site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37970 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 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.

13
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

No man, no problem.

Here's my modest proposal: have homelessness be punishable by the death penalty.

The liberals will be outraged, but anyone who can't get a stranger to house them, even under the impending threat of death, is obviously an individual who has completely and utterly exhausted the patience of society and is committing a slow form of suicide. If they don't care about their own lives, then why should we?

Housing is expensive, and giving it to the most useless members of our society is counterproductive. Bullets are cheap.

The policy you describe is obviously monstrous, but moreover, it seems likely to me that its worst consequence wouldn't be the people directly executed by the state; it would be the surge in crime brought on by well-meaning citizens frantically taking in homeless people to save them from the policy, no questions asked. The typical criminally insane homeless man wouldn't be killed under your regime; he would be given free access to the home of a WASP-y upper-middle-class overeducated Democrat family who conscientiously object to the policy. It would take many of their number being robbed, raped, and murdered for them to learn better, if they ever would; even relatively moderate sorts you wouldn't expect - Republican voters, even, hardcore Christian churchgoers - would be much more easily pressured into making serious personal sacrifices for the homeless under the conditions you describe creating.

I am cynical enough to wonder if something like this is your intent, although I am not so cynical to immediately assume it is.

"It sounds like you're just feeding naive liberal women to the homeless."

Quite astute. Yes, that was a foreseen secondary consequence. The burden of care falls about the socially conscientious directly, rather than abstractly through government policy. The reasoning isn't too far from requiring warhawks to register for the draft. And if they do so, without the public purse being involved, it is saving to the treasury: and the negative externalities are confined to those foolish enough to try, rather than the public at large.

So, overall, I see it as a win-win.

The reasoning isn't too far from requiring warhawks to register for the draft.

Okay, a rob-bank-hawk is someone who thinks we should arrest and jail bank robbers. Do you think that rob-bank-hawks should be required to become security guards (or maybe become bank robbers)?

The analogy would only make sense if in response to a legitimate problem (people robbing banks) people advocated for policies that would give out a percentage of the bank's deposits to anyone who would ask (for isn't the root cause of bank robbery the lack of money?) And if you questioned why you should give up your bank account to thieves (and why they suspiciously stuff all their income underneath the mattress) they called you racist or something. And that nonsense became the status quo.

Indeed, it would be the prudent thing for such concerned individuals to become security guards, rather than trusting the insurance to make up for rampant bankrobbery, somehow.

I can see where that analogy might work for homeless advocates, but how does it work for warhawks? Are warhawks advocating something that's equivalent to giving up your bank account to thieves?

I imagine he has in mind the myriad voices advocating for Ukraine, and giving it money.

The problem with ideas like this is that the people who are causing most of the problem are mentally ill, and part of that mental illness is often a lack of insight, impaired judgement and even things like a profound lack of awareness of the fact that they have a disease (anosognosia).

People who are more or less making a choice (ex: the mentally well, people with substance abuse absent mental illness)....it may be reasonable to treat these people harshly.

But figuring out who is in which population is HARD.

Can you tell me why their mental illness is a relevant factor in sentencing them to death without using the word ableism?

If someone was acutely delirious from say, sepsis, we'd forgive them for certain types of bad behaviors (like flailing and hitting their nurse). If they were high and did something they wouldn't usually we do we wouldn't forgive them. This is in part because the latter is a choice and the former isn't.

Mental illness is more complicated. Some people with schizophrenia don't take medication because they are lazy, or because they don't like the side effects. These people may be making a benefit risk calculation and failing. Some people don't because their illness tells them they are healthy and don't need medication. These people aren't making a "choice." Telling who belongs in which bucket can be very hard.

I think acute is doing a lot of the work here. We understand this person (1) doesn’t normal hit people and (2) won’t once the ailment passes.

That is entirely different from the druggie or the mentally ill.

Druggie's are one thing that is rather complicated, but for the mentally ill, especially at the level of severe mania and psychosis....they aren't making informed and considered choices, the disease gets in the way.

If someone lives a healthy, normal life, then gets frontal lobe damage and becomes an asshole....that's not their fault. We might lock them up to prevent them from threatening others, but the substrate is damaged and they can't make decisions required to stay out of trouble.

if your brain is telling you that you are NORMAL and HEALTHY and that medical people and government people are out to get you, then you can't make the right decisions. That's what a delusion is.

