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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   25373 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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This most recent iran thread is a complete shitshow and I lost braincells reading it. Can the mods make a containment thread or something, I think it may have reached the point where it's necessary.

Edit: Just fuck off and give me a 6 month - 1 year ban or even permanently instead of this weaksauce bullshit. The below iran thread is seriously reddit and twitter tier on both sides and if this is what the mods think of as good high effort discussion then just do me a favor and show me the door. Otherwise I can't resist responding in kind.

Edit 2: Yes, that is literally what I'm asking for that's why I did it.

  • -11

Edit: Just fuck off and give me a 6 month - 1 year ban or even permanently instead of this weaksauce bullshit. The below iran thread is seriously reddit and twitter tier on both sides and if this is what the mods think of as good high effort discussion then just do me a favor and show me the door. Otherwise I can't resist responding in kind.

Post-ban editing is usually a permabannable offense, and we are discussing giving you your wish.

We do not control the quality of discourse. You do. We are not going to rearrange the board to accommodate your triggers and kneejerk reflexes. You can resist responding like this. You choose not to. Your emotional incontinence is a You problem.

I asked you only a month ago to stop with the low effort posts. You are doing this at the top level too.

I said I'd do a month long ban last time, and I'm not going back on that threat. 30 day ban.

I like the banhammer flair that got added to the offending post. Is that feature new?

Nah, it’s been around. It only shows up if we ban from the comment’s context menu, though. If we go through the user page (say, to compare recent comments), I don’t think it shows up.

How so?

I'd like to see one, because it would allow for smaller updates that don't fit into broader conversations already existing.

The discussion has been fine so far. What you are noticing is that the war is contentious compared to most discussion here because while the sub has been broadly right-leaning and probably honestly strongly right wing since (at least) 2017, there is a lot of disagreement about this war. That’s not a bad thing, although it does create more work for the moderators.

I think there is an argument to be made that somewhat independently of the ideological drift, the discussion culture of the forum has degenerated (because moderators have all but stopped moderating on tone, and the community stopped caring). The ideological drift somewhat masked this, because there was simply not all that much disagreement (the few token left-wingers usually are either on the verge of meltdown or necessarily have pathologically low agreeableness so it's easy to dismiss bad interactions involving them as being their fault). Now we have a topic that splits the dominant camp, and thus throws the degraded discussion culture into relief.

Strongly agree. Although, is there anywhere left with good discussion culture, other than literal rationalists / LessWrong

Hey, it's me!

It's Char Aznable "I come here to laugh at you" tier shit for me; I need to come to a site where I think everyone is wrong/degenerate and engage honestly once or twice a week to get my mind right; too many people agreeing with you is bad for the soul, which is unfortunate for everyone who does feel comfortable here. There used to be a couple high profile dudes taking all comers, now it's just people doing mid effort drive bys at most.

I think it's a shame what happened after the end of the reddit incarnation; the standard ideological boiling has even driven off most of the traditional anti-semites. It's like seeing the last mammoth sinking into a tar pit.

I don’t think moderation has become much more lax. Regulars were always held to lower standards (justified in many ways) and now the board is pretty much all regulars, so the spectacular flameouts of the Reddit days are few and far between (the last was what, Hlynka?).

I still don't understand the flameout ban, although I totally get that he was going to have to be banned eventually. I miss having a different classical conservative on the board and maintain that implementing a smoke the whole pack rule would have been a better short term solution, sort of like how secure signals got the single issue posting rule.

implementing a smoke the whole pack rule

What's this

If you say something contentious enough to trigger a dogpile, you have to reply to every comment on it.

Right now I kind of wish this place had location markers, or at least an optional flag we could choose. But the best proxy I guess is how opinions seem to change drastically depending on time of day. Specifically, it's when the European posters go to sleep and the American posters wake up.

Guten Morgen. Have I already mentioned today that I am German?

Sounds like something a Russian spy would say...

Not sure if joking, but you're quite right. That is indeed the current position of the German establishment when faced with people supporting right-wing views or organizations: "You're a stooge for Putin!". There's some truth to it with the AfD having links to Russia and generally being more favorable to Russian interests than the mainstream parties. But beyond that, it's just used as a general-purpose blunt-force argument aimed to push rightists on the backfoot.

On Reddit too, people posting RW opinions are considered "Russian bots."

Sounds like those events where everyone has to wear a name tag with pronouns and identity markers to make the progressive stack enforcement easier. Israel continues being uniquely good at eliciting far left/far right horseshoe effects.

