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It depends what type of "correct" solution you're talking about.
A maximally "nice" solution, like free housing maintained by Government employees and unlimited free drugs, implemented in one city, would indeed probably draw all the homeless from the whole nearby area, thus exhausting the budget. Though honestly this would probably bust the budget of any city just dealing with the ones already there.
A maximally "mean" solution, like summary execution of all homeless, vagrants, beggars, etc, implemented in one city, would also solve the the problem of ordinary people not being able to walk the streets without being harassed, but would probably have the opposite effect, pushing all the homeless out of that city into other nearby cities with more average policies.
@anti_dan and @MotteInTheEye bring up a similar point.
I think my main point still stands, because there still is a selection effect as long as local policies differ, and as long as you can convince / trick / force the homeless to take a bus ride.
Lets say there are the two cities again. city A and city B. City A is maximally nice and "solves" the homelessness problem. City B is maximally mean and "solves" the homelessness problem. Both cities have to deal with side effects of their solution. Maybe city A has severe budgetary problems. Maybe city B is a totalitarian state where the presumption of innocence is gone and lots of people get thrown in prison or executed on flimsy grounds.
Now lets say there are two other cities. One city kinda likes the policies of city A, but doesn't have the budget resources to do it. One city kinda likes the policies of city B, but has too strong of a legal system and constitutional protections to carry it out. But they both have the budget / legal allowance to export the homeless. The solution for both of these new cities is straightforward, just send the homeless on to their preferred "solution" city.
Whether you think the solution is to be nice or mean to the homeless, the same problem exists with localities trying to implement it. The problem is certainly worse if places are trying to be nice, but its still there if you want meanness.
I had been thinking more about the opposite effects of the different solution types. One city doing the nice way draws in more homeless, and so places a substantially higher burden on itself while only having a minor positive effect on nearby cities that homeless move there from. So your point of it being unsustainable on a small scale applies. However, one city doing the mean way expels out homeless (anyone sufficiently with it to try to avoid near-certain death is going to leave), so having a minor negative effect on nearby cities. That means that way is sustainable and so is possible to start and grow without an all-at-once national initiative.
I hadn't thought of other cities aligned with the mean city but not going quite so far wanting to send their homeless to that city. I'm not sure that changes things though. The problem of getting more homeless that you plan to treat the nice way is that the cost of every extra one is high, but the cost of treating them the mean way can be quite low, presuming we're dispensing with legal protections. Especially when they've been conveniently gathered onto a bus for you.
I've never seen the cost of the mean solution as monetary. I think other people in the thread have pointed out the problems of being mean to homeless people. To sum up some of the points:
Some of the people on this forum seem a bit blase about executing homeless. I'm not sure if they'd all maintain that attitude if they were the specific ones delegated the task of carrying out the executions. For those that do maintain the blase attitude, I certainly wouldn't want to be neighbors with them. I'm not saying this entirely to admonish them. I had some homeless encampments near my neighborhood, and I have two young girls. I only found out about the encampments because one of my other neighbors had politely packed up their tents and left them a handwritten note of "dont camp here". He is an Afghanistan war veteran and has shot at people and been shot at. I had a lot of admiration for my neighbor in that moment, mainly for his restraint. I would have been tempted to at least trash the person's stuff.
I understand the tendency and desire to be tough and mean to the homeless. I feel it all the time. I just have a very premonition about acting on those feelings.
I'm having trouble phrasing my last point. To get at the heart of it though, violence is a slippery slope and a spreadable disease all in one. I see human society as a multi-generational project to try and use less violence and more trading to get what we want. Its a really difficult problem, because often the only way to stop violence is to use violence in response. If you have ever known some military or police families ... they can be a bit violent. The parents think corporal punishment is normal and fine. The kids think bullying is normal and correct as long as they have more physical power. Certainly not all of them ... but I can't be the only one with that observation?
Violence often looks like a small time monetary expense, but I think normalizing it creates a massive long term expense in the form of interpersonal misery.
I've described possible solutions at 2 extreme ends of the range of possibilities, but haven't actually advocated for any particular position. Part of why I enjoy discussing issues here is that I don't feel so compelled to take a specific position and defend it to the (metaphorical) death at all costs, but can consider a range of things before deciding on some specific position.
