site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37968 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.

They were pressured! Objectively, straightforwardly, unambiguously, they were pressured! It was the result of a multi-year lobbying effort from the NBCFAE, going all the way up to the Congressional Black Caucus! I spend four paragraphs detailing the contours of that pressure in excruciating detail.

You say they were under much more pressure than other directions--really? Why would you think that? Race is a uniquely hot-button issue in America, and left-leaning people in particular are very, very bad at facing down race-based pressure. That doesn't make it a willful pursuit of exactly what they want to do at every step. Massively changing a hiring process is an incredibly obnoxious thing to have to do. It's not the sort of thing that happens without pressure. Yes, they're more ideologically amenable to that pressure than you would be, but no, that doesn't make it not pressure.

The FAA is not at all clearly, not at all obviously, subject to more pressure from the voters and the pilot schools than a random black activist group. Did voters and pilot schools stage meetings with Congress? Did voters and pilot schools pursue a multi-year campaign to change things?

(The answer is: Yes, after the scandal. And they changed things! That pressure worked too!)

Look, dude, I get that you sincerely think this is a major blind spot of mine and I'm trying to obfuscate responsibility for the figures involved, but that is simply not the case. I presented the full truth in a way designed to leave not past administrators--who were already fired, demoted, and otherwise disgraced over it--but present ones, who had a mess dumped in their lap, a way to save face by acknowledging and correcting the harm.

Nothing in my presentation stopped millions of conservatives from concluding that the whole of it was a horribly corrupt mess. A great deal in my presentation convinced both people directly involved in the fight for justice in the wake of the scandal and other well-meaning liberals that I wasn't just another far-right figure with an axe to grind, and as a result the people involved were grateful and willing to go on record with further details (which I hope to get into a mainstream publication), and those liberals learned about a scandal that had previously been kicking around only places like Steve Sailer's blog.

It's fine to be irritated that I bend over to be charitable and to make people comfortable and to appeal to their better nature, but you don't have an accurate model of the people involved or of me, and it's leading you astray.

Yes, they're more ideologically amenable to that pressure than you would be, but no, that doesn't make it not pressure.

This is the crux of my argument, which I'm beginning to suspect you simply don't understand. At the limits there is no difference between an organization being "amenable to pressure" and the organization simply wanting to do something whether or not it's getting pressured into it. If it takes suspiciously little pressure to get an org to do something, you can be sure they already wanted to do it. That doesn't mean your pressure is super effective, it just means the org was already sympathetic, or perhaps even already on your side and just waiting for a catalyst.

You're basically trying to say, "Obviously they were pressured more by the NBCFAE than any other organization, because the NBCFAE is who they ended up listening to." Whereas my point is, "Obviously they were already highly sympathetic to the NBCFAE, because despite not being pressured very much by them, they made drastic changes to comply with the NBCFAE's demands."

If it were actually pressure that got the FAA to change their hiring process (the implication being, against their will) then surely more influential organizations such as the pilot schools would have been able to get it changed back internally, via pressure, rather than needing to go through Congress and written law.

Did voters and pilot schools stage meetings with Congress? Did voters and pilot schools pursue a multi-year campaign to change things?

(The answer is: Yes, after the scandal. And they changed things! That pressure worked too!)

This conflates the soft pressure the NBCFAE was applying with the hard pressure the court is capable of applying. There was no amount of soft pressure sufficient to make the FAA roll back their hiring changes--they literally had to be forced into it by Congress. Aside from explicit written confirmation from FAA leaders, this is the strongest possible evidence we could have that the changes were not actually made due to pressure.

I presented the full truth in a way designed to leave not past administrators--who were already fired, demoted, and otherwise disgraced over it--but present ones, who had a mess dumped in their lap, a way to save face by acknowledging and correcting the harm.

