site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   23709 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 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.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The Pogroms Will Continue Until We All Get Along

This is some good old fashioned culture warring. Happy New Year, y'all.

This clip has been popping up on twitter recently, most likely because Elon Musk re-tweeted it.

It's a doozy. I'm probably in too deep in AI land, but I thought for a moment it may have been a very well done deepfake. The cliches are just too juicy:

  • Calling for a focused investigation to various Republican personalities ex post facto after an (assumed) 2026-2028 Democratic sweep of house, senate, and white house. This is the pogrom vibe.
  • Over use of the term "accountability" which is not only grating, but an open code word for punishment / retribution.
  • Packing the Supreme Court.

A little Wiki background on the host here turns up the clown world dial even more. This is an atheist progressive white woman who has a podcast with a title that is synonymous with exasperation. She's been wanting to speak to the manager since before it was cool. The Wiki entry concludes with a Hasan Piker endorsement. Hashtag resistance, hashtag StayWoke.

I thought both left and right were starting to slip into a post-post-liberal dichotomy. Gen Z conservatism was figuring out how long is was going to stay in its Nick Fuentes giga-irony phase before figuring out how to TradLife it up but with good vibes. Gen Z liberalism was establishing a pansexual polycule, ordering designer embryos, microdosing, and flirting with anti-semitism. Yas Queen, Globalize the Intifada.

Turning down my own sarcasm, this appears to be like a kind of resistance-within-the-resistance of severly disaffected former Obama style liberals / progressives who have decided to go full Provisional IRA. It isn't the weirdo terminally online language of Gen-Z etc, but a hyper violent rhetorical style of a group that feels they are the besieged templars of the Final Stand against The Big Bad. I didn't think this was, well, real. I thought the "Karen" archetype was mostly a lot of bad looks on very bad days for otherwise milquetoast suburban ladies. Mostly, I felt sympathy.

But these folks seem serious! If this is TollBooth losing some of his childlike wonder of the world, so be it.

"Lock her up!" was a big part of Trump's platform in 2016. I'm not sure why some random podcaster saying this is particularly interesting, You can find thousands of podcasters saying every politician you can think of should be locked up for one reason or another. I think there is a sentiment among liberals that democrats need to start playing dirtier, because the republicans continually reap the benefits of defecting from norms. Merrick Garland being a prime example of that, and why there is talk of packing the courts as revenge.

progressives who have decided to go full Provisional IRA

I wonder how far the Provos would have gotten if they had been made up entirely of middle aged women with not a single military aged male to be found.

There is something very interesting going on with middle-aged White women, you see it with the hosts of this podcast and with all the recent ICE protests too. Obviously, I get middle-aged women being the moralizing demographic of Christian moms protesting video games, but recently White women seem to be radicalized with a degree of violence that is unfamiliar and shocking to me. Now, they aren't going out and committing mass shootings but they seem to have an open bloodthirst that seems very uncharacteristic. Anyone have any theories what is happening here?

Edit: The fact that Jennifer Welch is a divorced divorce attorney probably puts her in the 99th percentile for hatred towards men.

I am not sure this is really very surprising, to be honest. I'm not sure I can put it better than Kipling:

Man propounds negotiations, Man accepts the compromise. Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.

but

She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast May not deal in doubt or pity—must not swerve for fact or jest.

One could go a bit further and speculate that the arrangement Kipling describes:

So it comes that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer With his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for her

Has broken down and been washed away, particularly as the older Christian gender norms Kipling was familiar with have increasingly been forgotten, and commensurate with this breakdown we might expect to see ever stronger evidence that "the female of the species is more deadly than the male."

Now that one of their own has been killed they want others to commit bloodshed on their behalf?

This is actually a reasonably common position among left-wing intellectuals. They look at the evidence from the last 10 years, particularly Donald Trump winning two out of three presidential elections, and conclude that America simply is not ready for democracy. Sometimes they come out and say it outright. The proposed solution is usually somewhere between Reconstruction and Denazification.

I thought both left and right were starting to slip into a post-post-liberal dichotomy. I thought the "Karen" archetype was mostly a lot of bad looks on very bad days for otherwise milquetoast suburban ladies.

