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As a Republican who was broadly onboard with toppling Iran well before the most recent flare up, I would like to offer an alternate narrative to the one about Trump is a Joe-Biden-esqe meat puppet being controlled by a zionist cabal, that seems to be the popular consensus here.
First off what does winning look like, in the eyes of team Trump?
Ideally, Iran makes a credible and verifiable commitment to dismantling their nuclear weapons program and stop supplying arms to HAMAS, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Russian Federation, Et Al. Less Ideally, we turn them into a failed state that wouldn't be able to muster up a nuclear weapons program even if they wanted one. If the choice is between reducing Iran to Afghanistan-esque hodge-podge of pre-industrial warring tribes and giving the IRGC access to nuclear missiles we choose to turn Iran into another Afghanistan.
Importantly we are not going to do the Clinton or Obama thing where we give them a whole bunch of cash and trade concessions in exchange for a pinky-promise not to act up again and then sit on our thumbs when they renege on those promises 6-monthes later. While I'm not privy to the specifics my guess is that the plan is to hold Kharg Island hostage to force Iranian compliance.
How is this in American interests? I think it is just as valid to ask as how is it not?
While there is something of an isolationist streak present in the online right the prevailing attitude amongst the wider GOP is that if the US is going to occupy the role of hegemon we must play the role.
First, I think it needs to be pointed out that, with the Biden-era environmental limits removed the US is once again a net petroleum exporter and the US economy is much better situated to weather possible energy-trade disruptions than say China is.
As the global hegemon, international trade flows freely (and for the most part safely) largely thanks to guarantees that are enforced by the US Navy. If the US is the world's cop, Iran is not some innocent brown kid who got shot for no reason, they're the habitual bad actor with dozens of prior complaints and arrests.
From my perspective democrats' attitude towards the Iranian regime seems to echo their attitudes towards illegal immigration, violent crime. If you ask them if they want violent schizophrenics on the train they'll answer "no", but at the same time they will vehemently oppose anyone who looks like they might try to stop violent schizophrenics from stabbing people on trains. They seem to view the occasional train stabbing or ballistic missile attack as simply the price of doing business.
The violent schizophrenics on the train example isn't a very good one. The US vs Iran isn't a nice peaceful law-abiding society vs violent schizophrenics, it's a somewhat less violent and much stronger schizophrenic versus a somewhat more violent and much weaker schizophrenic. And it's unclear to what extent the much stronger schizophrenic is actually substantially different in willingness to beat up innocent bystanders than the weaker one is - to some extent, the difference in willingness is an effect of the difference in strength. It's quite possible that if the stronger schizophrenic was backed into a corner and desperate, he would start beating the shit out of civilians with just as little care as the weaker one has ever displayed. Furthermore, the stronger schizophrenic has only displayed this kind of concern recently. A few decades ago (Cold War) the stronger schizophrenic was regularly helping his schizophrenic friends beat and kill random innocent people out of fear that if he didn't do this, those random people would turn to the other strong schizophrenic across the street for protection.
Western Civilization is better than the Third World and America is better than Iran. Even for all our flaws America at her best is and can be a force for good. Putting America and Iran on the same moral plane is actually a form of weakness because -- well, if it's all the same anyways who cares if Iran conquers? Who cares if barbarism or civilization prevails? It's all predicated on violence anyways right? Well no, I assert that the ends towards which I apply violence are actually more moral than theirs. I do prefer my civilization to theirs. I'm not a neutral third-party observer, I'm not a nihilist. My values are better than theirs and it's justified for me to use violence to defend what's mine.
There is a word for @JeSuisCharlie's proposal for "reducing Iran to Afghanistan-esque hodge-podge of pre-industrial warring tribes". It is called "genocide", and it has strong negative ethical connotations.
The whole logic of "we are the good guys, therefore we are allowed to do bad things" is obviously flawed -- if you are the good guys then that will obviously show in constraints of your behavior.
