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I moderated a forum once.
Like many forums it struggled with one of the basic problems of forum moderation — how much niceness do you enforce, which I'll explain by way of some endemic user types in any forum with enough people and anything but the most milquetoast topic.
A: Here's the troll who comes by only to post egregiously offensive "go kill yourself [list of slurs]",
B: Here's the more subtle troll, who keeps toeing the line as much as he can get away with.
C: here's the user who is not a troll. They actually do participate in discussion and are clearly trying to be a part of the community. They're also abrasive and/or obnoxious and/or inflammatory.
D: And then here's the final type of user that's problematic as a mod: They're a sensitive snowflake. Honestly they need to be sub-divided further, because some of them are just born snowflakes that can't handle any opposition to their viewpoint at all, and others are retaliatory snowflakes, because if I got a ban for three days for saying this opinion is dumb then that guy also needs to get a ban for three days for saying this other opinion is dumb.
The forum was one that was trying really hard to be heterogenous in terms of opinions and also to be nice and moderating it was a nightmare, not because of the obvious ban on sight trolls but because inevitably when you want to moderate niceness now 90% of your mod time — and the mod time becomes a balloon that expands to fill all available space — is spent on dealing with constant playground supervision of the snowflakes. Also you've been slowly but steadily banning your type C members when they eventually accrue enough complains from the type Ds, and because they're really annoying you initially don't miss them until you realize that conversation in your forum is drying up a bit and also some of the valuable forum members who were friends with type Cs also got pissed off and left and also mixed into the type Cs and their friends were, inevitably, some of the more useful members of the forum who knew a lot (and hence got into arguments that annoyed snowflakes).
Also it turns out snowflakes are basically never satisfied as long and are just a self eating death spiral of a forum culture.
After my experience moderating that forum and swearing off moderating ever again, I ended up lurking the notorious kiwifarms. It was full of people who engaged in what would definitely be termed elsewhere as hate speech against me. Now, I never actually made an account there, and I also stopped visiting a few years back so idk if things have changed, but at the time I remember being struck by how much less of a threat I felt reading kiwifarms, because yeah slurs were being thrown around but users were actually arguing, you didn't just have someone with the viewpoint that was the forum consensus and then everyone else against that consensus gets to tiptoe around what they can say or get banned. Everyone shared their most idiotic opinions and had other people arguing with them no holds barred, the forum also had reaction emojis so you could freely post your insane conspiracy theory but wou would get 50 "lol look at this insane conspiracy theory" reactions.
I remember a few years ago people were still making fun of t*kt*kers and how they would asterisk everything or use idiotic word substitution like "krill myself" because otherwise they'd get blackholed by the TikTok algorithm.
Meanwhile I took a long long break from reddit and only recently returned, to a forum dedicated to a game I play, and discovered that in the interim reddit has added some kind of probably AI based site-wide moderation against violent language (or actual human beings are being this dumb idk) and it's impossible to talk like a normal person there anymore, because if you say, in a joking and friendly fashion perfectly understood by you and the person you are talking to to be friendly, "you said my build was bad, I'm gonna have to shove you off a cliff" (this example is not great because I forget the actual exchange, but whatever, fill in something more normal) then you get banned from all of Reddit and the poor guy you were talking with gets to post your exit speech from the discord you're both in as well. It does appear to be a strike system where first you get warned, since I got my first warning for telling someone who posted about a pedophile moving into their neighborhood that hopefully the pedophile would die suddenly.
It's hard not to turn this into some kind of doompost about how the internet is turning into a horrible little hellhole where no one has a normal argument anymore just constant barricading themselves into their own opinions lest they be offended by the not niceness of having to hear someone else's opinions, each little forum and its own narrow band of acceptable ideology, all while the biggest social media sites are enforcing the most transparently fake bullshit kindergarten language upon us all. It brings out the free speech absolutist instincts in me, it really does.
But what if you don't want an aggressively anti-censorship forum that will involve a forum culture of calling everyone slurs? You want the veneer of respectability and gentility but also the ability to have an actual conversation?
Well I already listed the shitty experience I had trying to moderate such a forum, against what was not bad faith actors but just human actors acting predictably human hence this being a pattern you can see all over the place, and now I have to address the flip side of the coin.
Let's by analogy discuss locker room culture. I don't actually know if locker room culture is a real thing irl so I'm going to discuss hypothetical locker room culture.
