site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27960 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 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
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

My understanding is that the HBD crackdown (more often just: conspicuous non-moderation of rule-breaking anti-HBD posts) was a project by the "bourgeois right" leaning (right but emphatically not alt-) mods, in the class of @Amadan or Hlynka (PBUH), rather than the handful of more "left" ones such as @netstack. This makes sense, too, as to the latter any HBDers are just the fargroup, while the former would feel irritated and threatened by the possibility of association with them ("I just wanted order, discipline and capitalism, but everyone including the racists insists that I am on the racist team").

As part of the pedantic minority(?) that subscribes to HBD as stated but is genuinely not interested in its common application as a resistance band for "therefore whites are superior" mental gymnastics (usually of the "IQ matters, but also the >100-average-IQ groups all have a disadvantage in some nebulous additional category like creativity so they are not actually superior" type), I just find the whole situation sad.

Your diagnosis of me and Hlynka is comically off-base. Also, the brief moratorium on HBD posting was before my time as a mod.

After looking through your posting on the topic (search author:Amadan HBD), I concede that in my impression of it you seemed to be more hostile than appears to have been the reality (which could be because I only encountered the handful of posts of yours that I thought were out of line - ones where you were a bit too quick to lump it in with a rather less commonsensical/more universally reviled position ("our still sizeable retinue of HBD enthusiasts and Holocaust deniers") - or because those left more of an impression). However, I don't understand how you reason that my diagnosis of Hlynka is "comically off-base": you talk about his open disdain for HBD yourself, and surely the gloss of "order, discipline and capitalism" applies to a proud salt-of-the-earth ex-military man like him.

Hlynka and I are very different (he used to like me; now he thinks I'm a chump and a boot). More significantly, while he's sort of on the right, he's very much an actual Red Triber, which is almost the opposite of "bourgeois right."

I already disowned my choice of the word "bourgeois" in a comment elsewhere in this subtree, as in hindsight it was not the right term to describe the group of people I was aiming for. I assumed you would have seen that post as well, sorry.

If Hlynka was here to see you call him "bourgeois right" I think he'd get himself banned again. Hlynka was an actual Red Triber and as far as I can tell he saw HBD as Blue Tribe Right egghead nonsense.

"Bourgeois" was probably the wrong term, I should have said something like "normie right" - I intended to contrast with a group that would include Moldbug fans, frog posters, antisemites who hate Jews for their treatment of Euro gentiles rather than for their treatment of Muslims, Great Replacement theorists and the "dark enlightenment". This includes a lot of people you would consider "Blue Tribe Right".

Yeah I'm not debating your wider point, just couldn't let the amusement of the Hlynka point go. Something I do notice is that non-liberal anti-HBDers tend to end up getting a lot more emotionally het up about it (sometimes, not in the case of the mods here, but sometimes jumping straight into outright dishonesty, like Michael Lind). It's understandable, in that the threat is coming from inside the tribe and so can't be instantly dismissed as liberal anti-HBDers prefer.

My understanding is that the HBD crackdown (more often just: conspicuous non-moderation of rule-breaking anti-HBD posts) was a project by the "bourgeois right" leaning (right but emphatically not alt-) mods, in the class of Amadan or Hlynka (PBUH), rather than the handful of more "left" ones such as netstack.

If memory serves the episode I referred to happened on /r/SSC, where neither of the people you mentioned were mods. Hlynka and Amadan started in /r/TheMotte, Netstack only became a mod after we moved here.

I'm also not talking about mere toleration of rule-breaking coming from one side, there was at one point a literal moratorium on the subject.

I remember the moratorium you are talking about, but thought you were talking about a more recent incident (I think we also got a sort of moratorium after moving here for a while? Maybe I'm mixing it up with a moratorium on SS's single-topic SSposting, which felt like another instance of right-wing mods wanting to bury the wrong and cringe kind of right-wing posting?). Not sure who were the mods back then and what was their motivation, though my instinct would be that it must have been similar, since the outgroup/fargroup relations to HBD in the SSC/Motte community have been like this for the longest time.

I remember the moratorium you are talking about, but thought you were talking about a more recent incident (I think we also got a sort of moratorium after moving here for a while?

Didn't happen - pretty sure we've never imposed a topic ban in the Motte. (We have occasionally told individual posters to grind something other than their singular axe for a while.)

I don't know if I can make a case backed by any specifics, but my subjective impression was that there was a qualitative difference between the moderation style of /r/TheMotte and /r/SSC, even when the former also had it's biases / failure modes.

You might well be right; if nothing else, /r/SSC mods lived in constant fear of the Reddit ICE busting into our sanctuary city and tried to limit discourse that would draw their ire.

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