site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9898 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 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
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The Iran War is beginning to alarm even the neocons

Robert Kagan has a new article in the Atlantic blasting Trump for the Iran War. This is somewhat significant. Kagan is an arch-neocon who supported every previous war in the Middle East. He was a major proponent of the Iraq War, acting as the media arm of the Israel Lobby. The neocons of the 00s were the mostly-Jewish “decisive voices promoting regime change in Iraq”, a pointless war that cost 3 trillion dollars, 35,000 American casualties including 4,500 dead, 200,000 direct civilian deaths by violence, and 1,000,000 excess civilian deaths in total, while indirectly leading ISIS to form among the disenfranchised and dispossessed former Ba’athist commanders (what did you think regime change consisted of?), a lapse in judgment which would cause the refugee crisis in Europe (with all the consequent rape and mayhem), the decimation of Iraqi and Syrian Christian communities, and myriad other human tragedies. It is important, I think, to continually remember how retarded that was; it is so recent, yet never sufficiently referenced in its full scope. (“Another Iraq”, yeah, but do you remember precisely how dumb that was?). Kagan’s criticism of the Iran War is interesting also because it retroactively informs us about the thinking behind the necon’s push for Iraq, given his prominence in that elite circle.

No state in the Middle East (including Iraq in 2003 and Iran today) ever posed a direct threat to the security of the American homeland. Iran has no missiles that can reach the United States and, according to American intelligence, would not until 2035. Access to Middle Eastern oil and gas has never been essential to the security of the American homeland. Today the United States is less dependent on Middle Eastern energy than in the past, which Trump has pointed out numerous times since the Strait of Hormuz was closed.

The United States has long sought to prevent Iraq or Iran from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, but not because these countries would pose a direct threat to the United States. The American nuclear arsenal would have been more than adequate to deter a first strike by either of them, as it has been for decades against far more powerful adversaries. What American administrations have feared is that an Iran in possession of nuclear weapons would be more difficult to contain in its region, because neither the United States nor Israel would be able to launch the kind of attack now under way. The Middle East’s security, not America’s, would be imperiled. As for Israel, the United States committed to its defense out of a sense of moral responsibility after the Holocaust. This never had anything to do with American national-security interests. In fact, American officials from the beginning regarded support for Israel as contrary to U.S. interests. George C. Marshall opposed recognition in 1948, and Dean Acheson said that by recognizing Israel, the United States had succeeded Britain as “the most disliked power in the Middle East.” During the Cold War, even supporters of Israel acknowledged that as a simple matter of “power politics,” the United States had “every reason for wishing that Israel had never come into existence.” But as Harry Truman put it, the decision to support the state of Israel was made “not in the light of oil, but in the light of justice.”

Even the threat of terrorism from the region was a consequence of American involvement, not the reason for it. Had the United States not been deeply and consistently involved in the Muslim world since the 1940s, Islamic militants would have little interest in attacking an indifferent nation 5,000 miles and two oceans away. Contrary to much mythology, they have hated us not so much because of “who we are” but because of where we are. In Iran’s case, the United States was deeply involved in its politics from the 1950s until the 1979 revolution, including as the main supporter of the brutal regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The surest way of avoiding Islamist terrorist attacks would have been to get out.

America’s interests in the Middle East have always been indirect and secondary to larger global aims and strategies. During World War II, the United States led a coalition of nations that depended on the greater Middle East for oil and strategic position. During the Cold War, the United States assumed responsibility not only for the defense of the Jewish state but for the defense and economic well-being of European and Asian allies who depended on Middle Eastern oil. After the Cold War, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the George H. W. Bush administration believed that failing to reverse that aggression would set an ominous precedent in the aborning “new world order.”

That sense of global responsibility is precisely what the Trump administration came to office to repudiate and undo. The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy, which has dramatically shifted the focus of American policy from world order to homeland security and hemispheric hegemony, appropriately downgraded the Middle East in the hierarchy of American concerns. A United States concerned only with defense of its homeland and the Western Hemisphere would see nothing in the region worth fighting for. In the heyday of “America First” foreign policy during the 1920s and ’30s, when Americans did not regard even Europe and Asia as vital interests, the idea that they had any security interests in the greater Middle East would have struck them as hallucinatory.

