site banner

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
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I am not sure what you mean by "genuinely concerned". I know there are trolls who join here to post normally and then start to make weirder and weirder posts that get closer to Jewposting. To tell you the truth, I am only mildly annoyed by this latest happening, because the family member in question is not likely to harass me with jewposts constantly like my own father is. I actually had to block my dad on certain social media for it. If you don't believe that, I can probably find some older posts where I mentioned it. But I don't know, I was bothered enough to post about it. In my family member's defense, he was probably pretty drunk when he confessed this.

I just wish there was some incontrovertible evidence that said "yeah a shitload of people died" that would be impossible to deny.

I just wish there was some incontrovertible evidence that said "yeah a shitload of people died" that would be impossible to deny.

I mean, it was WWII. 58 million people died. Some fraction of them were Jewish. I don't care what fraction of them were, and I immediately discount arguments based around what fraction of the casualties of the single deadliest event in human history were Jewish- or Chinese, or German, or whatever other stupid thing. It neither justifies, nor has anything else much to do with, Israeli current day security policy. Gaza is either a genocide(deserved or not), or it's not. The holocaust happened or it didn't. Those facts are entirely disconnected from each other.

@SecureSignals is fine, and even a welcome contributor. We can debate the holocaust as a historical fact. But boomers, uh, don't. Like that is not normal boomer behavior. Is your father a Mohammedan? Jews are about the only not-White-western-Christian group my own boomer relatives aren't prejudiced against on a racial level, maybe also Japanmen for some of them. Older folks are much less antisemitic than the general public.

Are you asking for some evidence to prove to this relative, regardless of whether he exists, that lots of people died in eastern Europe between 1941 and 1945?

My dad is a Christian fundamentalist who went steadily more insane as time went on. It started with regular conspiracy theories about fluoride or 9/11, to experiments where he had the entire house piss into jugs so they could be used for chemistry or fertilizer, to continuing paranoid arguments with my mother that eventually led to divorce in 2012, at which point he went far crazier, going into QAnon, going to /r/The_Donald until it was banned and then going to voat, where he then argued with Holocaust deniers until he found he couldn't argue anymore because he had been defeated by facts and logic, now on Gab and 8chan last I heard. Now he's a Christian fascist like the podcast I linked, who thinks that a revolution needs to happen so that the good Christians can take over the government and implement a Christian version of Sharia law. If that's not enough to convince you he's a real person, then I don't know, do you want the emails I've sent where I get into arguments with him, or the sprawling arguments I had with him over Discord about the earth not being 6000 years old? Yes, he uses Discord. Actually his account got banned once because he apparently was in a server that violated the terms of service a lot. Also he got super, super upset with me when he sent me a David Irving book about the Nuremberg Trials and my brother saw it and burnt it and sent him an email with a photo of it burning. I didn't even do it, and he was furious with me and super passive aggressive with me about it because I didn't prevent it happening. He got mad at me again after he bought me this game and I rejected it because it was poorly written platformer trash.

I was asking for a reason why the death camps are on the eastern side. Someone else already answered me pretty adequately, I guess, I don't really know for sure. But I get so fucking frustrated, and I have no fucking idea why I am still even thinking about this question after the war ended 80 years ago.

This, uh, sounds like a leftist strawman and not like an actual boomer evangelical fundamentalist.

Okay. I will be PMing you some screenshots shortly. It would be a lot of work to anonymize these screenshots.

That's fine; I'm not tech savvy. But these beliefs do not particularly go together. Qanon is a woman thing, and most appealing among people who thing 'voat' is a typo(it's spelled 'vote'- go do it for Trump). YEC has little overlap with holocaust denial. The median boomer fundamentalist thinks Jews are different, however awful Muslims may be. You're describing a mishmash of several different people, in general. Dominionists exist(in much smaller numbers than popularly believed) but I have yet to meet- and I know many Christian fundamentalists, quiverfull, tradcath, old calendarist orthodox, independent baptist, etc- who describe their beliefs as Christian 'sharia'.

I don't think he said sharia unprompted. He undeniably did advocate for taking away women's rights and for throwing gay people off of rooftops. I don't know if I have screenshots of those, but I think I drew the comparison to Muslim Sharia law, and he didn't disagree with it.

I mean, I just linked a podcast of people who think this, too, right? Do you still think they're strawmen? There are some crazy people in the world, my friend. They occupy a space on the internet, it stands to reason that they occupy a space in the real world, too.

You're describing someone way more online than is plausible.

I totally acknowledge that there's tons of people who don't like the nineteenth amendment, think gays are all mentally ill pervs, etc. 'Islam was right about women' is not how boomer conservative Christians think; boomer conservatives rant about how their particular sect restricts women's rights by being protective and acknowledging a higher dignity. They also do not know what discord is and aren't much into gaming.

This sounds like some right wing x poster you connected with who you're trying to claim is your father.

Okay, what if I forwarded the emails? Do you have an email account I can forward to?