site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32870 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Here is the list of the topic of top level posts in this thread since the viral ICE shooting.

  1. Minneapolis
  2. Minneapolis
  3. Minneapolis
  4. Iran
  5. Minneapolis
  6. Minneapolis
  7. Greenland
  8. Venezuela
  9. Minneapolis10
  10. Doctor Toilet hookup
  11. Minneapolis

Seven out of Eleven posts and they're by far the largest threads. It's probably too late at this point but I'd like to suggest that in the future mods should exercise some judgement and make a megathread on events like this that are likely to generate a ton of back and forth discussion with an expectation of new information coming out over the course of days/weeks. Both because it is more convenient for the reader to be able to check a dedicated thread and because it makes it much easier to find the more general discussion for those of us who find the interesting angles of the subject to have already basically been exhausted.

It does feel a little weird to me that this case is getting so much attention. Like, sure, I get that it's a contraversial situation. But is it really so important that it pushes everything else out of the news? I feel like there's been a lot of big news this week- Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland, the Somali daycare fraud leading to Tim Walz cancelling his plans to run for re-election... This situation, while tragic, is hardly unprecedented. There have been heated protests against ICE going on for years now. Frankly, I've stopped caring. Whether the officer shot her in cold-blooded murder, or whether it was completely justified self-defense, or somewhere ambiguously in-between... I just don't even care anymore. ICE will continue, protests will continue, illegal immigration will continue, small numbers of deportations will continue, small numbers of people get shot every day, and nothing big ever changes.

It does feel a little weird to me that this case is getting so much attention.

Because the case isn't about the case. It's about the limits of law enforcement in the US and what measures are justifiable in the name of immigration enforcement.

I feel like there's been a lot of big news this week

These are all largely tractionless issues. What is there to discuss about foreign policy? Nobody has any real expectation that Congress has the will to hold Trump accountable for overreaching his authority, and in the meantime it's just arguing about which of the Mad King's rantings are babble and which are dire warnings.

Just shows how myopic Americans are, I guess. We really, truly, do not give a shit about other countries. One white woman getting shot in Minneapolis is more important than conquering a foreign country in South America and potentially taking over another one from Europe.

edit- and I forgot all about Iran! I don't claim to know much about the situation there, but it seems important. It seems very important. Thousands of protesters there have been killed. I wish the news media would do more to inform us about what's happening there, instead of endlessly analyzing low-quality cell phone videos of this one stupid event.

There are simply more cell phone videos from Minneapolis than there are from Iran. And there's this sense of the ICE thing being something you, a random American, can actually influence in a meaningful way. That's what Ms. Good had been doing, after all. "A little less conversation, a little more direct action, baby"

To be fair, most people are pretty myopic everywhere, and it's easy to focus on domestic conflict when it's low-key existential.

It is pretty interesting on the meta level that the shooting was a good enough scissor that it generated much more discussion, vs. the abduction of a sitting (if not quite legitimate) head of state by the U.S. and the ongoing revolution fomenting in a country of 90 million people, and a major regional power.

Something something near mode vs. far mode.

You might think of it as a scissor but it's only so because one side refuses to leave dreamland. With the release of the officer's cam footage several lies/delusions were shattered, she was indeed there to protest, not deathly afraid for her life.

I think you're on to something but that it's kind of more mundane outgroup vs fargroup stuff. The ICE protestors are genuinely closer to me ideologically in most respect than chauvismo parties but they exist in my life in a much more visceral way. During the BLM protests I stood on my roof and watched people that rhyme with this group ram a U-haul into store fronts on my block, I have footage of it on my phone.

people that rhyme with this group

Not sure if I’m being obtuse, but what contextually-relevant term rhymes with “the Motte”?

Sorry, if it was unclear, 'this' is referring to the anti-ice contingent. I understand that the face is now middle aged white women but these were the people defending the riotous action during BLM as well.

ohh 🤦‍♂️ and here I was expecting a literal rhyme

It makes sense for you to be noticing stuff that is in your community.

But I guess from the 10,000 foot view, most should not be nearly as attentive to one lady being tragically gunned down when there's real, world-altering activity afoot somewhere else.