One would be hard-pressed to find any nation in the world that has been reassured by the Israeli and American war against Iran, other than Israel itself. According to The Wall Street Journal, Gulf state leaders are “privately furious” with the U.S. for “triggering a war that put them in the crosshairs.” Despite its impressive power, the United States was unable to protect these countries from Iran’s attacks; now they have to hope that Trump will not leave them to face a weakened yet intact and angry Iranian regime but will instead double down on America’s long-term military commitment to the region, including by putting ground troops in Iran. Israelis should also be asking how far they can count on the Americans’ dedication to this fight. A United States capable of abandoning long-standing allies in Europe and East Asia will be capable of abandoning Israel too. Can Israel sustain its new dominance in the region without a long and deep American commitment?

The unintended effect of the war, in fact, may be driving regional players to seek other great-power protectors in addition to the United States. Trump himself has invited the Chinese to help open the strait, and the Chinese are actively courting the Arab and Gulf states. The Gulf states are not averse to dealing with Beijing and Moscow. Neither is Israel. It sold management of a container terminal in the port of Haifa to a Chinese company, despite objections from the U.S. Navy, which uses the port. Israel, practically alone among American allies, refused to take part in sanctions against Russia when it invaded Ukraine in 2022. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ran for reelection in 2019, some of his campaign posters showed him shaking hands with Putin under the tagline a different league. No one should blame Israelis for this. They are an independent nation and can be expected to do what they feel they need to do to survive. Americans may have a sentimental or religious attachment to Israel, but Israelis cannot afford to be sentimental in return.

That is especially true given this administration’s cavalier attitude toward international responsibilities. The Iran war is global intervention “America First”–style: no public debate, no vote in Congress, no cooperation or, in many cases, even consultation with allies other than Israel, and, apparently, no concern for potential consequences to the region and the world. “They say if you break it, you own it. I don’t buy that,” Senator Lindsey Graham, arguably Trump’s most influential adviser on the war, said.

For Europeans, the problem is worse than American disregard and irresponsibility. They now face an unremittingly hostile United States—one that no longer treats its allies as allies or differentiates between allies and potential adversaries. The aggressive tariffs Washington imposed last year hit America’s erstwhile friends at least as hard as they hit Russia and China, and in some cases harder. Europeans must now wonder whether Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran makes it more or less likely that he will take similarly bold action on Greenland. The risks and costs of taking that undefended Danish territory, after all, would be far less than the risks and costs of waging the present war. Not some EU liberal but Trump’s conservative friend, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni recently warned that American actions have produced a “crisis in international law and multilateral organizations” and “the collapse of a shared world order.”

[…] Friends and allies will be ever less willing to cooperate with the United States. This time, Spain refused American use of air and naval bases in its territory. Next time, that could be Germany, Italy, or even Japan. Nations around the world will come to rely not on American commitments and permanent alliances but on ad hoc coalitions to address crises. No one will cooperate with the United States by choice, only by coercion. Without allies, the United States will have to depend on clients that it controls, such as Venezuela, or weaker powers that it can bully.

Funnily enough, one of Kagan’s last predictions just came true: Italy joined Spain in closing down its airspace this morning.

Is this not rather a sign of TDS? Kagan spends decades advocating war with Iran, hates Trump; Trump delivers war with Iran, now Kagan is against the war. It’s not that Kagan was ever wrong or ever changed his mind see, it’s just that Donald Trump is wrong about whatever it is we’re talking about today.

Is this not rather a sign of TDS? Kagan spends decades advocating war with Iran, hates Trump; Trump delivers war with Iran, now Kagan is against the war.

Have you read the excerpt? Kagan is obviously a fan of the US being the leader of the free world (a model which worked well enough for the Western world during the Cold War). I would imagine that his policy (which is more or less that of GWB) is the antithesis of Trump's foreign policy, superfluous similarities (bombing brown people) aside.

In guess in his model, a regime change operation in Iran would work differently.

First, Iran would have to violate the JCPOA so badly that most signatories would agree that it was not salvageable, because unilaterally withdrawing from a treaty would damage the image of the US as a reliable partner. (For Trump, Obama's signature was reason enough -- he clearly does not give a fuck about how other countries see the US.)

Then, the US would try to form a broad coalition, come up with a strategic plan to actually achieve the objectives, think about the obvious Iran countermeasures and how to block them, wait until the troops are in the area and then attack.

Trump did none of these things. He looked at the polling, saw that he would lose the mid-terms between Epstein and ICE, and decided to bomb Iran in a bid to cause regime change from the air. Unlike with Venezuela, he lost his gamble and did not achieve any strategic objectives, because no, blowing up missiles is not a strategic objective.

Your comment makes me update towards the real syndrome being TDSS, where people accuse others of having TDS -- treating the same actions differently when done by Trump -- when in fact the actions of Trump are at best vaguely similar.

