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Notes -
Political discourse as small talk
People approach political discourse the same way people approach small talk. They don't really put a lot of higher order thought into it. And that tends to frustrate both them and the people trying to have a higher level discussion with them. Most people engaging in water-cooler discourse do not have any intention to operate on any deep, thoughtfully-developed principles, but on vibes. That's just how human beings are.
Notably, vibes are not always directionally wrong, and analytical thought is not necessarily correct (else I'd agree with CRT and inequality of opportunity - common sense carveouts justified by added complexity). But the point is, most people don't really apply themselves in unraveling political discourse.
What got me to think about it was this excellent post downthread.
Summary: when our hypothetical character Lauren says, "Oh, I had so much traffic on the way here. I hate it. Man, what are all these idiot drivers doing out there?" There's a couple ways you can respond to that. The general way you would do it is to just go, "Yeah, I hear you. Traffic, man." There is not any kind of intellectual discourse that's being had here. However, when you answer that way, you're basically signaling a level of empathy for that person as an individual, a willingness to hear them, even if you're not that interested in what they have to say.
The second thing you can do is kind of signal disinterest. Maybe you just do not want to hear it, so you give a single-syllable response.
The third way is that you can be autistic about it, and you can say: "Um, actually, you know, nobody likes traffic. Why is that even worth saying? You're part of traffic too, right? You know, you're adding to the problem." Or, you know, you can be the Redditor autist: "If everyone took public transit..."
People don't go into small talk expecting you to start arguing about the intellectual valence of traffic-related frustration.When I was a little 12 year old autistic kid, if I heard another kid complain about rain, I'd be like: "If there was no rain, everyone would die." And that was a mistranslation of my father's attempt at making me a less cynical individual, where his response to my complaints over rain would be to say: "Oh, you should appreciate the good side of things, because rain gives us plants and stuff."
You might technically be right, but that's really just not the kind of conversation that's supposed to be happening here. When people open that kind of small talk line of discussion, they're not asking for a debate full of intellectual rigor. They're just expressing a basic observation, maybe in this case minor frustration. And they want that to be appreciated. They want other people to understand their current emotional state and what's driving them to it and offer sympathy. They're not really looking for any kind of discourse.
When you answer politely, you're signaling a baseline empathy for Lauren, even if you don't actually care about what's being discussed at all, and she probably won't even care if you really are. But what the Laurens of this world do care about is that you care about their feelings. And that's what you're demonstrating when you show interest in small talk. Your true investment is the individual. So the theory goes, that small talk fulfills a basic social function, kind of greasing the wheels, reducing friction between individuals. And that can actually start as a jumping off point for a deeper conversation. They might be less willing to just assume you're "one of those people," regardless of who has what beliefs. People are more willing to assume good faith if you have demonstrated that sort of general niceness, and you can both get a better sense of the vibe before things get too hot.
Back to the main thesis: Small talk is how a lot of people discuss political talking points. When a left-leaning person at work brings up Kyle Rittenhouse, they're not looking for philosophical debate on the merits of self defense. They're not looking for a proper legal assessment to uncover whether he was acting in accordance with the law. They're mad that those people got a murderer off the hook, and they want their fellow coworkers to appreciate how upset they are over such a ridiculous ruling. Obviously, this has the feature, not a bug, of acting as a soft social enforcement mechanism. Being impolite to Lauren would be weird. How about LeftyLauren? To her, hearing your rigorous undertaking in response would come off exactly the same way as me being a smartass to my fellow students about how rain is actually really good. She will not be impressed, maybe bewildered or angry.
Why is LeftyLauren like this? Well, from what I saw with Kyle Rittenhouse but also politics in general, most people who felt inclined to yap about it didn't really feel inclined to look into it. And when people raise any talking points to object to their pithy slogans, they just want to say, "I guess it's legal to murder progressives now." Someone with that mentality is not really looking at the actual facts of the case or anything like that. They're just vibing, and they're making small talk about a minor frustration. That's not to say they don't actually care—quite the contrary, they do. They are genuinely upset when they say these types of things.
And that's a big part of what frustrates people in political debates, because some people will approach these discussions with the mentality of getting to the bottom of it, of digging into the facts, of assessing the truth, acting on moral principles. And other people who have possibly never really given their baseline principles as they relate to such an issue any consideration will be caught unblinking. They will see that person being the weirdo autist, like the redditor ranting about slavery after you said Happy 4th. "Bro, you're hashing the vibe!" These people are generally going to be on completely different wavelengths.
I remember when the Kyle Rittenhouse thing was going down, I was getting in arguments with people about it, and a lot of them sure seemed to have strong opinions on it while also refusing to even watch the video. And I was just completely dumbfounded. I asked: "How can you have an opinion on something like this if you're not even going to do your due diligence as a professional opinion-haver and look at the freaking video and see what actually happened with your own eyeballs?" But, while I definitely think I was right in a technical sense — and this, in no way, excuses their lack of rigor — I had absolutely no awareness that these people were venting and looking for validation. They were being Laurens about it, just hoping for somebody to say, "Man, yeah, it's crazy what you can get away with in America, bro!" And hearing me respond with emphatic, sincere disagreement came off as hostile. They had no interest in an actual discussion.
