift weights or invest or make their lives better. I do think he would just tell cons to suck it up when policies he likes cause bad outcomes, instead of trying to change policy.

So... No elected Republicans, nobody who is part of mainstream conservative politics. Just to be clear.

Who defines "the core messaging of the right"? OP included "right-wing influencers". Those people are overwhelmingly discussing self-improvement. Politicians? Nobody is running on lifting weights and eating clean but there is absolutely a culture of "personal responsibility" and individual freedom. Whats's fair? Donald Trump isn't talking about it, but there are plenty of things that fairly characterize "the left" that Democratic politicians aren't running on either.

Who defines "the core messaging of the right"?

The core message of the Right could be defined as the message that is important to a majority (or perhaps a large fraction) of Americans who identify as Right of center or who vote for Right of Center politicians or support Right of center causes. Those people are the actual physical Right in real life. When describing what the Right is, rather than what we might like it to be, the description has to reflect the actual people who support the thing.

BAP, whose work I enjoy more than most here, has 143,800 twitter followers. Sean Hannity has 6,500,000. Tucker has 12,600,000. And it's fair to say that Twitter is a much more important playform to BAP than it is to Hannity or to Tucker! (For reference, Taylor Swift has some 95,000,000 and Lebron has 52,800,000) Ben Shapiro, who you brush aside casually, has 6,600,000. To point to a tiny portion of the Right as representative is like using /r/swoletariat (30k subs) as your standard for the left.

The Marxist left has its delusional fantasy of the movement as a vehicle for the proletariat, the working class straining against Capital; it can't cope with the reality that the socialist left in America is mostly a vehicle for stoned college students and those who never really graduated. The Right has its own fantasy of itself as the noble, bootstrapping, individualist heroes; and can't cope with the real life coalition that puts right wing politicians in power.

Here in Ohio, we elected J.D. Vance, the Hillbilly Elegy guy, to the Senate.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats