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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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Leftist journalists are ranting about how this shows they need to murder more fascist republicans, with no apparent fear of a 2am knock on the door from the police.
Remember Popehat the famous legal blogger? He's on bluesky telling people to do mass shootings at "soft targets" like federalist society meetings. Can link later if you'd like: unsynced phone.

Political violence is happening. Political violence is going to happen. And somehow the people with all the guns have become so bad at it that all the violence is happening to them and their families.

The time for right wing terror was 20 years ago, and I fully endorse going back in time to shoot evil robots and impregnate hot waitresses.
But it's sad to promise that it'll happen any day now, we'll totally go apeshit if there's just one more riot or malicious prosecution or assassination or ATF death squad or CPS seizing more of our kids to cut their dicks off, we really mean it this time!

They won't even sue the freaks talking about how the shooting was faked by crisis actors for 60 billion dollars. They're not even rioting and smashing up enemy monuments like the left does every single time they throw a wobbly about a criminal getting shot.
They can't even march to protest violence against them without being put in prison for a decade with some bullshit lawfare because one of them held a cigarette lighter, which suddenly counts as cross burning (unlike leftists torching city blocks).
Why should the left fear their threats when they've never once made good on them?

Remember Popehat the famous legal blogger? He's on bluesky telling people to do mass shootings at "soft targets" like federalist society meetings. Can link later if you'd like: unsynced phone.

I would like the link. I used to like Popehat before he succumbed to TDS, and I still find his legal commentary sometimes sound. I admit I am slightly skeptical that he actually advocated shooting up Federalist Society meetings, but I would like to see his actual words.

Here. [EDIT] - I've changed the link to Gatt's comment, as his archive link apparently doesn't work when I copy it.

Raw URL, since the link system suddenly hates me for some reason: https://www.themotte.org/post/1070/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/229599?context=8#context

There's this thing in the FromSoft games, where you have these Gods and Heroes who did great things, built mighty works, achieved beauty and glory, only to be worn down by the inevitable march of time and decay, until all that remains is a miserable shade. The internet feels that way now, when I compare what is now to the flower that came before.

We need a way to leave each other alone. I don't want to rule the Popehat dude. I really don't want him to rule me. I just want us to go our separate ways, to each have a chance to deal with the world's problems without having to fight each other every step of the way.

Broken link

fixed, thanks.

Er, no, still broken for me.

Well, fuck.

I got nothing. Dude has completely lost his shit.

To be fair, I'm not sure he believes it.

There's a point, here, if he did. There's a (neurotically) strong libertarian argument that goes something like a) Law is enforced at the barrel of a gun, b) every law has to have a punishment against violators to be meaningfully enforced, and no matter how many layers deep you try to bury the punishment it either boils down to a stern talk or serious harm and usually the latter, and c) no system of punishment will be clear from abuse or corruption, and our system is particularly bad. Every small tax means some fraction of a person strangled, every locked building or stupid regulatory rule means some fraction of someone getting shot by the feds, banning drugs pushes people to less safe drugs from less trustworthy sources that fry their brains, prison sentences mean rape (and 'consensual' sex that isn't), so on. That doesn't make every law automatically invalid -- sometimes people need shooting, and sometimes even shooting people that don't really deserve it is worth the cost -- but it resists the urge to flinch away with caveats about how all these problems would go away if people Would Just comply, or if only the police behaved better, or only the fuehrer knew, knowing that they never will.

But White has never made those arguments. Even in Garner's case, which is about as sympathetic to his positions are possible, it was always just that the Cops Were Bad. And he can't, because he wants to have the power of the state at hand for too many trivial things.

Okay, well, there's a steelman where even if White doesn't believe it for everything else, Immigration Is Genuinely Different; enforcement is unusually difficult, and no small number of immigrants are, if not legally refugees, at least fleeing from poverty in countries with high rates of violent crime. But White's not making that argument, either, here. It's that his enemies, the ones here, want to do these awful things themselves, and White doesn't even try to Pepe Silvia a how, nevermind a why, into place.

