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I agree that there are advantages to owning guns, but the 2nd Amendment is about more than an "advantage" it is about a supposedly inalienable right. I would imagine that we should hold rights to higher standards than merely being "advantageous", as there are plenty of advantageous things that aren't rights. Cars are advantageous, for example, but there is no recognized right to car ownership or operation.
I'm weakly pro-gun rights, because I think that gun ownership is one of the more likely ways for minorities to protect themselves against right violations by the majority (i.e. a black man during segregation, or the Black Panthers following cop cars in the 70's), but I honestly have trouble mapping the limits of acceptable political violence within that framework. What is the dividing line between the 1954 attack on the United States capitol by Puerto Rican nationalists and the January 6th riots? What is the dividing line between trying to assassinate Hitler or Pol Pot and trying to assassinate Kamala Harris or Donald Trump? If cops are a representative of the force and will of the state, who gets to decide when cops have crossed the line into tyranny and it is thus morally justified to kill them?
Because I am pro-civilization and anti-violence, I have trouble with my tepid support of gun rights. It seems great to be able to defend against a tyrannical majority in the abstract, but how do we balance that against the fact that any state (tyrannical or not) is going to defend itself and attempt to delegitimize resistance by the oppressed? Why do we consider the Revolutionary War and the Founding Fathers good, but the Whiskey Rebellion or the Civil War bad and illegitimate?
The nationalists' fellow travelers eventually took power and pardoned them. At least, so far that's the political difference.
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"Don't shoot at congresspersons" seems like a pretty bright line?
I suppose I didn't make myself clear. I am somewhat sympathetic to motives of the Puerto Rican nationalists of 1954, and I don't have a great argument for why they should have seen political violence as beyond the pale given their island's relationship to the United States. The ordinary means of political redress were denied to the Puerto Ricans, and violence seems reasonable enough under those circumstances, even if I prefer if Congress would not be attacked by people for the sake of stability.
While I don't think January 6 posed all that great a risk to the country given how badly executed it was, I tend to be less sympathetic to the January 6 rioters. A big part of this is because I don't think the thing they were angry about - stolen elections - were a "legitimate" complaint, if we don't engage in a motte and bailley about what we mean by a "stolen election."
However, what makes one "acceptable" and one "unacceptable"? I would prefer if there were easy and widely accepted principles for when political violence was considered acceptable, but the mainstream answer seems to "never, except in retrospect."
Like I said, for me it's the 'shooting up congress' bit that's unacceptable -- if the Puerto Ricans had held it to breaking a few windows whilst yelling and milling about in restricted areas, it would not seem like a very big deal? (either)
Do you believe there are ever any circumstances where it is okay to attack the US congress? Do you believe that there are any actions that the US congress could commit that would ever make violence against them acceptable?
I think the difficulty I have is that we in the United States aren't a nation. The United States isn't and has never been defined by being a single ethnic group sharing a common birth. We are a civic state, defined by our ideals and institutions. (This is the reason American conservatives are so different than "blood and soil" European conservatives. By and large, even the conservatives are classical liberals in the United States.) Because we got our start in a bloody revolution justifying itself based on a conception of natural rights, it must be the case that there are circumstances where it is alright to attack a government and its representatives. But despite this being a core part of the ideology under-girding the United States, I'm dissatisfied that the vast majority of people seem to think that it is never okay to rebel or engage in violence against the state and its actors.
If one of the justifications of the 2nd Amendment is that capacity of violence against the state needs to be preserved to lessen oppression and tyranny, why is it that in practice the set of "tyrannical acts that would justify violence against the state" seem to always be an empty set? Is it because America truly is the freest country ever conceived with no hints of tyranny and oppression anywhere in its 200+ year history? When is violence against the state ever justified?
Certainly -- not an expert but I think Puerto Rico's grievances did not rise to this level; or to the extent that they did it would have been more appropriately addressed in Puerto Rico. And J6 did constitute an attack.
Would that it were so -- 'people don't assault the state over trivial inconveniences' != 'you can push people as far as you like'.
It's relevant that the first part remains 'mostly true' -- the interesting part of the current phase of the experiment is that the bar is getting pretty low.
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This is incorrect and a vile form of genocidal propaganda that i will not let go unchallenged*.
Those fathers are the ethnic group of common birth. You are wrong, and while your conception is popular today, it is an invention of post WW2 globohomo. America literally didn't allow people who didn't share that common birth any citizenship at all.
America was founded by Americans, and I mean ethnically, not on paper or with a hyphen. There was an ethnogenesis which created the American race, and we exist despite people of your ilk trying to pretend me and mine dont exist and never did.
Look, on my dad's side I am 14th generation American with ancestors that were on the Mayflower. By your definition, I'd qualify as an ethnic "American."
