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 -
In my country, large parts of several major cities actually have been sold to rich Chinese looking to store their wealth somewhere the CCP can't get to it. This has materially harmed many of my countrymen by exacerbating the housing crisis and driving up rents. Yet, somehow, it never occurred to any of us to resort to terrorism. Given a choice between coexisting with some rich Chinese and starting a civil war, we did in fact choose to shrug our shoulders.
Nonviolence is almost always an option, and moreover it's almost always a better option.
I strongly disagree with the equivocation between immigration and invasion. There was a legitimate transfer of land-ownership from absentee landlords to immigrants looking to settle. It is a sad fact of life that many of these purchases involved the eviction of previous tenants, but that doesn't justify violence. You don't get to own land just because you live there, and I don't want to live in a world where every aggrieved tenant can start a civil war over every land sale.
My understanding was Palestine didn't have a property system analogous to western country systems. That the land owners were more like (charitably) feudal administrators over their land, and when they sold that land there was some expectation that the tenants had a remaining claim on the land. So it's not like Chinese immigrants coming in and making consensual trades for single houses, but more like (charitably) they gave the Mayor a few million dollars to overtake mayoral duties, and then they referred a la Hitchhiker's Guide to Property Rights to some Alpha Centauri law that administration of the city means full rights to all houses within and out you must go.
An expectation that tenants have some remaining claim on the land they live on after it's been sold is worth exactly as much as the paper it's not written on. On every continent, the imposition of modern property rights involved the dissolution of these supposed expectations without compensation. It happened in Britain with the Enclosures, in China and Russia during their respective Communist takeovers, and in the Americas when the colonial governments got out their maps and started drawing rectangles so they could sell them to people.
In fairness to the former tenants, this dissolution often caused mass human suffering. In fairness to everyone else, there was no vote to give these arbitrary land-based privileges to that particular handful of tenant farmers. Neither the people at large nor the governments in charge agreed to perpetuate any such rights. You can't run a modern state on vague feudal expectations.
It would be arbitrary and unusual to single out this one strip of the former Ottoman Empire to operate under the rules of the feudal system when practically every square inch of the rest of the world had either been converted to private property or was in the process of being converted to private property.
The privilege of forcing other people to live according to your arbitrary and whimsical ideas about property rights is exclusively reserved for those too well-armed to evict.
You seem to be severely underestimating the extensive use of customary land tenure throughout the world today as well as the increasingly conscientious approaches governments have taken when introducing land titling and property right acknowledgements for those lands. There is not one way to implement these changes, and yet you take some of the worst examples from history and seem to say this is just how it need go.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link