site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

It occurred to me recently that while I've seen a great many shows/movies/etc about prejudice/tribalism/bigotry/etc, none of them reflect the kind of dynamics I've seen in the culture war. The closest things I've seen were The Hunt, a completely non-allegorical satire of current day social dynamics, and "The Great Divide," a filler episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender. It's hard to identify what phenomena I want reflected in this kind of story, but one of the most distinct aspects of our current polarization is how the dominant tribe justifies its antipathy towards the opposing tribe by accusing it of bigotry. Dehumanization isn't unusual, but dehumanizing people by accusing them of dehumanization seems novel. Or at least, novel enough that I haven't seen it outside of a South Park episode (The Death Camp of Tolerance) that treated the concept as inherently absurd because, at the time the episode was made, it still seemed outside the realm of possibility.

Do you guys know any good works of fiction that depict bigotry similar to that we've seen in America over the past decade? I don't necessarily mean stories where one group accuses the other of being bigoted. Just anything that leaps out to you as similar.

I think your use of the term "Dehumanizing" has derailed the discussion.

I've had somewhat similar thoughts/frustrations. It seems really hard to find stories with antagonists that use Woke tactics, or narratives that roughly align with the Anti-SJW ethos, that aren't tediously cringe or partisan or obviously ABOUT being Anti-SJW. It'd be really easy to wind up doing "straight white men are the REAL oppressed class," which is cringe even when true.

30 Rock: plenty of episodes involved Tracy or Jenna or some other character being super-entitled while claiming to be oppressed, using proto-woke, or just straight-up Woke, lingo. Or that black guy who flat-out says any woman who won't date him is racist or gay. This stuff is funny, but becomes less funny and more kafka-horror-y when every other character buys in hook-line-and-sinker.

House: there were plenty of situations where House was just being an equal-opportunity-asshole but gets interpreted as being racist or sexist or whatever.

but one of the most distinct aspects of our current polarization is how the dominant tribe justifies its antipathy towards the opposing tribe by accusing it of bigotry. Dehumanization isn't unusual, but dehumanizing people by accusing them of dehumanization seems novel.

I don't know why you are conflating calling someone a bigot is the same as dehumanizing them. Archie Bunker was depicted as a bigot, but he was not dehumanized. Dehumanization is something quite different.

You're absolutely right. I was being inarticulate. The accusation of bigotry, itself, is not dehumanization. The dehumanization comes when you say that because someone is a bigot, it's okay to "punch" them. That their rights, the rights that are supposed to extend to all of humanity, no longer exist. The trigger word they usually use is "Nazi," and they expand the definition of that term enough to include wrongthinkers of all races and religions. That's the most extreme example, but even it is frighteningly common.

I don't think Archie Bunker wouldn't be tolerated in today's world. While he was absolutely portrayed as in the wrong, he was also tolerated, even loved. Today, people like that are not deserving of tolerance. They get "cancelled." It's like.. you know how in the 00's, some Christians had a "love the sinner, hate the sin" attitude towards homosexuality, while others didn't want to let gay people anywhere near them? Leftists used to be analogous to the former, hating problematic attitudes while still loving people who possessed them. Now they're the latter. Or at least, that's how I perceive the situation.

Your link is broken; correct link is here

Ok, but "it is ok to punch someone who is x" is not dehumanization. Eg: it is considered ok for a woman to slap an obnoxious drunk. Does that mean that the drunk has been "dehumanized"? If a mass murderer is put to death, has he been "dehumanized"? I think you are referring to a different concept.

If the obnoxious drunk is following you, despite your repeated requests to be left alone, then he is invading your personal space and implicitly threatening you, making it okay to slap him in self-defense. Punching someone who is not invading your space or violating your rights in any way is not comparable, and doing so is actually a violation of their rights. To deny someone their rights is to dehumanize them. You are treating them as though they are not human.

Merely saying that somebody should be physically assaulted isn't the same thing as assaulting them, but it is still a form of dehumanization, and it precedes the literal violence.

