site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 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.

For example half the world drives on the right and half the world drives on the left, but the moral fundamentals beneath which side of the road you personally decide to drive on are universal regardless. You choose depending on whether you want to safely reach your destination or create chaos and accidents around you.

There are baseline universal evolved principles of morality, but there's variation in the relative importance people place on any given moral precept and the specifics are far less universal than you seem to think (lying and deception in isolation is universally considered bad, but pretty much everybody considers this forgivable under certain circumstances and their ideas for when it is justified differ). Oftentimes there are tradeoffs between different moral principles (e.g. prioritising the individual's freedom vs. ensuring that a society is stable and ordered) and different people have different ideas of which moral precept should be prioritised.

To offer up a particularly extreme example that relates to driving I visited Vietnam in April and honestly that entire culture's take on how to drive was very close to "create chaos and accidents around you". The road was absolute anarchy, and the amount of aggressiveness Vietnamese drivers (particularly car drivers) exhibited was beyond anything else I'd ever seen. It is just normal and accepted that drivers will not stop around pedestrian crossings even when pedestrians are crossing. I am not exaggerating when I say there were times I thought I was going to die crossing the road. Vietnamese are just built different, IMO.

BTW are you the one who wrote summaries of your travels to different countries in the CW thread a while back? Really enjoyed that post. I remember you got a lot of shit for your less-than-positive review of Japan - the internet seems to have a penchant for hyping it up and treating it as this unassailable paragon of human development but actually after having heard the anecdotes of a family member who traveled to Japan last year and looking at their photos I'm inclined to agree with you (it's a cliche that Japan has been in the 90s ever since the 70s, but it's also true). I think I share your opinion of France as kind of depressing too in many places - even Paris was shockingly polluted and chaotic, and lacked much of the charm it's so famous for.