site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 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.

9
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Does that imply you think there are some more smaller, neutral, non-ideological, trustworthy news orgs waiting in the wings? Perhaps I take the lesson of 'no one is neutral' as a more fundamental one.

There are some "news orgs" that explicitly make it their mission statement to be politically neutral, like Ground News and Allsides, but those are news aggregators, not reporters.

As for actual newspapers, doing their own research and writing their own stories without political bias - there should be some. Surely they can't all be bad apples. There must be some reporters reporting for reporting's sake, somewhere, who aren't deliberately selecting stories to serve some narrative.

But yes, if in doubt, mistrust and the assumption of ideological capture seem safer bets.

As for actual newspapers, doing their own research and writing their own stories without political bias - there should be some. Surely they can't all be bad apples.

The existence of newspapers which seek to avoid political bias (except for the pro-establishment bias that comes from the need to cultivate sources and any bias which comes from seeking sensationalism) is the result of a temporary and somewhat unusual situation in the American advertising market in the second half of the twentieth century. Founding era newspapers wore their partisan bias on their sleeves, as did the Hearst era yellow press. So does the press in most other countries - the only British paper that isn't proud of its political slant is the Financial Times.

The truth-forming function of the press is best delivered by ideological diversity, not by hoping that a journalistic monoculture is unbiased. The problem here is that you need your partisan journalists to be journalists first and partisan second (as, for example, Rupert Murdoch and his news outlets always have been) or else you end up with Pravda and Infowars shouting at each other.