site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13947 thread views

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.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

You can, however, convince yourself that the purges will get rid of the reason it's not combat ready, and trust the post-purge officer corps when they say 'Yes Supreme Leader.'

One of the classic failure modes of officer purges is when the people doing the purging believe that issue with readiness is the officer corps, as opposed to the army as a whole. It typically comes with the underlying premise that the current issue is that the purged officers were being given everything they needed to make the force combat capable, and that by replacing the bad officers with good ones the previous malign factors will go away in relatively short order. Think of a strategy game where unit commanders provide modifiers to the units they are in- if you change the commander, the modifiers change as well, because the modifiers are tied to the commander, not the army.

This works if the new officers have, to use your analogy, negative modifiers.

Sure. It can also work if the new officers have positive modifiers. And thus we get into the implications of highly personalist autocratic systems that result in information flows for evaluation getting systemically distorted.

To continue the analogy, most strategy games work on an assumption that the numbers presented to the player are actually correct. When the game tells you the character has positive or negative modifiers, you can believe it because the game systems don't lie to you.

It would be a completely different dynamic if the character with negative modifiers was presenting as a character with positive modifiers, and that the only way for you to know it was different was to use that officer in combat first. And it would be an even greater deviation from that if using in combat didn't actually reveal objective stats. Say their negative modifier only comes into view if they lose- so if you actually win with them in an easy conflict, you think you have a good officer and that the costs were other issues.

But of course, between the paradigm of 'the game system doesn't lie to you' and 'the game system does lie to you,' reality is a bit closer to the later. The systems often lie, because the systems are made out of people with their own interests to distort the truth. China is no stranger to that, hence the economic statistic reliability for decades.

But that in turns is what helps drive the top-down paradigm that can over-emphasize a leadership solution. If you can't trust/rely on the reporting system, you trust/rely on what you can trust/rely on instead. Yourself first of all, but then intermediaries you trust, and then subordinates they trust. Less trust per degrees of separation, but a personalist system tends to run on personalities for a reason. And if a personality disagrees and isn't performing...

To step away from the analogy and make a clarification, I'm not saying that this is what is happening. But it is a failure mode that can happen, and would explain a bad decision- such as going forward into a war after an officer purge. No one rationally chooses a failure mode, but then no one would have rationally chosen China's Zero Covid policies either, and it still happened under- and because of- Xi.

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