site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29938 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 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.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Or the printing press which allows heretics to attack the honor of the holy Catholic Church. Let's pray this doesn't cause schisms and violence.

From the point of view of the powers that be, this seems like a great argument in favor of muzzling LLMs.

It is in their class interest not to destabilize a society that they are on top of. But internal threats are not alone. There's external threats to worry about. And those can't be as readily forced not to consider novel technology.

Don’t Russia China Iran etc rely much more on information control by the elites than we do?

All elites do to some degree, but China and Iran have hard power to lean back on that they have proven they are not afraid to use.

Russia is more fox like, but you do start mysteriously playing with grenades on your plane if you oppose the regime too overtly.

Meanwhile, the West is a lot more dominated by narrative management. Look at how the UK dealt with its local trouble recently for instance, it was mostly playing through the media and setting up frames rather than bluntly bashing the locals, though bashing there was.

Another thing to consider is how secure a particular elite is vis-à-vis the people who would benefit from technological advancement. Chinese corporations are solidly loyal to the party and integrated into the power structure, when western tech is basically a counter-elite at this point.

I mean you do have a point that China, Iran, and Venezuela use hard power internally to a degree that the US at least is probably incapable of doing. On the other hand, Chinese and Iranian censorship is legendary.

I'd argue it's amateurish actually. It looks extremely blunt compared to the refined techniques of narrative control the US developed through the study of social psychology in the cold war. Now granted, the mask has been slipping and US psychological operations have become pretty bad as of late, but the base level is still very sophisticated compared to Iranian methods.

I find China harder to evaluate. I don't know enough about how they do their internal propaganda. I know their diplomatic efforts have been a bit difficult but that doesn't necessarily correlate.

I don't know enough about how they do their internal propaganda.

TTBOMK it's not great, but it still works, because people don't get exposed to alternatives easily - the media and education system are held in an iron fist and almost every plausible back-channel is surveilled, plus foreign perspectives are largely negated by the Great Firewall. You don't need to be super-compelling if you can block people from encountering anything more compelling than your slop until they've long since internalised it.

Of course, this model is useless for external propaganda, which is part of why theirs is so memetically bad.

Bohemia (following Wycliffe) had already realized a bunch of the problems with papal teachings and practices, prior to the invention of the printing press.

The printing press merely allowed it to be scaled up.

The Founding Fathers used hand-cranked printing presses and never anticipated there would someday be fully automatic assault presses.

I'm a patriotic American, but I think the Revolutionary War was a mistake and history would have been a lot better if the US had stayed British. So the printing presses used by the Founding Fathers did a lot of harm even without being "automatic assault presses".

Have you seen Britian lately? It is clear that the usa is a lot better off than the UK or canada or india or aus.

Australia's doing worse on a couple of metrics (gun control and free speech, although we're not at European levels of hate speech laws), but a lot better on a bunch of others. In addition to what @AshLael said (no cities degenerated into chaos!), our politics are also far more stable; another civil war is unthinkable here.

I'd put Australia first on that list of five countries in terms of my preference to live in; the USA would probably get second, because Canada and the UK have serious problems of their own and India of course is a third-world country, but seriously Australia's not that bad.

After Australia's reaction to covid, i would not put it behind British state control. You guys were chasing down teens and harrasing women stopping on park benches, and restricting freedom of movement and curfews and 'papers pleasing' all over the place. It was insane watching it from the states. How quickly we forget.

The usa is not "close to civil war" That is mostly a larp for the very far right and left to fantasize about in very online spaces. It has about as much chance as "The Purge" or "Running man" at becoming reality. The country is pretty well mixed in geographically despite the voting maps that show the final results.

I also ask, were you born in Australia or was it a choice to move there?

After Australia's reaction to covid, i would not put it behind British state control.

That's not the part that makes Australia leaps and bounds ahead of Britain, indeed. Britain seems to be having a bad time of the culture war recently, what with the rioting, and I hear there are also economic issues.

The usa is not "close to civil war" That is mostly a larp for the very far right and left to fantasize about in very online spaces. It has about as much chance as "The Purge" or "Running man" at becoming reality.

It would take a big spark, but there are a few plausible ones. A hard hit on the debt ceiling (literally) defunding the police for an extended period. Obvious election fixing. Maybe court-packing. At least one other. None of these things are assured, by any means, but none of them are that unlikely either.

I also ask, were you born in Australia or was it a choice to move there?

Born here. Think I'm fourth-generation.

You position is that if we hit the debt ceiling, defund the police (which isn't actually a thing) or pack the court the usa will be in civil war? The population isn't even divided up geographically in a way that woild even make it possible, very very worst case it would be like the "troubles" in NI. Most people are way too lazy for that kind of thing.

A hard hit on the debt ceiling (literally) defunding the police for an extended period.

