site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   32726 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 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.

The Trump administration has cut off (some) federal funding to Columbia University because of antisemitism.

It's not clear exactly what is happening on what sources of dollars; there are a bunch of different numbers in the article, and they're mostly unattached to any particular mechanisms. It may be only $400M out of $5B. It's not clear if it's just some funding agencies or some other criteria. My guess from the following sentence is that it's currently just some funding agencies:

The Departments of Education and Health and Human Services plan to immediately issue stop-work orders on grants to the school, the task force said.

That would make sense, as DoE/HHS are a very small part of federal research funding.

One thing to note is that a "stop-work order" is a particularly harsh tool. Rather than simply defunding the agencies, so that there simply aren't new grants to go around (and no one knows how they can change behavior to improve the situation), a stop-work order says that the university must completely stop doing anything related to an existing grant. They certainly can't spend any of the money, not even on grad student salaries. It must grind to a halt.

I have heard about this sort of thing happening before. Back when the gov't started getting serious about China's influence in academia, they started requiring a bunch of disclosures about China-related stuff. Apparently, one guy at one university screwed up badly enough that they issued a stop-work order to everything the university did with their federal funding until they could sort everything out. At the same time, they were even prosecuting professors if they weren't disclosing. The message was clear that the gov't took this stuff seriously, and if anyone screwed up, then everyone, at the institutional level, paid the price. As I put it here, that makes the game theory pretty easy. If you're a top tier talent, you can't afford to FAFO with some university that can't get it together at an institutional level, no matter what else they might offer you.

Of course, right now, this seems to be limited just to antisemitism (and so far, just Columbia) rather than extending to further bad behavior in academia. I, of course, proposed doing this type of thing for when a university, at an institutional level, does basically anything that discriminates on the basis of race/gender (and I got a lot of downvotes here for saying that such a plan was way better then indiscriminate "chemo", just shutting stuff down randomly with no incentive for changing behavior). Maybe it'll come, and this is just the trial balloon. It could make sense to start with one that is over-the-top egregious. Even Scott Aaronson, who is famously over-the-top performative anti-Trump, went with this:

For the past year and a half, Columbia University was a pretty scary place to be an Israeli or pro-Israel Jew—at least, according to Columbia’s own antisemitism task force report, the firsthand reports of my Jewish friends and colleagues at Columbia, and everything else I gleaned from sources I trust. The situation seems to have been notably worse there than at most American universities. ... Last year, I decided to stop advising Jewish and Israeli students to go to Columbia, or at any rate, to give them very clear warnings about it. I did this with extreme reluctance, as the Columbia CS department happens to have some of my dearest colleagues in the world, many of whom I know feel just as I do about this.

He also sort of grudgingly accepted some game theory:

Time for some game theory. Consider the following three possible outcomes:

(a) Columbia gets back all its funding by seriously enforcing its rules (e.g., expelling students who threatened violence against Jews), and I can again tell Jewish and Israeli students to attend Columbia with zero hesitation

(b) Everything continues just like before

(c) Columbia loses its federal funding, essentially shuts down its math and science research, and becomes a shadow of what it was

Now let’s say that I assign values of 100 to (a), 50 to (b), and -1000 to (c). This means that, if (say) Columbia’s humanities professors told me that my only options were (b) and (c), I would always flinch and choose (b). And thus, I assume, the professors would tell me my only options were (b) and (c). They’d know I’d never hold a knife to their throat and make them choose between (a) and (c), because I’d fear they’d actually choose (c), an outcome I probably want even less than they do.

Having said that: if, through no fault of my own, some mobster held a knife to their throat and made them choose between (a) and (c)—then I’d certainly advise them to pick (a)! Crucially, this doesn’t mean that I’d endorse the mobster’s tactics, or even that I’d feel confident that the knife won’t be at my own throat tomorrow. It simply means that you should still do the right thing, even if for complicated reasons, you were blackmailed into doing the right thing by a figure of almost cartoonish evil.

This is what I have been saying. Use the tools that you have. Don't use them indiscriminately. Don't imagine that you're doing chemotherapy in just randomly attacking everything. Tailor them specifically to very very clearly change the incentives so that universities need to change at an institutional level and that if they don't, individual talent has a huge incentive to just leave them.

Now, of course, one always has to worry a bit about how when something is done by the stroke of a pen, it can be reversed by the stroke of a pen of the other guy (or an equal and opposite "Dear Colleague," letter). But solutions to that problem are much harder to come by.

DHS has already deported a Columbia graduate student (who was a student in December so not a current student it seems).

