site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 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.

This of course was a wrong idea and contributed to further depressions of the birth rate, which necessitated more immigrants, and so on and so forth until either some sort of great violence breaks out or the original people the planners were in theory looking out for become an unimportant minority in their own land.

Countries like South Korea and Japan have had far less immigration than the US and most of Europe, yet their TFR is even lower. Romania has ~97% native born population with the small number of immigrants mostly labourers from Moldova who speak the same language, and yet, the lowest fertility rate in Europe.

“Other states implemented different centralizing solutions to perceived problems and have experienced a similar crisis of modernity” is no different than what I’m saying.

Also, when coming at what was revealed to the reactionary in a dream, the facts presented must at least be factually correct.

Ukraine has the lowest TFR in Europe at 0.99, and that rate does in fact have a lot to do with immigrants.

Romania has a 1.71 fertility rate, making it #6 in Europe.

As for South Korea and Japan, they have their own problems of organic processes being interfered with. The Japanese people have always had a small and not particularly giving batch of islands to work with. The spiritual human carrying capacity on those islands might be as low 50 million people, maybe as high as 90 million. It is almost certainly not 129 million, where the population peaked. The solution to this is for the government to just not touch it. The Japanese government doesn’t actually have to pay old people. It doesn’t have to bring in waves of immigrants, either elite or lowly. It can just let the Japanese people find their own carrying capacity and then work with what is given it in terms of human capital.

Korea’s situation is even worse, and TBH they may be so far gone as a result of culture and government that they’re going to get rolled by North Korea one day, despite North Korea also having a declining population.. That would be a key marker of what the world’s future is going to look like, it it were to happen this century.

I did pick an outdated or possibly wrong map for that statistic, but the point still stands: immigration like you described does not seem to correlate with TFR.

If you look at the countries with the lowest number of foreign born residents in the EU, i.e. Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, they have TFRs of 1.31, 1.57, 1.71, 1.6, 1.50, they are not doing any better the ones with the highest amount of immigration.

Ukraine's TFR was already very low before the war, you can't blame the recent rapid Russian "immigration" for that.

Are you under the impression that I think what I described applies to Bulgaria? It may or may not. I have no idea and don’t care, because I’m not Bulgarian. I’m sure this will shock you, but the USA is different from Bulgaria. I don’t care about Bulgaria and didn’t mention it.

I’m concerned about White people in America, and our fertility is 1.75, and we keep being given the chance to welcome new immigrants with a 2.19 TFR into what is rapidly becoming not our country anymore.

You can think that that’s a good or a bad thing, but your argument is not arguing about what I’m actually saying.

What I am saying is that, in 1965, the United States government, staring down the barrel of the already massive drop in TFR from the pill, should not have passed the Hart-Cellar Act in an attempt to goose the numbers, because opening the floodgates to immigration made the problem worse for the native population in America.

That’s why your references to “Well, Bulgaria has a low TFR” hold no power here. Because at least that’s the TFR the native Bulgarian population is settling on. You can’t tell me what the TFR of the native German population is, because the national stats are full of Turks and Arabs now. These stats are meaningless and say nothing about the effects of immigration.