site banner

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
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I want to thank you for writing this, sincerely.

I had never considered that very logical end state.

And it makes my blood fucking boil.

This is how they actually take the wilderness away from us. Not through arbitrary laws that wouldn't survive challenges (and that people would willfully violate anyway) but by making it impossible to do on machine/electrical assisted physical level. They'll double down by making it illegal to own an "analog" machine that you can still control on your own (gas or diesel engine without any electronics). Everything will have GPS to the point that a lack of GPS will look like a "hole in the ocean" on a highway or other road and they'll send the police drones to investigate.

This is how they take it all away.

Not only are "they" not interested in taking the wilderness away from you, "they" make billions of dollars a year thanks to you visiting the wilderness. This post is just doomporn.

I don’t think that true. They want you to visit The Wilderness(tm) not go off wherever you want. I don’t think they’d prevent you from leaving the city entirely, but you’ll be directed towards nearby designated parks and nature preserves. And I think the bigger concern for me is that a car that’s entirely electric and hooked up to GPS alongside electronic currency sets up a situation easily controlled by a social credit score. Maybe your electric usage was too high and your car refuses to go anywhere but work and home.

They want you to visit The Wilderness(tm) not go off wherever you want.

Unfortunately unless you live in one of a small number of countries with "right to roam" you already can't go wherever you want.

I'm an American. BLM land is my place to roam where I want.

As an American, you should know that not all land is BLM land.

If the managerial state was interested only in doing things that benefit it rather than things that give it the appearance of control it would not be the managerial state.

If you don't think they could mandate something this stupid you need to spend more time reading random EU guidelines for whatever industry you work in.

Administrative pettiness has no bottom. Believe me.

It's amusing to read this, then flick down to the discussion about how the handmaid's tale doomposting is obviously totally ridiculous. "They want to take away the wilderness from us" is the handmaid's tale for dudes.

Do you guys even have any wilderness left in Europe besides the alps? I kind of thought it was all farms and pastures.

Do you guys even have any wilderness left in Europe besides the alps? I kind of thought it was all farms and pastures.

There are other mountains in Europe, forests of Scandinavia and Russia, some deserts in Spain. But you're broadly right, Western/Central Europe is like the US east of the Mississippi.

East of the Mississippi still has a tremendous amount of wild land, I don’t think there’s really any analogy there.

I’m not sure anywhere in the USA is analogous to western & Central Europe where the type of intensive cultivation that completely blankets the land has been going on for nigh near a millennia.

We have had such an abundance of land since our inception that the type of clear cutting and terraforming that leads to the kind of landscape of endless cultivated or formerly cultivated land you see from Spain to Czechia was simply not needed or economically viable.

Looks like you're technically correct, eastern US is 54.25% forest, more forested than Russia. EU-27 is 40% forest.

This is after about a century of reforestation. Parts of the East coast used to be just as intensively cultivated/settled as any part of Europe. Massachusetts now has significantly more forest than it did in the 1920's, for example.

Laugh it up, while you still can.

Is it really extrapolating much to assume that the system in your car that's mandated by the State to know and record your position, speed and have the ability to turn off the engine could also prevent you from doing other things that are not in the interest of the State that aren't specifically mandated by the bill? Are slopes ever slippery?

I'd attempt to fix the analogy with HT to make it more accurate, but that book's setting never really made any practical sense. Patriarchal theocracy already exists and it doesn't really look like that bourgeois rape fantasy. It's just Islam. Women are right to be afraid of its resurgence in the west, but the way the story frames it misses too much about the reasons that make that sort of society arise to be of any use except as agitprop.

Would be tyrants of both theocratic and modernist flavors do exist.

Meanwhile, on reddit, a conversation like this is happening:

is it really extrapolating much to assume that the party that requires healthcare providers to report any miscarriage so you can be investigated and prosecuted and mandates that you be raped with an ultrasound probe before you can get life saving medical care could also require you to have children by a certain age or other things that are not part of current legislation? Are slopes ever slippery?

I'm not speaking in any sort of loaded language here like this fictitious quote, but even if we remove that from the equation, it seems to me that women who want to retain secure and uncontested rights to abortion are right to be concerned at the moves their political opponents are making and right to think that the ultimate goal is to restrict their license.

I'd contest the low resolution idea that the "party" (presumably the GOP) would actually advance that political agenda significantly, but some people are indeed trying to do this and making moves to make it easier for them to do so, it's no hallucination.

I don't really get what you're trying to say here. Why deride people being aware that politics have an important influence on their life? We're not in the 90s anymore, endless present and liberal consensus is not the order of the day.

I don't really get what you're trying to say here.

Simply that the syllogism:

  1. I don't like X
  2. I don't like Y
  3. My political opponents have done X
  4. Therefore, they are about to do Y

Does not, in general, hold. Fantasizing about "they are going to take away the wilderness" makes perhaps even less sense than fantasizing about project 2025; at least that is an actual report produced by an actual think tank rather than a motte comment about what the out group is going to do next.

This is just "the slippery slope fallacy exists".

The logic is perfectly sound if you are able to find legitimate argument that the "political opponents" have a desire or interest to do Y, or that X is materially conducive to Y.

In both examples, there is plentiful evidence for both propositions.

Requiring strict proofs for suspicion of political activity is a stupid and idiotic policy that can only lead you to be ineffectual at the actual game being played.

You sound like a conservative defending civil unions for homosexuals on the ground that there is no evidence they will lead to marriage. If you want to be as politically ineffectual as that, be my guest. But I prefer to deal with the world as it is.

More comments

Yep. I think it'll also eventually be illegal to raise a kid without allowing your parenting to be scrutinized in detail. I think the main reason it isn't today is because it'd be too expensive, not because it'd be politically untenable.

it'll also eventually be illegal

It's already illegal; more a question of degrees now.

Yes, I agree.