site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8340 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 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.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Not one cent of it should benefit Israel or Ukraine until there are no more problems to solve here.

There's always a relevant xkcd....

Also, every bit of Ukrainian clay seized by Russia will undermine the post-WWII standard against wars of territorial expansion, which will almost certainly cause more problems here.

As for Israel, as long as the US, or nations in general, maintain border and immigration controls, the State of Israel must continue to exist as a haven for Jewish people persecuted in other countries. (If everyone had open borders, Israel might not be necessary because Jews unsafe in their homes could always go somewhere else, as occurred many times prior to the 20th century, and could have occurred in the counter-factual 1930s and 1940s absent the post-WWI implementation of modern passport and visa systems.)

As for Israel, as long as the US, or nations in general, maintain border and immigration controls, the State of Israel must continue to exist as a haven for Jewish people persecuted in other countries.

I look at this, and then I look at the Kurds. The exact same argument applies, except far more so because the Kurds are currently persecuted and the Jews aren't. You could also say this about the Uyghurs, or the Rohingyas, or any other nation that does not have a state. Am I missing some reason that the Jews are a priority here?

The trouble with ignoring the sentiment is that you always have to deal in the reality of limited resources. You simply cannot do everything and as such you need to set priorities that make some sort of sense. And really we don’t have the ability to police the world while also dealing with a major crisis. The same soldiers cannot both be preparing to deploy to the Middle East and mounting search and rescue in the Heléne hurricane zone. Of the two, I think any sensible leader would choose to at least delay until the S&R stuff is finished before packing them up to sail overseas.

As for the post WW2 consensus, I think it died the minute Russia invaded.

It died at least two decades prior, when the US waged war to claw an internationally recognized region away from Serbia.

I don't recall any Serbian territory being annexed by the US or any other country. A territory becoming its own country is a different matter, as otherwise India and most of the countries in Africa would have to be considered illegitimate.

If Russia funded Cascadia to secede from the US on the ground that they are oppressed by Californians, would that not violate the post WW2 consensus? And if not why not?

It would depend on whether, in that time-line, Californians had massacred Cascadians.

So all they have to do is quite simple: set up some paramilitaries, hide them amongst the civilian population, wait until the doorkickers fuck up and do some atrocity then denounce publicly the oppression of the Cascadian people.

This is such a common pattern I can name dozens of examples of the top of my head, multiple of which are matters of US foreign policy.

Texas is a US state through this very mean.

No it is not. Texas is a US state because the republic of Texas voted to join the USA. The republic of Texas kicked off due to complaints about mistreatment by the Mexican empire of the Anglo settler population(among other reasons), but the Texas war of independence succeeded without US support and occurred during a preexisting Mexican civil war, allied to other seceding regions(some of which are part of Mexico today and others of which are other Latin American countries).

The republic of Texas army was mostly repurposed defense against commanches militias and not a U.S. poison pill, and Anglo settlement in Texas opened because the Spanish empire invited in borderers to fight commanches for them.

It's specifically hostile annexation that's banned, where you take territory/people by force over their wishes. There's some degree of grandfather clause for existing state boundaries, but supporting rebels to get what the rebels want (as opposed to what you want) is generally OK (at least as far as the norms go; the state being rebelled against can retaliate).

The Donbass rebels were fine as far as the norms went; other states were free to back the Ukrainian government, and the Ukrainian government had some degree of cause of action against Russia (not that Russia cared), but Russia wasn't breaking the norms. Russia coming into Ukraine under its own auspices to chop off bits of it and annex them to Russia, that's breaking the norms.

Who defines hostility? Russia had "referendums" that were as phoney as the ones held in the Balkans. And they're still maintaining the same sort of pretense of a special military operation to help their clients against a larger foe, much like the US did in Vietnam with similar language.

The only discernable difference is which GP backs which intervention.

The norm or "international law" has nothing to do with legalisms and everything to do with the will of the British Empire, the USA, the Soviet Union or whomever happens to be hegemon at the time.

I protect minorities. You use salami tactics. They are a bloodthirsty empire that must be stopped.

countries. (If everyone had open borders, Israel might not be necessary because Jews unsafe in their homes could always go somewhere else, as occurred many times prior to the 20th century, and could have occurred in the counter-factual 1930s and 1940s

There is a 0% chance of Jews subject to actual antisemitism not getting asylum in a nice western country without Israel. This has been true for Israel’s entire existence, it will be true if Israel collapsed tomorrow, it will be for all the evidence we have true for hundreds of years.

There is a 0% chance of Jews subject to actual antisemitism not getting asylum in a nice western country without Israel.

