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It'd be better if Trump and China weren't busy spitroasting the biotech industry, but the home life makes up for it.
And now you've updated your priors in the opposite direction, right? And false prediction is a fun euphemism for being wrong :)
Somehow I doubted that you would. But you asked for instances where your tribe won without a corresponding escalation, or 'cheating' such that your side couldn't win. Your personal life notwithstanding, there was no supreme court stacking, there's been no widespread riots or criminal activity (Amusingly, there are more recorded instances of vandalism/violence against abortion clinics in the same timeframe than what you call low-grade domestic terrorism), conservatives took the W and moved on. In your words, 'it's been a fun year.' And yet, and yet, you still aren't happy.
As for your lack of reproductive rights, say you had those rights. Without knowing the specifics of your life, would you have grabbed your ex by the wrist and physically dragged her to the abortion clinic? Would you have held her down to dose her with abortifacients or undergo a surgical abortion? Or I guess just not have to pay child support? What does this world look like, where you have reproductive rights?
Coming back to your dichotomy of 'grace and forgiveness' versus 'punching back twice as hard,' I knew as soon gave any concrete example the goalposts would move from the latter to the former. If your expectation is 'my side wins and nobody on the other side says mean things' then you both have a long, unhappy life ahead of you and moreover, come nowhere close to living up to your own standard.
There has been tacit acceptance. Trump issued reams of EOs, gutted agencies, tariffs, pretty much whatever he wanted. There's no widespread unrest, no major congressional resistance (remember Schumer giving in on the budget because the alternative was worse?), no 'deep state' blocking his will.
And 'we' tried to kill Trump? Did 'you' shoot up that synagogue, or that church, or the wal-mart? Don't give me that nonsense. If you want to play that game, take responsibility for your own nutjobs first.
And democrats escalated, responding with their own molotov cocktail against norms and conventions, Joe Biden.
I used to work for a guy who reminded me of Trump in some ways (insofar as I can know Trump from watching him on the television). He'd commit borderline research fraud, but do it in such a way that he kept his hands clean. Hey, I've got this great research idea! Go find the evidence for it. Oh, you've got 3 months worth of negative data? You must have fucked up the experiments! Go do them again and stop being so incompetent, I'm going to take you off the project and give it to a real scientist, etc etc etc. I know a lot of his old research is fraudulent, but when the chickens came home to roost he just said his postdoc fabricated the data.
If nothing else, Trump showed that the only check on a president's behavior is impeachment, and so long as the president is popular enough with their base, he can go shoot someone on fifth avenue and Republicans would say that guy had it coming and vote against it. Hell, Biden did too in the heady last month of his presidency when the pardon printer went brrrrr and the ERA suddenly passed. If Democrats elected left-wing Trump, I guarantee that you would absolutely lose your shit.
Frankly, and I'm surprised I've never seen this theory floated, I thought Trump intentionally broke a relatively benign rule that he knew would have to provoke a serious response from the feds. He'd keep himself in the news, get to complain about witch hunts for the next couple years and make it look like the feds were picking on him. It's probably what I would do were I playing the game.
I don't, other than that it's suspicious when a government's legal system starts going after people the president is personally pissed off at. I'd give it a low probability of progressing, but it's not a great sign.
And we just had a long discussion about overturning Roe, the keystone project of Christian fundamentalists, that your party executed a plan over a decade or more. Tell me again how those factions have lost and millennial atheists are in the driver's seat? What fraction of voters in the Republican party today voted for Bush in 2000 and/or 2004?
In 2008, Republicans got wrecked far worse than dems did in 2024. Word for word, what you just wrote applied to them 10x and was written about them as well. And then we all remember how they moderated, played nice with hispanics (muh demographic replacement) and that strategy paid off in 2016, right? Much as I'd like them to (and the Republicans as well!) it boggles my mind that you would look at the last ten years and say that moderation and saying nice things on camera wins you elections.
Sure, things don't look great for the dems today. But four years is a long time, and Trump's got plenty of opportunities to fuck it up. Either he's as successful as you think he'll be and I profit (at least if he stops fucking my industry), or he tanks babyface JD's chances for 2028 and dems win again.
