site banner
PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   25097 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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.

8
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

This is the same attitude as removed the memorial to the Confederate Soldiers which is a really fucking stupid decision.

It was a civil war. Now, since you are all going to have to live in the same country after the war, and these were (in some cases literally) your brothers and not a buncha foreigners, are you going to conduct yourself as "vae victis" or are you going to try and heal the wounds and all live together?

Because if you go the "we won, bitches, bend over and take it" route, then you are setting up for more civil wars. Do you think North America would really have been better off to emulate South America, where nearly every country had a new insurrection and replacement as soon as the wind changed direction?

You may not like them, but if the entire fucking point of the war was "you are our fellow citizens, you can't just up and leave and start your own country", then afterwards you have to act like it.

And that includes memorials to young men who went out to fight not because they were ravening racists, but because they lived in a state where they were told to fight for their homeland. "We shoulda wiped the bastards out when we had the chance" is only proving that they were right to fight against the aggressors, because that's how you're behaving.

Not every war is as simple as "they're the Nazis so that makes us the Good Guys" and civil wars are particularly tricky in that fashion. And if you're saying "well they're not my fellow citizens, they're nothing to do with me", then they should have been permitted to leave and set up their own nation; the territory of the continent is big enough for two separate nation-states.

Not to mention that Reconstruction, if pushed to excesses by Northern hardliners, could have easily ended up being a long-term political catastrophe in a myriad of ways.

I don't think it's "stupid". I think it's a power move - showing that in fact those who want the monuments to stay are not "fellow citizens", but a disgusting basket of deplorables, and moreover, that the opposite side is feeling so strong they do not need to hide their sentiment anymore, neither out of respect nor out of practical necessity.

then they should have been permitted to leave and set up their own nation

But why would they be permitted anything? That would require considering them equals and peers, entitled to the same rights and freedoms as everybody else. But they are not, they are a disgusting basket of deplorables. They are not permitted anything except to shut up and be thankful they are not being sent to reeducation camps. At least not yet.

Because if you go the "we won, bitches, bend over and take it" route, then you are setting up for more civil wars

The Left feels they own pretty much every institution in the nation, and the right owns what? A bunch of rednecks with guns in their basements? They spoke openly and repeatedly at how they consider it to be laughable against the power of the government. And they are not entirely wrong in that. The Left has been willing to apply both chaotic power (antifa, BLM, now Hamas support gangs) and the lawful power (look what happened to Proud Boys and Jan 6 protestors) very forcefully and successfully, and the Right, with all their bragging about how many guns they have, has not been able to do jack about it. So no wonder they are very confident about pressing further, and are totally unafraid of any escalation. They feel they can handle anything, and easily.

why would they be permitted anything?

Natural law.

Your country is not founded on the sole primacy of might. You'd have to be fine with slavery if it was.

But you can't fight for self determination only when convenient. Lest you tarnish the political formula into mere power.

And at that point, yeah anyone's entirely justified in opposing you to the death so long as they win. Not a position anyone reasonable wants to be in.

Natural law only applies to men of honour who will kill for that honour and glory.

Hobbes, locke, and the founding fathers assumed they lived in a world where men would look a man in the eye and murder him rituallistically as his friends watched, because the man had insulted him, and that that man would sooner stare down a pistol and "Recieve fire" than reveal himself a coward.

Unless you're willing to die and kill for your personal pride and pride alone you are not a free man with natural rights but a slave.

We are doomed to be slowly conquered by the cartels, they will slowly take over and slaughter all who oppose them and we'll deserve it and the gods will howl in rage that they show us any mercy.

Much as this could be brought up and debated in other contexts, is there any other American foe that is more worthy of being called men of honor in this sense than the Confederacy? But let's not take easy asides, your real objection to what I'm saying is that you think power is the thing-in-itself and the fictions I'm talking about have no reality except as to describe the relationships between the weak and the strong.

I disagree because I think there is such a thing as magic. The sentimentality that binds people into being a nation and not just a warband is a spell that has to be taken into account. Mere brutes are not lasting rulers. Women lord it over men that could easily overpower them. The story people tell about what they're doing, though it cannot replace the reality of the deed, is still very important.

