site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   35696 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Do people prefer more Sunday top-level-comments, or more Monday-morning top-level-comments?

Anyway, Richard Hanania writes, Nationalists Already Have the World They Want but Need to Pretend Otherwise:

As JD Vance said in a recent interview, representing the nationalist perspective,

You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus on and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.

Huge if true. We might ask what evidence there is that the left, or the “far left,” whoever that is, prioritizes foreigners over American citizens. The US spends about 1% of its federal budget on foreign aid. States and localities spend practically nothing on non-Americans, except in cases where there is a large number of immigrants, though they also pay taxes. Democrats feel pressure from the far left on trans, climate, and other issues, but raising the amount spent on foreign aid or otherwise expanding our circle of empathy seems to be a very low priority.

Sometimes you’ll hear “America First” types argue for restrictive immigration and trade policies, and maintain that in these areas our leaders have prioritized the interests of foreigners. Yet they ignore the fact that analysts have produced a great deal of research and economic analysis arguing that such policies are good for Americans. Nationalists may disagree, but practically nobody of any influence is saying that the goal of public policy is to make foreigners better off even if it comes at the expense of Americans. When the left criticizes Trump’s views on tariffs, they focus on Americans having to pay higher prices, not the possibility that Chinese workers might lose jobs.

This is what makes modern nationalism so incredibly bizarre. The world looks pretty much exactly as they want, which means they need to completely check out of reality in order to argue for their positions.

This... makes sense? It's too uncouth for many people to say "America should make x nominal sacrifice, because it's increases our soft power," but people rarely say "America should make x sacrifice, even though it's zero-sum, because altruism." That's not to say there's no international philanthropy lobby, but foreign policy seems to be mostly "mistake theory." So, in that sense, yes, nationalists already have the world they want. But do they need to pretend otherwise?

Nationalists claim to care about their own people, not to hate others. Yet such assertions are difficult to reconcile with their priorities. Whenever you hear someone is “America First,” it’s never that he wants to cure cancer or fix the housing supply issue. Instead, he talks about Ukraine or foreign aid. He’s relatively indifferent to most questions regarding how to make Americans’ lives better, but he’s certain that he doesn’t want to help outsiders.

Imagine a man who pays little attention to balancing his checkbook and doesn’t put much effort towards organizing his finances. At the same time, he lives in a state of absolute paranoia that his wife might occasionally give a dollar to a homeless person. When he finds out, he blows up at her. “Our family first! What kind of person puts others ahead of their own family? A strange inverted morality you have!” Then he goes back to keeping his money in a savings account instead of buying government bonds or mutual funds. It would be rational to conclude that when he complains about the dollar given to the homeless man, he’s driven by malice more than love of his family.

The final sentence in that quote reminded me of the down-thread discussion of sadism. The substack comments have more about tribalism.

I don’t think that’s the case. It’s not that America First has no plans, it’s that most of them run on the premise of lowering taxes and regulations and reducing government involvement. The reason they don’t have a government plan (which is what most commentators mean when they say “what’s the plan?) is that they don’t think government should be doing those things. They aren’t communists, and therefore their housing plan is “lower the tax burden so people have money, remove the zoning laws and the environmental regulations that prevent homes from being built, and let Americans do their thing.” That’s not going to show up as a plan, because the plan is to get out of the way.

A big part of this is of course not blowing trillions of dollars a year doing silly unproductive things for everyone else with taxpayers money. Funding Ukraine is a marginal case at best, it’s a billion dollars a month to prop up the Nebraska of Eastern Europe until they inevitably run out of people to kidnap for the front lines. Funding kids shows in Iraq is a loss because Middle East TV simply pushes Islamic fundamentalism and jihad. Going down the list most of these “aid” programs are basically grifting— pay an NGO full of PMC kids to pretend they’re doing something important overseas, while doing nothing more than paddling their pockets from the three figure salary they get for pretending to help out. At this point, freeing up the public money wasted on these grifter programs and giving the money to average Americans who would build businesses and make things and cure diseases and so on.

Funding kids shows in Iraq is a loss because Middle East TV simply pushes Islamic fundamentalism and jihad.

I've seen television in the middle east...hours of it. You know who the big star was? Oprah Winfrey. After that there were tons of music video stations for each of the different leading countries. Sexy lebanese videos, super sappy Saudi Orchestras with lame poets, Emirate gun twirling and cane dancing...and Iraq? It was all blue jeans in night club dancing shows, like a very tame American Bandstand. I would not be surprised at all if Iraqi Sesame Street was popular. that's one of the USAID expenditures I find least offensive--even admitting that modern Sesame Street is peak Wokoso.

Anyway, it's not all fundamentalism. That's what's on the radio...

At the same time, though, Hamas made their own Mickey Mouse ripoff.

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