site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   31816 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 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.

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

A culture-war-adjacent court opinion that @The_Nybbler may find entertaining:

  • An 80-year-old man applies for a permit to buy a rifle. The permit is denied, solely because he was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital for four days forty years ago. He applies for expungement of the records of that commitment, so that he can get the permit.

  • The judge denies the application for expungement.

T.B.'s problematic interaction with LifeStream staff raised questions in the court's mind about T.B.'s "candor to the [c]ourt and fundamental issues that are here."

[T.B.] told the people [at LifeStream] that he was suffering from anxiety and depression. And he said he did that because that’s what he thought he had to say in order to get this appointment so that he could get the evaluation. And a concern to me is that he was not particularly honest with these folks about why he wanted this evaluation.

In that vein, the judge took issue with T.B.'s dismissive characterization of the nature of his hospitalization at Ancora versus the hospital record—namely, that after questioning the staff released him.

In the report it says, "unable to contain on open unit; violent outbursts; threatening; severely agitated; threatening others; yelling; demanding; attempted to strangle his wife at home; violent outbursts; tried to tear side rails off of the [bed]". So, this is not a man who showed up at Ancora mildly agitated or upset, but was described by the doctors down there as threatening behavior, so agitated they couldn't talk to him and violent outbursts towards the people on the staff there.

Regarding his present condition, the court noted that despite the medical reports stating he was stable, T.B. exhibited signs of memory problems and a lack of awareness regarding his own medication regimen.

[T.B.] doesn’t even know what medication he’s taking for his [d]iabetes or for his high cholesterol situation or his [h]yperlipidemia. And that, to me, speaks volumes about not that he’s dangerous to the public safety, but why would we give an 80-year-old man, who can’t even be responsible for his own health, access to a firearm that he wants to use for target practice with his friends. You know, is he going to forget to put the safety on the firearm when he isn’t at the range doing target practice? Is he going to forget to secure it in his home so that people who come to visit don’t have access to it? That’s what’s really of concern to this court.

  • The appeals panel affirms. "The trial court reasonably determined that defendant failed to meet his burden to demonstrate the expungement was in the public interest." No second amendment for him!

I don't pay a lot of attention to gun rights since it's not a particularly salient issue for me, but I'm softly intrinsically in favor of 2A rights. That said, gun advocates routinely make terrible arguments that alienate me from their views. This post is a good example of that.

The core issue here is that 40 years ago is a long time and there should probably be some automatic statute of limitations for psychiatric stays to fall off your record. Losing rights because of that seems wrong to me, but 2A advocates can't help themselves and go way further:

  • There's that absolutist SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED ideology floating around, where any violation of 2A rights is perceived as abhorrent, and thus worthy of maximum outrage. Everyone implicitly agrees with judicial ideology that rights aren't absolute in other regards, as there's no great controversy around e.g. inciting violence being illegal despite the existence of the first amendment. It's the duty of gun rights advocates to show that any given restriction is unreasonable, and I'm sure a lot of them are, but many advocates seem to want to skip this step in favor of leaping to indignant outrage whenever an article like this pops up

  • The facts of this case make it clear the guy is just bringing insufficient evidence. The guy's involuntary committal was violent, which ought to raise the bar for expungement. Then all he brings are a single psychiatrist's evaluation report that wasn't particularly sympathetic (The doctor found T.B. "very talkative," "shaky/trembling," "feeling angry," in "too much pain," and experiencing "memory problems." In his August 14, 2023 evaluation, Dr. Dada diagnosed T.B. with "an adjustment disorder and anxiety,") and an irrelevant NP report. Like, really? This man is your martyr?

I think it's the same for most defenses of basic rights. Either defend the rights of scumbags or everyone loses the right.

Happens in free speech when it's Nazis that need defending. Happens in criminal law when it's pedophiles or rapists getting railroaded.

And of course the question gets asked why not just defend the right for "decent" people. But "decent people" always tends to start looking a little too much like "my political allies".

It would be nice to not have this slippery slope hanging over our heads for every basic right.