My description of the maximally violent solution and how it might spread might be taken as advocacy. I see it at least as much a warning as advocacy. Beware, those who actually make policy, if any particular place feels that the situation has gotten bad enough to go that far, the going-that-far might possibly spread farther and faster than anybody anticipated or wanted.
Perhaps most of that was more of a reply to others who have more directly advocated such things. Nevertheless, regarding violence, I tend to think that a little bit goes a long way, and people tend to feel a desire to use excessive amounts of it when a situation has been allowed to go on too long and get much worse than it needed to be. I think "violence" (defined as a scale starting at things like firm orders and harsh looks) is best applied in small amounts and highly limited scope, but right away when necessary. Probably ought to have a better word for that, but I can't come up with one right now.
I'm not 100% sure what we should actually do. I think there is clearly a cohort of homeless who are all of the above of hopelessly addicted to hard drugs, regularly aggressive and violent towards random people, have no fear of any sort of consequences, and completely uninterested in any sort of help. I'm not sure what the size of it is, but I expect the local police, jailers, and mental health professionals in any particular area know who they are. Those people should at the very least be locked away until such time as they can go multiple months without reverting to their previous lifestyle, using whatever force is necessary to achieve that without unduly risking the safety of whatever personnel are doing so, up to and including lethal force if absolutely necessary. It may not be so easy though to ensure that all jurisdictions strictly limit such treatment to those clearly in that cohort, but I fear we've already let this go far enough that there isn't much choice but to do something like that and hope for the best.
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So, I am certainly one of the posters whom you would consider “blasé” about executing homeless. I consider the question “would I be able to pull the trigger myself” frequently. It’s very easy for me to ask, “Will no one rid me of these turbulent bums?” But would I capable of meting out that type of violence myself, if tasked to do so? Now to be clear, I do not believe that it’s illegitimate to advocate for a particular policy unless one is willing and eager to sign up to be a law enforcement officer, security guard, etc. It’s okay to have specialized positions which employ only individuals with the physical and psychological qualities appropriate for that job, and for others outside that position to still have a say in what policies will be carried out. But, it’s still worth asking whether my rather cavalier attitude about the topic is purely a consequence of my own distance from the ugly part of the process I’m advocating. I have personally never meted out any sort of interpersonal violence; I’ve never even been in a fistfight - I’ve been punched, but have not thrown a punch in return - and I’ve only fired a gun a handful of times. (My marksmanship leaves much to be desired.) So the question of whether I’m capable of carrying out executions, and the adjacent question of whether it would break me psychologically to do so, are appropriate questions to ask.
Now this, I don’t understand at all. What, specifically, are your concerns about having me for a neighbor? I’m an extremely respectful, quiet, and orderly neighbor. It is precisely my preference for orderly, clean, and peaceful environments which causes me such distress at being surrounded by homeless and the disorder they bring. What actual actions do you predict I would perform, as part of being your neighbor, as a result of my stated beliefs? Clearly I’m not saying that I personally am planning on going John Wick on random bums any time soon; I’m very much in the “be nice until you can coordinate meanness” camp, and am not a loose cannon.
Now, I did recently get in a very heated verbal confrontation with a bum who had decided to camp on the sidewalk outside my apartment complex, and whose long chain of tied-together shopping carts was blocking our exit path. That confrontation, in which I did not lay a hand on the man, resulted in him leaving almost immediately, taking all of his garbage with him, and he has not been seen since. Do you think this makes me a bad neighbor? Do you think I’m a coward or hypocrite for arguing with him instead of shooting him in the head, since the death penalty for chronic homelessness is what I advocate here? I would venture to say that the vast majority of those who advocate a similar position would act exactly the same way I did in that scenario.
I think this whole paragraph is asserting things which are not actually generalizably true. For example, Singapore is notorious for applying the death penalty for a far wider array of crimes than any European country does in this day and age. Furthermore, Singapore (like Japan) uses a method of execution - hanging - which has been out of use in European countries for over a century now due to its violent optics. However, Singapore (also like Japan) is one of the least violent societies on earth. It is perfectly able to contain the violence to one very small but important facet of society - the criminal justice system - in order to prevent its spread to the larger society as a whole. The men responsible for carrying out executions in Singapore do not, as far as I’m aware, also go out and blow off steam by murdering people for sport in their spare time. I’m not even sure if they have higher rates of corporal punishment of children than the average Singaporean or Japanese. (And, if they do, are you so sure that corporal punishment, within reason, of children for transgressions is ineffective at shaping those children into responsible and pro-social adults?)
