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 -
60 minutes recently released a big investigation on Havana Syndrome basically saying that the cause is real attacks by Russian intelligence agents and not some sort of psychosocial mass hallucination (which many have believed since these incidents first began to occur). They identify specific Russian agents and link their movements to occurrences of Havana Syndrome aka AHIs (anomalous health incidents). As someone who was unsure about what was going on here this seems pretty convincing: Russians have been using some sort of weapon to target US intelligence personnel.
The culture war angle to this is twofold. First, the US IC has seemed unsure whether these AHIs (which usually take the form of some sort of brain injury) were the result of Russian attacks. If this article is legit then these reporters managed to do a better job than the people we pay and give access to classified information to so that they can find out exactly these sorts of things. This is an enormous failure on the part of US intelligence services, its agents have been getting attacked, many have been forced to medically retire, and the organizations they belong to haven't even been able to determine whether an attack happened at all. To be fair, some organizations seem to have said these were likely attacks, others have said the opposite, so not every organization failed to the same extent in this respect.
The other culture war angle is that if this article is true, Russia has been attacking members of the US intelligence community for a decade. What will be the retaliation for this? US relations with Russia are already pretty bad, but this is quite a big provocation. Russia occupies a spot in the US culture war, I wonder if this will change that position very much. Is Putin still strong and trad? Can he get more reviled by the people who hate him? Most people seem uninterested in/uninformed about spy stuff so maybe this won't really register in the public consciousness.
This isn't as culture-war-y a topic as some, but I think it's interesting.
It is hard to believe that US intelligence is becoming worse. The recent events (Ruso-Ukrainian war, Crocus City Hall shooting) show that is has become better.
It appears that CIA has wide access to online communication worldwide and combined with modern AI technologies that allows to sieve vast amounts of information and find a needle in the haystack. A translator I had known got hired by a US agency couple of years ago. She has never spoken what she does but I suspect that she works on automated translation models for US intelligence. Currently we should assume that communication in any language is equally monitored and analysed.
Also, it hard to believe that if Russians really possessed such technology that many describe as improbable it wouldn't have leaked by now. Even best agents eventually make mistakes.
Russians have been involved in assassination in other countries, like in the UK. But we know that because eventually we found some evidence. It is likely that it could have happened in this case too, especially after repeated attacks in several countries. Unless, of course, CIA knows more about these cases but keep silent.
And third, why would Russians use this technology against targets of low importance instead of someone who really matters?
It's difficult to reason about the competency of US intelligence since both the successes and failures are often hidden.
From first principles, we'd reason that US intelligence is not very competent because they can't effectively recruit high IQ people in comparison to tech, banking, and consulting.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link