site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 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.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The wokes get their justification by claiming that disparate sentencing alone proves that law enforcement is racist and illegitimate,

Yes, I know, they lie. And it's easy to prove - you just need to establish a principle of "do crime - go to jail" - which is obviously blind to the race, and enforce it diligently without regard to the race. Once you start talking about race, proving that you operate in racially blind framework becomes much harder.

and having wide public agreement for this because HBD arguments are taboo

No, not because of this. You don't need to sell the public that 50 millions of US citizens are subhuman (not sure what you'd do with Ashkenazi Jews btw - does every Jew automatically gets PhD at birth? I mean, if you do the negative side, you have to do the positive side too... if you advocated for somehow suppressing supposedly low-IQ populations, you necessarily would have to advocate to promote high-IQ populations... not sure how that's supposed to work?) to sell them the idea of punishment following the crime. I know a lot of people that agree to the latter while not agreeing to the former, and I do not think HBD is the only way to combat racism. Especially given that it's the same racism, only with variables substituted. I mean "we are both racists, but we think we are actually the good guys, and so do they, but you can trust us!" does not sound as a particularly overwhelming argument.

If HBD became common knowledge, this would stop working.

How? The wokes would just switch from "you can't jail criminals because it's racist" to "you can't jail criminals because life's hard for them anyway, so you can not ask them to not be criminals, it's just cruel". In fact, many already do it anyway right now - the white progressive left is racist as hell, and many of them internalize a version of HBD very deeply, they just make different political conclusions from it. Attacking them on essentially agreeing with them is not going to be very effective. If you want to win over them, you need to reject their racist framework.

Yes, I know, they lie. And it's easy to prove - you just need to establish a principle of "do crime - go to jail" - which is obviously blind to the race, and enforce it diligently without regard to the race. Once you start talking about race, proving that you operate in racially blind framework becomes much harder.

Wasn't this pretty much what people said you were supposed to do from 1980 to 2010 or so? And then it fell apart in a concentrated program to dismantle it that most everyone just went along with for whatever reason where people started saying no, that's not what you are supposed to do, you're not allowed to do that. The system is fully tainted by structural racism, which you can infer from the different outcomes it produces, therefore it must be demolished and the structural racism (which we don't know how to fix because it's inferred from outcomes, not causes) be fixed before anything else. Before 2010, there was a tacit agreement not to talk about race. Then the wokes showed up, realized this lets them go wild with the disparate impact fallacy and started putting race front and center all the time to attack the system, and people couldn't respond to the criticism without arguments that were not permitted in polite society. So what's the next move?

No, not because of this. You don't need to sell the public that 50 millions of US citizens are subhuman (not sure what you'd do with Ashkenazi Jews btw - does every Jew automatically gets PhD at birth? I mean, if you do the negative side, you have to do the positive side too... if you advocated for somehow suppressing supposedly low-IQ populations, you necessarily would have to advocate to promote high-IQ populations... not sure how that's supposed to work?) to sell them the idea of punishment following the crime.

I'm not really sure why you keep pulling things this way. We want a society where you go to jail if you do crime and you get a PhD if you submit a thesis that makes an original contribution to your field. But also one where people won't succeed with campaigns that jails must be abolished because too many black people end up there and PhD programs must be abolished because too many Jews end up there.

How? The wokes would just switch from "you can't jail criminals because it's racist" to "you can't jail criminals because life's hard for them anyway, so you can not ask them to not be criminals, it's just cruel". In fact, many already do it anyway right now - the white progressive left is racist as hell, and many of them internalize a version of HBD very deeply, they just make different political conclusions from it.

Progressives have been doing this a hundred years, people dealt with it fine. The difference here is that now everyone agrees that the criminal did the crime and the criminal justice system is working as it's described. People can and will argue that we should have an entirely different stated purpose for the justice system, but then they need to make a case for that first. They don't have an option of campaigning for closing down the current system right now, because they're successfully making a fallacious claim that the system is fully corrupt, egregiously failing to work according to its stated mandate, and who knows the whole crime problem might just be made up because of structural racism everywhere.