But I guess from the 10,000 foot view, most should not be nearly as attentive to one lady being tragically gunned down when there's real, world-altering activity afoot somewhere else.

I disagree on both a practical and a philosophical level. I (predict that) I am never going to interact with a Venezuelan government official, and I don’t believe that geopolitical avalanches ever actually affect Western people’s lived experience on the ground that much. So what happens to one woman in American suburbia is in fact more relevant to me than what happens to one man in Caracas.

Neither of them are very relevant to me, but at least Good is actually sorta kinda in my reference class, and I can actually sorta kinda take actionable lessons from it (most importantly: don’t let my wife tell me how to drive)

Oh, I agree with that, I'm the one here complaining about how overrun the thread is with these post. My basic position is that this stuff is what we're going to be arguing about when we lose the race to build a silicon god to the CCP. I just understand why that is even if it depresses me.

I was actually relatively impressed how long the conversation stayed under my initial post, almost exactly 24 hours before the next one. Often I see it happen within hours. I'm sympathetic to starting a new top level when the thread has fallen below the threshold. I'm less sympathetic to starting a new post on the same event when a top level on the event is still the newest.

This thread is now in the top 10.

I think it'd be no harm creating that now that we've established that the shooting in Minneapolis will be dominating discussions at least for the rest of the current news cycle, but this

I'd like to suggest that in the future mods should exercise some judgement and make a megathread on events like this that are likely to generate a ton of back and forth discussion

seems like an awful lot to ask. It's not like the mods have a crystal ball and can see into the future about which culture war topics will generate the most discussion. Some police shootings/killings become front-page news and stay there for months; most do not. A week ago, if you had asked me to predict which of this shooting or Trump's invasion of Venezuela would generate the most column inches, I would have predicted the latter.

I agree that it wouldn't be a science and in practice we might get some megathreads that in hindsight wouldn't have been necessary. But I think we should err on the side of false positives.

I really don't get the purpose of using a single "Culture War" thread for everything. Why not just let people make their own top-level posts? Most of the topics in this thread aren't even about the culture war, they're about politics.

It's just the historical formula, don't think we should mess with it too much but there is precedence of mega threads and I think they do work. The CW thread structure gets me to engage with topics I might not have opened a dedicated thread for.

It's a tradition from two locations ago (We used to be /r/themotte on reddit, and before that, we were on /r/ssc where Scott asked us to do a CW megathread to not plaster the front 5 pages of his subreddit with political arguments). We keep because it functions as a deliberate barrier to entry that wards off people who are uncomfortable with million word walls of text.

We keep because it functions as a deliberate barrier to entry that wards off people who are uncomfortable with million word walls of text.

Somewhat ironically I tend to mostly ignore main posts because they are so often million word walls of text or worse, links to the authors’ substack with megazillion word wall of text.

A few weeks ago, in my community, based on rumors I thought Trump was announcing Venezuelan intervention and made a megathread for his speech and its aftermath. Nothing happened. A bit later it actually happened... On the other hand, I totally dropped the ball on Greenland - those topics would just emerge out of unrelated threads etc. Modding is hard.

Mods were obviously caught off guard, as I was, by how incredibly nerd-sniped this place was about the particulars of the shooting. They probably expected each new thread surely to be the last one.

About 6 persistently dishonest commenters managed to keep the discussion going by assiduously ignoring every fact that emerged and more or less abusing a loophole in the rules of the site. Users continued giving them (you)s in the naive belief that one more argument could prevail.

more or less abusing a loophole in the rules of the site

What's the loophole? If common knowledge, why don't you think it's closed?

It’s not so much a loophole as a central rule of the site. As a rule, we should treat people with viewpoints that are not our own as arguing in good faith, and (in the event that there are factual disagreements) we should treat them as coming from a reasonable place.

So for example, if someone were to say that the women in question did not know that they were ICE, and instead thought they were random thugs, we address it by providing evidence that the women did know.

