site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 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.

I'll agree with that in theory. In practice, note that "in appropriate conditions" requires "when the highway designers kept sight lines clear enough for that speed, including to any intersections or on ramps where someone might be trying to enter the highway after checking for traffic expected to be near the speed limit". Since highway designers never actually design for 115mph on purpose, you're pretty much stuck with places where it happened by accident, where the land was so flat and empty that you can't not see the road ahead of you for miles. I've had friends who enjoyed stretches of road like that in New Mexico, but I don't think any of them exist in Virginia.

My friends mostly enjoyed those stretches, I mean. One of them totaled his first car when a deer ran out into the road in front of him. In my experience most people who love driving that fast give other cars roughly the same consideration that he gave that deer, an implicit unexamined assumption that the highway ahead will be either clear or occupied by drivers doing the speed limit, that nobody will suddenly appear in front of them at surprisingly low or no speed. That assumption is usually correct, but it only has to be incorrect once.

I've had friends who enjoyed stretches of road like that in New Mexico, but I don't think any of them exist in Virginia.

Yeah, I guess this is where me being Australian starts to show up as relevant to my intuitions about this, because once you get a couple of hundred kilometres inland in eastern Australia (haven't been to the west) the highways start to look like "straight road for 50 kilometres, dead-flat wheat field for 100m on either side, no trees, mostly no large animals".