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 -
So here is a macabre tragicomedy that happened in Tuscon, Arizona:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/01/tucson-police-gay-bar-shooting
What is omitted in the article is that one of the victims was very active in the Pro Palestine movement. The perp is from Gambia which is 90+ percent Muslim.
What is interesting is how an such an event is absolutely not making any news. I know that this is extremely contested match in the oppression Olympics - but it seems to me that the mainstream media has decided to bury such stories, even though they happen way more often.
Yeah, from what I understand, hate crime attacks against gay and trans people tend to be perpetrated by blacks and/or Muslims. In fact I am a little surprised that the Guardian provided the name of the alleged shooter and didn't simply refer to him as an "Arizona man."
But anyway, I tend to go with Steve Sailer's idea that there is a "coalition of the fringes" and these types of incidents need to be downplayed (or deflected) in order to keep the coalition together.
In the case of black hate crimes against the alphabet soup, these are mostly not actual hate crimes- they're interpersonal disputes with annoying people used to using their identities as a shield, one of whom has a culture that glorifies low level personal violence.
Seems unlikely to be the case here, though, given
unless you surmise that he had an interpersonal dispute with several such businesses, and making a list and checking it twice is within the definitional range of low level personal violence. To begin with, a Gambian Muslim is hardly a central example of a black person in the USA.
More options
Context Copy link
FWIW I was referring to actual hate crimes in the sense that the victim genuinely is being targeted due to their being gay, trans etc.
Don’t get me started. Here’s 90 percent of “hate crimes”:
For whatever reason, this discussion has turned into a semantic argument over how the phrase "hate crime" should be interpreted. Which is an interesting question, and I am certainly open to the possibility that the concept of a hate crime is overbroad.
That being said, my point is narrower. I am saying that in the West, when a gay person is targeted because that person is gay; or if a trans person is targeted because that person is trans, there is a significantly better than otherwise random chance that the attacker was black or Muslim. To be clear, I don't have any statistics to back this up, it's just based on my general observations and common sense.
A likely example of the type of crime I have in mind is the crime which is under discussion here, i.e. a shooting at a gay bar and the alleged perpetrator is apparently in possession of a list of gay-oriented businesses.
I’m sorry, I actually had meant to reply to another poster, and I was mostly trying got vent my spleen. The incident you described does sound much more like the type of incident one would think of as a hate crime.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It looks like the statute says ten years.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well I was referring to assaults which wouldn't have happened had the victim been normal. Most black on weirdo crimes are triggered by the weirdo pulling the same shit they always do on someone who expects to be able to use physical violence in response.
Yes. That is called a hate crime. Such crimes are considered particularly heinous because they, in addition to the harm inflicted on the direct victim, also act as a terroristic threat to other members of the targeted group: "Know your place, or this will happen to you!".
And is that something that harms anyone, or rises to the level of harassment? Or is it just 'existing in a way that wasn't part of what I learned when I was little'?
As far as I can tell, these things are mostly either a) high risk activities(like streetwalker whoring etc) or b) serious social norm violations that are cast as the fault of the noticer(using the women's locker room while having a penis etc). Blacks are more willing to escalate to interpersonal violence in disputes, and circus freak genders definitely have a contingent which just gets up in arms at requests to be normal.
Hate crimes are prosecuted separately as part of normal imperial peace keeping policies. They are not particularly heinous for intimidation reasons, because many of these groups are entirely capable of defending themselves(blacks certainly are)- but just letting them defend themselves is not keeping the peace. The Romans and the Ottoman empire had separate courts for intergroup conflict. The US is not an exception.
The difference is in the U.S. the (erstwhile?) dominant view was a Pauline view that there is no Jew or Greek; only an American. Thus the idea of inter group conflict is irrational as it is all intragroup violence which is the same.
The USA is late in the transition from republic to empire; the prince who was promised will reconcile MAGA and BLM theories to create a more peacekeeping, intergroup governance in the core predicated upon Latin American tribute(in the form of commodities and labor) and international dominance keeping finance onshore to provide the revenue to occasionally bail out the economy from fiscal irresponsibility bombs. This will coincide with transactional, devolved government at the price of reduced public input on the government. You know, pluralism doesn't mean democracy.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This argument proves too much. Crazy people fighting on the street are assaults which wouldn't have happened had the victim been normal (to the extent you can identify one).
