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Last Friday, Bret Deveraux of ACOUP waded deeper into the Culture War than usual by writing about the anti-ICE protests, and insurgencies and non-violent resistance in general.
What unites both strategies is that the difference in power between the state and the dissidents is very large, so large that both conventional military operations and even a protracted war are not an option for the weaker party.
If you can not face your enemy in the field, and can not even hope to sap his strength through a thousand papercuts until you can face him, what can you do?
As a military theorist, Deveraux naturally uses Clausewitz to identify three factors which can limit the escalation of force and thus be employed by the weaker side to hamper the stronger side.
Friction (the natural tendency of stuff to break, things not going according to plan, your forces not being where you would want them to be) is a bit of a sideshow. If you are able to weaken your enemy sufficiently through friction, you are fighting a protracted war, not a terrorist insurgency.
Will means the emotional backing of the conflict by the politically relevant part of the population, which might be the body of citizens or some elites, depending on the system. This is a prime target in these highly asymetrical conflicts.
The third limiting factor is the political object of the enemy leadership. Unlike the population, which is modelled as being emotional, the leadership is modelled as rational. The idea here is that if you can inflict sufficient costs on the enemy, they might decide that it is no longer worth it to enforce their goal.
Will is the central point to attack for the weaker party:
For terrorist insurgencies, this means that the main goal of their attacks is actually sending signals. So the point is not to weaken the enemy's military by blowing up their troops and materiel, but rather to message audiences on both sides of the conflict (as well as these in between) that their cause is viable. If you could convince everyone that your victory is inevitable, that would be a great boon to your side. In practice, this means that terrorists favor flashy targets to military relevant ones. 9/11 is a prime example.
A key strategy is to bait your enemy into striking against you while you are hiding among the civilian population, thereby causing civilian deaths which result both in local dissatisfaction as well as in winning a propaganda victory -- which is the kind of victory which brings you closer to your objective. The main dilemma for the insurgent is that they need gruesome violence to further their cause, but that such violence may also serve to alienate the local population and strengthen the resolve of the enemy. While 9/11 was great for making Al Qaeda a household name, it was ultimately bad for the Jihadist cause.
Deveraux then contrasts this with a deliberate strategy of nonviolence, which does not have that dilemma. He is actually rather realist about why movements employ non-violence:
Of course, non-violent protest does not mean staying on the sidewalks:
If your protest can be simply ignored, it is likely that it will be ignored, so you do not get the desired escalation and attention. This means that you will have to commit transgressions to goad the enemy into strikes against you which will be terrible PR for them.
Bret talks about the Nashville campaign during the Civil Rights Movement, where Blacks would organize sit-ins on segregated lunch counters. This caused violent repercussions, which eventually eroded popular support of the segregationist side.
He also concedes that there are regimes which are impervious to non-violent protests, where the political relevant parts of the population are very willing to employ and support violence, but argues that societies which are running on violence are very inefficient.
Finally, he talks about the anti-ICE movement, of which he seems sympathetic.
He continues:
He points out that mass media help the protests a lot, as their position has gained massively in popularity over a relatively short time span (compared to the Civil Rights Movement).
I think that the gist is that the median American voter -- like the median Motte poster -- is very willing to vote for Trump's anti-immigrant platform, but unlike the median Motte poster they are totally unwilling to tolerate the Pretti shooting as a natural consequence of enforcement actions. Of course, the Trump administration did not help itself by reflexively claiming that the shooting was justified instead of spinning it as a sad mistake.
Deveraux:
When he was posting this, the decision to pull the DHS forces out of Minneapolis was already made, but it would hardly have been surprising from his point of view. At the end of the day, the only political idea Trump truly believes from the bottom of his heart is that he should be president. Toughness on immigration (spouses excluded) so far was of instrumental value for him because it gained him a lot of support, but if it no longer delivers the votes for him, I expect him to change policy.
