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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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Throwing more fuel on the bonfire of "women: what is the matter with them?"

On the one hand, this should hearten those who like to leave comments regarding feminism with "why aren't they fighting for the right to work in coal mines?" (disregarding that there was a history of women working in coal mines, this was considered terrible, and it was made illegal for women to work down mines).

On the other hand, it will dishearten those who think the solution to the TFR problem is "just encourage girls to get married and start having babies straight out of high school, don't go to college, don't be career-focused".

The Construction Industry Federation (CIF) had called for sustained strong leadership to further grow the number of women employed in the sector.

The CIF said it is essential to support the drive to meet Ireland's housing, infrastructure and climate challenges.

According to the federation, just 11% of those employed in construction in Ireland are women.

"We can’t afford, economically or socially to draw from only half the population," said CIF CEO Andrew Brownlee.

"The challenge is too big, and the opportunity to attract and retain the best talent to our industry is too important," he added.

The CIF is hosting an International Women’s Day Summit in Co Meath today.

The event is focused on highlighting pathways to careers in construction for women including via STEM subjects and construction-related apprenticeships.

"Our industry is changing and evolving every day and we will become even stronger as our workforce diversifies," said Joanne Treacy, Southern Regional Director with CIF.

"Our International Women’s Day Summit, which this year has the theme 'Give to Gain', will showcase an exceptional line-up of leading female experts to illustrate to women and girls from school-age onwards the vast opportunities a career in construction can bring," Ms Treacy said.

Right now, the way most economies in the developed world work, if you want a reasonable standard of living, you need two people working full-time jobs (and as good salaries in those jobs as you can get). Want a mortgage for a house so you finally can have those two kids? Both of you better be working your little behinds off or the banks won't even look at the application form (and I fill in financial details on said application forms for our staff who are applying for mortgages, so I can speak on this).

Want a good enough career to get those salaries? Better go to college and get qualifications, as this newspaper columnist says in his article about his teenage son having a work experience placement:

The greatest education I have ever received was in the workplace.

There is nothing quite like learning on the job, having systems and processes seared into your psyche through repetition, and occasionally learning things the hardest way of all – by enduring the shame of doing a task completely wrong and being told off.

But there is also great learning in having a job you don’t enjoy.

...The 17-year-old also learned some valuable life lessons during his recent week of work experience. He managed to get a few days working in a food production facility, and there he also learned a lot about modern food production, specifically, that much as he loves the end product, he’s not wild about being part of the magical process of making it.

It was an incredibly demanding few days, with dawn starts, long hours, and working at breakneck speeds to keep up with those around him. I’ve seen him take two days to unload a dishwasher so I can only imagine the pressure he felt.

But the experience made him start thinking about the future – any time we try to bring up college or career, he seems not to have any particular plan, or even really grasp the concept, but his work experience helped him focus on that in the same way I did.

After leaving school and dropping out of college, I worked in a kitchen for two years, where I learned a lot, mainly that I have absolutely no culinary talent, but also that I needed to go back to college and get some qualifications so I could get a job where I didn’t have to chop onions for ten hours a day.

And that last is the important part: for a decent job, you need qualifications. For qualifications, you need college. If college, no early marriages and child-bearing. And the current economic structure is, as I said, both of you better be working or forget it.

So all the neat solutions about 'get women back into the home' aren't that neat or practical when it comes down to it. I'd love for women to be free to be homemakers, wives and mothers instead of "the only value in your life is work, and the only valuable work is paid work, so get a job outside the home". But it takes two to tango, and it's not all down to "if only women weren't so uppity, problem solved!" Businesses are pushing to get more women into work. Maybe the promised AI future will mean "robots do all the jobs, AI makes the economy so productive nobody has to work, UBI means you can stay at home and have three babies and raise them yourself".

Or maybe not, and it will be "if you're not working some kind of job, you are on the breadline, and if you want a good job in the increasingly AI-dominated economy, you better have super skills and super qualifications, so more college, more everything, personal life? who needs that?".

The reason the industry wants to recruit women is because they want to spend less money on paying workers, so that they (the owners) can make more money. We really need to stop trusting business owners when they say there is a shortage of workers. A true shortage means that the owner no longer owns a mansion.

if you want a reasonable standard of living

I bet half of men would accept living a poorer lifestyle if it meant coming home from work to a sweet and stress-free woman who made delicious food with cheap healthy ingredients and beautified the whole house and wants to listen to how their day went. For such a wife, men would be happy with one pair of clothes and taking buses and living in a shack. Many men would give up all their luxuries for this singular luxury. What square footage, expensive watch, or number of baubles could ever compensate for a stressful partner who nags because both have to work and there are domestic duties that need to be done and everyone is exhausted and you have to order microplastic slop because no one was trained to cook or has time to cook? Hard to imagine more harm done to standard of living than this. Didn't we learn anything from Shrek? Or Rousseau?

