site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 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.

Rather than judge the emotion, we should judge the reaction to them

Perhaps, but some emotions are very easy to judge this way (anger leading to violence), and some emotions are very difficult to judge this way (fear leading to sabotage).

It's extraordinarily difficult to judge sabotage, both in that it happened, as well as what impact it actually had. And some forms of sabotage are known by other names, like "prudent business practice" or "protecting women and girls", where society at large can't even decide what is/isn't, and that's not even getting into the associated moral hazards from each group that would benefit from the laws against that kind of sabotage being stricter or looser. Oh yeah, and some elements of sabotage are personally profitable for whoever's doing them, and some people care less or more about that, and...

and we can generate emotions too to some extent

True, but see above, so the saboteurs are far more likely to get away with failing to control themselves. It's pretty easy to judge people who generate within themselves anger and then go out and get in a fight (hard to hide bruises or broken limbs). It's very hard to judge people who generate within themselves anger (or fear) and then go out and sabotage their domestic enemy with -ism or drowning them in an ocean of what-if. There's just no hard evidence that [progressives and the emotions they're responsible for] are harmful in any way, and since our system is set up for benefit-of-the-doubt, you can't catch them without going full RICO (which, it's worth noting, is exactly how laws mandating discrimination already work against their targets: a progressive would argue that law discriminates against Italians and be correct).

It is very likely that a panopticon society would be capable of prosecuting this, but the nature of/reasons such a society arises means it could only ever target the innocent. Ancient societies squared the circle by pre-emptively convicting [the gender of person more likely to cause sabotage by emotion] of that sabotage and limiting their opportunities to do that, but that filter punished most those who could control their emotions (and if we're going by contribution to economy, men and women are pretty equal in an age of automation so a more granular system is needed anyway).


but they've messed up the scale of the matter pretty badly

Difficult to get a wo/man to understand something when her/his salary depends on her/him not understanding it.