One reason that it is a loophole is that someone who is not arguing in good faith can make up more stuff than even the entire community can rebut. Most people, when they are presented with facts that go against their arguments, but who do not wish to change their mind, evolve their arguments - in the case of the above, for example, someone would stop arguing that they didn’t know the people were ICE, and instead argue that the instructions were unclear, or that running did not deserve death in this case. However, a determined troll will instead just go and continue making the same arguments in another spot.

There was a very determined individual named Darwin a while back who was infamous for doing this - one of the moderators here (I believe Amadan) eventually called him on it and told him that if he kept ignoring what people were responding with he’d be treated as a troll, and darwin quietly slunk away. I encourage you to look up the exchange if you’re interested - it’s a good example of the loophole while also illustrating that the mods are aware of the issue, but can’t really address it until it becomes egregious. (And of course, as we’re more right than left winged, there is a delicate act of balancing responses - someone who posts a left wing take will get a lot of replies that rebut it, and simply doesn’t have the resources to reply to all of them per se, so there needs to be some space for honest mistakes)

Minneapolis isn’t an obvious megathread. It’s not dominating my twitter algo. It’s something weird here that is causing a massive amount of posts. This lady dying is one of like 5-10 news items currently and from what I can tell barely mattering nationally.

A good board now would be 60% Venezuela (it matters), 20% Iran, 10% Minneapolis, 10% random. Venezuela has interesting discussions on whether we bribed people or we have some really cool new tech. Iran what I could tell from Israeli actions something like 90% of their administration are on Mossad payrolls. This should be geopolitics week.

Agreed that Venezuela is by far the most important thing going on right now. Iran is potentially more important, but based on the (very limited) available information the way to bet is nothing happens (in this case that the regime successfully cracks down).

I think "The President of the United States launches a criminal investigation against the Fed Chair" is a bigger deal than "10% random" implies, although I don't know if there is much to say about it.

I think "The President of the United States launches a criminal investigation against the Fed Chair" is a bigger deal than "10% random" implies, although I don't know if there is much to say about it.

He claims he wasn't personally involved, though in phrasing that generally means very little from him ("I don't know anything about it"), so there's a chance this ends up a nothingburger. (perhaps a trial balloon that didn't make it)

Tbh the shills are out in force on 4chan, spamming the board with this woman, the youtube algos are also relentless in trying to shove this shit down my throat.

There’s frustratingly little information available about what’s going on in Venezuela or Iran right now which dampens in depth discussion outside of speculation. There’s a lot of information about Ukraine but that’s been going for four years so everyone other than me is bored with it.

There is a cool story on this:

https://www.zerohedge.com/military/white-house-amplified-shocking-claims-us-super-soldiers-deployed-maduro-raid

Big if true. If not it’s good propaganda. Scares China on our capabilities.

If not it’s good propaganda

It definitely sounds somewhere between "it's not that we're incompetent, they were just too advanced" defensiveness and "this'll make a great story to sell to the media" opportunism, but yeah: why would the US government try to correct stories about "their troops were super-humanly accurate and their equipment was space-age advanced"? 😁 You really expect the DoD to come out with a correction "No, that's not the case at all! Our guys are just regular, some of 'em barely competent, and our kit is standard average like every other country's military!"

Venezuela may be incompetent. But I still expect country with 30 million people and some legacy wealth has a bunker or secure facility for their President to sleep in. And that he sleeps in said place when the USA is threatening to kidnap him. The men with guns protecting him have good places to shoot from versus guys landing in helicopters.

I am thinking about my condo building I sleep in. It’s a large building with 2 stairwells and 2 elevator shafts. It does have a 40th floor balcony. In order to get to me you either need to:

  1. Go up 40 flights of stairs. My armed men with guns can drop grenades on you and shoot you coming up.
  2. Take an elevator. My men with guns can light up the elevator even before the door opens.
  3. Come in thru the balcony. Which sounds like a very exposed entrance for a helicopter. My men with guns can shoot the helicopter from a few hundred balconies or the roof.

Of course you could fairly easily kill me. Just drop a bomb on my condo building. But we didn’t do that.

It does appear to me the US either bribed a lot of people or we have some technology that knocked guys out guarding choke points.

I think people overrate the testimony of that guy.

