site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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.

10
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

This comment undercuts the moral argument for Georgist taxes pretty severely. (I've long been suspicious of the practical argument in general, although the practical argument of "we ought to incentivize the medieval sheep farmer to get the hell out of the middle of London" still makes a huge amount of sense in your hypothetical.)

A tax that can be framed as "We're just taxing the value that the rest of society has provided to you" feels like a huge moral advance over the typical lesser-of-two-evils "We can't make civilization work without lots of money so we're raising the amount of yours we'll take; pray we don't raise it further". And this moral justification for land-value tax makes some sense, for land uses where most of your revenues (and/or at least your use-value for a homestead residence) really come from the value of proximity to your neighbors. But what if you just wanted to farm sheep, and the main thing your neighbors have done to aid that is dump a bunch of air pollution into their lungs and their wool? Asking you to pay ever-increasing taxes for that service seems almost cruel.

But what if you just wanted to farm sheep

Then you sell your central London sheep farm for a gazillion pounds and buy a sheep farm somewhere else.

If we make a rule that people and their descendants get to keep their property tax free forever we end up with a stagnant, feudal economy. That puts us in the bottom left corner of the "growth / equality" grid, the worst of all words economically speaking.

Honestly, I'm probably 90th percentile in the anti-tax camp, but we need to be practical. Abolishing property tax goes too far.