site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28213 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 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.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Er...

Young men at highest risk of schizophrenia linked with cannabis use disorder

Adolescents who frequently use cannabis may experience a decline in IQ over time

Now, before y'all @ me with "correlation is not causation," I don't have any strong feelings about marijuana either way. I'm just mystified by the idea that Harris is so certain that young men, especially young black men, would benefit from greater availability of recreational marijuana, that she has made it a highlight of her campaign. Legalized recreational drugs are the ultimate act of privatizing profits while publicizing losses (in the form of negative community externalities), and the tax revenues rarely measure up to expectations. This sounds like a recipe for the exacerbation of a negative trend in the lives of young American men (of whatever color).

I'm just mystified by the idea that Harris is so certain that young men, especially young black men, would benefit from greater availability of recreational marijuana, that she has made it a highlight of her campaign.

This feels like it rhymes with the argument that because most gun deaths are suicides, it's net negative for my own well being to own a gun.

It may be statistically correct, but it doesn't justify restricting my liberty to make my own choices.

I respect the self-consistency here. Guns AND drugs-- no dividing them! Either people have a right to hurt themselves or they don't. Though like the nanny-state liberal I am, I want pigouvian taxes on both guns and drugs. The average citizen should be able to afford LSD and an M82, but pistols and wrapping papers should be way more expensive.

It may be statistically correct, but it doesn't justify restricting my liberty to make my own choices.

Of course it may justify it, there are situations where your choices are limited exactly on these grounds - like with myriads of other illegal drugs and many other illegal activities, that limit your liberty to make many choices. What are you talking about.

The fact that "there are situations where your choices are limited exactly on these grounds" is not a justification. The government limits my liberty in many unjustified ways.

If Harris had simply said she would decriminalize marijuana, I might agree with you. But what she appears to actually say is that she wants to both legalize (a step that implies greater government endorsement than mere decriminalization) and also see to it that young black men are maximally empowered to profit from slinging dope.

For the gun analogy to hold, you would need a candidate promising not only to make gun ownership easier, but also to ensure profitability and a free flow of inventory for aspiring arms dealers seeking to do deals that are currently illegal.

Perhaps legalizing marijuana would have an impact on modern reefer madness rates if there was more of a free market to allow for non-insanity-inducing weed?

To point towards the gun analogy, the market has space for everything from wood-stocked single-shot shotguns and .22-caliber plinkers, all the way to semi-auto .50-caliber rifles and ATF-baiting niche products. Who's to say that the weed market cannot also sustain a range of products with different enough CBD levels to make things safer?

Now, granted, you might still be right that a thorough decriminalization might be enough to achieve this, but we must consider the possibility that the market may have an unaddressed demand for healthier product.

It doesn't though, legal pot markets push for the highest THC content possible. Nobody smokes because they enjoy the flavor- that’s for pipe tobacco.

I have had this thought too. If weed was fully legal but THC was capped at where it was in the black market in the late 90s rather than the ultra-potent strains we have now, most people would just buy what was legal rather than relying on the black market.

I pretty much gave up on smoking weed because all the legal options are way too strong. One of these days I'll grow my own weak weed.

Dutch weed is around the 8-15% THC range and it’s nice in Amsterdam, you can enjoy it without becoming a vegetable like on current US strains.

Well, that's terrifying...

Amsterdam weed was the first and only time I tried it, and ended up feeling how my IQ is dropping in real-time, and having a rather disturbing disassociative experience. Someone later told me I may have had too much for my first time, but if that's the "light" variant... damn...

You might have bad luck with genetics. In most people ingesting marijuana inhibits neurotransmitters related to anxiety, nausea, etc and has a calming effect, but for a minority of the population their brain chemistry is wired to react in the opposite manner and starts firing off on all cylinders.

Dosage and tolerance on weed is kind of ridiculous and all over the place. Low tolerance and low dosage can take you places high tolerance users simply cannot reach anymore with any amount of THC.

I’ve always figured that weed is a drug that imposes a heavy underclock on your brain and allows direct access for parts of your consciousness that aren’t meant to talk directly to each other.

Alcohol, by contrast, just removes some impulse control and makes motor functions more difficult, but those things turn off “silently” by comparison (and re-enable themselves quickly by comparison, whereas weed has a day of latency).

You don’t think slower on alcohol, you just have a harder time executing. Stoners, by comparison, are very apparently down-clocked.

More comments

First time smoking weed is like being a kid and getting drunk for the first time, it happens on two beers or a glass of wine. You build up tolerance to a much higher baseline pretty quickly.

