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PaperclipPerfector  16hr ago (text post)   1934 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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There's no content here but culture warring and "boo leftists."

Even some rightists are noticing that the Motte is converging into a rightoid hivemind. Maybe that is inevitable, and posting rightist opinions is fine, but you're a newly-rolled account with a grand total of two comments that amount to nothing more than "Boo hiss leftoids." I don't even care which permabanned returnee you are. Write something more interesting.

Senate ends shutdown.

With no provision to extend COVID-era ACA subsidies, merely a vote, it has the appearance and character of a Democrat loss. The usual suspects on Reddit are crying foul of cowardice.

But could it have ended any other way? The Democrats are obliged to government unions, who weren't being paid: and to the urban poor, who weren't getting SNAP. Two massive interests within their base were being sacrificed for the benefit of... four million recipients? The math never added up.

You could say that the Republicans were heartless, but they have come out of it looking like fighters and winners, while the Democrats have capitulated to 'fascists'. The midterms will still probably be a Dem victory, but this act by Schumer and the moderates will not be something the #resistance will be likely to forget anytime soon.

Feel like this is where I run into the limits of my government research ability and it is frustrating. As best I can tell the legislation being referenced here is H.R. 5371. At least, the last listed action is that the Senate agreed to cloture 60-40 and the breakdown of Senators matches those described. However this bill, per section 106, seems like it only funds the government through November 21st except for specifically named operations. This is in contrast to the Politico article saying it funds most programs for the rest of the year and some only into January. There are limited references to January in that bill and only one to January 31st. Is there some further piece of legislation I need to reference? I also don't see any amendments in the bill history so it's not clear to me why it would need to go back to the House.

ETA:

I think this is the text of the amended HR 5371 that was passed, which does seem to fund through January 2026. Apparently there is also a companion bill.

On the politics side I think this was dumb. The polling I'm aware of seemed to show Democrats winning this fight in the popular consciousness. "It's bad when people's healthcare premiums go up hundreds of dollars" is a very straightforward message. Republicans nuking the filibuster also would have been a great outcome. If not immediately, then in the future. Feels like the closest thing to a concession is the entirely-symbolic later vote on extending the subsidies. Bad political instincts all around.

The parliamentary maneuver was passing the house bill and then amending it.

It’s not just the urban poor who are on SNAP. The Democrats had a chance to make gibs into a real bread-and-butter issue, not just a culture-war distraction.

This was also a great opportunity to bait the Republicans into abolishing the filibuster, which would have helped Democrats in the long run. Zero Machiavellian instincts from these people. No wonder the base is angry.

Republicans have a Senate advantage. It's by no means clear that nuking the filibuster (especially in Trump's term) is a good idea in the long run.

Though I grant it'd allow Democrats to pull more shenanigans like the ACA subsidies and then dare Republicans to take away the gibs.

I'm mostly experience whiplash from the DNC messaging. I wonder at the hypothetical bugman who just uncritically believes all of it. Because in the span of hours, we went from "This is a Republican shutdown" to "Who are the traitorous Democrats who caved and allowed the government to open again?"

Ah well. No helping it.

I do not see the contradiction. As an analogy, consider the Ukraine-Russian war. I think it would be fair for Ukrainians to claim that this is Putin's war. However, it seems also likely that if the top eight military officials of Ukraine conspired to unconditionally surrender to Putin, the war would be over in very short order.

Would that make you go "Ha! This shows that it was Zelenskyy's war all along, he could have stopped it any time by surrendering!"?

Now, if the Democrat party line had been that they would never vote for a budget while Trump was president, I think it would be fair to call it a Democrat shutdown. But from what I can tell, they just wanted a few token concessions around the ACA, hardly something completely outlandish. In such cases, it falls to the party which controls the government to negotiate, and their failure to do so reflected very badly on MAGA. In fact, Trump pointed out the very same thing during an Obama shutdown.

I am realist enough not to expect the Dems to watch a million Americans starve to death before they decide to "put the country before partisan politics" or "be the bigger person". But from what I have heard, the number of citizens which died from lack of SNAP benefits is basically zero.

At this point, what MAGA should do is announce that any time a bill of theirs will not pass, Noem will kill another puppy. That should be enough to get the spineless Democrats to vote for it lest they be complicit in puppy killing.

In this metaphor Democrats are Putin: the shutdown / war would not have happened but for… Maybe Zelensky should have negotiated with Russia and they wouldn’t have had to invade. Maybe Trump should have conceded what Chuck Schumer wanted, and then they wouldn’t have had to filibuster.