Most regulars are known to be American, Indian, Russian, Jewish, Chinese, Finnish, Dane…. I also keep a mental catalog of who might be what nationality based on their respective knowledge on things if they never explicitly revealed their nationality. I don’t think anyone’s intentionally hiding it anyway, so what real use does a location marker have?

How do you remember all that about everyone here? It's really hard for me to remember who anyone is here on sites like this where there's no profile pic or anything.

If you make a habit of reading usernames and try just a little to remember, you end up retaining a lot through brute forced reinforcement.

For example RandomRanger and magic9mushroom are Australian. Southkraut German. 4bpp and quiet_nan are a little more coy but they're easy to round off to "generic European." Gasshk and MaiqtheTrue are women. And etc. all off the top of my head.

Many people have profile pics, basically a blob of color. Their flairs are colored, and their usernames have a specific pattern. Yours, for example, starts with a capital B, has three capital letters, and is medium in length…

A lot of regulars also mention their nationality or ethnicity once in a while. Eventually you just remember.

I dunno. Maybe it’s my autism showing, but the autism prevalence here has to be really high.

sites like this where there's no profile pic or anything.

What are you talking about? A profile image shows up next to every comment, though it appears that everyone in this thread except me has not bothered to set his image.

it appears that everyone in this thread except me has not bothered to set his image.

That's what I'm talking about. And most people don't have anything else to really distinguish themselves either.

at least an optional flag we could choose

Nothing is stopping you from putting such information in your flair or your profile text.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

Right now I kind of wish this place had location markers, or at least an optional flag we could choose.

There was recently a discussion about this, and given the number of expats, we would need a dual flag system to mark country of origin and current location.

My flair conveniently does both already, in addition to proposed future country during the Balkanization process.

We were the rootless cosmopolitans all along!

“🇺🇸 (Brazilian)”

“🇯🇵 (American)”

“🇬🇧 (Pakistani)”

Lol. Try on:

“🇬🇧 (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿)”

If N. Ireland and Scotland ever end up leaving, will you revert to St. George's cross or just keep the Union Jack? And if you keep Wales, can you make the flag depict St. George and the Dragon? I presume that would coax them to leave too, but I would also like to present the historical missed opportunity of a victorious Britain in the American War for Independence stepping on snek.

My guess is, it would depend on the ideological characteristics of the ruling government at the time of hypothesized-split, and the highest probability scenario is retaining the Union Jack. Remnants of empires often cling to their symbols way past their original meaning. But if there is ever a polity in the British isles that will unironically fly St George's, I think it coincides with high joint probability of there being another polity, one that has adopted the shahada or similar.

"🇺🇸 (American)"

I spontaneously burst into cheers of "USA! USA! USA!" and my favorite foods are Hamburgers, Freedom Fries, and Fried Chicken.

"🇺🇸 (Heritage American)"

I cast a side-eye at all the Catholics and non-Hajnal Euro types around here.

People who self-identify as unhyphenated Americans are disproportionately likely to be Appalachian hillbillies, which means they are probably more likely to be descended from transHajnal Europeans (namely the Scots Irish) than other Euro-American subgroups.

Not true for me, but a good general rule overall.

Can you even be A Real American if your ancestors didn't move there at least 10000 years ago?

Specifically, it's when the European posters go to sleep and the American posters wake up.

I'm really curious what is your impression of the differences? Are the majority of pro-Zionist posts made by Americans? I don't visit this forum much anymore, so I don't know about the situation here. But I feel like Europeans are generally more critical of the genocide in Gaza and the current attack on Iran.

This community is a spinoff of a spinoff of a rationalist community, there are is no question there are a lot of Zionist Jews here.

The MAGA types that would be here are more likely to be of the variety highly skeptical of the war (the low-IQ MAGA rank-and-file that supports the war at like 90%+ are not represented here much as far as I can tell). High-IQ Iran War supporters here, very likely to be Jews. Not to say there also aren't skeptical Jews as well.

But I don't get why people would want a location marker to correlate people's opinions on this question. If you really wanted signal you would want a different kind of profile badge that would not be appropriate for this forum.

But I don't get why people would want a location marker to correlate people's opinions on this question.

Christianity is one question where location marker would be quite helpful. A commenter claiming to be a Catholic from the US is going to have some very different opinions, outlook and rhetoric compared to a European (or South American) Catholic.

