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We are now in the timeline where the journalistic integrity of the New York Times rests upon whether or not it is physically possible to train a dog to anally rape a human.
The New York Times ran an opinion article by Nicholas Kristof wherein a number of Palestinians report being raped or otherwise sexually assaulted in Israeli prisons. There’s not much in the way of physical evidence, but that is hardly unusual in rape crimes. Israel has strenuously denied the allegations, characterizing them as blood libel. It seems to be a he-said/she-said that comes down to whether you believe the Palestinian prisoners (who often have ties to Hamas or other extremist groups, hence why they ended up in Israeli prisons) or the IDF.
Certain enterprising young pro-Israel influencers think they can to better than appeal to untrustworthiness. They puport to have found a smoking gun that proves the NYT published a complete fabrication in order to libel the State of Israel, and by extension all Jews. One of the more salacious anecdotes regards a man from Gaza who alleges that he was raped by a dog.
If, in fact, such a thing were impossible, then it would prove without doubt that the paper of record recklessly printed unverified falsehoods. We are now in the “doctors arguing with the author about the medical literature” stage of the discourse. See, even though we have documented evidence that dogs can cause rectal injury to humans, in none of those reports was the initial contact involuntary on the part of the human.
I am not well acquainted with dogs, but my understanding is that it is not particularly hard to get them to hump things. I guess the people making this argument are hoping that others won’t want to think too hard about the mechanics of dog rape.
Despite calls and rumors to the contrary, The Times so far has declined to retract the article.
Atrocity propaganda happens in every conflict, but this is so over-the-top it's like something someone would make up for an edgy Internet story.
Can I believe Israelis torture Palestinian prisoners? Yes. Can I believe they might even rape Palestinian prisoners? I'm very skeptical that it's SOP or approved, but I believe it happens. But raping Palestinian prisoners with dogs?
If you spend any time thinking about the mechanics (gods know nobody wants to, but here we are), you'd realize that even a large dog would have trouble mounting an unwilling person, who would have to be pretty thoroughly tied up, and then you'd have to think about how you'd train a dog to do that (yes, a dog will hump anything but you can't generally get them to hump in a particular way on command), and it just gets extremely unlikely. At most, I can imagine them getting a dog to jump on a bound Palestinian prisoner and laughing about it. A whole squad of trained rape-dogs? Come the fuck on.
Dogs are considered particularly unclean by Muslims, so this sounds like either something the Israelis made up as a story to scare Palestinians, or something Palestinians made up as a story about how depraved and evil Israelis are, or both.
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It is kind of interesting how, even with real atrocities, authority figures sympathetic to the victims almost always publish fiction that is more gruesome than reality. The reign of terror was a tragedy, but many of the stories such as republican weddings were false. Similarly, many Holocaust stories told by survivors were fictitious exaggerations of things such as human skin lampposts. You also have right wingers giving demographically impossible overestimates of Stalinist crimes. Over-exaggerating crimes seems universal.
Is there some Israeli abuse of Palestinian prisoners? Probably. Does Israel have a military department solely dedicated to training dogs to rape prisoners? Only in my AI Generated pornographic novel.
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Yeah, one of my first "I have been living in a synthetic Disney World" epiphanies I can recall having is when I was a teenager hanging out with a group of friends at one of their houses, and the host's dog just jumped on one of the guys and started humping him. The host immediately started shouting at the dog, grabbing its collar and trying to pull it off (the dog, not the collar). My first thought was "what kind of crazy dog is this?", immediately overridden by my much-more-rational thought of "wait, maybe this is what all those ads for spaying and neutering services were referring to. This is what animals are actually like when you don't do that!" My next thought was "And why is it doing that to a boy? I was told homosexuality is not natural and never happens except among godforsaken heathen."
Getting your dog fixed doesn't stop them from humping. My female dog, even after being spayed, was still super into humping stuff.
Surely it helps, no? Part of why it was so shocking to me is I'd been around a fair amount of dogs -- my immediate family had two, and I don't recall ever seeing either of them do that, not even to inanimate objects, much less guests. My extended family lives on a farm, and always had 2-4 dogs, and I don't remember seeing this among them, either.
I'm checking with Google now and it insists this is indeed normal for dogs of all breeds and ages. Clearly Google is not familiar with the level of reality-warping power behind the Disney world I was in, because this definitely did not happen, as I remember being repeatedly shocked and repulsed when leaving our bubble and seeing how the heathens' pets behaved.
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Unless you’re just having fun with it this post reads to me as if it’s way, way, way too credulous of the dog-sleights-man.
The question isn’t if a dog could mechanically rape a human being. (Although it would be a moderately disordered dog that would rape a man: what breed are we talking anyways?) The question is if Israeli jailors would sic a dog on their captive with the intent for the dog to rape him. (Actually, how does that work mechanically: did they tie him head down ass up?)
It’s a fairly unusual accusation. It requires e.g. that the Israelis have rape dogs. Which the jailors are willing to use. Without this being exposed in any provable way. Is it possible? Well, sure, technically, but why haven’t I heard of this sort of thing before? Do the Iranians have rapehunds? Did the Nazis sic specially trained dogs on their victims? I don’t recall anything like this in Leviticus. It’s not in Bernal Diaz.
The alternative, much more plausible event: “It didn’t happen. We made it up. It’s not real.” The story was fabricated because it sounded good. The victim hallucinated. Something was lost in translation. A rumor got out of hand. Those are all explanations consistent with everything I’ve ever observed in human nature.
Extradordinary claims require exorbiditrary evidence? It seems much much likelier that people will believe anything bad about Israel than than the dog didn’t even need any peanut butter.
