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 -
The classic Disney villain death is for the bad guy to fall off a cliff after getting into a final fight with the hero.
It's the best of both worlds; you get to see the hero defeat the villain in a climactic battle, the hero gets to show how good and noble he is by sparing the villain's life, then the villain dies anyway in a way that keeps the hero morally pure.
See Peter Pan, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, etc.
I was wondering if you were going to link to that Kulak piece as I read your comment. I haven’t been able to unsee that trope and ponder its meaning in each case I see it ever since reading it.
This is the first time I've seen it and it is a baffling article.
In particular it seems to build a case entirely from an imagined literary genre? He makes this appeal:
But the fact there is that if you do read those texts, they completely undermine his primary case, which is a plea for more retributive violence, even vigilante violence. If you read, say, Le Morte d'Arthur, you will notice regular and conspicuous displays of mercy to defeated enemies, and unnecessary bloodshed is portrayed as a major threat. Arthur and Pellinore become trusted friends and allies, for instance, and the fact that Pellinore killed King Lot, rather than spare him as he ought to, becomes one of the causes of his eventual death. Sir Gareth defeats several knights in a row, all of whom are acting as vicious bandits, and spares them (at a lady's request, no less) and they come to Arthur's court and are forgiven. When characters choose bloodshed, this is usually bad - the tragedy ends with Arthur's determination to kill Mordred, rather than allow him to flee, bringing his own doom upon him.
The trope of defeating someone and then forgiving them and becoming friends is extremely common in pre-modern literature. Half of Robin Hood's merry men are people that Robin defeated, and then extended a hand to in friendship, saying "you are a man after my own heart!"
Heck, this happens biblically: consider David's repeated and conspicuous refusal to harm his enemy Saul, even when Saul is in his power.
What about classical antiquity? Here I'd note something they have in common with the Viking sagas, which is deep concern about the possibility of blood feuds, and the demand that violence ought to be limited and proportional in order to avoid them. Destroying enemies in a temper is bad. The Aeneid ends with the defeated Turnus asking for mercy, or failing that, to have his body returned to his people for burial rites, and Aeneas' furious refusal to do this and act of retribution is presented as a bad thing, or as a moral failing. Likewise the way the Iliad treats Achilles' disrespect of Hector's body. Neither the Aeneid nor the Iliad are pacifist works that believe that violence is always bad, but they are written with an awareness of the dangers of vengeance. The same is true of the sagas.
What's the last one he cites? Elizabethan England? Suffice to say that I do not think the people who wrote this endorsed bloody-minded retribution.
Now, sure, in all of those cases there is a specific local context - David doesn't hurt Saul because he's God's anointed, and so on. All the examples are a bit more complicated. Everything always is.
Likewise there are acts of retribution, and those acts also have context - Odysseus kills all the suitors, not because they're his enemies in some general way, but because they have specifically violated the laws of hospitality, which are sacred, and even then the way Homer describes the slaughter does not seem to be one that we are intended to cheer for. In the Odyssey itself the act is presented as something somewhat transgressive. The slaughter itself is an extended sequence in which the suitors beg for mercy, try to rally a desperate defence, and so on; there is something terrible about it. And then in the poem the families of the suitors demand justice afterwards and Odysseus must reconcile with them, in book 24. Antinous' father gets up and makes a moving speech about his sorrow, and the suitors' families plan to attack. The Odyssey actually ends with Athena intervening and telling Odysseus to stop being violent lest he incur the gods' anger: "men of Ithaca, cease this dreadful war, and settle the matter at once without further bloodshed... Odysseus, noble son of Laertes, stop this warful strife, or Zeus will be angry with you."
Kulak is LARPing an imagined history, not reading the historical texts that he actually refers to. The ancients were extremely conscious of the perils of violence, and, though not always uncomplicatedly, prized mercy and reconciliation as well.
Kulak has made LARPing a revolutionary his financial income. Back in the Canadian trucker protests he made repeated calls to resistance and violence and called it a moral failing for any man not to risk death or hospitalization for the righteous cause... while begging exception since he was already in a hospital for a medical procedure. Gotta look out for you own health first, right?