To the extent that sexuality and "gender identity" are malleable within individuals (and despite "born this way" rhetoric used to justify gay marriage, there seems to be at least some amount of this, particularly in women), queer advocacy can be considered as harming the people who would otherwise have had functional lives. For a concrete example, you could consider the promiscuity of gay culture, which allowed AIDS to devastate gay communities so badly that it was designated GRIDS, for gay-related immunodeficiency syndrome, when it was first detected. A more recent example might be the amount of unnecessary suffering Monkeypox caused. For trans, the social contagions seem even stronger and the harms more stark (due to hormonal/surgical intervention and the reduction of one's dating pool to epsilon). People on Discord posting under queer identities have me aware of what they called a "queer gap", where all the time spent "figuring yourself out" means that queer people hit social/romantic/life milestones later than straight people. This, too, is a harm. Are the benefits of the promised self-understanding and self-actualization worth it?
I saw a tweet once about the Millennial experience being something like "get told none of the rules apply, and that you get to reimagine new ones, only to reconstruct all of Grandma's wisdom from first principles in your 30's and scramble to apply them before it's too late". Defaults matter and are mostly good for most people. It seems to me that a lot of advocacy speaks as if the defaults work for maybe 5% of the population when it's rhetorically something more like 95%.
More options
Context Copy link
In opposition with the crimes of love. When you love your children so much you gotta spare them from climate change, racism, ICE...
More options
Context Copy link
FWIW, that does constitute a (minor) harm. Social friction isn't cost-free. Shared norms and expectations lubricate every interaction you have with other people. What hydroacetylene is talking about here is just the most stark gap in American culture.
In 2019 there was a list of "murdered trans people this year" going around. I was skeptical, because there was a similar list of purportedly murdered gay people from a few years earlier that was entirely made up names, so I started searching. The trans list was real. Most of the names had local news reports about the murder. And as nearly as I could tell, every single one where the offender data was known was a case of a trans sex worker murdered by a black john. Because in that specific American sub-subculture, finding out that your whore has a dick is an insult and status-loss that is worth killing to redeem.
It wasn't the same list you were looking at, but whenever I go through one of these lists of "trans people murdered for the crime of being themselves in Trump's AmeriKKKa", they seem to be overwhelmingly made up of a) streetwalkers murdered by johns or b) ordinary domestic disputes between romantic partners. A non-negligible proportion were even murdered by a fellow trans person. I'm genuinely curious about the last time an American trans person was murdered in a literal hate crime (i.e. deliberately targeted for violence solely on the basis of their claimed gender identity, or gender expression).
I have personally seen IRL a trans person straight up hallucinate violent threats from blue collar working class people. The worst actual responses from that class are more like this.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Some German lady on twitter was claiming that the smartest parts of the LGBTQI+ aka the G were secretly voting for AfD in droves.
Why shouldn't they? The AfD has a Lesbian Lady Leader with a dusky paramour.
More options
Context Copy link
That seems to be happening in a few European countries.
It makes sense. The biggest threat to the gay way of life is Islamic fundamentalism, so rational gays should vote for the parties most likely to reduce muslim immigration.
More options
Context Copy link
There has been a certain disquiet between cis white gays and the rest of the Rainbow Mafia.
Which honestly makes sense, if you assume that Cis White Gays tend to be educated, reasonably-affluent DINKs who have already won all of the battles they care about regarding their own particular freedoms and status then you're left with male brains who likely don't really want much more social spending (beyond healthcare but PREP's already subsidized in and out the ass) and likely have a sense that they're the outer fringe of the Fringe conglomerate.
I'd also be interested to see what percentage of funding for LGBT issues from inside the tent comes from cis gay men. I'd be shocked if it wasn't an overwhelming majority
Depends on the funding model- and I want to further state that I expect most LGBT-oriented spending comes from government grants not donations.
But my naive expectation is that genuinely inside the tent funded lgbt NGOs get their funding disproportionately from cis lesbians, not gay men.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I kinda tried to explain something to a friend of mine along the lines of - you vote far right now and you may lose some rights (doubtful) or you don't vote and then in 50 years you and your granddaughter lose all of them. i was greeted with a blank stare and how that was impossible.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link