I, by no means, mean to imply that you are either in Camp Rigor or Camp Vibe at all times. It depends on the individual interest in the topic, I suppose. One person may be the most technically-rigorous autist in a discussion about gun control but an entirely vibes-driven normie on foreign policy. Perhaps vibes vs rigor pretexts is an explanation for Gell-Mann amnesia; consider if you had an astrophysicist rain on your parade by interjecting about how your super cool sci fi concept you brought up in an idle office conversation was just totally off-base. He would then go home and write a post about how dumb office talk is, and you'd write about how much of a dick he was to just not even try to have fun. You get the picture. You're vibing, he's not.
And I'm not going to just bash progressives here. I think I was probably in the vibe camp after the death of Charlie Kirk. I do not know if rigor was on my side - I like to think it was, overall, but it wasn't my primary operating principle. I vented my frustration privately to many progressive friends, was met with abject dismissal, and felt absolutely aghast about it. Then I came here and got "Facts don't care about your feelings" and other such expressions thrown in my face. Do you know how alarming that feels? It's very, very disconcerting to have your vibes spat upon that way, especially when they feel so normal, so unobjectionable. And that is probably not too different from how those poor normies felt about my confrontations over Rittenhouse.
But I do think this vibing is a valuable tool. Whining about traffic is as low-stakes as it gets. But this method of communication, this basic human tendency — I think its exploitation can be one of the ideal end states of propagandistic efforts. Uncritical small talk is, for reasons I discussed at length, kind of unassailable! You look like a lunatic for contesting it. This makes it the perfect tool for spreading an agenda, provided that it's normal enough that invoking doesn't make you weird. This is the perfect weapon for LeftyLauren to enforce norms, and to be honest, I have some doubt that it's intentional in all cases. I think this is a weapon that is often issued to clueless footsoldiers who probably don't even realize they're fighting a war.
I suspect this very detail was the reason "the personal is political" caught on, but I may be giving this too much credit. Either way, if someone says something flagrantly political, about, say, how awful it is that 10,000 unarmed Black men a year are killed by cops... I might be inclined to dispute that fact. But what am I gonna do about it, hash the vibe? All I'd accomplish is to rock the boat and look like a weirdo, at best, ignoring any disciplinary potential.
"What? You think getting rained on is fun?" and "You think it's okay to just shoot protestors?" come from the same fountain of normie autism-repellent. Neither of those are really accurate assessments of the contrary point of view, but you're never going to get an honest autist discussion from these two starting points. And from a propaganda spreading angle, that's actually really beneficial! It's not just about how you look to onlookers, either. You are as likely to convince Lauren to reconsider her vocal disapproval of some political happening, as you are to convince Lauren that her complaints about TRAFFIC are farcical, and that she should know better. It's completely orthogonal. At best, you're missing the point of her discussion.
And LeftyLauren can and will tune that exact same human mentality towards complaining about capitalism uncritically, which I bet is more likely to be a genuine expression of frustration than a deliberate attempt at manipulation. The intent doesn't matter though, either way, this has a profound normalizing effect, drawing people to a cause, making an idea more openly expressable, and forcing anybody who disagrees to adopt a socially weak standing. The Lauren making a flagrantly political argument in the first place will thus make an autist out of her weird political interloper.
You will be about as successful as my 12 year old autistic stuff harping about how rain is good, actually.
I agree with the broad Manosphere / Red Pill interpretation of the feminist slogan "the personal is political", namely that it’s the expression of the simple concept that women, as opposed to men, have an interest in pursuing political solutions to remedy or alleviate their personal problems. These include: no-fault divorce, rape shield laws, punitive child support and alimony laws, affirmative action, the Duluth Model etc. For men, the reverse is true: the political is personal. Namely: political developments have a potential effect on their personal lives, and their only resort are personal options, not political countermeasures. I know this is completely off-topic, my bad.
What are the personal problems that no-fault divorce is a political solution to? In the absence of such laws it is the state compelling you to stay in a relationship you'd rather end. Is thinking a legal arrangement is unjust a "personal" problem? Same for rape shield laws, which concern the admissibility of evidence in criminal proceedings.
If you consider your husband icky and feel stuck in a marriage, and would prefer to simply get divorced on "grounds" you just don't want to be married anymore, but you can't legally do so because no-fault divorce isn't on the books and your husband has technically not done anything that is grounds for divorce, than yes, I suppose it does feel like a personal problem. It violates your feelings, just like the lack of rape shield laws do. You feel wronged.
This is exactly what’s wrong with today’s social landscape. People I knew just fundamentally had a much more realistic sense of people than those who pass for “adults” in the year 2025.
If you described yourself as being “stuck” in a marriage 25-30 years ago, we ‘all’ knew what that meant. It meant you were in a physically abusive marriage and you needed a way out. Today being “stuck” in a marriage means your husband wanted to have sex with you last week and you don’t feel as attracted to him as you once were. One of these 2 things doesn’t belong.
Adults have this attitude today that life doesn’t involve hardship and making sacrifices. Anything that represents even the slightest inconvenience to you is at liberty to be disregarded because you should just “do what makes you happy.” Well I’m sorry, but that’s ‘life’. Life is about doing 100 things every single day that you don’t want to do. And while your personal happiness is important, it’s far from the highest value to aspire to and is the least enduring and meaningful when you’re on your deathbed and wondering what you’ve left behind.
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Maybe I'm confused. In your comment you referred to no-fault divorce as a political solution to a personal problem. My contention is that it is a political solution to a political problem. The circumstances under which one can exit marriage, and the details of marriage as a matter of law, being themselves political creations. Similarly rape shield laws. The rules of evidence for courts being political creations.
I'd argue that marriage was a religious creation.
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