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.

But the world did not literally end because he typed the wrong number into a computer terminal like in LOST

As president, Trump literally fired the guy whose job that was and we did have a worldwide catastrophe.

  • -10

As someone who has gone into the weeds on this, I do not think you want to start getting into the origination of COVID, Peter Daszak and the ecohealth alliance et al. There aren't any wins for progressive politics in that direction.

I know far more than I'd like about the lab leak conspiracy nonsense. But it's also not actually relevant: whether the virus came from the market or the lab, the US position in the Chinese CDC is about the cover-up afterward.

Remember we only got the sequence used to make the vaccines because an Australian scientist, Eddie Holmes, had a personal connection with a Chinese scientist and convinced them to defy the Chinese government to release the sequence (interview with Eddie Holmes about that). Having people in the Chinese CDC is to have enough visibility in what's going on there so they won't cover things up / have those personal connections so they won't. With those connections, we wouldn't have needed that Chinese scientist being willing to light their career on fire to get that information. And would have known about the outbreak sooner.

So we had one less guy to call us racist for pointing out something odd was going on in Wuhan?

I rated this "Bad" on the volunteer page; I actually agree with your point, but zingers are not how you have productive debate. You could have raised this point less obnoxiously.

Damn, had a pretty good warning-free run, but some things are too hard to resist.

@token_progressive, apologies, I was out of line.