site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 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.

3
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Charlie’s dead, man. I’ll be outside. Good luck.

While yes I generally agree with this, and yes this is all against my principles…

…the opponents of western liberal democracy have resorted to simply executing people. Those not actively involved in the execution have demonstrated that they will happily burn our cities when they don’t get their way.

My sense is that the conservatives don’t WANT any of this.

A few thousand people have resorted to executing people or burning cities, out of a US population of 350 million.

And the police let them do it, because their local, state and federal government wanted them to do it, because Blue Tribe collectively wanted them to do it. You are failing to appreciate the nature of the problem; it is not that we have riots and murders, it is that we have half the country that sees riots and murders against people they don't like as a good thing, and they don't like the other half of the country.

Blue Tribe collectively wanted them to do it

No, Blue Tribe wanted there to be protests. Most people fell on a spectrum going from "sincerely believes that the reports of widespread violence are Republican lies" to "grants that some protests devolved into riots, but thinks it's more important for protests to remain untouchable than to stop the riotous excesses".

I’m sorry but that’s bullshit. There is the famous imagery of the CNN reporter stating fiery but peaceful with a building burning behind him.

It was a meme. People knew. Everyone knew. But CNN (mouthpiece of the establishment which is blue) was encouraging it.

This is a fair counter to the innocently-unaware angle, but not to the more layered second option I presented, where people were aware that there was violence happening, but thought it should be tolerated for the sake of the protests, because allowing the government to use the excuse of the riots to suppress the (purportedly historically important) protests themselves would be even worse.

Shouldn’t those people want the riots to stop even more?

Abstractly, yes. But so long as they believe cops are instruments of the would-be fascist blah blah blah, and absolutely cannot be trusted, then they cannot countenance the government actually doing anything to make the riots stop. (This is in many ways just a larger-scale version of the broader piece of BLM wisdom about how you should never ever call the cops on a situation involving a black person unless you want their death on your conscience - which is thought to apply even when wrongful actions genuinely have been committed.)

Isn’t this just another way of saying “blue tribe supports the riots because it thinks without the riots other what they view as good things won’t come to fruition?”

Maybe you think that’s unfair, but I really struggle to understand the above thinking as it’s divorced from reality.