site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 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.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I dislike discussing this because it feels to me pretty consistently that we have lost the language to describe consensus reality.

"We" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here - there's a significant portion of people who if you held their feet to the fire would be able to tell you what a woman is, but for one political or social reason or another can't define it any more than they can describe what Peace in the Middle East looks like, or the steps necessary to get to fully automated luxury gay space communism. If the political right is using "what is a woman" as a political gotcha to get their opponents twisted in knots to avoid saying what they will face consequences from their allies over, who is the we? We don't describe correct human physiology by the edge cases, mostly because doctors are a necessary health function, but we define plenty of other things by edge cases, including when it can be used as shorthand for communicating much more complex ideas.

Anyone who has ever been a teenager could tell you there are about fifty things "gay" can be appended to that have nothing to do with homosexuality.

You are correct that without sex determination, then the definition of gay is meaningless. But my point is that attraction to a same-sex for some is non-trivial. I think there is a word that describes this same-sex attraction: gay.

When I was younger, gay was the word kids used for everything lame. I remember listening to NPR (Moth radio?) where a woman gave a story where her father came out as gay and she and her mother then become advocates for gay marriage, and the storyteller said she never used the word derogatorily. I think signaling political correctness as a child? To me bullshit. It didn't pass the sniff test for me.

But as I've grown up, the word gay isn't used for lame anymore and just is a synonym for homosexual. In my teenage years the word gay seemed to be trending away from the youth slang for uncool, for political correctness purposes.