AIUI, there are several 'foodstamps' programs, and the ones people might actually starve from not getting are funded- it's possible that a lengthy pause in foodstamps would cause issues for people, but private charity can bridge over it for a month or two- especially these two.

How do you, personally, decide who is to blame for the government shutdown? If Republicans had made concessions to Democrats, would you then be here arguing that it was a 'Republican shutdown?'

There is no contradiction between those two. Republicans could have, at any time, used their Senate majority to end the shutdown by over-ruling the parliamentarian and invoking cloture with less than 60 votes. What actually happened is that eight Democrats voted for cloture so that Republicans didn't have to do that.

We're supposed to pretend that such moves done in the past by Republicans weren't seen as massively norm breaking and a violation of normal politics?

It is literally called "the nuclear option".

Hell, Democrats cried bloody murder (and still bring it up with no small amount of bitterness*) about simply not holding a vote for Garland.

* Understandably. I'd be mad too if I allowed myself to be so outplayed.

Who is pretending? I am sure Democrats would have sought to make hay out of it. It's still a thing Republicans could have done. Both Republicans and Democrats have done it in the past. My preference would be to just remove it altogether and have a majority vote for everything. The filibuster is a cancer on US politics.

Based and true. Remove the filibuster so congress haas to actually legislate instead of passing the buck. Stack the supreme court every election so there's no point being an activist judge. Make the house of representatives 25x bigger to match constituency ratios in the early republic. (Optionally) Return the senate to selection by state assemblies. RETVRN to tradition.

Republicans could have, at any time, used their Senate majority to end the shutdown by over-ruling the parliamentarian and invoking cloture with less than 60 votes.

But that's the nuclear option, right?

Changing/re-interpreting the Senate rules by majority vote, effectively lowering the cloture threshold permanently for ordinary legislation, would change the entire game. And it would certainly come back to bite the Republicans the very next time the Democrats gain power.

That's fascinating. So your contention is that Democrats are mad that Republicans didn't end the filibuster?

Huh? Democrats (assuming this means voters) are mad that eight Senators voted to end the government shutdown with what seem like no material concessions.

For selfish reasons, I hope the democrats unseat them in bloody primaries which nominate #resistance dems instead of some of their highest value over replacement senators.

None of them are up for reelection in 2026, and no one will remember this in 2028.

with what seem like no material concessions

That's WhiningCoil's original point; how can you claim that it's the other side shutting down the government, while also asking concessions to allow it to open?

I'm not saying the Republicans necessarily had more consistent messaging, but come on, it's clearly double-speak.

While there exists at least one non-Republican senator who is not willing to blindly vote for any Republican proposal, a shutdown is obviously never 100% the Republicans fault in a very technical sense.

Still, the general rule in parliaments is that if you need someone's votes, you have to make them some concessions in exchange.

One might as well claim that on a technical level, both a rapist and (sober, adult) rape victim could stop a rape from happening by either stopping the act or just giving consent (at which point it would no longer be rape).

However, I am about as inclined to buy "it is the evil Democrats fault because they wanted some material concessions for their vote" as I am to buy "she is to blame because she did not give me consent", because the social expectation is neither that you vote for your opponent's budget out of the goodness of your heart nor that you must consent to any sex act others might afflict on you.

What concessions did Republicans get for their votes for the Continuing Resolutions during the Biden years?

I mean, what does it mean to be responsible for shutting down the government? There was a procedural path for Democrats to end the shutdown (by voting with Republicans). There was a procedural path for Republicans to end the shutdown (without any Democrat votes). There is no path for Democrats to unilaterally end the shutdown (being the minority party). What is the sense in which Democrats are responsible that does not also apply to Republicans?

What is the sense in which Democrats are responsible that does not also apply to Republicans?

This is about the messaging around who's responsible, not about who's actually responsible. Which would be Congress in general or, upstream of that, american voters who failed to elect a filibuster proof majority. But that's not going to make the party who says it very popular.

But the messaging "they're the one doing it" followed by (essentially) "why did we allow it to reopen without getting anything?" makes obvious that the narrative is bullshit.

I guess I do not think (and do not think voters think) assignment of blame like "Republicans are responsible for the shutdown" entails "there is literally nothing Democrats could do to end the shutdown." By this logic no party could ever be responsible for the shutdown, since after all some of its members could vote for a bill to end the shutdown!

