site banner
PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   32324 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 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.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Matthew Yglesias befriends Richard Hanania, leans against Joseph Overton, symptoms worsen from a case of the noticing, and everyone gets mad.

Matty is full steam ahead with Democratic Party's Abundance rebrand. Build stuff, hope, and change. Yglesias has infrequently expressed a practical or tactical acceptance of noble lies. Depending who you ask, Matt has the freedom to tell it like it is, is an amoral deviant, or he is a sophisticated engagement maximizer.

This week Yglesias published an essay titled "The troubling rise of Hitler revisionism" on substack. The title points towards a surge of interest in revisionists like Darryl Cooper who have been (post delete guy strikes again!) discussed a few times. Matt's article isn't fully a refutation of revisionism or a celebration of Agatha Christie-- who revised her own anti-semitic (I didn't notice) caricatures later in life. He makes a couple points there. This is an acknowledgment as a set-up for broader cultural trends. I will format slightly.

I completely understand what people mean when they say Donald Trump is racist, and I understand why they say it. It’s also true that he’s had Black cabinet secretaries in both of his administrations, which was a bridge too far for JFK. FDR wouldn’t endorse an anti-lynching bill, and Woodrow Wilson worked to increase the level of segregation in the federal civil service... And I think the desire to promulgate revisionist accounts of World War II is intimately tied to a niche (but growing) audience on the right that may not want to bring back segregation but does want to undo the shift that made Christie rethink her anti-semitism.

And the force of this is that while nearly everyone agrees that left-wing racial justice politics went too far 5-10 years ago, there’s big debate on the right about the implications of that.

Ibram Kendi said it wasn’t good enough to not be racist, you had to be anti-racist in a very specific way. And there’s a counter-view, perhaps most forcefully articulated by Nathan Cofnas, that it’s not good enough to reject Kendi’s brand of anti-racism, you need to work to rehabilitate racism so that people can hold their heads high and believe in a hierarchy of races. On this view, you (allegedly) don’t need to be hateful — you can acknowledge that Lazarus is one of the decent Jews, even while maintaining that most Jews are not decent — but it is necessary to destigmatize racism. Cofnas has a literalist’s way of going about this, doing blog posts urging conservatives to stop citing Thomas Sowell on race. But I think coming in through the side door, trying to problematize Winston Churchill and normalize Hitler while destabilizing the pop culture consensus that Nazis are really bad, is probably a more potent way of achieving the same result.

Under the set-up is The Controversy. Yglesias has written against things like disparate impact before, though not in these terms. "Taboos can be good":

I have noticed that Black people are significantly overrepresented in the top ranks of professional basketball, and my guess is that you have noticed this as well. You need to be more of an NBA fan, though, to have noticed that residents of the former Yugoslavia are also overrepresented. I’m not sure why people from the Balkans outperform other people experiencing a lack of melanin. I am also not sure why Black Americans outperform white ones. You could imagine these dual outperformances having similar underlying causes or very different ones. I have not looked into it, and frankly I don’t intend to, because I am happy living in a society where it is considered unseemly and inappropriate to preoccupy oneself with such questions.

In my opinion, it is completely correct to observe that dogmatic accounts of disparate impact à la Kendi are dangerous and bad.

But I also think it’s perfectly reasonable for people to worry that stereotyping will lead to discrimination. And parsing the difference between “taste-based” and “statistical” discrimination doesn’t really change the fact that people are individuals, and they reasonably do not want to be discriminated against. Conversely, I think there is a broadly accurate stereotype that people who roam around the world articulating unflattering statistical observations about ethnic groups they don’t belong to mostly are, in fact, bigots with bad intentions.

Years ago, there was a take that what some disparage as “political correctness” is really nothing more than the basic habit of being polite. I don’t think that holds up to much scrutiny. What is true, though, is that politeness is a virtue, and that the habit of bending over backwards to try to be polite to people who are disadvantaged or groups that have historically been discriminated against makes sense.

And while not everything that right-wingers attack as “woke” or “PC” is just politeness, much of it is, and the impulse in some quarters of the right to say that we need to become a ruder, crueler society that no longer observes politeness norms is bad. The mistake of anti-racist excess was in going beyond trying to downplay ethnic differences to insist on measures that in fact reify them and increase their salience. But going in the other direction, and doing it in a mean-spirited way, isn’t going to solve anything and poses massive downside risks.

Norms that lead kids to spout the latest /pol/ memes to their classmates sound unpleasant. I, too, enjoy polite norms. Matt describes "bending over backwards" not as extra virtuous but as making sense. Asking people to bend over backwards doesn't make sense to me. Norms that involve individuals bending over backwards require coercion to enforce or an understanding of reward.

The comments to the substack article include two I wanted to comment on:

A: "For whatever excesses the Great Awokening may have had, once it ended there was always a risk of overcorrection in the other direction." It's extremely disturbing to me that anybody would need that risk pointed out to them.

B: I think it's because people don't really understand how big that risk is. They think it's just a small possibility. Unfortunately I think the opposite is true. The more off-course and disruptive a political movement becomes, it will almost by necessity give rise to a counter-movement that is equally if not more disruptive in opposition. The question people should always ask themselves is, "what kind of opposition do I want to create?"

