site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8771 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 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.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

It's neutral vs conservative all the way down.

One of the major issues for aware independents/neutrals is that while Blues are doing this while they are in power, can Reds offer any evidence that they wouldn't do the same? The Reds clearly had the power in the 1980s and used it to do pretty much the same thing the Blues are doing now. They used the federal government to write laws to ban behaviors that they felt were morally incorrect, to punish organizations in the outgroup. Is there any evidence that the Red tribe has learn the bitter lesson? Or once they dismantle the Blue-tribe institutions with the help from independents, will they immediately turn on those allies for being sinners and go back to instituting their own class of authoritarian ideals, now with an extra helping of zero-sum power politics?

What did the Reds do in the 1980’s? Is this the war on drugs or banning some swearing? I guess we had LATAM commie death squads but that seemed like both sides were down.

Moral Majority. I'd go so far as to say a lot of the anti-conservative/anti-religious reaction today by the progressives is due to generational trauma inflicted by overzealous authoritarianism by the moral majority. Notice how most of it is not economic leftism but cultural leftism, the moral majority was authoritarian cultural rightism.

The moral majority also made a lot of people from Boomers to Millennials, incapable of even conceiving of the left as authoritarian. Gen Z having never experienced it seems a lot more comfortable pushing back against woke excess.

I wonder if its incapability or if has just created such a psychological scar that they perpetually view themselves as the underdog. A lot of ink has been spilled on the weird prog belief, that even as they control much of the establishment, they still genuinely see themselves as the underdog fighting the system. Part of that is undoubtedly the revolutionary marxism, but I wonder how much of it is scarring from the moral majority?

Yeah I predict Gen Z having experienced a decade+ of Leftwing Authoritarianism will swing rightward in the cultural direction while also being leftwing/populist in the economic direction as a direct consequence of their upbringing.

I guess I agree with the policies they want. But do you actually think they are the same as what we saw 2014-2024? Sure they did politics. And I could see how someone would find them annoying. But SPLC would basically ban you from the internet, maybe take away your job. Annoying family value rallies just doesn’t seem like the same thing.

I mean the internet didn't exist in the 70s and 80s. Considering the Moral Majority engaged in cancel culture at a similar levels as the Woke/SJW, I imagine, if it did exist the Moral Majority would have wasted no time in cancelling you on the internet. The Moral Majority did try to take away your job...

The Right passed actual laws in the 70s and 80s that banned gay people from teaching in public schools, or even someone advocating gay rights in public outside of school contexts. And there were the FCC crackdowns on indecent content, e.g. Howard Stern, the Helms Amendment.

There was also quite the panic around video games, movies, music, and board games, though that was admittedly bipartisan. I remember one teacher I had freaking out because I was reading one of those choose your own adventure books, which she associated with Dungeons and Dragons for some reason.

Did you ever feel like your fellow Americans hated you? Maybe I’m being histrionic but I guess 2016-2024 I just need knew fellow Americans were capable of doing things they did to me then. Like evil. The America I grew up with was united. Muslims hit us and we would all go kill them together. But 2016-2024 we were enemies with each other. It’s like losing my innocent. A civil war I never saw coming. And it honestly feels like we almost lost and America was over.

Did you ever feel like your fellow Americans hated you? Maybe I’m being histrionic but I guess 2016-2024 I just need knew fellow Americans were capable of doing things they did to me then. Like evil. The America I grew up with was united. Muslims hit us and we would all go kill them together. But 2016-2024 we were enemies with each other. It’s like losing my innocent. A civil war I never saw coming. And it honestly feels like we almost lost and America was over.

I'm not american, but welcome to how atheists (and gays, and so on) felt under the moral-majority-style religious right. It was the same kind of split were the moderate religious right was publicly saying not believing was fine, but they were actively politically allying (and thus empowering) a more rabid wing that would regularly go after people who do something that goes against their beliefs. Like, it's fine to be an atheist, as long as you don't do anything that might offend random christian activists.

To be fair, the woke actually still feels worse to me since it has more internal institutional backing inside academia, but there definitely is some symmetry here.

Your argument would be stronger if you focused on gays instead of atheists. I have no recollection of atheists facing any discrimination. I can 100% understand they thought the moral majority people were annoying but there are not any big everyday life frictions.

Gay potentially. But they did successfully lobby to keep gay bath houses open, during the AIDS pandemic. So they were not lacking political power.

