site banner

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.

3
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Things work in tendencies and on the margins. I thought that would be common sense for anyone here. If literature is marginally more entertaining to young males than they are now, then the boys for whom not-books was one epsilon more entertaining than books will shift over, this causing a higher proportion of boys to read. This is baseline for how ALL population-wide phenomena of personal choices works.

The fact that there are boys right now who read for fun and balance reading and video games for fun is about as strong proof as possible that there are boys on these margins. Resorting to some argument from personal incredulity of some version of "X can't POSSIBLY be made to tear kids away from Y due to A, B, C" when we currently see current versions of X doing just that - just to a lesser extent than would be equal - is a way of conceding the argument entirely.

Yes, as I said, I'm aware that's the one-size-fits-all prescription hereabouts. Similarly, I bet the tankies think flouting capitalism would solve the reading crisis and the NIMBYs think stricter zoning couldn't hurt. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

You make no point here, though. The point is that when you see a metal object with a flat head and a pointy end in a box that says "nails" on it, then you can most likely accurately call it a nail. The ideology in question has overtly taken over literature and other fictional media with the explicit intention of appealing more to females and less to males. Maybe they're so incompetent that all their efforts have no effect, but certainly just turning off their explicit pushing-away-males strategy is something one ought to consider when thinking about how to attract males.

More generally, if someone is failing to accomplish something, then the possibility of burning down whatever ideology got them there has to be considered a reasonable possibility. That this isn't one of the first thoughts to occur indicates a lack of desire to accomplish this. Which is also fine, but it's important to be clear that it's entirely due to a lack of desire, not due to a lack of ability (the ability might be lacking, but anyone who claims that we have meaningful evidence that it is is someone who hasn't been paying attention the last 20 years).

Right, and I am saying that just like the tankie's totalizing hatred of "capitalism" (by which he means partly that one asshole boss he hated, partly a media caricature of fat-cat cigar-chomping Gilded Age CEOs), the similarly vague tribalist loathing of "feminism" (=Twitter Karen memes plus that one insufferable lady in HR) is leading people to get the causal arrows very obviously twisted here.

But when the "Karens" are explicitly, overtly saying that they're going into these industries specifically to make them appeal relatively more to females (definitionally appeal relatively less to males), then the causal arrow is very obviously consistent with what I'm claiming.

Furthermore, when we're dealing with an ideology that is specifically unpopular among the demographic we're talking about - i.e. feminism doesn't have a good reputation among young men, relatively - it makes perfect sense that if one had the intent of appealing to that demographic more, then reducing the presence of the totalizing ideology that has taken over the industry is a pretty obvious simple step that's at least worth considering, if not actually trying out.

To use another analogy: if CEO income has increased, and also homelessness has also increased around company headquarters, and both of those things make you sad and annoyed, that still does not mean that "capitalism" is the ideology that "got us there," or that CEO delenda est would restore any meaningful number of homeless guys to happy productive lives in tidy little cottages of their own.

If capitalism was an ideology whose principles and whose strongest, most influential proponents were explicitly, overtly calling for increasing CEO income at the cost of increasing homelessness, you might have a point. But it isn't. The actual specifics of these concepts matter; you can't just swap some labels around an argument, show that that version doesn't make sense, and claim that that demonstrates that the original doesn't.

Furthermore, if someone had a plausible argument for why capitalism necessarily results in more CEO income at the cost of more homelessness, then it would absolutely be incumbent on anyone who wanted to reduce homelessness (or lower CEO income or both) to consider burning capitalism to the ground as one of the steps in a potential solution. Otherwise, they would be obviously an ideologue who prioritizes ideological commitments over actual meaningful goals and thus has no credibility in judging possible solutions.

EDIT: As for that superstimuli and vices business, if you're claiming that such things have some quality about them that makes them immune to margins and trends, and that modern video games fit into that, those are a couple of extraordinary claims. We live in a world where, right now, millions, possibly billions, of people are balancing superstimuli and vices like video games, gambling, heroin, meth, porn, cheesecake, etc. with their everyday responsibilities and also other non-superstimuli entertainment (e.g. chatting with a friend, going to a park, watching a baseball game) in a functional way, despite having near-trivial access to these superstimuli/vices at their fingertips. This points to the idea that superstimuli and vices are things that vast swathes of the population are capable of managing in their everyday lives, such that they're not purely slaves to it, i.e. they can modulate their use of it based on the potential consequences. If they can modulate it, then there will be a marginal effect from affecting their positive/negative qualities relative to alternatives.