site banner
PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   34277 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 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
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

A lot of this, as with every Republican nominee since 1932, is just that Everything I Don't Like Is Fascist Hitlerisms.

The steelman is that anti-immigration is a major component of Trump's interests, that the necessary steps for achieving those interests will involve putting a ton of people in extremely bad circumstances, and that when things get fucked up in the process quite a lot of people would die unintentionally or 'unintentionally'.

  • Exact numbers are messy, but when we're talking immigration we're necessarily talking about a lot of people. The official numbers for illegal undocumented immigrants (eg, not TPS enrollees) are only 11-12m, but this is broadly believed to be an undercount, with more skeptical takes being closer to 20m. There are around 800k TPS enrollees almost all of which are past the point where it's temporary, a larger-but-unknown number of refugee-applicants of varying levels of honesty, and a tiny number of really sketchy green card or naturalization or refugee cases (probably <10k?).
  • A large portion of Trump's claim is 'sending them back': charitably, to reenter a line or waiting list for lawful immigration that will be made moderately more accessible after enforcement of immigrant law returns to any level of credible effort; less charitably, by flipping the bird after.
  • Rounding them up is, alone, a big issue. TPS enrollees and refugees officially are supposed to keep their location on file, but enforcement is kinda lax and they definitely aren't going to have a lot of incentives if there's broad-scale deportation going on using that file. By definition, undocumented immigrants don't. There's a lot of trouble any time law enforcement gets involved in anything, but it scales up real quick.
  • Some number will 'self-deport', but this is likely to be a pretty small fraction. A more sizable group might take the L after getting caught -- trade a flight and a cleanish record for not kicking up a fuss -- but at best they'll be a minority, and more likely there will be direct efforts to jam up the system as much as possible.
  • Which matters because the system isn't built for high throughput, and several portions have Constitutional guarantees. Even if you avoid the question of whether non-citizens have certain relevant due process protections (which is itself a big question), you at least have to separate citizens from non-citizens with enough accuracy and due process. Some of them will have minor citizen children, so that's even more fun.
  • And even when you're absolutely sure you want to deport them, and you have all the physical infrastructure to actually bus or fly them out, you actually need a place to put them. In many cases, we're talking whole percents of country populations, often from countries that don't necessarily want or have the infrastructure to take them back.
  • So now you've got 5m-25m people that you're trying to kick out or are attached to people you're trying to kick out. You probably don't want to just have them wandering the streets after you catch them, but this is larger than the entire existing American prison system, possibly by an order of magnitude.
  • Well, we actually do know how to hold a whole bunch of not-especially-violent people without having to imprison them: set specific geographic areas aside for them with fences and limited in-and-out. It's not pretty, though.
  • Except, uh, we don't know how to do that well or safely. WWII Internment had no small number of rough edges, and it was much smaller, even after adjustment for general population size. We don't have good numbers for what sorta fatalities are happening in Uyghur 'reeducation' camps in China are, but I think a lowest plausible estimate is in the hundreds, and while I'd like to think that American open-air prisons would do better, I'm not hugely optimistic on them being perfect.
  • And, uh, we'll also have a large number of people newly removed from the mainstream population, not especially liked even by their home countries, and definitely not liked by the US government's leadership. Shame if something were to... happen to them.

This doesn't work, in a wide variety of ways. We've seen that it doesn't work, and at step one Trump gets slapped with APA problems, and it's going to keep going that way. Everything after step six or so just rolls around on the assumption that the Evil People are Going To Do The Most Evil Thing Possible, because mumble mumble someone said bad genes somewhere. In the actual real-world, in the incredibly unlikely chance that a Trump administration manages to get any of the big TPS status revoked, it'll be disruptive, but in the slow trickling sense.

But it's not incoherent or made up. It's just wrong. Probably with a bit of hyperbole because they see the plausible cases as Bad Enough. And those probably aren't really 'wrong'. You can do the QALY assessments, but napkin math puts 10-50m QALY on the table, sometimes pretty luridly.

((Though they may not be honest.))

You may recognize that this makes any effort to enforce immigration law Nazi-level, not just despite but because of Democratic efforts to make even trivial efforts to enforce the law so costly and disruptive. If so, congratulations, here's your Encyclopedia Brown merit badge.

My guess would be (assuming some level of competence on the part of the Trump team, I know) that they'd lean into the self-deportation -- if you crack down on illegals working/driving/transacting business in an effective way (which is theoretically possible, federally) then American Life becomes less attractive. Also it's not clear how much Trump cares about effectiveness of deportation per se -- being able to claim to have taken action and being cock-blocked by California or whatnot is probably fine with him.

Yeah, and I think conservatives are underestimating how hard even that limited approach is going to be -- there's a lot of people who know about past TPS rollbacks getting APA'd, but there's fewer who know about states just banning use of eVerify or firing people for their immigration status, or the extent that a lot of funding to support immigrants is laundered through various indirect grants or other organizations to make it hard to trim.

Trump taking whatever attempt, successful or not, and calling it is definitely plausible.

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