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 -
Some thoughtful replies to this post. I think your take is pretty interesting.
I'm hesitant to ascribe too much power to the BLM riots, though. While many perceived this as the Left flexing its practical power and control over the masses, I sort of thing it was just an over-indulged feel-good moment for people feeling a bit disempowered (a disempowered feeling being the true, root, and universal problem of our age I feel) on the left and a lot of cognitive dissonance too. So it drew in more people than expected due to those forces, but also on the flip side, I don't think it meaningfully demonstrated any actual control over the masses. Perhaps part of this lies rooted in media distortion yes, on both sides of the riots. For most participants, the talking point about peacefulness was actually true, and protest is objectively a significant and specially protected right as well as a force for change, generally and historically. Like, for a lot of people, it was like my sister's experience, where she was an impressionable and impassioned 16 year old who stood out with a sign in my very low-Black state of Oregon, in the suburbs, and... yeah that was the whole experience. Fox News did not portray this, not to a degree proportional to its reality OR its importance. Conversely, MSNBC was patently dishonest with its viewers. Ignoring the, uh, literal fucking flames, the beatings, the violence, all of this was difficult to watch. Police were defanged and demonized. Random Defund types were given megaphones. A lot of Red people were rightly feeling like they were watching some news describe an alternate reality.
Turns out all the public really wants is slightly more police, but with some accountability mechanisms that actually work, and which currently only barely exist. And guess what? BLM protests were actually, uh, fucking successful in the sense that body cam adoption rates among police officers have skyrocketed. Okay, fine. The accountability portion did not happen, not really. I still am waiting for that. It sucks. At the same time, it's clear that a lot of the numerical bigness of the BLM protests was not in fact "true believers" but fadsters. The accountability portion didn't happen because it turns out that while people vaguely want accountability, they currently don't actually want it bad enough. Possibly because most voters don't imagine themselves ever being on the wrong side of the law? Maybe we just need a few more scandals? Some police union reform? It will happen eventually.
The constitution has actual and practical meaning insofar as the well-founded and established legal protections derived therefrom provide functional and meaningful relief to abuse when seeking legal recourse. This actually accounts for many citizens, including you. Even top-end brokenness doesn't cancel out the taken-for-granted norms that are backed up by this option of last resort. Dysfunction in the Supreme Court does not in nearly any practical way diminish you and your actions, because they are not rewriting the entire body of common law that works jointly with relevant daily laws. The legal inertia of the legal system is not just massive, it is gargantuan. Of course, state-level laws are far and away the most impactful to individuals. There is likely some merit to a dedicated color-tribe to moving into an aligned state, but beyond that, no difference.
I think people confuse the lethargy of the system with inherent dysfunction. However, to throw out an ad-hoc rule of thumb, it only takes 10 years at a maximum for true and deep-seated, popular change to show up in actual law and legislatures. This is often longer than comfort. I get it. But redress is most certainly there.
You missed something. The document still has a strong guiding influence on the forms and functions alike of the use of said control. It's a well-worn groove that least-resistance rules say will often offer an underlying structure and direction to this exercise of power. In addition, there is strong legal inertia as previously discussed. In fact, the whole point of the Constitution, at its core, is that it provides a robust mechanism that can balance majority-tyranny with minority-rights while also accounting for future shifts in opinion, because some shifts are fleeting fads while others are more durable. Almost every single mechanism in the document is concerned with allowing some small amount of temporary change just in case the feeling ends up being real, while allowing for great shifts when these changes end up being persistent, and the latter is often deemed more important when the two conflict.
However! The only non-intuitive thing in the constitution is that it has a very strong allowance and permissions for State structures specifically. This is, in a way, a historical artifact of the at times greatly autonomous 13 colonies with separate charters and governance. Thus, the Senate being the way it is. Population disparities between states is the greatest foundational threat to the country and constitution, in this framing. The current national political situation almost perfectly reflects this. Personally, I'd split up the bigger states and admit them to the Union as new states, with combining states on the table as the stretch goal and totally redrawing lines as the super stretch goal, but I'm sadly not in charge :(
The problem with doing this is that this is unequivocally and permanently bad for Blue power.
Which, obviously, Blues won't like; since this will create a permanent Red Senate that can just block Blue policy goals (which will tilt the balance of power even more in the relatively-unaccountable executive direction) and has long-term ramifications about how their Tribe can exert influence going forward (since a sudden loss of territory in close proximity to the cities opens the door to massive State income and sales tax arbitrage, resource extraction is still rather lucrative in the states that have them, lawfare/process-as-punishment against Blue policies is more practical due to newly-independent police, etc.).
And sure, it's possible to create new states such that it advantages both Blue and Red, but doing that would require nonsense solutions that create city-states in flyover country (because cities are the only places that vote Blue, almost like the Blues are a purpose-built city interest faction or something). Sure, it could give the political situation a chance to stabilize if there were any other fault-lines other than "urban core" vs. "everyone else", but the economy has been hollowed out so much that I'm not convinced it's even possible (as the nation to the immediate north demonstrates: the "third way" Western left party was extraordinarily strong ~15 years ago, but is on track to disappear entirely in the next election).
Really? I’m pretty sure this is considered a Blue policy, though it might depend on the construction. Overall the Democrats usually win the popular vote but the Senate skews Red, this proposal is intended to level out the disparity between the two. Merging in particular disfavors Red, since rural states are lower population.
No, the trickiest issue is that even if we could balance the Red/Blue short term impact, it’s hard to actually draft a workable compromise because literally every state needs to individually give specific consent to border modification. Any one single state could torpedo the whole deal. There’s currently only a few places that would probably assent right away: for example Eastern Oregon has long wanted to join Idaho, and honestly they are a great fit.
I am visualizing an approach that would keep as many current state borders as-is as possible. So in practice we wouldn’t be gerrymandering cities, just slicing up bigger states into logical regions. For example California seems to be able to split in either 2 or 3, vertically stacked, without too much issue.
More options
Context Copy link
A North/South/West Texas split would create three upper-end-of average states, all of which would be pretty red. You could do a state of Rio Grande, which would probably be swingy, but look like obvious gerrymandering, or a set of even more obviously gerrymandered exclaves that are solid blue states. Ditto Louisiana; the obvious split would be north/south, both of which would be small red states.
But nobody's proposing those sets of splits. The main demand for a new state is to split off eastern Oregon- again, pretty red. Likewise, Northern California has a fairly fringe but real movement to split off from California; this is a red-leaning state of Jefferson. Upstate New York has wanted to split in the past, I doubt they're going to be a blue state.
For some reason, the people who actually want to have their state split up such that they're under a different government are all republicans with democrat-controlled state governments.
Whereas the split they'd actually need to come up with would be "State of Austin" and "State of Texas", since Austin's policy goals are quite a bit more suppressed by the rest of the state than the converse [whether the policies Austin wants are right or wrong is out of scope].
Which is why I think that, if we wanted it to be perceived as fair by both sides, it'd have to be city-states made up of Blue cities in perma-Red states- as this is the reverse of the "some reason" you're hinting at (which, again, comes down to "consent of the governed is not equally geographically distributed", and both Blues and Reds have motivated reasoning for not understanding that).
But nobody seems to want that. Even in blue cities on the borders of red states(that is, not Austin), they usually don't want to have a different state. I don't think there's any movement for Kansas City to be its own state. Nor New Orleans or Miami.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link