Shooting people or waving guns around is the biggest own goal you can score, and will stay that way until the state has truly failed. And even if you win, what then? You're going to kick down every door with a pride flag on the lawn and shoot them, every registered democrat too, and then institute a police state to prevent wrongthink? These are all just childish fantasies. 150 million people disagree with you, and even if, as you like to say, 'we're the ones with the guns,' those people aren't just going to disappear. But by all means, talk more about euphemistic responses in public fora - I don't think it will help your cause.
Not to mention the juxtaposition of you ridiculing left-wingers for being scared of Republicans and a Trump administration while also 'darkly hinting' about 'euphemistic responses' is frankly hilarious.
I'm skeptical that the government of 50 years ago was particularly honest or well-meaning (see: the Power Broker to start), and I wonder if it's more likely our environment changed. But I sure as hell don't have time to develop that idea in any meaningful way. /shrug
"It's difficult to predict when the Riot Party will riot" might not be as much of an update as you're looking for.
You seem to be joking here but have you already forgotten those psychotic blanket pardons?
Referenced later on in the same post:
The point stands. Even now, the typical angle of attack is 'senile admin run by the deep state' because that lands a lot closer to the mark for normies than radical leftist firebrand.
At a certain point, this level of cynicism and bitterness starts reflecting more on you than the people you hate. You, too, seem to be even angrier now that your star is ascendant.
Fair enough, sorry for missing that.
I haven't posted here much in a long time and we haven't had a conversation in what, years?
But Trump's not my star. Not once in any election or primary have I voted for Trump. As much as I found Tim Walz to be an odious little troll performing a racist minstrel act, I held my nose and voted for Harris. At least Madame President could probably stay competent for 4 years and keep the creep in the closet like she had been.
Down ticket- well, did you catch the wackadoo that ran for governor where I am? I didn't vote a straight Dem ticket but it was closer than I would've predicted a few years ago.
I am angrier, because I have a kid and I want my kid to grow up in a better world, and neither of these idiot parties are going to deliver that. I am angrier because I watched scientists and public health experts and journalists shit all over the reputation of everything, and for what? They ruined and debased themselves for nothing, but the public pays the price! Fauci got his pardon and nobody that signed that braindead open letter got stripped of credentials, and here we are with Trump, RFK, Florida cutting vaccine mandates.
I just don't viscerally hate Trump the way so many people do, or the way I hate Fauci (largely as a synecdoche for broader problems in public health) or even, really, Biden. I never considered Trump in potentiality, so there's no sense of betrayal there. Trump and Republicans are my fargroup, I guess.
Someday I hope to vote for a politician I actually like, that isn't a collection of horrible tradeoffs or ends up doing things that disgust me. All I wanted was a little accountability. That the universe, sometimes, makes sense. SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY- ahem, got a little carried away there. I'll admit, I kinda like the Harvard stuff. Resentment isn't the healthiest motivator but I have so much of it. Perhaps that's my most socialist trait. Ha!
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No, I think the only way to get close to parity given the biological realities is just allowing men the option to opt out of the legal responsibilities. But I thought I was being careful, I was just too much of a quokka to understand why a woman might lie about being "on birth control AND infertile". I was presented with the situation fait accompli and had my life thoroughly derailed. It doesn't match up to the body horror of having an unwanted entity growing inside you, but it's not nothing.
But that's what a reverent respect for norms as the highest value would actually look like. From the conservative perspective, that's basically what John McCain and Mitt Romney actually did, and that's why so many people picked Trump - because for all his flaws he's a fighter. Because no one (aside from maybe 4 civic religion fundamentalists and the older Republicans who were content to be corrupt Washington Generals) actually places norms and standards as their highest value.
Again, my objection is to the two-facedness of crying about norms and standards, while never actually prioritizing them when it would cost. It just comes off as concern trolling.
Schumer did cave on the budget, not as an act of goodwill, but because a shutdown gave Trump even more power and authority. Meanwhile, every action you listed has been hit with an injunction from activist judges, often with no authority to do so, even after the SC smacked them down and told them to stop it. I don't deny that the Dems don't seem particularly effective in their opposition, aside from the rogue judges, but they still seem to mostly be in earlier stages of grief than acceptance.
