site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 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 seem to recall left-wingers and Democrats criticising CHAZ, for instance, while it existed.

Name a single elected official at the federal level or high ranking unepected party member that did this.

(And to preempt the accusations of moving the goalposts obviously I didn't mean twitter randos, it's possible to find some of those saying nearly anything no matter how zany)

Yes, it's of course trivially easy to find left-wingers in general criticising it at the time. Plenty of outright communists, even, criticised it as bad praxis. So in the broadest sense, the statement that I made is correct.

You've now narrowed the claim. I don't think that's bad faith, since setting goalposts is necessary, but you did just narrow it to federal elected official, which is a significantly narrower category than 'Democrat'. I do not have an example of a federal elected Democrat who took a strong stance opposing it. My read is that this was mostly polarisation - Republicans were strongly condemning it, and Democrats generally don't want to say the same things as Republicans. Since in this case they had the option of dodging the question by saying it's a local matter, they took it.

For local Democrats, well, they eventually sent in the police and shut it down, but I'm guessing you wouldn't count anything from Jenny Durkan or any of the police?

Yes, it's of course trivially easy to find left-wingers in general criticising it at the time. Plenty of outright communists, even, criticised it as bad praxis. So in the broadest sense, the statement that I made is correct.

Are you sure about this? That's not how I remember it. From what I recall mainstream Democrats circled the wagons around it, and the only communists that criticized it as bad praxis were /r/stupidpol types that routinely got called nazis themselves.

Well, looking at Reddit, I noticed threads like this. That's from June 15, about a week into CHAZ's existence, but prior to the murders that I think turned most people against it. There's also this one from the 18th, again early on but prior to the shootings. Also consider this from the 11th, which is mostly communists pointing and laughing at the anarchists.

I think the responses can roughly be split into three camps: 1) CHAZ is great, I'm thrilled, 2) interesting idea, wait and see, 3) pointless, it'll do nothing. (There are also, as far as I can tell, a few non-communists who jump on to criticise, but I'm not counting them here.)