I find it much more reasonable to protect the speech of people I disagree with (e.g. Nazis) than to let people with lots of mental illnesses use firearms. Again, no rights are absolute. This is something everyone implicitly agrees with. For free speech we draw the line at incitement. For firearms we draw the line at crazy people (among several other places). If you're pro crazy-people-having-guns, firstly I think that's just silly on its face, and secondly I don't think it really does much to protect non-crazy-people from having their rights not be infringed.

I'm not in favor of crazy people having guns, but I'm not sure I fully trust the system to draw the line on crazy people.

If the system was accurately drawing the line of crazy people I'd be fine with having them all institutionalized. If you are considered too dangerous to own a gun then you are a danger to society in general, after all knives, vehicles, and lighters are still easily accessible for these people.

If you are too crazy to be trusted with a firearm, you should not be out in public, period.

I think that goes too far personally. Someone who e.g. is fine 99% of the time but has occasional severe hallucinations ought to be able to go out and buy food at the local supermarket. If they get unlucky and hit that 1% chance then you probably only have some annoyed retail workers. With guns involved it instantly becomes so much more high-consequence.

I think you can probably draw a line of separation between "normal" people who have personality traits, tendencies, hobbies, and political views I do not like and people who have severe mental illness (or an episode of the same with increased risk of recurrence).

Admittedly this guy was a lot further back so that the standards were different then they are today after some testing and improvement, but you have to work very hard to earn an involuntary stay and be very poorly behaved. Almost ALWAYS it involves true serious mental illness such and Schizophrenia, Bipolar disorder, severe Borderline, or MDD with suicide attempt or suicidal ideation. Or. It involves someone who is so unpleasant, uncooperative, violent, etc. that they are almost always a dangerous criminal they just might not have gotten caught yet (and the latter bucket is much less common).

If you are a threat to yourself or someone else in a real and foreseeable way you will likely be so again and the amount of danger is quite a bit higher. This is not "I dislike Nazis and they could do bad things!!!" this is "30% chance of murdering someone."

Someone being reasonable and apolitical can definitely draw that line. It's just that it's too easy for bad actors to start being political.

The way states usually handle this is that the person has to have some thing happen like a: has a psychiatric illness b. is a credible threat to themselves or someone else.

The presence of criteria for a psychiatric illness is important here and does most the political protection.

A really common teaching interaction is something like "haha, yeah man this patient is delusional because he is Trump supporter and thinks Obama isn't a citizen" attending puts on a very serious face "no, absolutely not. Political beliefs are not delusional unless they are totally culturally dystonic and fixed, the fact that he won the election is proof that is isn't delusion blah blah...."

Psychiatry is in general a pretty pozzed specialty but they don't fuck around when it comes to that kind of stuff.

You will absolutely see patients get discharged who are odious, violent, domestic abusers, substance users and all kinds of other crap because they don't actually meet commitment criteria and aren't psychiatric.

Now you are more like to see something like "this patient does meet commitment criteria yet we'd usually let him go because it's probably safe to do so however he was using racial slurs towards the staff so in he goes." This is unprofessional but still unfortunately legit.

My wife is a psychiatrist at a public hospital that deals with some of Chicago's sickest and poorest mental cases. I get a pretty good cross section of the stories. It's just not really the case that the kind of politics she's dealing with from her patients are mondain red vs blue tribe stuff. The craziest red tribe anti-vax position you can imagine would not phase her and would sound strange in its groundedness compared to the actual involuntary cases she deals with, which are almost always about refusal to take medication that stops them from like painting the walls with their feces. Psychiatrists are certainly like 400% more lgbt than the general population but they just aren't taking the politics of their patients seriously enough for discrimination to really be a thing, they're fighting tooth and nail just to get the feces smeerers to take their meds.

Absolutely, and while overt delusional beliefs are what pop to non-medical people seeing or hearing about these patients, the real problem is the negative symptoms of schizophrenia (often manifesting as a total inability to care for oneself in a functional way). That is much less exciting but more important for commitment purposes a good chunk of the time.

I think a lot of the doubters here would be way more comfortable if they had a chance to stay in a city crisis center for five minutes.