On March 9, 2025, in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism, and in coordination with the Department of State, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student. Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.

ICE and the Department of State are committed to enforcing President Trump’s executive orders and to protecting U.S. national security.

More details from AP:

Federal immigration authorities arrested a Palestinian activist Saturday who played a prominent role in Columbia University’s protests against Israel, a significant escalation in the Trump administration’s pledge to detain and deport student activists.

Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia until this past December, was inside his university-owned apartment Saturday night when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered and took him into custody, his attorney, Amy Greer, told The Associated Press.

Greer said she spoke by phone with one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the attorney that Khalil was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that instead, according to the lawyer.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, confirmed Khalil’s arrest in a statement Sunday, describing it as being “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.”

It's all so tiresome. It certainly puts the BLM Riots in context- they can shut down protest when they want to.

I'm not sure in the long run it's going to be a good strategy to resort to such overt hard power. Zionism in the United States is facing an unprecedented pincer movement from both the Left and the Right opposing it from different angles of critique. Every day that goes by, the Progressives on X complaining about Zionist influence in American society are starting to sound more and more like their right-wing counterparts. Who can blame them when they are forced to face the stark reality of hard power when they want to protest Israel?

It's a lot harder to sympathize with people as just another political advocacy organization when the thing they're advocating for is an islamist terror group, which is one of the closest things we have these days to out-and-out hostis humani generis.

And to be clear, that would be as true for people waiving Boko Haram or Janjaweed flags as Hamas or Hizbullah.

The anti-zionists would have a much easier row to hoe if the palestinian oppostion were still secularist/leftist.

It should be noted that all the verbiage of the EO and pending legislation identifies "antisemitic acts" and not merely "advocating for a terrorist group." The US has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance working definition of Antisemitism which includes, among other things:

  • Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.
  • Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.
  • Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
  • Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
  • Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
  • Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
  • Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
  • Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
  • Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.

So with these EOs and legislation talking about, like the "the No Visas for Anti-Semitic Students Act" specify only antisemitic acts with the definition above being the actual, real working definition used to define an antisemitic act.

Jewish orgs are already drafting lists of specific students they want to see deported so we'll see how far Trump goes with this. I don't think ICE showing up to deport pro-Palestinian protestors is going to work in the long-run.

There's pro-Palestinian protests and there's pro-Palestinian protests. I don't think there's much sympathy for the latter, however there would rightly be a huge outcry over targeting the former.

EDIT - the one guy named in the article you linked seems to have...uh...some spicy takes about October 7 and the proper solution to the Israel/Palestine question. Those takes in and of themselves are obviously not grounds for deportation (although given what he teaches - "a first-year Africana Studies writing seminar called 'What is Blackness? Race and Processes of Racialization'" - I can't imagine we'd be losing that much of real merit - or anything that you in particular would particularly like having in our country).

However, one of the protests he was involved with allegedly involved a mob forcing their way inside a hotel where a career fair including Boeing and L3Harris was being held (those companies make weapons which Israel uses, which apparently makes them persona non grata), and making the event impossible to continue through the use of "bullhorns, cymbals, pots, and pans" and chanting. He also appears to have been a ringleader in Cornell's SJP encampment. Regardless of the cause, it's reasonable for a college to suspend someone over that kind of disruptive behavior which is sufficient to cause loss of an F-1 visa, apparently. The guy knew the terms of his immigration status, and still thought that playing radical was more important. FAFO.

one of the protests he was involved with allegedly involved a mob forcing their way inside a hotel where a career fair including Boeing and L3Harris was being held (those companies make weapons which Israel uses, which apparently makes them persona non grata), and making the event impossible to continue through the use of "bullhorns, cymbals, pots, and pans" and chanting. He also appears to have been a ringleader in Cornell's SJP encampment.

Student visas have (hypothetically) strict rules. If a student wants to drive drunk or advocate for terrorists then they can do so in their home country. The natural default state is a particular foreigner not being allowed into the US. They have no right to be here, merely a rarely granted conditional privilege.

I understand that enforcement has been lax for quite a while. I remember in college the members of the Muslim Student Union advocating for designated terrorist organizations. A lot were foreign students. As best I know they were not deported for violating the terms of their visas. This was a failure in law enforcement.

Now in the littlest way the rules are being enforced. I say good. We give some few foreign students conditional visas, let's then enforce the rules.

I hope very much that a foreign guest student who disrupts an American career fair with defense companies gets deported. The sooner the better. They have no right to be here and can prosper opposing American defense capability in their home country.

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