I remember acoup guy being a huge smartass and his articles are mostly well acktuallys that let him sound smart. He totally writes like he's talking down to his audience.
I remember his series on ancient greece was getring shared around a lookoong time ago and he had an article mostly about "well acktually spartans sucked, actually" and every other paragraph he would go "look at how bigoted these stupid racist spartans were. Maybe with some more diversity and feminism they wouldn't have sucked so bad!".
But anyways I find his writing extremely hard to take seriously. In a sense he's kind of like the lazerpig of history blogging because he hides his lack of rigor under a veneer of self deprecation ("unmitigated pedantry" - "low tier youtubing") yet will get incredibly defensive and lash out whenever someone criticizes his stream of hot takes.
I remember his "fremen mirage" series, and being left with the strong impression that he was playing word games in an attempt to obfuscate a fundamental reality he found unpalatable. Particularly, his four-part definition in the beginning of the first part more-or-less immediately convinced me that he was not operating in good faith.
What do you think the fundamental reality he is trying to obfuscate is?
The Fremen mirage series is very clear that it is rejecting the "Hard times make strong men" thesis, and the first two posts present evidence that it false (in post 1, that states usually beat non-state societies, and in post 2 that richer states usually beat poorer ones). Nothing is being obfuscated here - Devereaux might be wrong, but he isn't obfuscating his argument.
Very briefly, central examples of the "Hard Times Make Strong Men" thesis do not claim that non-states usually beat states, or that poorer states generally beat richer ones. Devereaux is attempting to frame the thesis this way because if he can bake absurdity into his audience's understanding of the argument, then it's all over but the sneering, which is pretty clearly what he's primarily interested in doing.
"Hard Times Make Strong Men" exists as a thesis because we can directly observe that rich, powerful states often actually do decline, that states are defeated by non-states, and rich states are beat by poor states. Not all the time, not as the expected result, but often enough that very clearly wealth, population, or whatever other technocratically legible KPI one prefers are not deterministic. Why is this? What causes upsets? What causes the mighty to decline? What injects mortality into the putatively super-mortal? This is a fascinating question, but Devereaux appears mainly interested in cauterizing such interest in anyone he can, and is enthusiastically willing to employ the argumentative dark arts in doing so.
Here are two paragraphs:
...This is propaganda. The person writing it likes you stupid. To the extent that you not of my tribe, the more you listen to him, the better for me.
Notice the caveats, that you wrote yourself. Notice that ACOUP argues against the typical way in which the "hard men" theory is presented. The dudes with Greek statue profile pictures aren't doing nuanced historiography, they actually want to camp out in the bailey. They want to claim that moral rigidity/orthodoxy, avoidance of "luxuries" and a focus on martial prowess uber alles is an easy short-cut to civilizational dominance. Setting the bailey on fire, as Devereaux does, means there's little Motte left to defend.
His points are, broadly:
Hell, I'll give up on summarizing it, and focus on his own definition:
First: That people from less settled or ‘civilized’ societies – what we would have once called ‘barbarians,’ but will, for the sake of simplicity and clarity generally call here the Fremen after the example of the trope found in Dune – are made inherently ‘tougher’ (or more morally ‘pure’ – we’ll come back to this in the third post) by those hard conditions.
Second: Consequently, people from these less settled societies are better fighters and more militarily capable than their settled or wealthier neighboring societies.
Third: That, consequently the poorer, harder people will inevitably overrun and subjugate the richer, more prosperous communities around them.
Fourth: That the consequence of the previous three things is that history supposedly could be understood as an inevitable cycle, where peoples in harder, poorer places conquer their richer neighbors, become rich and ‘decadent’ themselves, lose their fighting capacity and are conquered in their turn. Or, as the common meme puts it:
That is what he's arguing against. That is actually how people use the phrase.
