site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29410 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 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.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Top Administration Officials Are Now Openly Admitting That America Is Israel's Bitch.

Rubio: "The president made the very wise decision—we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties."

This wasn't clipped and quoted from a fringe groyper. This was posted by an official White House account.

I can't believe this shit. The United States has abdicated strategic initiative to Israel. The American armed forces in the Middle East have been reduced to reacting to and mitigating damage from Israel's operations in the theater. The straightforward interpretation of the above quote is that Israel started a war that killed American troops.

I was watching Tucker Carlson lay out this exact theory and thought, “well that’s an interesting idea. Too bad we’ll never know for sure.” And then the first thing I see when I tab over to Twitter is Marco Rubio making the exact same thought.

If Republicans are going to be Israelis bitch can the Jews decide that they will play on my side in domestic politics?

I will take the deal gladly. ADL comes out and says white lives matter. Open borders are stupid. Advocate for deporting 200k Somlians. Kagan writes some eloquent opinion that birth right citizenship is obviously false.

I’m fine with shipping $200 billion in bombs to Israel if the bulk of Jewish intellect plays on my team. We can motte and bailey all day long on whether “Jews run the world” or they just “play way above their size” because they’re smart. My big issue with Jews is the bulk of their community seems to have played a game that is against my interests.

The left is too infiltrated with third-worldism for their old political arrangements to work out. If you want MAGA support then I want to see Jewish money going 80% to MAGA and the Jewish vote being 80% MAGA. I feel like these are reasonable terms.

Maybe Jews as a group have too many ancestral memories in their culture to ever end up giving 80% of their money to something like MAGA, at least for the foreseeable future. For them, MAGA has too many unpleasant connotations of past cultures that were violent toward Jews.

On a side note, I think that while Jews lean left in American politics, they also happen to be over-represented relative to their population size in American right-wing politics. Unsurprisingly if one believes in the hypothesis that they are influential mainly because of high intelligence, they're basically over-represented relative to their population size in every political movement that does not deliberately exclude Jews.

Maybe Jews as a group have too many ancestral memories in their culture to ever end up giving 80% of their money to something like MAGA, at least for the foreseeable future. For them, MAGA has too many unpleasant connotations of past cultures that were violent toward Jews.

What makes MAGA different from the causes they're actually supporting, like infinity Muslim immigration, or the Blue Tribe in general?

I mean, you can watch the same guy wishing for this deal turn around and accuse Jews of running their own blood libel. I could see how that would be a deal-breaker.

Yeah, but that "same guy" is as MAGA as he is Jewish, I wager.

Is there evidence that they actually support infinity Muslim immigration, as opposed to just enough of any immigration that no ethnic group gets the strength to advance its own interests by virtue of numbers? Do they encourage further Muslim immigration to countries that are majority or nearly majority Muslim, like Lebanon, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania or Indonesia?

(Maybe you could argue that (((they))) islamised Syria, but that was more about Russia. Weaponising Muslims against Russians seems like more of a gentile Anglo civilisational project to me.)

(((They))) might not advocate for literally infinite muslims, but (((their))) leftist catspaws certainly do. To them (them, not (((them)))!), immigration and muslims have become poles of GOOD on the moral compass. There is no quantitative limit; more is better.

(((This))) is fun.

Quasi-ethnic majoritarian nationalism with strong but unadhered to Christian themes has… not tended to be a good bargain for Jews in the past.

I think it’s fair to say every group hates the Jews. Being a minority group that ends up with more people at the top and does have some of their own independent desires is just not a good place to be. It’s the same thing in S Africa with the 10% white population. The 90% black population will end up singing “kill the boer” when the 10% control everything.

A multicultural society of third worlders will mostly end up hating the Jews too. As we have seen.

That hardly explains why they'd prefer infinity Muslims, or the Blue tribe.

The blue tribe has generally been good to Jews, does that need much explaining? Imperial centralizing scholar-bureaucrats usually are.

The blue tribe has generally been good to Jews, does that need much explaining?

