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.

6
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The last one is very speculative; I have a suspicion it might be impossible. The middle one is somewhat less speculative; something akin to it is probably possible, but there are degrees of success and you're probably looking at more like "eats organic matter at a foot a day" than the "lol eats planet in minutes" sci-fi shit. The first one is proven possible by PNA, the aforementioned terribility of RuBisCO, and the wide variety of possible biomolecules only some of which are used. Anybody who knows second-to-third-year biochem knows that that design is 100% chemically and physically possible; the roadblock is the incredible difficulty of designing a full biochemistry ex nihilo (it'll be a while before anyone succeeds at this without AI aid, although I'd still rather nobody tried). I get that not everyone does know this, but seriously, this is uncontroversial in terms of "is this possible, given a blueprint?"; it is. That's why I said it's the best-case of "what the final form of bioweapons looks like"; they can be worse, but they can't be better.

shouldn't we prioritize making sure that doesn't happen again over "stop Skynet"/"Butlerian Jihad Now" type stuff?

I mean, I'd rather that 200 million people die next year from a pandemic over everyone dying 10 years from now. I'd rather that even if I'm one of the 200 million. I'm not seeing the issue.

The issue is that you are prioritizing problems that are arguably possible (well, one of them) but have never manifested in an even directionally similar way over one that just happened a few years ago, repercussions of which were quite severe and still being felt.

I resisted "millenarian cultist" analogies so as not to be uncharitable, but you didn't want to talk about Ford Pintos, so fuck it:

It's certainly possible that Jesus will descend and start casting the goats (that's you) into a lake of fire at any moment -- this is roughly the worst thing that could happen (for you); shouldn't you prioritize Christian worship more highly than (I assume) you do?