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 -
Breaking news: Trump is saying he will not be deporting illegal immigrants who work on Farms and in Hotels.
Gavin Newsom is claiming it for a win for the violent riots that have taken over LA and other major cities.
This is a bit of a let down for Trump Supporters and anyone who wants to take America back from those who were not invited. Especially with Gavin Newsom rubbing it in the public's face. Especially with American Approval of deportation efforts have been increasing.
Trump's rationale appears to be:
Hotels/farms are low hanging fruit, it's easy to pick up illegal immigrants from these locations.
After swooping these groups first, then the only applicants to these positions (at the wages the farms and hotels are willing to pay) are the criminal illegal immigrants.
So focus on criminality first.
Does this mean that, once every last criminal is deported, he will then do sweeps of farms and hotels? Left ambiguous.
One problem is the effect of exploitable labor goes in one way. Over the past 2 decades, Landscaping businesses that employed high school students and ex cons went out of business because they couldn't compete against undocumented workers.
If one farm gets raided, and one farm growing similar things does not get raided for another year, then the first farm needs to hire more expensive people and raise prices while the second farm will still benefit from the lowered wages. The farm that got raided first goes out of business first, the second farm maybe gets to buy up the first farm, then when they are inevitably raided they still stay in business and make more money now.
It's not fair. It's not fair that the government has not enforced its own rules surrounding hiring employees uniformly across industries.
The fair thing would be to deport 100% of everyone deportable all at once. The shock of that will be destructive to every industry that is predominately illegal immigrants.
The next fair thing might be to deport 10% of employees in every business all together, then another 10% later, and so on until the bottom is reached.
Of course, the above two "fair" plans are ridiculous. We do not have the man-power to do it.
Any other fair ideas? Besides Trump's new plan of "Don't try to tackle this right now."
All Trump's actions have done is ensure the next Dem president grants a mass amnesty to all illegals in the USA so something like this can never happen again.
I want Trump to be so cruel and arbitrary to the illegals that the next time someone tries to pull a Biden and import billions, nobody wants to come because they're afraid.
High time preference populations aren’t going to be worried about what happened to the last group of migrants 10 years ago.
More options
Context Copy link
A country capable of such measures is not worth defending.
So, most of the countries that have existed in the entirety of human history are not worth defending?
Inter-ethnic conflict that expresses itself in “cruelty as deterrent” is as historically common as the summer rain. It’s currently happening in multiple places, and depending on where you live, it’s happened in the recent past. In your backyard.
I find it rather hubristic to tell someone from the baltics, the balkans, the eastern Mediterranean, Eastern Europe, or Southeast Asia that their country isn’t worth defending.
This is very “rootless cosmopolitan” coded.
A lot of things are historically common, but we still condemn them as bad; inter alia, chattel slavery, spousal and child abuse, and many types of war crimes.
Fair cop; I'm the kind of person who, as Scott Alexander described, sees a headline 'Victory for Man United' and feels inspired until I look at the article and realise it's just some sportsball thing.
The difference between those things you’ve described as historically common, which I agree is accurate, and a more generic “deliberate cruelty as deterrent for mass illegal migration” is that the latter has not been supplanted by anything clearly superior.
The Industrial Revolution killed chattel slavery & most extreme institutional types of patriarchy. It substituted a physical technology in place of a social one; it was made possible to permanently discard old ways through sheer power of technology.
The same cannot be said about of the problem of mass migration and the erosion of the hosts’ social environment that it causes.
As I’ve stated before, the only possible way this can be completely ignored is if the framing simply doesn’t acknowledge or value the social solidarity provided by the nation at all; it requires a wholesale denial or blindness to the glue that binds various societies together since time immemorial.
As a former libertarian, I’m frankly embarrassed by how blind I was to these basic social truths. On X, a pithy little tweet described libertarianism as “truly the only equivalent of feminism for men.” Which made me chuckle; the theory only works if you’re willingly or unknowingly blind to social forces which make the political possible in the first place.
I endorse the rest of this take, but libertarianism has no problem with joint ownership, and countries can be conceptualized as intergenerational, publicly owned enterprise, so the doors are opened if you ever feel like coming back
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
America isn't Lwow 1918 though. In Florida and Texas the majority of Hispanics voted the same way as the majority of whites.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Do you think it's worth defending now? Do you think it ever was?
I suspect his list of “countries worth defending” is paper thin in both time and space, as if political morality only started 70 years ago.
Liberal internationalists are almost all like this. It’s terminal recency bias.
It’s like that meme about liberals lecturing Christians about Jesus; “No, I don’t believe in your backwards ideas, but if I say the right things you might do what I want.”
Substitute The Nation for Jesus and you’ve got it pegged; in reality they don’t think any nation is really worth defending on its own terms, they never have, and they never will. It’s total anathema to them. When pressed, they don’t even think The Nation exists or should exist, or they believe in it in only the vaguest, wishy washy terms.
I don't really see the issue with having a short list of "countries worth defending"
My list is incredibly short, and it's getting shorter as western nations/political elites signal clearly that their values and mine are becoming more and more at odds
Basically every historical country isn't worth defending as of 2025, because human society and norms have changed since then, and now they'd be outdated.
If I lived in the 1800s, I'd like the countries around then, and shit on the countries from 1600 for being backwards idiots. But I don't live in the 1800s so instead I look down on them for being backwards idiots. I imagine the people of 2200 will feel that way about us.
More options
Context Copy link
Correct. Individual human beings are worth defending as an end in themselves; all organisations, from the nation to the East Cupcake Middle School Parent-Teacher Association, have value as a means to an end. (cf. Immanuel Kant).
I disagree. Institutions and memeplexes exist in a positive or negative feedback loop in relation to its constituents, it’s not unidirectional like an impossibly neat organizational chart; not only is the whole more than the sum of its parts, but the sum of the parts are a function of the sum of the whole.
Individuals and institutions push and mold each other and they have values independent of each other but separately the whole equation shifts.
When I was younger I saw as criticism of globalism & neoliberal economics a term; “Autistic economics”. I laughed when I saw it at first but I think there was a there there in the criticism.
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
I'm afraid to reach such a level of fear, he'd have to be cruel and arbitrary to at least one white citizen who looks illegal.
I'm not completely opposed to telling brown legal immigrants and citizens in illegal immigration hotbeds (kind enough to label themselves "sanctuary cities") that they really ought to start carrying their papers, provided that the state of exception doesn't last too long.
My bet, though, continues to be on nothing ever happening. The browning of America will continue apace, and the Trump deportation spree barely a blip in the grand scheme of things.
More options
Context Copy link
Isn't the whole point of being white that you don't "look illegal?"
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