site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24828 thread views

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
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Ok, but getting right wing faculty is… difficult, and in practice would look like making universities hire creation scientists and give them tenure.

A modest proposal: Replace all social science professors with economists.

They have the methodological training and interests to fully replace sociology, political science, and much of anthropology, psychology, etc.

They're only moderately left leaning instead of being dogmatically so.

And there's currently a surge of economists desperate for work thanks to the government hiring freezes. Now is the perfect time to strike!

Notre Dame supplies a template for purging marxists from the academy. They formed a new "econometrics" department, gave them the courses that students actually need to take. Then after enrollment in the old "heterodox" econ department withered, they binned the entire thing. (Tenure only protects individual faculty; entire departments can still be shut down if they aren't financially viable.)

Thanks, this is a good idea

Is that really so much worse than hiring tenured STEM faculty who actually just write zero-value low-impact papers for sci-ed journals about the history of race in science? Mr Creationist can sit in his nice office at Harvard and write papers for the Kansas Journal of Creation Science and teach a class on creationism that 5 students a year (4 of whom are just curious about this strange ideological subculture) will take and that's fine. In time though, even his presence will, in a small way, counter the equally poor equivalents on the left.

No. The Journal of Creation already exists, you can read it right now if you’d like to.

As an alternative, how about we simply stop funding universities that have been spending public money on things as ridiculous as creation science? They can even keep the tenure, so long as they fund it themselves.

Trying to defund woke by instead funding creationism honestly seems like a pretty likely outcome!

It isn't as if "woke" is particularly distinct from creationism. Both ideologies essentially agree on the impact that evolution had on group differences and cognition after all.

You have, correctly, arrived at a single similarity between the two ideologies- the idea that genetic differences between races(and for creationists sometimes species) are too minimal to explain differences in behavior.

I have yet to see demonstration of others. I mean, yeah, there's not-creationist woo with lots of similarities(ancient aliens theory is quite often literally just creation science with a search and replace function). But woke isn't among them.

Wait I’m confused. Wasn’t creationism just being suggested here because it’s a right-wing theory with roughly equivalent public support to the core wokism (like the actual serious all whites are racist etc type) and with roughly the same level of grounding (which is to say, a lot of circularly cited papers and few ground facts that don’t have better alternative explanations) and so would be a ‘fair’ replacement?

I don’t think the point was ever that there’s actually a 1-1 prevalence of every single problem between the two of them.

Creationism is about twice as popular as woke ideas in opinion polls.

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