I am also moral majority. Don’t be gay. It’s bad for you. Just find a nice wife.

Don’t be gay. It’s bad for you. Just find a nice wife.

You don't need to save me or anyone else, we don't want you to. Just live your own life. Other people being gay does not affect you.

I can imagine to an actual gay person hearing comments like that feels a lot like your fellow Americans hating you.

More comments

Yeah, you're really not helping my impression here. Progressives literally say 100% the same. It's fine to be a conservative religious, as long as you're like one of the good ones in their tv shows who lives a conservative lifestyle and is spiritual in some undefined way, but who doesn't actually espouse any conservative values nor seems to have strong specific religious convictions, either. And certainly doesn't "spread hate" about trans people, or "threatens reproductive rights" or whatever.

It's true in a sense, you can mostly live life just fine as a religious conservative as long as you don't trigger random progressive activists.

More comments

I was more late 90s and 2000s, and the closest I got to feeling hated was around the Iraq War, when I was vocally anti-war in a time when everyone supported it, in what we would now call a red state (back then, the blue-vs-red framing barely existed).

I would say I feel more hated now than I did then; my politics are the same, but my visible identities create negative reactions (and my invisible ones--like being bi--I don't advertise).

Or once they dismantle the Blue-tribe institutions with the help from independents, will they immediately turn on those allies for being sinners and go back to instituting their own class authoritarian ideals, now with an extra helping of zero-sum power politics?

Obviously, which is why the most liberal times in American history come when either Blue is busy destroying Red institutions, or vice versa (or there's an economic boom which distracts everyone; you can't deploy cancel culture lists when people [and in particular cities] are so desperate for workers it doesn't matter at all what their political persuasion is).

Once one side starts consolidating things get bad, which is why 2014-2024 in particular were especially fucked.

This is why independents are the way they are: it's more about Noticing when one side is starting to accumulate enough power to pull this off, and [trying their best] to deal with them. And whether that best is good enough or not generally depends more on economic factors than anything else.

I think this is an interesting thought. Like a trace that economic need/prosperity requires cooperation among a larger subsection of the populace, but once a threshold is achieved, the luxury beliefs of intra-tribal warfare resurges until at which point all the economic surplus is consumed starting the cycle over again.

Of course we would, there's no constituency for classical liberalism. But ask yourself- do you prefer school prayer, or school secret gender transitions?

I view them as equal levels of bullshit. The fact that you think one is worse than the other is the point. You think the Red's way is the lesser of two evils.

You don't think one is worse than the other?

I understand you aren't a big fan of prayer in public schools, and probably not Christianity more generally. But if one is an atheist, then following along politely with the Our Father once per day is not a big ask, not in the way that 'the school can arbitrarily change my child's gender' is.

The difference is that underage gender transition will only affect a vanishingly small proportion of the underage population, while school prayer affects everyone. There's a difference between being pissed of about what other people's kids do and what your own kids are forced to do.

and what your own kids are forced to do

Ah, but [my kids] are forced to affirm a lie (as in, that a man magically becomes a woman because he donned fake breasts and cut his penis off), in exactly the same way, and for the same reasons, as it is for State religions. The school will punish them for blasphemy misgendering if they do not.

Naturally, for those who believe in that, especially for those who draw a salary from that belief, it's just Common Decency.

Naturally, for those who believe in that, especially for those who draw a salary from that belief, it's just Common Decency.

This is the biggest issue, both sides feel that they are just right and need to save others from poor behavior or bad decisions when its not asked for. The can't recognize that their beliefs are not the one-true reality.

There's a difference between being pissed of about what other people's kids do and what your own kids are forced to do.

At the risk of channeling WhiningCoil, that implies that the progressive version stops at other people's kids. Even ignoring for now the difficult question of how consenting a 13-year-old getting browbeaten by the educational system gets, there's no shortage of directly compelled pro-transgender speech that the state has been quite happy to mandate in schools, and an even broader set that the schools 'don't mandate' they just punish anyone that doesn't go with.

Much of the worry about the school gender crap is precisely worry about what your own kids are being groomed to do.

To be clear you are clearly biasing the framing towards your viewpoint.

