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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Nate Silver just accidentally posted a link to an AI slop article. A quick delve into the article text makes it obvious that the contents were blatantly copypastaed directly from the output of ChatGPT. Various GPT detectors also agree, giving it a solid 100% confidence of being slop. Unfortunately, it seems that nobody in the replies even seems to have noticed or cared.
I'm of course already used to my google searches being clogged up by black hat SEO slop, but I expected it to just live in the shadows quietly collecting clicks and boosting pagerank. So it was sobering to see an aislop article just get posted like that by someone I regard as at least somewhat intelligent.
What does this say about the world? Are normies, even somewhat intelligent ones, incapable of distinguishing the most obvious stinky smelly chatgpt output? Or did hundreds of people read the headline and drop a snarky comment, and not a single one bothered to read the article? It's either a depressing anecdote about human nature and social media, or a depressing anecdote about the lack of intelligence of the average human.
Of course aislop grifters should be fedposted just like indian call center scammers, but sometimes I can't help but feel like the victims deserved it. But when they bother me waste 5 seconds of my time again, I am right back in fedposting mode.
Edit:
Since you idiots are out here defending the slop, these quotes are hallucinations:
Here's the full recording of his talk and you can check the Youtube transcription: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MPt8V3MW1c4 And before you ask, the fake article specifically claims these fake quotes were said at his Harvard talk, not at some other time.
So again the AI put totally false words into somebody's mouth and you apologists are defending it.
I've started noticing AI generated video in the lead up to the Australian federal election. There was one on X floating around with Tucker Carlson dumping on the current Prime Minister. Really made me think about the need to curate my feed more.
Not a rhetorical question -- do many Australians know who Tucker is? And do many Australians care what he thinks? I thought he was only relevant in American politics.
Australians who are interested in politics are pretty much bound to follow American politics, at least in the vague outline. I'd guess that your average person on the street either doesn't know who Tucker Carlson is, or knows him only as some pundit in America. Among Australians who take an active interest in politics, I'd expect much higher recognition.
I would not expect Carlson's endorsement (or disendorsement) to have any significant impact on Australian politics, though. If anything, I expect that his endorsement would hurt a candidate. We have a federal election tomorrow where it looks like what would have been a very winnable election for the Coalition has turned into a disaster, substantially due to Trump. Trump and MAGA-style voices are widely hated over here and any association with them is more likely to harm than to hurt. It's not as bad here as in Canada, but it's still true, I think, that Trump has been a disaster for conservative parties throughout the wider Anglosphere.
I've read that the reason Trump's impact on Canada was a disaster was that there is no analog to blood-and-soil MAGA voters there, only what would be called in America progressives and "RINOs"/"boomercons". Is that why Trump has damaged conservatives in Australia?
We're largely missing the Borderers, and so they're culturally alien to us (so are American Descendants of Slaves, but for various reasons including good PR and relative invisibility there's less friction there).
We also have a much-weaker two-party system, so instead of being a faction with some amount of influence in our major right-wing parties, the alt-right has its own party (well, technically two parties, One Nation and
the Clive Palmer Partythe United Australia PartyTrumpet of Patriots, but the latter is a bad joke). There's no cordon sanitaire in Australia (there was one, like 25 years ago, but it fell apart); the Coalition (the neoliberal Liberals and rural-conservative Nationals) put One Nation above anybody besides themselves on their how-to-vote cards and they're willing to work with One Nation when they have to. But because One Nation's primary vote is quite a bit lower than that of the Coalition and they're not unusually-concentrated like the (hippie/SJ) Greens voters, they have no lower-house seats (though they do manage a few Senate seats, as the Senate is pseudo-proportional representation), so the Coalition mostly haven't had to (or have been impotent even with them).And yeah, as the others have mentioned there's a bit of an issue that Trump wasn't being all that friendly to Australia. Friendly fire isn't, and all that.
More options
Context Copy link
Sure there is- those are, counterintuitively, Liberal party voters. That is who all the jingoism was coming from.
If you're of an age sufficiently advanced that you remember that your parents actually took Canada seriously (i.e. you're 60+), you think that insults to Canadian 'sovereignty' are a big enough deal that you're going to latch onto whoever you perceive promises to do the most about it.
(Everyone else understands that this is a post-national country, so they don't care so much... if they can even afford to care in the first place.)
And that's not going to be some foreigner from Alberta (and, to the peoples of ON/QC/Atlantic, this is what he is) no matter what he otherwise says or does- because "he isn't aggressive enough against Trump" wasn't a legitimate criticism of him in the West (where he gained seats, unusually, in urban areas). I believed that not taking a suitably aggressive stance was still a mistake in the beginning, but now I'm starting to think that if he had the Liberals would have secured a majority simply because they are more likely to believe that Trump is directionally correct even if they disagree with the incidentals (cynically, it is in their socioeconomic interest to do that because "kill all new development, degrowth now" hurts their ability to accumulate wealth in a way it doesn't for Toronto retirees, federal government employees, and provinces that are already financial have-nots).
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think this is true - there seems to be a 20%ish vote for right-populists everywhere the electoral system permits it.