Has any ethnic group gotten blanket asylum in the West? There has been a slow shift away from permissive asylum policies (see the entire cats thing): nobody is letting in "the other" wholesale (Rwanda? South Sudan? Yazidis?) with maybe a few limited exceptions like Ukrainians fleeing Russian invasion or Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh. That's putting a heavy assumption that those Jews won't be treated as "the other" there (for which there are plenty of pre-WWII examples), and even then I don't think that supposedly-favored groups like white Zimbabweans (whose population there is down at least 80% since the country became independent in 1980) have ever been recognized as categorical refugees.

But that may follow from my general skepticism on putting faith in "moral arc of history" memes: literal blood-and-soil nationalism even gets praise from self-declared progressives, as long as who, whom? fits. It's funny to me that the West is expected to allow any-and-all immigration of largely-unverified refugees seeking asylum and giving jus soli citizenship and votes to their descendants, but the residents of the (withdrawing) British mandate for Palestine in 1948 and their descendants are eternally allowed to "resist the occupation" in means that would make even the American far right nauseous. But again: who, whom?.

But that may follow from my general skepticism on putting faith in "moral arc of history" memes: literal blood-and-soil nationalism even gets praise from self-declared progressives, as long as who, whom? fits. It's funny to me that the West is expected to allow any-and-all immigration of largely-unverified refugees seeking asylum and giving jus soli citizenship and votes to their descendants, but the residents of the (withdrawing) British mandate for Palestine in 1948 and their descendants are eternally allowed to "resist the occupation" in means that would make even the American far right nauseous. But again: who, whom?.

The basic model these people have of the world is that "the West", as colonisers/imperialists, have forfeited for all time the right to any ethnic criteria for who lives in their countries, while "Indigenous peoples" (basically everyone else) have always lived peacefully and harmoniously in the same spot and so have a fundamentally legitimate claim of ownership of their land.

Would you wager your life on that? Your children's lives?

Were I married to a Jew I would no more worry about the USA going 1930’s Germany on them than I currently do about an alien invasion.

There is a 0% chance of Jews subject to actual antisemitism not getting asylum in a nice western country without Israel. This has been true for Israel’s entire existence,

That's a convenient elision of the fact that the Jews trying to escape the Nazis were in large part turned away from those nice western countries. Even years after the end of WWII, hundreds of thousands of European jews were still sitting in Displaced Persons camps guarded by allied soldiers because no "nice western country" would take them, and were only able to leave after the establishment of Israel as a national homeland for jews (those "nice western countries" still weren't willing to take them).

And I wouldn't count on most of Europe being too safe for jews in the future. France is already markedly unsafe, and as Britain islamicizes over the next couple decades anti-jewish sentiment is likely to increase.

What a perverse cycle of history: the West turned away Jews, Holocaust, West feels guilty and sets up asylum laws Never Again etc, those asylum laws ultimately end the "guilty West," becomes anti-Semitic again, Jews get turned away.

And I wouldn't count on most of Europe being too safe for jews in the future.

Bring back the Slattery Report.

We did get a middling detective story out of it, at least.

There’s a convenient elision of the fact that it’s not the forties anymore. Israel has the right to exist, they don’t have the right to demand a blank cheque from the rest of the world.

If Israel fell tomorrow the Jews would move to Anglosphere countries and Central Europe. Well, the ones that didn’t get massacred in the process of it falling at least. There won’t be a second Holocaust.

It's easy to play armchair general, but I think @Celestial-body-NOS made a point that can't be ignored.

While you might feel certain that Western countries would take in Jewish refugees, you presumably don't have any skin in the game. Would you be willing to be the lives of your family on this?

As a fellow armchair general, let me say that while I think it's probable that Israeli refugees would be accepted, it is far from certain. Nothing is certain when it comes to hypothetical future world conflicts. And if we're indexing from known past events, we know that Jews haven't been welcome with open arms in the past.

they don’t have the right to demand a blank cheque from the rest of the world.

A blank check would entail allowing Israel to actually do what the rest of the arab world - including the palestinians - did and continue to do: pushing all of their enemy's co-ethnics out of all territory they can martially claim. What they're doing now is significantly more humane than what the Saudis did to the Yemenis (and lost), or what the anti-Assad rebels backed by the west did to the Yazidis, or what NATO-ally Turkey does to Kurds, etc., etc., etc. Much of the criticism of Israel is one giant isolated demand for rigor.

Israel has every right to kick the Palestinians out of Gaza to somewhere nonspecific. My objection is solely to having some sort of moral objection to pay for it.

I mean, the US provides aid to Israel because they feel they gain some geostrategic example from it. Maybe they're wrong about that but I don't think there's a moral dimension to it.

Elian Gonzalez has entered the chat. Progressive emphasis on immigration uber allies has long had a lot of exceptions for political utility.

The return of children transported across borders to their parent(s) in the country of habitual residence is, in general, uncontroversial and has nothing to do with immigration law or politics. The relevant treaty is one of the many confusingly-named Hague Conventions - please, dear international community, if you are going to have a treaty with a long and non-memorable name then sign it somewhere that isn't the Hague.