While I agree that there's definitely criticisms to be made of the war even from a neocon perspective, this does read like TDS. The war on Iran is easily justifiable from a Neocon perspective(we invaded Iraq over less), and there is an international coalition- it happens to be middle eastern countries rather than European ones, but it's there.

(bombing brown people)

Every ethnicity in Iran is light skinned, and the dominant one has an extremely long history of civilization. Are Chinamen 'brown people'? Russians?

First off, I am not a neocon (I was opposed to GWB's Iraq war for example), and don't know how good I a am at the ideological Turing test.

Still, I would say that execution matters. In Iraq and even Afghanistan, the US at least managed to achieve some strategic objectives, like toppling the regimes. A neocon might argue that the bombings were means to an end. (Of course, in my point of view, neither operation achieved a desirable long term strategic outcome.)

Afghanistan was a blunder but at least not an obvious blunder, I am sure that some people predicted that the nation-building would fail, but I was personally not certain of that.

With Trump's Iran war, the blunder is obvious immediately. He gambled on regime change through bombing, and his gamble failed, and he does not have a plan B which is why he is bullshitting about Iran surrendering any day now.

(bombing brown people)

Every ethnicity in Iran is light skinned, and the dominant one has an extremely long history of civilization. Are Chinamen 'brown people'? Russians?

This phrasing annoyed some people, including @Shakes. I apologize, also for being factually incorrect as you point out.

What I meant to suggest was that for the US, killing people in far-away lands which are of different (particular Muslim) cultures is just Tuesday. I think the USG began using drone strikes to blow up weddings beginning in 2010 under Nobel laureate Obama and continuing under Trump. The median voter did not give a damn. My phrasing meant to suggest that few voters cared because the victims were not Caucasians. I certainly did not mean to suggest that I bought into any framework where 'brown' people mattered less personally. I do realize that I am posting on a forum where such views exist, so that was a failure to clearly communicate on my part.

On reflection, I do not think the racism answer for drone death apathy is quite true. The CW waves created by police shooting innocent blacks by mistake are second to none. I think that it is more a case of Newtonian Ethics. People in Afghanistan or Iran are far removed from Americans both in space and social graphs. My personal guess is that the US military killing Australians would upset the voters a lot more. Sure, Australia is also far away, but they speak English and their most recent common cultural ancestor is much more recent.

Of course, Trump has shown the median voter also do not care about him blowing up "drug smuggling" ships presumably crewed by Hispanics, which are both culturally and spatially closer to the US. I am a bit puzzled why that is. It might just be opportunity to oppose, though: in foreign matters, the president has a lot of leeway, so activists can not do much to stop him from ordering military strikes. On US soil, his power is much more limited, so activists can oppose him for sending in ICE or the like.

With Trump's Iran war, the blunder is obvious immediately. He gambled on regime change through bombing, and his gamble failed, and he does not have a plan B which is why he is bullshitting about Iran surrendering any day now.

I think this is the problem. I don't suppose to read Trump's mind at all. Moreover, I don't understand why we assume that Trump's only goal is regime change through bombing -- the speech he himself made at the start of the war lists several other objectives, such as destroying Iran's ability to produce missiles and project force in the Middle East.

I'm rambling about this here because I see this as a case of a kind of "degenerate case" we can't ever really argue out of.

Everything is a matter of taste. Basically, you think something is plausible. I don't. We can argue and butt heads about the underlying facts or methods or fallacies and such. But you think your interpretation of the world is plausible, and I don't. You think that not even because of one news story about Donald Trump and Iran or a month's worth of coverage. It's your entire life and experience that inform your point of view. Likewise mine. For you it's reasonable to imagine Trump acting rashly on a gamble and to interpret everything subsequent as bullshitting. I imagine that comes through not just a decade of interpreting Trump but, e.g. --: honing your personal sense of "bullshit" arguing with partners and family and coworkers; matching the news with your own expertise and intuiting when you can believe your eyes and when you can't; values about what's important in the world and a related sense of who you can trust as allies to inform you about the world; etc. etc. etc. Well, we probably have very different life experiences.

I can say, for instance, that I have some familiarity with military intelligence, and that informs what I believe. And I don't think it's possible e.g. that Trump just hit launch by the seat of his pants because there must exist detailed plans that have been drafted for decades for every contingency. But if I'm being honest, it's not as though I have direct experience of the (putative) Situation Room. I don't actually know Donald Trump. It's possible I'm wrong about everything, I'm only filling in the blanks of things I can never possibly know with my imagination. And hoping that my imagination is quite powerful.

Opinions are primarily formed through life experience. And the vast majority of life experience is media consumption.

