site banner

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
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

When does "criticism" of the current military action in Iran (and by criticism I mean a variety of behaviors from our political leadership to randoms on the internet) become "treason" (both in the firm prosecutable sort and the "historically your neighbors would have stopped talking to you or maybe chased you out of town" sort)?

I get it, people are mad at Trump, Republicans, America, the Jews, Israel, whatever.

I get it.

Many people would rather have had us not get here. But we are here. The ship has sailed.

If everyone returns to their corners now at the very least we have billions of dollars in economic dysfunction, realistically we have tremendous destabilization in the region which is going cause the biggest problems we've seen in decades. In truth, we call it all off now, Iran will probably finish arming themselves and nuke a civilian population, likely Israel. Even the most anti-semitic person who ever lived should be able to understand how bad doing that could go. It would likely be the worst thing that's ever happened just from the resulting chaos.

So we are stuck.

But you see a lot of people with an agenda trying to defang the war effort or get it cancelled or whatever. Many probably don't expect it to happen, they are just trying to set up Trump looking bad. An example of this is probably the war powers resolutions.

But at that point you have overt politicking putting American, Israeli, Middle Eastern lives (and maybe everyone else?) at risk because you want to slightly increase the chance you can spend two years repeatedly impeaching Trump.

I think that's kind of treasonous? Maybe not the executing kind, but definitely the "holy shit what are you doing kind."

Like the war. Hate the war. It's happened. Criticizing how we got here is understandable, but I think we need to be careful.

Make the PR bad enough and we stop with the job half done and everyone loses.

  • -23

Interestingly enough, I'm pretty sure if this kind of thing went to court, the typical Executive latitude over foreign affairs probably isn't enough for actual treason convictions. You need a Congressional statute to work off of. Maybe not a full declaration of war, though a really pedantic judge might say so for the most direct "treason" charges, but something that they've put out. Now, given, a few of these Congressional bills do devolve some judgement to the Executive, but I could easily see even the current conservative court make a ruling against it being enough for treason based on the Major Questions doctrine. After all, it's quite literally not (inherently) the President's job (normally) to decide who is an enemy and who is not. I think for this reason, the administration is probably a little wary of actually bringing treason or similar charges against certain people supporting certain groups, because legally some of them are not slam dunks and can even backfire. Funnily enough, there's a parallel for why the president of the Confederacy didn't end up getting prosecuted at the end of the day even though he was jailed - lawyers were at least a little worried that awkward questions would be asked in court about the legality of secession.

Now, politically that's a different story. And I can't remember the exact incidents off the top of my head, but Trump has thrown around the "treason" word already in at least several cases where the word obviously does not apply, so I don't consider him representative at all.

With that said, getting shunned by people for helping enemies/evil people is already part of modern politics to some extent. See not only Hamas supporters, but also BDS types shunning pro-Israel people, to give the obvious example. But rhetoric is free and part of free speech. Personally though I'd put a strong line between "persona non grata in society" and "we run them out of town".

In terms of enforcement, usually the line is "material support". That is, sending money or physical stuff to questionable groups or people. Again, congressional statute regulates these penalties and where the lines are, for the most part. In some cases, you're even forbidden to send money to a Hamas member for humanitarian purposes (because they might then use the freed budget to support military action, I think this was in the news recently).