Alas, any cause that warrants risking hospitalization to prove virtue is worth leaving a hospital that you might be returned to.
Kulak is a modern day version of the man with their rocking chair by the fire who valorizes the virtue of fighting and glory of dying young to defend hearth and home.
To be fair he almost lost an arm and it was touch and go re: whether he'd ever get full use of his hand again, or even sensation. I've seen the scars (and the arm while it was healing) and they're wild. Took several surgeries. FWIW he also accomplished this injury while doing something badass, but I've said enough.
"Driving around the country" is just Tuesday man -- he reminds me of myself when I was his age in some ways, but if he wants to be badass he needs to do better than "I crashed my bike" (also "Tuesday" for a lot of guys I used to know) in my books.
More options
Context Copy link
Victory in violence always demands the sacrifice of your body. You might hope to get away without injury, but you never expect it. People of violence understand this and accept it, or lose. So I am going to need more than assurances he did something badass if you want to change my mind that that incident didn't cement his status as a risible caricature.
Why would I be interested in changing your mind about this? I have no idea who you are and it's a personal matter. Sticking up for a friend is all.
Welp, I thought you were going to say Dean is spinning it or doesn't have all the facts and maybe find a way to hint at the shape of this badass thing he did, not immediately back down.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why is that fair to him? He set the standard he judged others by, and he can be judged by it in turn. 'Fair' is not 'nice,' it is impartiality.
Did he meet his own standard of sincerity and moral courage that he accused other of lacking if they did not join a violent resistance despite risk of bodily harm as a consequence?
Or did he abstain on grounds of the consequence of bodily harm?
When someone makes moral judgements and accusations of cowardness for others not risking life or limb, the fair response to claims of personal abstainment on grounds of risk of limb if they went forth is not 'oh, you could get hurt? That's understandable.' It is 'so what, coward?'
Particularly since there have many been many other contexts, before and after, for him to have proven his bravery, if he wanted to tie bravery to political defiance and violence.
By way of reply, if I knew the answer, and that answer were yes, do you think I'd talk about it?
Kulak can be accused of many things but I haven't yet caught him in moral inconsistency.
By way of reply, does your willingness to acknowledge whether someone else is a coward or not change any factor of them being a coward?
In his old reddit posts on the trucker protests, Kulak made cowardness conditional on whether one conducted political violence regardless of being caught and identified. This was a demand for a positive action, and failure to meet that action was a categorical proof of personal failure deserving social contempt. He established no exceptions- inaction itself was proof of failure.
Kulak has also made no claim of having conducted political violence at the time he claimed it was necessary to prove one was not a coward. Nor have any of his sympathizers. In fact, sympathizers have provided claims that he did not meet the non-coward criteria for reasons that did not meet his pre-established exceptions. Further, no claim of compensatory action has been claimed- nothing that might provide absolution for the initial failure if her were physically incapable of prioritizing getting into a protest over his personal health. Which itself is a claim no one has made, least of all his defenders.
The principle of positive claims requiring positive evidence to warrant belief does not get reversed for reasons of OPSEC by people who dismissed fear of discovery or arrest as grounds for non-involvement. 'Oh, Kulak can't admit to conducting political violence- he'd be caught!' is not a basis to believe Kulak lived up to his claimed requirements for not being a coward. Kulak would not admit to have conducting political violence if he had not met the standard. The absence of the claim is not proof of a claim.
None of this would seem to have any relation to whether you would admit to any knowledge or lack of knowledge.
Kulak being a moral coward would be morally consistent. It might be morally contemptable, but it would be consistent.
Kulak can be condemned on plenty of grounds. As a historian, a literary analyst, even a rhetorician. However, the condemnation of cowardness can be justified by his own standard presented that he presented as a demand for action lest one be dismissed as a coward.
He did not act. Hence, he can be dismissed as a coward. That he makes no claim to having acted in other cases are additional, but redundant, cases for being a consistent coward.
I find this whole conversation and the intensity of your passion bizarre, but okay.
