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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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Makes sense to me.

Suppose that I believe that Republicans (or Democrats, pick your poison) are all either not paying attention (ie, Stupid) or actually are all in on the party platform (ie, Evil). Why would I ever want to date someone I think is a lesser human than me?

Putting "No X" in the profile just saves time and effort for everyone involved.

Semi related: It's probably an artifact of the weirdly mixed politics of the area that I live, but even the apolitical women I know have started putting various flavors of "I think Trump is stupid and his followers are cultist idiots, if this offends you then fuck off" instead of "No republicans", simply because that filters out a good chunk of men that are a problem to date.

It really is an open field for women willing to tolerate conservatives in high income areas, they get to pick out of a huge lineup.

someone I think is a lesser human than me

That is a curious way to phrase it, and fails the ideological Turing test hard.

Most people have outpgroups whose members they like less than members of their ingroup. For example, they might consider the classes below them to be the unwashed masses and the classes above them to be entitled snobs who do not deserve their wealth and status. Even the most enlightened utilitarian will like some people more than others.

But to explicitly impose a total ordering of human worth is definitely Nazi-coded, and almost nobody does it these days. Even our resident immigration skeptics would rather speak of "low human capital people" than of "lesser races".

Now, you can certainly make the argument that SJ does impose a total ordering, but its proponents would say that this is merely conditional on the history of oppression, and that in the SJ utopia white cisgender MAGA-voting men would not be sent to the salt mines, but be convinced of the wrongness of their beliefs and then life in harmony with everyone else or something.

But to go from "oh, you don't like $outgroup" to "you think $outgroup are lesser humans, just like the Nazis!" seems a poor argument.

I am using hyperbole for comedic effect, but to explain myself:

I believe that someone's qualities, their value, even their actions, should be decoupled from their moral weight; while simultaneously reckoning with the fact that some people are just lesser than.

Any moral, aesthetic, or effective judgment of anyone or anything is de facto placing them on a ranking. I don't just think I have different opinions than my political opponents, I am fundamentally BETTER than them as a human; and there are people that are fundamentally BETTER than me, who are purer of spirit and bigger of muscle and brain; even though we all deserve the same amount of moral consideration.

I think one of the places that some heinous behaviors spring from is the false consciousness required to believe that everyone deserves equal treatment because we're all the same in the end. No! The deontological value comes first and stands alone, the other things are all head measuring and have no effect on the first thing!

It's not going to happen of course and I only use my specific autistic terminology on these websites for a reason, but it is a coherent view IMO.

Why should I pay attention to something that I have literally zero power over, as opposed to focusing on building a rich, fulfilling personal life? Does that make me stupid?

I don't understand the connection here.

Edit: Oh, I get it! Response: You are on this forum, you are a human, you were born with the right to vote or at least the right to die on the barricade. Choosing not to think about it is an act of moral cowardice, and no amount of grill talk will convince me otherwise.

If you think that "not paying attention" means "stupid", you have a very blinkered view of human nature - as is common among people who are very into online politics, though, which is now a large and growing percentage of the population.

I disagree.

Politics is the river we all swim in, deciding to close your eyes and ears but still swim in the same rivier is either cowardice or stupidity.

If you choose to leave, or become a Mennonite or something, that is entirely different and much more worthy of respect.

Some people are just normal and healthy, you know. (And some are too smart to care about politics. The smartest woman I've ever met doesn't give a shit about politics except insofar as it affects her family personally, anything else would be a distraction from math).

To that I say: Cope.

Unless you live in the woods and never engage in the exchange of goods and services outside your direct community, you are engaged in politicas. Choosing to look away doesn't mean anything other than you are giving up your power over your own life.

The woman in question can't be that smart if the amount of brain power needed to calculate her incentives against her axioms against the expected outcomes takes any energy at all; and if it makes her tummy hurt to think about it so she doesn't she's back to being a moral coward.

Girls are suppose to be empathatic in their role so become a liberal and having suicidal empathy fits with ideal female personality traits. I don’t think many men would not date a girl because she’s a liberal. Though they may question whether people with those traits should get to vote.

If I was a girl and hear someone say Suicidal Empathy I would put that right up there with SMV. Even conservative women would cringe at that sort of line, because of the implications. You gotta keep that shit on the forums.

This is a forum.

The funny thing with giving women the right to vote is now we have the evidence (partisan splits) that either women or men should not have the right to vote. One side has to be correct - right? Which means the other side shouldn’t get to vote.

Married women vote like their husbands. Single women vote for the left. So instead, a modest proposal- male heads of household get an extra vote for every dependent, including co-resident children.