That's not the point of the whole mess. If you somehow pinned him down (without getting blocked) he'd probably point to the Flores homicides, or less charitably the alleged ICE eugenics, but there's reason he doesn't point to them or anything else here.

It's like trying to disprove that "jailers could not possibly be so incompetent, cruel, or indifferent as to let such a high-profile prisoner commit suicide" by providing thirty-five really compelling examples of deaths or near-deaths in jails and prisons, until you look again and only three of them were suicides (and one attempted suicide), one of which involved the jailers literally urged the victim to kill themself, none of which were high-profile. He has more examples of jailers killing their charges directly, ie exactly the sort of thing that proposed in the Epstein conspiracy theories he's supposedly trying to debunk! But you agree with what he's saying until you realize that he's not saying anything about the original question.

That's not an optimistic thing -- in many ways, it makes a lot of his earlier works (that I trusted too!) a good deal more painful to read than if he'd merely had his brain dribble out one ear in the meantime. And it's worse when you start seeing that pattern show up more and more (for a still-right-wing example, see Blackman at Volokh, and to a lesser extent on the libertarian side Balko) as you look for it.

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Old slatestarcodex poster anechoicmedia points out that ken white is still in good professional standing while the top federal judge in his district was forced to resign for telling a black woman she had street smarts.

It's not a double standard, it's no standard vs literally any excuse. The time to do something about it was decades ago, too late now.

Social confirmation, purity spirals. Humans inevitably human. the archive link has the thread, and his audience appears to be nodding along with his wisdom.

You guys, who haven’t heard a really bad Scissor statement yet and don’t know what it’s like – it’s easy for you to say “don’t let it manipulate you” or “we need a hard and fast policy of not letting ourselves fight over Scissor statements”. But how do you know you’re not in the wrong? How do you know there’s not an issue out there where, if you knew it, you would agree it would be better to just nuke the world and let us start over again from the sewer mutants, rather than let the sort of people who would support it continue to pollute the world with their presence? How do you know that you’re not like the schoolkid who superciliously says “Nothing is bad enough to deserve a swear word” when the worst that’s ever happened to her is dropping her lollipop in the dirt. If that schoolkid gets kidnapped and tortured, does she change her mind? If she can’t describe the torture to her schoolmates, but just says “a really bad thing happened to me”, and they still insist nothing could be bad enough to justify using swear words, who do you side with? Then why are you still thinking I’m “damaged” when I tell you I’ve seen the Scissor statement, and charity and compassion and unity can fuck off and die? Some last remnant of outside-view morality keeps me from writing the whole list here and letting you all exterminate yourselves. Some remnant of how I would have thought about these things a month ago holds me back. So listen:

Delete Facebook. Delete Twitter. Throw away your cell phone. Unsubscribe from the newspaper. Tell your friends and relatives not to discuss politics or society. If they slip up, break off all contact.

Then, buy canned food. Stockpile water. Learn to shoot a gun. If you can afford a bunker, get a bunker.

Because one day, whoever keeps feeding us Scissor statements is going to release one of the bad ones.

Remember Popehat the famous legal blogger? He's on bluesky telling people to do mass shootings at "soft targets" like federalist society meetings. Can link later if you'd like: unsynced phone.

Here, with a backup here for when he purges his timeline next time.

Thanks. Does he purge it a lot? This is the first I've seen from him since he flounced from Twitter.

He blew up almost everything during his twitter flounce, and I'm pretty sure the remainder only exist because he couldn't (figure out how to) delete the remainder. I haven't seen him yglesias his bluesky timeline yet.

You guys do terrorist attacks all the time though. Every couple months one of you ODs on 2016 /pol/ memes and shoots up a synagogue or a mosque or a crowd full of blacks and Mexicans.

  • -11

Who is "You guys"?

Speak of specific groups, not in generalities, and if you want to start lobbing accusations of mass shootings and terrorist attacks, you really need to be specific.