Setting aside the indisputable fact that you have no idea whether he 'conducted' 'positive action', it remains the case that even you don't claim he's ever said that someone should intentionally broadcast the matter afterward. That would obviously be crazy. After reading your post multiple times it's still not clear to me what inconsistency you're trying to catch him in. What is clear to me is that there's some kind of unseemly antipathy here. At any rate I'm checking out of the conversation and will not be responding further.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
TracingWoodgrains once likened him to Nikocado Avocado, a man (or catgirl?) made ever more grotesque by the vehicle that brought money and fame. I cannot unsee it, despite enjoying some of Kulak's earlier writing (like the Alex Jones/WWF piece).
I remember quite enjoying a piece he wrote about Shakespeare. But I suppose the internet does have a tendency to turn people into parodies of themselves. Even people like Trace, bless him, feel like they've become flattened over time - or at least their online personae have.
As they say, anything that you do for a living rather than passion, you'll eventually end up economizing to minimize costs- including time and effort- relative to expected income.
When people make their opinions the basis of their livelihood, their future intellectual freedom is shaped by the nature of their payment structure. If you draw a salary, you're not exactly going to be criticizing the hand that feeds you for long. If you make commissions, you're going to optimize for iterations to earn more commissions.
But when you go substack-style subscriber model, you're going to be pressured to keep providing people what they pay money for. The information you have is that they paid money for [x], and your brand grew from your reputation, and thus recommendations, for saying [x]. And if you don't, the subscribers go away. You live or starve by your brand.
In some respects this is more ideological constraining than a salary structure, since a salary-payer may have special interest in your input if you change an opinion. If you live on [organization Y]'s salary-dole, and you raise issue that [organization Y] may not like, that could be really valuable to know. Your reputation for supporting X makes warnings against X all the more credible. It's like if the Catholic Church criticizes papal conduct. If your job is providing advice / recommendations, this is the most important sort of advice you're liable to offer, and thus justify continue paying for. (Up to a point- if you get a reputation to anti-X instead, it may turn differently.)
In a subscriber model, however, going against the audience grain is a recipe for losing buy-in, but without gaining equivalent opposite payments. At which point, a variation of 'the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent' kicks in. Your audience base can remain unhappy and unwilling to fund you longer than you can get by without an audience base, and you can go under sooner than it takes to build a new audience base.
At which point, your incentive structure is that if you want a comfortable existence, don't fail to deliver what keeps you in a comfortable existence.
I wonder if this is the natural course of all Substackers? Fleeing big media for Substack was meant to be a way to seek independence from traditional constraints, but if it just enables a stronger form of audience capture that ever existed before, while encouraging writers to avoid risks and double down on the same crowd-pleasing themes over and over, we may find ourselves missing the old system.
Kulak isn't a journalist, of course, but I do notice something of the process with more 'mainstream' Substackers. It may have taken a few years, but, to pick an example, I feel like Freddie deBoer has ended up just writing the same half dozen articles over and over, as predictable as the tide. I can think of a few others that I read that seem to be sliding down the same incline.
Maybe it's all just bad.
My response to the 'missing the old system' is 'the grass on the other side is always greener.' That substack has its own authorial restraints doesn't mean it doesn't successfully establish independence from traditional media constraints. It just means that it's a change of constraints, rather than an absence of constraints.
Which, frankly, is not going to change. In the same way that the abolishment of private markets under communism didn't mean that people didn't have to work for a living, there is always going to be a tension between 'what the writer wants to do' and 'what the paymaster is willing to pay for.' And as long as there is a need to justify receiving limited resources- and there will always be limited resources- there will always be a paymaster in some form.
That doesn't mean that it isn't a net gain. The fact that Tracingwoodgrains and Kulak are equally eligible to make a living giving their opinions is still better than a world where only one or even none of them could because established opinion-generators ran the system like a cartel.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Abolish the police
Give everyone a gun and a wink
???
Justice!
Give war a chance.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is basically everything Kulak writes. He makes up a version of what people in the past thought, from the ancient Greeks to the American founding fathers, that bears no resemblance to anything they actually wrote, but in Kulak's version always boils down to "Violence, violence, and more violence."