So first, labels.

Karens are, above all else, hyper-establishment. They tend to be the less morally developed individuals of their group with the time to take that out on everyone else. Take the perennial reasons liberals claim this about conservatives- "they're just not at the proper state of moral development, and have never been".

And I agree with this assertion- Karens tend to be Kohlberg 3 and 4s. 5s and 6s are generally too morally developed to be Karens, though they retain the ability and vocabulary to Karen out as needed.

What Karen uses to justify herself varies based on what the establishment is. When that establishment is the Christian Right, they're good Christian women; when that establishment is racist, they're protesting bussing; when that establishment is "men should beat their wives", they're the ones justifying that to their daughters; when that establishment is "spare the rod spoil the child", they're beating that evil left-handedness out of you; when that establishment is "kill the X", they're the ones telling the machetes where to go; when that establishment is "cut your daughter's clit off", they're the ones holding 'em down. But they always use the Establishment as justification [1].

I thought both left and right were starting to slip into a post-post-liberal dichotomy.

They kind of are, but what the two sides are going to be is kind of indeterminate, because much as the definition of "liberal" and "conservative" are in flux, so too is the economic model of the world in transition from the mid 20th century (where physical labor was the limiting factor in economic growth) into the 21st (where time is the limiting factor- modern high tech manufacturing doesn't actually require huge amounts of capital or physical labor, but require decades to spin up, software development requires no capital and no physical labor, standard manufacturing requires some capital but little physical labor due to automation). It might legitimately not matter what they think if their ability to exercise political power is compromised so severely that the middle class is erased entirely (it won't really look like that, but elections mattering less and less, and splitting across 51/49 lines, is what this looks like- countries with a larger middle class will still feel the need to jail opponents though, which is why France and the US have done that [publicly], though that failed in the US' case).

Gen Z conservatism was figuring out how long is was going to stay in its Nick Fuentes giga-irony phase before figuring out how to TradLife it up but with good vibes. Gen Z liberalism was establishing a pansexual polycule, ordering designer embryos, microdosing, and flirting with anti-semitism.

But the important part here is that, for the most part, the Gen Zs tend to leave each other alone. Gen Z "liberalism" votes Establishment, and Gen Z "conservatism" votes Reform, mostly out of convenience- but Gen Z liberals are not natively Establishment any more than Gen Z conservatives are Reform, that's just how it shakes out right now. Gen Z UBI vs. Boomer DEI (Gen Y is split across gender and property-owning lines; women and owners want DEI, all others want UBI if they don't have a job, or are anti-DEI if they do).

but a hyper violent rhetorical style of a group that feels they are the besieged templars of the Final Stand against The Big Bad.

This is what Caesar's assassins said to themselves. It didn't work out very well for them, and I don't expect this will. Perhaps noteworthy is that both groups were in their 40s- and if you have something to lose from the establishment turning against you, that's when you're going to act (before that, you're flexible enough to make it out OK; after that, you already have one foot in the grave).

[1] The stereotype is female for a reason- men can do this, but for evopsych reasons, men at Kohlberg 4 are typically just the executors of Karen's will. They'll knit the ghost costumes/burkas/Hugo Boss uniforms but they leave the actual enforcement of obscenity-banning, cross-burning, witch-hunting, and clit-cutting to the men. (For evopsych reasons, it's useful to humanity for women to pretend to be less blameworthy, even if they're all Greta Bösel inside.)

Ok, we've seen what the institutional left in the US trying to target the right looks like before. It was... the Biden admin. Not Biden personally, he was sundowning for most of it. But figures like Ron Klain and Merrick Garland are pretty core to the DNC apparatus- if 'democrats take the gloves off' has a face, it's one we've seen. Their attempt at internal repression was largely a fizzle. They lost a domestic hard power confrontation before they were even halfway through!

One thing to remember about democrats vs republicans is that- not for every case of right vs left, but for this one- their failure modes are different. It's optimate vs populare, in the original meaning of the term- how they derive their sense of internal legitimacy, of deserving to win. The democrats are representing the class that should be in charge, simple as. The republicans are representing the thoughts we all have but which the experts won't entertain, simple as. Republicans thus have an internal telotic pressure to move and then take the gloves all the way off. Democrats have an internal telotic pressure to focus group and study the issue until they can issue new regulations.

