site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 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.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

No, statistics show that cars cause deaths 8x more. That doesn't tell you anything about cyclist behavior, because cyclists are unlikely to cause deaths. My experience has been that cyclists violate road laws much more frequently and egregiously than cars; I see bicyclists run red likes roughly 10x more often than I see cars do so, and I see a LOT more cars than bicycles on any given day.

You didn't read my statistics quite correctly. That's just pedestrian deaths.

###Deaths/Year

  • Car -> Car : 40,000
  • Car -> Pedestrian: 8,000
  • Car -> Cyclist: 1,000
  • Cyclist -> Pedestrian: 10
  • Cyclist -> Car: ~ 0

After that you can do your own normalizing based on capita or miles driven. The latter is most fair to cars, but given how much further they can go and how often cars kill riders despite their rarity, I think per-capita is a much better measure.

Roughly cars are at a minimum 10x more deadly, and realistically more like 100x

I don't see how that's relevant to my point at all, which is that that death rates don't tell you much about rates of bad behavior. Obviously cars are more likely to kill someone, ke=1/2mv^2 and cars have a lot more m and a lot more v. I think cyclists commit bad behaviors much more often.