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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Nah, you have to make friends in the government first. Generally, the way this works is that you and your fellow rodent groomers get together and decide that you want to form a cartel. You can't call it that, and you can't act too overtly anti-competitively at this stage. Instead, you're just a 'trade association' that wants to promote rodent grooming. Alone, it's hard for you to have much of a marketing budget, but if you get together and each kick in a little bit, you can market occasional fade cuts for little Mickey to a much wider audience. Yes, you're not personally capturing all of the benefit of the advertising, but maybe there aren't that many of you, so you can capture enough to make it worth kicking in to the club.
At some point, everyone's kicked in enough money that you start thinking about what the most effective use of that money is. You look at the market trends, the providers involved, etc., and perhaps that money isn't best used for broad industry advertising of services. Instead, you might think that it's best to use that money to hire some professional lobbyists who waltz into the state capital, shake hands, pass around goodies, make buddies, and impress upon them that you have a group of individuals who just might happen to be thinking about where they'd like to allocate their campaign contributions. Conveniently, they also point out that there seems to be some minor problems with some shady, low-cost rodent groomers lurking in the underworld. Since your trade association really cares about the quality of the industry, you'd be more than happy to help root out the problems. All the politicians need to do is let you. It costs them nothing; you're going to do all the work of taking care of the situation. And oh by the way, you'd be very grateful, wink wink, something something, campaign contributions. It definitely doesn't hurt if you can get a couple prominent trade association members elected into office.
Then, they pass a law, promoting how they're going to rid the scourge of seedy rodent groomers, so the public can have full faith and trust that they're getting a good one. The law sets up a Board, and the qualifications for this Board are obviously that they need to be decorated and awarded by your trade association, since you're the experts in determining who is fantastically qualified. They may even directly appoint a bunch of your leadership to the Board right off. Then, you can fly, ye formerly caged bird! You can invent all sorts of
barriers to entrysuitable training qualifications, most of which require payment to members of your trade association. Then, you can haul randos into your kangaroo court for brushing Mickey's hair this way instead of that way, for that may look too much like a fade and constitute unlicensed rodent grooming. You now have all the power you could have wanted, directly handed to you with the authority of the policy powers of the State. Just try not to look too outlandishly anti-competitive, and make sure to heavily heavily emphasize any possible examples of an unlicensed individual doing anything that could have hurt Mickey in any way.1 You've gotta market fear now. The more scared people are of anything going wrong, the more leeway they'll give you to put in place any silly rule thatwill drive out any competitionyou might think could be useful in some way.1 - As seen in the linked comment, it's not even really necessary that it was actually unlicensed people who caused the harm. The vast vast majority of people who were hurt by the drug that kicked off one of the whole shebangs in the medical industry had taken it under the direction of a government-licensed doctor.
More options
Context Copy link