site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 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.

Agree-and-amplify style approaches are much older than Gen Z or pick-up culture. In his Enchiridion, Epictetus says:

33.7. If anyone tells you that such a person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you, but answer: "He does not know my other faults, else he would not have mentioned only these."

Part of the secret of ancient Stoic therapeia (midwifery of the soul) is to replace the usual motivations of pro-social actions (like desire for social approval and status anxiety) with the pursuit of virtue in itself, a sense of duty, and a feeling of connection to the cosmopolis (city of the Cosmos.)

I think this is the purpose of a lot of the so-called Stoic paradoxes. In Stoicism, phrases like "all virtues are equal", "all vices are equal", and "only the sage is free" serve a similar psychological role to Christian sayings like, "only God/Jesus is perfect and sinless", "we have all sinned and fall short of God's perfection", and "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Properly internalized, both philosophies will make it impossible to feel fundamentally better or worse than anyone else, and changes your point of comparison to a perfect ideal instead of something a mortal human is really capable of achieving in this life.

It makes it feel like Morgan is not in on the joke. It denies his moral frame that any hint of racism = bad. He needs to come up with a more concrete argument. When he instead tries fails to re-establish the frame through repetition, it doesn’t land.

While I hardly think Nick Fuentes is a Stoic sage, I think the power of denying a moral framework is bigger than this. It isn't that you're refusing to be moral, it is that you are refusing to give in to the coercive element of moral socializing, for better or worse. In the best cases, this frees you up to do the right thing in spite of what society's worst impulses might try to get you to do, like when Socrates refused immoral orders while serving the Athenian military under the 30 tyrants, and in the worse cases it enables you do a bad thing in spite of any social censure you might face.