site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29428 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 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.

Do you believe that the UK has a functional right to self-defense?

Yes indeed. Though largely you can't want a gun for those purposes. Again excepting Northern Ireland where you can get a firearms license for that reason alone.

Edit: Though this has nothing to do with the correction that the UK does not have a wholesale ban on guns. The rest of jeroboams post may or may not be true, but that particular statement is straightforwardly incorrect.

UK has duty to retreat, carrying any weapon is illegal, pepper spray and stunners are illegal and famously the pensioner who shot someone in his own home was jailed.

What right to self defense?

Tony Martin did shoot one of the burglars in the back with a gun he did not have a license for. Even in the US shooting someone in the back as they run away may find you having trouble with a self-defense plea.

I've been in three violent altercations in my life, all in the UK, all where I was defending myself. In all three I called the cops, and in all three the cops did not arrest me, but either arrested or attempted to arrest the attacker. Now none of these involved guns or weapons (other than a pint glass in one case), but that doesn't stop them being self-defense.

Edit: and the duty to retreat was removed in 2008. Then in 2013 the standard for self-defence in one's home was improved from not being unreasonable to not being grossly disproportionate.

Yes indeed

I'd have to look up how things are in the UK, but Europe is pretty staunchly against self defense, and I haven't heard anything that would indicate the UK is any different.

IIRC there are situations where self-defence is allowed, but as @FCfromSSC implied there's no functional right to self-defence; if you have a gun to hand when someone goes active shooter, I think you're allowed to return fire... but you 99.99% of the time don't have a gun to hand if you're following the law, because you're not allowed to take a gun (or a knife or armour) with you for the purposes of self-defence, which makes the point moot.

Forget guns, a lot of Europe has this idea of "proportional force" which requires you to make constant legal evaluations as you're fighting for your life, resulting in cases like this where people watch helplessly as an attacker scales a ladder to assault them in their own home (there's a more disturbing video version of this somewhere that I can't find now, because all searches suck now).

Is that because of the legal framework or because most modern people are very unfamiliar with violence and hesitant to engage in it? I heavily suspect the victim there was not worrying about the law.

My experience having had a bit of a rough and tumble upbringing is that a lot of middle class people whether in the UK or US shy away from violence even in self-defence, not because of legal worries, but because they have never really had to engage in it.

Is that because of the legal framework or because most modern people are very unfamiliar with violence and hesitant to engage in it? I heavily suspect the victim there was not worrying about the law.

I'd default to believing that these things reinforce one another. If a legal framework demands constant checks when physically defending oneself, then a culture of just shying away from violence is a reasonable response. And if there's a culture of just shying away from violence, then structuring the law to punish the few outliers who choose not to disengage, since engaging causes more direct, immediate harm is a reasonable act. Perhaps one was the chicken and the other the egg, or perhaps both were birthed by some 3rd common factor, but ultimately, those don't matter; if there's a self-reinforcing cycle, then every part of the cycle is caused by every other part.

Sorry, not sure how am I supposed to engage with this argument. My experience having had a bit of a rough and tumble upbringing is that just about the only thing that would make someone meekly submit to a knife attack in their own home is the threat of an even stronger punishment. How do you propose we resolve the disagreement?

Well my observation is that most people in a crisis situation are not making rational decisions, but acting out of instinct, (in)experience and fear.

Given the West for anyone in the middle class and above is much less violent than decades ago, most people are going to have much less experience with violence. They freeze, they plead, they try to de-escalate. They don't in my experience think a lot about the law.

If you and I have both had a rough and tumble start to life, then we have had more exposure directly to violence than many. I've been glassed, and I've been attacked with a barbed wire club, I've been threatened by a paramilitary leader. I grew up in a nation where we had bomb evacuation drills in school and had soldiers on the streets.

My observation is that many people without that, simply on some level do not believe that violence will be the outcome. This is a place where I think Hlynkacg was correct. They have internalized a world view where this is a rules based existence, because to them it has been.

That's why you often see people flipping their belief systems once they have been a victim of violence. Their worldview was upended.