How would hitting the federal debt ceiling defund the police which is mostly funded from state and local sources?

A good point, and makes me less worried. Although, with that said, the FBI is IIRC the main org dealing with domestic terrorism and rebellion.

More comments

The country is pretty well mixed in geographically

What does that have to do with the risk of civil war? The American Civil War was actually rather unusual, as civil wars go, in its clear geographic lines. Many civil wars don't involve secession attempts.

Compare, for example, the English Civil War(s). Yes, there were some geographic gradients — northwest vs. southeast, but even more city-vs-countryside — but only partially; and, AIUI, the two sides were still "plenty well mixed in," at least initially. Another, more recent civil war of "city-vs-rural" character was the Nepali Civil War. Or try looking at maps of the decades-long conflict in Colombia.

There is just no clear way to have a real war without battle lines. Otherwise it is just somthing more the the "troubles" in NI, or chaos.

I would put Australia as a serious contender for #2 country to live in, but I'm curious what the rest of your list looks like?

Who's your #1?

NZ I'd probably put on par with Australia or maybe a hair below due to marginally-greater levels of SJ.

Outside the Anglosphere it gets more complicated (and where I'd personally prefer to live starts to diverge from where I think would be objectively good places to live, as I'm decent at French and have a foggy idea about other Romance languages/Mandarin/Japanese but am only fluent in English). I've also a less clear idea of what's going on there. But of the five main Anglosphere countries I'd say only the UK is having enough trouble to potentially lose top-5 status, because Western Continental Europe is clearly worse in terms of SJ/ethnic conflict issues than anywhere else in the Anglosphere, Free Asia aside from the rather-uptight Singapore is also known as "ground zero bait for WWIII", and basically everywhere else is notably poorer.

I haven't the foggiest idea which African/South American/non-East Asian countries are better/worse than their neighbours. Russia clearly beats China but I'd take the First World over either, and obviously North Korea is terrible.

USA is my #1. Australia rivals Costa Rica(where English speakers are almost automatically middle class or higher) and Japan(which is at least stable, cohesive, and very safe). I'd put France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland as my top three western European countries and Poland as my top Eastern European country. Russia and Iran both over China, but even the shitty parts of the first world over any of three. Botswana, Kenya, and South Africa as top African picks, but none of them near the top overall.

As for South America, Northern Mexico, Uruguay, Chile, Costa Rica, and Southern Brazil are developed countries with right-here-right-now decent economies, but very high crime for two of them and the levels of income inequality one comes to expect from Latin America. Still, the upper middle class in those places have good living standards. Argentina is a developed country that might be on the economic upswing; its welfare state is probably too expansive to achieve the labor force participation rate necessary to truly achieve an economic breakout. Paraguay and Panama are relatively safe and steadily improving, but they're still poor even for Latin America. Venezuela, Haiti, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Cuba are the real shitholes.

I know right? I was just thinking the other day, man it really sucks having a secure border, a quarter of the crime, half the national debt, policy set by elected officials instead of unelected judges, clean cities, etc, etc.

When we talk about a secure border in the US, we're talking about preventing the wrong people from getting IN, not citizens from getting OUT as in Australia a few years ago.

Canada and the UK are poor compared to the US. And nanny states in the worst ways.

Our unelected Supreme Court is a powerful defense against the obvious failure modes other Anglo countries suffer from.

unelected Supreme Court is a powerful defense

An unelected Supreme Court is not useful unless you also happen to have a powerful Constitution, a people that still believe in means something, and a Federalist Society.

Yes, but Singapore is better than the US especially when you adjust for the difficulty level they are playing at. The US has massive land advantages over Canada (too cold) and India (too hot and dangerous neighbors).

Singapore is one city. Not a sprawling world power. They can't be properly compared.

Have you seen Britian lately? It is clear that the usa is a lot better of than the UK or canada or india or aus.

Britain and Canada are the way they are because they imported American wokeness without having any of the American cultural antibodies to wokeness like freedom of speech or the right to bear arms. If America never existed the point would be moot.

Britain was on the hard downturn way before american media "wokeness" was a thing.

Divorced from politics America’s extremely bountiful natural resources mean it is always likely to be wealthier than Britain. The same is true of Australia, which has politics (and a “nanny state”) closer to Britain’s but which is closer to the US in terms of income because of natural resources. Both countries have been richer than the UK since the 1880s and 1890s, before Britain’s decline as a world power accelerated in earnest.

With apologies to Voltaire, if wokeness did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent it.

I don’t think so. Wokeness emerged out of the uniquely American experience of, “oh shit, we have to live next to all these black people we imported now,” which was then imported to Europe after we bailed them out in the World Wars.

I dont think so, if "wokeness" is anything its an attempt by the marxist vangaurd to adapt thier ideology to a nation with an unusually low background level of class resentment.

