site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29656 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 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.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Yeah, it's a terrible choice. The only difference between voting R or D is the slope of the decline.

For a conservative, there's three paths:

  1. Vote R because you think that things will get better (delusional)

  2. Vote R because you think things will get worse more slowly

  3. Vote D because you want things to get worse quickly so they can reach "rock bottom" and then come out the other side.

For the United States, I prefer path 2. There is true value in fighting a rearguard action. Maybe some exogenous force will come about to reverse the tide. America is still an amazing country with a massive reserve of wealth and human capital. We can't give in to socialism just yet.

For truly gone places like Chicago, then I would suggest path 3. If I were mayor of Chicago, I would lower taxes, increase spending, and hasten the inevitable bankruptcy.

But America is not there yet... It's time to play defense and not blame the defenders overly much when they occasionally lose ground. Voting Trump probably buys the United States another decade or two.

For the United States, I prefer path 2. There is true value in fighting a rearguard action.

This is SCOTUS and lower Federal courts doing what they do. Saint McConnell saw the necessity of this 30 years ago and went all in on his career to get the courts where they are today.

Saint McConnell saw the necessity of this 30 years ago and went all in on his career to get the courts where they are today.

And who is ironically hated by MAGA as a swamp creature when his ability to navigate the swamp gave them Dobbs. I'm fairly certain that he made a deal with Trump in 2016: We GOP holdouts in the Senate will support you if you let us pick all the judges. It's emblematic of Trump's know-nothing approach to government and the blind cult of personality in his followers that McConnell is so despised by the new right.

McConnell consistently opposed MAGA and conservative desires. His people spent money against conservatives in the 2022 midterms so he could maintain power over the Republican Senate bloc. The man is currently opposing conservative priorities, for example, the SAFE act.

McConnell's treatment of justices was a great victory for cons and perhaps did more to elect Trump than any other Republican. He's also a snake and conservatives are right to dislike him. It's entirely emblematic of the know-nothing commentariat to declare that conservatives don't know anything, while not knowing anything yourself, then smugly declaring that we're nothing but a "blind cult".

His people spent money against conservatives in the 2022 midterms so he could maintain power over the Republican Senate bloc.

Or maybe, to try to win? There were a lot of places (e.g. Arizona) where the more MAGA candidates did a lot worse in the general election.

McConnell has his merits and faults, but he intentionally tanked 2020 WRT to the senate with his allocation of dollars spent.

There is no hitting rock bottom. You can look at the worst places in the US, like Pine Bluff, Baltimore, or Detroit and they have only learned to turn left even harder. You can also look at countries like the UK and see that there's no bottom. Accelerationists need to zoom really fast if they want anything to happen, because there is no bottom.

Yes in most cases I agree.

For Chicago they need to prevent themselves from becoming Detroit. Which means preserving as much human capital as possible. Every year, thousands of high performers leave and are replaced (if at all) with low skill immigrants. The end of this path is Detroit. By precipitating a crisis, they can declare bankruptcy, and get out from under the crushing burden of pension obligations and debt. If it happens soon, there might be enough human capital left to save the city.

But of course this assumes that the new Chicago wouldn’t just make all the same mistakes as the old one. Which seems unlikely. I think they are doomed.

The best bet for the Chicago machine is to keep delaying the inevitable until they can manage to get a non-bankruptcy bailout (e.g. by the Harris administration). Then everyone else can pay for their malfeasance and they can continue as usual.

like Pine Bluff, Baltimore, or Detroit

Genuinely curious, can you say more about Pine Bluff? That town doesn't usually come up in lists of "most whatThefuck places in the USA" ... while Baltimore and Detroit absolutely do.

Pine Bluff, AR is pretty rough, but probably not that much worse than Jackson, MS or other similar places in the South. I frankly thought immediately of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, which is definitely a bitterly poor place that I've heard of as being uniquely bad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Ridge_Indian_Reservation#Social_issues_and_economy

Can't speak to Pine Bluff but the most fucked town in the U.S. might be Cairo, Illinois.