It's a group of like fifteen guys in a guy's only space. They're basically all normal guys, plus rapey Kenneth and edgy Doug. Sometimes rapey Kenneth makes a joke about how some girl in the school really needs to be fucked into her proper place in society and Doug will make some follow up joke and everyone else is maybe thinking "c'mon man can we not do this" if it's been like too many times that day but usually you're just trying to finish getting dressed and maybe John also is like "that's not cool man" and pushes back. But like, the rest of the time the atmosphere is just a comfy men's only space plus the occasional rape joke or comment about how women suck or are all gold-diggers or are responsible for everything wrong with society.
Anyway, if for whatever reason that locker room decided it wanted to actually be a co-ed discussion space instead, it would have a little problem, which is that any individual woman walking in would get the vibe — they're the barely tolerated outsider — and then leave unless they're like extra autistic/socially challenged.
Because there's just the microculture of what kinds of things are ok to say there and what aren't, and sometimes what's ok to say is anything negative about group A and what's not ok to say is anything negative about group B, and it's not really about an active policy one way or another it's just this is the overall culture of the social group, read the room and get out.
This is, unfortunately, the part where I admit that I've spent weeks now debating if I should just quietly show myself the door. I didn't mean to enter themotte under false premises, I just decided my first post wouldn't be some "here's all my labels and opinions" and would be an actual post about a controversial topic I wanted to talk about. And then before I had the chance to like, casually drop the relevant information about me and get it over with (I despise sharing personally identifiable information online, but it was nonetheless something that needed to happen eventually if I wanted to talk about any number of topics I wanted to discuss), my government did a surprise attack on Iran. I quite vividly remember someone posting a comment about there being a siren and someone else saying "can't find any news confirming it" and not piping in with "it's me, I'm the news, posting from the spotty internet in the bomb shelter". And then it became just increasingly not the right moment for it (also I was quite sleep deprived and dealing with lots of other more immediate concerns).
And in the meantime I got to have the uncomfortable sensation of listening in on conversations I felt were very obviously not meant to include me. For several days now I've been debating doing a rip the band-aid off kind of post (how? What framing?) to get it over with and be able to discuss things again or to just... Leave.
Because of course the alternative is to figure out the correct, respectful way to tiptoe around the conversation over whether Jews control the American government/assassinated Kennedy, since we aren't doing kiwifarms style dialogue where someone talks about the kikes ruining everything and someone else responds by calling him a retarded autist, you've got to politely request sources and carefully have respectful mutually productive dialogue.
Or to just like ignore that the conversation is even happening? Stick to discussion of feminism and essentially continue faking being a normal non-Jewish mottizen...
Polite respectful mutual dialogue.
But only for some opinions, because others are an "immense pain in the ass".
Yes this is the actual reason I ended up writing this comment instead of continuing to waffle over if I should just leave. Because it is actually really annoying, if I need to play nice with the neonazis and have polite and measured conversations — I am willing to do this, even though conversations with people who are (only theoretically!) interested in me and my family being dead are a "pain in the ass" to conduct civilly — and to then see someone else express some opinion that is more objectionable to the baseline motte culture, but expressed according to all the rules of the site, and get banned (temporarily) for it. Because it just means setting the lines around what kinds of people are in the locker room, which is pretending to be a co-ed discussion space, but isn't. And yes I'm biased by being more inclined towards free speech over banning and thinking that it's better to have the opinions and talk it out then constantly police what people say, sure, but if the forum can tolerate holocaust denial I think it can also stretch itself to tolerate libtards. I'm not interesting in doing some tit for tat thing where I'm like "well if you banned them for this, why didn't you ban that other person for that" because like I stated up front that's just the path to a death spiral where almost no one interesting sticks around. But still, come on, you didn't ban them for constantly sticking their conspiracy theories into every discussion couched as consensus building obvious fact. Apply the same low bar consistently. Let people have an actual conversation with actual disagreement.
When you moderated a forum, what did you do about posters who threatened to leave and take their valuable perspectives with them if they didn't get their way?
(I promise that thought came to mind before I realized it would come off as accusing you of doing so. I can say I hope you're not.)
You see, moderators do not have the power to keep members in a community: they can only ban/punish or not. Members have their right to decide to stay or go. And here, many left-wing posters have left not with a permaban but with a flounce: a public door-slam denouncing the moderators, and/or the posters, and/or whomever, for tolerating the wrong kinds of people too much and the right kinds of people not enough.