A decade ago I absolutely would have agreed with you that civilizational progress is all about reducing the amount of interpersonal violence across the board, and I still share your basic visceral aversion to violence in terms of the way I live my own life. However, I’ve come to believe, through observation, that actually reducing violence requires the carefully targeted and process-based application of non-arbitrary violence against the most anti-social elements of society in order to maintain sustainable peace. Those anti-social elements are not going to stop being violent and unstable just because the rest of us forswear violence; rather, we need people who are not inherently prone to extreme violence to be willing to step up and do a little bit of it, in small doses, so that we can then go back to living our normal lives.
Except this is the lowest period of non-arbitrary violence against the most anti-social elements of society in probably human history and also the least violent part of human history. In the past, there was way harsher actions against anti-social elements of society, and far more general violence and chaos.
Also, the reason I wouldn't want is you're not a nice, respectful, orderly neighbor. You're an authoritarian with dreams of violent cleanses of people lesser than you, so in aggregate, crime and disorder goes down by 5%, if they're out of bounds of what you determine to be an orderly society.
This is that "nothing was ever good" thing you see all the time on Twitter, isn't it? The outright denial that there was ever a time when things were better in any way, that all the problems caused by recent policies always existed, and all evidence to the contrary is a Reactionary Fascist Myth.
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Actually no, violent crime rates in America are significantly higher today than they were in, say, 1950, when the U.S. had harsher vagrancy laws than today. In 1890s England, violent crime rates were lower than they are in England today, despite laws being stricter at that time. Yes, certainly the world of 2024 is less violent than the world of medieval times and before, but it’s also true that rates violence in, say, 1990 were significantly higher than they had been a couple of decades prior; since laws had grown more lax during that time, rather than less, whatever causal relationship you’re attempting to draw between laxity/non-punitivity and low rates of societal violence seems fairly questionable.
What specific actions do you think I take, as a result of my beliefs about crime and punishment, that actually impact how good or bad a neighbor I am? Do you think I discuss my philosophy of policing with my neighbors? Do you think that any of the policies I advocate would have any significant impact on the day-to-day lives of the other residents of my apartment complex? If not, then in what sense am I “not a nice, respectful, orderly neighbor”?
Sure, you don't do anything bad now - firstly, becuase you're by your own admission timid, but also because the state would put you away for shooting an irksome vagrant. Why would I want to take chances with living next to people like you in case the state shifts to be more permissive, though? Would you like to live next to a literal Marxist-Leninist intellectual who is perfectly civil yet a) owns a gun and b) posts on the Internet about all the kulaks and bloodsuckers he'd be putting against the wall if only the revolution came?
This seems to be an unfair comparison. Unless you/Outlaw are a drug-addicted, psychotic, violent bum, you have nothing to fear living next to Hoffmeister in his ideal society. The class which Hoffmeister is describing has very sharp boundaries, which (I doubt) any of us posting here will ever fall into. In contrast, it’s pretty likely that many of us on this forum would be shitting our pants in the Marxist-Leninist’s ideal society.
The situations are not symmetrical. Using a prisoner’s dilemma analogy: Hoffmeister seems to be saying that he will cooperate with any neighbor who cooperates with him and defect against any neighbor who defects against him (where “cooperation” is being a good neighbor and “defection” is attacking one’s neighbors and their property). The Marxist-Leninist has a far more restricted set of people whom he cooperates with. And the psychotic bum is just a plain and simple defectbot.
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You know, this is actually an interesting moral point that leftists usually hammer into mush with their usual lack of nuance and subtlety, what with "words are violence, silence is violence, everything is violence," etc. but... hypothetically, let's say I'm your neighbor, and I'm black, and I become aware of your views. I know you personally are probably never going to take any action against me. You'll be a nice, respectful, and orderly neighbor. We'll get along, and you might even loan me your drill or ask me to watch your cats and stuff, like a good neighbor.