I don't particularly like the Ayatollah regime. They support Hamas, which tries very hard to be pure evil. But do you really want the standard "any country which supports particularly nasty murderers gets wiped from the face of the Earth?" It is not like the US did not support bloodthirsty dictators, would it be okay to reduce their capabilities to pre-industrial levels in response?
If it is unjustified to level Kansas City in response to Pinochet, then it seems to me that it is also unjustified to level Tehran in response to Oct-7.
A lot of world leaders which I would prefer to have no nuclear armaments do have nukes. Some of them are of questionable sanity. I do not particularly see a line dividing the Mullah regime from the rest of them. Let them play mutually assured destruction with Israel, both of the regimes deserve each other.
It's good to destroy evil and it's evil to destroy good. That's what good and evil even mean. Quite literally it's different when we do it, we are not fighting Iran from a position of moral relativism.
You're conflating several things here: the necessity of all states to commit violence; the extreme acts of aggression of Iran in particular that does not have a counterpart in the West; the value of supporting pro-West dictators over anti-West (Communist) dictators. Factoring all that in I don't think America is just another cartel country that deserves to be leveled by the laws of the jungle. (Not that anybody could.) However, for the sake of argument: sure. I'm glad we genocide evil men. I hope any country that supports particularly nasty murders gets wiped from the face of the Earth.
Well I'm not moving to Iran but you're welcome to if you don't see a difference.
This is an overly simplistic morality, the real world does not work like forgotten realms, where you have always chaotic evil races which can be slaughtered by good characters as an act of faith.
At best, you get ingroup moralities, where you support your country for the same reasons that a German in the 30s might support the Nazis.
A more universalist morality would start by recognizing that there is no group of school girls -- not American, not Israeli, not Iranian or Gazan or German or British or whatever who are intrinsically evil and thus deserve to be killed by air raids.
The key insight is that most people you are killing with bombs are actually closer to the school girls than to war criminals.
Take Nazi Germany, which established a new standard for evilness. In the Nuremberg trials and the subsequent trials, a few dozen people were found to have committed acts so irredeemably evil that they deserved death for it. Now, I will be the first to point out that this is only the tip of the iceberg, and perhaps hanging every concentration camp guard as an accessory to mass murder would have been closer to justice. If you also count the Einsatzgruppen and everyone who knowingly enabled the genocides, you might make a case that a decent fraction of the German armed forces deserved death, but I would claim that it is still a minority.
The median German soldier killed by the Allies was not killed because his death intrinsically made the world a better place, quite the opposite. Instead, his death was justified merely instrumentally -- he was part of an army which was preventing the liberation of the death camps, and defeating that army so one could liberate the camps had a higher utility than protecting the lives of the soldiers. (Note that this reasoning does not extend to Harris' morale bombing, though.)
Under a universalist morality, the best you can hope for is not that most of the opponents you kill in a war will deserve to die for their crimes, but merely that killing them is the lesser evil compared to letting their state continue with its crimes.
But for that to be the lesser evil, you actually need a plan to put a stop to their crimes. Soviets killing German soldiers in combat was the lesser evil because the Soviets made a ground offense which enabled them to liberate Auschwitz. By contrast, you could bomb Tehran until you only had a few thousand people left without removing the capability of the surviving IRGC members to slaughter civilian protesters.
Now, I will not claim that killing the Ayatollah or his generals is not intrinsically good. The problem is that for a consequentialist, one evil man getting his just rewards is dwarfed by the indirect effects. If we could turn Iran into a democracy just by murdering the Ayatollah, we would have done so a long time ago. Instead, what Trump accomplished was granting an aging old tyrant martyrdom, while replacing him with a guy whose father, wife and sister were murdered by the US. How is that an improvement?
All things being equal, I would prefer not to move to any nuclear armed state, perhaps excepting the UK and France. (Not that this is a unique property of nuclear states -- I would nope most non-nuclear states as well.)