I wouldn't have believed most of the things that happened at Abu Ghraib if there hadn't been pictures of it. Some people will do weird shit if they have the oppurtunity.
Abu Ghraib seemed more like "assholes taking an opportunity to do sadistic shit". Rape dogs seems like the kind of thing you'd need training programs for, with like, budgets and performance evaluations.
The Israeli military uses dogs pretty extensively, this is well documented by non-controversial sources. In the context of a large detention center run by the Israeli military, I'd imagine they are particularly useful to search for contraband like drugs, or to incapacitate combative detainees in a non-lethal manner.
This seems like it could easily be a case of "assholes taking the opportunity to do sadistic shit" especially because they know the Muslim perception of dogs, and therefore it would be even more humiliating and degrading than other forms of sexual assault.
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Yeah, that’s sort of my point. If you want to sexually brutalize male prisoners there’s a wealth of options easily available with a ton of precedent.
The dog thing is obviously designed to be maximally inflammatory to the intended audience; the red / green alliance of islamists and hardcore leftists and their
useful idiots“fellow travelers”.Plus of course anyone already maximally inclined to believe negative things about da joos.
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Woke leftists: "Well we don't know for sure that Hamas raped anyone on October 7th!"
Woke leftists: "OMG can you believe how depraved Israel is???!"
Hard to avoid the conclusion that there's a double standard being applied here.
And these are the same woke leftists who think that Brett Kavanaugh's career should have been derailed on the basis of an allegation of sexual misconduct (completely devoid of direct or circumstantial evidence) being brought against him three decades after it allegedly occurred.
This is exactly what I would expect. Of course both sides do it. "Law and order is good, except jan 6th does not apply."
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There's a whole internet joke about white women liking to have sex with dogs, which is a good sign that it's possible to get dogs to fuck someone without having to look it up myself. And once you get to "horny dogs will fuck humans" level, I'm not sure why its unbelievable that you could train them to do it. Heck, you probably don't even need to train them much, fucking is a natural instinct if they haven't been neutered and tons of animals commit rape. Hell bottlenose dolphins apparently even form rape gangs together. If you believe you can train a dog to chase someone down and hold them in place, why not rape?
That doesn't mean the NYT story is true, but "a dog would never do that" seems like extreme innocence at best. Yeah, a dog would never maul a child to death either I suppose.
It's possible that the internet joke is, uh, false.
Having had and trained dogs before, my suspicion is that male dog on human bestiality cases involve adolescent dogs and that adult males require the stimulation of an ovulating female canine- a quick google search shows that introducing one is de rigeur for canine artificial insemination. 'Dogs trained to rape people' is a standard lefty accusation at regimes they don't like(Pinochet, Israel, etc), but as a particular torture method it seems odd that it crops up in every regime the left is mad at and only regimes the left is mad at, rather than also being eg a Cuban thing.
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Never imagined I'd be posting this on a Wednesday morning, but I think applying the word rape to animal behavior is unnecessarily anthropomorphic. A dog doesn't rape, it just goes with its instincts. Rape is a human term involving consent, etc.
Your comment makes me think now, of when, if ever, will androids gain whatever human qualities are required in order to be capable of raping a human? This seems like a potentially important threshold to cross in the realm of sex bots, given how common rape fantasies are among humans.
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So what date/time would you have imagined?
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In this context, there would pretty clearly be a human involved, so the term seems appropriate.
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I love the argument that dogs have sex with humans, yes, but they can't rape humans because they have an instinctual understanding of the Oberlin model of consent.
You know I always just assumed the vast majority of dog beastiality was like receptive oral where the human smears peanut butter on their genetalia or the dog is the receptive one either vaginally or anally.
I suppose training an adolescent dog to be the one penetrating is possible but it seems extremely difficult; aren’t dog members not nearly as stiff as humans? I don’t know how much anal sex you’ve had but it’s an “out” hole and it fights back more than a bit when compared to a vagina, unless it’s been really “trained up” so to speak.
Someone up thread described this as essentially a blood libel and it seems more likely; dogs are a very specific Arab / Muslim taboo so it smells like a maximally offensive myth made specifically to inflame an already maximally uncharitable audience primed to believe basically anything.
To my mind it reminds me of the 19th century Indian revolt against the British Empire. One of the precursors was a rumor spread amongst Indians serving as auxiliaries that the rifle cartridges were stored in beef fat. And crucially for my point, they told the Muslims that they were stored in pork fat. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, eh?
Plus, if you wanted to sexually brutalize prisoners there’s a lot easier ways to do it. We got a ton of examples of this.
Ironically this reminds me a bit of that old /pol/ bit about holocaust survivors talking about nazis freezing Jews with dry ice and putting them on mine carts so that they smash into a million pieces looney toons style. Way too baroque to be true but the ones spinning the yarn are given maximum charity due to their “victim” status.
The “Dogs raping prisoners” schtick is a double blood libel as well as it’s a pretty standard lefty canard against any unfavorable regime; I believe the same accusations were leveled against Pinochet, Franco, the Greek Military Junta, etc, etc. usually the CIA is invoked, as is tradition.
A final point; this to me is also illustrative of how certain sexual topics that are politically explosive are difficult to discuss because people are understandably reluctant to engage with the mechanics of the subject. I think for example the backlash against LGBQT ideology only could grow because increasing numbers of people were willing to frankly describe, outside of the gatekeepers eye, the physical acts being performed routinely in great detail. The rest followed.
I don't like that we're describing every accusation as a blood libel now. I'm not a fan of creeping woke rhetorical norms.
The doctor above objected that while they had seen cases of dogs anally penetrating humans, it was always consensual. This is an absurd assertion: the dog has no concept of consent.
I remain blissfully ignorant on the practicality of this entire episode.
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