Yes, actually. The most fanatical support for Israel and Jewish people in general seems to be coming from a particular brand of Evangelical Christianity, not the Blue Tribe. If lack of support for Christians is supposed to be explained by Christianity rhyming with Nazism, the Blue Tribe rhymes with should prevent support for them as well.

The Blue tribe is the Jews. To be more precise, the Blue Tribe is the Anglo-Jewish culture that appears when not-Orthodox PMC Jews and PMC WASPS start working at the same banks/law firms etc. and joining the same golf clubs.

Blue tribe doesn't have the connotations of "stupid angry white hicks who will come to our village and pogrom us".

The Muslim immigration doesn't seem like a viscerally real, tangible problem because so far it has only built up to small minorities in Western countries.

This seems obviously false now. We have seen the brown people march and chant “from the river to the sea” now.

Maybe 5-10 years ago it was not viscerally real. Today the visceral reality seems very real. Team third worlders if they had enough political power to pogrom Jews seem fine with it.

We have seen the brown people march and chant “from the river to the sea” now.

We have seen it. The average Jew is not a politics-obsessed person who watches the latest aggregated videos of demonstrations on social media and automatically distrusts mainstream framings of topics.

Jews don’t watch the news seems like a poor argument to me. Compared to the average American even adjusted for education they donate more to politics, volunteer more in politics, and spend more time on message boards. They are literally the most politically engaged group in America.

Blacks are the most "being an NBA player"-engaged ethnic group in America, yet the vast majority of blacks are not NBA players.

More comments

Blue tribe doesn't have the connotations of "stupid angry white hicks who will come to our village and pogrom us".

How so? They're the ones doing all the "antisemitic" protests that they were complaining so much about.

The Muslim immigration doesn't seem like a viscerally real, tangible problem

Then why were they complaining so much about all the people celebrating October 7th?

It's all propaganda. In reality, anti-semitism in America was historically not a Red Tribe phenomenon. Anti-semitism in America wasn't pograms, it was stuff like Harvard's Jewish quotas, country clubs refusing Jews, that sort of thing. There was the Klan, who hated almost everyone, but Jews weren't their main focus. There's also black anti-Semitism and Muslim anti-Semitism -- the latter is basically imported and the former fairly recent and not Red Tribe either. Meanwhile, there's some revanchist with a Confederate flag muttering the N-word and the someone calls him an anti-Semite, and he scratches his head and says "Wasn't our Secretary of State named Judah Benjamin?"

Black anti-semitism goes back quite a ways, actually- it’s always been part of black power/black liberation.

Agreed, but I guess I'm not American enough to consider that "a long time".

How so? They're the ones doing all the "antisemitic" protests that they were complaining so much about.

That's very recent and mostly confined to a small subset of Blue tribe. So far it's not much compared to hundreds of years of being pogromed by people who seemed more like Red tribe.

Then why were they complaining so much about all thr people celebrating October 7th?

You can get viscerally upset watching some people celebrate the killing of your co-ethnics without it making you decide that their entire ethnic group is inherently unassimilable to Western civilization. And I think that Jews have been turning more against Muslim immigration recently.

I feel like this is a comfy US Jewish view that’s been accepted for a long time. I don’t believe the state of Israel shares this view.

Abu Zubaydah when he was captured told the CIA officer that he didn’t really want to kill Americans he just wanted to kill Jews.

The main difference between third world antisemitism and white antisemitism is whites are very good at war. Overall Western Europeans are likely less antisemitic than other groups but when we do turn on Jews we can kill a lot of them.

These two issues were relevant enough for them to (successfully) lobby for state actions like deportations and withdrawal of government funds. If they were such a small issue that they don't warrant any reciprocical support, their requests should have been denied. Hell, they should not have made them in the first place.

Well, they're not a monolith. Some of them wanted such radical actions, some were opposed, some indifferent.

My overall point is that, even though Jews in Western countries have been moving a bit to the right recently, white-dominated right-wing populist movements probably have, to a Jewish perspective, so much historical baggage that I don't expect 80% of Jews to support them any time in the near future. They might do it if Muslims rise to make up like 20% of Western populations or something. Even then I'm not sure.

More comments

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