The Eilan Gonzalez case wasn't an immigration case - it was a family law case where the conservative side wanted to make an unprincipled exception and refuse to return a 5-year-old child to his only living parent because Cuba bad.

Incidentally, this type of bullshit on the part of the country the kid is taken to is sufficiently common that the Hague Convention isn't really working. The US returning a child to the parents in the country of habitual residence in the face of noisy local opposition is unusual globally.

please, dear international community, if you are going to have a treaty with a long and non-memorable name then sign it somewhere that isn't the Hague.

The Hague : international treaties :: Leonhard Euler : mathematics.

There's always a relevant xkcd....

I think a better analogy for that XKCD comic would be: We can't fund the Ukrainian space program until our space program doesn't have anything left to do. If Ukraine wants to have their own space program their citizens can choose to fund that, or if US citizens want to fund the Ukrainian space program they are free to donate their money to it.

Which...yes?

There are perfectly reasonable foreign policy objectives in funding Ukraine’s war effort.

That analogy might work better if Mexico were trying to re-negotiate the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at tank-point, or if Canada were aiming for a re-match of 1812.

However, as we do not currently face any remotely credible threat of armed invasion* at this time, our 'keeping the Stars-and-Stripes flying over El Paso and Detroit' program doesn't have anything left to do.

*No, people coming in looking to work for money is not the same thing as an invasion.

Is Ukraine a US state? Do they pay taxes? Can we conscript their sons to go die for the protection of our nation?

Russia invaded Ukraine. They don’t invade The United States, they didn’t threaten to invade The United States.

Is Ukraine a US state? Do they pay taxes? Can we conscript their sons to go die for the protection of our nation?

They don't pay taxes, but the view of the people running the US is that there's a substantial benefit for the US in defending the rules-based international system*, that in the long term is probably worth substantially more in dollar terms than the cost of funding Ukraine. Maybe they're wrong but it's still largely an economic calculation, not a decision based on abstract philosophical principles for their own sakes.

*Rules that the US sets and gets to break, before anyone comes with examples of the US being hypocrites on this front.

Russia invaded Ukraine. They don’t invade The United States, they didn’t threaten to invade The United States.

You sure about that?

Furthermore, if Russia were to have encountered no opposition in the forceful seizure of Ukraine, how long would it be before they went after the Baltics? Poland? Eventually we wouldn't be able to stand on the sidelines any more.

Furthermore, if Russia were to have encountered no opposition in the forceful seizure of Ukraine, how long would it be before they went after the Baltics? Poland?

Actually, they'd just stop there and not go any further. They had specific reasons for getting involved in the Ukraine that aren't there for Poland and the Baltics. I don't even think they're going to want to retain control over Ukraine in the end either - I think they're going to want to turn it into a thoroughly dysfunctional rump state that's utterly unable to credibly threaten Russia or prevent them from interfering in internal domestic affairs.

If you want an example of a military force that forcefully seized territory and was then emboldened to claim more, you're going to have much better results looking at the Middle East - who owns the Golan Heights again?

who owns the Golan Heights again?

Who owns the Sinai?

Besides, the salient fact about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine isn’t that it was considered strategically necessary by a solemn council of Russian foreign policy elders. It’s that Putin, in his own writing and speeches and interview (eg Tucker) clearly considers part of a multigenerational plan to restore Russia to greatness that has no clear territorial bounds, and which might reasonable include at least some more of the Russian Empire of his youth and early employment, which stretched all the way to the West German border.

At the least pacifying the Baltics would be very much strategically valuable and I think it’s ridiculous to suggest he hasn’t thought about it.

Could you please provide some examples and quotes of Putin talking about his desire to Make Russia Great Again by bringing back the empire? I've read multiple interviews and talks with him and don't recall him making similar claims in any of them. I'm entirely willing to believe you, I just want to see some evidence - most of the sources I've seen describing Russian politics in this area believe that Putin is actually more restrained and less eager for conflict than most of the people waiting in the wings behind him.

You can't just claim everything to be a step onto a slippery slope without evidence and/or concrete arguments. There are plenty of instances in world politics of actors doing a particular thing with ease and not proceeding to attempt every other action that is somewhat similar to it: the US rolled over Iraq but did not proceed to invade Iran, the Russians waltzed within something like 30km of Georgia's capital and then just turned around and went home, ...

Funny enough paying the Danegeld can sometimes work. See Alfred.

As for Israel, as long as the US, or nations in general, maintain border and immigration controls, the State of Israel must continue to exist as a haven for Jewish people persecuted in other countries.

I broadly agree with the sentiment, but, you know, I don't think it's in the Constitution of the United States.

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