site banner
PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   26697 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 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.

8
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Posted this in the comments last week, but was curious to get some more thoughts on a potential path forward on the healthcare front that isn't just single-payer across the board:

I do occasionally wonder if you could get to a decent place via:

  1. Get rid of Medicaid. It maybe made sense at one point, but it's current incarnation is, as far as I can tell, such a disgusting mess for all involved parties that it's better to just kill it with fire.
  2. People who would be on Medicaid can now get insurance via the ACA exchanges - they'll get a 94% CSR plan for 2% of their income. There's some annoyance around how they will enter their income, but much less paperwork than it takes to interface with Medicaid. There would need to be a small legislative tweak to allow this to happen (let <138% FPL income people get subsidies), but in practice they should trade a bunch of annoying documentation and everything is free for a functional network (ie a blues plan) and everything is very cheap + 2% of their income.
  3. Expand Medicare to more disease categories other than just end stage renal disease (in addition to the elderly). In practice I think you want to try to capture an additional several million of the sickest people. Hemophiliacs, organ transplant, some cancers, some rare genetic disease perhaps, that sort of thing. This will dramatically lower premiums in the ACA. However power-law distributed you think healthcare costs are, the reality is they are likely more power law distributed than you think.

That's going to create some winners and losers, hospitals will be upset that more high cost people are on Medicare, but shifting people from Medicaid to commercial reimbursement rates should help out with that. The amount of bureaucratic nonsense saved by getting rid of Medicaid should be huge.

All a bit of pie in the sky dreaming anyways...

It's not about the system, it's about the people.

Low income, high obesity, non-White or non-east-Asian will topple any system.

What evidence is there of this for income or race?

What kind of evidence are you looking for? That the largest brown population groups in America make less money than the Whites and East Asians? That low income people pay less, despite requiring the same treatment? That obesity is a cause for many medical issues? That doctors can spend up to 30 hours in a week servicing people who don't pay anything at all, ever?

Conceptually it's a simple proposition. The system is based on pooling resources together, and then that pool is used for those in need. People who pay more than they take out can maintain the system. People who pay less make it harder. Both ends of this equation matter.

The problem America has is that it wants to maintain a 'high' European or East Asian standard, but it's lacking the population to maintain it on both ends. Which leads to odd systemic 'errors'. The complexity of the system muddies the water as to why it is so expensive. But it makes sense when you operationalize the population differences.

If your logic is based solely on income, including race is very confusing.

It's not based solely on income. I said that it's based on people and the differences between them.

We can tease out some obvious differences using various proxies, such as the examples I gave before: Income, obesity, or 'race'. But the overarching point is that we have big natural experiments when comparing various different health care systems. Those experiments collapse a lot of the complexities, but they also help verify the proxies we used before and the limited but relevant insights they give into the health care systems.

What natural experiments show this for race, controlling for income? That's why this is confusing.

I want to say any majority black country, but I'm not sure we are on the same wavelength with regards to income.

To highlight what I'm getting at the most obvious example I can think of is the fact that the black population In the US can not functionally maintain the white/east asian standard. I.e. you have a population block that does not contribute to the pool of potential quality medical staff in a similar way that the white/east asian group does.

This disparity might not be pronounced in any relevant way so long as there are proportionally enough candidates for quality medical staff, but change the proportions enough and you will run into the aforementioned 'system errors'. This has similar cascading effects when looking at other professions that require high quality people.

To that extent income isn't as relevant a factor as one might think. There are a lot of wealthy people whose wealth is only made relevant by the existence of the quality people that enable that wealth to begin with. You might argue that to be the case with regards to any society in general, and I'd agree, but what I am getting it here is that the wealth generating avenues are not at all equal or equally predicting with regards to social outcomes. Which is exemplified by the fact that even when controlling for income, blacks commit more crime than poor whites.

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