site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15048 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 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.

Pod Save America host Jon Favreau interviewed DNC Chair Ken Martin yesterday after months of criticizing Martin's leadership on the podcast. Martin apparently requested an appearance to defend himself, but the attempt backfired severely. Favreau's discontent stems from the DNC's unwillingness to release their "autopsy" on Kamala Harris' loss in the 2024 presidential election - a viewpoint Ken Martin once claimed to agree with during his Chair campaign.

Obviously Martin is in a difficult position (indeed, I wouldn't envy any white man attempting to lead the Democratic Party) because 1) everyone knows the autopsy will be humiliating for Harris, 2) Harris may be a future presidential candidate, and 3) donor funds rely on the DNC or their candidates not being revealed to have acted incompetently.

But really, Martin going back on his campaign promise is not of note here - keeping the autopsy to themselves is likely the right move to retain any dignity. More interesting is the bellwether progressive media mouthpiece openly targeting their ideological and sociopolitical wellspring. Favreau seems to conflate the burial of the autopsy with peril in future elections, as if 1) the Democrats have a history of being honest and confessional and 2) the mistakes of the DNC in 2024 are not apparent. I often question whether PSA are true believers or the modern equivalent of César Chavez's "don't want to hurt the cause" club, but here Favreau radiates (or pretends to radiate) true-believer-dom to a naive and childish extent. Of course he wants to see his party be honest - they're the good guys.

In the end, Ken Martin looks like Jerry from Fargo and Favreau looks like a kid struggling to accept that Santa Claus isn't real. But I don't expect either to leave their post - Martin is too valuable as a scapegoat and Favreau has a comfortable incentive to just keep swimming.

Obviously Martin is in a difficult position (indeed, I wouldn't envy any white man attempting to lead the Democratic Party) because 1) everyone knows the autopsy will be humiliating for Harris, 2) Harris may be a future presidential candidate, and 3) donor funds rely on the DNC or their candidates not being revealed to have acted incompetently.

But really, Martin going back on his campaign promise is not of note here - keeping the autopsy to themselves is likely the right move to retain any dignity.

This is the perspective that I see commonly but disagree with vehemently. As a Kamala voter who wants the Democratic Party to have success in the future, the most dignified thing to do here would be not only to release the autopsy but to point highlights at the dirtiest of the laundry that gets aired out in the process. When one fails, there's no dignity in hiding or obfuscating the failure. Dignity is in owning the failure in a way that makes it clear that the most important thing to you about the failure is your wrongdoing or errors that caused the failure, to the extent that you welcome any and all humiliation that public ownership of that failure brings you.

If Harris's 2028 POTUS run's viability is dependent on the dirty laundry of her 2024 campaign not being public, then may her 2028 POTUS run not be viable, for the sake of the success of the Democratic party.

This is the perspective that I see commonly but disagree with vehemently. As a Kamala voter who wants the Democratic Party to have success in the future, the most dignified thing to do here would be not only to release the autopsy but to point highlights at the dirtiest of the laundry that gets aired out in the process.

The issue I see with the autopsy is its unlikely to be helpful. There are a few ways it could go. It could be like the RNC Mitt Romney autopsy, which was nonsense corporate donor catering. Embrace immigration, lower taxes, reform entitlements, etc. The Trump campaign rejected basically every recommendation and won.

So what ways did the DNC actually take the autopsy? I only think there are a few ways they'd actually take it:

  1. Racist-Sexist America rejected Kamala because racism and sexism.
  2. Kamala was too moderate. Joe was too moderate. We need Mahndami.

I don't think either direction would actually be a good evaluation of what happened, and would not help Democrats improve their chances.

Except in a realpolitik way it doesn't make sense to release it. If I'm in the DNC and want the party to have success in the future, the best situation is to move on entirely from anything that had to do with Biden. There are plenty of younger politicians out there without any of the political baggage that comes with being tied to an unpopular president and losing bid. If they release it now it's news for a week, only political junkies pay attention to it, and a year from now when people start announcing their candidacies the whole thing is yesterday's news.

If you really think that Harris candidacy is a threat to the party, then you tell her not to run with the implicit threat that if she does then it may get leaked at an inopportune time. If she doesn't announce then it never sees the light of day. If she does, then she isn't a team player and they won't mind throwing her under the bus. If it's leaked and she wins the nomination anyway, then she's a stronger candidate than anyone thought and she deserves to have it.