But it takes two to tango, and it's not all down to "if only women weren't so uppity, problem solved"

You’ve got about a century to find the solution before the native Irish population is dropped to below 20%, ie you have lost the game of life. The most practical solution (because anyone can do it) is to form patriarchal microcultures where women are excommunicated for certain lines of work while commended to train in the traditional feminine arts. Then you can once again go back to the norm of happy families and SAHMs. You can share wealth from the wealthiest to the poorest members in this community, as was tradition in Christian Ireland for many-a-century. Then you just add some community rituals and you have yourself a functioning above-TFR community forever. The gypsies do this and they are dominating Europe’s TFR scene; the Irish travelers do it and have above 2 TFR. The alternative is to persuade the elites to care about their nation, which seems… delusional.

wants to listen to how their day went

Absolutely fucking not. This question is either a shit test, or a continuing assessment of the beta bux potential. I wish back when I had or was anything I had a lover who explicitly didn't give a damn about how my day went.

I have experienced "shit tests" and annoying interrogations from women, but "How was your day?" isn't one of them.

"What is your plan for the day?" is the dangerous one.

Multiply that by frequency.

What does that even mean? She asks how your day was every day? And you interpret this as a hostile interrogation?

When it's an every day question where you can't win and can only lose, rarely catastrophically and frequently marginally, then the purpose of that interrogation is what it does. No sex object has ever been asked about how their day has been.

When it's an every day question where you can't win and can only lose, rarely catastrophically and frequently marginally, then the purpose of that interrogation is what it does.

dude, if this is how any relationship you've been is functions then you need to get out of it, that's madness. Me and my wife ask each other how ours days went basically every day, it's just a pulse check. The last psychiatrist has this to say about boring routine conversations which I think strikes true:

But why do we need "the balance?" What does it replace, what went missing? The very thing Holden Caufield hated: "phoniness", protocol and ritual for seemingly no purpose. Politeness is fine, but why do I have to make small talk? Why do I have to pretend to care about the weather? Why, after a decade of marriage, should dinner be a regular review of the somewhat boring goings-ons of "the day"? Because that formality is freeing, it allows self-conscious physical bodies to get used to standing next to each other without having to be acting, this includes husbands and wives. When dinner is a controlled process with "manners" and expected topics of shared conversation and start and end times, as boring as it may get, it is boring, not you. Women are especially sensitive to this absence of convention, this is one reason for the popularity of Downton Abbey, not to mention alcohol and iphones at dinner. It is against this background of "phony" convention that teens can productively "rebel" and find their own individuality against a status quo; fighting against an emotionally illogical, arbitrary, unpredictable structure results in learning the opposite lesson, "whatever gets me through the day..." Without this structure to social activities, when the "natural" conversation stops being interesting-- and it will, even if most of you weren't bad at it-- it would be a judgment about your relationship, about you. And you'll beg St. Jobs to blink a path to safety because otherwise you have to sit there with no existential support. Texting and social media's slowness gives them their power for this purpose. You read a text, and it lingers, it keeps your attention because it's all there is; and then you respond with a piece of your real self, and wait for a response... what's happening is time travel-- while you are on pause, the rest of not-your life goes faster. It is far more efficient at killing time than a phone call.

Domestic questions are good, life isn't a scripted move where every line can have depth and pointed purpose. You need small talk and mundane connection.

if this is how any relationship you've been is functions then you need to get out of it, that's madness

I definitely got out of the relationship business after a couple of attempts. Nowadays, even aided by me being borderline broke, where I couldn't get back even if I wanted to. Which I don't.

Flip me sideways, I never thought I'd be quoting a Tumblr post of all things, but here we go.

So, to cut it short: person posting talked about how they asked their husband "what are you doing?" and he got all defensive and upset. Couldn't understand why, so she asked him "what did you hear me saying?" and he replied "I thought you were angry with me, why wasn't I doing something, why was I being lazy?" She only meant literally "what are you doing?" as signal of being interested in him.

Conclusion of post was that asking about "what did you hear me saying" for both of them saved a lot of arguments, trouble, and misunderstanding.

I think this applies to our friend here; if what they are hearing from "how was your day?" is the start of an attack, then it's either Mommy Issues from childhood or maybe they need to work out why they are dating/involved with crazy bitches all the time.

they need to work out why they are dating/involved with crazy bitches all the time

Because of heterosexuality.

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Sometimes I wonder what kind of women people are dating. They describe sex vampires who only want your money, and then are bitter because asking "How was your day?" is some kind of malicious kafka-trap.

A normal person asking how your day was is... asking how your day was. If she is your girlfriend/wife, it is generally because she cares about how your day was (or at least is willing to engage in a minimal level of concern to show affection and empathy). That's how things work in normal relationships. Do I actually care about how her day was? Eh, not unless something notable happened. But I will still ask because women like it when you do that. And they do the same thing.

If your partner is just a "sex object," of course you aren't going to ask how her day has been because you don't care. That's not actually a partner.

The word "partner" is a whole can of worms I will lovingly save for some other time, but I need to clarify something: I want me to be the sex object. There are only two kinds of objects in a relationship, a sex object or a resource object, and I can't stand being the latter one. And "personality" is a kind of a resource, perhaps the most humiliating one, a speculative investment instrument for resources of a more material kind.

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Do I actually care about how her day was? Eh, not unless something notable happened. But I will still ask because women like it when you do that. And they do the same thing.

You have inspired me to make an "I hate the Antichrist" comic edit depicting the disgust that I feel for such institutionalized untruthfulness.

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