site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23324 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 24, 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.

What I am seeing from you description is that high skill + top 1% athlete defeats 50th percentile fat guy. That isn't interesting.

The dude doesn’t have to be fat. I would consider myself a decent submission grappler and I’m not fat, but I will lose to this kind of woman.

I would say this is interesting, because it informs how realistic things like Hollywood movies with a female action star are. A tiny woman kicking the shit out of a bunch of dudes: pretty unrealistic. A tiny woman hitting a picturesque flying triangle, actually a little more possible (well maybe not because flying triangles don’t really work, but that’s what passes for grappling in movies). It’s a proof by contradiction that “no woman can beat a man” is false, which seems to be the position that some people are defending.

People are defending it because its basically true. We are talking about combat sports where Olympic level women can't make their own high school team. Where the star girl in a gym will routinely get humbled by a guy who's trying to get better at football and so is taking up the sport in the off-season.

That's not to say some men can't just be weak or unathletic, but it's silly to compare a 21 year old girl who's the best in the county to a 40 year old who works out once a week and picked up combat sports in his 30s and think that makes any sense.

If you think that’s the situation, you are mistaken. In college about five guys from the varsity football team came to the mma club to try out grappling. All of them were physical specimens, and when I rolled with them it would just be me submitting them every 30 seconds to a minute for the whole round. I just recently submitted a competitive college wrestler in practice (after getting thoroughly beaten positionally of course). I’m not a bad submission grappler and I’m not a 40 year old out of shape dad who just picked it up recently. I’m not a great one either, but I know my way around on the mat.

Bjj is just not something where strength matters nearly as much as untrained people think it does. There is enormous skill depth, on the level of chess or go. Given that it is something you can get good at by knowing things and making rapid decisions, it should not be surprising that some women are able to get good. Every gym has a 16 or 20 year old scrawny kid who has a great guard game and plays a good spidery high tempo defense against guys half again his weight. A athletic woman who lifts will have pretty much the same level of physicality as those kids, and if it’s not surprising when they hit triangles and heel hooks on everyone there is no reason to think a woman couldn’t either. Women’s minds are just as good at knowing things as men’s are (maybe modulo stuff at the tails which does not matter here).

You're really underestimating female bjj practitioners. I'm fat at 6'1" 245 lbs, but I think I'm pretty convincingly 80th percentile or higher at fighting compared to men in my age cohort thanks to previous martial arts experience. But the (short, fat, female) purple belt at the jiu jitsu gym I joined still beat my ass on the rare occasion that we fought. Multiplying it out a female jiu jitsu purple belt is probably far rarer than 1%-- relative to women her age, I'd guess she's at or above the top 0.01% in terms of fighting ability-- but the interesting result is that it's not athleticism, but technique that puts her over the edge.

Is BJJ actually relevant in a combat scenario though? Grappling is pretty cool but what good is it if you're just getting pummelled by a guy with longer reach and more muscle-power? In an actual fight, you're allowed to strike, you can do anything you want, you actually are trying to hurt the opponent.

If you want to talk about actual combat scenarios...

If you can de-escalate the situation, you should. If you have a weapon and your opponent doesn't, use it. If your opponent has a weapon and you don't, just do what they tell you instead of getting stabbed or shot. If your're both unarmed and there's nothing keeping you where you are, just run. If you're both unarmed and you're trapped-- and this is the scenario woman (rationally) fear the most-- you're probably already grappling, so you might as well bring out the bjj.

Striking may be tactically useful, especially as a supplement to grappling, but if you get into a stand-up fistfight you've almost certainly making some sort of strategic mistake. I say this as someone who's dabbled in a few different martial arts. The most important thing your instructor can teach you about fighting is how not to. The second most important thing they can teach you is how to win the specific kind of fight you're training for-- whether that's in boxing ring, or in the living room against a rapey tinder date. To that extent, I think it's an important result that a 50th percentile women can spend three to five years to get to a point where she can win a grappling match against an 80th percentile man.

a 50th percentile women can spend three to five years to get to a point where she can win a grappling match against an 80th percentile man

Maybe in an arena with rules and social judgement for men who beat up women. Real fights tend to be extremely chaotic, good chance they start with a sucker punch or are in some cluttered space where technique is less relevant and both sides are improvising.

