site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 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.

I was more describing why people felt that way rather than claiming it was correct. It was on the "is" side of the "is-ought" divide. Staying on that side for a moment, I can't think of any atrocities committed by Communists that had the same death toll x deliberateness that the Holocaust had. It had some with plausibly higher death totals, and some that were just as deliberate, but none that were both.

Moving to the "ought" part, I think Communism should be lumped in with Nazism broadly as "Authoritarianism" and stand in contrast to Democracy or Liberalism. We can quibble over exactly how much proportional guilt should be assigned to something like the Cultural Revolution compared to the Holocaust (0.5x? 0.8x?) but any measurements would pale in comparison to how relatively well-behaved democracies have been. They've obviously done some bad things themselves (e.g. Japanese internment), but the difference in scale and severity is readily apparent.

I believe that the West still harbors Communist sympathies because I observe its treatment of previous generations of Communists, and I observe a current generation of violent Communist thugs organizing widespread political violence

ANTIFA is not guilty of widespread political violence since it's not popular enough to generate such action, and BLM can't reasonably be called communist.

I note that I am routinely lectured on the present threat of nazi ideology by people with the hammer and sickle in their social media bio.

Deranged leftists on Twitter are not evidence of widespread communist sympathies. At least, they're no more evidence than deranged right-wingers on 4chan or this very site(!) are of widespread Nazi sympathies.