site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 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
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I would describe myself as a proponent of a more reasoned, systematized form of 3. I regard illegal immigration per se as something that certainly should be illegal, but which it is wholly disproportionate to repress through life-ruining violence, especially when we are in a status quo where millions of people are involved. Treating every illegal as if they were some sort of dangerous felon seems as obviously daft and inhumane to me as clapping people in irons for jaywalking.

If there is an epidemic of jaywalking in the country with millions and millions of jaywalkers, and death tolls from traffic accidents start rising as a result, then certainly you should take top-down measures to curb the phenomenon - but going after individual, benign jaywalkers with the full force of the law would be an absurd and nasty way to do it. If a strict interpretation the law as written designates millions of perfectly harmless people as serious criminals, then there's an unaccountable chasm between the letter of the law and the reality we're faced with. Ruining random people's lives (and in some cases ending them) for daring to do what hundreds of thousands of people do every year, what half the population of their own country would sympathize with at worst and actively praise at best, is not how you deal with that - it is not kind, it is not just, and it's frankly not that effective, compared to a more systematic solution that treated the cause instead of bashing the symptom.

You can stop a jaywalking in progress by getting the jaywalker out of the street. It seems absurd to me to compare that to an ongoing crime where halting it requires forcing the perpetrator to move their entire residence.