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 -
Another day, another man engaging in auto-auto-da-fe. While the stellar minds of the frontpage Reddit debate if it is QAnon or TDS that make a person set himself on fire, less stellar ones dug up his manifesto, where he places Trump and Hillary on the same side, and Thiel and cryptocurrency at the heart of it all. Points for originality. Not many points, but some points. But this is only the background for a comment which I read in the thread, one of a thousand semantically identical ones over the years.
It sounds incredibly plausible that the term "conspiracy theory" and flooding the field with flat-earthers, bigfoot hunters, extraterrestial anal examination enjoyers, and the rest, is itself a conspiracy designed to discredit people who ask questions about Kennedy assassination and Mkultra by conflating them with kooks and schizos. But going further, there is a meme, that comment which I have read a thousand times, which says it's a fear of nobody in control, of a random universe and of Hanlon's razor that makes people invent conspiracy theories. Is this meme a psy-op itself? Its aim to bring down status of those who ask questions about possible conspiracies even lower, paint them as cowards running from the reality? Given how reliably it appears as a call-response pair with somebody mentioning a conspiracy theory in a discussion, I'm inclined to answer positively.
And maybe it's a typical mind fallacy, but another piece of evidence of the artificiality of this meme is that it reverses the scariness of those two possibilities. To me, a world where people come to harm because of impersonal arbitrary forces, of an inherent chaos which can be mitigated or ignored according to your risk tolerance, is a comforting world. It is not the world I believe in. I believe there are malicious, intelligent, competent agents which plan for humiliation and elimination of large masses of populations, because, respectively, social status is zero-sum and material resources are finite. I know that I'm not as intelligent, as connected, as fortunate in the circumstances of my birth as them, so there is literally nothing I can to in mitigation, not to mention that malice aggravates the feeling of injustice so much more than bad luck, when something horrible happens. This world I believe we live in, the world of conspiracy theories that are true, is without a doubt not the more comforting one of the two.
This is a silly position to hold. The world is positive-sum given that scientific advances in productivity combined with returns-to-scale have allowed us to make humanity richer than ever before. I presume you are right-wing but this horseshoes pretty well with the leftist idea that European civilizations only got rich by plundering brown countries, and that whites will forever be tainted by this until reparations enforces equity upon all nations (and perhaps not even then). It's utter tripe.
Material wealth can be positive sum because we can add to it in discrete components.
Social status is innately relative, and as a function of that is innately zero sum. The lower classes have more absolute wealth than they did in 1800, but they don't have more status.
That just begs the question what social status is. I think ranking is too poor of a definition and instead esteem should be considered at least as an important part of ones social status. Then social status trivially isn't a zero sum game, as we for example could increase the total trust in a system, taking for granted that 'trust afforded' is a component of ones esteem. For example imagine a group consisting of a 1:1 split of gentlemen and Criminal Scum (tm) compared to one that's purely gentlemen. Hopefully I don't have to belabour the point of how the amount of trust and pleasant behavior are different for each group, and how the amount can be increased by decreasing the ratio of Criminal Scum (tm).
I think the closest to zero sum is attention, but even believing that to be zero sum can be likened to believing that material wealth is. Of course there is some maximal bound on both of them, but I don't believe we are anywhere close to saturating the amount of attention that can be given and not either it's quality.
But given that you believe that social status is innately zero sum, how do you think adding people to a system interacts with status? Is the amount diluted or is average kept (per person)?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link