"You guys" meaning the category of right-wingers he wishes would take violent terroristic action, using the specific example of mass-killing prominent antifa figures, a category he presumably identifies with (or else why would he be mad they're not doing terrorism?).

A few replies down he says that Anders Breivik made "a fair effort" so it's fair to say he's pro-mass shooting in principle but takes issue with its practice. Real right-wing terrorism never been tried.

Just appalling.

Fc writes the following and this is the guy you mod?

"They whipped themselves into a frenzy over Trump, and now someone has actually tried to kill him, and for many on the left there is no actual way to walk it back, nor ability to recognize the realities of their position. All they know how to do is double-down, which makes further incidents inevitable, which in turn makes reciprocity from the Reds inevitable."

Yes. Talking about what "leftists" or "Reds" do is arguable (if FC wrote "Leftists are terrorists" as a blanket statement, that would not be okay - but he didn't). Directly addressing someone with what "You guys" do is not okay unless you can justify it by explaining who "you guys" are (and if what "you guys" are doing is terrorist attacks, you'd better be very specific).

Given the who he was responding to, obviously "you guys" is referring to a general category of right wingers

That was my interpretation, and saying "You guys" (meaning right wingers) "do terrorist attacks all the time" violates a bunch of our rules.

I understand that you do not agree with my ruling. Such is the way of things.

But saying, leftists perpetrate attacks all the time as fc did doesn't break the rules?

Theres no agree or disagree about it. I Simply do not understand the principle behind this application of the rules. It seems incoherent to me.

"Leftists perpetrate attacks all the time" and "Rightists perpetrate attacks all the time" are both true statements. Saying "You guys" (implying the person being addressed is part of the group of people who commit terrorist attacks) is a different kind of statement. People are modded for making equivalent generalizations about leftists.

If you still don't understand, feel free to elevate your inquiry to Zorba or ask another mod if you think they will give you a different answer.

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What's your actual objection to the passage you've quoted? Where am I wrong?

Mandalay isn't wrong either.

That's chimps running wild with a Glock, not planned political violence. The closest the right ever got to that is Breivik (a fair effort) and McVeigh (absolute "please read literally any other book" retardation)

Where's the White Army Faction that car-bombed blackrock CEOs, disappeared politicians, shot down air liners, massacred a whole country's Olympics team? And then went on to get hidden in safehouses by right wing politicians until their financial backers got them pardons?
That's political terrorism.

I'm curious: what is it about the Oklahoma City bombing that you consider "retardation"? Presumably you're not worried about discrimination given your suggestions; are you making the same objection Pierce did, or something else?

Ashamed to say I haven't read Pierce's comments yet, that book report project is on hold for a bit. I'm guessing he said that it was done too soon, against a target that wasn't strategically important (unlike the surveillance center targeted in the book), nor aimed at destabilizing the regime?

The amazing part to me was that the protagonist of the book even second-guessed their bombing because in retrospect it focused the attention of the regime too early, when the resistance didn't have anything lined up to exploit the brief opening it gave them. The surveillance system was rebuilt with better hardening by the time the war got going, and it was only total economic and social collapse that stopped the regime wiping them out.
I said "read any other book", but honestly reading past the first hundred pages of the book he did read should have made him think twice about bombing symbolic targets without a strategic plan.

That's actually the reason I found the book fascinating enough to write about. It avoids so much of the wish-fulfillment you see in other rebellion stories: most of the characters' ideas don't work, most of their plans go awry or backfire, many of their successes are ultimately irrelevant or sideshows in the larger picture. Pierce ended up writing such a realistic story he had to pull a cabal of hooded supermen out his ass to have it end in any kind of victory.

I'm guessing he said that it was done too soon, against a target that wasn't strategically important (unlike the surveillance center targeted in the book), nor aimed at destabilizing the regime?

The amazing part to me was that the protagonist of the book even second-guessed their bombing because in retrospect it focused the attention of the regime too early, when the resistance didn't have anything lined up to exploit the brief opening it gave them.

I don't think he mentioned the importance of the target, but yes, from what I've heard he said that terrorism's only worthwhile if sustainable.