Yeah, I'd believe you if you had actually blamed the past admins, rather than saying they were simply stuck between a rock and a hard place trying to fulfill an impossible mandate. I'll acknowledge you later somewhat contradicted this by highlighting how their internal investigation found no wrongdoing, but that's not in your main post.

Extending endless charity to the people who orchestrated this mess (or, like Pete, inherited it) is useful up to a point, but it misses the broader, more important picture. Whether you think the spark came from within the FAA or from an external activist organization, it's clear that leftist institutions are highly susceptible to hyperpartisan, extreme-left ideological takeovers, to the point where rank-and-file government employees are enlisted to conduct illegal activities and hide the evidence. The only two possibilities are to either say,

  1. "This was a fluke caused by extreme circumstances. We should deal with it and move on." Or,
  2. "The circumstances that led to this were nothing all that special, and are present in many government orgs today. We need to make large institutional changes and put different people in power or this will happen again."

I think #1 is probably better for dealing with this specific situation. It's essentially begging the overlords to be merciful, and I suppose they may comply just this once. But #2 is the better conclusion, both more accurate and more forward-thinking. Do you disagree?

I understand and have understood what you’re saying, but I just don’t think “suspiciously little pressure” is a good descriptor here. The schools weren’t influential after the change! They were shoved to the side altogether and granted only the slightest bit of attention. Pressure had to come from outside the org, because that’s where the injured parties were.

I extended, and extend, little charity to those who made the mess. As for extending charity to people who inherited it, since nothing happened about it in the Trump admin, I’m disinclined to blame the Biden admin for nothing continuing to happen.

I do think the circumstances were not particularly unusual; I don’t think we have an alternative that would properly right the ship.

I don’t think it was a fluke and didn’t convey that it was a fluke—I just highlighted and emphasized the incident.

Anyway, all of this is stemming from you coming one step away from calling me a liar for a framing you would have presented differently. I am not persuaded, and given the amount of time I spend criticizing progressives and trying to build alternatives, it takes an incredibly strained reading of my position to treat me as fundamentally aligned with them.

Thanks for the chat, at any rate. This will be my last response on this topic, since I’m headed away from the forum now-ish. All the best.

I understand and have understood what you’re saying, but I just don’t think “suspiciously little pressure” is a good descriptor here. The schools weren’t influential after the change! They were shoved to the side altogether and granted only the slightest bit of attention. Pressure had to come from outside the org, because that’s where the injured parties were.

  1. My whole point is that pressure and influence are not the same thing. Sympathetic organizations get lots of influence without much pressure, and unsympathetic organizations can exert practically limitless pressure without gaining any influence. The schools and pilots were sidelined, not because they weren't applying pressure, but because the FAA wasn't sympathetic to them the way it was to the NBCFAE. I honestly have no idea what you think my point is, if you think the fact that the schools weren't able to influence the FAA afterwards is counterevidence. The schools, pilots, etc. had plenty of political power, to the point of beating the FAA in both the legislative and probably the judicial systems, but no amount of pressure can translate into influence in a hostile organization.
  2. The schools literally are outside the org? I don't get what you're saying here, you seem to be saying the schools couldn't be influential because they were inside the FAA?
  3. Just to be clear, you seem to be focusing on the schools alone. When I've brought them up I've consistently done so solely as an example of one of many forces arrayed against the pressure exerted by the NBCFAE. The pilots, voters, congress, and the judicial system are also part of that group. I don't particularly care whether the pilot schools in particular pressured the FAA or were sidelined or whatever--my point is that despite virtually every other political entity involved with the FAA pressuring it to reverse its hiring change, it somehow was "pressured" more by the NBCFAE, which indicates that this has less to do with pressure and more to do with the organization already wanting to make those changes. Note that I include passive pressure here--the FAA knew these changes would be unpopular and tried to keep them hidden, which I consider pressure from most of these orgs to not make such changes in the first place.

I extended, and extend, little charity to those who made the mess.

