site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 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
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Did you research how they did it? The state AG's intervention was the only thing that stopped them from overturning the process from 1998.

The criminals, the media, the defense, and the prosecutors are all on the same side and all literally employed by the same leftist prison abolition groups, and the only people still opposing them are a handful of right wing politicians.
They're mostly succeeding in their goal of releasing violent criminals to kill again (see my link to the SC case), and the occasional failure just gives them more propaganda material.

It was a fair assumption that you were referring to the case in question where, again, the actual achieved outcome was that they executed the guy.

I am referring to the case here, where they would have gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids attorney general.

One lucky wrench foiling an otherwise perfect plot just highlights how easily they usually get away with it without us ever hearing about it. Just check out the "success stories" on the innocence project site and read between the lines that all those guys were as guilty as this one.

They released 14% of the entire prison population in 2020 using covid as an excuse, and if you read that paper and don't acknowledge that their goal is total prison abolition I don't know what else to tell you.

And if you think they care about the concept of truth when it comes to lawfare, just check out the "disparities" section that starts

People of color remain massively overrepresented in prisons, accounting for nearly 7 in 10 people in prison. Systemic causes range from a history of racial and ethnic subordination to ongoing police tactics that unfairly ensnare people of color into the system...

Children and youth, especially Black and Latinx children and youth, have also been swept up in mass incarceration’s harmful policies. Under the guise of concern over rising violent crime in the late 1980s and early 1990s, policymakers quickly adopted and spread the fabricated “superpredator” theory that described young Black boys as especially dangerous.