Or they just didn't make the jumps: there are still plenty of well-known left-wing posters from the /r/slatestarcodex Culture War Roundup days still seeming to post their same views under the new "no culture war" regime. (Speaking of which, it occurs to me this community has twice been sent off into exile, both times on account of outside demands/threats over too much right-wing activity.)
But what do you do about flouncers? The most obvious solution is to give them what they want: give them special treatment, "affirmative action for left-wingers," as Scott did on SlateStarCodex. You can do that, but, in this case, affirmative action doesn't prove effective at healing underlying divisions. The majority ends up rankled and chilly towards the officially-favored minority, it seems.
Offhand, I don't have any other policy proposal options based on the history of the Scott-sphere. Now, I thought about asking about your experience handling intractable disagreements, not as a forum moderator, but as an Israeli, but that seems like it could get really pessimistic really quickly, so maybe we shouldn't get into that.
Eh, I don't think it makes sense to ask people to stay or make special exceptions, but if there's a really high attrition rate it might be a sign something needs to be tweaked. But there's a limit on how effective it's going to be against a beleaguered minority.
Tangentially, as a woman in tech, it makes a big difference to me if I'm the only female programmer in the entire company, and there isn't really anything the company can do about it except hire another braver woman first (or I guess hire three women all together) because I have options for companies that aren't 100% male programmers and I go for those instead.
(I mean I think what draws me here specifically includes having less PC views that I can't voice elsewhere, and I think if you're toeing the PC line 100% then why would you choose to be here and be uncomfortable? And idk how fixable that is but I also don't know how much of that boils down to the PC culture of "cut off anyone with bad opinions" exacerbating the issue by reducing tolerance for being around people who suck)
Re: intractable disagreements: this is a very long effortpost topic for sure, and something I can maybe get around to writing about.
... fwiw I posted my original comment and then went off and curled up in a ball shaking because it was a high stress experience for me posting it, but at least the response hasn't been a bunch of jeering so hey forcing myself to not be conflict avoidant has so far paid off.
Well, damn. I didn't upvote you originally, but I have now. I'm less likely to upvote long comments, because the longer they are the more imperfections they have, and if something highly-upvoted isn't 100% good then there's too-often someone who picks out the worst small aspect and says "Look what TheMotte agrees with!!!" ... but I hope it's clear that, even when people disagree with you, we're very glad you're here.
"Harry Potter had replied ... it was not a trap, it was simply a rule of how scientists operated that you had to try to disprove your own theories, and if you made an honest effort and failed, that was victory.
Draco had tried to point out the staggering stupidity of this by suggesting that the key to surviving a duel was to cast Avada Kedavra on your own foot and miss." - HPMOR
One of the lessons of that fan fic is that even the smartest characters aren't nearly as smart as they think they are, but here I think Harry is intelligently expressing the correct attitude and Draco is intelligently expressing the natural attitude. If you're in a fight, then to win you want to express your side's Correct beliefs, not undermine each other. But if you want to have correct beliefs rather than just Correct ones, then exposing your beliefs to challenge is barely even the first step in the process toward the ideal of being both the believer and the challenger.
This is so sad to read. I'm old enough and naive enough to still think that 90s-style "just be blind to race and sex and everything else irrelevant when hiring and it'll all work out fine" is the ideal way for society to operate, but it turns out that that plus a little hysteresis is enough to make whole companies indefinitely segregated even against their own desires? You're making a good argument for company-level affirmative action programs, and an even better argument against disparate impact lawsuits.
This comment and that of @Clementine is basically exactly the Parable of the Polygons IRL, where you can mathematically model how self-segregation happens naturally to some extent under certain conditions. Of course it's natural to expect someone who is a super-minority to not like it there! So no individual is even necessarily at fault. What the math says is one potential "fix" for companies and other organizations with this challenge is simply to insist on some minimum diversity level as a requirement. Well, okay, more specifically it says that individuals should refuse to accept jobs in low-diversity organizations, but I think you can still offer some organizational help for that. I actually quite like that framing personally. Maybe rather than aggressive DEI targeting perfect equity in all things, it's a 'good enough' lower goal for DEI to both penalize over-uniformity as well as reward under-representation, and only to a point. That's not DEI as we currently understand it, but I think it reaches some level of social good as well as maintaining some level of fairness.
