site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 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.

6
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Why would you tell the MAGA true believers about Operation Bring Down Trump?

That's the thing that really muddies the waters in conspiracy discourse, everyone acts like they have no idea how the government (or people) work. They act like "the government" is this magical monolithic entity. But "the government" doesn't do things, people inside the government do things, and sometimes they do things unofficially and/or illegally.

The threat that people are trying to get at when they talk about "the Deep State" isn't that "the CIA" will "decide" to screw over an elected official. You think there's some internal CIA policy that says "it is the official position of the Central Intelligence Agency to bork This Guy in Particular"?

No, the threat is that some guys at the CIA who don't like This Guy in Particular will use their official position and resources to bork him. I mean, look at Watergate. There wasn't an official FBI position of "we will leak evidence of the Watergate scandal to the Washington Post," Mark Felt took advantage of his position as Deputy Director to do that. And it would be the same with the DC police - IF this theory is true (and it seems too soon to tell, to me) it's not "the DC police" doing this. It's a group of DC police officers who, by virtue of not being completely stupid, aren't going to tell DC police officers who would disagree with their plan any more than they would post it on the Internet.

That's not to say that there's never been an Official Policy To Do Something Bad (there has), but the Stringer Bell's rule applies doubly so to people in the government. (If only conspiracy theorists would actually watch and pay attention to The X-Files, which actually understands the dynamic here decently well.)