site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15029 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 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.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Lately I've stumbled on a new (to me) dark corner of the internet: VetTV.

At first I thought it was just a youtube channel, since it was showing up in my shorts feed. And I assume that's what it started as. But eventually it became a full-fledged subscripion service with its own website, which you can subscribe to for just $6 a month (not an ad, I just thought it's interesting that it's a paid service but the cost is so low).

Anyway, they do have some very funny shorts and short videos. Mostly screwball, low-brow comedy, like you'd expect from young people who just got out of the military, especially the marines. Some of my favorites were: innappropriate gunny vs young marines, high school recruiting and holy waterboarding.

Bear in mind, those are just the clips they could get on youtube, the full episodes on their site are much more raunchy. It's obviously not a big budget production, but it is a little more polished than typical youtube channels. It's a low-budget yet professional studio where absolutely anything goes. So, well... they have some promotional clips where they compare themselves to a porn sites, and that's not wrong. It's interesting to see what ordinary people can come up with on a camera when there are absolutely no restrictions.

They have a few full-length (lightly censored) episodes on youtube for free. In particular I really recommend Recruiters. I liked it because... well, many reasons.

  • I've never been in the military myself, but I used to get those sales pitches from recruiters as a teenager. So it's relatable to me in a way most war movies aren't.
  • Most war movies are about soldiers in the field fighting big heroic battles. This (and a lot of their content) are about normal, boring office jobs. In this case they're working a call center in a strip mall. This seems more like the actual reality for most modern military people. And it's just a new angle that doesn't usually get explored in war movies.
  • There's a real moral dilemna here. How are they supposed to convince young people to join when they're going through their own mid-life crisis and feel depressed about their service? What can you actually offer a kid in peacetime to convince him? What are they supposed to do when caught between the realities of modern life and impossible demands from higher-ups? At times, they almost seem like drug dealers or con-artists, willing to lie cheat and steal to con kids into signing a contract. EG, the female recruiter is not shy about promising boys that they'll "totally get so much pussy..." right before shipping them off to all-male military bases in the middle of nowhere. Her tactics only get more extreme and unethical from there.
  • Even though they're just working an office/sales job, you still get the sense that it's a real military job too. They have to wear uniforms, follow uniforms, and exercise relentlessly. They're under immense pressure to meet quota every month or... well, I'm not sure what happens if they don't, but it seems very bad. That would "fail the mission." It's just interesting to see that clash of cultures.

Their more serious series is A Grunt's Life. This one... is interesting, but it's a very tough watch.

  • For one thing, they're mostly all in uniforms all the time, and often wearing helmets, so it's just hard to tell the characters apart. I guess that's part of why militaries wear uniforms. Not as good for Hollywood though.
  • It's set in a remote base in Afghanistan, in Helmand province, in one of the most intense periods of counter-insurgency. The troops their seem jaded beyond belief, convinced that this mission will never work because Afghanistan is such a hellhole. Their leader, Lt Murphy, (the main character of the series) is an older enlisted man turned Lieutenant. He's an antihero who's very good at his job but very dark and twisted. His main goal it seems is killing as many Afghanis as possible and collecting body parts for his personal collection, and he doesn't much care whether they come from insurgents or civilians.
  • The higher-ranking officers are always portrayed as hopelessly naive and out of touch. They have to radio in from far away, and keep telling the base to "win hearts and minds" when it's an obvious trap.
  • The Afghanis are portrayed as either complete idiots who shoot their own heads off, or utter villains who push their wives to tank bullets. Admittedly the low budget plays a factor here, some stuff got obviously cut. Every so often it makes me think it's setting one of them up as sympathetic, but then he takes a heel turn. And they couldn't find anyone who actually speaks Pashtun so they just used a mix of Turkish and Hindustani for their language. Some of this is admittedly pretty funny, but cmon... it's a racist caricature.
  • The marines have a weird sort of sexuality. Sometimes its just being horny young guys with nothing much to do. But it goes way past that. They seem to enjoy really public displays of sexuality that most straight guys would never do. "Marine gay" is how they sometimes describe it. The show has some really graphic, depraved scenes that honestly seem worse than anything I've seen in porn. But there's still a sense of comedy to it. I really don't know how to describe it. "Insanity" is probably the easiest word to use.