Venezuela can't even maintain their own oil industry, the core basis of their national wealth, why would they be any good at fighting? They probably didn't know how to use their equipment and certainly couldn't maintain it. The Russians quit giving Venezuela loans to buy military equipment a few years ago, I think that even they had written Venezuela off.

Security Guard: Without a doubt. I'm sending a warning to anyone who thinks they can fight the United States. They have no idea what they're capable of. After what I saw, I never want to be on the other side of that again. They're not to be messed with.

I think this indicates he was paid to say this as part of the propaganda campaign. He was probably paid much more than he was making as a soldier. The real superpower is just having a certain level of organization and discipline.

That, or a dude had a panic attack from the bombs and lack of comms and the physical intensity of the situation. Then he shit himself, and wondered what the fuck happened.

If the dude even existed.

Zerohedge is best characterized as a one-mind kiwifarms operation with less discipline. Its great fun, but the world it presents is a bit too lizard-pilled for my liking. This particular 'sonic weapon' thing sounds like Havana syndrome again, a malattribution to genericized discomforts that acutely present in stressful circumstances. LRAD is mitigated really easily because it suffers the standard problem of any beam weapon: it gets blocked by everything including atmospheric pressure, and just falling out of the cone makes the effect stop immediately. We aren't getting Atreides sonic tanks anytime soon guys, life just isnt that cool.

I’ve often pondered whether zerohedge might have the highest IQ readership on any newsite. It basically grew out trading desks communities which have a floor of about 120 IQ. I’m not sure how widely read they are outside of those communities. Traders also read news differently than other people.

Zerohedge posts conspiracy slop on the free page to attract the crazies and keeps the good shit hidden behind the paywall. Analyst reports out of Seekingalpha or Morningstar were obligate maximizers of whatever slop pushed by the funds, so there was too much noise within the signal. Zerohedge econs stuff is still crazy doomer but itll reveal good underlying points. Stuff like "the lizard globohomo are unwinding all their longs! watch for the metal inflection!"

Trading desks speak a different language than the rest of society. I guess every industry has their own language. You are always asking yourself why your wrong. Or a cottage industry has grown analyzing a CEOs body language and tone versus what he’s directly saying. Which I guess develops a natural bit of conspiracy thinking. It doesn’t apply to the automated shops which is basically more engineering.

More comments

Quite possibly. That or HackerNews, I'm not on there but even the stupidity that gets crossposted seems fairly erudite. I know a bunch of extraordinarily successful guys who read ZeroHedge, generally with a "this is silly but some of it might just be true" vibe.

HackerNews was the other one that I thought of that on average probably has a reader 1 standard deviation above the NYT average.

Scott’s readership is high IQ, but he writes in a smart person way.

RW Twitter has been having fun comparing this to how the Central Americans might have felt when Spaniards showed up with ships, steel, horses and guns.

I’ve seen that. I wouldn’t be surprised, I heard a lot of stuff about sonic weapons and pain rays 10-15 years ago and then it suddenly went quiet which means they are probably actually deployable now.

The Good shooting came in the middle of the Minnesota news. What we had was:

(1) Fraud allegations from that Youtuber (2) Walz dropping out of re-election (3) More fraud all the time, apparently (4) The ICE protests and shooting

It just happened to all be in Minnesota, which is probably the most excitement they've had in a long while. Living in interesting times, indeed.

(3) More fraud all the time, apparently

Huh?

Not just the childcare which was the most recent; the original fraud was the scamming of funds for meals for children during Covid, and there seems to have been a few other areas of 'creative accounting' as well. All of which started getting wider publicity after the daycare videos.

It's not weird. This is the Culture War thread. It's not the Geopolitics thread. Geopolitics are discussed here, but the Minnesota shooting is the most Culture War-y topic in the news cycle right now.

I agree that it doesn't need a megathread, but Minneapolis is incredibly important. The left has their mojo back. This is the moment the pendulem swings back and we end up with an immigration policy based on, "14 heartbreaking photos that will make you say fuck having borders and law and shit."

The left has their mojo back.

I kinda see what you mean, but I'd be careful with these sort of statements. It's not 2016 anymore, when all this was new, so I doubt following the same script will yield the same effect.