The problem is more simple - Trump is anti-Canadian, or at least was playing anti-Canadian during Q1 2025. If you were a blood-and-soil Canadian patriot, you would be anti-Trump because Trump is hurting Canadians with tariffs and does not appear to respect Canadian sovereignty. Right populists from different countries are only allied if their countries are committed to respecting each other's sovereignty.
More options
Context Copy link
Hm, I'm not sure how much I follow the categories that you're using. Australia doesn't really have what I would call a MAGA base. If you're looking for blood-and-soil types, well, firstly a lot of indigenous people are just straightforwardly blood-and-soil in their approach, but presumably they don't count, so secondly you're looking at One Nation and the nativists.
The thing is, the constituency for Australian nativism is somewhat complicated. Over 30% of Australia's population was born overseas, and because we have compulsory voting, all those people turn out. So you can't win an election just with people born here. Fortunately, the One Nation position isn't that immigrants simpliciter are bad - they tend to distinguish along the lines of culture, or less charitably, race. Nobody cares about English immigrants, for instance. They're where Australia comes from in the first place. Likewise we don't care about, say, New Zealand migrants, which are actually very common anyway. (Long story short, if you're an even slightly ambitious young New Zealander and seek opportunity, you come to Australia. And we're fine with that.) One Nation complained about being 'swamped by Asians' in the 90s, and today they're more likely to complain about Islamic immigration. The idea is hostility to people who don't share Australian values or a common cultural identity. Thus, for instance, around 70% of Australians are in favour of open borders with Canada, New Zealand, and Britain. We perceive ourselves as pretty closely connected to all of them.
(It will be interesting to see if demographic changes in Canada alter popular opinion on that, but I digress.)
At any rate, think of the right-wing 'blood and soil' position in Australia to not be 'Australians only', but rather 'Australians and the countries we like only', with the understanding that 'countries we like' means basically the white parts of the British Empire. People who take this view too explicitly will probably be accused of wanting to re-enact the White Australia Policy.
To Trump specifically -
I sometimes think of Australia as being the most America-like country that isn't America. (I would say we beat out Canada only because Canadian identity is specifically formed by not being American. They have a much more intentional sense of resistance against America.) However, there are still important differences, and I think the big one is probably that America has a very different idea of greatness or success to us. You couldn't have 'Make Australia Great Again' as a slogan because we don't have that kind of ambition or pride. That's not how we think of Australia. However, the American influence on our political tradition is significant - while structurally we are a Westminister democracy and the UK is the biggest influence on us, the framers of the Australian constitution read and were significantly (but not slavishly) inspired by the American effort. If you look into Australian patriotic writing from the late 19th and early 20th century, there is a strong feeling that we can use America as a model, or that Australia can be a kind of 'second America' (only loyal this time). Then you have to add to that, of course, the American alliance that has persisted since the Second World War, and we do just look to America for a lot.
This means that when anything in America reads well or sympathetically to the Australian electorate, politicians suddenly get keen on copying it; and likewise when anything in America reads unsympathetically, politicians need to struggle to distance themselves from it. In the past the Coalition has been more vocally pro-America than Labor, and have had close relationships with the Republican party. John Howard made a big show of his friendship with George Bush, for instance, and while it's been a bit more complicated since then, you can see how proud ScoMo was to be next to Biden. (And Biden apparently forgetting his name caused a minor scandal.)
So the issue for Peter Dutton in particular is - the Coalition has generally marketed itself as pro-America, or closer to America than Labor (which has instead been quietly proud of rebuilding our relationship with China). Dutton has also experimented a bit with American-style culture politics, and generally is perceived as a more 'American' politician.
And that seemed to be going well up until Trump lashed out with tariffs, and while we only received the lightest of American tariffs, Trump also refused to give us an exemption (which he had done in his first term). Add in that Trump's self-aggrandising, bullying style of politics plays very badly with an Australian culture that tends to prefer humility and self-deprecation and America's brand is currently in the toilet.
Dutton gets some of the overflow from the hatred of Trump. He and his party are too close to Trump and too close to America. When it comes to foreign policy, I suspect voters currently want a leader who will stand up to America.
More options
Context Copy link
Well, no, you wouldn't expect large constituencies of "make [another country] great again" voters in another country, unless we're talking about special cases like Christian Zionists supporting Israel for religious reasons. Beyond that, why would one expect even right-wing Canadians to feel particularly positive about the guy who talks about annexing Canada and has just slapped Canada with punitive tariffs for... something?
Insofar as I've seen, the sort of Canadians who would actually support American annexation or at least be OK with it would be either disaffected forumlords who treat politics as an abstraction, general fringe loons, or recent immigrants - I remember seeing a post indicating that the Indian immigrants in Canada would be more likely to support annexation than the born Canadians.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not a lot do except for the 'very online' that enjoy US and geo-politics.
However one of the populist parties is called 'The Trumpet of Patriots' and is clearly trying to piggyback off of Trump's success in the US. I'd say more of the voters for that party would than average.
Edit: Should make it clear that TOP is a minor party that isn't expected to pick up many seats. Its run by a dodgy billionaire with a checkered history.
A billionaire who is pretty much in it for the entertainment value. He's rich and he likes being on TV and having his face on billboards.
Trumpet of Patriots in general is a good case study in why Trumpism doesn't work in Australia. They are copying Trump-style campaigning while making zero adaptation to the local context and it is pretty miserable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link