site banner

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.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

and for those who come to the mainland being better than the ones already here with regards to litter.

And now I'm reminded of a forum post I was once linked to — I think it was referenced by a commenter on a Steve Sailer post — by a puertoriqueño New Yorker complaining about how "the Jews" obviously control New York City, or at least its sanitation department. His argument? That the streets in the "Jewish neighborhoods" were always so much cleaner — free of litter, and especially empty/broken beer bottles — than those of his own, predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood. This, he concluded, could only be because the Jews were using their control of the city government to have the sanitation department focus on constantly cleaning the litter and beer bottles from the streets of their own neighborhoods, and less on cleaning everyone else's streets. That maybe different groups litter at different rates, and that the inhabitants of predominantly-Jewish neighborhoods simply don't toss empty beer bottles into the street to begin with, never crossed his mind. (What's that old quote, from a Roman author IIRC, about people mistaking their particular cultural norms for universal laws?)

Its quite obvious where I live that there is a gradient from one side of the neighborhood (which neighbors a primarily mexican one) to the other (which borders a primarily white yuppie one). You go from frequent corona and modelo bottles to fewer, to on the other side your problem being that the trash cans are overloaded by then end of a 3 day weekend because those people can't help but use the cans, and the city refuses to install enough cans. Also people write on their own private cans "private use only" because otherwise these litter-adverse folks will simply seek out the closest available can rather than utilize a sidewalk once the official cans are spent.