The attempts to sow division based on⁸ class failed due to every american imagining himself to be a temporarily embarrassed millionaire and thus they were forced to resort to more primitive "asiatic" rhetoric about blood and soil that Americans weren't already on guard against

About half a million of 2.5M Americans in 1776 were slaves already. The number would presumably have increased apace even without independence since cotton made a lot of money and moneymaking was the whole point of owning colonies.

As @2rafa pointed out yesterday, in a Parliamentary system, the party with a one vote advantage in the House of Commons has sweeping power to do what it wants.

The United States has much greater checks on power with, in theory at least, a federal system that devolves many powers to the states. It's also much more difficult to control all three branches of government .

The joke has always been "If not for the Revolutionary War we could have turned out like Canada. The horror".

This is less funny today in light of the widespread abuse of government power in the Commonwealth countries against their people, first during Covid, and now against speech. The elites are well and truly in control there in a way they aren't, quite, in the United States. And without the salutary influence of the United States, who knows what would happen?

There has always been a totalitarian current in the UK that there hasn't been in the US. It's been mitigated over the years by the fact that the elite loved their country and its people. Now that this is no longer true, the totalitarian impulse is taking the UK and Canada to some dark places.

God bless George Washington and the founding fathers.

If Kamala Harris gets to appoint two Supreme Court Justices I suspect the 1st Amendment will be found to have a hate speech exception that coincides with what Big Tech censors you for saying.

I'm actually not sure of that. That would be pretty disappointing if it turns out that Kagan is only pretending to care about free speech.

In theory there are much stronger safeguards in Canada and Australia because of their constitutions, the UK is pretty unique in that sense.

Australia's constitution doesn't provide safeguards of rights*; it has a number of safeguards of the political process (the ban on dual-citizens serving in Parliament, for instance, is constitutional), but not of individual rights. What we've retained, we've retained via not electing parliaments that would take them away.

*There are a few things the federal government can't do due to enumerated powers, some of which (e.g. bills of attainder) would be violations of rights. The state parliaments can do those things, though (they've never done attainder TTBOMK, but they could if they wanted).

I'm a patriotic American, but I think the Revolutionary War was a mistake and history would have been a lot better if the US had stayed British

Why? Without the American Revolution, we'd not have gotten first amendment speech protections (even if Mills had still existed on this timeline), and without those, it would have taken a lot longer to dispel the popular falsehoods of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The UK and Canada actually do have freedom of speech. It's just not interpreted as liberally as it has been by American judges in the latter half of the 20th century.

"Freedom of speech, unless your ideas suck" allows totalitarianism as long as the totalitarians get to draw up the list of which ideas suck. Remember that censorship only of ideas you don't like feels a lot like freedom of speech.

You're missing the point. The difference in freedom of speech between the US and Canada and the UK is not because of the first amendment. Canada and the UK also have laws protecting freedom of speech in basically the same language, but they've been interpreted differently. The first amendment also used to be interpreted very loosely, resulting in the US having many laws restricting speech in the past that would not be allowed today.

  1. The UK doesn't have constitutional freedom of speech; it has no constitution. Yes, there are laws saying free speech is a right, but those laws are automatically overridden by any subsequent laws that breach freedom of speech under the doctrine that Parliament can't bind itself. In this case (though not the Canadian or EU case), it's not a matter of interpretation.

  2. Yes, there has been a miscommunication here. You said "the UK and Canada actually do have freedom of speech", which I interpreted as meaning "the state of speech in the UK and Canada is what I, Glassnoser, would describe as 'free'". Lots of people, including the governments of Canada/the EU/the UK, agree with that latter sentence, because they are naïve and/or in denial regarding the result of "freedom of speech, unless your ideas suck". Hence, I assumed you were one of these people and attempted to correct your understanding. It would now appear that what you meant was "the UK and Canada actually do have a constitution requiring them to respect free speech, but they flagrantly ignore it, pretending that free speech is some pitiful, mutilated version of itself that doesn't accomplish its purpose". This is still untrue with regard to the UK (see #1), but I agree with it in regard to Canada. I apologise for misunderstanding your sentence, but I hope you'll agree that your actual meaning was not exactly clear.

The UK has an unwritten constitution. But that's irrelevant. I didn't say it had a constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech. It has freedom of speech. They could repeal that law, but they haven't. They've simply interpreted it to not be as restrictive as the first amendment. The US Supreme Court has done the same in the past.

The British abolished slavery without a Civil War! If the US had been militarily part of the UK you don't get WW I and II (probably) and as a bonus no communism.

I don't see how you figure this? The Kaiser was convinced Britain would stay neutral in WW1. What does it change if he expects Britain + America to stay neutral?

I'm actually listening to a WW I podcast and Germany was worried about Britain entering WW I. If it had been Britain + America, Britain would have been able to dictate terms. The German military was not stupid.

