site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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.

13
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

the Chinese lockdowns actually worked.

That means they took 40 deaths per million.

Makes 0 sense.

Effective lockdowns = Less absolute number of deaths, not fewer deaths per proportion of those who got the disease. What would a lockdown do for someone who is already sick?

The fact that their proportion of deaths is orders of magnitude lower than the Global mean should raise the "China's pants are on fire" alarm, not "lockdowns worked".

E - If it's deaths per population instead death per number of people who got sick then it's back to square one.

E - If it's deaths per population instead death per number of people who got sick then it's back to square one.

?????

I'm talking deaths per million, not deaths per million who got sick! You could easily check this by looking at the stat I linked to.

If you think the Chinese are lying massively, provide some evidence! Are they burning huge numbers of bodies? Did they have a suspicious fall in mobile phone number usage? There's been talk about this - the Epoch Times stated that 21 million phone numbers had been lost, suggesting a very large death toll. Other people have fact-checked that and said there's no way to be sure.

I maintain that if we can hear about a few hundred protestors in Shanghai or various Chinese cities, the world wouldn't have missed hundreds of thousands of Chinese deaths from COVID! These people have families and jobs, they can't just disappear. In Xinjiang maybe but elsewhere?

My bad, I replied assuming the wrong metric.

In which case yes lockdowns did work, given a tortured defining of the word work.