site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8692 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 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.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Following up on the post about assisted suicide, here's more about that Swiss clinic which is the subject of allegations by an Irish family:

Two families whose loved ones ended their lives at a Swiss clinic in secret have said they are heartbroken that another family has been put through a similar ordeal.

Anne Canning (51), from Wales, travelled to the Pegasos clinic, near Basel, to end her life in January following the tragic death of her only son. She told her family she was going on holidays.

Under similar circumstances, Alastair Hamilton (47) travelled from the UK to the clinic in 2023.

Following Mr Hamilton’s death, the clinic reportedly promised last year that it would always contact a person’s family before carrying out an assisted death.

However, Ms Canning’s family claim they were never informed.

Last week, the daughter of a Co ­Cavan-based woman who ended her life alone at the same clinic told the Irish Independent that the first she knew that her mother had died was when a volunteer for the group sent her a WhatsApp message.

Maureen Slough (58), who had a history of mental illness, travelled to the Pegasos clinic on July 8, having told her family she was going to Lithuania with a friend.

Now, I'm not going to argue over the right to die, when is suffering intolerable, religious objections, slippery slopes or the rest of it. What I'm going to do is say that this is a business (indeed, this is a claim made in the story by one of the families). And, just the same way that IVF has become a business, and embryonic selection (see the Herasight proceedings) will become a business, when we get into business territory, it's about profit. And to maximise profits, we reduce costs. If that means setting up a clinic that looks like a blocky industrial estate unit and skimping on postage, so be it.

There's some indication, at least from claims by these families, that procedures are not being followed through, or at the very least, merely rubber-stamped and not, in fact, keeping the promises they made about communication with and informing the families:

The Pegasos group said it received a letter from Ms Slough’s daughter, ­Megan ­Royal, saying she was aware of her mother’s wishes and accepted them.

It also said it verified the letter through an email response to her using an email address allegedly supplied by Ms Royal.

Ms Royal said she never wrote such a letter or verified any contact from ­Pegasos, and her family think Ms Slough may have forged the letter and verified it using an email address she created herself.

Her family have questioned why ­Pegasos staff did not ring Ms Royal on a number that Ms Slough had supplied to them for her.

The same way that someone in the comments over on ACX described her experiences with IVF and why the clinic downplayed/ignored her problems, it's the same answer here: it's a business now, and profit (not the message about "we'll compassionately give you what you so emotionally desire") is the motivation. And the more it becomes just another business, the more slippage we'll see. No, I don't mean slippery slope, I mean this kind of thing: we don't email you, you have to track your mother's ashes "using a code, like she was a parcel in the post", and hey, verbal promises aren't worth the paper they're written on, we're legal in this country so too bad.

Standards only last as long as the brakes are on. When we take the brakes off, then it's a business and death (and life) is a commodity to be monetised.

I don't see the need to complicate things. Assisted suicide is objectively bad, and restricting a persons freedom to commit suicide is objectively bad if and only if said person is having an episode (a temporary state of mind of lowered lucidity).

Making it into a business incentivizes death (by incentivizing profits, which is a trivial result of the death of unproductive members of society). Do I need more arguments? Did I even need this one? Assisted suicide is never needed. Suicide is trivial, and obvious. Obviously trivial. But in case there's some psychological defense mechanism which blind people to obvious, painless methods of suicide, I'm not going to write the method for now. If anyone reading this is suicidal, it's a good thing that they think they need to travel to an entire other country just to stop being alive. Being unable to think of a fast, easy and painless way out is great.

Can you, uh, rely on the most miserable, desperate portion of the population to make optimal decisions? Optimal for the rest of us, that is. It’s not like they’re going to be around to clean up.

In the best case, that’s first responders removing a body. I think most cases are messier, more personal, or otherwise worse. They’re externalities to the suicide. Mitigating those is worth something.

incentivizing profits

Okay, but that’s a fully general argument against doing stuff. Plenty of companies are naturally incentivized towards collateral damage. We generally handle this by regulating them instead of banning their industry outright.

Well, you can't, but I still think this is the only correct answer. If somebody wants to kill themselves for say, a year non stop, then at that point, it's not just a hasty decision they've made because they sank into a bad mindset for some time. Depriving them of freedom for extended periods of time in order to 'keep them safe' wouldn't be right.

Assisted suicide is a terrible idea. You cannot possibly regulate this, it's simply a lost cause. It will be used to mass-murder the elder population for economic reasons. I can see many many ways to abuse this and zero ways to make it even slightly unlikely to happen. Suicide should remain one of these things which is illegal, but which nobody can stop you from doing if you really, really want to.