I think it's okay to be proud you had ancestors who fought in the Revolution or whatever, but I don't think your categories make a lick of sense. At the very least, I think most people would say that a white person who grew up in America from birth is basically "as American" as an "(Anglo) American." I have friends who were 100% ethnically German, and who grew up speaking English and no German and they're about as American as you can be. They're definitely not German.
I guess in principle, I'm not against the idea of calling out specific subethnicities like "Anglo American", "German American, "French American", but people just don't do that for white people, and it seems likely that we'll see a new ethnogenesis of "White Americans" if it hasn't happened already. And to be fair, I think the Anglo Americans played a large role in the ethnogenesis of White Americans.
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America was founded by Europeans (or perhaps the British presumably if we are being more specific. It can't have been founded by Americans as no Americans existed prior to its founding surely?
They became Americans with its founding certainly, but that isn't quite the same thing.
It was founded by Americans, as the ethnogenesis had already occurred by then.
Certainly by the 1789 Constitution.
The US was founded in 1776 though. Possibly by 1789, you had enough of a change (though I would think it probably took significantly longer), but that still means that it was not founded by Americans.
I suppose that does also pose the question, would you consider those brought into the US via the Louisiana purchase Americans? Do they get a pass because the territory being incorporated was carried out by the Founders? Are Cajuns Americans in your system?
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I’d like to register my disgust with this definition.
Civic nationalism, the choice to become an American through the legal naturalization process, is as fundamentally American as birthright citizenship. As long as my neighbors have come in through the front door, or were born on this land, I welcome them as my cousins.
If someone rejects America while living here, as many WEIRD socialists do, they are to me as alien as the person who snuck in under cover of night.
Is it?
Can you find support for it in the earliest writings of the founding fathers? I am open to being persuaded, but they left enough comments about their "posterity" and how the USA could only be possible among their type of people etc that I can't really see this claim being valid.
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That's fine, you can be disgusted, but no Italian or German or Mexican or Chinaman can be an American. They can be citizens of These United States of America. They can even have American children, provided they procreate with Americans and not other foreigners. But they cannot ever be American because that is an inheritance of blood, earned by my fathers, bequeathed to me.
So, not fundamental at all? Only a result of a despotic empire punishing its conquered enemies? Because what was fundamentally American were Free White Men of Good Character, and Negros and Indians not welcome.
It was a hundred years ago that people like Roosevelt and Wilson warned about hyphenated Americans. Was birthright citizenship really fundamental to America then? Hell no, and they both knew it. It's all post-WW2 dreck, and I'm tired of entertaining it.
This is insane to me. My cousins are my family, my neighbors are my neighbors. Living in proximity is not the same thing as sharing grandparents.
If immigration were still restricted to FWMoGC, then maybe I'd feel more like you, but when half the country thinks everyone on earth is already an American, some are just missing a plane ticket, then there's little room for me to do anything but say, "no."
Yeah, except that your fathers never put any such restriction in the founding documents of the country, and made no distinction between "Citizen of the United States" and "American."
You may believe that they never intended anyone but Anglo-Saxons of English descent to be Americans. Probably that is what many (not all) of them did believe. But that's not how they wrote the Constitution. They certainly didn't write anything like "Chinamen can't be Americans, but their children can be as long as they procreate only with Anglo-Saxons." Your entire formulation is idiosyncratic and appeals to your very specific prejudices, but it's neither coherent nor historical.
And if your objection to all this is "Foreign immigrants changed the deal that was understood to be in effect by my forefathers," well guess what, they changed the deal that was understood to be in effect by... the people who were here before them. Presumably you believe Anglo-Saxons coming here and creating America (and conquering the natives, and bringing slaves) was justified because... they could. So given that amassing sufficient power justifies altering the polity in which you find yourself, that's what happened.
Also, while you may disagree with people who think America is not defined by a single ethnicity, it's pure hysteria to call that opinion "genocidal." If you don't like leftists calling everything they don't like "genocidal" and "literal violence," then don't call things that are nothing like genocide genocide.
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If you live in a civilized country, you should have little trouble trusting your neighbors with weapons.
If you don't live in a civilized country, the need for weapons should be almost self-evident.
I used to lean slightly pro-gun-control, but there's simply no way you can deep dive into the statistics and come away with the idea that the guns are the problem, and by focusing on guns, it is in fact harder to address more fundamental issues.
Which is why I am losing patience with gun-control advocates who burn so much effort on a cause that simply will not achieve its purported benefits.
I mean, you can own a car and it can't be taken from you by the government without due process and such (literally the fifth amendment), whereas operating one on public property is explicitly a 'privilege.' So no, there is no explicit right, but there's still an inherent protection in there.
I mean, in my civilized country, a rando tried to assassinate the candidate of one of the two major political parties, so my trust is being strained.