I'd say he's historically and culturally illiterate, but accuracy isn't the point. It's all a con to convince other people that violence is the answer (to everything).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The dark meaning of mercy for the villain is the same as the dark meaning of opposition to the death penalty. Brutal thugs are not executed, but given long prison terms. Warehoused. Saved for later. This reserve army of brutal thugs is a valuable resource for avant-garde revolutionaries. Think 1917 Russian revolution. Its was a close run thing with a brutal civil war. Typically the avant-garde don't have the numbers. They may win power, but not have the numbers to hold on to it. They need to put boots on the necks of counter-revolutionaries. Since their tests for counter-revolutionariness have too many false negatives, they have to go large and put boots on the necks of the general population. Where do they find the feet to fill the boots? They release brutal thugs from prison to provide the muscle for the NKVD, KGB, Stasi, etc.
It is a very dangerous game. The avant-garde revolutionaries need to retain control of their brutal thugs. The thugs need to be kept divided. If some get ideas above their station, others are sent to kill them. But the Russian revolution and the French revolution both ate themselves. One faction within the revolutionary avant-garde sends their tame thugs to kill a rival faction within the avant-garde. The death toll rises and Stalin or Napoleon comes out on top.
I'm unclear on the causal connections here. Perhaps opposition to the death penalty is all high minded mercy. When the revolution comes, it is an unfortunate accident that the revolutionaries are gifted a reserve army of brutal thugs to help them consolidate their power. Or perhaps there are some strategic thinkers covertly funding the merciful people naturally inclined to oppose the death penalty. The money boosts the opposition to the death penalty, enough for mercy to defeat prudence.
It is not just domestic revolutionaries that one has to worry about. When the USSR took over Eastern Europe at the end of WWII, releasing brutal thugs from prison, to provide the muscle for the secret police, was one of the techniques used to impose the new communist governments.
Source on the use of prisoners for such tasks?
More options
Context Copy link
The original communist revolutions in Russia and Germany were carried out by mutinying army units, not by condemned criminals.
Repeating myself
Think about what happens after the Kronstadt rebellion. The soldiers mutiny, and overthrow the Tsar. The Bolsheviks take power. The infighting starts. Where do they find the men to stab their colleagues in the back on their behalf?
It is not about the overthrow of the old regime, it is about the worst people rising to the top of revolution and needing henchmen to do deeds that are repugnant to the earlier idealistic revolutionaries.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’m on record as opposing the death penalty not because of any high minded ideals, nor because I want an army of thugs in reserve, but because the government is entirely untrustworthy. I can easily picture a government deciding that mean tweets warrant the death penalty, while something like assault warrants nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
In theory, not having the death penalty allows for a future government, or the people themselves, to rectify things in the future in the way that the death penalty doesn’t. If society was less bifurcated in their beliefs, I could see it being more of value (as people could more consistently agree on the targets of violence).
In general, though, I’m very much in favour of anything that limits a government’s power - people with a monopoly on violence should be severely limited on what else they can do, lest they use violence to seize all else in life.
That cuts both ways. Do you limit government power by permitting the government to accumulate a reserve army of brutal thugs, or by preventing this by murdering the nascent reserve army in its crib?
I've mentioned Communist revolutionaries. See https://theworthyhouse.com/2024/11/19/on-the-1956-hungarian-revolution/ for an interesting, horse-shoe twist
But one could read about Oskar Dirlewanger and where he found the men to staff the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirlewanger_Brigade
Coming up to date,
https://www.newsweek.com/inside-wagner-group-criminals-contractors-putins-war-1770392
I must stop writing this comment before I sink too deeply into despair, both about where government power comes from, and the level of counter-ruthlessness needed to oppose it.
The issue is that the government will only perform the death penalty on those that would be the army of their opponents, not their own. A left wing government would give slap on the wrist sentences to those that perform left wing coded violence, while bringing the full force of the law down on those that commit right wing coded violence (and vice versa is true too).
