site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7894 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 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
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Some would go even further and describe Woke 1.0 as the "political correctness" movement in the 1990s.

...or the "New Left" of the 60's, or various far-left movements in early 20th century Europe from Spain to Russia, and and so on and so on, probably until the French Revolution, if not before...

I see the tendency to group the Woke with such things like the 60s left or the French Revolution, but I don't think that quite captures it. Woke is actually just the latest iteration of identity-based tribalism. 10,000 years ago, it might have simply been "Grog looks like he's one of those guys from the tribe across the river; let's kill him and steal his stuff," and 300 years ago, it might have been "X people intrinsically belong in chains due to their nature, while Y people like me intrinsically belong to the ruling class above them due to our nature," and today, it's "X people have been oppressed by Y people throughout history; therefore, individuals who belong to groups X and Y deserve privileges/disadvantages to counteract this historical effect, which we know as a FACT had some unfair and unjust effect in the lives of these specific individuals." People have been coming up with rationales for why unfairly discriminating against people they dislike is actually virtuous and even obligatory forever, only changing up the rationales based on what the current population would be receptive to. Wokeness is the version that's been most perfectly evolved for modernity.

A major difference between woke and the other identity-based tribalisms is that it is adopted and promulgated by members of the hated tribe. Big difference between "Whitey is the enemy" coming from Stokely Carmichaeel and "Whitey is the enemy" coming from e.g. Stephen King.

Yes, I think enabling this via the use of pseudoscientific language around things like "systemic racism" and "privilege" and all those other terms is the great innovation of Wokeness in updating bog-standard tribalism to a Modern Audience who would reject something that was overtly purely based around selfishness. The gloss of the false claim that The Science - which is objective and universal and True - supports Wokeness is what allowed such naked, self-serving tribalism to appear just not-tribal enough to fit into the egos of people who consider themselves beyond good and evil above all the old tribal nonsense due to their modern, enlightened sensibilities.

While one can easily situate wokeness in a lineage with historic leftist/progressive movements, I think nineties political correctness (with its fixation on identity politics organised around race, sex and sexuality) has so much overlap with the wokeness of 2010s that it's fair to consider it a recurrence of the exact same ideology, rather than an offshoot, or a distinct ideology that shares a common ancestor. Consider the use of the term "rape culture" in that clip: it's the exact same vocabulary, the exact same preoccupations. It isn't hard to find earlier examples of uncontroversially leftist movements which were explicitly not feminist (e.g. just pull up a quote about women by literally any Black Panther of note). My guess is that when we get woke 2.0 3.0 4.0, it'll be pronouns-in-bio, "we acknowledge this meeting is held on unceded Pawnee land" all over again. If the next ascendant thing in progressivism is something radically different (e.g. centred on class consciousness and wealth expropriation), then while it'll still be left, it won't be woke.

While one can easily situate wokeness in a lineage with historic leftist/progressive movements, I think nineties political correctness (with its fixation on identity politics organised around race, sex and sexuality) has so much overlap with the wokeness of 2010s that it's fair to consider it a recurrence of the exact same ideology rather than an offshoot.

Yeah, but I'm saying the 90's were themselves a recurrence. For example, this:

Instead, the task for socialist feminists is to develop a cultural marxism that can adequately explain the intricate interactions of the oppressions of race, class, and sex; a cultural marxism that helps give a clearer articulation of our various voices: feminist, black, chicano, Native American, Asian, male, female, gay, lesbian, heterosexual; a cultural marxism which understands human needs-family, ritual, religion, sex, fun, insanity, pain, fear and so on.

Was written in the 80's, and the obsession with identity seems to already have been in place, and the author was not the one who came up with the idea either.

In the other comment you put forward a hypothetical of Nazism being defeated, but not condemned in the same way we do it now. I think one of the effects of that would be what we're seeing here - the ideas periodically resurfacing under a new coat of paint, and the old iterations being forgotten.

That's a fair point. Which leads me to wonder – what's the absolute earliest ideological movement which could be characterised as "woke" in a way people in the 2010s would recognise as such?

The easy mode answer is for wokes to list off Martin Luther King, the abolition of slavery, Mary Wollstonecraft etc. I'm looking for the hard mode answer.

An early example of an insufferable SJW twat wielding real power was Danish physician, philosopher and regent Johann Friedrich Struensee (1737–1772).

The defining feature of woke is the Omnicause, so third wave feminism is the obvious thing to point to.

Right, there’s black supremacists who believe in woke narratives about race, not woke because of their views of women/palestine/the concept of gender. Theres TERFs, actual feminists, not woke because of their beliefs about sex/gender and because they don’t care about Palestine or race. Etc, etc.

07mk upthread mentionned the French Revolution as something people sometimes mistakenly compare to woke, but I think there's definitely significant parallels; a liberation movement (so a "noble" cause, har har har) that devolved into purity spirals and witch hunts. You have the same obsession with redefining the language to erase the traces of the past. I, of course, don't need to be told, I'm just a decent human being who celebrates "holidays" in early Nivôse.

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