site banner
ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38752 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.

I was reflecting on the right-wing tactics in a world where they have less and less cultural power, and the Eye of Sauron in Washington is completely fixated on destroying them whenever they are.

I, as a chronic pessimist, don't think that they will ever adapt their tactics fully against the left-wing. Because, unlike the left that moves only by using Conflict Theory, the right-wing coalition suffer often from desertion, moderatization of issues, necessity of creating coalition with more moderates party and organizations etc.

For example, how anyone can think that the right-wing can be successful when, if they are in a coalition, only the most moderate and centrist policies that they promote can pass?

In a left-wing coalition you can be sure that, in a given arc of time, the coalition will implement policies that are more centrists first, then they will pass to more radical positions, and so on and so on.

The arc of history goes left also because the right has no sense of scale and can only concede, never take something. The only place where the government and administration (But not the Culture or the youngs!) have gone right in the West is Hungary, and only because Fidesz has total control!

Meanwhile, in order to help the left, you need only a smallish more leftwing party in the coalition, who will ask for more immigration, more of something, that will be for sure accepted.

That is why I absolutely despise centrists coalitions: Because they will negotiate with the Left, receiving something inconsequential on the long run (like a lesser tax on something useless) and giving to the leftist part something that cement their coalition (immigration, genderification, more cultural egemony)

How the right can win something if, whetever party or coalition you vote, they will for sure adopt with time leftists policies?

The process is like this:

  • Right wing comes in power, they adopt more centrist policies and get attacked as nazi anyway.

  • Centrist parties come in power, the negotiate with the left and with time leftist policies get adopted as a result of this.

  • You vote moderate left, and with time they switch to some more radical leftists positions.

It is maddening how there is no escape from this spiral.

The problem here is less with journalism and medias or whatever being left wing, and more with the right-wing being completely useless at doing anything of substance.

It's not entirely correct that the right always adopts leftist policies. Gun control policies have been suffering multiple defeats over the years. Pro-life policies have never been abandoned. And while fiscal conservatism is mostly dead (or at least comatose), the taxes aren't as high as they have been at many periods in American history.

Gun control policies have been suffering multiple defeats over the years.

Sure. For instance, there was recently a decision striking down discretionary-issue carry permits in New York. So now you can theoretically get a carry permit on objective criteria (except there's still a loosey-goosey acceptable morals standard), but the carry permit now doesn't allow you to carry a gun in such a wide variety of areas that it's nigh-useless. Some "defeat".

I am not saying gun controllers in New York (one of their primary bastions) are completely vanquished. I am just saying they were handed a defeat, and that the right never abandoned the cause and never adopted the leftists policies. I do not claim the right won ultimately, finally and completely - not even on gun rights - I am just saying they have not abandoned the struggle, and the struggle has not been in vain.

This seems to me to ignore all the times the left loses. The right wants to conserve how things are because what worked in the past and especially in a nation as successful as America is likely to work in the future. The left is like a scientist who runs a 1000 experiments trying to find a physics breakthrough. Most of the time the experiment fails. The rights job is to block the left from doing too much but once an idea appears to be working then they take the position.

Also the right has won before. Neoliberalism was a right wing extremists ideology. It has largely been adopted by the left. The left now has to frame their social spending in neoliberal terms and not as plain redistribution. Student loan forgiveness isn’t just a handout to constituencies but will boost growth by increasing education, spending power, and allowing college students more freedom to pursue their passions.

The left is like a scientist who runs a 1000 experiments trying to find a physics breakthrough. Most of the time the experiment fails. The rights job is to block the left from doing too much but once an idea appears to be working then they take the position.

That's a nice attempt to try to make sure that everyone has their proper place, but, I can't actually endorse this.

I'm not just an admin who signs off on the left's "experiments". I have my own substantive moral view of how the world should work, one that is not merely reducible to "keep things the way they are".

You can still have you own moral view and want to do things on the right. And sometimes we make moves to reverse things.

But I was replying to why the right always loses and for the most part it’s because the primary purpose of right and left is for the right to guide and block the left. And only occassionally allow change.

Right as moderator is certainly a popular idea among among the moderate left. For it to actually work, you need the Right to buy in, though, and I question the degree to which that is sustainable. The problem is that the "experiments" you describe have consequences, and those consequences can be used to draw conclusions on whether continued coexistence is desirable. Choose your experiments poorly enough, and the lab burns down.

For the right to buy in to ‘right as moderator’ entails the left acknowledging that their ideas can sometimes fail for reasons beyond the usual lack of funding complaint, and the right to accept that past ideas they support came from the left.

This is not the political culture we see in the USA.

The problem is that conservative ideas are only popular among the conservative base to the extent that they can be used to make culture-war hay. When it comes time to turn this rhetoric into policy, the politicians know that it won't fly, so they back off toward moderate reforms. For example, most Republicans in the US blame "tax and spend Democrats" for a whole host of economic ills and advocate for a leaner Federal government. But when it comes to actually reducing spending, the big social programs are so popular among the conservative base that they're untouchable. No Republican is going to march into the US congress and advocate for a big plan to reform, let alone eliminate, Social Security. Or Medicare. And these two programs alone account for nearly 60% of the entire Federal budget. Add in military spending and you're looking at 3/4 of the Federal budget that's off-limits to conservatives to any kind of cuts. Add in that most conservative constituents expect at least minimal spending in other areas, and grand plans of budget cuts are reduced to trimming around the edges.

