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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
If you think something's a Gish Gallop, show at least one claim that the "gish gallop" made that is false. If you think you can show a post is bad, respond to the post. If you're making a top-level post to complain about another poster's behavior, ping them.
If you think a post has no through-line, at least try think harder about it than a 12B quantized LLM (Gemma4-12B). I actually ran this test before posting (caveat: deleted original chat, this is remade now) so as to make sure I was being sufficiently clear.
If you have good examples of the same process starting from lies from the right, I'd be interested in examples, but everything I could find was either fairly distant history (Iraq War), very arguable (exactly how true the 'defund the police' mechanism was versus not continuing increases), or just stupid (peace in middle east).
I like the way you structured the post and I think it felt more honest than posting them as three separate topics.
Your post was "here is the pattern I'm noticing, here are the data points, here is what I think of the pattern". If you claim to notice the pattern after just posting one or maybe even two incidents the responses are likely to be "these are isolated incidents". If you try to get everyone to notice the pattern just by posting one of these stories every week or so for months on end then you risk people get annoyed with you "get off your hobby horse" and it defeats the purpose of this place being able to speak plainly.
@EverythingIsFine Having specific incidents to discuss is fine. But being able to have meta discussions is also useful. This post you are discussing allowed for both types of conversation.
@stolen_brawnze I'd generally suggest people not worry too much about the meta-health of themotte discussion forum. It especially should not be a reason to complain to someone who is improving the discussion.
Thank you for the charity, but I’m being selfish. I want more comments to read while I’m bored at my desk!
I stand behind this:
Maybe the interaction is more draining than the initial effort. If I write a controversial post I usually spill three - five times more words defending it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think you should put each topic in its own top post.
Because bruh. Why are you trying to corral all discussion led by you into one thread? We have an issue where we can go 24+ hours without another top-level thread, and you were withholding three of them to save for one post? I don't understand why you do it like that. It's what I imagine you would do if for some reason you wanted to minimize the amount of interaction you get for all that effort.
I enjoyed reading it. I'm not as convinced by the "through-line" justification.
That's more fair. The more serious justification's that we've had a number of topics, both political and non-political, where a common rejoinder was that an individual small case was not meaningful in some way, the large case not representative, and the attempt to connect them after being 'called out' on it mere retrofitting. Where my examples clearly stand on their own, I'll write them individually, cfe 3d Printers or Legos or furry cancelation. I'm not sure that the fair booth example would be worth a standalone post even in the Bare Link Repository era.
I also specifically don't want to be the type of person that optimizes for interactions. I'm probably overcompensating on 'don't get braincored', but the failure mode is dire enough I'd rather risk that.
But fair. And there's a good example coming out of Louisiana that might serve as a test case, if I have time to write it up later this week.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link