It's interesting to see the parts of the American conservative coalition that are represented even after we account for tastes in intellectualism(like duh, megachurch Evangelicals do not want to engage in philosophical political discussion. That's not to say they're stupid, but they simply have different tastes). We have tradcaths but no orthodox Jews and I've never seen a confessional Lutheran. We have libertarian techbros and NrX types but few of the deep red RFK fan lifestyle skeptics- you know, the real life Ron Swanson types. Really very few crunchycons at all. None of the black dissidents you see hanging around conservative intellectual circles but lots of white nationalists. We've had conservative housewives in the past, but I think all of our women are working right now.

I've never seen a confessional Lutheran.

Hello.

like duh, megachurch Evangelicals do not want to engage in philosophical political discussion.

Speak for yourself! Some Evangelicals get C.S. Lewis-Pilled.

Are you a "megachurch" evangelical, though?

Eh. Depends on your definition. I’ve been at small churches and bigger churches over the years. Current church is on the big side, but I don’t know if it’s “mega”. I’m not sure how many members we have exactly, but there are two different service times and several hundred people at each service. Plus there’s a “satellite campus” on the other side of town, and another one up in the valley.

As a working definition, I would say a church is a megachurch if

  • it is not affiliated to a denomination
  • more than 1000 people watch the same sermons in real-time (either in person or by videolink)

But the interesting thing about megachurch Christianity as practiced in Red America is the distinctive theology and Church polity it produces.

The theology is de facto based around the "born-again" experience and the personal relationship between individual believers and Jesus (if you are being polite) or about being gay for Jesus (if you are being rude from a male perspective) or about Jesus wanting to be your perfect romance-novel boyfriend (if you are being rude from a female perspective).

The Church polity is based around the effectively total-within-their-Church authority of individual charismatic lead pastors who are openly permitted to keep a significant percentage of the collection plate for their personal consumption.

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Have any of your churches ever utilized a smoke machine during a worship service?

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confessional Lutheran

What does that mean, in this context?

A Lutheran belonging to a body which split from the main Lutheran body in his country over the belief that that body doesn’t embrace the Augsburg confession anymore. In the USA the main such body would be the Missouri synod, very common in intellectual conservative circles and big enough to be locally dominant in some areas- but all the self proclaimed confessional Protestants here seem to be reformed.

Missouri Synod Lutheran here. I do think I'm the only one on here, and I never post so it barely counts. Still, there's at least one.

Awareness of the confessional/mainline distinction is basically zero among non-churchgoing people that I've met in real life. Unfortunately, laypeople I meet sometimes hear "Lutheran" and think "ELCA."

I will say LCMS Twitter is surprisingly lively.

This is WELS erasure 😁

I only became aware of the various denominational splits years back when observing the Anglican Wars as they played out in TEC. As a Roman Catholic European outsider, it was fascinating to get any kind of look at American mainline Protestantism and how it tended to split along various lines.

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Awareness of the confessional/mainline distinction is basically zero among non-churchgoing people that I've met in real life. Unfortunately, laypeople I meet sometimes hear "Lutheran" and think "ELCA."

Awareness of that distinction was pretty close to zero for me as a churchgoer growing up.

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I actually had to look up the Lutheran church I grew up attending... Evangelical Lutheran, apparently (which is, confusingly enough, not "evangelical"?)

All I know is, the pastor was insistent that nobody bring lutefisk to the smorgasbord, which always disappointed my grandmother. Dunno where that falls ecumenically.

In Lutheran circles, "evangelical" means "believes in the gospel according to Luther's understanding of the gospel," or in other words believe in salvation by faith alone. Luther originally wanted his followers to be called "evangelicals" becaue he believed that his understanding of the gospel, evangelion, was the most important element of his theology. By this definition virtually all protestants are "evangelicals," roughly speaking, and it has that meaning in some of the northern European countries where Lutheranism became the normative version of Protestantism.

The term has come to mean different things in the British and US context because of the history of great revivals with the goal of convincing mass numbers of people to have an emotional experience of surrender to the divine, which was central to their understanding of the gospel in a way that Lutherans/Calvinists/Catholics generally connected to sacraments rather than conversion experiences. Evangelicals (in that sense) also strongly defined themselves as popular preachers who wanted to make large numbers of people have a conversion experience, and felt that naming themselves after the evangelion was worthwhile because that was their message. You could make the argument that Anglo-American evangelicals were also evangelicals in the sense Luther would have meant it, but they just shouted it really, really loudly.