Now, the process of stasis is well advanced in the American republic, but it's important to remember that optimate choleric lashout to enshrine the mos maiorum virtually never works, and the next attempt at Sulla won't work either. Progressive elites talking out loud are quite open about their views that the mos maiorum of democracy is progressive institutionalism, damn the voters. It's been published all over The Atlantic. The unwritten constitution, in their view, is a set of values. A set I'm sure we've all seen before, which puts self expression- especially over gender and sexuality- above ancient rights. They'll lash out, impotently, it will fizzle, and the backlash will enthrone the caudillo. All this has happened before, and it will happen again. As a matter of fact I wouldn't rule out that Trump is that caudillo and Biden was the Sulla. Stasis can't be stopped at this juncture.

Ok, we've seen what the institutional left in the US trying to target the right looks like before. It was... the Biden admin. Not Biden personally, he was sundowning for most of it. But figures like Ron Klain and Merrick Garland are pretty core to the DNC apparatus- if 'democrats take the gloves off' has a face, it's one we've seen.

That's a wild take. Biden and Garland were pretty explicit about not targeting the right and slow-walking any legal action and a pretty common sentiment on the left (or maybe just the far-left? certainly not the NYT-wing of the "left" mainstream media) is to be upset at them for that.

Taking them at their word is pretty wild considering we literally have FBI memos noting that there are no non-ideological reasons for targeting the people they've been sicked on. That's what the 'FBI targeting traditional Catholics' memos were about- the agents mostly wondering why they were supposed to be doing this, considering they're infiltrating people who are not white supremacists, dislike white supremacists, and have no affinity for terrorism. Or considering the novel theories like the Doug Mackey prosecution.

Let's flip this- the right wing twitterati is frustrated with Trump for being too moderate with his priorities, slow walking immigration enforcement, etc. Is that, uh, objectively correct?

the right wing twitterati is frustrated with Trump for being too moderate with his priorities, slow walking immigration enforcement, etc. Is that, uh, objectively correct?

It's not quite the same, but, yes, I'd consider the claim that Trump was taking immigration enforcement seriously to be only slightly less absurd. The Trump administration is very interested in the theater of immigration enforcement, but has repeatedly avoided or backed down from doing anything actually effective. It's clear they don't actually believe in the goal (likely because it would be bad for the profits of their funders) and merely want theater for their base. That said, this is one, among many, areas where the theater of the Trump administration is itself at least somewhat advancing the long-term goal of destroying the cultural concept of the US being welcoming to immigrants.

He's certainly being not right wing enough on gun control.

How so? Trump's Big Beautiful Bill was going to give the gun lobby the biggest win in a generation, before that provision sank in congress. Trump has done virtually nothing else about the question.

or maybe just the far-left?

Definitely not just the far left. Highly engaged people across the range of the left were increasingly steamed over the fact that Garland was slow-rolling prosecution trying to maintain propriety (failing to grasp that there was literally nothing he could do to convince Trumpists of his bona fides).

So, how big or significant is this group? "Got quote-tweeted by the outgroup and caused a wave of outrage" is not a good measure of relevance, and all Wikipedia has to offer is that it once got nominated for some award (that I haven't heard of). It's not like the other side doesn't have self-published clickwhores who fantasize about political violence to give their audience warm fuzzies.

So, how big or significant is this group?

I would guess it's not that big or significant. But I do get the sense that within the Democratic party, there is a growing contingent of people who feel pretty strongly that their coalition must seize power By Any Means Necessary, which includes defecting from various norms. (e.g. 9 Justices on the Supreme Court). Of course, part of the problem is that there are a lot of people on the other side of the aisle with similar sentiments.

If both sides feel that they must "fight fire with fire," it's easy to envision the situation spinning out of control.

You might be reading too much into this. One of the hosts is a divorce attorney. Female divorce attorneys have been the most rabid Karens since before the term ever existed. They are the epitome of angry radicalization. Trying to use one as the bellwether for a movement is probably not accurate.

The Hasan Piker to Morning Mimosa pipeline

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