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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The more interesting question IMO is where is all this talk about "swapping out Vance" coming from?
Is it some sort of Journo-List thing?
I think Vance scares the leftist journalists a lot. They're used to having Republican leaders be kinda stupid, or at least look stupid in their manorisms. Trump, Pence, W Bush, etc all fit into the sort of mold of "dumb prole low-education guy that the elites can look down on." (Even if it's not literally true, IE W Bush went to Yale, but he's still relatively stupid and low-education compared to the PhDs writing policy papers). Vance is different, he's like Douthat where even if you hate his politics, its hard not to notice that he's kind of brilliant. He has ideas which, right or wrong, have the potential to expand the Republicans outside of "aging broke white people" and win over young people.
And perhaps more vitally, those ideas might be sufficiently powerful to return "disagreeing with the journalists' faction" to a respectable position (doubly so because new tech companies, all full of young men that faction is desperate to oppress, are less likely to be stupid enough to build weapons for their enemies to wield than they were in 2008).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's bizarre. There's no one Trump could have chosen that the media would have applauded. Being disappointed by the lack of applause shows a failure to understand the current meta.
Choosing a blood relation as his VP candidate would be a disaster and would validate a lot of the worst things people say about Trump. Vance, on the other hand, shows that Trump is at least trying to bring serious people into his administration. He's a great pick.
I have no idea if Vance is a serious person because he appears to have no deeply held views besides bending in whichever way the political winds are blowing. The fact that all the weirdest and most online rightoids love him makes me think he’s probably not serious.
There are a lot of potential candidates who don’t give half the electorate the ick. Burgum, Rubio, Romney, etc.
Rubio would be an ok choice but is probably more useful to the party as a Senator. I don't know enough about Burgam to have an opinion, but can say with confidence that Romney would've been an absolutely terrible choice likely to alienate both Republicans and Democrats. Cheney or Manchin would come with less baggage than Romney.
Romney never would have agreed, though, so it's super strange he was even being mentioned. I mean, he was the only person to vote to convict Trump on impeachment!
That's just one of several reasons that I think picking Romney would alienate even more potential Trump voters than picking Cheney.
Meanwhile the Democrats would presumably dust off all thier old "Mormon Christo-Fascists puting women in binders, dogs on roofs, and blacks in chains" talking points from 2012 for round 2.
Even if Romney agreed, (which as you point out is doubtful) he'd be a terrible pick.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Agreed, as i said in last week's thread.
The people who applauded when the Democrats tried to put a cross-dressing luggage thief in charge of US nuclear policy are now telling us that Vance is weird and disgusting for saying that Men and Women should want to start families. In my opinion there is only one sane response.
Vance shores up Trump's position with the donors and establishment Republicans which is what he needs.
Sorry, it's not quite accurate to paraphrase him as saying "[m]en and [w]omen should want to start families". That's his defense of his comments (painting the Democrats as anti-family, perhaps correctly), but he also took pains to say that being a parent does influence your perspective and that the government is overrun by corporate oligarchs with misaligned incentives. Obviously there's some good substance in what he's saying!
However, he did explicitly say that miserable Democratic women "effectively run" the country. His defense doesn't change the quote. Which not only seems to be outright false on its face (women aren't even the majority of decision-makers in the bureaucracy, much less childless ones) but also his comments pretty much explicitly stating that parental status can make change how you run the country for the worse I disagree with (even if I sympathize with the feeling, which I do). I mean, George freaking Washington never had kids. Same for Madison and Buchanan and Jackson and Polk (though not all were "good" presidents of course). I mean out of 46 that's not so many, but still. It's kind of like the old tired claim that atheists can't have a moral code.
I think both belief in God and being a parent are generally positive influences on your moral code, but it's far from deterministic and their lack is certainly not insurmountable. Beyond that I don't think it moves the needle much, really. As a simple and factual example to back up my point, parents and nonparents worry about climate change at very similar rates. If parental status were in fact the dealbreaker, you'd see much more of a difference. But we don't, even though nonparents quite literally don't have skin in the game the same way, and the same applies to government. Sure, the perspective of a parent still matters and if we had a dramatically abnormal lack of parents in leadership I might worry. But that doesn't seem to be the case at all.
So in short, Vance is wrong, and people are perfectly entitled to take issue with both what he actually said and what he continues to say he actually believes.
I notice these are all men. Do you have any childless female politicians whose achievements render Vance's judgement inaccurate?
Non-parents who believe in climate change could believe not what the science actually says, but what they are told by joirnalists: that within their lifetimes a mass extinction of humans is possible. If they believe such a thing, then they think they have "skin in the game".
As a source they were asked about the "perceived threat" and found no difference, so while that's still a plausible claim of yours, note that the average is only just under 6 (1-10 "not a threat" to "extreme threat"), so I don't find that argument about doomsday media very convincing. Clearly most people only consider it a medium threat of some sort.
So ChatGPT cites Bush-era Secretary of State/NSA Condoleezza Rice, three-decade Maryland senator Barbara Mikulski, one term Illinois Black senator Carol Moseley Braun, and two-decade Maine senator Olympia Snowe. Interestingly, ChatGPT decided to add a little thing to the end saying leadership isn't impacted by having kids without prompting. Though I probably disagree with the politics of at least some, on both sides of the aisle, I think at least two of those were relatively prominent?
Still, this doesn't quite answer our original question, which was more about the administrative machinery, often alleged to be non-elected. I have no idea if good statistics exist for the federal workforce more broadly, though probably not. Maybe a good proxy would be to go more local? And anyways childless women in politics aren't like crazy common, at least none come to mind right away, but part of that is we haven't had decent representation of women in Congress for very long either. Still if anything childless women (in electoral politics) seem to be very under-represented? Back of envelope math puts the proportion of childless women as about a quarter of adult women, though that likely goes down if you cut off the age a little higher (like most politicians). However, if you look at most female politicians, the vast majority seem to have kids. So yeah, back to local politics I guess.
I used this wiki page of notable women legislators in my home state of Oregon (which I thought might represent a liberal and childless state) and asked GPT to look up how many did or did not have kids. In my random sample of 15 people from that list, 3 did not, 2 were unclear, and 7 did. That doesn't seem too out of line with the general population. And the ones I read about (there were a few obituaries) seemed to have been impactful even when they didn't have kids.
So I really don't see the pattern Vance is talking about. I think he's talking out of his ass.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The talk about swapping out a candidate by the Republicans so soon after the Democrats did it reminds me a little of the popularity, in the former USSR, of the theory that the USA is on the verge of disintegration. "If it happened to us, it'll happen to them."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link