site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 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.

8
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

If this X thread is to be believed, what is actually going on here is that a federally-funded labor arbitrage organization called Switchboard is providing extremely low-wage labor to these businesses, offering to link them up with “refugees” who can be paid dramatically less than native workers (who are not even considered for these job openings, nor even made aware of them) because their entire housing and healthcare budget are 100% subsidized by the very same government.

Twenty years ago, committed leftists would still have had the good sense to be highly skeptical of capitalist claims that immigrant labor is “just better” than native labor; see Bernie Sanders famously calling open borders “a Koch Brothers project.” They would have immediately smelled a rat and seen this for what it is: a way for employers to pay their employees as little as possible. Nowadays, however, leftists eagerly gobble up these businesses’ transparent excuses, because it flatters their fetish for diversity and population replacement. “Haha, of course the factory owners wouldn’t lie about this; white American workers are just a bunch of lazy entitled slobs, and the non-white scab labor is more virtuous!”

I can well believe that one of their major complaints- marijuana- about native white labor is 100% true. This is ubiquitous amongst the native born and dramatically less common elsewhere. I can easily believe that this is the one major problem Haitians are less prone to.

And marijuana use is often a problem for blue collar bosses, both for reasons stemming from observations of its effects and because insurance companies don't like it when your employees can't pass drug tests.

On one hand: yes to all points.

On the other hand: no employer of mine has ever dared drug test me. Somehow I get a pass but some guy whose job involves stacking and unstacking boxes must never touch cannabis on a day off work, unless he wishes to be fired.

I get firing people who show up to work high or drunk. Obviously. But checking if someone smoked weed at any point in the past few weeks is a craze for many employers. And I mean craze in a very negative sense.

At least some major employers are coming around. A few years ago Amazon stopped firing low level warehouse workers for pissing hot for weed. Because if someone wants to work in an Amazon warehouse and can hit their strict metrics, why would you fire them because they smoked weed at some point in the past few weeks?