site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16994 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 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
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Feminism in the YooKay

This is an article that popped up on my feed and has been making the rounds.

It's about young women in the UK. The UK, for context, has been stagnating on a GDP per-capita basis since 2008 and is facing funding problems amid a large social spending bill. It's hardly a Randian capitalist paradise.

O’Brien grew up in Leicester, in what she calls a working-class family. (She defined this in the Marxist sense, meaning anybody who works for a wage, unlike the “asset class” and what she calls the billionaire “Epstein class”.) She had always been progressive. But while studying for her master’s degree at Bristol University, she started going to Black Lives Matter protests on College Green and felt inspired by the collective energy she saw there. She already had a TikTok following from sharing “random content”, but her audience rapidly grew as her posts got more political. Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, and Israel’s response in Gaza, was a “catalytic moment” for her. “I had been talking about immigration issues before, like Marxism, like philosophy,” she said. “Then it all just became the war.”

I don't have a problem with her in particular. There are odious people in every generation, in either sex. There will always be people that demand more even in the face of the state being bankrupt, nobody ever thinks they live in a good economy (not to say the UK has one).

The problem is that the movement here has become utterly unmoored from reality. In the case of the UK, the left broadly got what it wanted. There are sweeping laws against almost every leftist bugbear, there are gender equality rulings that means female cashiers have to be paid the same as male warehouse workers, taxes are incredibly punitive at the top end, the UK has worse pay compression than the Soviet Union (!!!).

While Adolescence was filmed about incels (an utterly fabricated moral panic, as involuntary celibate men are both more likely to be non-white, less likely to rape and less likely to be violent against women than their sexually more successful counterparts), there is no societal feedback mechanism against the wishes of women. When the (western) world chafes against women's preferences, the world gets sanded, even if it shouldn't. There is no accountability or feedback mechanism against female preferences, they are assumed to be true. While this is unpleasant, one could stoically accept this for a while. But when it starts intersecting with politics at large and with the functioning of the economy, well, that's a different story. I don't live in the UK but I have strong ties there, so this story did feel sad.

Online divides have also bled into real life. Exclusive polling by Merlin Strategy for the New Statesman reveals that young women, aged between 18 and 30, are by far the most progressive demographic in the UK. This polling found that young women are 26 percentage points less likely to feel positively about capitalism than young men, and much less likely to feel the economy works in their favour. They are also much more pessimistic about the future – their own, and everyone else’s. They also feel much more negatively towards young men than young men feel about them.

Again, beliefs utterly unmoored from reality. Young women outearn men and the economy bends over backwards to an absurd degree to make that happen. I work in quantitative finance, in a field where there is an incredibly tight feedback loop between performance and PnL. It's really not that possible for us to do affirmative action or similar. And yet every year, HR tries to force teams (sometimes successfully) to hire subpar women. I am sure there are some women who could do the job, but most very intelligent women eschew quant finance. And yet.

O’Brien told me she considers herself a revolutionary rather than an activist. “Revolutionary is more, ‘I want systemic change. I don’t want to exist within these same systems. I want to be an instrument of the revolution.’” She said she felt anxious seeing injustice and doing nothing. It was a physical sensation in the centre of her body. Perhaps this was why women were more likely to be progressive than men, she speculated. “Women tend to be a little bit more connected to their bodies and their physical sensations and emotions.” It seemed like an essentialist, even reactionary view of gender: the idea that women are emotional, physical beings, in a way men aren’t.

Women are more agreeable and more neurotic than men, in a big five sense. Both qualities that are not necessarily adaptive. Women are good at steering and enforcing social consensus, at language games, etc. What is described here is just women's greater emotional reactivity, as measured by the big five personality scores. This is not new information or anything; variants of these tendencies have been known to societies across the ages.

Anna’s politics had become more radical during the long process of getting personal independence payments for her disability. She felt the whole system was set up against her. The experience made her feel dehumanised.

I grew up in a European country with a large welfare state. It's quite funny how quickly people start taking welfare payments for granted. I guess if you believe in the whole Marxist system as such you are just taking what you are owed and any obstacles to that are just signs of reactionary resistance.

When I asked women what specifically had radicalised them, the war in Gaza was the most common answer.

Gaza as the omnicause. Many words have been spilled about this already; suffice to say that the Gazans would have none of this.

These women weren’t outliers. According to the New Statesman’s polling, young women are twice as likely not to want children as young men. All the Leeds women told me they feared a Reform government pressuring them to have babies. One woman mentioned Suella Braverman’s pledge to scrap the Equality Act and repeal other human rights laws. “It just feels… out of control.”

Their growing isolation could also have profound long-term consequences for British society. It will almost certainly make relationships harder: fewer than half of young women feel men understand them. Young women are much less likely than men to date people who disagree with their politics. People will get lonelier, and angrier. And it’s getting worse. Among those under-30, younger women feel the bleakest: women under 25 are most likely to believe things are “stacked against me, no matter how hard I try”.

