site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25087 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 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.

10
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Even granting everything you just said for the sake of argument, I still don't understand how that can or should result in someone actually believing in the privacy of their own mind that Jan 6 wasn't violent and bad.

There's a classic Scott Alexander essay about this exact issue, so I'm just going to quote a bit:

If he can unilaterally declare a Worst Argument, then so can I. I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be this: "X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member[...]"

...Suppose someone wants to build a statue honoring Martin Luther King Jr. for his nonviolent resistance to racism. An opponent of the statue objects: "But Martin Luther King was a criminal!" Any historian can confirm this is correct. A criminal is technically someone who breaks the law, and King knowingly broke a law against peaceful anti-segregation protest - hence his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail. But in this case calling Martin Luther King a criminal is the noncentral. The archetypal criminal is a mugger or bank robber. He is driven only by greed, preys on the innocent, and weakens the fabric of society. Since we don't like these things, calling someone a "criminal" naturally lowers our opinion of them.

The opponent is saying "Because you don't like criminals, and Martin Luther King is a criminal, you should stop liking Martin Luther King." But King doesn't share the important criminal features of being driven by greed, preying on the innocent, or weakening the fabric of society that made us dislike criminals in the first place. Therefore, even though he is a criminal, there is no reason to dislike King.

This all seems so nice and logical when it's presented in this format. Unfortunately, it's also one hundred percent contrary to instinct: the urge is to respond "Martin Luther King? A criminal? No he wasn't! You take that back!" This is why the noncentral is so successful. As soon as you do that you've fallen into their trap. Your argument is no longer about whether you should build a statue, it's about whether King was a criminal. Since he was, you have now lost the argument. Ideally, you should just be able to say "Well, King was the good kind of criminal." But that seems pretty tough as a debating maneuver, and it may be even harder in some of the cases where the noncentral Fallacy is commonly used.

In such a situation, there's a lot of different approaches available. Two examples:

"No, King was not a "criminal", in the sense you appear to be using the word."

"Yes, King was a "criminal" in a very limited sense, but that sense is not germane to this discussion. Applying it here adds no relevant information, so I object to it being so applied." In any case, simply insisting that the technical definition is met and therefore the label is fair to apply is unproductive, because the context swamps the technical question entirely.

Another way to say this would be that I'd happily agree that the protest was "violent" in the sense that my last paintball game was violent, and "bad" in the sense that Taco Bell messing up my last meal order was bad. I suspect that this sort of agreement is not what you or most other people arguing that they're "violent" and "bad" are looking for, though, which sort of indicates that it is in fact about more than the words themselves, that the implications matter as well. And if the implications do in fact matter, than it is more honest to argue the point than to allow a pretense of agreement where no meaningful agreement actually exists. To most people, "violent" and "bad" mean "something significant and meaningful should be done about this", and I strongly disagree.

none of this is a matter of masks being on or off. People cannot generally bring themselves to believe that this is a purely pedantic argument over strict, rigorous definitions, and so they are arguing what they perceive to be the core of the issue as best they can, I think.

I'm familiar with that classic essay, but that's not at all describing what I'm doing. I think the Jan 6 mob's behavior was, on its own merits, worthy of contempt, shame, and mass criminal charges. This is not because I'm lazily applying words like "violent" and letting my opinion of the event be colored by the baggage the word and its central examples come with. I don't particularly care what words you or anyone else want to use to describe it, as long as we agree on what actually physically happened there on the ground (which, alas, I'm not so sure we all do. You seem perhaps more reasonable than some other posters in this regard).

My opinion of the Jan 6 mob also has absolutely nothing to do with the detestable behavior of the 2020 rioters and their shameful defenders in the Blue Tribe. I still can't fathom how one's opinion of the two even could be related. As if our opinion of the perpetrators would change in a counterfactual world where one event happened and the other didn't. That is such an alien moral framework to me I don't even know how to begin to understand it.

And most people would probably be with you in punishing J6ers if the previous consensus on violence hadn't been utterly thrashed by progressives and fellow sympathizers. So yeah, they're not judged as harshly because the standards changed. We weren't aware they had changed, but media consensus dictatated otherwise. And this is somehow incomprehensibly alien to you? Come now. That's a pose.

So you would be willing to throw the book at J6ers because you feel they objectively warranted it. Congratulations; now what? I am more interested in fair treatment than I am justice as a terminal goal, because I think that's the superior algorithm for a host of reasons. So what if I think J6 qualified as violent by some technical metrics? So does play-shoving a friend, and I'm not going to entertain anybody calling that violent just because Webster says so.

So if BLM wasn't violent, then neither was J6. As I said before, this is indeed partly cynical. But is also deadly serious. I refuse to call J6 violent because of the valence of that word, much in the same way I don't consider assimilation to be cultural erasure, that taxation is theft, or that the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is ethnic cleansing, even though any of those could be considered technically true. This isnt being cryptic, or hiding behind a mask. Why do you assume this some deliberate, self-inflicted partisan error?

So yeah, they're not judged as harshly because the standards changed. We weren't aware they had changed, but media consensus dictatated otherwise. And this is somehow incomprehensibly alien to you? Come now. That's a pose.

I think I didn't do a good enough job explaining what I mean, so I can genuinely see how you would think that. To clarify, I'm fine with outwardly downplaying J6 because of the new standard that Summer 2020 wrought. What I'm confused and concerned about is that some people seem to believe that J6 wasn't bad on its own merits. As in, if Summer 2020 hadn't happened, it seems some people still wouldn't think J6 was a big deal and that the perpetrators still shouldn't have been charged or even condemned. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding them.

So what if I think J6 qualified as violent by some technical metrics? So does play-shoving a friend, and I'm not going to entertain anybody calling that violent just because Webster says so. So if BLM wasn't violent, then neither was J6. As I said before, this is indeed partly cynical. But is also deadly serious. I refuse to call J6 violent because of the valence of that word

As I explained to FC, it's not that Jan 6 was bad "because it was violent", as if we're robotically applying a flowchart of "matches dictionary definition of violent" -> "is therefore worthy of condemnation and criminal charges". Jan 6 was worthy* of condemnation and criminal charges because of what actually happened there. I don't care what words you want to use to describe it. I care that people see what happened and condemn what they're seeing as harshly as I believe it ought to be condemned. Yet so many people seem to have convinced themselves that it wasn't actually a big deal and that we don't actually see what we can plainly see on video.

* Again, on its own merits. There's a reasonable argument to be made that the new standard of Summer 2020 compels us to go light on J6ers, at least outwardly.

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