In very careful and controlled circumstances we can work around it, but it's depressingly rare. Many people feel great and are normal with meds (and want to continue), but then they get sick and metabolize a dose differently and then the whole thing starts again.

Do not underestimate the way severe mental illness impairs your ability to make the right choices, hell some of the medications have side effects like "compulsive gambling."

There comes a point where "is it their fault" doesn't matter. If someone is regularly violently criminal, it doesn't matter if it's because of a brain injury or they're just a sociopathic asshole, what matters is that they be stopped from victimizing other people. Whether or not they are morally culpable is a secondary concern over the need to incapacitate them for the benefit of their would-be victims.

This is overcomplicated and inhumane, and unprecedented. Instead we should use the cheap, simple, traditional solution- declare those who refuse efforts to help them outlaws, who can be beaten, threatened, and harassed with impunity. The police or ordinary respectable citizens can deal with the problem homeless them damn selves then, without the need for a baroque process involving NGOs and doctors. Likely it won’t apply to the non-problem homeless.

A modest proposal, then?

At the risk of taking the bait, and against my better judgment... This is a hideously lazy solution for a society that has moved beyond sustenance farming. You're making a cynical presumption of intentional apathy to justify unreasonable measures, when in reality, there but for the grace of God do you go. In a society where your friends and family reflect your attitude, you're one TBI away from being labeled an inconvenience and put to death. Without a hint of introspection or irony, you condemn the homeless because your tiny slice of the collective burden of housing them is too costly and inconvenient for you? Have we considered, perhaps, making the burden less burdensome? Maybe eliminating legislative barriers to affordable housing erected by the economically privileged would be a better place to start than getting out your guns and going postal on a tent city? As it stands, you want society to grant you a license to kill those who inconvenience you - and this is exactly the sort of small-minded, impulsive criminality that society is constructed to curtail.

While we're unseriously venting our spleens, here's a modest counter-proposal: you can have your license to kill the homeless, but you only get to kill as many people as for whom you voluntarily provide housing, and if you ever stop providing that housing for any reason, and anyone you housed is killed by this policy, you too are put to death. This is at least marginally less lazy than your proposal, because it forces you to exercise discriminating judgment as to who is worth helping and who is a lost cause, and it guarantees that you can't take someone in for a day just to execute them the following day. You get to slake your bloodthirst and prove that you aren't just a lazy sociopath who wants society to give you a free pass for murder; I get you to rehabilitate or hospice someone who doesn't deserve to die, because your skin is in the game; some people get a better life than they currently have; and we get to eliminate the truly hopeless cases. And if no one agrees to house someone for their license to kill, we're no worse-off than we started.

I'd personally prefer if we don't openly advocate for killing groups of people over inconveniences and unproductivity, but if we must, let's at least try to address the obvious, foreseeable objections to our modest proposals with our own well-reasoned conclusions, and not just show our whole ass to the world?

You're making a common, fundamental mistake: the problem isn't that they don't have housing. "Homeless" is a misnomer. The problem isn't where they sleep, the problem is how they act. They aren't homeless because rents are too high, they're homeless because they have failed to hold down a job, or pay their rent, or maintain relationships with friends and family, or stay out of jail, or prioritize their own well being.

https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2023/05/hes-just-been-a-wrecking-ball-accused-arsonist-in-sw-portland-apartment-fire-hit-with-stalking-order-day-before-blaze.html This is what happens when you give them free housing (though an admittedly extreme example). This is not a problem of allocating sufficient money, this is a problem of "what do you do with people who destroy everything around them when given freedom."

Uttermost nitpick: "subsistence farming", as in you can farm just enough to subsist on.

Though arguably with stuff like bioethanol we've also moved beyond sustenance farming...

Oops, thanks.

It's not laziness: it's restoring man to the state of nature where if he does not think of his morrows, of his shelter and sustenance, he will die. There is no ambushers lying in wait on the outside of corporate layoffs. Police forces around the world have a list of 'individuals known to authority', who commit the pareto majority of homeless nuisance. Let us kill them all: swallow your liberal indignation about the rights and dignity of man and other such nonsense, and I'll let you embark on whatever reformist scheme in the aftermath that you please.

That's my counterproposal!

it's restoring man to the state of nature

Would that be the same state of nature in which there was a 40-50% infant mortality rate?

Bailey Not-Castle: let's make homelessness punishable by death!