More comments

My province caps THC at 30%, that is generous for flower but is too low for concentrates to make any kind of sense. Ultimately people consume more of the less potent stuff to compensate, or go find the potent stuff outside of the legal market. That's how it's been for me when I was partaking and letting my tolerance build up. I could always reach the same level with flower than with, say, THC crystals, I'd just have to chain vape for 3 hours to get there (easy with the degenerate setup I had).

I think a different standard should apply for vape oil or whatever and I agree true degenerate stoners are always going to get their fix (same with true alcoholics in places where they make booze hard to come by, like Greenland), but I think if weed was cheaply and easily available in dispensaries but capped at 12-15% (and vape carts etc at proportional levels) most regular people would stick with that.

Guns have valid uses, recreational drugs have less of a claim

In b4 “but what about alcohol” yes that’s also bad but much harder to restrict given yeast and fermentable carbs are omni-available

Guns have valid uses, recreational drugs have less of a claim

What valid use does this website have? It's largely recreational and a drain on user's productivity, a bit like weed. Should the government ban the Motte?

I don’t think weed and internet usage are comparable or analogous at all for a variety of reasons

Of course they are different but the logic that it's ok to ban things as long as they lack "valid uses" (according to whom?) is seemingly applicable to both.

Guns have valid uses, do they not?

Alcohol has a pro social use as well.

And cannabis is just a plant you can grow. Easily in fact. It even requires fewer tools and resources than making alcohol.

It even requires fewer tools and resources than making alcohol.

This is definitely false, you can make an alcoholic drink by blending fruits/berries and letting them sit for a few days. No need for seeds, soil, fertilizer, regular watering, sunshine, waiting for the plant to flower, etc.

This feels like sophistry. No negative social consequences that result from alcohol will result from people home brewing weak berry wines. The bad stuff, alcoholism etc, happens because of readily available distilled liquor and beer in volume.

Beer of course is not distilled. Even spontaneously fermented beer can have ABVs above 6% (which is a pretty normal beer abv), so you don't even need special yeast to hit this ABV.

Yes but you can't get it in volume from the local corner store, which was the qualifier I put on it. Nobody drinks 64oz of spontaneously fermented homebrew and beats his wife.

We know this because even in countries with significant illegal alcohol problems, no illicit alcoholics are drinking homemade wine or beer in a problematic way. They're going blind from moonshine or bathtub gin.

Making alcohol illegal results in more distilled liquors and less lighter stuff, for the same reason illegal opiates results in stronger opiates being preferred.

More comments

I've both make my own alcohol (cider) and grown my own cannabis. Both have some challenges and different aspects that make them easier or harder than the other.

For the cider I get the apples from a local orchard's roadside stand where they crush the apples into cider and put it in milk style jugs for you. I've processed the apples myself in the past but its a pain. Once I have the soft cider I use a few of these https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K5Z78SC/ fermenting bottles with yeast from the local wine shop. Takes about two weeks to ferment. You can easily screw it up and make revolting vomit cider if your equipment is contaminated. I give some of it to my father in law who makes apple jack out of it. I drink very little personally so 3 gallons last about a year. You can make it at any time of the year but I do in the fall, as that's when the local apples are up. This is the only alcohol I consume.

Cannabis is dead easy to grow and process if all you want is dried flower. You can put effort into preparing the soil, using fertilizer, staking the plants to encourage multiple flowering runners etc. You can also just literally throw handfuls of seeds at your yard. Cannabis is an extremely hardy, robust plant that can overcome some pretty rough conditions. I've seen seeds sprout in wet carpet near a window. With even a small amount of prep: tilling the soil, checking on the seedlings a couple of times, maybe giving them a generic garden center fertilizer, they will do the rest of it on their own. This assumes outdoor growing. Indoor setups are a whole other beast and largely driven imo by prohibition and the need to hide it. I put a fair amount of work into my outdoor plants. I grow them from seedlings in planters inside until they are about 6-8 inches tall them transplant them outside when the weather is foretasted to be nice for a week of so. I prepare the soil well with a tiller and fertilizer, stake them up, and check on them regularly. Its legal in my state so they are just beside the house. 5 plants per person is the limit, so my wife and I grow 10. Curing is easy, I just cut the flowers off in the fall and hang them in the barn for a week. I live pretty deep in the country so I'm not really worried about passers by bothering it. Everyone in eyesight of my farm is a family member anyway.

The cannabis is ostensibly more work, but not that much more. Not really any more than growing tomatoes tbh, which I also do, and peppers and some herbs. What is a bit of work is that I process the flowers into hash oil, which requires specialized equipment (https://www.dabpress.com/products/4x7-rosin-plates-diy-heat-machine) and has a learning curve. Of note, 10 outdoor plants produce a tremendous amount of product for personal use. Each plant can easily output 1.5 lbs of dried flower. With high quality seeds and care, before it was legalized, this was like $30,000 worth of cannabis per year. Honestly its still worth that much now, IF I was part of the legal market, which I'm not interested in. Prices really haven't gone down for the high end stuff. I give about 2/3rds of it away, as wax or oil. For personal use I ingest it in cookies/gummies etc. I haven't actually smoked dried flower in years, I may occasionally vaporize some of the oil.