But I know that should the state suddenly go full Jim Crow II and start rounding up me and mine in trucks, you not only won't raise a peep in protest, you will approve. That you are, in fact, quietly working towards that happening, even if it's only very abstractly. Maybe you will feel a teensy bit bad about it happening to me and my family, but not bad enough to protest or even think it's wrong.
Do you see how in that situation, I might not actually consider you a great neighbor, no matter how pleasant you are to my face?
I am not trying to pick on you here - I honestly find you kind of interesting (and yeah, in person I probably would find you pleasant and easy to get along with - though, granted, I am not black), the self-admitted soy blue triber who's gone full wignat. But I have to admit there is something I find deeply unpleasant about your repeated instance that you are a kind and gentle soul who'd never harm a fly. No, you just want the state and men with less scruples to do the dirty work for you. I'm really trying to avoid Nazi metaphors here, but they do spring to mind. No, I do not believe that wanting to change things via force requires that you be willing and able to execute that violence yourself, but I must admit, the men who at least are open about how much they'd enjoy being the (literal) whip hand strike me as more honest (including to themselves). I may find them disgusting also, but for an entirely different reason.
I’m going to respond with a consolidated reply to this as well as the comment below in which you tagged me.
Firstly, I have also fairly extensively pondered the same questions you’re bringing up here. I’ve spoken before about my black female boss, with whom I have an excellent relationship on both a professional and personal level. When I consider all of the terrible consequences in the event I was doxxed and my posts made visible to everyone in my life, I think that maybe the worst potential result would be her being made aware of them; not even primarily because it would likely result in me losing my job, but because it would probably deeply hurt her and poison the goodwill which I’ve built up with her in the time she and I have worked together. This is also true of my remaining black friends; I can imagine how gut-wrenching the conversations would be if I had to look them in the face and justify my stances to them. Simply explaining to these individuals that I consider them exceptions to the rule and bear them no personal ill will would, I’m quite sure, be nowhere near sufficient to prevent them from taking deep offense and hurt.
That being said, you have once again misrepresented my views, both here and below. When you say I have “gone full wignat”, that’s demonstrably untrue. I do not want all non-white people deported; I’ve said numerous times that nearly all Asian-Americans and a huge proportion of Latinos are an unalloyed asset to this country and will - in fact, must - be integrated into the fabric of this country’s future, if they haven’t already. I have even spoken about how some percentage of black Americans can and should be included in a future America. I have a post I’m mulling over about castizo futurism and how we can complete the assimilation all of the various ethnic groups within America, and I plan to include a section about blacks and how they could be integrated if separation is not on the table
Speaking of which, you claim that I support “racial segregation and ethno-states.” No, I don’t! I support the creation of a single ethnostate for the black Americans who want to live there. When you claim, “when pressed, he admits that probably won't happen which leaves only literally ‘shipping people off’ or worse on the table” you are not accurately summarizing any of my stated positions. In fact, I have repeatedly said that I do not want the partition to happen unless and until it is voluntary and peaceful for the vast majority of people affected. I believe that it is possible that this day will come - that black Americans’ ethnogenesis will blossom into proper nationalistic/separatist sentiment held by such a large portion of black Americans that the others will basically be dragged along by social censure and evaporative cooling.
Now, if I’m wrong and this does not happen, then I don’t think the “racial divorce” should take place. I would not in fact be willing to countenance rounding random middle/class black Americans up and shipping them off against their will. I have never once expressed support for any such policy. You seem to believe that if I can’t provide an airtight roadmap showing how we get from the status quo to the future I imagine, I must actually be willing to accept all manner of savagery when push comes to shove in order to make it happen.
I also don’t advocate anything like “Jim Crow 2.0”. I don’t want the state to legally punish businesses for being willing to serve blacks, or anyone else. I support freedom of association, which in practice would, I think, lead to some private entities refusing to do business with some proportion of blacks (and homeless, whether black or white or otherwise) but not on anything like the pervasive level seen in the Jim Crow South. I’m perfectly happy to interact socially and professionally with blacks of good character, up until (and even after!) the eventual “racial divorce”, if such a thing ever does in fact materialize. (And remember that I’ve said that such a thing doesn’t have a great likelihood of happening within our lifetimes.)
