site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24720 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 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.

Honestly, I think we should replace Congress with this app.

I think this is where I'm going to take a moment to shill my personal vision: let's amend the apportionment act of 1929.

I don't know if the house of representatives having 1,000 members would be an improvement, but I'd like to see what would happen.

A while ago I kicked around a concept of political representation that hinged on dunbar's number

Basically: You choose to join a group of 100 people. These 100 people can live anywhere, it's just the group you're a member of. You can leave your group if another is willing to accept you.

Every group, let's call it a "century" after the Roman military unit, is a member of a higher level group of 100 centuries (call that a "meta-century" for now), and each one elects a representative into the meta-century. Just like individuals, the representative can choose to make their century a member of a different meta-century, if that meta-century is willing to accept it. The meta-century chooses one representative into the meta-meta-century, and so on until you have one president.

Every century would be essentially sovereign with respect to every individual who is a member, including up and down the hierarchy.

I have no idea how well it would work but it would ensure that every single person is contained within a political unit below dunbar's number, which I think is a good property.

Every century would be essentially sovereign with respect to every individual who is a member, including up and down the hierarchy.

This doesn't make sense - the whole point of sovereignty is to solve the problems that can't be solved by freely-formed associations (like . In practice those problems tend to exist in physical space, so practical sovereignty is territorial. A century of people who don't live together can't provide policing, defense, roads, environmental regulations etc. and a century that net contributors can leave at any time can't provide social insurance unless there is some kind of shared bond that means that the other 99 members won't just leave if one gets expensively sick.

A similar system that functioned purely for allocating voting power (so there is still a single sovereign, but it is controlled by a vote of the nine meta-meta-meta-century representatives) is part of Eliezer Yudkowsky's sort-of-utopia dath ilan, and the general approach (which is a good idea and should probably be tried) is called liquid democracy

You choose to join a group of 100 people. These 100 people can live anywhere, it's just the group you're a member of. You can leave your group if another is willing to accept you.

It might be slightly more practical to say:

  • A normal-size group comprises 71–140 people.

  • An undersize group comprises 51–70 people. Within one month it must become a normal-size group, by either merging with another group or taking on new members individually.

  • An oversize group comprises 141–200 people. Within one month it must become a normal-size group, by either splitting into multiple groups or bleeding off members individually.

I'm glad this was the biggest problem you could find with this proposal lol

house of representatives having 1,000 members

Weak. Return to the original apportionment ratio of 1-30,000. Bring on the Small City of Representatives.

(It would make gerrymandering harder and less impactful, though the dynamics of an 11k member house would be very weird)

Small City

Ackchually, according to the United Nations you don't hit "city" status until 50,000 people, so this would just be a mid-sized town.

Trying to imagine the sheer logistics of this. A roll call vote like the vote for Speaker would (assuming each vote takes 5s) take ~16 hrs to conduct.

I don't see why roll call votes are necessary. Just use an electronic tabulator like they used to poll the audience on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

I am sure we would end up with some kind of electronic solution, but it's still something that would have to be built. Congress currently has electronic voting for bills but that currently has a rather limited number of options (Yes/No/Abstain). Currently any Representative-elect can say basically any name as their choice for Speaker of the House. I don't think it needs to be anyone nominated in advance nor even any Representative-elect. Do you just give everyone a text box and hope ~5k people all type the correct name together? Do you constrain options in the voting system? Interesting to think how those discussions might play out.

I imagine you'd end up with a house-within-the-house that dealt with the vast majority of business.

I am under the impression this is already largely how the House functions, with committees. And particular committees (Rules comes to mind) being much more influential on general business than others.

Most business is conducted in committees, but virtually every rep has committee assignments. With 11k representatives, I could easily envision a situation where the vast majority of reps do very little except vote to organize the House and handle constituent issues.

I wonder if maybe you'd end up with highly specialized committees. How much of the bureaucratic/topical expertise currently embedded in executive rule making agencies could make it back into Congress if the House had 11k members? Although that expertise would probably not be optimally distributed, since it still relies on actually winning elections.

If you had real political parties rather than primaries then the parties would have an incentive to get the expertise they needed into the House by running the experts in safe districts.

If each subcommittee has 15 members (about the average for current House subcommittees) and each part-time Representative sits on two, then you could have about 1500 sub-committees - roughly one for each Senate-confirmed executive branch officer under the current system. So as long as the required expertise was there and there was a working system for getting less-controversial legislation that passed after a detailed markup in subcommittee through committee and to a quick yes/no vote of the whole House, you could indeed replace regulations with legislation.

