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 am continually impressed by your ability to write the exact same comment every single time regardless of the subject matter

I would be impressed if you’d be able to identify such an “exact same comment every single time regardless of the subject matter,” but to the extent you flail and fail I’d be amused.

To be clear, I wasn’t attacking you. I simply find it amusing.

You only post about how women are terrible. Even on a discussion about men doing law enforcement you manage write a comment mocking women.

The word misogynist is horrendously overused, but in your case I think it is fitting. Fear hating women is the mindkiller.

@Sloot has his schtick, sure, but his posts are mostly well written, often humorous, and, IMHO, do bring up excellent points even if I disagree with them and if they're sometimes too "on the nose."

But in this specific instance, I actually want to double down on my support for @Sloot.


Dispersed, grassroots social phenomena tend to have (at least) two levels of causality. There's something proximate, obvious, and discrete at the surface. That's usually where they get their name. George Floyd protests were about, ostensibly, George Floyd. Occupy Wall Street was about the feeling of financial industry excess post 2008 recession. The OG Civil Rights marches in the 60's were about ending what was then codified and explicit racial discrimination.

The second level is a broader and more amorphous manifestation of long building social change that has now reached a critical mass. George Floyd was about COVID, Trump Bad!, and the 2020 election. This actually made it kind of unique as it was not the culmination of a multi-year development (or, to be generous, only about a 4 year development during the first Trump admin). I believe it is safe to say the extraordinary circumstances of COVID are what created it.

Occupy Wall Street is a better example; this was a movement born of the slow motion economic displacement following trade liberalization in the 1980-1990s (NAFTA, China / Korea / Japan). It wasn't all about 2008. OWS even shifted and changed into the Tea Party and is now still the spiritual ancestor of MAGA style economic populism.

The 1960s Civil Rights movement is the poster child. After decades of Jim Crow, the socio-economic reality in the majority of the US made the codified racism of the South no longer tenable. This wasn't all about Rosa Parks trying to improve her commute or a couple of kids in Kansas wanting to enter the transfer portal switch schools. The Civil Rights movement's success and enduring place in the American consciousness as The Right and True Righteous Cause is evidence of its long developing scale - and, perhaps, its lack of actual success six decades after the fact (that's for a different post).


So what does this have to do with @Sloot hating women?

The subtext of the Minneapolis ICE protests is feminist LARPing finally smashing into the wall of hard reality.

We're in anywhere between decade 4 to 6 of this. This being modern American / Western feminism as a loosely defined social phenomenon. Colleges are now significantly majority female. Women have occupied every major leadership position (political, corporate, and beyond) with the exception of President (which would've been claimed as well if Hillary Clinton hadn't been the worst candidate in history). Millenial women out earn millenial men at the median. All of this female success has been great! Except for TFR, family formation, and general happiness. But, like, whatever. The Future is Female and all that.

What's happening in Minneapolis, now, is evidence that the nth-wave feminism of today has out kicked its coverage. Smashing glass ceilings and hanging tough with the boys is all well and good, but literally conspiring to disobey laws and obstruct law enforcement has real and immediate consequences. Maybe Wonderwoman didn't get that promotion at work because of actual sexism - she can keep the struggle going however she likes because she's alive, healthy, and, gosh darn it, ready to kick some patriarchal ass!

But when Wonderwoman decides that the best way to deal with a toxically masculine man in her way is to hit him with her car she can't keep the struggle going because he might respond with his own lethal force. When Wonderwoman decides to clap back at a flashbang, she might never be able to clap at all after that.

I'm being a little flippant here as an ode-to-@Sloot, but my point is real; the feminist "movement" as far as it a cohesive one and not just a vibes based mentality, has broken containment and exited reality. It is now responsible for women putting themselves into highly dangerous physical situations with potentially lethal immediate impact but under the guise of fun-and-safe "girl power" vibes. That's an irresponsible ideology. They're choosing the bear to signal how much of a girlboss they are and then are shocked, shocked, when the bear rips off their face.