To me you asked me:

  • Would you rather your kids be forced to give a little Sig Heil in the morning and have the school teach them why being gay, crippled, jewish, romani, black, not white and straight is evil and should be killed for the betterment of the community

Or

  • Would you rather your kids be forced to recite the communist manifesto and have the school teach them why being a dirty selfish capitalist is the root of all evil in the world, and if they don't share everything or report on people, including their parents, to the state then they are anti-revolutionary and thus evil.

long politely with the Our Father once per day

Yes a polite Sig Heil is not a big ask.

'the school can arbitrarily change my child's gender' is.

Have you tried not oppressively forcing your child to adhere to evil capitalist notions that people are not all inherently created equally?

Your conception of the prayer vs gender pronouns is hysterically biased. It's never just a polite "oh father" just like its never just a polite "please use they/them". Give an inch and everyone takes a mile.

In practice we kinda do know what religion in schools looks like(and it’s not the handmaid’s tale)Christian schools are a dime a dozen.

Private Christian Schools are a dime a dozen. You know the kind that selects for parents who want to send their children to a Christian school in the first place? If you don't like Christian practices, then you can easily remove your child from the private school. If you like the other benefits then you can weigh your distaste against them.

In practice we kinda do know what progressive schools look like, and its not 24/7 Groomers, pedos, and gender transitions. Just because you have a personal distaste for one over the other doesn't mean there isn't symmetry. In my eyes, you are standing in a glass house and trying to justify why you should be allowed to throw stones. Every argument you make against progressive schools can just be flipped and applied to Christian schools. In part because progressivism is just derived from Christianity and holds similar memetic characteristics, but also because its a totalizing belief system than for some reason requires you to force it on others who don't want it.

Everyone would eventually do this given the ability. It’s in the nature of humans to form hierarchy and enforce their ideas of morality on society. It’s been that way for most of human history. I don’t think we’re that different.

It’s in the nature of humans to form hierarchy and enforce their ideas of morality on society. It’s been that way for most of human history.

Which is why we must never rest on our laurels and assume that liberalism has decisively won. We must always be on the lookout for those who seek to turn this world into a penitentiary and themselves into warders. We must maintain CONSTANT VIGILANCE!!!

Damn why does this sound so much like revolutionary Marxism... Yes! Comrade the subversive illiberals must be rooted out before they poison the discourse! Vigilance must be maintainted!

Sure, but is not history evidence that WEIRD Anglo's enforced a classical liberalism morality that strongly emphasized a "fuck you stop bothering me" morality. Seems to me that it won so hard that people are like fish: they aren't even aware they have it until its gone. People are slowly waking up to that fact, and currently are re-inventing all the sectarian conflicts that lead to that morality even emerging.

Maybe people should stop being barely evolved apes and actually just grow up.

I mean other than trying to conquer the entire planet, sure. It’s kinda strange that Anglos invented the idea of conquest for liberal democracy.

I think giving Anglo's the credit/blame for inventing the idea of conquest to be a bit nonsensical. And I'd say classical liberalism and democracy are two separate things. I'd go further and argue that democracy actually exacerbates that weakness/failure of classical liberalism. The crowd is always dumb, and there is nothing dumb people like more than dopamine triggering behaviors. The failure of democracy is that it provides a means to allow such easy thrills to be indulged, provided by the state. And what thrill is more primal, more intrinsic to human nature, and more destructive to communities than intra-tribal warfare.

Universal Suffrage has pretty much fucked us.

As moderate evidence, the fact that the Reds tolerated this behavior from people who were often open insurrectionists acting in accord with a hostile foreign power. Just saying, we live in a world where a third of academics refuse to tolerate the hiring of colleagues they consider to be right-wing, no matter how qualified. If Reds were willing to act the same, Bill Ayers would still be rotting in a prison instead of teaching Education at Columbia and communist sympathies would be as much of a hiring black mark as Nazi sympathies.

See I am increasingly cynical that this is not a Red vs Blue split but an Elites vs Proles split. While a case could be made on the sanctity of freedom of speech, to me this looks like the Red Elites not punishing the Blue Elites so that they won't be punished in return. The common man still gets fucked by the laws. The common gay/lesbian was still barred from marriage, Abortion was still banned, Porn is still trying to be banned, DnD was still shunned as devil worship. The rich/elites didn't have to worry about any of these "laws" because they were rich/elite. Evidence of them being exempt is about as convincing as rich blues being exempt from DEI and woke-shit.

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