My point is that I am rather indifferent between Iran and say North Korea -- both seem about equally terrible in my opinion. And yet we allow one to have nukes but try to prevent the other from gaining them at large human costs.
Are you of the opinion that Iran is a much worse place than North Korea? Would you trade a 1% chance of having to move to Iran (current war aside) against a 10% chance of having to move to North Korea?
A binary "black and white" morality allows for twice the complexity of the unitary everything is gray morality you and others appear to be advocating.
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But is the United States part of the Western Civilization? To me it looks like you're some mix of Middle Eastern (at the top) and South American (at the bottom) culture. Is Laura Loomer and Mark Levin, your two spiritual pillars as we now learn, "Western Civilization"? No, they're hysterical Levantines. Consider whom you've chosen as your representatives for a bona fide "Western Civilization" society, France: Charles Kushner. What is Charles famous for? Among all else, for hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother in law, for purposes of blackmail/retaliation. How did that play out long term? Kushner's son in your "administration" got the prosecutor Chris Christie fired from Trump team, claiming that Christie should've let the rabbis handle the matter. This is a primitive, clannish, theocratic society.
Sure, you have some trappings of the West, true (like "Senate", "Capitol hill" etc), you have "elections" to reinforce the legitimacy of this primitive system. But it's like Arabs when they were translating Aristotle. Stewardship of alien ideas. You also have advanced Western technology. But is that "Civilization"? Is China «Western Civilization» too, then?
And your notion of the Western Civilization is impoverished, it's just «Judaism with some shit on top». Nothing about the Greco-Roman world or Renaissance, science and rational thought. At this point, you are about as far from the West per se as Iran is.
Is the argument here that Jews are not part of Western Civilization? Trump praised Mark Levin on social media therefore America has severed all ties to Rome. Or is the argument that you don’t like America?
Sure, whatever, America is not part of Western Civlization, Americans can’t do rationalism or science, we lost them in translation. Let’s call America something new, it’s “Bestern Civilization” which is way better than those fuddy-duddy Old World Europeans with all that learnin’, or as I like to call it “Worsten Civilization”.
Now I advance the argument that Bestern Civilization is better than the Third world, and better than Iran, so I support our moral claims against theirs etc. etc. etc. etc.
Israel is obviously not part of the Western civilization, it's an older and completely distinct tradition, and as the demographic share of secular Ashkenazim in Israel is reduced, so the authentic Israeli culture comes more to the fore. And the American doctrine of Judeo-Christianity is laughably stupid retconning. Levin is an hysterical Israeli Firster who's shedding his assimilation, if it ever existed. Just look at how the guy posts.
But even before this recent obsession with Israel, many Europeans had remarked that the US is culturally not a white or Western society, though they differed in specifics. Consider Jung:
Hopefully you can notice this in your own manner.
It's not so much that he praised him, it's that it was a weird hagiography one could expect from a Muslim or Jewish person, prompted by a personal request for backup in a petty online spat. And generally Trump is very clearly a representative of Middle Eastern culture, what with his extended family nepotism, corruption, bling, low-inhibition behavior, and yes, Israeli ties. To an extent that he represents America, being a legitimately elected populist president, this just means America is not part of Western civilization either.
Fair enough. It's just that, not being your kin, the Western Civilization doesn't owe you shit. Worse, you're engaged in zero sum competition against it, trying to annex its lands, steal its markets, offload consequences of your tribal conflicts on it, rope it into your weird theologically motivated wars etc etc. You're not providing enough value to justify further tolerance of this behavior from an alien society.
Israel is a settler state run by the grandchildren of European Jews. Perhaps it's diverged perhaps the Seph migrant influence was too great perhaps proximity to the Arabs is too much. But even if we adopt some Spenglerian definition of Western Civilization rooted in the Medieval Experience and let's even adopt the Khazarian hypothesis for the sake of argument and the Jews really have nothing to do with the shared root of Christianity and their influence on European-American-European history can be dismissed as a foreign one -- what are we talking about? What does Trump praising two Jews have to do with whether American is Western or not?