I think this is true, but it's really not the people that must consider this a risk. It's elites and power that embrace a movement, eschew old taboos, and adopt new ones that take this risk. They mainly consider falling out of favor, but they also (should) consider how it demands resistance from competing elites and power. In our world the power pretty thoroughly embraced a movement with certain taboos which were themselves taboo a few years earlier.

Rather than coerce people into adopting a version of extra virtue, my proposed path forward includes seeking answers to questions like "why black basketball players outperform white ones?" Matt doesn't fully explain his position, but "intelligence research isn't worth the social costs" is not an uncommon one. Rather than fighting the power, as one might surmise from reactions to his post, I think Matt doesn't know he is asking for more of the same. Calling social coercion politeness sounds a lot nicer than what it is. If there's truth in uncomfortable answers, then it has to be buried. Instead, I think it is up to the Yglesi-i of the world to synthesize those answers into something that can become polite, then help normalize that.

That is a big project and I don't expect to see it happen in my lifetime. My small hope is we land on a stable normie consensus that better balances politeness with the incorporation of reality, science, and hard truths. Intuitively, pivoting the culture from identity groups towards individualism seems like step one, but that might just be my preference speaking. In sum, a not insignificant amount of moderate Democrats -- arguably a wing of the moderate Dems -- read and respect Yglesias and he has stepped into a soft HBD position.

A: "For whatever excesses the Great Awokening may have had, once it ended there was always a risk of overcorrection in the other direction." It's extremely disturbing to me that anybody would need that risk pointed out to them.

B: I think it's because people don't really understand how big that risk is. They think it's just a small possibility. Unfortunately I think the opposite is true. The more off-course and disruptive a political movement becomes, it will almost by necessity give rise to a counter-movement that is equally if not more disruptive in opposition. The question people should always ask themselves is, "what kind of opposition do I want to create?"

Reading this reminded me of the whole "woke right" thing, which I don't know who coined, but which I've seen pushed heavily by James Lindsay (of Sokal^2 fame) to denigrate the identarian right as an attempt to prevent the right wing from falling into the sort of insane and extremely harmful identity/resentment-based politics as the left has been for the past couple decades. I don't know how successful it has been or will be, but I'll admit that despite seeing it mostly as crying wolf at first, I see signs that this is a legit potential problem worth preventing.

But what worries me about this is, what happens if we apply this sort of thinking to the sort of liberal enlightenment-style thinking that people like Lindsay and myself espouse? If we push things like free speech, free inquiry, freedom of/from religion, the scientific method, critical thinking, democracy, and such too much, are we destined to have a pendulum swing in the other direction, such that we'll get extreme forms of authoritarian or irrational societies in the future? Have we been living in that future the last couple decades with the rise of identity politics that crushed the liberalism of the 90s?

I guess the whole thing about "history repeats" and "if there's anything we can learn from history, it's that people don't learn from history" is probably true and also pretty depressing.

But what worries me about this is, what happens if we apply this sort of thinking to the sort of liberal enlightenment-style thinking that people like Lindsay and myself espouse? If we push things like free speech, free inquiry, freedom of/from religion, the scientific method, critical thinking, democracy, and such too much, are we destined to have a pendulum swing in the other direction, such that we'll get extreme forms of authoritarian or irrational societies in the future? Have we been living in that future the last couple decades with the rise of identity politics that crushed the liberalism of the 90s?

We are destined to push, pull, and change, but not always or usually on an pendulating axis. A forking, mutating spiral is cooler to think about anyway. If you can shove a helical shape in there then, baby, you got a stew goin'. A monarchy can lead to dysfunctional, parasitic decadence that allows its dismantling. A more liberal system that replaces it keeps some things, discards others, then passes on the scientific method through the next 300 years of political evolution.

My favorite modern opposites attract phenomena is the Antifa/Proud Boys duking it out in Portland or wherever some years ago. It seemed a perfect example of conflict attraction. Is the scientific method at risk? Humans consistently commit themselves to science-y endeavors. Perhaps it is safe until we survive the human battery farms as luddites.

Your concern is a good reason to maintain a broad, coherent consensus. I admit it is tough in a society that leverages polarization to stumble around. Even if principled, the no, stop, don't politicize X warnings are a conservation. No, stop, we need shared national identity and mythos. A counter-example might be that science didn't prune the consensus tree to accommodate evangelicals on evolution. That seems to have been mostly okay and now we don't argue about evolution much. Consensus maintained. Or we got bored and less religious.

Now that I think about it, it sounds like I'm instead answering "is conflict theory total?" with a desire to say, "No. Also, here's a bunch of reasons to be conservative and keep stuff the way I like." Heh.

Have we been living in that future the last couple decades with the rise of identity politics that crushed the liberalism of the 90s?

Maybe. Postliberal will come, or has come, but we do have a hand in defining it such that it might not be Patrick Deneen's vision or any other particular one.

Humanity repeats common mistakes in different contexts and time. Which is banal, but the point is it doesn't make critical thinking a guaranteed battle ground. Degrees of authoritarianism might swing back and forth for reasons. That does usually hit certain individual freedoms. Focus should be or should have been on keeping the important bits regardless of the change that comes. Which is always coming, common mistakes along with it.

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