site banner

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
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I suppose I'm just not enough of a lawcuck to understand why this is being blown up into such an ordeal.

That's fair, which is why I think it's good to look at what the seasoned legal system is doing to get an idea at what is important and why. In this case, there's a reason the Supreme Court went 9-0 (with a reminder three of them were appointed by Trump himself), there's a reason why the appeals here was 3-0, there's a reason why the Trump admin keeps getting ruled against so much on this case in general.

These are experienced judges, many of whom have deep histories of conservative sided judicial idealogy.

There was some minor procedural error, therefore we must make an elaborate show of correcting it, at great expense, to achieve an outcome that will immediately collapse back to the current status quo. This is your brain on legalism.

Maybe it will just collapse back to the status quo, doesn't really matter. That's not the concern of the courts anyway. The court system doesn't really need to care what happens as long as it's not unconstitutional or against a constitutionally valid law, it does care how it happens if it breaks those though.

Edit: As was written after all

If the government is confident of its position, it should be assured that position will prevail in proceedings to terminate the withholding of removal order. See 8 C.F.R. See 8 C.F.R. § 208.24(f) (requiring that the government prove "by a preponderance of evidence" that the alien is no longer entitled to a withholding of removal)