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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I’ll steelman this.
When you’re talking about large classes of people, you have to make generalizations to draw an arbitrary line somewhere. We already do this, uncontroversially, about voting- you can, if you want to, go out and find a sixteen year old with 18+ levels of maturity. It’ll take you maybe a couple of days.
The law doesn’t care because regulating the rights and duties of different classes of people is a task for which it is of necessity a blunt instrument.
So you have the propositions 1) women are much more neurotic and conformist than men(I’ll add risk aversion because no one disputes that) 2) very neurotic, conformist, and risk averse people should not be allowed to vote 3) women should not be allowed to vote.
The disconnect isn’t actually at 2->3. It’s at 1->2. And if we do agree that sufficiently neurotic, conformist, and risk averse people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, then the most obvious question becomes ‘where is the threshold and how far is the median woman from it’. If the median woman is on the other side such that only a minority would be able to vote in the presence of an objective test for neuroticism, conformity, and risk aversion, then it is no more unjust to categorically deny women the vote than it is to categorically deny teenagers the vote- our hypothetical objective test doesn’t exist, can’t exist, and would probably be cost prohibitive if it did exist.
Steelman over- to be clear, I think at that point you’re arguing for the average woman being mentally ill, at least if you consider this a strong enough argument to stand on its own. At that point you’re arguing for women’s independence to be rolled back in toto, with things like guardianship laws. To be clear, my opposition to women’s suffrage stems from old-school views on gender roles and family in society, similar to the original anti-suffragettes. But I would sign on to a much weaker form of the above as a minor supporting argument; making decisions about groups as a class is a normal way to govern society, and it’s not normally seen as unjust.
I like the thought you’ve started but I don’t think you’ve really thought it through - or else have a deeply skewed and inaccurate view of where women are on the scale and the underlying distribution.
What you describe has an entire math background. For example, it’s highly related to logistic regression and analysis of classification/cutoff rules. Basically any time you make a cutoff, you produce a square with false positives, false negatives, etc. Analysis of whether this array of outcomes, mathematically fixed based on the underlying distribution as well as the cutoff point itself (you can also slide the cutoff point around a little bit in numerical contexts but gender spectrum stuff aside we can’t here) relies on some sort of subjective judgement about if the trade off is acceptable or not (or, considering alternative trade offs). In this context, a false positive might be “we took away the vote when really it would have been fine”, you get the idea. When your only choice of cutoff is “you are a man or woman” the numbers don’t produce anything other than a horror story for accuracy. That’s just the math of the situation. When your cutoff is numeric like age, you can actually produce a set of outcomes that are morally acceptable and practically feasible.
All this to say that again, unless you have some deeply disturbed and unrealistic idea about the actual distribution of eg female neuroticism, or simply don’t care about unnecessarily disenfranchising half the population, this idea is completely untenable. Especially if we consider the right to some degree of say in governance to be a human right of thinking people, which I do.
Well yeah, that's what the second to last paragraph was about. I understand algebra and statistics on a basic level but I lack the ability to truly model this, so I didn't try. Is the difference between the average(adult) man and woman similar to the difference between the average 16 year old and the average adult? It probably isn't that big- women don't on the whole seem to be as bad at managing their own lives as teenagers are. As I got to, arguing that the average woman is incapable of voting isn't actually an argument for American gender roles in 1910; that wasn't the argument in use against women's suffrage at the time, and American law and gender roles at the time gave women more independence than that attitude would suggest(which would be norms more similar to Saudi Arabia before the recent liberalization). Factually Iran gives women's suffrage while maintaining guardianship laws(don't know much about how they work out in practice).
Instead a western argument against women's suffrage has, of necessity, to be rooted in arguments about how individuals should interface with society- either as members of a household or on their own. And enfranchising landless males seems like it set the anti-suffragette position up for defeat on the grounds of household voting being good, except possibly for heavy reliance on gender roles. Which is what we lost on.
Being genuinely reactionary, the issue with expansion of the franchise dates back to the introduction of universal male suffrage, which made truly universal suffrage inevitable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link