The core issue here is that 40 years ago is a long time and there should probably be some automatic statute of limitations for psychiatric stays to fall off your record

Our track record at actually curing serious mental illness isn't that great (especially if it's controlled by medication that the patient is always one dose from going off). Many of those conditions are inherent and fairly permanent.

The core issue here is that 40 years ago is a long time and there should probably be some automatic statute of limitations for psychiatric stays to fall off your record.

It's a state thing, so it varies, but my understanding is that restriction periods being in some proportion to the burden of compelling a given treatment is the norm. On federal forms, the question about mental health/competence has wording along the lines of "have you ever been evaluated..." but includes an asterisk clarifying that the correct answer is actually your current status, according to the state's laws.

I can also get annoyed at the politics and the (especially online) culture.

A recent example: there was a shooting at Salt Lake City's No Kings protest a couple weeks ago. There is a brief video that shows what went down. It sounds like the SLCPD was aware that event volunteers were carrying pistols which resulted in reported "peacekeepers" (volunteer event staff) shooting a man armed with a rifle.

A pair of volunteers, easily identified by high visibility vests, observed this individual dressed in black "seclude" himself, don a mask, take out his AR, and approach the crowd with his rifle at what looks like low ready. The volunteers draw their pistols, aim at him as seen in the video, and allegedly shout at him to stop. The 24 year old panics, runs towards the crowd, and a volunteer fires 3 times. He hits the the suspect once, but then also kills a bystander beyond him. Turns out charges are not yet filed against anyone, although the 24 year old was initially arrested for reckless endangerment or some such thing.

The demonstrator -- reportedly a lefty anarchist John Brown Club adjacent type -- dressed in all black with a mask approaches the crowd by his lonesome. Apparently he was not prepared to be challenged. Despite the politics of the guy, the open carry fetishists guys, or people pretending to be them online were in absolute uproar about the violation of his rights. Of course it's unreasonable to intervene. How dare they! He didn't even fire a shot. These volunteers had no right to stop this guy from demonstrating if that's what he meant to do. They wrongly believed a different intent. They were probably so concerned about a shooting they created one. They fucked up so bad one of them killed an innocent man.

To me, a basic expectation for carrying in a public demonstration, especially doing so alone while obscuring one's identity, requires all sorts of technique, safety, and etiquette. Sling your weapon, signal your intent, and prepare to be challenged. Be a prosocial advocate. The freedom to demonstrate is limited in trivial ways with my expectations, but we get to have mass gatherings with firearms.

There's that absolutist SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED ideology floating around, where any violation of 2A rights is perceived as abhorrent, and thus worthy of maximum outrage.

I find it easy to believe takes like Rov_Scam's below. A trashy individual who can't manage to present himself as a decent, responsible person doesn't get what rights he is entitled to. Pretext for a judge to judge an individual as too irresponsible or dangerous.

Capital A-bsolutists are real, though they are less common among advocates. The absolutist rhetoric is some part cultural signal, part true belief (what is a right?), and part tactical. For the last bit, what benefit is there to giving an inch? 2A groups fight alone for a right, at best, most don't care too much about. The public is fickle and of limited value to the advocate's position. The world and many American jurisdictions set an example that incentivizes and justifies obstinance.

The 2A lobby is arguably more alive than ever, so that also contributes to being annoying. Where and when the lobby fails -- which happens -- many people scream with glee. A great many more shrug.

It's the duty of gun rights advocates to show that any given restriction is unreasonable

Unfortunately, yes. A government reinterprets, ignores, or dismantles a right, and the onus is on the citizenry to challenge it. This should carry additional explanatory power for any stubbornness. It would be nice to not require advocacy at all in a high-trust, high-functioning society. Lots of things would be nice!

Are you going to send a donation to a 2A advocacy group because, upon reflection of the details in this case or another, you perceive them as acting reasonably? As @gattsuru studiously documents for us, every little niggle, every small "in", each precedent and alternative interpretation that can be exploited gets explored fully.

Also, 2A rights are still largely intact? Some states can screw with you a bit or place some minor restrictions on firearms, but none have been able to ban them outright.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats