site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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.

7
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Trivially, trans stuff is going to come to a critical head soon one way or the other: social conservatives has been focusing most heavily on minor transition, but Kincaid v. Williams is the other shoe dropping for Bostock, can't be put off another four years, and it's... hard to overstate how broad of an impact it would have. In addition to the direct regulatory impact, it would likely (given the recent EMTALA example) result in the feds overriding every remotely anti-trans state law under a Dem admin. And the next President has non-trivial chances of replacing the two names on the dissent from denial of cert in Kincaid. I don't think Trump particularly cares about trans stuff, but I don't think you can staff a Trump admin without anti-trans activists precipitating out of the woodwork even if he did care.

There's a lot of active encouragement of at-least-gray immigration under Biden. It's possible that most of that escapes scrutiny in a Trump administration, but at least some of it won't survive, for better or worse, and I'd expect it to be a serious target as this decade's version of 'self-deport'.

There's an increasing set of broad policies that the Democratic party is looking to get through over a wide variety of infrastructure goals for their political movement: regulation on charter or private schools, post-Janus encouragement for unions like banning right-to-work states, reparations-likes for (certain) minority groups. Trump obviously would be strike against any of those going anywhere, but progressive seem him as likely to do reversed version. Again, I'm not sure Trump cares, but a Trump administration will near-certainly bring people who do.

((Conversely, I think Paxton talks a much stronger talk than he actually walks.))