Population in 1920 of 15,203. Today just 1,733.

The Wikipedia article is a decent read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo,_Illinois

Cities are the Curley Effect in action The productive move out and the people remaining are even further left. The problem is nobody ever learns from this (except Cubans), least of all the not-personally-useless leftists who move out and turn their destinations further left.

A country is different; it doesn't look like Baltimore but like the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s, which could not feed itself without subsidies from its great enemy. Except there will be no benevolent enemy to feed the United States.

Cheer up, China might throw a few scraps in return for subservience.

We gave the USSR food for physical sustenance; China gives us cheap backdoored trinkets and TikTok for spiritual sustenance. We have willingly made ourselves subservient.

If we are talking economic output, then rock bottom would be 'everyone is dead'. However, this is a really hard state to reach, even horrendous commie countries don't make it that far.

Of course, there is no bouncing back from that state.

In general, I am skeptical of the 'things have to get worse so they can then get better' meme. The real world is not full of either metaphorical or physical springboards.

Of course, I am also skeptical of the decline and fall narrative of the US. I don't think that every job will be that of a DEI officer eventually. Instead, it might eventually go the way of McCarthyism, where we got rich of most of the witch hunts (but obviously still screen job seekers in highly sensitive jobs like defense R&D for political leanings).

Yeah, accelerationism is fun to think about but I am skeptical that it actually makes sense. Places like Venezuela and North Korea show that you can get pretty close to the bottom and just linger there for years upon years, with no coming out the other side.

Some people have never lived in dead-end countries, and it shows.

The other option is start a location independent business and move from the declining West to Dubai or some other Special Economic Zone. I can't really see anything else that will have a major personal impact, but it's not really feasible for those that have put down roots.

to Dubai or some other Special Economic Zone.

Maybe it's just my personal pet peeve, but Dubai is a two bit dictatorship totally devoid of any human capital and social order. Its special economic zones are "business friendly" like the North Korean ones are, and can be yoinked away if the dictator wakes up on the wrong side of bed.

If you want a place that lacks anything of value for your business, you might as well set up in Antarctica.

can be yoinked away if the dictator wakes up on the wrong side of bed

As opposed to what? Russia and China are well known for stealing businesses they don't like at gunpoint, and the West's reputation for not doing that is well and truly over now that they're denying any property rights at will to anyone who may or may not be involved with belligerents of the Ukraine war.

Even Switzerland isn't safe anymore.

Where would a Pavel Durov set himself up exactly but in a SEZ where he has some interest in the local government?

Nowhere is safe, so set up somewhere that makes it more likely to succeed. If you're a dissident then you have to find friends in the enemy of your enemy or the fargroup.

Singapore can be a stand in.

There may be others like Switzerland.

A location independent business has no local resources that can be nationalised. Dubai is more of a tax friendly base (at least until it isn't). Sure if you own property, that could be confiscated in the worst case scenario.

If there’s a huge global crisis I think there will be few worse places to be than the Gulf, a place with no loyalty to its foreign residents, no ability to grow any food for itself, utterly reliant on global commerce and trade flows, with no safety net and an extremely heterogenous population.

The best bet is some rural or semi-rural community in a European or North American country where you know everyone and that is far away from major population centers to be irrelevant. Or somewhere similar. There’s a reason Thiel and co built their compounds around Lake Wanaka on New Zealand’s South Island; it’s probably the safest place on earth.

New Zealand is a great place to retreat to in the event of a global economic collapse, but its a terrible place in terms of personal income tax. If you're at the billionaire level and just take loans out against your assets instead of 'earning income' then this probably won't bother you.

New Zealand does seem pretty safe, but its violent crime rates are significantly above those of places like Japan and even, to some extent, Germany. I suppose that the Maori have a lot to do with that.

On the plus side, New Zealand seems pretty unlikely to get nuked in the case of WW3, because there would be very little benefit in nuking it.

Is there a particularly large Māori population around Wanaka? I just looked it up and apparently that region has the lowest Maori population of anywhere in the country; they’re largely concentrated on the North Island.

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