The UK's current TFR is 1.41 and recent research suggests TFR is heavily downstream from relationship formation. It making relationships harder is one thing; if the Zoomettes mass opt-out of having children then it's very possible (and I'm generally no doomer!) that the UK as its current society no longer exists in 50 years. Maybe reality has to be the escape valve that forces women's beliefs to become moored to reality again.

Is this what it's like to be in Latin American country seeing decline, like Argentina? Blame everything on capitalism, ignore the fact that you are getting your preferences (as much as the state finances and bond markets can bear it year over year) and continue advocating for a system that guarantees you'll be worse off in 20-30 years?

Among those under-30, younger women feel the bleakest: women under 25 are most likely to believe things are “stacked against me, no matter how hard I try”.

One of the biggest issues we seem to be facing socially right now is pessimistic victim complexes, especially among young people but it's popping up everywhere. The obsession with being the underdog narrative has grown to massive proportions, whether it be young people adopting oppression olympics identities or the insane comments I saw just a few day ago comparing being a modern man in Europe as tantamount to slavery. Everybody needs to be a victim now in at least some way.

I do think part of it is exposure to more information and negativity focused algorithms. It's hard to feel all the wins when everything in your feed is just people complaining about the compromises they've had to mistake. It's like what Scott Alexander had talked about before with showing the same film to Israel/Palestine supoorters and them both coming thinking it was biased against them. People see the stuff that agrees with them as the neutral baseline and the stuff they don't agree with as an anomaly so something that might be "70% agree, 30% disagree" gets treated as "70% normal and smart, 30% abnormal and dumb". So even just more fair information looks like biased against you information.

But it's not just algorithms and information, they would not work if people did not bite. It's because they want to be angry. Someone naive might think "good news, data centers don't use much water!" or "good news, vaccines don't cause autism and there isn't an autism epidemic, it's just diagnostic drift" or "good news, cops don't really kill that many minorities" or "good news, schools are not giving litter boxes and trans surgeries to cat identified kids" would be received with a smile, but instead it's pushed away with anger. Weirdly enough, "the world is better than you thought" is seen as a bad thing to learn! They want to be a victim of a bad society.

People see the stuff that agrees with them as the neutral baseline and the stuff they don't agree with as an anomaly so something that might be "70% agree, 30% disagree" gets treated as "70% normal and smart, 30% abnormal and dumb". So even just more fair information looks like biased against you information.

You nailed one of my least favourite trends in the Israel/Palestine discourse. I've personally flirted with the Zionist conspiracy bandwagon myself but even in my Joo-poasting arc, I could not read any article from "Jewish" mainstream media and come off thinking the IDF are the good guys. The examples they usually cite of this supposed pro-Israeli bias are occasional word choice hedges (“clashes,” “alleged strikes,” contextualising rocket fire as “response to…”) or instructing reporters to avoid terms like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”. But to me, that feels less like propaganda and more like the cautious house style of an establishment outlet that doesn't swallow the full activist catechism. The tone is still predominantly grim Palestinian suffering, orphaned children, power imbalance and skepticism of Israeli explanations for strikes. So is the real charge that these papers are not maximally pro-Palestine and anti-Israel enough? On the other side of the spectrum, pro-Israelis believe that progressive media is inherently biased against "apartheid" Israel and won't take everything their government says at face value, while purchasing the "Hamas narrative" with far less scrutiny.

I could not read any article from "Jewish" mainstream media and come off thinking the IDF are the good guys. The examples they usually cite of this supposed pro-Israeli bias are occasional word choice hedges

Tbf a good part of the this cause is also just illiteracy. People can read in the sense of "X does Y" but actually understanding anything beyond that can be difficult for many. Consider the reaction to the Economist's obituary for the Ayatollah.. Just a whole lot of idiots who if not explicitly told "The Ayatollah is bad, the Ayatollah is bad" over and over again are unable to comprehend that you're actually criticizing him because they're too stupid to look past the most literal of readings.

So with the "Jewish media" if you don't explicitly say "Israel bad is evil kill millions of children" then you're basically pro Israel to many of the complainers.

Yeah I don't miss leaving X at all. That title comes across as a withering backhanded slap at a tyrant's delusions of divine grandeur, I literally can't read any adulation there. Hot takes and one-note emotionally charged short-form communication have killed people's reading comprehension like tiktok has killed the youth's attention spans. This is why I abandoned my own joo-poasting, took me too long to realise I was insulting my own intelligence.

Tbf a good part of the this cause is also just illiteracy.

The thing is that journalists and others in the media either know that illiteracy of this type is incredibly common among the audience of their articles and even moreso among the audience of their headlines, or they have the intelligence and knowledge required to know. So when there's significant misunderstanding by the audience of stuff like this, it speaks to either malice, malicious ignorance, or incompetence that's advanced enough to be indistinguishable from malice.

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