Motte Castle: let's kill everyone on the "individuals known to authority" list, as they commit the Pareto majority of homeless nuisances.

I won't poke too much more fun at this, since I did literally ask for it, and clearly connecting punishment to crimes instead of statuses is a promising step forward.

Padme: You confused the motte with the bailey... right?

...right...?

Maybe! I like to forget which is which. It makes for some funny threads.

I am not one of those advocating for executing homeless people, but I think there's an important point to be made here: if no solution is implemented, then this is what people will resort to. You cannot expect them to sit around for years waiting for enlightened technocrats to come up with the most humane remedies for societies' ills while they are harassed and threatened on a daily basis on the subway, going to a grocery store, or walking home. Any solution that goes into effect today is worth more to the folks on the ground than the perfect plan at some unspecified time in the future.

I can at least respect this position. Taxpayers and charities have handed lots of money and time to various entities to fix the problem, and they have a nasty habit of either making the problem worse, or running up a huge bill to sit around and pontificate on the problem. The police are neutered, incompetent, apathetic, or incapable of dealing with the problem, often by the demands and threats of a tiny slice of the activist class. And the homelessness problem has visibly gotten terrible! I live somewhere where I've seen firsthand how bad things have gotten. I can understand why people are eventually going to reach for vigilantism or mob rule when every function in society designed to protect against these problems has failed or turned traitor to wage class warfare.

And if we reach the point where our leaders, police, activists, and technocrats really can't fix the homelessness problem, and the only solution really feels like mass murder... indiscriminately taking out our collective anger on the mentally ill, addicted, and financially unlucky, is missing the forest for the trees, no?

You cannot expect them to sit around for years waiting for enlightened technocrats to come up with the most humane remedies for societies' ills while they are harassed and threatened on a daily basis on the subway, going to a grocery store, or walking home.

Yes, you can. And if they don't, you can have them imprisoned. And that will teach the other regular people that the homeless crazies are not to be interfered with; unlike the homeless crazies, most people respond quite well to incentives.

if no solution is implemented, then this is what people will resort to.

Not if you prohibit them from doing so, and consistently enforce this prohibition with serious punishments.

You cannot expect them to sit around for years waiting for enlightened technocrats to come up with the most humane remedies for societies' ills while they are harassed and threatened on a daily basis on the subway, going to a grocery store, or walking home.

Why not? What are they going to do about it? Particularly after anyone who decides not to just sit around gets prosecuted and sent to prison for decades pour encourager les autres.

Your response is just unbounded sympathy without a real solution. Indeed, the failure mode of every unsuccessful homeless "solution" appears to be the assumption that we are failing them, rather than that they are failing us.

I met a call for indiscriminate mass murder with a self-regulating incentive system that simultaneously brings out the best in people, offers a second chance to those truly down on their luck, and condones the death of the undeserving - I'd hardly call that "unbounded sympathy".

On a serious note, I totally agree that there has to be a limit to society's generosity for recalcitrant insanity and unrepentant antisocial behaviors. I also think that, as far as solutions, "kill them and everyone that roughly matches that description" is a lazy edgelord hot take; the ridiculous cost of food and shelter lately is probably responsible for a considerable fraction of the "roughly matches that description" class; and there's an important distinction between criminal and personal nuisances.

Here's my modest proposal: have homelessness be punishable by the death penalty.

If you dig into the lore of the Purge - it is literally how it started.

This is all just a uk sketch comedy bit from many years ago.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE?si=3wutHxO7qKcatKZa

I would prefer exile.

Also, as an addendum, might I propose deliberately loose enforcement? The whole problem I'm trying to solve for is belligerent vagrants ruining public spaces. If a given bum person temporarily experiencing unhousedness can avoid being a nuisance in public spaces, I really don't need to burn police resources tracking down remote encampments.

The problem with exile is that there's nowhere to exile them to anymore. Exile only works when there is unowned wilderness or other communities that are not significantly connected to your own nearby. We're definitely not going to be exiling them to Canada or Mexico, and there's no real way to exile someone from say San Francisco that doesn't affect San Jose, Oakland, and Palo Alto nearby. We're definitely not going to be exiling them to somewhere like Yosemite or Death Valley.

This makes even more economic sense: we'd save the price of a firing squad and the bullet too. All of the residents of the Tenderloin should be recollected to wherever those German tourists went in Death Valley a few years ago.

