site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 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.

2
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I think the screenshot link needs to be this to work. Do you mind spelling out where is the 71% coming from?

But yeah, this has been a long-standing problem, and not one specific to the UK. There's also a tendency for people to get marked as white who... well, I'm not great at telling race, but it doesn't take a lot of effort for these examples. You can even get progressives to admit it happens when it's useful to their arguments. And then on top of that, many jurisdictions outright try to avoid convictions that could have immigration consequences, so two people with the same actual bad behavior might get marked down into different categories based on what their recorded race is.

I don't want to go to full radical skepticism on the numbers, here, but it's hard to take the public numbers seriously.

Do you mind spelling out where is the 71% coming from?

In the article it's labelled "Fig. 6", and it's for all convictions, not just sex crimes.

I think the screenshot link needs to be this to work

How did you get the correct link?

In the article it's labelled "Fig. 6", and it's for all convictions, not just sex crimes.

Ah, thanks. I glossed over that one. That's... a lot more of a discrepancy than I would have expected.

How did you get the correct link?

The raw text is https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_%21JrTm%21,w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdf803be8-5743-4154-be73-d753d4d02a59_1725x394.png, but the https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_%21JrTm%21,w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/ block is a helper that probably only works in combination with other code (javascript?) on the substack webpage proper.

The real CDN location is the https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdf803be8-5743-4154-be73-d753d4d02a59_1725x394.png block, but it has some URL-encoded characters. %3A is a :, and %2F is /. If you don't want to manually decode it, there's a bunch of web pages that will do the change for you.

Thanks, I'll amend the links when I get home.