The advantage to “the government can’t kill anyone” is that it removes it’s discretion to do this - there are always ways for a government to avoid prosecuting those in its favour.
I'm more interested in what happens when there is a change of government. The link about the Államvédelmi Osztály was interesting because of who Arrow Cross was.
Arrow Cross were right-wing thugs. After the left come to power, were they taken out and shot? No, they got demoted to junior thugs. They beat up the people that the new left wing government told them to beat up. Only if they were disobedient would they face harsh punishment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
In the United States? What precedent can you point to in the history of this country to justify this fear? The death penalty was widely practiced across the U.S. until well into the second half of the 20th Century, and is still practiced in many states today. As far as I’m aware there are no historical examples, whether at the federal, state, or local level, of it being used to punish pure speech crimes. Several American administrations have been more than willing to imprison political dissidents — the Wilson administration very famously harassed and imprisoned many socialists and anti-war activists, for example — but none (again, as far as I’m aware) has ever suggested executing them.
In fact, looking at the sorts of crimes people have been executed for over the history of this country, it seems like they’re all pretty much exactly the ones you’d expect. There actually does seem to be pretty widespread agreement, at least among those in this country who don’t actively oppose the death penalty, regarding which crimes merit it. This was true in periods wherein Americans were more “bifurcated in their beliefs” than they are now. (i.e. during the Civil War) It seems like paranoia about being executed for tweets is fairly disconnected from any sober analysis of the actual probability of that event coming to pass.
The USG has executed a few people for basically political grounds, granted that they committed actual crimes those crimes would probably not otherwise have resulted in the death penalty.
Mary Surratt seems like the clearest example; I'd guess you could also add the Rosenbergs even if I have no sympathy at all for them.
More options
Context Copy link
I meant mean tweets as shorthand for any politically incorrect speech; and I live in Canada, not in the United States.
Remember that Britain (for example) spent state resources prosecuting someone for misgendering their rapist.
It’s actually not that hard to reach a state where the state could justify it. If words are “literally violence,” it is fairly straightforward to make the case that mean words towards a minority group is exactly what Hitler did (even without the literal violence clause, you could claim that the person in question is encouraging violence and erasure, which is literally genocide).
The political coalition in this country who would find any of this logic appealing is also the one that is dead-set against the death penalty. They’re not even willing to support execution for actual murder and rape, so I don’t see how you can imagine them getting to “death penalty for hate speech”. It just does not strike me as a remotely plausible series of events.
I mean, this coalition is willing to burn cities and churches because of misinformation (the number of unarmed black men killed my cops is estimated to be around two magnitudes higher than it actually is, and they destroyed around 50 churches in Canada because of a moral panic around mass graves that never unearthed even a single bone). What makes you think they aren’t willing to use violence against their outgroup?
You’re just using uncharitable framings of the most extreme versions of your political enemies’ beliefs, in order to avoid having to engage with the specifics of my question. Nobody here is disputing that certain low-level elements of the American left’s coalition were, and perhaps will be again in the not-too-distant future, willing to use extrajudicial violence and criminal activity.
What I’m disputing is the plausibility of that element of the coalition gaining significant political power at the federal or state level, such that they could totally remake not only the party apparatus’ official position, but also the common constitutional interpretation of what crimes merit the death penalty, and could then get the Supreme Court to agree with their novel interpretation, and that rank-and-file members of the criminal justice apparatus would willingly carry out such executions. You’re proposing so many moving parts all coming together in a very particular way which, again, seems to have zero analogue in the history of this country.
I just don’t think there’s any realistic through-line via which we get from “some random black felons started fires in some major cities” to “a high-level progressive government official declares that hate speech, and only hate speech, is now a capital offense, and everyone at all levels below this — and horizontal to this, such as, again, the courts — signs off on this and carries it out. The conditions necessary to facilitate a series of developments like this would really only be possible in the case of full state collapse, catastrophic military defeat, etc.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A significant portion number of such people were willing to support or at least accept extrajudicial execution for being an insurance executive or a trump supporter demonstrating in the wrong city.
They didn’t support the government doing that executing, though. That would be a very significant change in position.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link