In that sense, Methodism, Pentecostalism, and most forms of the Baptists had major evangelical influences, and you can still find some Anglicans in the UK (a few) and the US (a few more) who would identify with the evangelical movement.

The "Lutheran" term came about because the common Catholic custom was to call a heresy by the name of its inventor, as in Arianism, Hussitism, Calvinism, and also the old-fashioned Christian term for Islam that hydro likes to use, Mohammedanism.

I guess the lesson is that the terms people call themselves rarely denote something concrete. "Democrat" and "Republican?" Their dispute isn't really over whether the US should be a democracy or a republic, though some particularly confused and pedantic Republicans like to claim "the us isn't a democracy, it's a republic!" like those aren't compatible, and the US is of course a Federal Democratic Republic and those terms lent their names to the first American party system (Federalists vs Democratic-Republicans) and to the current party system, while "Democratic Republic" on its own means communist, and "The Democratic Republic of America" is basically the "Man in the High Castle" of conservative fear fantasies. We live in a confusing world, and whales are fish.

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Presumably it means, “Lutheran, with conservative theology,” or in other words a Lutheran who believes in the real presence as a literal metaphysical belief and takes the Augsburg confession as a literal statement of truth about reality.

Though I’m not sure it’s true we don’t have any. I know we have some confessional Protestants who have positive views of Lutheran scholasticism. Presumably at least one of those is a Lutheran.

Yes, my impression is that the Europeans are much more critical of the war in Iran and the US in general, for obvious reasons. Americans are... pretty split about Zionism, but a lot more likely to support Trump. But I'm just generalizing wildly based on time of day and how people write. I have no idea where most of the people here are from.

But I feel like Europeans are generally more critical of the [self-defense by Israelis against Hamas terrorism emanating from Gaza] and the current attack on Iran.

FTFY. But that's my impression as well.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds

Is this the same Human Rights council that has condemned Israel more times than every single other country in the world combined? Or is that a different part of the UN? If so, I'm not sure they're entirely unbiased... or I'm wrong, and Israel really is worse than Iran, Russia, North Korea, China, and everyone else on the planet put together.

Iran, Russia, North Korea, China

None of these countries are actively committing genocide (maybe with the exception of China and the Uyghurs, though I don't entirely believe the over-the-top claims). The grossest thing about Israel is that they did manage to build a semi-coherent ethnonationalist state, but ruined it. Naturally, if you know what I mean, greed got the best of them, and they pushed their borders further outwards, far beyond where the Jews live. But an ethnostate cannot be an ethnostate state if there are other ethnicities living within its borders. There is only one solution.

None of these countries are actively committing genocide

China aside, as you said, I suppose it all depends on who you ask. But isn’t that always the case?

Russia’s violently imperial war in Ukraine is not only a flagrant violation of international law and interstate norms, but it also carries all the hallmarks of an ongoing campaign of genocide in Ukraine. From Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s 7,000-word screed that systematically and historically denies Ukrainian nationhood; to mass graves uncovered in almost every Ukrainian territory liberated from Russian occupation; to the Kremlin’s public campaign of mass deportation and of Ukrainian civilians and children through “filtration” concentration camps; to the deliberate targeting of maternity hospitals, medical facilities, schools, and basic civil infrastructure; to the widespread employment of rape and sexual violence as a weapon of terror—rarely has genocidal intent and pattern of action been so clearly telegraphed and demonstrated for the world to see. According to the five-point definition under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Russia has demonstrated clear, notorious, and mounting evidence in all five criteria, even though only one must be fulfilled to qualify as genocide.

The grossest thing about Israel is that they did manage to build a semi-coherent ethnonationalist state

Weren't there always some number of Arab citizens in Israel, with full rights?

Russia

The difference between what Russia is doing in Ukraine and Israel in Palestine is that Russia is taking Russian lands with ethnic Russians living on them. They are correcting previously incorrectly drawn borders which paid little mind to ethnicity, hence the ethnic tensions. For the situations to be comparable, Russia would have to take over Lviv.

Weren't there always some number of Arab citizens in Israel, with full rights?

There will always be minorities. But, also:

The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people

Iran is run by an ethnic supremacist Arab ruling class forcing (at pain of death or worse) the native Persian populace to bow to their god. The tens of thousands of protesters they killed are more legibly a genocide than the fog-of-war deaths of far fewer non-Hamas Palestinians.

