site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12668 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 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.

Out of these examples, the flooding of Japan by hundreds of millions of, let's say, cloned Ainu and the surrender of Israeli territory to Palestinian Arabs are the two that strike me as different and more justifiable, and I suspect that I may not be alone in that view.

It's not hard to come up with a fairly coherent principle that rationalises this pattern: if your homeland gets seized by another people, your people get a perpetual moral claim to reconquer it from the people that seized it, but not from anyone else that may further seize it from those people and thus has not perpetrated a direct injustice against you and yours. This way, the German/French/... claim against Arabs is live; the Arab claim against Israelis is live; the Jomon claim against Yayoi Japan is, somewhat surprisingly, still live; but the Israelis only have a claim to the Levant against the Romans who scattered them, which is long dead.

Under this framework, in fact, the Jews have a much more plausible claim against the various peoples of Europe who expelled them (especially, if you want to appy the "invader" framework to their whole history, where they settled on lands that changed hands to some entity that was later cut down to size by someone else). This agrees with my long-standing intuition that after WWII a Jewish State should actually have been carved out of the losing nations in Europe (which I remember @Southkraut taking great offense at for reasons that still strike me as insufficiently thought through; imagine the different trajectory many things could have taken had Germany been allowed to discharge its blood debt with soil in this way).

which I remember @Southkraut taking great offense at for reasons that still strike me as insufficiently thought through

They are. The thought terminates at "Rightful German clay must remain in German hands."

I always liked (perhaps a bit sardonically) Michael Chabon's solution in the The Yiddish Policemen's Union. They turned the southern bit of Alaska, the area around Juneau, into Israel. The US didn't miss it. I always think about that whenever the discussion of what to do with the Palestinians comes up. If everyone is so concerned...give them the cold wilderness no one else wants to deal with. (This is just a silly thought experiment, not meant as a serious solution)

That was actually a real proposal that was kicked around by the Roosevelt administration, which is where Chabon got the idea. I don’t think it got particularly far in real life, but it was considered.

As the old line goes, the socialists will never forgive the Jews for surviving the Holocaust.

The solution was supposed to be "final", yet 80 years later here we are.

As the old line goes, the socialists will never forgive the Jews for surviving the Holocaust.

Fascists, not socialists.

Tomatoh, Tamatah.

Contra the last 50 years of leftist propoganda, national socialism and international socialism resemble each other far more then either resembles any other ideology.

National socialism is still socialism.

I got as far as the subhead:

Since they liquidated socialists by the score and opposed everything we believe, Nazis were not leftists.

Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin also liquidated socialists by the score, and opposed "everything we believe in" at one time or another.

It's not hard to come up with a fairly coherent principle that rationalises this pattern: if your homeland gets seized by another people, your people get a perpetual moral claim to reconquer it from the people that seized it, but not from anyone else that may further seize it from those people and thus has not perpetrated a direct injustice against you and yours

This is only coherent if you set the clock at a completely arbitrary cutoff and commit to ignoring the fact that nearly every slice of land on the planet has changed hands numerous times. The “Germans” are only considered a coherent people now, in hindsight, as a result of millennia of mutually-hostile civilizations slaughtering each other. Why do “the Germans” have a legitimate claim against “the Arabs”, but the Western Hunter-Gatherers of 20,000 years ago (themselves certainly not a unified ethnic group) do not have a permanent claim against any descendants of Neolithic Farmers and/or Proto-Indo-European pastoralists?

This is only coherent if you set the clock at a completely arbitrary cutoff

Only semi-arbitrary. We cut it off post-WWII because that's when we realised that the seizure of territory by force of arms was increasingly damaging, and thus could not be allowed to continue in the future. Thus we set the cut-off at 'now' as a Schelling point, because we had to set it somewhere, and 'now' was the least disruptive.

because that's when we realised that the seizure of territory by force of arms was increasingly damaging, and thus could not be allowed to continue in the future

No, that's when the American Empire completed its conquest of most of the world, and as the sovereign thus deny lesser/client states the right to wage war on neighboring states. There are 5 countries with the de facto right to do this and 2 of them (Britain and France) are mostly just US vassals at this point anyway.

The Americans and the Russians are in a hot proxy war right now. "We" is clearly just self-serving American bullshit, something they inherited from the English; the "all wars are defensive" stance, by contrast, is straight out of the Roman Republic.

the right to wage war on neighboring states. There are 5 countries with the de facto right to do this and 2 of them (Britain and France)

Eh? When did the Brits wage war on a neighbour post WW2? I assume you’re not talking about rearguard colonial stuff in the late 40s.

and 2 of them (Britain and France) are mostly just US vassals

Brits tried it with Suez (until being politely reminded that the only power they had was at the US’ pleasure for anti-Soviet reasons- Argentina was a gimme though), and then there’s the French in Indochina and, importantly, Vietnam.

And regionally, they’re still relatively powerful, as Libya found out in the early 2010s. But they don’t have the power they used to before the European Civil Wars.

Brits tried it with Suez (until being politely reminded that the only power they had was at the US’ pleasure for anti-Soviet reasons- Argentina was a gimme though

Right. Britain clearly does not have the power to make war on neighbouring (ie European) states, which is why it confuses me so much that OP claims otherwise. Argentina was purely defensive: the settlements are British and have been for centuries.

Did you actually read my post? I'm not setting arbitrary clock cutoffs (see: my opinion regarding the case of the Japanese), but instead using cultural continuity as acknowledged by the people involved. The present-day Germans think of themselves as the same people as the Germans from 100 years ago, before any significant Arab immigration commenced; and conversely there is a continuous chain from the ones of 100 years ago to the present ones where older generations thought of younger generations replacing them as "their people". It's an interesting question whether the same reasoning should apply to wider or narrower circles of ingroup status as well, rather than just those at the scale of a "nation"; but if there actually were descendants of Western Hunter-Gatherers alive today that had some semblance of this sort of continuity, I would at least be open to considering it valid if they demanded that Indo-Europeans should gtfo back to the steppe.

The present-day Germans think of themselves as the same people as the Germans from 100 years ago

This is actually more complicated than you are making it sound! The thorny questions of German “nationhood” were the source of many wars over the course of centuries. There was a dialect continuum of German (or German-adjacent) languages, but the extent to which these various peoples were culturally- and politically-unified was very much in dispute for a very long time. “German” identity in many ways had to be imposed from top-down. (And we can see the extent to which this process was not completely achieved by, for example, the existence of a separate Austrian state.) The same is equally true of “the French” as a people. Once you start digging into the specifics, the “unbroken chains of continuity” start to look more like frayed ropes held together by tape.

I picked 100 years rather than a larger figure on purpose (and I'm reasonably familiar with German history; that's where I got my passport and most of my schooling!), and I'm happy to elaborate the rule as being against irredentism in case of doubt (so no German pre-Bismarck claims survive). The situations I opined on just all seem to be fairly clear-cut cases of nationhood continuity.

An even easier solution might be to posit a one-sided onus based on present-day claims of inheritance - so e.g. a hypothetical Russian Empire acquisition of North Africa would be morally open to a claim by descendants of the Carthaginians the moment the Imperial Russian government opens its mouth to say something about being the "Third Rome".

(I'm not trying to propose a counterintuitive-but-defensible rule, but rather some simple rule that aligns with intuitions about right and wrong that I have independently, as one does in analytic philosophy.)

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