site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 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.

4
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

abortion clinic bombings

When was the last abortion clinic bombing? Literally. There was a 2015 shooting at a planned parenthood by a man who, though clearly motivated by anti-abortion sentiment, was unable to express this in full sentences.

The pro-life movement is an interesting example of a movement which had a violent fringe that it then decided to get rid of(oftentimes that mechanism was to inform the Clinton DoJ). For this they have received no credit.

If you go through Wikipedia's anti-abortion violence list and take bombing literally, that would appear to be 2012. The chief method of anti-abortion violence/vandalism since then appears to have been arson.

The more recent parts of that list are mostly trespassing and minor vandalism(there's as much spray paint as gasoline involved), with a smattering of genuine crazy in the actually completely schizo sense(the last anti-abortion fatality was committed by a man declared unfit to stand trial), while earlier examples are lots of otherwise-sane fanatics causing serious property damage, killing specific targets, kidnapping people, causing severe injuries, etc. Anti-abortion terrorism is genuinely on the long term decline and has been since some time in the nineties.

For this they have received no credit.

Oh, it's the good old Catch-22. "If you really believed abortion was murder, you'd be out there shutting down clinics by force! Since you're not doing that, then you don't really believe abortion is murder, it's all about hatred of women's free sexuality!"

Then someone does shoot an abortion provider or bomb a clinic, and it's "See, we told you they were all violent murderous brutes!"

For this they have received no credit.

Right--putting myself in the shoes of their critics, I would guess that this falls under the "you get no points for being a decent human being, being a decent human being is the baseline expectation" clause. Of course, this clause is only ever applied in one direction, and also I am suspicious of the claim that there is anything "baseline" about humans being kind to one another, but nevertheless--the rhetoric is the rhetoric.

That said, I have to wonder how much of the decrease in violence against abortion doctors can be explained by pro-life activism self-policing, and how much can be explained by the successful psy-op of raising two or three generations of citizens who just don't think that killing the unborn is a very big deal, and often think that subjecting women to authority, ever, for any reason, is peak oppression.

Right, I don’t expect a ‘congratulations, you haven’t killed anyone this year’ award. What seems much more reasonable to ask for is to stop claiming that the prolife movement is violent- it’s not. The answer to ‘who is bombing abortion clinics?’ is ‘statistically, nobody’.

That said, I have to wonder how much of the decrease in violence against abortion doctors can be explained by pro-life activism self-policing, and how much can be explained by the successful psy-op of raising two or three generations of citizens who just don't think that killing the unborn is a very big deal, and often think that subjecting women to authority, ever, for any reason, is peak oppression.

It’s an interesting question how much of the end of the violent fringe of the prolife movement was due to self policing and how much was due to the Clinton DoJ making it a priority. But the prolife movement is as strong as ever. I don’t think secular trends are a major factor.

Right, I don’t expect a ‘congratulations, you haven’t killed anyone this year’ award. What seems much more reasonable to ask for is to stop claiming that the prolife movement is violent- it’s not. The answer to ‘who is bombing abortion clinics?’ is ‘statistically, nobody’.

Statistically Muslims in Western countries are perfectly peaceful.

In the US at least, ‘Muslims are about as peaceful as native whites’ is a statement which at least passes the sniff test.

Last I checked, Muslims commit about 4% of the domestic terrorism despite being only 1% of the population.