site banner
ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38751 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 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.

40
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

how ultra-orthodox Jews in NYC are funneling billions in public money for use in their yeshivas. Students are barely taught how to read and write in English

There may be something here, but let's frame this in comparative terms. How is this different from regular public schools? And do the educational outcomes at the end of this produce bad societal results? For instance, is there a lot of welfare usage, violent crime etc. in ultra-orthodox circles?

Hasidim are underrepresented among violent criminals, true, but their welfare use is the literal highest in the nation- in part because they refuse to undertake any secular education whatsoever and do not do any secular work.

I’m not saying ‘send cps into them, force their kids to attend public schools, break their culture wide open’, but we can easily stop paying the bills for their lifestyle and expect them to support themselves. I’m sure they have the wherewithal to support themselves at least to the extent of, say, rural Mississippi.

I understand that this happens as lot in Israel too, and fuels a lot of Israeli unhappiness towards the Hasidics (who also refuse to perform the military service that is mandatory for Israelis because it "violates their religious tenets."

No successful society tolerates parasites and freeloaders in their midst. The reason the West is failing is because our leaders are gutless people-pleasers who lack the moral culture to persecute any minorities who behave this way, for fear that they'll be accused of bigotry.

The hasidim are protected and accommodated largely for political purposes; ‘avoiding the appearance of bigotry’ has nothing to do with it. They live in high concentrations and vote as a block, that’s why.

That kind of highly-polarised tribalism is a very dangerous game to play. In the short-term, it gets your group what they want, but in the long-term it fuels lots of resentment towards them. This kind of heavily-polarized tribal mindset is the reason that the Jews have been driven out of almost every country they took up residence in. It was only until WW2 - when Jews learned the costs of these cultural traits and adapted their society to be more multicultural and less insular - that their worldwide persecution stopped. And I think that if the Jews ever went back to their insular pre-WW2 attitudes (with the "us against them" mentality that many non-Jews find so distasteful), it would very quickly become socially acceptable to persecute them again.

Like I said, nobody likes freeloaders. You can't be part of a nation while prioritizing tribal loyalties over national identity. This kind of mindset is rightfully viewed as disloyalty at best, and treason at worst. In other words, if you are an American Jew, then you're American first and Jewish second. If you can't handle that - if you view your Jewish identity as more important than your American identity - then you don't deserve American citizenship. Likewise, if the Hasidic Israelis view themselves as Hasidics first and Israelis second, then they don't deserve Israeli citizenship.

Given the way polarization is shaking out in American society, Hasidic people are distinctly small potatoes in the tribalism issue.

There has to be a difference between "trying and failing to teach reading in English" and "refusing to teach English at all".

That's true, though in turn it raises a few awkward questions. One of the possible explanations for a bunch of 'schools' that have very long classroom hours and culturally-encouraged out-of-classroom study, yet get these test results is that they're learning to read, write, and do math in another language.

((You can find the ELA and math questions online.))

I don't see a functional difference that society should care about. Either we're ok with public money going to private enterprises because we don't want poor kids going hungry, or we are so enraged by a pack of religious nutters who figured out how to game the system that we are not.

Personally I don't really care which, but I find the sudden surge of interest when the religious scammers are jewish to be depressingly predictable. This article could have been written about any charter school in the country. The NYT is publishing it, and we're arguing about it because the position of jewish people in the progressive stack is in question.

To be clear, I don’t mind state resources going to catholic or Mormon or evangelical or Islamic schools separate from the local public school in large part because almost all catholic, evangelical, Mormon, and Islamic households have at least one working adult.

Generational welfare scammers shouldn’t get catered to by the state, even if it doesn’t cost any more than sending them to public schools. If I had my way, the kids of these communities would get bussed to inner city public schools with high percentages of households on welfare until the community boosted its male employment rate to match the surrounding community.

