site banner

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
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Apologies, I thought you were referring to gun-related rules specifically, and in fact, gun-related rules have indeed been rolled back, and others have been prevented.

If the question is about federal tyranny as a whole, it seems pretty clear to me that the last two decades have seen significant erosion of federal capacity, and the gun culture has been a crucial vanguard in that erosion. Social cohesion is decaying at a significant and accelerating rate, and with it the capacity of the federal government and blue tribe generally to impose its edicts on society as a whole. We are now seeing open, organized defiance to federal edicts from state governments, and the federals backed down. We are seeing a complete collapse in trust for the media, for the federal bureaucracy, for the federal courts, a deadlocked congress, collapsing trust in elections. The military is facing a severe recruiting crisis, serious readiness and procurement issues, most notably in the Navy, and a deep-rooted toward any foreign mission among its historical core source demographic.

You claim that gun owners are too fat and lazy to mount a rebellion. I counter that the federal government is so sclerotic, deficient and mismanaged that actual enforcement of actual laws against anything other that the fat, lazy and supremely comfortable is completely beyond them. They can, sometimes, make examples of unfortunate individuals, but even this capacity is increasingly failing, and each "example" they attempt generates significantly more defiance than it does compliance.

It is common for moderate Blues to opine that the tribes need each other, that the Conservative commitments to order and stability are a necessary counterbalance to the Progressive commitments to change and innovation. This makes sense if you believe that the old order was a good thing that should be preserved. But then, that same order is the tyranny that you're asking for examples of Gun Culture resistance from, isn't it? To the extent that Conservatives have done what moderate Blues claim to want them to do, you would be correct in accusing them of failure to impede tyranny. Only, those commitments have largely been eroded, haven't they? Red Tribe has in fact embraced Trumpism, abandoned fiscal conservativism, largely turned against foreign interventionism and the maintenance of the international order, become deeply critical and skeptical of the "free market" and of corporations, and is increasingly hostile to the concept of law and order generally. We are pretty clearly done being a moderating counterbalance, cleaning up your messes and paying the bills in an unreciprocated pursuit of an entirely theoretical "we". It is evident now that there is no "we", and likely will never be a "we" in the foreseeable future.

All this, over a period of relative peace and prosperity. It was often claimed that what we needed was a good external threat to pull people back together; we saw how that went with Covid, and now that claim seems to have been quietly retired. The stability and the unity are gone, and they are not coming back. Likewise the state capacity, and the orderly, instinctual rule-following it was built upon. What follows is an escalating conflict terminating in separation of one kind or another. There is far better hope for meaningful freedom in that breakdown than there ever could be in a federal government cementing unitary power over a population of pacified subjects.