site banner
PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   20558 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 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
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Yeah but this is retarded since having all of those values at roughly the degrees that makes them equivalent to your 2020s medium-Left player makes him a massive outlier from the social norms of his day

Let's say in the heroes story, over the course of a thousand years we have one million people who tried to fight against the dragon and failed. Is it an outlier that our story has the one guy who wins? Yes. His story gets told because he's the outlier of the world. And of all of the potential worlds with stories to tell, this world was done because the hero is likeable and had an Epic Quest with Adventure and Challenges, rather than just an easy time beating the dragon and then living a normal life. This potential story world is may be an outlier of worlds, but it is the one being told.

That is the selection effect of storytelling, and complaints about "oh but that's rare or unlikely!" just fundamentally doesn't get that basically every good story, even realistic ones, falls into that. Even the ones that try to be about normal everyday people in everyday situations are typically more interesting lives than the typical everyday person actually has.

You could have an open-minded, fairness-driven Arthur Morgan by the standards of his day who was a 'good guy', but he's still going to have a vocabulary and assumptions that are still going to shock and appall the playerbase.

Now it's true that he'll probably be going around saying some words that were considered normal at the time that we in the modern era now consider to be slurs, but vocabulary changes and RDR2 is not unique. Stories about the far future don't have an English (if they even speak it millions of years from now) completely unrecognizable from ours. A story set in 1500s France will still inexplicably have them speaking modern English (or whatever the dub language is in) and stories about the past like RDR2 also do this.

It's not just things like slurs and swears, tons of words shift in meaning overtime. "awful" means bad now instead of "full of awe" so characters mean it to use something is bad. "Gay" of course meant to be happy or carefree. "Artificial" used to have a more positive nuance to it. "Propaganda" didn't gain the negative connotation to it till after the world wars. There are tons and tons of other examples you can find, because vocabulary shifts naturally like that. Writers aren't going to accurately portray how people really talked back then, they're going to portray how the character would seem to be talking in modern dialects transposed onto the time period.

You aren't going to hear "He was a silly, awful, and gay man who regularly engages in intercourse" to mean "He was a harmless, inspiring and happy man who regularly partakes in social conversations" in most modern dialogue.

I mean I guess your argument is that 'John Marsden is a fairly liberal guy relative to the other characters of RDR2, meaning that since we're transposing the language into the modern lens that he should become a fairly liberal guy in the modern context and therefore be pushing a bunch of social stuff that'd be absolutely alien to his period'.

I find that kind of absurd. Whilst Marsden isn't a historical figure, I feel equivalently about if somebody had say Martin Luther King Jr attending a pride parade or William Wilberforce enthusiastically encouraging his daughter to date a black person. You can be overwhelmingly progressive by the standards of your milieu but you're not going to automatically leap through time to 2020 mores. I'm not even saying this from some sort of torrid desire to 'cancel' historical progressive figures

they're going to portray how the character would seem to be talking in modern dialects transposed onto the time period

Yes, but what they're doing is also transposing modern attitudes onto the time period, and that's the problem. Okay, it's a silly, fun game that makes no pretensions to historical accuracy, so having a bunch of thieves and swindlers who would never do a bad, awful thing like use a slur is fine. Shoot a guy dead for the fifty cents in his pocket? Sure! Call him a [bad no-no name]? Heavens to Betsy, no nay never!

Yeah. Like I'm pretty sure if the average 2020 moderate-left Woke person met people they literally idolized like Martin Luther King or Lincoln or Mansa Musa or anybody from Palestine they'd rather quickly run into a wall of 'wait this person has their own moral compass and cultural context and is saying no-no things'.

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