site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28048 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.

The overarching theory is very poor here. Andrews is writing as one of the few women in a field that has always been and continues to be extremely male (American right wing political opinion), and has no real experience of working in a female dominated environment.

empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.

Women are viciously competitive (as most women who went to high school will tell you) and don’t particularly empathize with their enemies. The safety point is correct in the abstract (men are much more willing to take risks) but arbitrary and poorly considered, for example one can easily construe mass immigration, soft-on-crime and other progressive policies as inherently riskier and ‘less safe’ than just not doing them. You can say that empathy overrides safetyism, but then it appears to sometimes and not at others, and that arguably challenges other conclusions she makes too. Andrews hints at this but then dismisses it in a very unsatisfactory way (she mentions ‘underhanded’ female competition but then says again later than women aren’t competitive). The implication is that a few women (like her) are fine but majority women (she has never worked in such an organization) are not. In fact, historically there have been many times in which women were more conservative than men. Women were and remain in many parts of the world the enforcers of traditional sexual morality (ie ‘slut shaming’) in the traditional institutions that they manage.

Nevertheless, their urging and clamouring is real and does have an effect, the UN Human Rights Commission helped get sanctions on apartheid South Africa.

What helped get sanctions on apartheid South Africa was the largely male Western governments being afraid of the almost entirely male governments of the Soviet bloc and almost entirely male government of red China and the almost entirely male governments of various third world countries fomenting a more intense global anti-western movement if they didn’t support the end of apartheid. Indeed this drove the entirety of ruinous American ‘decolonial’ and ‘anti colonial’ policy back to the late 1940s, through Suez and Algeria and onward.

What really drove academia to be woke from the early 2010s is the interaction between both wider cultural developments like mass immigration and specific sector dynamics, like large numbers of foreign faculty at American universities (the global holy grail for academics because pay is 2-3x what it is anywhere else), extreme competition for tenure due to ridiculous levels of PhD overproduction, the need to narrow that competition, the fact that academia had been broadly very left for many decades (depending on faculty for centuries) and extremely so since the 1960s, making structures very weak to faculty racial activism. Once you decide you must hire many more black faculty, you soon find, for example, that 67% of black people awarded PhDs in America are women, so naturally you will hire mostly women.

This is all obvious stuff that Andrews was too lazy or otherwise unwilling to google, clearly.

for example one can easily construe mass immigration, soft-on-crime and other progressive policies as inherently riskier and ‘less safe’ than just not doing them

Changing it from "risk" to "personal risk" may be more accurate. I'm pretty sure that the people who are most involved in promoting such policies are the least personally affected by them. The risk to themselves is low.

Women are viciously competitive (as most women who went to high school will tell you) and don’t particularly empathize with their enemies. The safety point is correct in the abstract (men are much more willing to take risks) but arbitrary and poorly considered, for example one can easily construe mass immigration, soft-on-crime and other progressive policies as inherently riskier and ‘less safe’ than just not doing them. You can say that empathy overrides safetyism, but then it appears to sometimes and not at others

Which is why you'd say it's more likely higher agreeableness than higher empathy.

Conformity to an inconsistently sympathetic or safetyist ideology would explain this.

Women are viciously competitive

There are multiple kinds of competition. Are women known for violently beating or killing eachother for a stranger looking at them the wrong way? No, that's a male thing. Women do not compete like men compete. What kind of man does this:

Bari Weiss, in her letter of resignation from The New York Times, described how colleagues referred to her in internal Slack messages as a racist, a Nazi, and a bigot and—this is the most feminine part—“colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers.”

What helped get sanctions on apartheid South Africa was the largely male Western governments being afraid of the almost entirely male governments of the Soviet bloc and almost entirely male government of red China and the almost entirely male governments of various third world countries fomenting a more intense global anti-western movement if they didn’t support the end of apartheid. Indeed this drove the entirety of ruinous American ‘decolonial’ and ‘anti colonial’ policy back to the late 1940s, through Suez and Algeria and onward.

And so it stopped when the West won the Cold War, all sanctions on South Africa were ended? No, of course not, people believed this stuff. It was the Cold Warriors like Nixon and Reagan who were amongst the more positively inclined US presidents towards South Africa, not the reverse. South Africa was actually on their side in the Cold War, possessed useful naval bases, fought communist-backed states.

Most importantly, Andrews has this statistic:

One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.

What is that if not indicating wokeness? Maybe it's not 'conservative' or 'liberal' since that depends on context. In the imagined Trumpenreich, it would be very left-wing to fight for free speech and Stand Up against His Lies about a cohesive, all-white society. But in the modern day, in the real world, we know the polarity of 'free speech' vs 'cohesive society'. I fail to see how calling for the undermining of free speech in the America of today to protect a cohesive society could be interpreted in any other way than as woke.

And if women are woker, then having more women in places of prominence where they can implement this mindset can only make everything woker. If those two lines of argument hold, then everything else falls into place.

And so it stopped when the West won the Cold War, all sanctions on South Africa were ended?

Apartheid ended before the Soviet Union fell.

Good point, for some reason I thought it was like '92 or something... Nevertheless foreign aid and support for black South Africa continued and still continues today. It's not exactly the height of Cold War realpolitik to support putting the Soviet-trained, Soviet-funded guerrillas into power.

?? Apartheid ending was a relatively long process lasting into the early 90s. The Berlin Wall came down in '89.

I don’t know, I think she’s got a point, especially here:

the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tug at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.

The women in my life (not loads admittedly but some) are broadly:

  • More inclined to be agreeable, and to practice a form of ‘conscious centrism’ by carefully triangulating between the people in the room to decide what they believe.
  • Much less inclined to bite bullets, that is to accept ‘cold equations’ logic when it hurts sympathetic people.
  • Generally more inclined to be guided by empathy for the right people. I know a family lawyer who will take sympathetic women pro bono for example.

The points you are making are true as well. There is vicious intra-group competition, empathy can be very limited, etc. I don’t think those points are in opposition to these conclusions.

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