I haven't observed that. The only places I'm hearing about Minneapolis are here and DSL. I think I saw one thing on Youtube, but didn't click and it went away. There was a Facebook and Instagram storm in 2020.

What "you" are you thinking of here. The people who have strong feelings probably already wanted soft borders and lots of refugees.

Go to youtube and scroll down the front page until you get to the section that suggests news clips even though you never watch the news on youtube. For me, 3/4 are MN shooting (the other one is Trump talking about Cuba). Looking at the general news tab, the MN shooting is at least a plurality if not a majority of suggested videos.

OTOH, apparently the NYT has decided that this story is bad for their interests and begun memory-holing it.

OTOH, apparently the NYT has decided that this story is bad for their interests and begun memory-holing it.

There's a David French opinion column today. Predictably dishonest:

An eyewitness, however, said that she heard conflicting instructions — one agent telling Good to get out of the car, while another agent told her to drive away.

French probably knows this isn't actually the case, that's why he is careful to attribute it to an unidentified eyewitness. There's a shitload of video and audio, and not one indication that an agent told her to drive away. (Her wife yelled "Drive, Drive", however)

The Minnesota videos show that it was never necessary for the officer to open fire. If a first shot is taken only after an officer is out of the path of the vehicle, that shot is not necessary to save his life.

The first shot went through the front windshield. Seems unlikely it was taken once he was out of the vehicle's path.

That means a frame-by-frame analysis of a shooting doesn’t come close to resolving its legality.

Translation: "Well, shit, the evidence is against me, so don't look at it"

The first shot went through the front windshield.

I admit to not keeping up with this as much as most mottizens. Would you link me a timestamp or screenshot of when this?

There aren't any good videos from that perspective, but this shows him firing and being hit almost simultaneously at 7 seconds (in the slowed-down video)

How do you perceive that W.R.T. NYT? I just went to their homepage and the top 4 stories were in order:

  1. Noem Says 'Hundreds More' Agents Will Be Sent to Minnesota Over 'Corruption'
  2. Somalis Fled Civil War and Built a Community. Now They Are a Target.
  3. After Minnesota Shooting, ICE Again Limits Congressional Visits
  4. Who Was Renee Good, the Woman Killed by an ICE Agent?

The "front page" looks different, but I did actually overlook one.

Why are we obligated to follow some imagined proportionality of objective importance? You forget, this forum exists for entertainment, no different or more significant than Fortnite. We’re all just shooting the shit for fun and sometimes discussing gender relations in the latest season of Love Island is just plain more fun than some dry geopolitical developments that only nerds care about.

It’s mattering a lot nationally, people I don’t often see as intensely political have become emotionally affected by it, on both sides. It’s also being pushed by the media pretty hard, I can’t scroll through YouTube or try to read the news without a “special breaking news event!!!” banner about some new detail of the event being presented.

I don’t think it needs to be that important and I’m bewildered it’s become such a big deal, but it’s activated strong feelings on both sides and people have very different intuitions about it.

It’s like 10% of my media consumption. I guess I hope some of you are just in blue bubble worlds trying to make it a thing because it’s not finding its way into my bubble outside of the motte.

I’ve seen one girl mention it on instagram and it was praising ICE. So hopefully some of you are just in the blue bubbles because it doesn’t seem like it’s breaking out.

It’s something weird here that is causing a massive amount of posts.

It's not weird, or at least nothing new for this forum. It's just the n'th iteration of George Floyd, Kavanaugh, Nick Sandman, Jussie Smollet, Kyle Rittenhouse, Richard Stallman, James d'Amore, etc., etc., etc. One side decides to ride or die on a particular issue, so the discussion continues more or less indefinitely, because no argument works, and autists keep banging their head against the wall in frustration.

Unlike Iran and Venezuela, there's a lot of actual information available for Minneapolis.

But you can add Cuba now, Trump's at least talking about it.

I have to keep reminding myself that this is only the start of the second year of his second term because Good God it's all kicking off.