When one fails, there's no dignity in hiding or obfuscating the failure. Dignity is in owning the failure in a way that makes it clear that the most important thing to you about the failure is your wrongdoing or errors that caused the failure, to the extent that you welcome any and all humiliation that public ownership of that failure brings you.

If there were a noticible portion of the population who were even capable of this, the world would probably have a lot fewer topics for this thread, and fewer problems at all. It requires a focus on something other than the Self that is rarely seen, and not particularly valued in our society. I've felt this way about things that really matter to me. Letting down the people I love. And then only sometimes; I quickly return to Me.

Assuming there are at least some people who accept personal responisibility with this depth regularly, they'd never be allowed anywhere near the reigns of power.

When one fails, there's no dignity in hiding or obfuscating the failure. Dignity is in owning the failure in a way that makes it clear that the most important thing to you about the failure is your wrongdoing or errors that caused the failure, to the extent that you welcome any and all humiliation that public ownership of that failure brings you.

Do you have any idea how rare this sort of psychological self-awareness is? You are nothing like representative of pretty much any major movement that's ever existed. That's true of more or less each of us here.

The masses of humanity don't have anything like that kind of mental horsepower or internal philosophical integrity. We throw the word 'tribe' around for a reason. Politics is generally irrational and votes come through stoking subconscious emotional responses. Under that rubric, admitting one's side was wrong is generally devastating. People want to be on the side of success, not failure.

Try instead "the process [electoral college] is flawed"; that has some legs. Or, you know what would be even better? "They stole the election from us."

Now we're cooking with democracy.

I don't think this requires psychological self-awareness. It only requires self-interest. It doesn't take someone particularly self-aware to notice that, when someone fails spectacularly and then tries to hide it or ignore it or otherwise try to minimize it, this lowers their esteem in the eyes of people who aren't already predisposed to liking them. Or the opposite, that someone who takes full ownership of their failures, in a way that credibly signals that they're not doing so for the purpose of image, tends to have their esteem raised in the eyes of people who don't particularly like them but are open to the possibility of liking them.

I do get that the market voter-base can stay irrational tribal longer than you can stay solvent the next election cycle, but also, if my side decides that embracing tribalism over responsibility is fine, then that substantially lowers my ability to believe that my side is actually better than the other side. The entire and only reason my side is better than the other side is because we actually did and do the hard work of finding our errors and correcting them, and the only way to credibly do that is to, again, be so much more concerned with correcting one's faults than concerned with one's image to others that one welcomes any humiliation that follows from highlighting one's faults.

I don't think this requires psychological self-awareness. It only requires self-interest. It doesn't take someone particularly self-aware to notice that, when someone fails spectacularly and then tries to hide it or ignore it or otherwise try to minimize it, this lowers their esteem in the eyes of people who aren't already predisposed to liking them. Or the opposite, that someone who takes full ownership of their failures, in a way that credibly signals that they're not doing so for the purpose of image, tends to have their esteem raised in the eyes of people who don't particularly like them but are open to the possibility of liking them.

I work in a very regulated industry that places a massive emphasis on responsibility and owning and learning from mistakes. It has been a horrendous struggle to get people to not run screaming any time there's a problem and a fact finding analysis.

I can only imagine it's a hundred times worse for something like politics rather than engineering.

I work in a very regulated industry that places a massive emphasis on responsibility and owning and learning from mistakes. It has been a horrendous struggle to get people to not run screaming any time there's a problem and a fact finding analysis.

Of course. You're asking them to not be defensive, to show their belly. And instinctively they know that's asking to get stabbed. And no matter how much talk there is about responsibility and owning and learning from mistakes (or "blameless postmortems" or whatever the buzzword is for this)... sometimes someone's going to get stabbed in the belly.

sometimes someone's going to get stabbed in the belly.

There may have been a very significant disconnect between senior management and the ICs over "proportion of these investigations that do in fact result in someone being stabbed in the belly, or indeed whether the purpose actually is fact-finding and improvement or just an excuse to stab someone in the belly..."

I hope she runs and gets curbstomped in a 3-to-1 blowout.

If that's going to happen, it will happen in the primary. And I wouldn't find it that surprising in the primary.

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