I'm skeptical of every popular modern thing which could have been introduced decades earlier if we wanted to. In almost every case, the reason we didn't do said thing earlier is because we argued that they were terrible ideas. And only now, as the modern world is becoming increasingly ignorant of traditional arguments against these things do we consider them "good ideas". They're chesterton's fences. Other examples are IoT, online IDs, social credit scores, mass immigration, censorship laws, guilt by association and "fact checking". I'm too lazy to think of more, but the years to come will provide us with plenty more examples

And only now, as the modern world is becoming increasingly ignorant of traditional arguments against these things do we consider them "good ideas". They're chesterton's fences. Other examples are IoT, online IDs, social credit scores, mass immigration, censorship laws, guilt by association and "fact checking".

  • IoT and online IDs and social credit scores are becoming a thing because technological progress makes them feasible. In 1994, when most people were offline and the few which were online were mostly running PCs with Windows 3.11 and a modem, a dishwasher costing twice as much with a BNC port to connect to a home network which 98% of the population did not have would not have been very successful. Today the hardware costs are basically nil and most customers have WiFi in their kitchen. That does not mean that these are good ideas! Mao simply did not have the tech level to track which of his countrymen were good commie citizens and which ones were bad at the level of granularity, but I think he would have liked the idea.
  • Censorship is an ancient idea. When the first warlords turned into nobles at the dawn of civilization, they very likely reacted badly to anyone claiming that Kodos would make a better king than Kang. You put "fact checking" in scare quotes, and I get it -- calling biased fact checkers neutral and objective does not make them so. My personal approach to fact-checking would be bottom-up. Rather than having a fact-checker in chief appointed by the president, I prefer random bloggers who have a track record of being credible in my book (i.e. Scott Alexander). I would also add that fact checking has become a thing because populists have increasingly told the public laughable lies. A lot of politicians lie, but GWB lying about WMD in Iraq (which CNN was not in the position to call BS on) is different than Trump lying about Immigrants eating cats and dogs or the size of his inauguration crowd. News organizations should call bullshit on provably wrong claims of fact. (Like SA, I have a bounded distrust for MSM. They will certainly report selectively and apply spins, but they will rarely conjure a story out of thin air. My distrust for Trump is unbounded -- if he told me the sky was blue I would go outside to check.)
  • Guilt by association is likewise ancient. In Rome, the smallest legal unit was generally the family. It mattered little who in a family had committed an offense, the head of the family was on the hook for paying the fine.
  • "Mass immigration" is likewise nothing new for the US. In 1850 and 1930 and 2000, about 11% of the census were foreign-born. In 2022 it was about 14%. More, but not dramatically so.

Tech is making it more feasible, but keep in mind that these ideas have not been promoted to the extent that they've become feasible. There's forces pushing back against them. What are these forces if not competent people?

Second point makes social norms and systematic censorship into the same thing. The second one can be automated, and it only requires following strict rules. The problem with this is that one can follow rules for so long that they stop considering the reasons behind them, and also that rules are rigid - they lack the flexibility that people have, they cannot take context into account. In short, "Seeing like a State" is a great book.

You cannot really outsource trust. Here's my reasoning: If you're more intelligent than the person you're outsourcing your trust to, then you don't need them to judge for you. If you're less intelligent than them, then you cannot reliably assess whether or not you can trust them. They could just be lying to you.

So, how did you decide that Trump was actually lying? You likely updated your belief over time based on things you couldn't verify. Don't get me wrong, Trump does lie a lot, but if they compared Trump's inauguration crowd to somebody elses, they'd take pictures of his at the time of the day where the least people arrive, and then find pictures of the other crowd which makes it look at flattering as possible. People who support Trump experienced the opposite, they saw the flattering image of Trumps crowd, and the unflattering images of the other. And who told you that Haitians don't eat cats? I don't read the news, this is one of the reasons I'm so clear sighted.

Populists have increasingly told the public laughable lies

The "fact-checkers" are the same people as the liars. Every original fact-checking website is propaganda. The term might have caught on, leading to independent people having "fact checking" blogs online or whatever, but the concept is still ridiculous. Plus, no meaningful conversation can be had about any modern events, it's just people throwing sources at eachother that the other party already considers completely untrustworthy. If you ask me, nothing but raw evidence is worth anything, and people should use just that (and if they can't, then they're not competent enough for truth-seeking in the first place)

Again, people have been lying for 1000s of years, it's an ancient problem, so why have there been no "fact checkers" until now? It's simply because the modern world is retarded.

You make a good point about the family traditionally being one unit, but being judged by your family is still way different than being held responsible for how people (edit: ones who are complete strangers) use the things that you've sold them.

Foreign-born

The problem is not immigration itself, but the mass import of people who are incompetent, culturally incompatible, 10 times more likely to commit crime, or otherwise a net drain for the destination. Again, only the modern world is too stupid to realize this.

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