Let me quote the places where I think you extend far too much charity to the people who made this mess.

He has been saddled with a messy, stupid lawsuit built on bad decision after bad decision, from predecessors who--between a rock and a hard place in the impossible task of avoiding disparate impact while preserving objective standards--elected to take the easy road and cave to political pressure to implement absurdities.

In this one sentence alone, you:

  1. Characterize the actions of those who made this mess as "mistakes," implying the consequences were unforeseen and/or unintended.
  2. Imply that they basically did the best they could in their situation
  3. Blame their final decision on political pressure

The next paragraph does basically the same thing.

...it represents a decades-long process of institutional failure at every level. A thousand things had to go wrong to get to this point, and if people want to harp on it—let them. But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue. Virtually nobody, looking dispassionately at that questionnaire, wants to defend it.

  1. You characterize the mess as "institutional failure", implying innocent mistakes rather than malice
  2. Again, you say things had to "go wrong". The problem is not that anything "went wrong" it's that the wrong people were put in power. From their perspective everything except getting caught went right.
  3. You call it nonpartisan, apparently using a nonstandard definition of the word. Maybe your objective is to promote peace and reconciliation among your readers, but in the process you also imply that the original actors were not in fact hyperpartisan activists.
  4. You flatly deny the existence of the many, many people who do want to defend the questionnaire. There is literally an active lawsuit involving people spending tens of millions of dollars defending that questionnaire. The NBCFAE and FAA together probably had at least hundreds of employees and students involved in this who would not only defend the questionnaire but actively created and took advantage of it. I personally know plenty who would directly defend that questionnaire, and all of them are super partisan.

As you said:

I think it's a grave misreading to take it as me absolving anyone of responsibility or treating it anything as other than a blatantly corrupt institutional failure on all levels.

Reading the above excerpts, do you really still stand by this? You called this everything but corruption. You directly stated in multiple places that it was not corruption that caused this. You literally said the predecessors "caved to pressure" which is emphatically not corruption.

Anyway, all of this is stemming from you coming one step away from calling me a liar for a framing you would have presented differently. I am not persuaded, and given the amount of time I spend criticizing progressives and trying to build alternatives, it takes an incredibly strained reading of my position to treat me as fundamentally aligned with them.

I've come one step away from calling you a liar for your framing, because your framing is one step away from a lie. Specifically, the part I most take issue with is your assertion that the leaders were pressured into this rather than doing it of their own free will. I think you're still using "pressure" in a very nonstandard way, so let me be more clear about what I mean here.

  1. "Pressure" means political pressure, e.g. lawsuits and institutional consequences if an entity does not have their demands met.
  2. "Influence" means how much control you have over the hearts and minds of an org. If everyone in the FAA is devout Catholic then the Pope will have unlimited influence over the FAA, while still being unable to exert practically any pressure on them at all.
  3. The NBCFAE clearly had more influence over the FAA than student pilots and pilot schools did, because the FAA listened to NBCFAE demands even knowing it would go against what student pilots etc. wanted.
  4. Student pilots and pilot schools clearly exerted more pressure over the FAA than the NBCFAE did. They obviously have more political leverage than a random activist group, and in the end they triumphed.

I draw this distinction between pressure and influence because it is the whole crux of the issue. You cannot fairly characterize the ringleaders of this situation as being "pressured" into doing this if the only "pressure" applied is a couple toothless letters from a small activist organization. If their decision is based on what I call influence, not pressure, then it is still in the end their responsibility, whereas if it's caused by what I call pressure then it's somewhat understandable.

The pilots and pilot schools had to exert a literally unstoppable amount of pressure on the FAA, going all the way to Congress, just to reverse a policy instigated by a single letter from the NBCFAE. They weren't pressured into it.

Your theatrical slamming of the door is so protracted that my ban has expired before you left. Don't let that door hit you on the way out.

Then since you didn't get the point the first time, take another three days off.

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