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 -
I think that almost no one believes data that contradicts what they see with their own eyes. And that is good, because there are million ways data can be limited, poorly recorded, confounded, erroneous, etc. And that applies a hundred times more so to numbers that are not "data" but complex statistical creations.
Data is useful as a check on personal experience. If the two contradict, then one simply has to do the work to see which is more likely to be wrong. There is no shortcut.
The one that bothers me personally is when I've seen people point to total crime data to show that crime hasn't risen in the major US cities. But as someone who lives in such a city, I know that simply reporting a crime is a very burdensome process of waiting hours for the police show up, and the police won't do anything anyways. I know that many (most) people don't report crimes in the city that would likely be reported as a crime in the burbs. Thus total crime number is rate-limited by the police capacity to arrive on the scene and take down a report; it has nothing to do with the actual rate of minor crimes. Thus trend data is absolutely useless. But you would only know this if you knew actually knew something about the city in question, and didn't blindly think that "data" is the highest source of truth.
However, we should remember why the specific phrase "lived experience" became the target of much ire. People have forever validly cited personal anecdotes during debates; but citing "lived experience" was a novel and obnoxious argumentation tactic. The appeal to "lived experience" was specifically being made when the person could not actually specifically describe the evidence they had seen with their own eyes. Rather than say something specific like, "I've had X many racist interactions in these situations in Y years ..." etc the person citing "lived experience" was citing something far more amorphous and undefinable. Or, the context was often that the person citing "lived experience" was claiming the sole right to interpret events that had happened to them. So person A says, "I have experience racism all the time, such as people asking me where I am really from." And B says, "Eh, I don't think that is racist, white people get asked about their ancestry to, that's just a result of living in a country that is a melting pot" and person A then responds, "how dare you deny my lived experience of racism."
In contrast something like this is a valid contribution to a debate:
HlynkaCG's claims are worth taking seriously. We should investigate this discrepancy. And maybe we find that he just had the bad luck of liking one kind of meat which has risen in price the most and when you do a more broad analysis the government numbers are correct... or maybe we find that the government economists are actually cooking the books.
This only works if accurate and relevant data actually exists in published form, which often it does not. You must avoid the "looking for the keys under the lamppost fallacy."
It's at least worthy of further investigation. Where did Ezra live? Who are his friends? If he grew up in a rich suburbs and all his black friends were friends he made at the Black Student Union at a private boarding school, then the reason for the discrepancy becomes obvious. His friend circle is not at all representative of the general population. If Ezra lived in very typical black neighborhood in south-side Chicago and all his friends were all from the neighborhood and public school, then his claims would be puzzling and worthy of more investigation. If Ezra was the only person saying this, I might think he was just making it up, or was ignorant of his friends behavior. But if other people like Ezra kept making the same claim, I might suspect there was something wrong with the government data.
In reality though, your Ezra is fictional The anecdotal evidence, even as supported by black activists like Ta-Nehisi Coates, corroborate the FBI numbers. Personally, I don't believe that blacks have a higher crime rate solely because of the FBI data, I believe it because of lots of anecdotes and from what I see with my own eyes. Actually, based on what I read from news stories and what I see with my own eyes, the FBI data likely significantly understates the black crime problem, because FBI data does not distinguish public crime (knock-out game against strangers) from private crime (eg, a bar fight).
The "lived experience" thing made me realize something, which I guess I'll put here:
I think it's actually a bit of a cheap trick by the OP to bring up the term "lived experience," as used by The Hated Woke, and try to equivocate it to the "Republican vibecession." The thing that makes the term "lived experience" noxious is precisely because it was often a lazy, vague justification presented by progressives for the idea of Massive Systemic Changes to Society. If Hlynka and others were vaguely citing their lives and pairing that with "therefore, we should change the order of things," that likely would get my hackles up, but they haven't really done that.
More options
Context Copy link
The best rebuttal against the argument that black arrest rates aren't reflective of actual crime rates is the government's own National Crime Victimization Survey, which, as I understand it, corroborates FBI offender data.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link