Jung is hysterical, Teddy Roosevelt's laugh is an expression of the primordial Negro? (Did Jung even meet Roosevelt? I can't decide if it's funnier to imagine Jung standing in a corner at a party seething while an American laughs, or whether it's funnier to imagine him hyperventilating over a newspaper caricature where Roosevelt is drawn with bugged-out eyes and a wide grin.)
Jung is so ridiculous I want to try to construct another argument so I can at least respond with some kind of decorum: Western Civilization has always been open to influence from the foreign. The British had India, the French Morocco etc. There's nothing unique in principle about America being influenced by the blacks. (America at the time Jung was writing was also 90% white.) The argument that the "transplantation to a primitive soil" is a definitive "break" is maybe stronger, but this is then an argument that falls apart if it generalizes: What of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc.? Can no colony planted by the West be called Western? Or is there something special about America? (Well, there is, but it's not anything as crude as that.)
Sounds like Agamemnon, sounds like Napoleon. Trump isn't Israeli, his family is German and Scottish, his grandfather built the family fortune running a saloon in Gold Rush Yukon Canada. That's just what New Yorkers are like. I don't think Western Civilization has some special claim to inhibited behavior and a disdain for bling.
I really can't respond to every point thoroughly point-by-point or this my response will become even more unwieldly and unreadable, but I have to ask: What about you talking about? Western Civilization is now against "weird theologically motivated wars"? -- since when? (You should also stop believing every news article you read about how the Americans are doing this to bring about the end world or whatever, that's almost a disqualifying level of credulity, by the way.) Or that America is engaged in "zero sum competition" against Europe (stop putting tariffs on our goods!) and "trying to annex its lands". (I guess the argument that crossing the ocean represents a break between Europe and America doesn't apply to Denmark and Greenland? I can only assume you're referring to America asking for Greenland and the Europeans hallucinating a war.) Moreover: What are you even talking about? "Western Civilization" owes America a lot unless your belief is that everything would have been better off if America didn't intervene in 1941 or had just let the Commies win. Maybe Communist Italy wouldn't have been so bad, the reds destroyed the foodways of Russia but not those in China so maybe Italy would still have churches and bread. Well, we don't have to find out because America has been paying for Europe's defense now for 80 years. And the thanks we get is being told off about it. We're not providing enough value? Enough value? What are you even talking about?
No, those are Western nations.
New Yorkers aren't Western, indeed. They are spiritually Middle Eastern/African. Jung didn't mean ancestry (he makes it clear his argument sidesteps actual miscegenation) and neither do I. Trump isn't Western nor even white, sorry, this is just obvious.
It very much does, it's one of the more obvious WEIRD traits. Culture of dignity, meritocracy, deferred gratification etc. Bourdieu called that Habitus. Trump-Loomer-Levin belong to the breed of people who shout Allahu Akbar before exploding, even if their religion is different.
Approximately since the Peace of Westphalia. It's evolved and secularized a fair bit since the Crusades; and even those had nothing to do with your "Judeo-Christian Civilization", but rather with the opposite.
Do you understand that I consider your attempts to sanity-wash your culture as an entirely disqualifying level of gaslighting? I don't need news articles, I can make my own conclusions from what your savage tribal champions utter.
Seeing as I'm not interested in getting gaslit, there's no point to debate this. You're a self-interested tribalist and so you feel entitled to European gratitude irrespective of the balance of payment or current behavior. Well, until they establish military deterrence against your aggression, this is rational behavior.
>have ridiculous ideas
>call criticism gaslighting
>"i win"
Ok, based
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The US massproduces and exports the very ills which put Western Civilization on its deathbed. Many in the US may tend the embers, but far from all and not from a position of strength.
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I am not putting them on the same moral plane. I am pointing out that depicting the US vs. Iran conflict as analogous to polite society vs. violent schizophrenics would be an exaggeration of the actual degree of difference.
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