The cider is less work, but mostly because I produce so little. In equivalent dosage it would probably be more work overall.

Apples are harder to ferment nicely than other fruits/berries due to the high levels of pulp and pectin in them. Every time I make cider dealing with the pulp is a huge pain in the ass, and it varies by apple variety as well. Berries are much easier to manage and generate much less pulp, and since they don't have any pectin, they clear up nicely just standing in the fermenter without the need for fining agents.

Since fruits and berries are and always will be available at any market (unlike cannabis, which in most places and times is a specialty product), and yeast is in the air all around us, there's really no contest here between growing and processing a plant by yourself vs blending some berries and letting it sit.

Having done this, it might be possible to make an alcoholic beverage this way, but usually some degree of intentionality would be required or you’ll produce vinegar, not wine.

Your mileage will certainly vary based on the microbiome in the air and on the berries. There are styles of beer that are spontaneously fermented and can be quite tasty (e.g. lambic), and I've visited family in the countryside that literally just blend berries picked in the woods and make a kind of fruit wine from them that's also pretty tasty. However in my spontaneous fermentation experience at home, off flavors are much more likely.

I've never managed to try it, but the literature on palm wine suggests that palm sap will ferment to a nontrivial ABV (4% or so) in just a couple of hours sitting out unrefrigerated at what I assume are tropical temperatures.

No need for seeds, soil, fertilizer, regular watering, sunshine, waiting for the plant to flower, etc.

How exactly do you get fruits/berries without seeds, soil, sunshine, rain, waiting etc?

You buy them from the supermarket. Obviously.

Recreation is not a valid use? Why? We have a long list to go through if we just start crossing off anything that's not at the bottom of the Maslow pyramid.

Yep. The last thing the black community (or any community) needs is more drug use.

Let's also not overlook how bad the optics are here. "We heard that you black guys like smoking weed". Maybe they should throw in some benefits for 40 ounce malt beverages and scratch offs while they're at it.

The idea is that since drug dealers are disproportionately black, they must have some special expertise that will give them an edge in legal cannabis sales.

Of course, most drug dealers' comparative advantage is in willingness to risk prison and engage in violence to defend their turf, neither of which are particularly useful in sales of legal products.

Surprising no one who gave it five minutes of thought in advance, neither black nor Latino people have, in fact dominated legal cannabis retailing.

Either she didn't get the memo, or she's alluding to some sort of program that privileges black-owned (i.e. mostly white-owned with black figureheads) cannabis businesses.

Actually a good amount of the legal weed around me IS grown, or at least the operations are owned, by black men. They are retired professional athletes who were able to afford the state licenses when they auctioned them off.

The idea is that since drug dealers are disproportionately black, they must have some special expertise that will give them an edge in legal cannabis sales.

I think it’s more the idea of reparations. Given the war on drugs has hit blacks harder. They should profit more from the repeal of unjust drug laws, so as to heal their communities from these laws. Or something. I dunno it just feels like more racial welfare giveaways. But that’s the spin.

Yeah she’s alluding to the NYC program that limited licenses to people convicted of weed dealing, but just led to the proliferation of various gray market stores.

Not a fan of marijuana, but I think that Harris is banking on claiming that these young black men will have the economic benefits from legalization.

I would support a law that people who were convicted of marijuana offenses during prohibition have the exclusive privilege of owning legal marijuana businesses now.

For what duration? Eventually they’ll age out of the business. Or is this just a sneaky attempt to reenact prohibition in a few decades’ time?

I'm just mystified by the idea that Harris is so certain that young men, especially young black men, would benefit from greater availability of recreational marijuana, that she has made it a highlight of her campaign.

I don't think either Harris or Trump or any particular politician that's running for office has any reason to care if policies they propose would actually benefit anyone. I think the implication of Harris making this a highlight of her campaign isn't that young black men would benefit from greater availability of recreational marijuana, but rather that pushing for greater availability is more likely to cause young black men, as well as people who believe that young black men are disproportionately likely to go to prison for marijuana use, to giver her their votes.

It was a common mode of speculation so far back as high school as to whether smoking a lot of pot made you stupid, or whether the stoners were dumb to begin with.

It makes you stupid. I have seen people who recover all right after years of heavy use. They become snappier.

I can’t speculate on whether it makes you permanently stupider, but in my experience it takes me at least a few months of total abstinence after heavy use before I’m back to my usual intellectual level.

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