I obviously know that this is just a dopey hypothetical, but the Bureau of Land Management owns 247 million acres and plenty of it is remote.

I guess exile to Alaska is always good as a last resort. But at that point, we might as well start exiling them into the Pacific Ocean.

You might be underestimating how much federal land there is.

Yes, but if you exile them to the wilderness, they will die. It's a bit of fringe leftist cope that was slightly popular recently that "we" owe the homeless a living because there's no more wild lands where they could survive on their own. But that's nonsense; they'd nearly all die rather quickly in any halfway-wild place.

You don’t even need to use blm land. We have plenty of nearly abandoned towns in Nebraska. Fetterman in Pittsburgh was the mayor of an abandoned town.

Isn’t part of California’s homelessness problem the tendency for other cities to offer exile to California as an option for the homeless?

I always thought it had to do with the fact that Californian laws were simply more favorable to the homeless, creating a self selection process.

Probably part of the reason this offer gets taken, honestly.

remote encampments

Structures in encampments (not tents but e.g. wooden shacks) should be considered homes, allowing them to invest further in their structures etc. Adverse possession already exists on the law books. Private citizens may push them off. Then, on government land, why not let them homestead it?

Indeed, LA's "rivers" aren't used. Why not let people build structures in them, open insurance policies etc. If it does rain and flood, the government's already subsidizing housing in landslide and wildfire zones. At least peasant hovels are cheap to replace.

The subset of the homeless who are causing the problems are also the subset who, if given a home, will trash it. This includes encampments, so it won't work.

I will echo @erwgv3g34 and say that this is ultimately probably the only sustainable solution. Maybe rope instead of bullets, or lethal injection or whatever other painless and visually non-icky method of execution our society wants to come up with, but the general idea of executing the chronically homeless or profoundly mentally ill is entirely sound.

I'm not going to endorse OP's proposal, but just watching the opioid crisis and overdosing hit my city looks a lot like your suggestion already. I'm modestly surprised I haven't heard any self-declared progressives declare that euthanasia is a human right and trying to discourage Narcan in obvious heckin' valid overdoses suicide attempts -- there are already plenty of anecdotes of people saved by it becoming violent about its effects. It's an obvious opportunity to pat oneself on the back and save money at the same time.

But I do find the idea fairly repugnant.

But I do find the idea fairly repugnant.

Me, too, but I find the reality of tents under every bridge, and a panhandler at every stop sign, unacceptable.

I feel bad for feeling this way, but I have a weird feeling about Narcan for precisely this reason. It's pretty clear there's a large group of opioid users who hate their lives, hate their existence, find extreme painkillers and euphoriants necessary to carry on, and find absolutely no reason in living a life free from their drug addiction. They become a burden to themselves and their families, sometimes resorting to theft or even killing for pennies to buy fentanyl. After years -- years! -- of desensitization, they can take even large quantities of the hyper-potent fentanyl. And then you find them lying on the floor in a mall bathroom after years of this self-destruction, overdosed on their powder of joy and headed straight for escape from this quintessence of dust.

I think we need to do what we can to prevent people becoming opioid addicts and to help people who aren't too far gone. But more and more I see these stories of people who obviously don't want to live being brought back to the life they don't want with Narcan, and I feel bad for them. Their behavior has pretty clearly demonstrated what they want and yet we insist on holding them to the life they so profoundly despise.

I don't know why Americans love drugs so much. No other country deals with this like we do. But on this issue I'd say the moment Narcan becomes involved we've already failed many times. We've got to fix the reasons why people come to hate their lives so much they want to escape by any means necessary.

But once they've decided they hate existence so much they'll risk death to feel relief, maybe they're too far gone to save them and what we're saving is a shell of a person filled to the tippy-top with white powder.

I think we should allow 2-days a year for people to use heroin. Every other day during the year it is banned and punishable by death.

I’ve heard it’s an amazing feeling before your addicted. Everyone gets high once a year and enjoys it. The rest of the year access is impossible so no addiction.

Legal tolerance breaks. I like it.

"self-euthanasia" is a very niche position on the left, while having Medical Professionals prescribe MAID is now universally supported.

It seems strange to support one but not the other, until you consider it in terms of "rugged individuals making individual choices" vs "creeping bureaucratization of every aspect of human life from birth to death"

This, but unironically.

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