So yes, while I am not shy about my personal antipathy and prejudice - developed due to repeated negative interactions as well as observation of available data - toward blacks, I do not in fact want my boss and my black friends rounded up and shipped anywhere against their will, violently or otherwise. You can continue to suspect that I’m lying or that I would change my tune once the rubber hits the road, but at this point I’m not sure what else I would need to say in order to change your mind.
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What bothers me about this point is - who in this whole thread said anything about caring about skin color? Hoffmeister25 didn't, neither did I, nor as far as I can tell did anyone else in this thread.
I think any of us would say, if you're white and regularly using hard drugs, sleeping on the street in filthy rags, harassing and violent towards ordinary citizens, and completely uninterested in getting help or changing, then you go in the truck too, and I'll wave goodbye. If you're black and live a responsible life, keep a reasonably tidy home, work some sort of regular job, treat others around you with respect, and deal with problems in an adult manner, then I'm happy to have you as my neighbor and would in fact protest if somebody wanted to drag you off because of your skin color.
If anything out there makes me a little bit skeptical of black people generally, it's not the 13/52 crime statistics, the HBD IQ gap that may or may not actually exist, or any other such statistics; it's the way quite a lot of black people who are in fact leading normal and respectable lives are so quick to assume all white people want to ship them off to some horrible fate due to their skin color when they've never suggested or implied any such thing. As well as a lot of white liberals. If they're never going to trust me no matter what I do, why should I trust them?
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Which is why all interactions become colored with that aggression. Of course, small/tiny/micro interactions happen all the time so naturally that makes all of those interactions micro aggressions.
But conversely, that's why they have to have the right to shoot me if I try that, and I'm also not allowed to ban any disagreement but violence so I have to allow him to speak, I can't kick in his door without a good reason even if I'm in charge, I have to follow a process if I want to convict him of a crime, etc. so that it doesn't come to him just saying "fuck it" and shooting me pre-emptively.
He doesn't have to tolerate me, he just has to work with me, and those rules if followed allow that peace even though their pursuit of happiness involves enslaving me and vice versa.
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You bear my quote in your flair.
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You get at the heart of why I ask about being willing to carry out violence. Someone is going to take on that psychological burden. Its easy to forget that when its not you. My level of experience with violence is pretty similar to yours, except I do have some decent marksmanship. I think I'd be able to pull the trigger and execute people, but I am also decently certain that it would eventually break me as a functioning member of society. Its a big mind-shift to see people as fleshy bodies that can easily be blown apart with a few rounds, and that is what I think I'd come to see other people as. And I have a cold temper that never manifests as screaming in people's faces, but certainly does manifest as logically thinking of ways I can maximally hurt someone. Having the 'murder' option readily available in my mental toolbox would be very bad for me.
Basically I wouldn't be happy to have myself as a neighbor that carries out executions. It is similar reasons that make me a libertarian. I'm pretty certain I would abuse power if I were in a powerful position, so I tend to not trust others in those positions.
Your interaction with a bum is something I'd like in a neighbor. I might have found your particular approach too risky for my taste. Unless I had a few other neighbors standing there with me.
Japan and Singapore mostly don't execute that many people. Maybe a dozen a year. I'm not worried about the spillover effects of that level of capital punishment. Certain cities of Texas might have a higher per capita execution rate.
There are currently about a half million homeless people in the US. I don't think you'd need to kill all of them. But conservatively maybe 10% of them are hopeless about getting out of their situation and would end up on the chopping block. Fifty Thousand executions. That is an unprecedented number in not just the Western world, but the entire world.
I went and looked it up and Iran apparently executed the most people in 2023, about 850 people. I think their society is already far more violent than I'd ever like to experience. Its not just the people carrying out the executions, its a support structure, and a society willing to say "yeah thats fine, go murder those people".
This is basically my belief as well. As I said above, getting rid of violence often requires violence. But executing about 50k people would not be trying to minimize violence. It would be a society wide escalation. There are only about 20k murders a year in the US. This just doesn't seem like "carefully targeted" violence at all.
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