site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 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.

7
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

If it was actually possible to stamp down the number of handguns circulating in the US metro areas (and not just taking them from the law-abiding citizens), I'd expect a general reduction of crime for the following reasons:

  • criminal ghettoes could be policed more reliably and in a less volatile manner, resulting in lowering the hostility of inner city culture towards cops;
  • harder to commit crimes and run gangs when guns are harder to get;

In addition, while I'll let Americans correct me my impression was that the large segments of the population who are wary of black people and the segments of non-black population who live in the US metro areas were two circles that do not overlap much. Cities vote blue, rurals vote red, do they not?

my impression was that the large segments of the population who are wary of black people and the segments of non-black population who live in the US metro areas were two circles that do not overlap much.

Eh maybe. To start with, the black-hispanic... strong mutual dislike... dwarfs any other racial tensions in the US by the numbers, even if BLM shenanigans are more common in the media, and this is a mostly urban phenomenon. You're certainly correct that the blue tribe is less wary around black people but nice urban liberals are well aware that big crowds of blacks/majority black areas are not good news from a safety perspective. They won't say it out loud of course but they are aware of the general correlates of race and crime, even if they think 13/52 is exaggerated, blame racism rather than criminals, etc.