What’s interesting though is that the split was long-predicted but took nearly a century to actually develop. Which would seem to moly there are other factors that have recently separated men’s and women’s joint interests.

That other factor would be the decline of marriage, which was predicted by anti-suffragettes. Social conservatives are always Cassandra, eventually.

Of course, many of the predictions of anti-suffragettes(Women will begin wearing pants!) are, from the perspective of even many on the right, firmly in the territory of 'it happened and it's a good thing'.

Maybe; could be that if you take the average of two biased perspectives you get closer to reflecting the true state of things.

At the moment, Men are the ones who are in their feelings about everything, 'Wah wah wah dating is hard, my wife is legally allowed to leave me if I beat her, I'm lonely, I want cheap treats but also I want my job to be easy and pay well and everyone should respect me'.

Real I want all my groceries in one bag but I don't want the bag to be heavy behavior.

It will eventually either normalize or shift the other way as it always does, but you do get tired of the bitching in the meantime.

Maybe; could be that if you take the average of two biased perspectives you get closer to reflecting the true state of things.

This is correct.

Let's say women in general tend left and men in general tend right. This would give you the situation we see at the moment, where sometimes the left wins and sometimes the right wins, and swing voters matter a great deal in directing which way it goes. This is plausibly superior to "the left always wins" or "the right always wins".

Of course, since we've seen male-only electorates, we have a pretty good idea of what a single-sex electorate would actually do, which is not that so-and-so partisan split always wins. Rather, both major parties will orient around the median voter. In a male-only electorate, the Overton Window of politics is probably further right than it is right now, but government still swings back and forth between the less-right and the more-right parties. Replace 'right' with 'left' and that's likely what you get in an all-female electorate.

It would be the just world fallacy to suggest that the electorate at present has the Overton Window in exactly the right place. It is, however, not obvious that the current state of the electorate is worse than either the right-tilted male electorate or the left-tilted female electorate.

It's worth noting that the incorporation of women voters tilted politics more socially conservative for a good half-century.

One side has to be correct - right?

I'm not sure this follows. Democracy is meant to represent the collective will of the people, not find the correct answer to a binary question.

If 60% of the country votes for the dog party and 40% for the cat party, our conclusion should be that 60% of state pet funding should go to dogs and 40% to cats, not that cat voters should be disenfranchised because they answered 'wrongly'.

In that situation dogs win every vote and can vote against cat interests despite cats having 80% support among cat voters. So cats would probably prefer to live in a country that is filled with cat voters because then they can vote in pro-cat legislation.

There's a particular pathology I sometimes see on this forum (and generally wherever high-decouplers congregate to argue) which is along the lines of "the majority of people disagree with my political views by at least epsilon. Given that this means the world is wrong and evil, should I kill myself or go on a murder spree?". It seems to be based on a questionable deduction from the observation that intransigent camps in politics tend to get an unfairly large share, and high-decoupler aversion to changing one's value function (something about Murder-Gandhi, the orthogonality hypothesis etc).

Yeah, and as someone who likes talking to/is a weirdo I don't get it. A majority of Westerners who live in say Dubai aren't monarchists yet seem to manage just fine. IDK I disagree with a lot of modern politics but also being a modern westerner is fairly easy. IDK why these types can't just be like "the world is fucked, fuck the powers that be" I'll tend to my own family and my own garden.

What about Pathological Altruism?

Still bad!

Portraying any of the biblical virtues as bad or wrong in some way is gonna come off as, if I may, Satanic to any normie westerner.

As in, made up?

I don't think normie westerners think in terms of things being "satanic" or not. Do you mean in the actual IRL church-of-satan sense, or the Satanic Panic sense? Or do you mean bizzarro-verse inverse Christian values?

Either way, all the satanic iconography and tropes are basically fanfiction.

The median person thinks of 'satanists' as occultist weirdos dabbling in animal cruelty- and possibly committing serious crimes with human victims. Not the edgy shit made up by a topless bar manager in the 60s. You're correct that it's probably not a go-to insult, but it is not a word with positive, neutral, or even only mildly negative connotations. Normies have a very positive impression of Christianity and biblical values, even if they don't personally practice it.

As in, something that a Saturday morning cartoon villain would say as a shorthand to indicate to the audience "I am evil as I am opposed to your hegemonic cultural values inculcated by centerius of being more or less christian!"

And totally separate from the colloquial meaning of the word; you've got tot talk to more conservative normies. They are Deep in that shit. A majority of the republican parties' voting population (maybe, data is fuzzy here) are committed believers in the red skin horns on head spaded tail actual DEVIL, it doesn't matter that it's all fanfiction, it's real to them.