@Sloot's injection of female revealed preferences in relation to military / police sartorial choices isn't him contorting his "womenz bad" theme into the conversation. This topic actually demands that we look beneath the surface level "ICE vs commies" narrative to figure out the much larger scale social phenomena at work. I believe that the phenomena is a long running social change - feminism - metastasizing into a view of the world that is divorced from reality. Human brains don't do well with cognitive dissonance. And the data shows this.

Liberal women are fighting a battle between their identity-ideology and reality. In continuing to lost that battle, it's not just a matter of ill-advised hair colors, tattoos, and a surfeit of feline companies. It is now immediate death or maiming because of an injection of self into horribly dangerous and easily avoidable situations.

You only post about how women are terrible.

As I mentioned similarly elsewhere, the beauty about remarks such as this is it takes only one counterexample to disprove. You had time to write a short bitchy comment; you had time to first quickly do some ctrl + f'ing to see whether such (a) counterexample(s) might exist (in this thread or others) before hitting "comment."

However, insofar that my comments about women live rent-free in people's heads such as yours, sounds like they're pretty high ROI and I should make them more frequently.

Even on a discussion about men doing law enforcement

You curiously omit that the discussion is specifically about the uniforms these men wear while doing law enforcement—men who are often ironically or unironically compared to Nazis. Nazis were even mentioned in OP.

When prompted by such a discussion, it's not difficult to Notice that:

  1. Lipstick feminists as a contingent are quite vocal in being anti-ICE
  2. Lipstick feminists as a contingent have been quite vocal over the years that people (RE: women) shouldn't be judged for what they wear or be told what to wear

And that 1) and 2) can be humorously combined. Further adding to the humor is if one has the background recollection of how fetching girls and young women of occupied countries found German soldiers and their uniforms. The following portion of my comment now also doubles as a response to @HereAndGone2.

Examples such as Sisters in the Resistance indeed recount how girls and young women thought the German uniforms—and the soldiers contained within them—looked cool and good… and then some. In reflecting upon the first few days of the German invasion, Charles de Gaulle’s niece sounded almost disappointed that the German “young war gods” didn’t take any prisoners:

The next day, smartly uniformed ‘young war gods’ arrived by motorcycle in the town where we had spent the night, but they did not stop long enough to take prisoners.

A female historian described her “vivid memories” of the “superb [] angels of death” from the day the Germans invaded, specifically highlighting the black and skull-and-crossbones:

It was extraordinary. They entered our garden; just like that. They seemed to belong to another race. It was a Panzer division. The soldiers were very tall—almost six feet—and dressed entirely in black with skull-and-crossbones insignias. They were superb, like angels of death—completely different from our friends, our comrades, from all that we knew.

Find you a girl who looks at you the way French girls and young women looked at German soldiers. Modern day 5’11” guys punching the air rn that girls used to consider 5’11” to be “very tall.”

Check out how happy this French girl looks donning a Nazi coat and hat (unclear if she has anything on under the coat). I’m gonna tell my kids this was Sabrina Carpenter and this was Gal Gadot.

In the article from which these photos came, it is claimed that DESPITE…

more than two million Frenchmen being held in prisoner-of-war camps, the birth rate boomed in 1942 with an estimated 200,000 children born to Franco-German couples.

“Horizontal collaborators” was the amusing term-of-art for French women who, well, collaborated horizontally with German soldiers.

Romance novels featuring local European women and occupying German WWII soldiers is like an entire subgenre in itself. As Sisters observed, being “the victors” made/makes the Germans “seductive” to women, combined with being “smartly uniformed ‘young war gods’” and “tall, blonde ‘angels of death.’”

Dang, my radar must be busted. I never picked up on that, I just thought he was stating an undeniable fact: them uniforms were indeed cool. I'm no fashionista, but they looked good. Someone in an earlier comment said black had negative associations, but on the other hand think of Coco Chanel and the little black dress. Black is also sophisticated and elegant:

The SS uniform
Shiny black boots, a black jacket over black trousers, and a bright red band with a swastika on the arm. On the cap, below the German eagle, sits a silver skull. The SS uniform was designed to impress, and it still does so today.