When I used to have these arguments with Yassine, I think he perceived my skepticism of Truth to be quite radical. I would say that, well, ultimately, we don't really know that. That story is something that happened in the Oval Office and was witnessed by maybe six people, and one (or two of them) with an axe to grind talked to a reporter, who was edited by his boss, until a story was written up with a headline eye for drama, posted for twitter without any context, except whatever context it is we're all of us each carrying with us all the time. And you're not even considering the stories twitter surfaced to me but not to you. Yassine would say, well, sure, but isn't it convenient that you don't believe whatever isn't convenient for you? I think he thought I was arguing some post-truth magical realism, concomitant with Donald Trump crying "Fake News" and dumb conservacon talking head punditry. And maybe there was some sense in what I was saying as a kind of trivial philosophy, but, well, it's awfully convenient, isn't it?

I'm rambling about this because it does strike me as a particular problem and not a general one. We could be having an argument about facts and figures. We could be debating radically different visions of The Good and how society should operate. I think most Culture War debates tend into these categories, and are much more acrimonious in that way.

Well, I believe that Donald Trump is the most successful man alive and has total control over Iran and everything is going to work out fine. But I can't really be mad at anybody for seeing things differently or even thinking this is the craziest thing they've ever heard in their life. So it goes, right?

This phrasing annoyed some people, including @Shakes. I apologize, also for being factually incorrect as you point out.

So, in that spirit, I'm not sure we can ever really understand each other; Because everything was formed through experience. I can't put you under the fluorescent light where my dentist swore that it was true that my father used to get his teeth drilled without anesthetic, where he would say that pain was a choice and he could choose not to feel it. I can't put you on the chair where my aunt's girlfriend waved her arms over my head like a jedi mindtrick and an image of a clogged sink flashed through my head and my chronic neuropathy dissolved forever, although a friend calls that a placebo and I suppose his imagination is as good as mine. And I'm not sure where I learned to love America or believe in God except that I observe these feelings bubbling up from within me as plainly as I obviously feel the rain when I forget my umbrella during a storm, etc. etc. Maybe you have had good Chinese food and will sympathize when I declare it one of the great cuisines, and when my friends who have only tasted Kung Pao and the general can only titter and laugh about bats all I can do is shine. But I'm sure the reverse is true as well and I want to maintain a little humility when all I've done so far is talk about myself without ever really trying to understand you.

So I appreciate that we are, after all, just arguing to kill time and there's nothing personal about it.

And it's better actually to have these "arguments of the imagination" because we can at least acknowledge the gap and -- shrug? smile? As opposed to the other kinds of arguments where we have to do battle in some sense.

This is my problem with the phrase "bombing brown people". It's the kind of thing that transforms an imaginative gap into a personal one. Or at least it feels that way to me, I can't really propose that it's the same for everyone. But I feel as though people didn't talk this way when I was a kid. There were white people and black people, but nobody used the phrase "brown people" until the last Obama years and it felt vulgar to me then like some new viral load. I think the Progressives were using it in some sense to say, well, society is racist and it reduces people to colors, and it's important for us to talk in these terms so we can examine what is happening invisibly and unsaid. Maybe so but it always felt to me as though some words were being put in my mouth, because I never thought in these kinds of terms as far as I could tell. Or maybe this term preceded me and I was too young to notice and my perception that it's a new and vulgar insertion is totally without basis. I can't really know, you could show me Google N-Gram proof that it's been there all along, but I've also read somewhere that the moon landing was fake, and I don't really believe that either. Because all I'm doing is believing whatever feels convenient to me, exactly as Yassine said all along.

Anyways there's nothing for it but taste, everything is a matter of taste. And maybe time makes more converts than reason and time will tell and we can wait and see and one of us will be right and one of us will be wrong. But my experience tells me that even then we'll be debating what it all means anyways forever and ever, like Vonnegut on Hamlet, a drama that never resolves. So there's nothing personal.

Because, whatever their views on the Iran war or drug interdiction, it seems inarguable that cartel crews or Islamofascistic regime enforcers are bad people, and that is what people care about- not what they have in common with them.

I am aware that you are German, but in America the death penalty is broadly extremely popular. 'The government killing bad guys' is a very popular position, and arguing about the niceties of exactly how they do this is splitting hairs. BLM gets support because of the view that many black victims of police shooting are not bad guys, or at least not bad enough to deserve the death penalty(AFAICT most of them die from their own stupidity after committing various crimes which carry prison sentences of less than a decade, which of course is pretty far off from offenses most Americans regard as justifiably capital).

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