The problem is that defining dehumanizing that broadly renders the term meaningless. If denying someone their rights is dehumanizing them, then a prosecutor commenting on a defendant's decision not to testify a trial is dehumanization. As is kicking a cheerleader off of the team for saying "fuck school fuck softball fuck cheer" on Snapchat. As is refusing a trademark to a band called "The Slants" because the term is derogatory.

And the other problem is with your argument that punching an obnoxius drunk is not dehumanizing him because he is invading your rights. That is the exact argument that Antifa types use when justifying punching people. They claim that speech is violence, after all.

Finally, you are needlessly complicating matters. What you are talking about is simply people using violence to silence those they disagree with. That is hardly a new phenomenon.

I was trying to say that the woman in this scenario is justified if, and only if, the man is following her and won't leave her alone despite her requests.

I'm trying to say that there's a spectrum of behavior that has violence against people you disagree with on the most extreme end. You can call this spectrum murderism, or dehumanition, or whatever, but I think it's fair to consider them all part of the same phenomenon. That's the entire concept behind racism, homophobia, and so on. I'm just expanding it more broadly.

And yes, lynchings and genocide and so forth are hardly new phenomenons. Doesn't make them acceptable. They are so terrifying that I want to make them as rare as possible.

No one is claiming that violence is generally acceptable.

To be clear, when I said that "people using violence to silence those they disagree with . . .is hardly a new phenomenon," I was not referring to lynching and genocide. I was referring to lesser forms of violence. I am dubious that most lynchings and genocides have been conducted simply because the victims held unpalatable views (and I say that as someone with PhD-level coursework on political violence).

You can call this spectrum murderism, or dehumanition,

I am sure there is a spectrum, but my point is that you really can't call it dehumanization, because that term already has an established meaning in the field of political violence.

Oh. What is the academic meaning of dehumanization? The most literal interpretation would be that it's denying someone's status as human, but that's not what happens. Like, the German didn't literally believe that Jews were rats in the clip you posted, but he was comparing them to rats as a heinous metaphor.

i marked this comment "bad" on the volunjanny page so i guess i should reply.

"it is ok to punch someone who is x" is not dehumanization

yes it is. "it is righteous to practice violence against the outgroup" is the last realization of otherizing rhetoric.

  1. outgroup is bad

  2. we should do something about outgroup

  3. we should be violent to outgroup

to give the sharpest comparison, that phrase is syntactically identical with "it is righteous to kill jews."

no motte & baileying. as-spoken "it's okay to" is to be heard and understood as "it is righteous to"

it's not righteous for a woman to slap a lush, but also nobody gives a shit. almost all of europe believes it is not righteous to execute criminals because their framing of human rights extends even to mass-murderers. this is a deep subject of philosophy where i largely though not entirely agree with the europeans. i blame none for being uncomfortable with the state ending lives.

it is not righteous to practice indiscriminate violence against anyone. even nazis. this was the point of postwar trials: moral authority. righteousness. because they understood the indiscriminate violence practiced during the war was bad in and of itself. that statement goes against the trials.

that statement necessarily affirms certain premises; it is okay to dehumanize, it is okay to practice indiscriminate violence.

that statement says what the nazis did was only bad because of who they did it to.

to repeat and conclude: there is nothing you can say more dehumanizing.

There are several things wrong with your argument:

"it is righteous to practice violence against the outgroup" is the last realization of otherizing rhetoric.

  1. Even if the last step of otherizing is making the claim, "it is righteous to practice violence against the outgroup", it does not follow that every incident of making the claim is necessarily the last step in the process of othering.

  2. We are talking about dehumanization, yet you are making a claim about othering. They are not the same thing. See, eg, Genocide Watch's "Ten Stages of Genocide", which distinguishes clearly between othering (what they call "classification") and dehumanization.

to give the sharpest comparison, that phrase is syntactically identical with "it is righteous to kill jews."

Perhaps I was imprecise when I described the class of statements as, "it is ok to punch someone who is x." As my examples showed, I did not mean to define "x" as group membership, but rather as exhibiting a certain attribute, such as drunken loutishness, or a tendency to commit murder.