The Iranian ruling class is not Arab.

Is this the same Human Rights council that has condemned Israel more times than every single other country in the world combined? Or is that a different part of the UN? If so, I'm not sure they're entirely unbiased... or I'm wrong, and Israel really is worse than Iran, Russia, North Korea, China, and everyone else on the planet put together.

In my experience, the anti-Israel types genuinely believe that Israel is the very worst country in the entire world by a wide margin. Any other position would require an admission that the UN is biased against Israel. And an admission that the UN is biased against Israel undermines a whole slew of UN pronouncements that they LOVE.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds

I'm not going to debate it in this sub-thread.

Then please don't make drive-by shitposts on the topic. If you don't want to have the conversation, don't bring it up.

Then please don't make drive-by shitposts on the topic.

Funny, I was thinking basically the same thing about the post I responded to. Admittedly, it was tempting to rise further to his bait.

Most regulars are relatively open about what they support and what their broad tribal identity is, I don’t think this is a big issue here.

You can definitely tell the Iran war has really hit some identity-buttons, because most of the thread is about what the war (or the causes of the war) means for national identity, political identity, and of course, as always, the Jews.

I have very strong views of opposition to the Iran war as I think it will not work and puts Americans in harms way for an impossible objective, but psychologically it's very hard to try to argue measuredly against accusations from foreigners that my country is evil, even if I agree with them on the object level. The fact that things like the Iran war harms American prestige abroad factors into my feelings about it, but it's one thing to evaluate American desire for regime change and dislike of non-aligned regimes in the Middle East from the inside, and another to feel like I have to justify my country in the midst of our worst impulses.

I think some element of the "I voted for this, bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran," energy is a kind of reaction formation to feeling like the country as an entity is being criticized from the outside based on actions that almost everyone in the country is either opposed to or bewildered by. Everyone I've talked to on the ground is completely confused by what's going on, no one is going John McCain "Iran deserves it."

Americans have a lot of that -- feeling like we're powerful enough that the world inevitably views us as wildly suspicious, yet without much international glory and prestige to show for it. We theoretically have the power to level cities, yet our government could not protect us from a Saudi rich boy living in an Afghan cave flying fully-fueled jetliners into skyscrapers, and the headquarters of our military. Inevitably some level of response is "maybe we gonna level they god-damn cities."

I think the American psychology is a sense of being burdened with the criticism, responsibility, and threat that being a great power inevitably generates, but without any of the respect, from within or without, that such power might engender. Some element of our worst impulses, and even the Trumpian "America First" political movement, is about examining the Machiavellian dilemma, observing that with the US's power it is unlikely to ever be loved, and therefore choosing whatever means might make us feared.

Unfortunately, war is always a complete shitshow. But especially so when identity, fear, pride, ego, and power get involved. In other words, always.

I appreciate the sentiment of this comment. We can direct all Iran war discourse directly at phailyoor.

I get the irony of me posting a discourse on the war to someone who was upset about the discourse about the war, but my point was that I actually agree with phailyoor that the thread is a shitshow and I wanted to provide a meta-discussion on what exactly made it so frustrating to read. If phailyoor is unhappy with this I'm happy to re-post it somewhere else.

Edit: I notice that phailyoor got angrier after posting his comment and is now banned. I'm sorry if my comment did something to contribute to the frustration, my goal was to commiserate and not to add to the fire. I found the Iran thread frustrating as well, and hard to read.

We very rarely need "containment threads." We're not that large and there isn't that much activity.

If you don't like it, don't read it.

Can you not minimize the thread instead? Splitting the small userbase is bad for discourse.

I feel like that's what the transnational Thursday thread should be for.

The transnational thursday thread is pointless. There is essentially a separation between ‘issue’ discussion and ‘community’ discussion on the board. Issue discussion (encompassing news, politics, diplomacy, the economy, culture as it relates to the above obviously) goes on the culture war thread, community (encompassing casual social discussion, media recommendation, slice of life updates, advice, humor) goes into the various other threads.

There is only one overlap thread (Sunday) which kind of works since it’s the last thread of the week and the CW thread is quieter. Other threads are the occasional essay and links to blogs.

There are culture wars outside the US as well though.

I am registering my support for a schizo Saturday thread. Put conspiracy theories, manifestard ramblings, fringe science ideas etc in the second to last thread of the week. It'll be dead Monday or Tuesday, contain all that shit to one place.

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