There was uncertainty (both in Germany and in Britain) over what Britain would do - the Kaiser famously said "I have the word of a king, and that is good enough for me", while others were less optimistic.

Britain could not dictate terms because Britain itself was not clear on what its terms were. Ultimately pro-war voices were able to use the invasion of Belgium, an entirely uninvolved party that just happened to be in the way, to galvanise Britain into declaring against Germany. But it was far from clear before the fact that this was how things would play out.

I also am sceptical that Britain could have deterred Germany anyway - I think the Germans considered themselves to be in a "fight or die" situation, and they would have fought regardless of the odds against them. The party that I think was the critical decision maker is Russia, in the sense that they chose to fight and could realistically have chosen otherwise, and that would have prevented the war from becoming a much bigger deal than Austria v Serbia. But a stronger Britain doesn't prevent Russia from getting involved.

There was a miscommunication that for a short time caused the Kaiser to think that England would not fight against Germany and might even stop France from fighting, but this was quickly cleared up, and was cleared up before the start of war. If Britain was a lot stronger, the British foreign minister would have had a lot more influence and could have either told Austria-H don't invade Serbia, or Russia to stay out of it. Germany would have figured that with a strong Britain against them, they would be unlikely to get Turkey or Bulgaria to join them and they probably get Romania and Italy to side against them.

Of course WW1 and 2 would start with the same arrangement of players if Britain was more powerful, but that doesn't there wouldn't be massive wars. Maybe the war would have been British vs the whole Europe.

Manifest Destiny!

One of the factors leading to the American Revolution was that the British leadership wasn't really interested in Westward expansion: it kept causing troubles with the natives and their allies requiring expensive interventions (see the French and Indian War) and the American colonies were, economically, afterthoughts compared to the sugar trade in the Caribbean. Not to mention the entire Louisiana Purchase thing.

I'm not sure the modern borders could have happened at all, much less been a likely outcome under Crown leadership.

Maybe SoCal + a bunch of desert would belong to Spain -- maybe not though; the British Empire did after all span to the Pacific eventually, and I think the same forces that led the US to seek lebensraum would have driven the colonies inexorably South and West. The exact timing of things would be pretty important I guess, and the redcoats probably would have massacred fewer Indians.

It would have been the Louisiana conquest if the US had been part of the UK.

Slaveowners were a tiny portion of the British population. They were powerful disproportionately to their numbers, but they would never have been able to resist abolition by force like the American South could.

If the Revolution has failed/never happened, the British slave owning population would have been much larger and more widespread -- remember, most Northern states abolished in response to the ideology of the Revolution.

But the South's strategy for winning the Civil War relied on the UK Navy not allowing the South to be blockaded. The UK + North American North would have easily beaten the South and so could have forced the South to end slavery without a Civil War.

Or alternatively everyone in North America might have grown to see the "peculiar institution" as a defining trait that set them off from the Brits and when the British moved to crackdown on slavery in the 1800s the combined North American colonies might have steamrolled them with superior Yankee industry and Southern military leadership, resulting in a hundred more years of chattel slavery across the entire Anglosphere!

I find your hypothetical more reasonable than mine. But something one doesn't understand until one reads letters from the time period is how much Northern will to fight the South was motivated by (checks notes) antipathy towards Europe, not slavery per se. (On average I'd say Northerners didn't like slavery but they didn't like black people either.) The Northerners saw the Southerners as oligarchs after the European feudal model, and that was a large part of what they had a problem with. Splitting the Union was unacceptable to them because it meant that the grand Republican experiment had "failed" (read: made them look bad to the Europeans.) Or at least that's what I recall being struck by when I did some primary source readings. Perhaps my memory and/or coursework was selective.

That's not to say that there weren't a very vocal and dedicated group that saw slavery itself as unacceptable and campaigned specifically to get rid of it, even at the cost of war. But (and this is my point) culture works in funny ways and in an alternative history where the Revolution never happened over self-government+taxes it might have happened later over "self-government+slavery." Never underestimate how crotchety people will get over being told what to do.

Just as a technical note, the South wanted the UK to intervene badly, but I don't think that was their best or only chance of winning, and they actively pursued strategies to unilaterally break the blockade themselves. Ultimately I think they lost because they got bled white, not because they were blockaded. Southern casualties were extraordinarily high as a percentage of the population compared to any other American war, and although they had trouble with heavy industry (you know, cannons) they were able to produce basic necessities like gunpowder to the end. In fact, IIRC, their soldiers were better off for powder than they were for food.

You could be right about the South. My only somewhat informed view is that the Civil War was a war of choice for the South, and not going to war would not have caused them to have to give up slavery. Unless they were crazy (which they might have been) the war only made sense if they thought they could win easily and that needed the UK to not let the North blockade the South.

More comments

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