So instead you end up with things like perennial calls to defund public broadcasting. PBS and NPR have been in the crosshairs of conservatives for some time, particularly because their news programs have a leftist slant. One issue, though, is that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's budget is so small that scientific notation is needed to express it as a percentage of Federal spending, so eliminating it is more about signaling than about actual spending cuts. The other issue is that while NPR and PBS news are undeniably left-wing (NPR to a greater degree), they are also pretty much the last bastion of "traditional Western culture" in mainstream American media. For example, classical music would disappear from American airwaves in all but the largest markets if NPR ceased to exist.

An even better example is the utter failure of the Republicans to repeal Obamacare. Opposition to the program was a centerpiece of conservative politics from the act's proposal in 2009 all the way up to 2017. Yet a conservative trifecta couldn't do anything about it. It turns out that when you expand coverage to people who couldn't afford it before, you create a constituency that benefits from the program. Actually repealing the ACA would have meant that a ton of people would have gotten cancellation notices and the status of their healthcare coverage would be in limbo. So there was at least the early recognition that the "Skinny repeal option wasn't really viable"; something needed to replace the program that kept most of the essential protections in place. In a sense, this was already a capitulation, because it suggested that the Republicans' only real problem with the act was that it was endorsed by a Democrat, not because of anything substantive. But even then, they still failed to come up with "Obamacare under another name" and didn't have the votes to repeal the law. The best they could muster was a repeal of the individual mandate, a supreme irony in that the only part of a large Federal program they got rid of was the funding aspect, which only had the effect of making the policies more expensive than they were before. So in the end, all we get from conservatives in the US is moderate tax cuts, which only serve to increase the deficits the right is claiming are ruining our economy. The right can't get any traction beyond "moderate" reforms because there's simply no call for it

Maybe it is because I am European and I come from a different political culture, but a lot of these actions make no sense to me.

It is NPR public and at the same time insanely left wing? It is simple, you are the government! You decide who staff the NPR and PBS and whatever! Are the journalists there unsatisfacted? They will leave or bow. Is the problem classical music or traditional western music or whatever? Fund another national public broadcast who will do these things!

I understand the libertarian political culture, but leaving these things at the force of the market will help only the left, not the right.

you are the government! You decide who staff the NPR and PBS and whatever!

This was called the Spoils System, which (as Wikipedia will helpfully tell you) was fought and eliminated in the US for being a hotbed of cronyism and nepotism. If this process also incidentally eliminated the electorate's ability to put any kind of break on bureaucratic sclerosis or culture drift, well, it's a short encyclopedia article, no room to mention everything.

The public broadcasting situation in the US is complicated. NPR and PBS aren't so much monolithic entities like the BBC but amalgamations of local stations. Congress created NPR and PBS and set requirements for member stations. The member stations can't be commercial and are often owned by public universities or nonprofit corporations that exist solely to run the stations. The member stations in-turn chose directors to run the national-level organizations. Member stations also produce most of the content, some of which airs locally and some of which is nationally syndicated. The government's only active involvement is through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. CPB board members are political appointees, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, but like other independent government agencies the board members are subject to terms and can't simply be fired (although I'm sure there's some impeachment process that's never been invoked). That being said, the board seats are apolitical and most presidents simply reappoint whoever's currently serving, regardless of political party. That's because CPB's power is basically limited to distributing its funding among local member stations. They don't produce any content or make any editorial decisions, they just deal with funding. And this funding is what's at issue when conservatives talk about eliminating NPR and PBS.

It should be noted, though, that this funding makes up surprisingly little of the overall public broadcasting budget. Member stations only get about 10% of their funds from CPB grants. The rest comes from donations from individuals, businesses, and private foundations. Every public station has a "pledge season" a couple times a year where they interrupt programming to incessantly beg for money for a couple weeks. It should be noted that most of the content on these stations isn't notoriously left-wing. On PBS it's basically limited to NewsHour, the nightly news program, and that isn't even that far to the left. On radio most of the content is either music, locally produced programming, locally produced programming that is syndicated nationally, and independently produced programming. The notoriously left-wing part of NPR is the daily news magazines produced by NPR itself, Morning Edition and All Things Considered. And at that it's mainstream urban left-wing, not radical left-wing. NPR itself, though, gets little to no money from the government directly; its budget mostly comes from syndication fees paid my member stations to air its content. The reason it leans left is that most of the people who donate to member stations are educated PMC lefty urbanites, and he who pays the piper gets to call the tune. If NPR decided to go MAGA its member stations would stop paying for its content and if they didn't, they'd see their donations dry up pretty quickly.

The USA is different in part because of highly successful private enterprises with a right wing slant.

Sometimes it’s not about tactics. Sometimes it’s just hopeless, and that’s it.

Were there any “tactics” that dissidents under Stalin could have used to make the fall of communism happen faster than it did? Doesn’t seem very plausible.

Dissidents under Stalin didn’t control two out of the three most populous provinces to the point of telling federal corruption investigations ‘no’.

It's interesting how strong a narrative attractor WWII continues being; it's the year 2022 and the descendants of the participants still want to LARP as being on the Eastern Front. Someone around here (or perhaps at our Operation Gladio over at Reddit) posted a clever quip the other day along the lines of "of course [right wingers] are nazis, because [left wingers] are communists and the only working definition of nazi has been 'someone who fights against communists' all along"; the converse ("...the only working definition of communist is 'someone who fights against nazis'") seems to be just as serviceable.

Dissidents under Stalin were hunted down and shot.

Here the dissidents can actually win election and make laws.

The point was that there is such a thing as a hopeless political situation. I wasn’t comparing our present situation to Stalinist Russia, nor was I offering any thesis on what the necessary and sufficient conditions for a “hopeless political situation” are.

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