I'm fine with fixing the welfare laws to prohibit lifelong moochers in the vast majority of cases. I'm fine with banning public funds from going to religious schools.

I don't think it's logical to construct a just-so scenario that lands exclusively on one out of thousands of religious groups. Seems really specific.

I suppose that could depend on what you consider a "bad societal result" but I would say yes, definitely.

There is a lot welfare usage and active abuse, like the comment you replied to mentions in the bottom. There probably isn't a lot of "public" violent crime like gang murders (although I did find a report of a dynastic struggle in Jerusalem that lead to street brawls). However, I expect there's quite a lot of abuse that goes unreported and/or unresolved because, like with most cults, any such problems are swept under the rug or "handled" internally and victims (especially young or female victims, or victims of anyone with social power) are expected to not make waves for the sake of community cohesion. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haredi_Judaism#Controversies or search Google for something like "Hasidim and domestic violence."

In addition, members are typically made completely dependent on the community, and made to believe that any contact with people outside the community will make them unclean (like with the Roma or FLDS) so any violations of norms can be punished with shunning which is obviously legal but devastating. As with these others groups, even members who would like to leave may struggle to do so because they have no relevant skills, poor English, no outside family or friends, etc.

There presumably is a lot of indoctrination into a very regressive religious world view (what else are they going to do in a religious school that doesn't teach basic English) which leads to conflicts with the outside world, such as Hasidic men refusing to sit next to women on airplanes.

One could argue that, given how academically inclined Jews typically are, a failure to teach basic English and Math is much more damning of the Yeshivas than of urban public schools.

Yes, how dare they be free to practice their dumb religion? This is America.

Did you mean to reply to someone else? I can't imagine how that's a reasonable reply to what I wrote.

The NYTimes piece suggests that Hasidic schools do have worse outcomes on the 12-year-old reading and math tests than most low-income public schools. Hasidic schools counter that their students do better in (voluntary) high-school-aged tests, though it's not clear that those are much more representative. A lot of the rest of the numbers and arguments seem to be pulled or supplied from this YAFFED report, although they're a single-issue non-profit focused on this issue.

That said, the breadth of the difference looks wonky enough that I'd like to see the actual measurements, especially since I can't find any mandatory testing for private schools in New York or NYC specifically, and that the numbers don't make sense -- YAFFED repeatedly highlights the breadth and importance of this topic, with tens of thousands of students effected, and... I can't see how that matches with a total of 12 boy's schools, especially given the Hasidic preference for tiny classrooms. A different YAFFED report looks like it found low scores in a NYC-specific subset, but the numbers there don't look to match either. That report points to NYSED, which seems to love 40+MB Access or Excel files (why?!), and doesn't seem to cover non-charter private schools anyway.

EDIT: actually, the extent that this doesn't seem to match the internals of the NYSED researcher files worries me a lot about its general accuracy.

In terms of broader results: Hasadic communities have high poverty and welfare usage, but low reported rates of violent crime (although there's some controversy about how much domestic violence is not reported).

It's much worse than regular public schools according to the article. However, the zero pass rate seems suspicious, and perhaps they are deliberately blowing the test to avoid demonstrating whatever the real extent of the issue is.

For instance, is there a lot of welfare usage, violent crime etc. in ultra-orthodox circles?

Yes, but it's organized welfare usage and violent crime.

That's the interesting thing. Once you've assumed an extremely high level of coordination in the group you're examining, then you CANNOT assume that the outcomes you're seeing are 'natural' and accurate, because it would be relatively trivial for a highly coordinated group to game a test to produce a particular outcome for outsiders.

I could absolutely see it being simply known wisdom among Yeshiva students that you bomb all the state tests. Perhaps this is to camouflage the students who genuinely aren't learning the material or is itself a coordination mechanism (students who don't bomb the test are looked on with suspicion?) but there's no reason to assume they aren't aware that this test is producing signals that outsiders can see, and thus manipulating it (like everything else in the process) to their own ends.

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