As a work of art, it's certainly powerful. It made me feel things. It sucks me in to the whole "whoo rah, kill 'em all" feeling of comeradie and bravery, and makes me curse those stupid officers who won't let the grunts just "do what needs to be done."

But then I step back a minute. Granted, I was never there, I'm just a sissy civilian who only read the news. But from my perspective... the higher up officers were correct. The grunts in the show are basically just murdering civilians, or at least going way, way past any sort of justified warfare. The Afghanis are, quite reasonably, furious that these foreign invaders keep killing them, and they have no idea why because of the huge language and culture barrier. The officers are trying to bring peace, while people like Lt. Murphy just keep fanning the flames by killing people.

It reminds me a lot of two other famous war movies, which I'm sure it was inspired by. Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse now. In both cases, there's a bad guy (the drill sergeant and Colonel Kilgore) who looks super cool and badass in the movie. People love those characters. But I think it's important to keep our perspective and remember that they're villains who caused immense harm and suffering. I wish people were more film-savvy and could see that, because I don't think those movies are at all ambiguous.

Also, after writing out all of this, I realize that almost all of their characters are marines. So in some sense, it's not really about military life in general, but just the marines. It's almost like, how civilians see the general military, is how other military branches see the marines. Or maybe it's just that people in the marines have a hard time transitioning back to civilian life after leaving the military, and need something like this to cope.

...Thoughts on any of this? Sorry I don't have an exact thesis statement here. Maybe it's a sign of how corrupt and out-of-touch Hollywood is that we need something like this to bring us "real" cinema. Maybe it's a sign of how we're all so brainwashed by porn that porn starts to influence everything else. Maybe it's a sign of how horrific military life is that it just can't be expressed in any mainstream media. Maybe now, with cellphones and social media, we can finally see "the truth" of what war and military life is really like. Maybe it's just funny to see women trying to act like men, when mainstream TV usually shows the opposite. Or maybe I'm just bored and looking for something new I can't find on Youtube.

  • But then I step back a minute. Granted, I was never there, I'm just a sissy civilian who only read the news. But from my perspective... the higher up officers were correct. The grunts in the show are basically just murdering civilians, or at least going way, way past any sort of justified warfare. The Afghanis are, quite reasonably, furious that these foreign invaders keep killing them, and they have no idea why because of the huge language and culture barrier. The officers are trying to bring peace, while people like Lt. Murphy just keep fanning the flames by killing people.

I'm not a vet, but I made some effort to follow the war in Afghanistan as closely as possible for much of its duration. My understanding is that the Afghan war was quite bad.

  • The "winning hearts and minds" aspect appears to have been aimed primarily at American hearts and minds, not Afghani ones. That is, the goal was to persuade Americans that they were winning Afghani hearts and minds so the mission could be sustained, as opposed to actually winning Afghani hearts and minds. When the Afganistan papers leaked following the pullout, my understanding is that this was more or less confirmed by internal documentation; the leadership and administration had no idea how to actually win the war or what that would even look like, and so they defaulted to "what can we do that will look good back home?"

  • The Taliban appears to have had what amounts to a durable public mandate throughout the war, and there is at least some argument that they were in fact the good guys, to the extent that the term applies to a place as alien as Afganistan. They'd ruthlessly suppressed opium cultivation and the practice of Bacha Bazi, ie organized rape of young boys, to give two examples of concrete moral issues; the factions we sided with were, from the accounts I've heard, enthusiastic proponents of both. I've heard numerous accounts from vets about how they were ordered to not interfere with drug cultivation, and how they were told to ignore what their Afghan "allies" were doing in their barracks on the weekends.

I would argue that the higher-up officers were in no sense "correct". They were essentially running a scam, whereby they ordered the low-level soldiers to do highly dangerous, exceptionally pointless and often quite evil things in pursuit of meaningless bureaucratic objectives, shoulder to shoulder with "allies" who were frequently moral monsters, and not-uncommonly on the enemy's payroll. On top of that, they're soldiers, not policemen, and their entire training and corporate ethos is based around breaking things and killing people. They're a hammer, and most of the things around them are nails, and some of the things that aren't nails probably ought to be... This was not an environment that encourages deep ethical analysis and carefully regulated restraint.

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