site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 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.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Come on now. It's quite possible for something originally created for honest motives to be coopted later by abusers, without it being the fault of the Jews. I have no doubt that the Commerce Clause really was put there to control commerce, just like Jews really did need asylum during World War II. Using "asylum" as a pretext for illegal immigration because of how the bureaucracy works no more calls Jewish persecution into question than using the Commerce Clause for everything else calls into question its original intentions.

It's quite possible for something originally created for honest motives to be coopted later by abusers, without it being the fault of the Jews.

You mean like my other example - African-Americans and the Civil Rights Act?(I swear, right when I'm trying to tone down on my pathological hedging and over-explaining I run into a situation where I apparently needed to clarify some more...)

I think perhaps the Culture War has made you oversensitive? "Jews were left to die in industrialized murder and everyone agrees that was bad, so now no one can argue against asylum as such without taking the Nazi card to the face" is not by any charitable reading equivalent to "it was the fault of the Jews" and especially not "calling Jewish persecution into question" , especially when I gave another example of a minority with a similar dynamic that usually isn't used to imply that the victims are actually the secret protagonists of Western civilization and weren't actually oppressed (if anything the traditional argument is 'yes, but it's been X years now.")

Which you don't seem to take offense at or even note...I'm not really sure how that makes sense. Either you recognize the point I was making, in which case why not be charitable and apply it to the original example (since obviously what unites these two groups is not the sense that they're both secret protagonists of Western civilization), or you don't, in which case why are you not also defending the honor of African-Americans and how I'm "calling black persecution into question"? It seems like an easy point to make without any of the stuff that muddies the "JQ"

(I swear, right when I'm trying to tone down on my pathological hedging and over-explaining I run into a situation where I apparently needed to clarify some more...)

For what it was worth, I thought it was obvious what you meant.

I think a lot of bad law and politics are made by such over correcting, and I don’t think it’s the fault of previous victims, but at the same time, the over correcting is often defended by reference back to the original sin. And until such time as we can come to grips with the situation without any such attempt met with accusation of “denying” the original problem, it cannot be fixed into something sustainable. I think you can create a real asylum rule-set that would allow truly persecuted people in without having to simply create an “I declared it” carve out for anyone who wants in.

Having congress or parliament create laws that rigorously define the conditions for seeking asylum and requiring that people either wait in the original country for a hearing or living in a camp on the border seems reasonable. You could allow legislation to be passed to declare asylum zones for specific countries and classes of people (with sun setting) to allow for true emergencies.