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 -
... Racism?
Or, more charitably: you're variously making unsubstantiated declarations of fact that are not accepted into evidence yet, defending a motte that's entirely different from the bailey people are actually caring about, cherrypicking a couple of statistics that support your view from the entirety of human history and civilization which has literal billions of such metrics you could have chosen instead, and presenting a bunch of disparate and unrelated phenomena and demanding a singular explanation for all of them at once.
Maybe the tiny sub-sub-population of Ashkenazi Jews has an average advantage; good for you, the motte is about whether black people are too stupid to participate equally in the economy, and whether we need to shut down the borders because allowing generic 'immigrants' in will make us dumber.
The claim that adoption studies show kids following racial outcomes rather than parental outcomes is not a fact in evidence, and you would need to do a ton of work to establish what you actually empirically mean by the claim and that it is true, and then the answer for that individual claim would probably be something like 'half those adopted kids were still raised in poverty for the first 5 years' or 'people who put their kids up for adoption have worse genetics to start with and provide bad fetal environments' or 'yeah, we told you racism of various types exists and affects people's outcomes, good job demonstrating that.'
I have no idea what your claim about Tamil Nadu actually means in empirical terms or whether it's anything resembling true, but if it is I have no idea what economic and cultural and historical factors obtain in that part of the world, and from your fluency in English I bet you don't either. By one dumb metric Jeff Bezos alone represents 1% of US GDP, how sure are you that whatever metric you are invoking here is actually much less dumb than that? Based on your knowledge of the region and its history, how sure are you that something local variant of bigotry and discrimination akin to racism can't possibly be the explanation?
Etc. The answer here is 'that sounds a lot like a gish-gallop, and there's a reason people don't respond to those'.
Shit, I must have deleted my comment (you’re right, it was pretty low effort) the same minute you posted your response. I’m very sorry, please do make this reply elsewhere.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link