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 -
So "shoot while they're knocking at someone else's door" is the equilibrium strategy, then? At least "one of us got shot before we killed the shooter" can be spun as a heroic story; "one of us got shot before some kid at a desk bombed innocent people" (not to mention the crime scene where evidence of the bullet trajectory used to be) is the sort of thing that makes you look for a better job than "sucker who draws fire on the civilian-bombers' behalf".
And that's assuming no other collateral damage, which is ... a stretch. The 1985 MOVE bombing was horrifying enough to show up in the news last year, even though all the "this is unconstitutional", "pay millions of dollars to the victims", etc. decisions were made decades ago. This does not scale up.
You are pattern-matching to some random commune in Philadelphia. You should be pattern-matching to Fort Sumter or Pearl Harbor, because that is what questioning American sovereignty (the kind that elites care about) amounts to. It’s pretty undignified to die on a million-dollar battleship in port from a dive bomber hitting the magazine. Did America look at that and decide, “whoops, our bad. We’ll stay on our side of the Pacific and mind our own business from now on”? No, they hunted down and killed every single Japanese soldier who wouldn’t surrender. How many collateral casualties were acceptable in that conflict? Do you think there will be sympathy for the terroristic gunmen on American media? Fox canned Tucker despite much better ratings than anyone else on their network because nobody would advertise on his show. Can you imagine if there was an actual shooting civil conflict and a host sided with the “bad guys”?
It's not a perfect match. It's people wanted for illegal weapons possession who got bombed for it, but it was also a group that had been threatening the lives of their neighbors. Many of your future missile victims will be much more sympathetic.
You've found much worse matches, though.
The first key bit with Pearl Harbor was "in port". When Americans died undignified deaths in others' ports, we weren't quite so gung-ho about keeping the pressure on forever. See Vietnam (which had celebrities siding with the Viet Cong, even, not just with civilian collateral damage), Iraq, Afghanistan.
The second key bit was "Japanese". Not just in a racist or myopic "wait, my neighbors' lives matter!" way, but because a coordinated empire trashing our defenses while conquering the Pacific looked like an existential threat. Impromptu snipers would be a threat to the secret police knocking on their neighbors' doors, but nobody's going to imagine that that kid safely behind the drone controls had no other choice.
The last key bit was "mind our own business". Japan had started conquering its neighbors before even economic sanctions started. What is your average hunter doing, that we need to ransack his home if he claims to have lost a gun that you think he's hiding? In this scenario the initial surprise attackers aren't the victims of your missile strikes, they're the perpetrators of them.
Imagine for a moment that we decided to invade Mexico, not because they had knocked out battleships or skyscrapers in a surprise attack, but because they have four times the gun homicide rate that we do and obviously we want to do the most good first, by sending in the military to disarm them all and kill off any resistance. Do you imagine this plan getting wide public support? There may be some "anti-colonialists" who are less resistant to invading Wyoming than Mexico, but I suspect that that group will balk at invading Chicago.
For snipers picking off cops that aren't coming for them specifically? No. For victims of misunderstandings ensuing from jumpy cops and drone operators trying to collect guns in such an environment? Absolutely. The largest mass shooting of civilians in US history was committed while trying to round up the victims' guns, and we call it the "Wounded Knee Massacre", not the "Lakota totally had it coming". How many more Breonna Taylor incidents (shot in the crossfire while her boyfriend was shooting at police, yet still the subject of protests for years!) would you expect to see while rounding up the guns owned by ten million African-Americans? How much more extreme would the reaction be if the "crossfire" was a missile and she didn't even have a chance not to die? What about the next time there are kids in the Hellfired house? How about when it turns out that one of her successors had a restraining order against a violent stalker and obviously had a good reason to keep a gun? What about when nobody in the house even had a gun, but it turns out that the cops and military panicked when someone across the street shot one of them from behind? What about when nobody at all had a gun, but some kid set off a firework at the wrong time, or was waving around a toy like Tamir Rice? You're not getting rid of a hundred million guns, even if somehow everybody was on board with that, without triggering a hundred thousand such incidents by accident. And it's going to get worse when terroristic gunmen start triggering such incidents on purpose. There's a quote about the Viet Cong that goes something like: "To demoralize the enemy you send a child carrying a flower and wearing a bomb. To really demoralize the enemy you then send five more children with flowers and no bomb."
"We're going to get rid of guns and shootings by removing part of the Bill of Rights then bringing heavily armed cops from door to door and killing people" is not the obviously easy PR victory you think it is. Have you missed the last few years? At this point "replace as many cops as we can with unarmed social workers because cops can't be trusted with guns" is a serious movement. "Swatting" is a thing you do when you're a horrible person who wants to risk someone's life, not something we want to make mass policy. "Deck the cops out for SWAT and send them door to door" isn't on the table among the left any more, much less the right.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link