Are we thinking Greenland is really going to happen? This was one of the "just Trump being Trump" notions I dismissed, but he seems to be making noises like he's semi-demi-serious, and the EU seems to be taking it seriously.

I don't know whether to laugh or be terrified about it; is this the US attempt to finally technically qualify for Eurovision? Though it seems that they are currently ineligible, alas!

and the EU seems to be taking it seriously.

I don't think that means anything. There's political capital to win for western politicians in being the one who's most against or opposite Trump, and that's easier if you interpret everything he says in the least charitable, most unhinged way. We saw the same here in Canada, a certain defeat for the liberals was flipped by the media acting like Trump is seriously planning to invade.

That's true but there's equally political capital for Trump supporters to say no one should take him seriously when he says crazy things about invading allies. The fact their leaders are trying to curry favour with them is not an adequately reassuring thought to a European worried about the world order.

A lot of Trumpists, heavily practiced in sanewashing Trump and accustomed to the institutional restraints on his behavior from his first term, have basically become incapable of processing negative attitudes towards Trump as anything other than TDS. It's all a joke/big talk/hardball. Until he actually does it, at which point of course he did it. He said he was going to. The fact that Trump says twenty insane things a week and only follows through on two gives enough cover to act like taking him seriously is ridiculous.

In particular, I suspect the Venezuela operation rattled observers far more than Trump supporters grasp. You don't have to like Maduro to feel anxious about Trump suddenly deciding that rapid, unilateral operations are cool at the same time that he revives talk of taking Greenland.

He's not actually saying anything about invading allies, what happens is that he mentions he'd like something that's a long shot, journalists jump to ask "is a military intervention ruled out?" and then he (or a surrogate) answers "nothing is ruled out" because the administration doesn't want to play or discard cards in their hand because of some jackass journalists. And the circus of "he's planning to invade an ally!" starts.

Let's say John frequently talks about murdering his wife in a way that suggests he's not going to do it, but he just keeps randomly bringing it back up. Steve asks him if he's actually going to do it and John says his policy is to never confirm or deny anything. Oh and just the other day John beat somebody up that he similarly talked about beating up, but nobody liked that guy (Venezuela).

Is the problem here:

A: Steve for taking John seriously and repeatedly asking him about it. Who would openly talk about murdering their wife? That's crazy. He should know that John is weird, and that he never denies anything.

B: John because talking about murdering your wife is deeply unsettling behavior even if you're not being serious, and there's evidence John does in fact do crazy and possibly illegal things. If asked if you're going to kill your wife, maybe saying that you never confirm or deny anything shouldn't be considered an acceptable answer.

...because the administration doesn't want to play or discard cards in their hand....

Which is exactly what has people so alarmed! They believe that the reason we're not currently rebuilding from World War Five right now is because, for the last eighty years, there has been a rule that military intervention for territorial gain should not be considered as an option.

That's why so many people support Ukraine, why the world came to the defence of Kuwait in 1990, and why anyone besides a few anti-Semites gives a rat's tuchus about the West Bank settlements.

Trump himself said: “I would like to make a deal the easy way but if we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way."

Then Vance told European leaders they should "take the President of the United States very seriously."

It's disingenuous to pretend it's all been kicked up by the media.

There really isn't - I think you underestimate the amount of TDS there is outside of the US. Seriously, we went from "liberal party may fit inside a minivan" to "a few seats shy of a majority" based not even on the CPC being seen as pro-Trump, but being seen as insufficiently anti-Trump.

If it helps, even Trump believes that he caused the LPC to win.

Poilievre losing to Carney is a profoundly non-central example of TDS. Canada's strategic situation actually changed because of a change in US policy.

If you treat the invasion threats as the social media rantings of a madman, the US (a) elected a madman President and (b) announced and executed on a tariff policy which Trump justified to his domestic supporters as a punitive measure to force Canada to address a non-problem (fentanyl flowing south across the US-Canadian border).

The tariffs were not really about fentanyl, and both Canadian elites and Canadian voters know this. If you think "Trump wants to annex Canada" is TDS then they are obviously not about that. So the best non-TDS read is that the US has, for domestic policy reasons, decided to pursue a new economic policy that was profoundly harmful to Canada (and is explicitly repudiating his own trade deal to do so). Canadian policy should change in response to this.

