site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 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.

You're trying to fix the debate around your particular framing, but if you are actually correct that's wholly unnecessary.

And anyways, convincing people to have a "traditional" views about what a man and women are doesn't even prevent kids being sterilized or being abducted from their parents. So it's doubly useless to argue from a position of privileging your own moral framework. You not only fail to convince people to adopt said framework, you also fail to make progress on the object level issue.

Here's an example: I was arguing with my girlfriend about transgender people in women's sports. She's "pro," I'm a muddled sort of "anti."* I eventually discovered she held her position because she genuinely didn't believe that men had any advantage over women besides height and weight-- and that existing sex segregation was actually the result of discrimination against women. She actually thought women would do fine in men's sports, if they weren't excluded from tryouts, or something. So none of my appeals to fairness, or justice, or even entertainment value were working on her, because they were all made from a framing that she viewed as essentially incoherent. I eventually got her to concede that, were we to have true co-ed competitions at an elite level, and men consistently won, then it would make sense to keep males, including transgender ones, out of women's sports.

That's what it took to get the object-level issue resolved, and in the process I saw that currently-intransversible gap between our frameworks. Before I can even get her to care about the higher male genetic propensity for sexual assault, I'd need to convince her it was genetic in the first place, rather than culturally mediated. And in particular, to someone who believes most observed differences between sexes are due to cultural factors rather than genetic, it would seem trivially obvious that changing their cultural presentation of gender is changing their gender, because gender is all culture in the first place.

Anyways, altering your body is a natural right, in that it has no external victims and requires active government intervention to stop. Natural rights can be exercised poorly, but that doesn't stop us from having them. Parents have a justifiable authority to restrict the rights of their children, but the government doesn't have that right on their behalf. By the same token, government doesn't have leave to interfere with a parent's justifiable authority to restrict the rights of their child. So the hypothetical people you're arguing with are wrong, but you are too.

* I don't think "transgender women are women," but also I'm not really in favor of women's sports? So it's like, whatever to me. I don't judge sporting organizations for just doing whatever is going to get them the most viewers and therefore the most money.

I eventually discovered she held her position because she genuinely didn't believe that men had any advantage over women besides height and weight-- and that existing sex segregation was actually the result of discrimination against women.

Well, that's just plain nuts.

Parents have a justifiable authority to restrict the rights of their children, but the government doesn't have that right on their behalf.

Why not? It bans tattoos for kids and FGM. Preventing child abuse is one legitimate government functions under minarchism, so if government is to exist at all it should do that.