80th percentile man does some kind of sport, probably tall and fit, regularly goes to the gym. Is he really going to lose in a practical scenario? Doubt it.

I agree 100% regarding weapons and avoiding fights. My point is that the sex that gets men to carry heavy things has no place in a fight fundamentally and should avoid it wherever possible.

Real fights tend to be extremely chaotic... but not in a way that particularly disfavors women in comparison to men. Also, a cluttered space is, again, exactly the kind of environment where grappling skills predominate. See: Carjitsu.

80th percentile man does some kind of sport, probably tall and fit, regularly goes to the gym. Is he really going to lose in a practical scenario? Doubt it.

Do you disagree that "both parties are unarmed and in an enclosed space" is the modal practical scenario where any martial arts training actually makes a difference? Because my argument descends from the fact that such is scenario is exactly where grappling ability is most useful, and the fact that my personal experience in grappling demonstrates how technique can very convincingly make up for physique.

Do you disagree that "both parties are unarmed and in an enclosed space" is the modal practical scenario where any martial arts training actually makes a difference?

If we're talking men vs. women, yeah. Ages ago (possibly before moving offsite) someone posted a compilation of "girlfriend shocked at the strength differential between her and her boyfriend" Reddit threads, where silly playflighting games somehow gave the girls the idea that they're roughly equal to their boyfriends, and their world suddenly shattered when for some reason or another the boyfriend picked them up like a kitten. Technique can be important, but it's just not going to be a factor in a fight between average man and an average woman. Your 50th percentile woman (after training) vs 80th percentile man strikes me as extremely unrealistic.

Sort of necroposting here but... unrealistic how? Unrealistic in the sense that the scenario I posit (unarmed and in an enclosed space) is unlikely to happen? Unrealistic in that you disbelieve my foundational claim (that a woman with 50th percentile fitness and 3 years of training can defeat a man with 80th percentile combat skills)? Unrealistic in that you think that women receiving adequate martial arts training is unlikely and therefore it's not worth discussing the rare fights where they have it? Responding to each potential complaint in turn,

  1. If you find the scenario unrealistic, what scenario do you believe is modal?
  2. If you find the claim about fighting capability unrealistic... I admit I can't really provide solid evidence otherwise because this claim stems from fundamentally anecdotal experience. But I would suggest that you would very much enjoy the experience of finding a mixed-gender jiu-jitsu gym and replicating my result for yourself. (I know, that's a really big ask for a faceless internet goon to make, but I would recommend jiu jitsu on its merits even unrelated to this argument.)
  3. If you think the scenario is plausible, but unlikely to happen due to the rarity of serious female martial artists... I would agree. But I say that it's an interesting result because women can volitionally make it more likely to happen. So much of our lives is decided by the circumstances of our birth- gender, race, zip code, family situation, etcetera... so I think it's useful to identify and promote the rare actions that can actually improve our lots in life. I won't ignore the possibility of the worst case scenario, where women do more martial arts and as a consequence overestimate their physical capabilities and put themselves in danger. But as a biased heuristic, i think the benefits of martial arts are so great that even without considering domestic violence, promoting jiu jitsu for women will benefit them... and (though this is a bit of a bailey relative to that motte) the difference in the domestic assault success rate provided by better martial arts training will more than outweigh any increase in the overall rate. Especially since these women would be getting the same sort of paradoxically pacifist inculturation that most martial artists go through, that being, "now that you know how to fight, you know exactly how badly you don't want to fight, so on top of being better able to respond to violence you'll also be less likely to get into it in the first place.

I really would go out of my way to get the chance to roll with a female blackbelt at some point, just so that I could offer first hand experience on this instead of this theoretical opinion situation.

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