site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6646 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.

Josh Gerstein is a Terrible Legal Expert

A man wrote a bad post on twitter:

At some point, the amateur effort to knock on doors of home daycares intersects with robust stand-your-ground laws

This isn't so much a statement as it is a bunch of Implications given current events, but whatever extent it's implying anything, it's worth spelling out that it's fractally wrong. Minnesota is not a Stand Your Ground state, Stand Your Ground laws don't allow anyone to just blammo someone for knocking on a front door of a public business, there's no bonus tag on amateurs, Minnesota has an unusually constrained castle doctrine, so on, so forth.

At his claimed defense, this is just snark about his imagined false beliefs about the law resulting in the deaths of his hated enemies. False beliefs that Gerstein has actively promoted, and which he does not correct here even twenty hours later to dispel, taking full strength "90% of posters quit digging right before they're about to get out of the hole". Which would be funny, were Gerstein just another incompetent internet lawyer: it's not like I'd have space to complain just because someone's wrong, there's a surfeit of people wrong on the internet, and I'm not exactly bar-certified myself.

But no. He's an expert incompetent internet lawyer. Gerstein is, as his bio helpfully points out, a Senior Legal Affairs Reporter at Politico. He doesn't need X payouts to be compensated to be this wrong: he's a professional!

There’s things to be said about trust in expertise, but Ive said them before, on clearer matters; there’s little I can add to his presentation than shouting “the Cognitive Elite” at the end like the punchline to an Aristocrats joke, and that’s applicable nearly everywhere anyway.

To provide a real steelman, he doesn't want me dead. He doesn't even know me! He might even pretend to be apologetic were Shirley shot tomorrow. It's just be hilarious, the day after.

((Although it's worth spelling out that staff writers for a local media org published by a man with fraught ethical ties to the current Minnesota Governor are very interested in the identities of certain 'citizen journalists'. Just "reserving the right", anyway?))

... but that's not exactly news. Indeed, this stuff isn't newsworthy. Gerstein might feel proud about 4.8m (and counting) impressions of being a dumbass, but the reality is no one that matters cares about his entire existence except as a way to make the demons from Frieren look sympathetic and multifacted; if his computer blew up and he was stranded on a desert isle without internet access, there's a hundred thousand Vox wannabes chomping to take his seat. Brendan Eich got decked in a public space by someone specifically targeting him for his political positions a decade ago, you didn't hear about it at the time, I can't find any reporting now, and the only reason I know is that the guy who did it was happy to tell me. A guy who celebrated a political assassination took an NYT slot to debate the corpse, and he's better-known now for (allegedly) electrocuting a dog (cw: music, and be glad that I didn't link the furry version). Ken White has gone from jesus christ territory to full "who needs LLMs when the real hallucinations were with us the whole time". He can't even get an intervention, or for whatever shrink he's paying to pay attention to where his political screed hit actual madness; for everyone else, they're just noise coming from that thing in the corner. There's no shortage of these things; I'll just throw out the link and save the scrolling for everyone else. Even for people here, fish don't think about water.

Ken White is a lawyer in good standing. Punch-happy programmer, afaik, works at a FAANG. RPGnet isn't getting the ARFcom treatment, or men with no sense of humor that they are aware of asking for IP addresses. Discords and fundraisers where people call some political assassinations a good start don't have Harvard-supported orgs delivering hacked personal information to Fox News.

And Gerstein isn't going to lose his job over this. This is his job; he's a Legal Affairs Reporter not someone who actually needs to know what the actual laws are or who to ask about those things. There's no one who can boycott Politico who could care. It's certainly not going to end with fascist jackboots dragging him out of his door at 6AM in his underwear, and the mere idea, were it even imaginable, would be enough to unify a massive array complete with lawyers and judges with little interest or attention for technicalities and no hedging about bad behavior.

That's not a concern, for some.

And Gerstein isn't going to lose his job over this. This is his job; he's a Legal Affairs Reporter not someone who actually needs to know what the actual laws are or who to ask about those things. There's no one who can boycott Politico who could care.

This is what it comes down to -- his job is not to provide accurate legal analysis to inform Politico's readers. It's to provide legal-sounding reasons that their culture war enemies are obviously evil, bad, and wrong. And he delivers.

Worse, he probably gets the last laugh given the state of the judiciaries; if your case impinges upon culture war issues, and in particular if you're on the right/red/MAGA side, the leanings of the judge probably have a lot more with the outcome than any sort of legal reasoning.

but the reality is no one that matters cares about his entire existence

Then what's the point of posting about him?

Partly, I'm just incredibly petty. Partly, because Gerstein's pivot to Project Veritas is unusually naked and galling - even as a defense of 'principles', both Gerstein and his cited experts quickly pivoted to defending the Times in their attacks on Veritas. Gerstein himself would later imply that Veritas only avoided criminal prosecution thanks to Trump winning the election, and it's possible he's not even wrong, though I'd need to check deeper before I could commit to it.

Partly, because writing up this stuff helps me remember the event. Partly because I've got some port I'm trying to work through before it goes bad, and while I can't drink enough at once to get really drunk, last night it was apparently enough to get me spicy. Partly, because if I don't write up un-newsworthy stuff, no one else will.

((and, I will admit, partly because I can't resist an easy "own", even when it degrades my writing. Can't claim in vino veritas as a defense on that.))

But mostly because, while Gerstein doesn't matter, the system does, and you can't meaningfully talk about a system without mentioning the completely replaceable gears. If I'd sed -i 's/Gerstein/Politico/g' that post, it'd have gotten criticized writing a smear; if I'd done them same to switch Gerstein's name for the entire leftist sphere, I'd be inviting moderation action, probably correctly. It's only that he's going to keep getting supported, employed, unarrested, and unmolested that even lets me make this into a broader critique (and, coincidentally, leaves a testable prediction... and one I've very, very, very seldom had to eat crow on.)

((bonus prediction, SHA256 for three days: 7d4ed1e8c28b93c95e7b533870073df64ca533c9174589124b5b145fd818a611.))

It's not very productive to unload both barrels at a particularly squeaky replaceable gear, even if it can be a little cathartic. Doesn't mean the system's in good shape. This guy shows a lot of the ways its defenses aren't in good shape.

I don't care about the existence of a single thermometer, but I am relatively interested in knowing the temperature outside.

Is something wrong with archive.is right now? None of the links are loading, nor does archive.ph work.

John Galt not showing up for work again. Who even is he?

Not working for me, either. But that's not unusual; it sometimes stops working for a bit. Give it a few hours and try again.

EDIT: It's back online.

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