site banner
PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29676 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 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.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

If someone put up missing posters of Gazan children buried in rubble, it would still be a pretty awful move for someone to tear them down. You don't tear down other people's posters, and doing so looks especially bad when the posters are raising awareness of dead kids.

raising awareness

I do not wish my awareness raised.

I don't like ads, but I don't tear them down.

You don't tear down other people's posters

I do it routinely with illegally placed ads. (if not easy to remove, I notify local government so they remove it)

I also did it with propaganda stickers.

(note, I am from Poland)

(bonus note: be careful, there are reports of razors being glued below stickers, more likely to happen with aggressive propaganda than ads)

If the posters are placed illegally, then yeah, you can tear them down. If they're not illegally posted, then tearing them down is suppressing the speech of fellow citizens, and you don't do that. It's un-American.

You don't get to decide what speech is or is not appropriate! That's the whole point! If you don't like it, put up your own poster: but what is or is not allowed to be said in the public square is not based on your opinions. That's the whole point of the 1st Amendment.

Tearing down posters is a much a sort of speech as putting them up in the first place. Consider the natural limit if we could only put up posters and never take them down: the whole world would be tiled with posters. Since you don't own the public square in the first place, you don't have a right to have your displays persist there indefinitely. And the only productive way to communicate "this discussion isn't important in the first place" is to shut down the conversation. Allowing it to evolve into a debate implicitly accepts that it is a debate worth having.

Silencing others is not speech, it's censorship.

If speech can be used as a weapon to silence others by overwhelming them with speech, then the antidote - censorship - must also be a form of speech.

That doesn't logically follow at all: that's like saying that if poison can be used as a weapon, then the antidote to poison is also a form of poison.

If someone uses their speech to overwhelm someone else's speech (for instance, if someone is giving a lecture and someone else starts screaming on a megaphone so that you can't hear them) then they're engaged is censorship. Their speech itself is not censorship, but the form they are presenting it in is censoring others.

No it wouldn't be am awful move. Putting the posters up was the awful move, tearing them down is restorative justice. You don't get to spread propaganda in paper form on public surfaces.

Yes! You do! Unless it's a place where it's illegal to put up posters, you totally get to do that!

Depending on exactly where the posters are placed, you kind of do, given the First Amendment.

Yeah, uh, fuck that noise. Buy a billboard ad. Better yet. Make "advertising" on walls or visibly from the street illegal in general.

If someone put up missing posters of Gazan children buried in rubble, it would still be a pretty awful move for someone to tear them down.

Bingo and that is why both the progs and the dissident-right object so vehemently to any implication (or reminder of the fact) that Israelis might be victims. The cease-fire advocates are not anti-war as much as they are on the other side.

You might not tear down other people’s posters, but progressives do. They did it to the pro-life group on campus when I was a college student. They did it to “All Lives Matter” posters when that became an issue (and even got the progressive administrations to do it for them). They’ve done it to any number of student groups who tried to advertise a conservative speaker, after which they’ve often followed up with a heckler’s veto over the speech itself. Progressives, especially progressive college students and, increasingly, faculty, aren’t used to operating on a level playing field with their opponents.

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