It is also worth noting that if Trump's threats to annex Canada were broadly understood in the US as the rantings of a madman, they would have been ignored (or even covered up) by his supporters and signal-boosted by his opponents. What actually happened is that MAGA Twitter went off on an orgy of reciting the (mostly made-up) crimes of Canada against the US that justified the invasion, boasting about how easy the invasion would be militarily and how cool it was that Canada and Canadians didn't get a say, and discussing plans for the government of post-annexation Canada. To remain in good standing with the Trump White House and the broader MAGA movement, MAGA-aligned elites had to pretend to take the ranting against Canada seriously. I don't think Trump is planning to invade Canada, but he is very careful not to send the kinds of reassurance you would expect if a joke between two friendly countries was getting out of hand.

The thing is, if people had been reacting on this basis I think they'd actually have had a point; they didn't.

They reacted solely as "Poilievre is conservative, Trump is conservative, obviously Poilievre is going to immediately capitulate and sell Canada to Trump!!!" (Nevermind that Poilievre almost immediately denounced the tariffs, and numerous conservatives stated that "Canada is not for sale").

He's serious about wanting it, not serious about taking it by force from Denmark.

I'd like rich people to give me all of their money, but obviously the people who would need to make that decision are not going to go for it. A one-off joke might be one thing, but it's a bit weird if I repeatedly talk about it like it's going to happen.

Trump is definitely more than a bit weird. And he's serious about wanting Greenland and probably DOES think he can make a deal to get it. But he's not going to take it by force.

As much as I dislike Trump, if Trump can make a deal that all parties are happy with to buy Greenland (including not bankrupting America) I'll give him credit.

But thus far I am not seeing any serious attempt to convince Denmark and Greenland to want to make that deal. From the Deal Maker in Chief I mostly hear complain, complain, insist that it's going to happen so they should just get with the program, complain, and make something that could vaguely be interpreted as a threat. I know he's serious about wanting it, but it would take a lot of effort for it to happen and I am seeing very little from Trump to explain his confidence. I know there's long odds that Trump will use force, but with Trump I can never rule anything out and I see more breadcrumbs of evidence that he might use force than I see evidence he's going to charm them into agreeing.

It's not that reassuring though. The EU ought to put troops from multiple countries there to create some sense of jeopardy for the US that it might not be a totally bloodless operation, even if they can't realistically stay to fight.

They could put troops in Nuuk and a few other Inuit towns, but the US would just ignore it. The navy can just show up to any spot on the hundreds of miles of uninhabited coastline and start building whatever facilities they want. I suspect that this is the agreement that will eventually be reached. The inhabitants of Greenland will continue to be under the dominion of Denmark, but the United States will have free reign over all currently uninhabited territory.

If Trump just wants extra military bases, he only had to ask.

This leaves us with the question of what the point of the entire drama is if the goal is simply to establish more US bases in Greenland, since the US can already do that under existing agreements with Denmark. Is Trump so thug-brained that he needs to see such actions as taking something rather than exercising a pre-existing option?

No, Trump wants to be able to say the US owns Greenland, and his reasons for wanting that are almost certainly incredibly stupid and thug-brained.

The EU ought to put troops from multiple countries there to create some sense of jeopardy for the US that it might not be a totally bloodless operation, even if they can't realistically stay to fight.

That's both never going to happen and would do the opposite of deterring Trump if he really wanted to do it.

I think it is actually very likely to happen under the guise (?) of saying the troops are there to repel China and Russia, and thus assuage Trump's stated concerns about the island being seized.

I thought about suggesting a megathread and then didn't get to it. My bad, but you're right, it would have been better to create a megathread than having a dozen people each creating a new top level post.

Right, I don't blame you or the other mods for not doing it. I would like it if we could have a general policy worked out though so in the future you or anyone else on duty would feel confident to throw one up even with like a placeholder OP. Nothing too explicit, just the general idea that it should be expected.

I created a top-level post in the CW thread because it feels even more presumptuous to create a megathread, but maybe I'm thinking about this wrong.

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