I assume that members of the main committees would be full-time. I also suspect you would need some kind of Grand Committee of a few hundred senior full-time Representatives (probably the same ones that sit on the major committees) that could handle bills which are sufficiently important that you don't want to pass the text reported out of committee without further debate, in the same way that current legislatures allow for amendments to be proposed and voted on on the floor. I assume that Grand Committee members would get Washington offices and larger staffs, and that Grand Committee members plus a random selection of part-time Reps would get seats in the House Chamber for important ceremonial events.

In this model the work of a backbench part-time Representative has three components:

  • Constituent service.
  • Ensuring "their" Grand Committee member (what "their" means depends on how the Grand Committee is elected and how the party caucuses stitch up those elections) is aware of issues that particularly affect their district.
  • Legislative work in sub-committee.

Sub-committee chairs also need to spend a lot of time managing their subcommittee's business through the parent major committee - they might need to be full-time as well to do that job.

Full-time Representatives would have similar jobs to what they do now, except that their "constituents" would be the backbench members of their own party, rather than voters.

It feels like an experiment worth trying.

Recursive sub-parliaments?

Wait a minute, that's just Syndicalism.

Imagine the committee appointment drama.

I've done the math, and if we kept up with the original intent, we'd be close to 1776 congressmen right now.

I will admit, I've wondered before about the feasibility of making the people into the "fourth house" of government. I feel like introducing an app where the people get a veto on all bills, budgets, etc. and make the margin for blocking a flat 50% of those who vote on the bill. I guess the major problem is that it introduces a bias to inaction, but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing.

I think if there's one thing the US constitution doesn't need, it's another veto point. Congress has basically abandoned legislating, leaving actual lawmaking to the Supreme Court and the Presidency. It doesn't need another thing stopping it from doing its job.

So the reasoning behind it in my eyes is that the government keeps doing things that (almost) no one wants. Like, I don't doubt it's popular with the actual people in office, but most people would be very happy to cut off a large amount of foreign aid (especially to Israel).

Up here in Canada, we had a recent bill (C-12 I believe, but it may be C-2) which was basically "close down the borders, but also give warrantless search powers to cops." Our most recent budget included lines that basically said "our government can arbitrarily exempt any business it wants from following the laws." I think a bit of stalemate when the government tries to spend money is a good thing.

I'd say most of the law making gets done in the bureaucracy. And technically that bureaucracy is under the presidents authority, but reality is a much different picture. The supreme Court handles a tiny minority of disputes that are interesting to legal nerds. But they rarely make much of an impact. The only ruling I can think of recently that impacted me was their handling of homelessness.

The supreme Court handles a tiny minority of disputes that are interesting to legal nerds.

Didn't they abolish segregation, mandate the legalisation of gay marriage, mandate the legalisation of abortion (before later returning that power to the states), abolish affirmative action in colleges and mandate that states allow individuals to carry guns? Those seem pretty political and sigificant to me. Certainly they seem like things that should have been decided by elected representatives or by referendum.

abolish affirmative action in colleges and mandate that states allow individuals to carry guns

Neither of these have worked. Everyone who might be affected just refuses to obey the ruling and nothing happens to them. The others are left-wing causes so they didn't face this problem.

They DID in fact face this problem. But the executive and the Supreme Court were willing to do something about it. The Feds sent in the National Guard to do desegregation, and the courts backed them up. And the courts have often done follow-up rulings to landmark cases to indicate that yes, they really meant that. For guns and abolishing affirmative action, they did not. That's because while they consider the rulings they made to be correct in an academic/constitutional scholarship sense, they want the opposite policies.

I said they rarely make an impact, not never. Those rulings you listed are spaced out by decades sometimes.

It's also often questionable how much impact they really have. We have a resident gun law expert that will tell you the supreme Court rulings aren't worth shit and the states regularly flaunt them.

They abolished obvious and explicit affirmative action, but it was very much still happening under "holistic" evaluations.

Compare their impact to something like the IRS which has a daily impact on our budgets, and their yearly rule changes can make thousands of dollars of difference.

Or your state DMV which isn't federal but impacts almost everyone.

The bureaucracies of the federal and state governments impact me way more than any of the official branches of government. But of those branches the supreme Court is often most removed from daily impact on my life.

flaunt

flout

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