Formerly niche high IQ movement that went a little mainstream with normies that crashed and burned

What is the implication?

That you are a piece of shit that will take advantage of her and then dip, because you don't respect empathy as a cardinal virtue.

Tell me you have read Aristotle without telling me you haven’t read Aristotle.

I'm my area, the women demand that you are also a leftist and/or communist. Sometimes every single Hinge prompt in their profile is something political.

In my area they are like this but are also frustrated that the men they match with are all burnouts and losers who are unemployable. The blue coastal elite men they desire are at the coasts.

"Why can't I just find someone with an honest blue collar job that's not MAGA?"

They're so close to putting it together.

(I'm a Dem voting blue coastal elite that retired to this town and am enjoying the comedy)

There are functionally no normal blue collar men who are conventional progressives or democrats in any way. Yes, that includes the unions.

The blue coastal elite men they desire are at the coasts.
Why can't I just find someone with an honest blue collar job that's not MAGA?"

“Coastal elite”

“Honest blue collar”

one of these things is not like the other

My interpretation @dr_analog's comment that they want a "Costal Elite" but would be willing to settle for a good-looking guy with an honest job.

The "problem" is that selecting for men with honest jobs means selecting against men who hold luxury beliefs. They may as well be asking "why can't i find a handsome dark-triad bad-boy who wants to settle down with me?

The answer is that these are contradictory desires. Dark-triad bad-boys aren't interested in settling down. And well-adjusted men with honest jobs who are interested in settling down are not going to share their politics.

Do you live in Leningrad?

I haven't been on the apps in a couple years but putting conservative on your profile in any major metro in the West is absolute poison as a guy

Is it? As a guy, don’t you want to differentiate yourself? Better to stand out for 10% of the population compared to be unnoticed by 100%.

You're standing out as a complete autist who doesn't want to get laid. If you're otherwise a 10 it might work but you're gonna struggle immensely otherwise

No, you do not, not in this case. It doesn't particularly stand out as anything other than proof to them that so many men are racist fascist orange man supporters.

Also, apparently listing "moderate" or "not political" are also regarded by women as proof of being a sexist racist transphobic bad person.

I don’t believe that 95% of women that age are progressive. Let’s say 70% are, 10% are neutral, and 20% are on the right.

Why aren’t you increasing your odds on the 20%

Because a conservative woman who isn't already married is a "Pick Me!" who's after hotter guys than me.

Because I don't want to listen to Jesus talk any more than I want to listen to BLM ACAB LGBTQ et cetera talk.

Because I no longer use online dating after going through a summer where 95% of my arranged dates flaked or ghosted me the day of the date, and this included the people I'd met IRL, and the only ones who turned up were obese or had all the personality of wet styrofoam.

Yes this is what the loud majority (minority?) might say. But again you aren’t trying to attract the majority of women. You are trying to attract a small enough set of women to find hopefully a good match.

Yeah. I've literally AB-tested this anything but liberal under politics kills you in large metros

Chicago.

Chicago is awful for this sort of hicklib/post-tumblr politics, but on a dating app you can basically treat it as 20%/80% "I'm cripplingly neurotic and vanishingly unlikely even to go on a date" or "I'm absolutely not relationship material, but play the first date right and I'm coming straight back to yours". You can respond to that signal as is appropriate for your goals.

How is a major metro area "hicklib?"

Hicklib is a state of mind. They're still motivated by a hatred of the podunk chuds they see as surrounding them, and still look up to an ideal of the rainbowed coasts. Many if not most have moved from smaller places in the midwest to Chicago. You even get hicklib transplants in New York and SF, though they usually try to hide it.

Ehh, I found plenty of conservative women in chicago, when I lived there in the late 20-teen/early 2020s, including a date with a straight up neo-nazi adjacent woman. There are a lot of people in the city and even more in the burbs, it's just a numbers and signaling problem.

including a date with a straight up neo-nazi adjacent woman.

I was going to make a comment about you fumbling a win, but then I remembered the one I met who had a swastika and SS bolt tattoos. A man's got to know his limitations.

I fumbled nothing lol. She was interested afterwards, I was not, we wanted a different relationship style. I might have a pathologically open mind but spendapotamuses still trigger a disgust reaction in me.

Edit: neo-nazi in views but not a skinhead or a “baddie” looks wise, she definitely wasn’t the biker bar type.

All the conservative Chicagoland women are in the collar counties and don't use dating apps.

I'm not looking for conservative, I'm looking for someone who doesn't ask me what my pronouns are.

Is she's talking to you, your preferred pronouns are "you/your". If she needs a third person pronoun on the first date, it implies she gossips about first dates, so not a keeper. See, easy.