More importantly, you seem to believe that I said that it is righteous for a woman to slap a lush, or righteous to execute a murder, or righteous to practice indiscriminate violence against anyone. I said no such thing, nor do I believe any such thing. I merely said that doing so was a phenomenon different from dehumanization. I was making an analytical claim, not a normative claim.

i marked this comment "bad" on the volunjanny page

I >90% agree with your post, but I marked the one you're replying to as neutral because I didn't see evidence that @Gdanning was dishonest. My theory is "we want honestly-wrong people to come here, say honestly-wrong things, talk to people about them, and stop being wrong, so I don't want people to get in trouble for saying honestly-wrong things".

If we say that dehumanization means strictly to treat someone as inhuman or less than human than maybe not. But people on the left have been using an expanding definition of dehumanization for decades. Feminists love to say that various forms of sexual attraction to a woman are dehumanization. Like if a man wants masturbate to images of pretty women, it's dehumanizing to the women. That sort of usage has the same flaws as saying that "it's okay to punch someone" is dehumanizing.

  1. I'm not a big fan of the "the other side does it, so it is ok for me to do it" argument.

  2. Those examples are re using "dehumanize" to mean "treat as an object, not as a person", as in the second definition here ["to deprive of human qualities or attributes; divest of individuality"]. I believe that the OP was using the first definition ["to regard, represent, or treat (a person or group) as less than human"]

I'm not a fan of "the other side does it, so it is ok for me to do it" either, but I think it makes far more sense that people saying "we should be able to inflict physical harm on a person without remorse" is an example of dehumanization, as opposed to "we should be able to imagine a person in sexual situations". The later doesn't make much sense for it to be dehumanizing.

The latter fits the second definition of dehumanizing reasonably well, it seems to me, if the claim is that the person in question is treating a human being like a fleshlight, as a tool, essentially, as opposed to a person with feeling of their own, etc. That is indeed what they are saying, as I understand it. I don't know that I agree with the claim empirically, but it is a reasonable use of the term. It is really a very different claim than the other definition, which I think OP was using, which was to see someone as less than human (note, by the way, that some have argued that, in some contexts, it is toxification, rather that dehumanization, which is what is really going on).

Archie Bunker was depicted as a bigot, but he was not dehumanized.

The Archie Bunker TV shows were made in the 70s/80s. Do you think that today a TV show would be made with such a character in the lead role, and as anything other than an out-and-out villain?

How is that relevant to my point, which is that claiming that someone is a bigot is not the same as dehumanizing them?

It's relevant in that you claimed Bunker was presented as a bigot but not dehumanised. That was forty-plus years ago. Today, we wouldn't get an Archie Bunker except as a villain with no redeeming features, or else he does a 180 degree turn and realises he was wrong about everything and current-day idpol is right, true and just.

Have you really not seen any online descriptions of Republicans? Even Freddie deBoer has to do the customary obligatory disclaimer about how bad they are:

if the odds of Democrats doing good are a 1,000,000:1, the odds of a third party or the Republicans doing good are even less

The issue is that “better than the Republicans” is a bar about as low as “better than slowly lowering your genitals into a blender.”

the same maniacal zeal the Republicans pursue a right agenda

Why the Republicans don’t appear to pay more of a price for the utter insanity of the messages in their media is a question for another time

The Republicans were asked whether they could continue to be the party of bitter racist yokels and hope to win elections.

you can engage with a roster of interchangeable lunatics who lie and dissemble in defense of a cruel revanchist movement

I like Freddie, I think he's honest and he makes reasonable points, but even he goes for "maniacal zeal", "utter insanity", "bitter racist yokels", "interchangeable lunatics" and so on. Maybe it's not yet at the point of calling Republicans actual rats and vermin, but some will go that far.

Ditto with the pro-life movement, TERFs, etc. It's a short step from "they're bigots and maniacs" to "they're not real humans, not like us, they have no compassion and are motivated only by hatred and spite and destructiveness".

"Customary obligatory disclaimer" implies that he's just saying those things due to outside pressure, not because those are his actual thoughts. Freddie is a socialist, you'd expect him to view Republicans very negatively.