My basic problem is that I can't say whether a rando trying to assasinate a political candidate is the 2nd Amendment working as intended (since it puts the power to decide when to overthrow tyrants in the hands of individuals), or if there is some principled way to criticize some acts of political violence as outside of the intended scope of gun rights?
The relevant comparison is whether it would be constitutionally possible for a Federal or State ban on cars to be enacted. I very much doubt if such a thing would ever happen, but I don't think it would be unconstitutional.
And in Japan, another civilized country, THAT HAS GUN CONTROL OUT THE WAZOO, a rando succeeded at killing an ex-prime minister. With a gun.
As I said, dive into the stats nice and deep and things become clearer.
If the problem is you DON'T trust your neighbors, that's a significantly larger issue, and evidence you don't live in a civilized (part of the) country.
And I should perhaps remind you that we can 3D print firearms at home now so you're NOT going to prevent a sufficiently dedicated rando from getting one.
The interstate commerce clause MIGHT stretch that far, but it is not in fact clear to me that a blanket car ban would pass muster unless there was some actual harm that the government was intervening to prevent. "Climate Change" might but probably doesn't cover that base.
The point of criminal laws is not to ensure that a thing never happens. We outlaw murder, but there will always be murders. The point of laws is threefold: 1) to discourage other criminals from committing the crime in question, 2) to reform the criminal so they never commit the crime again, and 3) if 2 is impossible, to safely contain a criminal away from the rest of society so that everyone else is safe.
My guess is that the number of gun-related assassination attempts in Japan over the last 50 years is probably going to be less than the equivalent number per capita in the United States. Now, if all-cause assassinations per capita were the same between the two countries (all else being equal), that would be evidence that gun control is unlikely to play much of a role in preventing assassination attempts.
... I mean, you can say that. But if that were the real point, surely we'd be seeing much stricter punishments for even petty crimes. And its the same people pushing for gun control who push for decriminalization of various activities, and 'defund the police,' and set up bail funds, and otherwise support an agenda that is so-called 'soft on crime.'
Yes, I have no problem admitting that the Japanese are far less violent on average than Americans. Not even a controversy.
Do YOU want to assert that violence in Japan would substantially increase if they repealed all gun laws and suddenly gun ownership became widespread in Japan?
(Because that's when we can start talking about the ACTUAL cause of violence, aside from guns)
What's your theory of the case? What, say, three interventions do you believe would have the largest effect on societal violence and crime, and be implementable within a little-l liberal constitutional republic under the rule of law?
Literally just aggressively prosecuting and sentencing violations of the firearm restriction laws we already have on the books would go a long way to solving the problem. If a felon with a firearm goes away for 10 years, they're not going to be robbing people on the street for a while. Instead we have a strong demand for gun laws that can be used on the mostly law-abiding, because otherwise we end up prosecuting too many of the wrong demographic.
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Not who you asked, but:
Forced institutionalization of the mentally ill and people addicted to hard drugs (i.e. heroin and meth, not weed). We had this in America until the 60's and 70's or so and we were definitely more of a little -l liberal constitutional republic back then. Institutionalization had plenty of its own problems, but most of them aren't inherent to the system, and it's hard to imagine it being worse on the liberty-tyranny spectrum than the current anarcho-tyranny letting junkies commit crime without real consequence is.
Mandatory high cash bail (or no bail at all) for violent crimes where there is strong and clear evidence that the arrestee is in fact the perpetrator. Also a three strikes rule or similar for violent crime, with a mandatory minimum of 20 years or so. Most young male criminals "age out" of crime around age 40.
Empower individual citizens and communities to police themselves. Robust protections for defense of self and property. Prior to the establishment of professional police forces this is how law enforcement was largely handled. The sheriff would deputize a bunch of locals temporarily when a more serious emergency arose that needed more manpower/force.
1 and 2 are really the most important things.
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I could get behind 1, but I don't know if I agree that institutionalization's biggest problems aren't inherent to the system. Sure, we can make very nice madhouses with blackjack and hookers, but at the end of the day there's always going to be people who straddle the fuzzy line of "too crazy for society" and "able to safely exist in society", and if those people are forcibly robbed of their liberty, they'll often be able to mount a justifiable case against any system that exists, no matter how nice.
We can always ignore such voices of course, but enough sob stories will almost certainly end at them being shut down again, no matter how nice they are. People don't like being stuck in a cage, gilded or otherwise.
With regards for 2 - surely you'd only want to set a high cash bail for violent crimes with a chance of recidivism or something? A crime of passion that's unlikely to have a follow up probably doesn't need a $1 million dollar bail.
As for 3, I'd certainly be open to letting communities police themselves. I was interested in the proposal someone put forward here about a neighborhood all chipping in for private security to supplement what the state provides, and I find that an interesting idea as well.
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