site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30023 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 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
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The LA Times editorial board was going to endorse Kamala for president, but the owner prevented it (Archive). An Editorial Chief resigned in protest.

This situation made me remember a section of an article that Yarvin wrote a while back (it's about AI risk, but the section about using money for political power is what I keep coming back to in response to claims of money in politics)

What can Jeff Bezos do with his two hundred billion dollars? Well, it turns out, he can buy the Washington Post, the world’s second most important newspaper. That ain’t nothing. But… can he tell the Post what to say? As though he was W.R. Hearst? Lol.

Jeff Bezos does not really own the Post. He sponsors it, as if it was the Indy 500. If he sponsored the Indy 500, and decided the cars should have five wheels and a rocket exhaust, and also it should go farther and become the Indy 2500, they would tell him to go pound sand. If he started telling the news desk what to write and cover, like Hearst, or even like “Pinch” Sulzberger, they would laugh at him and quit. (Pinch’s heir, sadly, seems to have ceded that power to the NYT’s Slack—like many a weak monarch of a waning dynasty, letting his authority decay into an oligarchy. Hard to get it back, bro.)

Jeff Bezos could destroy the Post. Since journalism is redundant and the Post is only #2, this would have zero effect on the world. There is no way he can use the Post. Anyone talking about the “Bezos Blog” is either ignorant, or a fool, or a fraud.

The LA Times situation is still only a few days old, so more people could quit in protest in the days to come, vindicating Yarvin. But as of now, it seems that an owner can control their newspaper to a certain extent. Yes, telling the editorial board to not endorse someone is a different category of control than telling the news desk what and what not to cover, but Yarvin didn't make those caveats and I suspect if you asked him about this scenario when he wrote the article, he wouldn't distinguish it and would say journalists would resign in both scenarios. In fact, he even says, "There is no way he can use the Post", which is a very strong claim.

Potential Yarvin defenses and rebuttals

It's an endorsement, it doesn't really matter. That's why there haven't been mass resignations. If the owner told them what to cover, there would be mass resignations

Many individual news articles don't really matter or only barely push the needle, yet Yarvin still made the blanket statement. He didn't say "Bezos can use the Post for minor things, but for anything major, people would resign." He said, "There is no way he can use the Post"

It's the LA Times. If it was the Washington Post or the New York Times, they would resign

Possible, but now the argument is no longer that you can't use money for power. It's that you can't use money for power at the biggest, most prestigious organizations, but you can use it elsewhere. This is a much weaker claim. Plus, it's not like the LA Time is some middle of nowhere town's local rag.

This situation has changed the strength of my belief in that Yarvin argument about using money for political power. I will be going back to it less frequently.

For journalists, the job market in 2021 is not the job market in 2024.

Now it seems Bezos actually stopped the Post from endorsing Harris. It will be interesting to see what the fallout is.

The Washington Post weighs in:

"The Washington Post’s decision not to make an endorsement in the presidential campaign is a terrible mistake." - The Washington Post.

Maybe Yarvin is right after all and this is the start of a WaPo journalist revolt, which might also spark one at the LA Times.

The "Must Read Opinions" recommended on the side of that article (presumably some simple algorithm suggesting popular, recent opinion pieces)

  1. On political endorsement

  2. For The Post, the wrong choice at the worst possible time

  3. Readers respond to The Post’s decision not to endorse Harris or Trump

  4. Refusing to endorse a candidate, The Post wounds itself

  5. Democracy Dies in Darkness

I instantly thought of my post on this when I saw the news. The second of my "potential Yarvin defenses" is even weaker now, assuming we don't have mass resignations at WaPo.

As well as the fallout from this, I'm also interested in how this decision was made. Very rich people all generally know each, so I wonder if the LA Times owner and Bezos spoke about this and coordinated in any way. Or maybe they spoke and one convinced the other? Or maybe they didn't speak at all and did it completely independently from each other? Or maybe they didn't speak at all, but Bezos saw the LA Times owner do it with only minimal fallout (so far), so he thought he could do it as well?

The chances of mass resignation from either paper go much higher if there was any coordination between the two. Also, I'd guess that if one paper mass resigns, the other will probably be inspired to mass resign as well.

Maybe the owners have been looking for a way to shake up their newsrooms, maybe reduce bias or introduce more AI content.

I strongly suspect that the owner is not using the LA Times to advance a political agenda, but rather trying to get them to maintain the thinnest fig leaf of objectivity in order to enhance the paper's credibility. He has to know there's no way the LA Times' endorsement is going to tip the vote in a swing state.

Unless I'm wrong about that, this is totally consistent with what Yarvin said.

Jeff Bezos can’t call up a desk or bureau chief at the Washington Post and order him to do something without causing a ruckus and leading to resignations and bad (and probably embarrassing) press coverage, sure.