More importantly, I did not get the impression that:
And I've read the whole series. Devereaux does excellent scholarship, studies a variety of different cases, and provides citations. Rome is typically used as an example in "favor" of the HTWM theory, and luckily for us, he's a classical historian. He covers several hundred years of Roman history:
He uses shipwreck archaeology, ice core analysis of atmospheric lead, and epigraphic evidence to track Roman wealth over time. He outlines a clear pattern (supported, as far as I know, by other period experts): a period of rising affluence in Italy in the Middle and Late Republic, followed by a long period of prosperity in the early empire, disrupted by the Crisis of the Third Century, with another period of economic stability (but at a lower level of prosperity) in the fourth century.
Guess what? : no part of Roman military 'decline' follows this patternz. Rome's military power was greatest when it was getting wealthier and more urban was growing, and began to decline in a period where the empire seems to have become somewhat more rural and poorer.
Even better: Romans were complaining about decadence the entire time! Polybius, Cato the Elder, Sallust, Tacitus, all moaned and bitched about declining Roman virtue.
(Sallust wrote about decadence two centuries before the peak of Roman power under the Nerva-Antonine emperors.)
Over eight centuries, Rome fights dozens of "Fremen" peoples. The Samnites fought three wars with Rome all of which were tough and in many cases the Romans lost battles and struggled, but Rome ended up winning each war.
The Gauls in Cisalpine Gaul? Crushed at Telamon, then systematically smashed one by one after Hannibal's defeat. Caesar had a great fucking time up there. The Celtiberians in Spain? Three wars, all Roman victories. The Germanic Cimbri (Marius stomped) and Teutones? Effectively annihilated. The Helvetii? Near-total genocide. All we've got left of them is a font, the poor bastards.
The successful "Fremen" invaders at the end of the Western Empire make a relatively short list: Senones, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Franks, Angles/Saxons/Jutes, Alamanni. That's seven successes against dozens of failures. Most of them were Romanized too!
If it's not obvious, to survive, an empire must continue winning indefinitely. To lose, it can take as little as one war. It's the KDR that counts dawg, if you live long enough, common cold, cancer or a car will end any winning streak, and we've got several thousands of years of history to measure the life expectancy of empire.
The quotes you picked do not demonstrate Devereaux “baking in absurdity.” They are him accurately describing the common version of the claim, including the decadence framing, then openly mocking one specific implication (virtue leads to battlefield performance).
He then does the opposite of propaganda: he tells you to watch out for selection effects and to ask about win-rates, not vibes. And he summarizes his conclusions in a way that is falsifiable: if the “Fremen” were systematically superior, you should see them winning more often, not losing more often than they won.
That destroys the bailey and salts the fields. If there's a more sophisticated version hiding in the Motte (one that merely says "states can decline for complex reasons including but not limited to overextension, internal political dysfunction, and occasional bad luck") then congratulations, you've described basic history. And that version doesn't need the "hard men" framing at all.
If you disagree with his central thesis, then I welcome actual arguments.
Devereaux is excellent at finding some idiotic thesis a couple guys (he would say "bros") on Twitter hold, claiming it's the bailey to a sensible motte, burning down the bailey, and claiming he's destroyed the motte.
You know who's actually really good on this particular historical topic?Deleuze
I promise you that it's more than "a couple of guys". My Twitter is schizophrenic enough that I find myself looking at their posts more often than I consider ideal. Oh well, it's good ethnography if nothing else. They're thriving out there, posting inspirational quotes and bad history takes when they aren't recovering from parasitosis after the consumption of raw meat.
You'll find plenty of examples on this very forum, if you use the search functionality.
The thing is, there is no Motte! Or rather, there is no interesting Motte. Empires rising and falling because {many reasons} is the boring yet correct explanation.
I do not blame Devereaux for targeting the version found in the wild, the meme tuned for maximum virulence. If there is a counter-thesis of comparable scholarship arguing in favor, well, I haven't found it yet. Sometimes, one side of a debate really does have a disproportionate number of idiots alongside little factual merit, see the Flat Earth community for an existence proof.
They're preparing a padded cell for me already, I've booked one with good wifi reception.
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