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The current state of online politics discourse seems pretty dire to me. Here are forums I'm aware of:
TheMotte - often a bit too "assume that social conservatism is correct" and wordily show-offy for my taste, but it's a good forum, you can speak your mind without being banned.
X.com - engagement bait grifters, engagement bait grifters, engagement bait grifters... and the occasional rare actual worthwhile discussion.
/r/moderatepolitics - good, very surprisingly good for average Reddit censorship norms, but a bit slow.
/r/politicaldiscussion - used to be decent like 5 years ago but now has been overrun by typical Reddit TDS ("Drumpf will end all elections", etc...)
4chan /pol/ - basically useless, 95% literally mentally ill people, trolls, and maybe bots. Might as well engage with flat Earthers about astrophysics as engage with these people about politics.
Astral Codex Ten comments - can be interesting sometimes, but isn't mainly politics focused and the politics discussion seems to be be dominated by the same few people.
rDrama.net - is usually directionally right about politics, in my view, by the simple expedient of assuming that anyone who is very demonstratively committed to a given political ideology is likely worthy of ridicule, but of course not a forum for discussing policy in any depth, most of the time, and also unsurprisingly given the origin of the site, is as focused on trolling as on political analysis, lol.
/r/politics - TDS central, orange man bad 24/7.
/r/centrist - seems ok, but pretty TDS leaning.
/r/stupidpol, /r/redscarepod, etc... Dirtbag left, good for criticizing the establishment but also they tend to be Hamas apologists etc... basically mostly people who are still at the I hate America so anyone who fights America must be awesome stage.
debatepolitics.com - people yelling at each other, very slight step up from 4chan /pol/.
Like, there have to be some good forums I've missed, right? Billions of people are online, including hundreds of millions of Anglophones (I largely have no idea what the state of non-Anglophone political discussion is like). Is it really possible that only like 0.00001% of them are capable of having relatively moderate and rational (not that I've always been) political discussion?
I've been searching for good politics discussion forums for years. You'd think there would be more. What the fuck is going on?
Politics is innately partisan and ugly. It's all about control of power and wealth. If I get a pension, you don't get a free education or he has to work harder and pay more taxes. It's mostly zero-sum.
Nah, that kind of bickering about how big each slice of cake should be is policy discussions, and mostly boring, not ugly. Most of the "good" culture war topics (Dobbs, immigrants, LGBT, gun rights, free speech issues, climate change, Gaza) which are really toxic are not about "how should we divide money between interest groups?" It is always that there are conflicting underlying principles by the different participants.
I don't agree with this -- the culture war is absolutely about dividing power between interest groups. At its very core! I think you saw the reference to pensions and got sidetracked by economic theory, which currently mostly resides in the "boring policy discussions" category because opposition to liberal free trade has few major proponents among the elite.
But think about Dobbs -- like RandomRanger says, it's ultimately about power. In the feminist formulation -- what they actually say themselves -- abortion is about "a woman's power to control her own body." Stripping away the philosophy of it, the conservative viewpoint is that the state has the power to stop abortions. The interest groups are "women who don't want to bear a child" and "children who are not yet born."
Immigration? Of course that's about the division of power between interest groups! What should a native's labor be worth -- that's about relative power and status. What should the language people speak be -- that's about the power of different linguistic groups, and particularly of monolinguals vs multilinguals. Should there be a pathway to citizenship? Voting rights? That's literally about dividing power between interest groups, between constituencies!
LGBT? Again, division of power between interest groups. Should the religious baker have to bake the gay wedding cake? What are the relative powers of the LGB and the T -- should lesbians be required to accomodate transwomen?
Gun rights? Division of power between interest groups. What is the relative importance of people's desire to own a gun and people's desire not to live in a society that has many guns? How do random acts of mass gun violence -- sometimes perpetrated by people with little to no background that would impede their ability to legally buy a gun -- affect this calculation? What are the rights of mentally ill people to self defense? What are the rights of society to corral others' right to self defense for its own safety?
Freedom of speech? You mean the issue where the deciding factor for most people is "my friends can speak all they want and my enemies should keep their dirty mouths shut?" The issue where the right says "criticism of Israel is antisemitism" and the left says "criticism of immigration is racism"? Where "hate speech" is offensive and defamatory statements made against racial groups -- except white people, because they deserve it? (And don't exist, by the way: "white people have no culture." This is not hate speech.)
Climate change? The issue where a leading activist said, to a crowd of older politicians, "You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words?" Where the young activists feel energized because they believe baby boomers stole a healthy planet from them to lower gas prices? Where the rich jet-setters can fly all over the world announcing the Green Gospel but vacations for the hoi polloi are ecological sins? That's not about the division of power between interest groups?
Gaza? Really? The issue where if you support one side you're calling for Shoah 2.0, and if you support the other you want to firebomb children? The issue that's about, quite literally, two interest groups who both want to live on the same territory? The issue where both sides of the conflict engage in war crimes that endanger or hide behind civilians, but both sides of the debate plug their ears to the horror of the whole thing because My Side Is Oppressed? Isn't that the interest-group-power-struggle par excellence?
I know you're sincere in what you say. And I admire the focus on conflicting principles -- there are indeed a lot of those. But your thesis about the culture war strikes me as precisely wrong. The culture war default, and its cause, is conflict theory. Maybe it's not always about money. But it's definitely about power.
To reply to both you and @RandomRanger, I concede that CW about power. What I was arguing was that it is not primarily about the allocation of resources, money.
I would still argue that the term zero-sum has all the wrong connotations. It vaguely implies rational actors competing over finite resources to maximize some utility function, like me bidding on a coconut you are selling.
In most cases, CW is not like this. The energy spent on fighting the bathroom wars is wildly out of proportion of the actual importance of that issue over the natural state of affairs (if you can somewhat pass and behave normally, you are fine, if you can't pass and/or spy on people, you get treated as a sex pest). The point of fighting the CW is not to achieve a grand strategic victory for your side, but to be seen by your peers fighting the CW. It is mostly performative.
Often, the behavior displayed is not about scoring a win for your side at the expense of the other side (zero sum), but purely on punishing the other side (negative sum). Getting someone for some tweet by doxxing them is a classic CW past-time, after all.
Consider abortion. Depending on whose side holds the majority, some states might allow all abortions up to birth, and some might ban all abortions. I propose that this is a lot worse in satisfying the aggregate preference of the Americans than a compromise solution based on a term limit.
Israel/Palestine is theoretically zero sum (only one side can control a given square meter of land, after all), but in practice it is vastly negative for both sides.
If the point of the CW was to achieve strategic victories for your side, e.g. a power struggle, then one would expect that it would be mostly fought over stuff which actually mattered, and money would be a central angle. People would try to build broad coalitions which would gain them small policy victories. This is not what we are seeing. Instead, we see an outsized focus on small but very emotionally charged theaters, and a trend to prefer the humiliation of members of the other side to actual policy victories.
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