site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 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.

That would also tend to mean that not many on the left are liking and sharing such content.

Not necessarily. The twitter algorithm is semi-public, and what they do is they take a bunch of features of a tweet, feed them into some ML models that predict how likely you are to like, bookmark, look at for [8,15,25,30] seconds, follow the author, etc, and then choose which tweets to serve to you based on those that are predicted to get the largest amount of engagement of the type they like (which they don't publish but you can kind of infer based on which metrics have the most granular predictions, like dwell time, video watch time, whether you will share / reply / quote / retweet).

Tweets that make people angry get more replies and quotes and dwell time than uncontroversial ones. That means those are the ones the Twitter algo will choose to show to you. If the Twitter algo thinks you'll engage more with a fedposter than you will with a call for deescalation, it will show you a fedposter. This is true if the ratio of calls for deescalation to fedposters is 1:1, 100:1, or 1:100.

I don’t see a ratcheting down of rhetoric, or even calls for such

In terms of what you see from Twitter randos, this is just a statement about what the algorithm thinks you'll engage with. As a rule of thumb, if you have not heard a person's name before reading a tweet of theirs, you shouldn't care what that tweet says no matter how many likes and replies it has. The number of likes a tweet has is more influenced by reach than by quality, and the twitter algorithm is out to get you.

mainstream professional broadcasters on the left

... seem to have pretty much universally condemned the attacks? It'd be nice if they also said "and also cheering for murder is bad, you ghouls" but I don't particularly expect it of them any more than I'd expect Rush Limbaugh to tell his listeners to stop saying the people who died in ICE custody deserved it. It's not really a thing professional broadcasters do. It'd be nice if it was a thing they did but it's not an unusual and surprising moral failure that they didn't.

It'd be nice if they also said "and also cheering for murder is bad, you ghouls" but I don't particularly expect it of them any more than I'd expect Rush Limbaugh to tell his listeners to stop saying the people who died in ICE custody deserved it.

You just take it for granted that mainstream broadcasters are arms of the left, like that's somehow acceptable. And yet in an environment where the people who are supposed to speak to the whole nation are only willing to tell one side to stop being ghouls, you want to blame the twitter algorithm for the lack of left wing sympathy in anyone's feeds?

The most popular cable news program is Fox News, and it's not a close race. Fox News is not an arm of the left by any reasonable definition.

you want to blame the twitter algorithm for the lack of left wing sympathy in anyone's feeds?

I do want to blame the twitter algorithm for the content of peoples' twitter feeds, yes. Twitter is a distributed adversarial attack on the minds of its users.