I also like it because it's empowering in a certain sense, and applicable to majority-members. It says we should seek out diversity, which I think is as a general rule correct and economically validated to be successful and net-positive return even if a lot of the implementation and rhetoric around it went "too far" and lost sight of some things. It's empowering to the individual who can help prevent segregation in a pretty direct way, even if you're a majority class (locally or globally, it cuts both ways).
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Sorry to do something that may register as injecting more fresh conflict into a situation that is already stressful for you from the amount of conflict, but unfortunately by the nature of the thing there is almost no way to bring it up in a situation that is not like this. I think that women making remarks like this is actually a big irritant to mixed spaces (and tends to breed resentment even when people are socialised to be accommodating on the surface). As is often said, men's capacity for physical violence is mirrored by women's capacity for social violence (that is, the threat of exclusion, suspension of reciprocity, coordinated punishment...), and one of the ways in which the latter is exercised are such overt displays of discombobulated emotion (perhaps signalling something like "I feel endangered to the point I can no longer maintain the default façades of social interaction, this is an emergency, someone please help"), which trigger bystanders' defensive instincts and tend to override System-2 social rules about fairness and equality that are otherwise in place.
Once, almost half a lifetime ago now, I had a very long and emotional (but not hostile) argument with my then-SO where at one point out of frustration I punctuated a sentence by slamming my fist into the mattress I was leaning on (the arrangement was such that she was reclining on the bed, and I was sitting on the floor leaning against it with one arm, fairly close to her). I had zero violent intent towards her or the object that received the blow in doing that - it felt really more like a physiological reaction, no different from when you are a little kid and got hurt and can't stop crying - and there was little in the topic of the conversation that should suggest otherwise. Yet, when I did this, she froze and stared at me with the most genuine expression of fear I've ever seen from anyone in the flesh for a few seconds, to then dissolve into a frantic run-on sentence to the effect of "oh my god, I did not know you were like that, this is not okay" which was completely out of line with her usual composed character and in turn left me horrified and impotently trying to explain myself. We talked it out in the end; the relationship did not last anyway; but that day I learned one important lesson about how what an action means to me can be different from the effect it has on others.
It is quite likely that many men have an experience like this at some point in their lifetime, which teaches them to be judicious about even accidentally flaunting their capacity for physical violence, though often it is embarrassing and private and not a thing they will proudly talk about. I wish more women could have similar experiences about their capacity for social violence - as I see it, the casually dropped "and then I curled up in a ball shaking" is really the feminine counterpart to punching the drywall and leaving a hole. The latter can never not send the message that this could have been your face, and likewise the former can never not send the message that the sentence could have been extended with "...because of you, and let's see what the people around you have to say about that" (which often needn't even be said out loud).
I think it's emotionally healthy for people of any gender or political orientation to occasionally demonstrate and discuss an eminently human reaction. It's only an "irritant to mixed spaces" if done repeatedly in my opinion. I wouldn't call it some kind of nuclear bomb to the discussion or playing with online debate-board PTSD or 'something that can't be unsaid' or anything, if I'm understanding the thrust of your comment right.
Eh. That's a statement that would not be so easy to prove - examples of the sort of slippery slopes that are enabled by encouraging the sharing of such "human reactions", and what sort of communities form at their bottom, abound (as the advantage gained by exhibiting the "reactions" is so strong that nobody is going to leave that $5 on the ground in the long run), while if discouraging it is in fact a bad thing, this badness must be rather subtle.
I didn't suggest that it's a "nuclear bomb" in the sense of one instance of it being immediately massively destructive (though it certainly can be; in the phpBB era, I have once seen a fairly major community ripped apart by what was, impressively enough, one sharing of such a "human reaction" by a guy's sockpuppet account LARPing as a Japanese half-sister (a critical mass of people including staff really wanted to believe).)
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It's pathos over logos.
The equivalent is a man saying that a forum post got him so agitated that he smashed his laptop to pieces with his bare hands.
Or saying he got an axe and chopped a tree apart in lieu of his interlocutor's carcass. I actually did that once (and yes, I mean both the chopping and the telling him); I think the only reason I didn't get banned was that the troll who provoked the response was the forum owner and wanted to troll me more in the future.
