site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 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.

4
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Well it doesn't seem to be helping them much in the struggle for public opinion. It's remarkable how anti-Israel some of my female friends have gotten, despite being otherwise very much normie. One cancelled a newspaper subscription to 'The Australian' because of the amount of Israeli propaganda in it.

I know they've been doing all kinds of work to go after the algorithms and manipulate AIs but that doesn't seem to be working out so well? I just see people posting like this: https://x.com/JohnDoe1465199/status/2021247139616092212

What kind of idiot gets their volatile, strongly held political opinions from a chatbot or is prepared to admit they've lost an argument with AI? There are plenty of people dumber than AIs but I think few would admit this. The clumsy way that they try and manipulate these AIs is also not particularly effective. When it comes to deception, humans are still the masters.

Perhaps the media system is like how a dam needs to be at 100%. If the dam is at 99% then it's broken and the water slices through. Twitter and 4chan have considerable influence amongst the young, many older people remember that Iran was supposedly 6 months from a nuke 20 years ago...

On the other hand it's not totally like a dam. There are also plenty of people who are just set in their ways and go on and on about Judeo-Christian values or, in the case of Trump, just openly bemoan that Israel doesn't control the US congress like they used to. That's the boomer and old-media class who run governments and order strikes.

The current generation of Jewish leadership is clearly a lot dumber and more short sighted than their forefathers. Or put another way,

"Hard Times create Strong Jews

Strong Jews create Good Times

Good Times create Weak Jews

Weak Jews create Hard Times" <- You are here

The natural state is that the vast majority of goyim hate them. The fact that some of the boomers actually like them speaks volumes to the effectiveness of propaganda. Without the propaganda the US would probably have had bouts of pogroms. Christians and jews are naturally incompatible. Getting sections of Christians to like jews is an impressive feat of propaganda.

Christians and jews are naturally incompatible

But Christians worship a Jew as the son of God? There's a certain kind of esoteric 'And did those feet in ancient time, Walk upon Englands mountains green' Christianity but in terms of base elements, Christianity is pretty Jewish.

But Christians worship a Jew as the son of God? There's a certain kind of esoteric 'And did those feet in ancient time, Walk upon Englands mountains green' Christianity but in terms of base elements, Christianity is pretty Jewish.

A Jew who the Pharisees conspired with Pilate to have crucified because they considered him a false prophet. And modern rabbinic Judaism looks like the intellectual descendant of the Pharisees, not whatever kind of Judaism the historical Jesus practiced. "God the Father sent the Son to the Jews as the Messiah in fulfilment of the old covenant, but the Jews rejected him and then suffered divine punishment and exile in much the same way as when they rejected God on previous occasions" is the simple, obvious interpretation of the Gospel story.

But that is about history and tradition, not religious practice. And lex orandi, lex credendi. At the level of day-to-day religious practice, Christianity is focussed on right belief to the near-total exclusion of ritual purity, whereas Orthodox Judaism is the modern religion that is most focussed on ritual purity.

Is Islam pagan because its origin involved pagan elements and pagan characters? Or is it Jewish because it worships Moses and Abraham?

Jesus Christ is defined by his opposition to the Pharisees who are essentially the progenitors of Rabbinic Judaism, which is what we call Jewish today.

All that remains is the ethnic element, which frankly is tenuous given the distance between the Levantine people of the time and most Jews today.

There's a common cultural ancestry between Abrahamisms, that's really about it.

Is Islam pagan because its origin involved pagan elements and pagan characters?

People who believe those are pagan elements (as opposed to elements corrupted by paganism*) absolutely believe that about Islam. It is one of the most common attacks used against Islam actually.

* In Islam monotheism is ancient and paganism is the degeneration. The Kaaba is supposedly a house built by Abraham and Ishmael and then corrupted by pagan worship and restored by Mohammed. If you don't believe this, the Hajj (which predated Islam) really is just a pagan ceremony that was given a face-lift. There's a reason Muslims insist on it.

Many critics of Islam consider things like the Hajj (which most scholars believe predates Islam) and ritual circling of the meteorite stone embedded in the Kaaba to be pagan, sure. And of course many both Jewish and Muslim critics of Christianity consider aspects of the Trinity to be polytheistic / shirk / etc in character.

Yeah but a lot of the Palestine narrative is built around lending sympathy to fairly radical islamics who should be less preferable than Jews.

They would be, if we weren't decades downstream of anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist education. People know just enough to feel they can slot each group into the appropriate ethical slots.

The Jews are Jim Crow Southerners and the Palestinians at worst are the Nat Turners of the world: righteous freedom fighters (ignore any nasty stuff of course) driven to evil by oppression. Any complaint by Jews that they'll be murdered if they ever give the concessions the other side wants are obviously just a repeat of what the Southern slavers said.

"Natural state" as I understand it would require that the "goyim" know absolutely nothing about jews from things such as cultural background, religion, etc. and form their opinion solely on living alongside them. I am not aware of any such social experiments.

Looking at history it is not difficult for explicitly religious Christians to hate anyone at all who is not Christian. Jews aren't particularly special in that regard.

"Natural state" as I understand it would require that the "goyim" know absolutely nothing about jews from things such as cultural background, religion, etc. and form their opinion solely on living alongside them. I am not aware of any such social experiments.

In medieval times, these social experiments are called China and India. Here, where no one heard about Abrahamic faith, Jews were seen as just another foreign barbarians with strange and ridiculous habits, or just another caste that keeps their customs and rituals for themselves.

In modern times, these experiments are called Thailand, Laos, Cambodia etc. - countries where few people care about Abrahamic scripture or Middle Eastern issues, but know well tourists and travellers from all over developed world. Ask there what tourists are the least welcomed, the answer would be tourists from Asian country named on I (and it is not Iran, Iraq or Indonesia).

The reason Israeli tourists are disliked in non-Muslim parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America and places like Cyprus is simply that they’re largely boorish, annoying, plebeian men fresh with money from their military service and looking to get wasted, laid and cause trouble.

It’s like asking why British tourists have a much worse reputation in Spain and Croatia than in Japan and America; the former are of a very different class and standard of behavior. American working class soldiers have a very bad reputation in eg Okinawa and parts of the Philippines for harassing women etc.

Interesting. Specifically Israeli tourists, as opposed to "American with sidelocks"?

I have heard this too. For corroborating/conflicting information, you can go to /r/Israel and read stories by Israelis of how terribly they were treated by the locals on vacation.

Few "Americans with sidelocks" are likely to go backpacking through SE Asia. It is specifically Israeli tourists who have well earned reputation of super-hyper-duper assholes (and not only in this part of the world).

Secular Westerners and Jews are not incompatible, though. In fact, it seems to me that many secular westerners cannnot even identify jews as such. Maybe post-WW2 Germany is a little extreme an example, in that the Jews did their best to not stand out and the Germans did their best not to notice them anymore and we're a bunch of ethnic mongrels in the first place, but by now most Germans wouldn't even know how to spot a Jew if they don't see him coming out of the synagogue with a kippa on his head.

In a homogenously Christian society Jews are easy to spot and are incompatible with the Christians. In a secular, atomized and individualist society, it is otherwise.