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 -
Is Yvette Falarca a liberal?
Would you agree that there are now large groups of communist thugs in America, with institutional support and cover, committing organized violence against their perceived political enemies? Would you agree that these communist thugs are engaged by the police and the justice system generally much less than we would expect for a random person committing the sort of violent crimes they routinely commit?
Would you agree that most of these thugs originate, directly or indirectly, from the higher education system? That is, they were students or employees of the higher education system, or they received their ideology from students or employees of that education system?
...And if you don't agree with the above, would you agree that hypothetically, if the above were the reality of the situation, it would be a case of communists converting to "liberalism", only for their "liberalism" to recapitulate communism?
Based on the details of her criminal record, she doesn't appear to be.
I think that Antifa would qualify as such, yes. My impression is that lately they've been less active in terms of large public actions than they were during the height of the Trump years, but maybe I just haven't been paying attention as much.
Yes.
I don't know. That's an empirical question that I don't feel prepared to answer. Determining the causality of large-scale social and historical phenomena is always a tricky business.
Generally, I'm in a position where I want to believe in the capacity of cultural production and academic thought to have impacts outside of their own provincial spheres, but I don't know if the evidence actually supports such a claim.
The author of the linked post may be suffering from a bit of myopia. He gives a historical account of certain trends within analytic philosophy departments. But you can certainly still find people in non-analytic philosophy departments, people in non-philosophy departments (English, sociology, the menagerie of "Studies", etc), and people outside of academic altogether, who call themselves Marxists. (Of course, the authenticity and seriousness of such commitments are always open to questioning.)
Then where did she and the infrastructure supporting and defending her come from? IIRC, she's a lifelong academic.
I'd agree that it's a tricky business, but it seems to me there's no way to avoid engaging with that business. Further, it seems to me that we've been engaging in that business routinely more or less forever. I engage in that business every time I consider an argument about strutural racism or sexism or colonialism or any of the other basic arguments of the progressive worldview. I reject the progressive arguments not because the question is too nebulous to draw a conclusion, but because I examine the evidence and draw conclusions. It seems to me that the sort of uncertianty you describe seems to pop up when the sort of critique that is usually applied by progressives is instead turned on them, and it seems to me that it pops up even when those applying this critique to progressivism have much, much better evidence to support their critique than the progressives generally do.
For an example, it is routine in our society to attribute violent crime rates to socio-economic factors, and to claim that these violent crime rates can be increased or decreased by various policy interventions. Well, we just witnessed an extremely powerful cluster of policy interventions, and we can observe that it was immediately followed by the largest change in violent crime rates ever rigorously observed. And yet when I suggest a causative linkage, the same people who have spent years telling me that I should take the impact of socio-economic factors on the crime rate more seriously suddenly start claiming that the whole issue is an impenetrable fog, and real knowledge is simply impossible.
Likewise in this case, I observe that there's a long and quite sordid history of involvement in communist activism on the part of Academia, that academia seems to be ground-zero for the current crop of communist thugs, and that academia takes public steps to organize and defend their thuggery. I'm not sure where the uncertainty is coming from, or how we might reduce it. Would an analysis of association between Antifa and Academia be sufficient?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link