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Mainly, it's a kind of test I put myself through. I want to believe true things; I want to be sure that, where my beliefs and the consensus align, it is because the 'PC' position genuinely seems correct to my best judgment, not just because it's what everyone else in my bubble is saying. Thus, I find it useful to get into civil arguments with dissidents and contrarians so as to regularly confront myself with their best counter-arguments and, having faced them with open eyes, reassure myself that I still just don't find them convincing at all.
Secondarily, insofar as I believe my opinions to be correct, and that it's better for other people to believe true things, engaging with my opponents is a chance to change some minds and - essentially - "redeem" some of them. Bodhisattva-style. But this is more of an ego-stroking, self-congratulatory justification and if I'm being dead honest, most of the actual motivation is coming from the first thing. Helping people see the light on the margins is more of a positive externality.
(Also: I guess I do have a few points on which I differ from the, like, bog-standard Blue Tribe catechism. But there are many individual subjects where my genuine opinions involve nothing I wouldn't and haven't said in the presence of the most mainstream leftists you can imagine, and I still get into Motte arguments about those, so I think the point stands.)
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Just my 2 cents, but thanks for sticking around despite having some gripes and despite feeling stress about it. Admittedly on the first read I thought that this would be yet another flameout "I'm taking my ball home because y'all don't behave the way I want", especially since I strongly disagree on Turok (in short, he has always been a bit contemptuous, but completely independently of the mods recently I have found his posts increasingly difficult to parse, it's often unclear who he is even arguing against, he mixes viewpoints that may be aligned against the woke but are otherwise quite distinct, and all of that with what I perceive as a clear sneering tone). But your further posts make me update in the direction that you're engaging in good faith.
Yeah I'm off the anti-woke reservation.
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Even if we had jeered at you, never forget that we are just random assholes who don't matter. The more you tell yourself that the more you will believe it. And please post more, while I disagree with your conclusions I enjoyed how you write so much I nominated your op for an aaqc.
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Same here, sort of: no literal curling up or shaking for me, but other people talk about dopamine hits they get from seeing their posts have been replied to, but for me it's always a stab of dread. Sometimes I just feel something needs saying, and I guess I just have to live with it whenever I give in.
Oh, would that everything was fixable. I don't know that this isn't, but I'm not confident that it is. The fact that there's total freedom of exit and lots of alternatives (combined with how remote this site is now) makes it look pretty tricky to me, if the solution is going to involve anybody having to compromise rather than just bailing. If you have any ideas, though, we'll all be glad to hear them.
I'll be glad to read that, too! (I don't guarantee I'll reply, though - stabs of dread and all...)
Edit: to be clear, I am not saying that anyone should avoid replying to me if they otherwise would! My feelings are my own problem, and the dread is really ~never warranted, as I've found, anyway.
This is basically the only reason I post. Well, this and alcohol.
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Y'all looking for a psychiatrist? I'm cheap.
Ahem. A position I semi-endorse is that most liberals tend to be more neurotic, and less likely to post here if the waters aren't welcoming. Plus, most of the internet is liberal-aligned by default, why would they be specifically drawn here? I imagine those who do are attracted by the quality of discourse, if nothing else.
I don't fit neatly into most political categories, on a political compass scale, I end up in the middle by virtue of multiple extremes canceling out. I'd call myself quite thick-skinned (a common trait in our most prolific posters), but I'd probably not engage at all if all the feedback I received was negative. So I can't really blame you for having some degree of dread. I've submitted comments where I was confident I was right, but I certainly didn't look forward to the task of wrangling all the people convinced otherwise. It's an acquired taste.
This does have a converse effect, in that most liberals arguing politics on the internet are completely marinated in liberal-aligned or more often liberal-only spaces, and that shapes their ability to discuss things. OP's use of "libtards" is telling - lib"tards" are not welcomed here, just as rightards or libertardians are not welcomed, because they're unable to follow the rules or live up to the standards of the space. And the process of marinating in homogenous spaces does turn an awfully large percentage of online liberals into "libtards" in that sense, people who don't know how to debate outside of the context of a front-page subreddit, college classroom, or similarly low-quality space. One reason why the few high-quality and highly-emotionally-regulated liberal posters have, for the most part, been greatly valued here.
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Kinda. Out of places where I can go and find people who disagree with me and test my mettle against them, it's the one with the best quality of discourse.
That's a better reason than most, and one I share.
To me, a great deal of the attraction of The Motte is the opportunity to lock horns with intellectual peers. If my ideas can't stand up to scrutiny, I owe it to myself to find out.
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