So what your saying is, making Trump our king to keep the government from shutting down again is just as viable a political strategy as demanding infinity dollars for special interest groups?

I exaggerate, but that's the directionality here. Republicans could have ended the shutdown by fundamentally changing how the senate conducts business. Trump even wanted them to, because then they could ram through whatever he wanted. I'm all for it! I just never thought I'd hear those same words out of someone arguing the Democrat's case about why Republicans should own the shutdown.

Glad to hear we're united in our aspirations for Trump's agenda to be completely unimpeded. Too bad Republicans didn't own the shutdown like you say they should have and done it.

This is a very strange response. I think, and have long thought, ending the filibuster would be a good thing. I think it is singularly responsible for the erosion of Congress's role in our politics and has been a boon to the growth of presidential power. Even if the Senate did abolish the filibuster that would not come close to making Trump a king. The filibuster was not a significant impediment to Congress for the first 200+ years of our nations history. It's only in the last ~20 or so that it's seriously become a problem.

the DNC messaging

You linked to a Democrat celebrity, not to the DNC. It does not appear that the DNC has issued a post-capitulation statement.

I linked to a Democrat celebrity, who then embeds numerous Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, complain about the traitors who reopened the government.

Here it is on it's own.

https://x.com/SenSanders/status/1987718655736528939

I know the first clip was a whopping minute and 19 seconds, so it was hard to watch the entire thing. This one is even longer, a minute 39 seconds. Good luck.

Sanders definitely doesn't represent the DNC.

On the other hand, Schumer possibly could be taken as representing the DNC, since he's listed on its "Leadership" webpage (though not as having any particular role in the organization). He has issued a speech in opposition to the capitulation.

If Schumer didn't like it so much then he could have whipped the senators into not voting for it. Trivial parliamentary politics doesn't deceive anyway - he's clearly the leader of the moderates! That he didn't have the courage to vote on it himself and is hiding behind his fellows makes him more wicked imo.

Two BBC bosses, Director-General Tim Davie and news CEO Deborah Turness, both resigned after a scathing dossier (full memo) was published days ago, showcasing strong bias in BBC's reporting.

An example from the dossier where BBC's partiality may be readily observed, without requiring to into the weeds of culture war issues, is BBC produced special, airing a week before the most recent US presidential election about Donald J. Trump. In the part of the spcial about the 1-6 Incident, editor had spliced together without indication of doing so, Trump quotes an hour apart:

So near the beginning of his speech, Trump stated:

We’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re gonna walk down, we’re gonna walk down any one you want but I think right here, we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women

Then, roughly an hour later:

Most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say, I wanna thank you very much and they go off to some other life, but I said something’s wrong here, something’s really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country any more.

As quoted in the allegedly biased pre-election special:

We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell you’re not gonna have a country any more.

(Also in video form)

Also elaborated upon in the dossier are bias in reoprting on the US POTUS election generally, alledging without evidence the existence of racial discrimination in insurance, covering up illegal immigration, distorting opinions of historians to promote racially incendiary historical narratives, parroting the LGBTQ activist line regarding transsexuality. Coverage of the local consequences of the 10-7 Incident is in particular depth critiqued.

Here is the punchline: Mr. Davie had in the past worked issued guidelines which would have been violated, if these accusations are true. He is more closely associated with the Conservative, rather than Labour, party. Strange that a man who can be accused of at most trying and failing to correct the ship, resigns. Now with Labour in power, the person replacing him will be more likely to be sympathetic to those who feel called out by this dossier and less likely to see the dossier as pointing at a real issue.

With a reputable report, whose accusations are confirmed by resignations, showing leftist bias in media, trust in media takes another hit.

Personally, I think that spicing together two sentences with "and" in them is the kind of thing which should never be done. That is a very different ballpark than the Reagan free trade ad, which simply elected to reorder a few sentences.

Also, this seems as pointless as making up a story about Trump eating toddlers. The unedited quotations from Trump speak for themselves (and picking soundbites out of a longer speech is 100% accepted journalism -- let Trump whine about how the quotes are not representative of the overall speech and taken out of context, nobody will give a fuck), but someone apparently thought they could make Trump look 20% more evil with their clever manipulation, with the predictable result that Trump can now claim to be the hapless victim of the evil manipulative mainstream media.

What's striking about this to me is that there was zero advantage in fabricating this video. There's about a million other different ways for the media to rally the troops which are totally above board (at least by media standards): dark insinuations, taking things wildly out of context, five degrees of Kevin Bacon, etc. And they'd have had the same effect, without any risk of blowback. Is there anything in the dossier about how exactly the decision was made to create and release the video?