And though as you justly point out, the higher levels of civilization Hobbes calls out for are only possible if we retain the ability to do violence. These higher levels are still real, desirable, meaningful and -- insofar as the Enlightenment is wrong about there ever being a state of nature -- natural.

Your country is not founded on the sole primacy of might.

The founding of the country was a long time ago, and the current powers on the Left consider the founders to be irredeemably evil racists, whose legacy should be wiped out. So I don't see how you can expect them to operate within the same ethical framework as the Founders did. In fact, we know they aren't - a lot of heinous crimes are easily justified by the Left as part of "decolonization" and "resistance"- why you expect they would make any exceptions for their ideological enemies? You can consult your modern history textbooks to see what the Left does to their ideological enemies when they get to power. None of the dead old white patriarchal male chauvinist pigs and none of the old parchments would stop them from doing the same. They openly and explicitly rejected this framework already.

Plenty of tree branches in the South, and there weren't that many rich planters. Hand the planters land over to white and black farmers, and there we go.

Because if you go the "we won, bitches, bend over and take it" route, then you are setting up for more civil wars.

That's fine, you just keep winning until they are thoroughly beaten down or all dead. There are few political problems that cannot be solved with sufficient application of violence, supposing you have the capacity to apply it.

And all that to achieve...what? That 13% of all brain surgeons and software developers are Black?

No, the beating down is its own reward.

From 1984 by George Orwell:

"Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"

...

"The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men." He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: "How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?"

Winston thought. "By making him suffer," he said.

"Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy—everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."

That's fine, you just keep winning until they are thoroughly beaten down or all dead. There are few political problems that cannot be solved with sufficient application of violence, supposing you have the capacity to apply it.

Worked like charm in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. Winning pitched battles is one thing.

Having a population of civilians that is really keen on backstabbing everyone with a yankee accent is really hard to govern.

The US cared about civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. At first we were trying to win hearts and minds, not subjugate them under our boot. By the end that was gone, but we never tried a serious campaign of crushing them and genocide was never on the table. (In Vietnam, of course, there was another superpower-backed army)

Those arguing that Reconstruction wasn't tough enough have no similar compunctions about subjugating Southerners.

I am fairly sure. I am talking about logistics though. The nazis had better technology, better records, much smaller (and better pacified) territory than the south, targeted a way smaller percentage of the population and they still managed to half ass the thing.

As far as genocides go, they didn’t half ass it, 85% of Jews in nazi occupied territory were killed. And if you’re talking about resistance movements in general, it was mostly pretty minimal for much of the war, particularly in Western Europe.

I think Nybbler's referring to the genocide option, or even the decimation option (every time there's a revolt, kill a random 10% of the population).

Killing 100% of the population of Iraq would, trivially, have prevented any uprising. It would also, of course, have been terrible.

In Vietnam you don't even need to go that far into "lol war crimes"; simply being willing to invade North Vietnam (and fight the PLA) would probably have sufficed, although that's a huge expenditure of men and money.

Yep. If the south kept resisting then a simple policy of "take the children of whites from them at age 6 and indoctrinate them in the memes of the north, only sending them back after the age of 18" would clear away the problem in a single generation (this could be paid for by taxing the south for the upbringing of its children) once the people indoctrinated with northern values started making up a large portion of the south.

Not saying this would be the right thing to do or even moral, but it is a possibility.

If the south kept resisting then a simple policy of "take the children of whites from them at age 6 and indoctrinate them in the memes of the north, only sending them back after the age of 18" would clear away the problem in a single generation

Ah yes, and this is why the implementation of the Residential Schools resulted in the complete erasure of Indian/First Nations groups, which today are mere memories with no relevance or political salience at all.

Education doesn’t raise IQ levels… not sure why this would do better than the last 70 years of public education has done at raising achievement rates for a particular section of the population.

You just described the public education system.

Except states set their own curricula and Southern states aren't exactly known for their wholehearted embrace of Anti-Racist memes.

Fair point.

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