This doesn't actually seem dehumanizing. There is no comparison of republicans to animals(unless you count the handwringing over dogwhistle politics), no description of disgust, no description of republicans as lesser-than.

It's an accusation of republicans being evil. And in a democratic system, that's far, far from unprecedented- the Greeks had a special word for it(stasis) and the Romans saw the same thing occurring in their republic and saw it as almost identical to the Greek process. Nor, by the way, is it a one way street; republicans also see democrats as evil.

This is an emergent process of republics and cannot be fixed by one party acting alone.

Online rightists call leftists "NPCs".

Again, how is that relevant? My point is that the categories "calling someone a bigot" and "dehumanizing someone" are distinct categories. Hence, whether someone is dehumanizing Republicans is an empirical claim which must be established by evidence more than that said person called Republicans bigots. I note that deBoer's articles from which you got those quotes seem to have little to do with bigotry, for example.

I think the point is that "dehumanising != bigot" is ITSELF irrelevant because while you are right that it is theoretically possible to portray someone a bigot without dehumanising them, if you use a 1950s dictionary and several slide rules, it is not practically possible to portray someone a bigot without dehumanising them in The Current Year, because the incentives of the zeitgeist converge modern media writers on that conflation too incentivisingly.

That is true only if you are using a very eccentric definition of "dehumanize." it does not mean "immoral" or "evil" or even "loathsome."

It's interesting to note that Norman Lear meant for Archie to be seen as a bigot. The audience was supposed to laugh at the racist ignoramus, not with him. Lear was horrified when he realized that Archie was becoming the Fonz of the show and that the audience loved the old rascal for being so "politically incorrect."

That said, I can list many, many shows made in the 70s and 80s that would never be made today (or at least, not with the characters and storylines we saw then). Like for the example the infamous blackface/n-word episode of Gimme A Break!

Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” is famously about white supremacists who envy black bodies while denigrating black minds. A true horror delight, and definitely Culture War fodder. His “Us” and “Nope” are less on the nose for your request, both terrific filmmaking in and of themselves, but also worth watching for what they have to say about the black experience/The Struggle.

The rather confusing hextuple film “Cloud Atlas” is what drove home for me the concept of privilege, but also how much social justicers want to be The Ally Who Helps Oppressed Group Get Unoppressed.

I saw Get Out and loved it. I don't think what I got out of it is the same as what everyone else got out of it, judging by other peoples' reactions to it and even what other people have directly told me, but I did love it. I should see the other movies you've mentioned. Thank you.

I saw the symbolism in Get Out, but I got more out of it as a sci-fi horror film dealing with the nature of brains and minds. I’ve always loved body transformation stories, and fantastic tales about what nerve networks can actually do, and this scratched one itch while giving a delightful ick factor to the other. I enjoyed “Nope” even more.

Have you seen Being John Malkovich? The central plot device is the same as that in Get Out, but the themes of the film are different.

That was the film which gave me an appreciation for John Cusack; I think I’ve seen it thrice.

I see no correlation between these two life-extension films, even though apparently there are links such as one actress being in both films. One was a magical realism story where the mechanism is mystical and the multi-person possession target is apparently random; the other is barely squishy hard SF where the mechanism is bloody and the single-person possession targets are kidnapped for their physical attributes.

If anything, I see more in common with both in 2011’s In Time where the rich buy time to live and the poor have to beg or steal it.

It’s worth noting that the truly subversive aspect of Get Out is that the “white supremacists” (as you call them) are old-school liberals who fetishize blacks, almost literally consuming them for their own advantage, reflecting the racial dynamics of the Democrat party.

Can you remind me what part of cloud atlas you’re talking about?

Five of the six stories has a person being dehumanized by their society because of one of their attributes: the slave, the gay guy, the senior citizen, the clone, and the “primitive human” on the Old Earth reservation. Each gains the sympathy of a person with a standard amount of privilege and together they struggle for the dehumanized person’s freedom from their oppressive situation, with varying degrees of success.

Five of the six stories has a person being dehumanized

In the sixth story, nuclear power is dehumanized.

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