site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25651 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 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.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The issue is that Russians aren't Hajnali liberals with their cuck fetish of getting shafted due to the fear of being seen as improper.

wat

I honestly don't understand what you're trying to say there, and I hope there's a rule against this kind of formulation.

Okay, to explain what that means, Western Europeans from the Hajnal area have this weird obsession of not being seen as improper and doing things 'by the book' etc and thus refraining from actually doing mildly hard things such as brutalizing Albanian economic immigrants by arresting them, holding them in prison camps and summarily deporting them back to Albania. That'd be of course bad for TV and so on. Instead, nothing is done but they're given a place to live and debt goes up.

Instead, the Hajnali liberals in western Europe issue half a million orders to leave and then do not actually collect the people that should leave and just mill around impotently while said people who were supposed to leave generally get up to no good and are a massive drain on finances and public order.

So you get spectacles like the small boat issue in the UK where government is paying thru the nose to warehouse illegals in hotels. Or the Chagos deal, where an island from which UK just took & deported its native population is given to a wholly unrelated island state and said unrelated (there was basically no connection between the ethnics) state is also going to get paid for the deal.

I let K2 try to explain it, actually did it better. (except for the Hajl hallucination)

Breaking the slurs down into the actual concepts they are meant to stand for:

“Hajnali liberals” – a sneering reference to the political current associated with the Hungarian economist János Hájl (anglicised as “Hajnal”). The Hajnal-line thesis is that west of a line running roughly Trieste–Trieste–St.-Petersburg, Europeans adopted late marriage, weak family ties and, later, the whole Enlightenment package: individual rights, rule-of-law, compromise politics, and a taboo on open ethnic favouritism.

In the on-line Right’s vocabulary “Hajnali liberal” has therefore become shorthand for “Western liberal who believes that decorum, legalism and self-limitation are ends in themselves.” “cuck fetish” – the alt-right slur that such liberals are like cuckolds: they supposedly enjoy watching their own country/power/status being taken by outsiders because proving their moral respectability is more important to them than collective self-assertion.

“getting shafted due to the fear of being seen as improper” – the claim that whenever the West has to choose between (a) using hard power or ethnic-national assertiveness and (b) keeping the appearance of propriety, it will let itself lose, because the appearance is what the “Hajnali” mindset values most.

So the whole sentence is just a crudely phrased version of: “Russians do not share the Western liberal reflex that being ‘proper’ and ‘law-abiding’ is more important than winning; they are willing to act ruthlessly rather than accept humiliation for the sake of looking civilised.”

Although, on a second look maybe I'm wrong because there's clearly a substantial and powerful minority which acts as if it desires the importation of more criminal & economically unproductive people - in judicial bodies & so on. But it's not clear to what degree it's something like a 'civility trap' and to what degree capture by people who actually desire large scale demographic change for ideological or economic reasons.

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