site banner

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
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I mean, maybe. But then you're talking about the US right and the US alt-right, not the "consensus" of this forum. US right and US alt-right are certainly popular in this forum, but to say that there's anything nearing a consensus that such political/ideological movements are Good is, in my view, absurd, just from my time reading the comments here. Furthermore, even if there were, the people here tend to be idiosyncratic enough that their support for broad political/ideological movements such as those tend to have tons of caveats and places of severe disagreements, often in very different areas depending on the person, even when they're ostensibly on the same "team" (this is present on the left as well as on the right here, in my view, where there are plenty of left-leaning users including myself and you, but our views on what the left is doing right and what it's doing wrong tend to be quite different from each other).

If you were to say that there are many people on this forum, especially ones who produce a disproportionate number of comments, that support the mirror image of DEI, then I would agree. If you want to say that the presence of such people who make lots of posts in this vein who don't get significant pushback (a description I disagree with, but I am willing to take for granted for the sake of argument) indicates that there's a consensus, then I couldn't disagree more. Again, I don't perceive there being any consensus on this (the closest thing to a consensus on this forum I can tell is that "wokeness/leftist idpol/SocJus/CRT is, on net, harmful to our society"), but I'd wager that the most common view here - not common enough that I'd call it a consensus, but I'd bet it's a plurality - is that society is better when it prioritizes individual competency when picking people to put into important critical roles, and as such that's what we ought to do. Some (many) people here believe that discriminating on the basis of race is one particularly effective method of accomplishing this (one might say this is the mirror of DEI - one core component of DEI is that society is better when it prioritizes Diversity* when picking people to put into important critical roles, and most of its proponents believe that discriminating on the basis of race is one particularly effective method of accomplishing this).

But, who knows, in a forum like this, determining if there's a consensus, much less what it is is both nearly impossible and highly subjective. It's not like we have some numerical criterion by which we can say, "Aha! So that reveals that the consensus of TheMotte is XYZ!" It's almost entirely based on vibes, at the end of the day. My vibes is that there's no shortage of leftist posters here, and probably even moreso centrist/heterodox posters. When weighted by post count, perhaps they're, put together, less voluminous than the rightists, but the amount clearly seems significant enough to deny any sort of rightist consensus (except, again, that anti-DEI thing).

* Diversity here has an idiosyncratic meaning of something like "more people from populations that we have judged to have been overtly oppressed in the past and thus still suffer from both the legacy of that and the existing structures that reinforce that today," rather than the generally understood meaning of "having a large variety of types" or the like.