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 -
Conversation has been slow here. I feel like the standards have increased to the point where people are afraid to post (except of course for bad faith posters who don't care).
So, let me try a post that's more of a conversation starter and less of a PhD thesis.
According to Bernie Sanders, it costs about $5 to make a monthly dose of Ozempic, the blockbuster-weight loss drug. Americans pay about $1000/month. Canadians pay $155. Germans pay $59.
The stock of the company which makes the drug, Novo Nordisk, has doubled since the beginning of 2023. (I considered buying in 2022 but didn't because I thought I was already too late 💀) It now has a market cap of nearly $600 billion, making it the most valuable company in Europe.
I assume that if companies were forced to charge the same price in U.S. as they do in Europe, the global pharma industry would become insolvent.
So why is the United States paying for > 100% of global pharma research? And how can we fix the glitch?
Well 1) I'd rather have a slower forum with higher quality posts than a faster forum with lower quality posts, and 2) I don't think the standards are actually that high. I've never seen a top level post get modded for effort as long as it had ~2 paragraphs of original text that wasn't copy-pasted from the linked article. Maybe even one paragraph would be fine.
I think discussion has been slow simply because the news itself has been slow. The American culture war has entered its trench warfare phase, and it's not nearly as fresh and exciting as it was in the 2015-2019 period - the lines have been drawn, wokeism isn't going anywhere, much like the Ukrainian situation the territory that has been won is very unlikely to be ceded. It's hard to come up with a hot new take at this point. Instead we'll simply witness the long slow grind of things continuing on as they have for the past decade.
There was a lot of AI discussion around the time of the site transition, but AI news has also been rather slow for the past year, compared to the frenzy of activity that happened in late 2022 and early 2023.
I'm always happy to read high quality evergreen philosophical/theoretical essays, but these sorts of posts have understandably always been less popular and fewer in number than current events-y type stuff.
I think some people here are so stuck in a doomer mindset that their minds refuse to accept wins for their own side. It's like they are committed to a world-view in which they are eternally oppressed. Much like the wokes are.
From where I sit, wokism looks much less dominant than it did 4 or so years ago.
For example, Musk buying Twitter has been a huge win for anti-wokes. With that act, he pulled a bunch of previously taboo and semi-taboo discussions right into the mainstream. If he had instead tried to start a Twitter competitor, network effects would probably have meant that it would never take off. But because he bought Twitter, network effects are instead working in his favor, making it so that even many of the people who dislike the changes he has made still stay on the site.
Another interesting recent event is the civil war inside the Democratic coalition over the issue of Israel. That divide has been there for a long time, of course, but I do not recall it ever having been as intense as it is now.
Yet another interesting event is the increasing European shift against immigration from MENA countries. Reddit's /r/europe is practically indistinguishable from here now when it comes to stances on MENA immigration, with the one exception that they do not usually discuss genetics quite as much.
I think it's not so much that there aren't interesting things happening, it might be more that this is a pretty small community with not a lot of fresh blood and a lot of fixation on a small set of topics (HBD, trans, Jews, etc...), and so if you've been here for a while, you've already seen the same 20 or so people rehash the same 5 or so topics over and over again in pretty much the same ways. People's takes are often good, but it gets repetitive.
I mean the rebuttal I expect to see is to ask if those represent progress or a rebound to further-left than it was before.
Is being allowed to discuss freer-but-not-freely on some subreddits and X/twitter a win? Certainly it isn't the wild west I remember.
Your other examples are a change in vibes in some places, which I think is important but is far from an actual realization of a win.
I am not quite blackpilled, but I've not seen many wins for the Rand Paul clan of the red tribe and I don't see a path to get there.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link