But that doesn’t mean he’s powerless to direct coverage. Over 5-10 years of ownership he could have the paper recruit various closely-allied journalists who share whatever ideology he has. He could quietly advocate for their promotion. He could sit in on the interview panel for a new EIC. He could use layoffs and cutbacks to get rid of people whose opinions he doesn’t like for unsuspicious reasons.

Over time, he could have a paper led by close personal allies who agree with him on all major issues.

Huh? I think this is entirely consistent with what Yarvin lays out. The owner of the LA Times was unable to make the paper print what he wants. He was only able to prevent it from printing what he doesn’t want. This can always be trivially accomplished by firing everyone and closing the paper, which Yarvin readily concedes that Bezos would be able to do with the Washington Post. Indeed, the editorial chief of the LA Times did in fact, “laugh at him and quit.”

Actually he didn’t even get that. He lost. The story isn’t “LA Times didn’t endorse Kamala.” The story is “The (evil) owner of the LA Times didn’t let them tell people they endorsed Kamala.” Which is a back door way of the LA Times endorsing Kamala (within days of whatever editorial the LAT was told not to publish) with the added insult that they got to say that the owner of the LAT was pushing for an outcome and that they the “responsible journalists” were pushing for The Truth. So not only did they get to endorse her, but they got to discredit the owner, and paint themselves as brave truth telling journalists in the process.

To reiterate, the OP quoted Yarvin as stating "there is no way [Bezos] can use the Post." Vetoing a specific news article or editorial absolutely counts as "using".

I haven't see any indication that the owner of the LA Times wants Trump to be endorsed, only that he wanted the paper to be neutral on this, which he got. One person laughing at him and quitting is not what Yarvin was talking about. He was talking about the whole news room quitting, which didn't happen.

Reading the Yarvin quote, do you really think he is making a nuanced point of "Bezos can tell WaPo to not cover something and a few people might quit, but it will otherwise work. But, he can't tell them to cover something they don't want to cover. They'd all quit in that case"? No, he says pretty plainly, "there is no way he can use the Post" and what the LA Times owner did sure looks like him using the LA Times.

Yarvin seems allergic to making minor nuanced claims. Go big or go home is his approach. It makes his writing more interesting, but also wrong more often.

I wonder what the reasons are for the LA times owner saying don't endorse Kamala. It could be that the owner likes Trump, but it could also be a more mundane business decision, like "neither of them has spent money advertising with us, and we shouldn't be a free whore".

Yarvin is being a pretty good scientist here. He has a theory of history (one that actually holds up under scrutiny, unlike the Narrative Theory of History) that can actually lead him to making pretty accurate predictions about what kinds of things will happen— and he can do so making those predictions before the fact, something the Narrative Theory cannot do. Yes, he’s wrong more often, but it’s because he’s actually making a falsifiable prediction, not a prediction that can be nuanced into meaning whatever he needs it to mean. The “nuance” of the Narrative is exactly an attempt at avoiding falsifiable predictions. If they’re “wrong” it’s because they were misunderstood and if you just understood how complicated the system actually is, they were right, as always if only you understood the nuances.

The “Historian Predicted a bunch of Presidential Elections” bit is to me, exactly that. The keys are vague. Kamala can be an incumbent. Wars mean exactly what they need to mean. The economic indicators used can be anything. So even if he’s wrong, it’s actually right, but you missed the nuance.

For what it's worth:

So many comments about the @latimes Editorial Board not providing a Presidential endorsement this year. Let me clarify how this decision came about.

The Editorial Board was provided the opportunity to draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation. In addition, the Board was asked to provide their understanding of the policies and plans enunciated by the candidates during this campaign and its potential effect on the nation in the next four years. In this way, with this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years.

Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision. Please #vote.

https://x.com/DrPatSoonShiong/status/1849217132183060705

His very online progressive daughter retweeted that as well, along with an excerpt about how he got arrested for participating in anti-apartheid activities.

The LA Time is not a Trumpy paper. There's actually interesting family drama between the owner - an immigrant South African/Chinese surgeon and pharmaceutical inventor who is reputed to just want to get mainstream influence and respect, and his VERY limousine-liberal/progressive daughter Nika. Nika had initially taken a heavy hand in pushing news coverage at the LAT in a very progressive "abolish the police" direction, but there has been some backlash. Her dad does not share her ideological priors, it seems.

I wonder what the reasons are for the LA times owner saying don't endorse Kamala

The rumors I saw when this dropped were that the owner has some kind of family connection to Palestine, but I don't know whether those rumors have since been substantiated.

Arguably, Kamala has been so noncommittal about policy that there is nothing there to endorse. She could walk up to the podium on Inauguration Day, pull off a lifelike rubber mask to reveal that she was actually Donald Trump in disguise all along, and she still wouldn’t technically be violating any of her stated campaign promises.

FYI, gotta approve that one, it's showing as filtered for me. Get that mod hat on and let that post through!

(Or don't, I don't actually know what's in it.)

The LA Times owner's daughter is a very vocal Palestine supporter and is closely involved with the paper.

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