Apparently Boss did not design them:

By the third quarter of 1932, the all-black SS uniform was designed by SS members Karl Diebitsch (artist) and Walter Heck (graphic designer). The Hugo Boss company was one of the companies that produced these black uniforms for the SS. By 1938, the firm was focused on producing Wehrmacht uniforms and later also uniforms for the Waffen-SS.

I should mention that the black uniforms and the silver death's head badges originate from Brunswick during the Napoleonic Wars.

Which seem to have inspired the Millais painting The Black Brunswicker.

Let a military have much input into its own insignia, and it will inevitably include skulls. Badges, pins, emblems, flags, or the literal bleached bones of the vanquished, they will be there.

Probably less now than in the past precisely because of the Nazi use.

I still can’t believe this is a real insignia from 2013.

Not a single skull or bone in sight, though! That's progress!

I'd say he made a good attempt at humor and correctly summed up what the argument of lipstick feminists would be if it was a uniformed organization mainly consisting of women that'd be the one criticized for its looks.

Also, I'm somewhat of a misogynist myself, but I'd ask you to differentiate "women" from "lipstick feminists".

It is a bit funny that the response to 'Your idea wouldn't work due to automatic naysaying by ideological opponents' is to complain about ideological opponents automatically naysaying OP's idea

It's not the exact same comment, but they are all projections into our reality of the platonic ideal woman-mocking comment that you channel.

It's not the exact same comment, but they are all projections into our reality of the platonic ideal woman-mocking comment that you channel.

He has been doing this non-stop on some handle of another for at least 10 years

It's a bit unsportsmanlike to dare someone to find a pattern in your posts while having private mode turned on to frustrate any attempt to systematically look through those posts.

Nothing unsportmanslike about keeping your dribble while someone attempts a reach-in.

I’ve had private mode on the majority of time I’ve been registered here; never turned it off after turning it on initially. If one can make claims about my comment history without the most convenient way to “systematically look through” it, one can back it up too likewise.

Come to think of it, so far the greatest unsportsmanlike conduct I’ve seen in this chain is your drive-by attempt at shaming and moving the goalposts from “exact same comment every single time regardless of the subject matter” to “pattern in your posts,” like a spectator heckling from the stands or a journalist looking to shit-stir while feigning indifference.

If one can make claims about my comment history without the most convenient way to “systematically look through” it, one can back it up too likewise.

It's much easier to remember posts than the URLs of those posts, and theMotte doesn't allow searching for multi-word quotes or for filtering a search by a private-mode user.

drive-by

TBQH, most of my posts are on subthreads that showed up on the volunteer page; browsing theMotte is tedious. In this case, @Quantumfreakonomics' post got reported.

moving the goalposts

exact same comment every single time regardless of the subject matter

would be a

pattern in your posts

but the latter is notably shorter and I'm habitually concise.

I tried to check whether his accusation was hyperbolic, as it was relevant to rating his post and to whether I ought to chide him for it (example of me crawling up someone's arse over hyperbole within the last few days, in case you think I'm fabricating). But I hit your privacy block, and I'm not about to chide someone for hyperbole until I'm sure it is hyperbole (hypercorrection is a pet peeve of mine). And, well, hitting that block itself seemed extremely-relevant to your challenge, so here we are.

Part of my intent was to give you the opportunity to give QF a fair attempt, as I figured you may have had it on and forgotten about it. Another part of it was, admittedly, to ensure that anybody reading did not overupdate on QF being unable to provide evidence under present conditions.

Part of my intent was to give you the opportunity to give QF a fair attempt

Oh, how noble of you, to give me such a most generous opportunity.

Another part of it was, admittedly, to ensure that anybody reading did not overupdate on QF being unable to provide evidence under present conditions.

Again, the initial claim was made under present conditions—the same ones that have existed for years—so inability to follow-up on that claim under the same past and present conditions is no excuse. The status quo is already the fair attempt.

For a claim such as “exact same comment every single time regardless of the subject matter,” it only takes one counterexample to dismantle. Who knows, there may even exist multiple counterexamples just in this week’s or last week’s CWR or FF threads. Shouldn’t be hard to find given the apparent relative ease by which to remember posts.