‘The boss wants to use AI’

Strange that a man who can be accused of at most trying and failing to correct the ship, resigns.

I'm pretty sure he could also be accused of not even trying, perhaps even outright abating. Why should we assume he was trying to right the ship based on nothing but which party he's associated with?

With a reputable report, whose accusations are confirmed by resignations, showing leftist bias in media, trust in media takes another hit.

As @JTarrou points out, it's gone already (or rather it's split, with the partisans for one side believing the media uncritically, the partisans for the other side assuming it's all lies, and nothing in the middle but a yellow stripe and dead armadillos). As @WhiningCoil noted in a slightly different context, "The goalpost just shifts to them having been correct to do so, because the axiomatic belief is that Trump must be destroyed by any means nessecary." That they were doing this isn't something anyone's going to update on; though it is interesting that they're actually being punished for it.

It's one group that doesn't trust the BBC and another group that insists that, yes, the BBC has problems but it's also the bulwark against barbarism and the target of a nefarious right wing plot (sotto voce: maybe driven by American lackeys) to destroy it. A similar dynamic exists with the CBC: any talk of funding becomes a matter of the sort of paranoid patriotism that would otherwise be mocked from the other side.

So I think the situation is actually worse for the BBC than uncritical trust of half the electorate. They don't even have that.

Is there any trust left? None of these organizations are due the slightest of deference or respect, they're all ideologically captured shills. The BBC is a state propaganda organ, and the state propaganda organ of the UK is hostile to the US president. This is neither surprising nor that interesting. "News" exists to create opinion, not inform it.

The BBC is a state propaganda organ

It's a propaganda arm of the progressive cultural and social elite in the UK rather than of the state itself. It has such influence on state policy that it's easy to conflate the two, but that's getting cause and effect mixed up.

I would agree except to say that the government has considerable influence on it, but the BBC will fight this influence with every tool if the government is right-wing and accede easily of left-wing (though maybe not as left as Corbyn).

""News" exists to create opinion, not inform it."

Well let's not forget humdrum local news, weather news, and business news. It's not all top level How to Think About News.

Mark Twain had a useful heuristic to give us on the matter:

“If you don’t read the news you’re uninformed. If you read the news you’re misinformed.”

The telegraph link is paywalled.

Was the dossier primarily about the Trump interview? I'm seeing some mentions that it also discussed trans issues, but all the headlines are about the Trump interview. Example:

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/britains-bbc-boss-tim-davie-resigns-following-criticism-over-trump-documentary-2025-11-09/

BBC boss and head of news quit after criticism of Trump documentary edit

Archive link: https://archive.is/2025.11.06-162854/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/06/read-devastating-internal-bbc-memo-in-full/

Yeah, I also saw a lot of trans commentary. It makes sense for the international press to ignore it, of the two issues this is less consequential - "oh no, a UK media outlet was dishonest in it's coverage about the elections in another contry!". Bias about the trans issue is relevant to other countries, because the same kind of shenanigans are going on throughout the west, so bringing up what the BBC did about it would cause normies to start asking the wrong sort of questions.

I thought this was evident already for anyone who’s ever seen a BBC Hardtalk interview. All these institutions are prejudiced and to that end are involved in setting the agenda. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or left either.

Demonstrating bias in this context is very hard. For the most part the emotional resonance one picks up from weeks or months of accepting information from a biased source is hardly if ever a culmination of a singular aspect of that information. It's also the lack of information regarding some things, differential treatment of otherwise similar events, or the opposite. It generally tumbles along until your gut tells you that something is wrong. But by that point you're months deep into the information stream. Where it's practically impossible to do a comparison since you could not know that the source was biased or in what way.

To that extent this revelation is just a handy receipt of what everyone with a brain already knew, but could not confidently assert. To my mind a much more obvious example was the 3 day hesitation period after the Pakistani rape scandal was published about in British newspapers.

That hesitation period was very reminiscent of Swedish news publishing at the time, that centered around minimizing negative backlash against migrant crime. Which in and of itself was based on a theory that if migrants could be accepted and integrated into Swedish society, the true social cause of the crimes would be dealt with. In contrast, news publishing that stoked negativity towards migrants would only hinder integration and acceptance. I always liked that theory and its practical application as it demonstrated just how insane the progressive/neo-liberal economic project is in practice, and how inhumane and sadistic the necessary policies to sustain it are.

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