site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 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
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

That doesn't and hasn't really happened in the US

Nonsense. You don't sell guns or sex or heterodox politics or alternative payment systems so you wouldn't know.

It's been happening for a long ass time, it just creeped up to normies now.

don't sell guns or sex

Those aren't speech. Those are definitely questions of autonomy, but they aren't speech. Which makes me think we're both having different conversations here.

There was a six-month period in 2018 where every major social media site, and many minor ones, would not only ban transmission of DefCad files, or ban discussion of those files, but even discussion of the ban. And they lost. CodeIsNotFreeSpeech was shoved off AWS. Entirely away from the sphere of sales, ARFCOM was booted from their DNS provider with little notice and no recourse. YouTube has banned guntubers for showing (legal!) machine guns or silencers, or for taking gun sponsorships.

There are other things than guns, for that matter. This story is hilarious in hindsight and the politician in question was able to get a workaround, but a lot of people don't.

And that's the stuff we hear about.

I highlight the pornapocalypses (and dildopocalypses) here because I want people on the right to recognize that it's not just hitting them.

But the other half of that is people who aren't on the right need to recognize that there's been stuff hitting the right, too, and many of these are either less defensible or far broader-reaching.

I'm well aware Americans have a longstanding hypocrisy about pornography not being art along criteria that even their Supreme Court refuses to explain, but if documenting historical machineguns or how to build 3D printed guns doesn't count as speech, then this conversation is indeed over, because all that's happening is that you don't like when the tools of censorship apply to things you like.

It's a popular position, but don't come and pretend to have any attachement to free speech as a concept if speech is narrowly restrained to the content you approve of.