I do sincerely think there's a massive gap in how nutjobs are parsed. I would bet that 80%+ of Republicans would support putting a bullet in Dylan Roof Storm. OTOH, Mangione (who I think is an actual drug-addled nutjob, rather than any kind of ideologue) is openly lionized on the left. People wear shirts emblazoned with his face in public. In the wake of the most recent shooting, the response that I've seen on the Dem side is a blend of blaming Trump (ABC news had an amazing piece where they noted that "Trump's name was on one of the guns" without mentioning that the phrase on the gun was "K-ll D-nald T-ump"), mocking prayer, and freaking out over the possibility that people might try to have a conversation about the Venn overlap between trans, mental health, and violence that looks like it might be a Thing.
Eh. I think the calculations there are very different. Biden himself probably is a good standard bearer for the "norms and standards" crowd, or at least he would have been 10-15 years ago. Same as the Republicans I mentioned above, I don't think Biden has broad ideological commitments. I think he wanted to keep the boat steady and enjoy the kickbacks.
The people who made up his administration are a different story.
They very much did go for the Hispanic vote. That didn't pan out too well, but ironically, going absolutely ham on illegal immigration did seriously improve the Republican party's favorability with that demographic.
But let's look at the comparison of today's Rs with the ones from 20 years ago. Roe was overturned, and that was a major win for the religious right, but it's coming from a president who utterly refuses to pass national legislation on the topic, and openly talks about how a 6 week window "isn't enough weeks". The religious right "won", but at the cost of their party being forcibly dragged over towards the much more popular centrist position on the topic.
Gay marriage is not something that anyone anywhere in power on the right is willing to spend political capital to roll back.
They're much more opposed to foreign adventuring. No more Iraqs. No more Afghanistans. The neocons have flipped back to the Democrats as a more pliable vessel for warmongering.
It's not "saying nice things", but these are all significant motions back towards the center of the American Overton window.
No, you're mostly right. I don't give high odds of things ever getting that bad. I did try to phrase that carefully, as "if the worst of the worst comes to pass". If a future Democrat administration invites in a hundred million foreigners on welfare, and all but openly tolerates them raping my children while viciously repressing the native population, then yeah. But I don't think the version of the party that could do that is one that can win national elections in the first place.
I think a lot of Democrats believe the world we live in is as bad as the "worst case scenario" I outlined above. I often hear people talking about ICE snatching any random non-white person off the street to disappear them forever - this is a thing I literally hear from strangers. FEMA camps for queers are opening up any time now. Women are dying in droves because Roe was overturned, and they'll probably lose the right to vote soon. The economy is surely about to melt and all the poor people will starve. Millions of children have been stripped of healthcare, we murdered millions more in Africa by cutting US AID, etc, etc.
So many issues where the emotional rhetoric is starkly at odds with the facts on the ground. So many people openly wishing for violence about it, much more than I saw during the Biden administration from the other side.
I think there is a world of difference between believing that there are potential futures where political violence is acceptable or necessary, versus catastrophizing yourself into believing that we're already there by social media psychosis.
This is complicated even further by the "who has the guns" issue, as you noted. I think a lot of the left-wing psychosis and ideation is driven by a kind of general helplessness. Someone should be doing violence to save the innocent trans migrants, someone else. I think a major factor in why the rhetoric gets so heated and incendiary is because there's no thalamic outlet, just keyboard rage until exhaustion. Humans weren't evolved to handle that kind of stimulus. I think the right is less prone to that because there's at least some degree of awareness that the specific individual might actually have to do something, and because they're more likely to have a gym habit or manual job that offers endocrine catharsis. There's a reason this rhetoric stuff seems the worst with "disabled by mental illness" twenty-something NEETs, because they have the most frustrated energy.
Or maybe it's just a bubble, and I tend to see the worst in the outgroup and only pay attention to the parts of the right I find tolerable.
I'm fine with that in the abstract, although in terms of concrete details it seems like a system open to abuse. But I'm sorry you're in that situation, and I imagine you don't want to debate something so personal.
The bad thing about McCain and Romney is that they lost, and the good thing about Trump is that he won.
Not to mention it's easy to lionize men who never won the presidency and had to actually get their hands dirty.
You think Mangione doesn't have fans on the right? Are you telling me MAGA is a populist movement that loves CEOs of health insurance companies?
For all the conservative memes mocking childless liberal women for their breathless, supposed erotic fixation on the Handmaid's Tale you have a shocking lack of awareness for similar fantasies on the right. There's this odd fetishism with home invaders and having to defend your family from the rapist hordes at the gates.
Isn't that the point of this place?
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