In other words my feeling is you may be underestimating the aversion and unfamiliarity with violence by the average middle class Western person who may never have thrown a punch in anger in their life, let alone had a knife wielding maniac at their door. I think it is highly unlikely they are being concilitory and non confrontational because of the law, but simply because that is how the modern world has taught them to deal with violence. You don't punch your bully, you avoid them and tell the teacher.

Or to put it more simply, violence is scary to people who have not some experience with it. And many, many people in wealthy Western cultures nowadays grow up without any exposure to it. Which is generally good! But it has neutered their threat responses. (Obviously generalizing here, but overall i think my point is correct. Few people even know what their own nations self-defence laws are..because they very rarely have to know. )

Given the West for anyone in the middle class and above is much less violent than decades ago, most people are going to have much less experience with violence. They freeze, they plead, they try to de-escalate. They don't in my experience think a lot about the law.

My observation is that many people without that, simply on some level do not believe that violence will be the outcome. This is a place where I think Hlynkacg was correct. They have internalized a world view where this is a rules based existence, because to them it has been.

In other words my feeling is you may be underestimating the aversion and unfamiliarity with violence by the average middle class Western person who may never have thrown a punch in anger in their life, let alone had a knife wielding maniac at their door. I think it is highly unlikely they are being concilitory and non confrontational because of the law, but simply because that is how the modern world has taught them to deal with violence. You don't punch your bully, you avoid them and tell the teacher.

I agree with all of this, from personal experience. I've seen an entire bus full of people stare helplessly at one guy who wants to ride without a ticket because he's physically refusing to step off and nobody is prepared to go and shove the guy one step backwards. It's not a legal problem, it's a helplessness problem.

Likewise, of the few times I've been close to a confrontation (ignoring schoolyard scuffles and things), my instinct has been to run and/or call the police. I'm not entirely happy about that, but it is what it is.

More comments

I still don't see much to engage with here. I too can write an essay, about how even to most meek coward lashes out when you corner him, and that you'll be hard-pressed to find a more central example of being cornered than a home invasion, but that too will just be an essay with no way to resolve the disagreement.

If you insist that Americans are afflicted with the same sort helplessness in the face of violence, but their legal framework is different, maybe you can give a few examples of a similar assault, in a state with strong self-defense laws, where the assailant makes himself absurdly vulnerable for several minutes in the process of preparing for an attack, and the victim chooses to do nothing. Maybe we can see who can find more of these stories, or who taps out first? Not a perfect process, but far more constructive than just-so stories based on lived experience.

They don't in my experience think a lot about the law.

That would be the argument I'm making. No one can make legal calculus as they fight for their life, so a good deal of people default to paralysis.

More comments

Edit: Though this has nothing to do with the correction that the UK does not have a wholesale ban on guns, and claims that it does are wrong.

Sure. You've established that the UK does not have a wholesale ban on guns, I'm trying to get to what they do have and how to describe it. What's the optimal encapsulation of the socio-political position of firearms in UK society?

Generally, most people do not keep firearms even though they most likely could have a shotgun or semi-auto .22 rifle, or larger caliber bolt-action rifle if they wanted to. This is mostly because of cultural attitudes to firearms in the UK and is not particularly a live political issue. Even back home in Northern Ireland, where you can get a firearms license for self-defence alone, and where you can get handguns legally, the vast majority of people do not do so, even during the Troubles. It is also not particularly difficult to get hold of an illegal Kalashnikov or similar automatic rifle in Northern Ireland, but very few people outside of the paramilitary organizations do so.

Restrictive firearms laws are generally supported by the majority of the population, because the cultural attitudes towards firearms are very different than in the US. Most people who have guns will likely be farmers or other rural folk, (most of my uncles have shotguns and rifles for example), and the average person (certainly in England) is likely to be somewhat uncomfortable around guns, and most police will not be be armed (again as almost always excepting Northern Ireland, where almost all officers are armed, and the population is exposed to people carrying firearms probably on a daily basis).

Going for maximum brevity: you are allowed a gun for shooting objects or animals, but never ever ever for shooting at a human being no matter what.

(i.e. generally the law tries to say yes to sport and hunting, but no to lethal self-defence or rebellion. In days when people had more faith in government, this was pretty well understood and supported as being the government retaining its necessary monopoly on violence. Now, of course, two-tier anarcho-tyranny beckons.)

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