site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12058 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 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.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I am only familiar with "As I remember London". The idea that functional society will be irrevocably changed for the worse by immigrants has been creeping closer to the overton window for a while now. It is honestly not that controversial outside of left-wing circles. People have eyes. They see what is happening around them, and increasingly vote against immigration basically due to similar concerns.

Saying the quiet part out loud is controversial, but it is no longer a fringe idea at all.

Maybe I'm nit picking. I'm a bit sympathetic to him but I wouldn't say it out loud and expect not to be cancelled. It's very not benign.

Not benign to whom? I think it's extremely benign for western civilization.

Well John Cleese just posted on X the other day that the reason Arabs don't have a problem with their former slaves today is that they castrated them so they wouldn't reproduce. Implication being that England's immigrants are bad and it's only England's generosity that has brought the country to its current situation.

Which is of course all completely accurate but something you wouldn't have been allowed to notice before.

The Overton window is a lot wider than it used to be.

Oh man I didn't realize that was Cleese. Just scrolled past what I thought was another twitter anon rehashing a well-tread point.

At age 86 he has finally reached the stage of intellectual readiness. Someone send him a copy of “The Bell Curve” and “Noticing” by Steve Sailer.

As I remember London says that the fraction of "native Brits" in London has dropped to about a third. Clicking the link (which is to the Wikipedia article on ethnic groups in London) suggests that he uses "native Brits" to refer to people who tick the "White British" box on the census. (I tick "Irish" because it won't hurt me professionally and might help, so according to DHH I am not a "native Brit" despite having four grandparents who were drafted in WW2). The literal English meaning of "native Brit" is, of course, someone born in Britain - and London is still about 60% British-born.

"Britishness is tied to skin colour and being born in London does not make you a native Brit if you have the wrong ancestry" was cancellable back in the 1970s when Enoch Powell was cancelled for it.

As always, I think the language about 'skin color' is intentionally-evil rhetoric. The question is about ancestry, genetics, and shared culture; of which skin color is an exceedingly minor and unreliable indicator.

A huge number of leftists sincerely believe that racism is about skin color and frankly I think the only responsible thing to do is push back on that whenever it comes up.

Enoch Powell is portrayed as this crazy voice in the wilderness, but he was just completely right about everything.

I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation? The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that the country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking—not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen.

Everything that's happened to England, the horrors of Rotherham, it was all avoidable. But it happened because people didn't think through the consequences over a long time period. Immigration must have seemed like a very small thing indeed in 1968 when England was like 95%+ White British. But all it took was to do the math and see that, over decades, it would grow into a very big problem. People had their heads in the sand then and , even today, when major cities are on the cusp of becoming majority Muslim, people still minimize the problem.

There have been three major population replacements in English history. The first was the Bell Beaker culture around 2500 BC which replaced 90% of England's DNA. The Celts replaced about 1/3rd around 1000 BC, and the Saxons also replaced 1/3rd around 500 AD. The Romans, Danes, and Normans left much smaller genetic traces. Notably all of these replacements took place gradually.

The current population replacement (the 4th largest to date and on track to be the 2nd largest) is happening more quickly.

The literal English meaning of "native Brit" is, of course, someone born in Britain

I'm sure this wouldn't have been considered the literal English meaning of "native Brit" in 1900. And it's not how we use the word "native" now either. Or is everyone born in the USA a "Native American"?

"Native" anything as a racial or ethnic descriptor was never a standard way of talking about civilised people - most of the Google hits on "Native British" are for plants. In 1900 as in 2026, people using "native", "indigenous" or "aboriginal" to refer to a subset of British people were probably comparing more-indigenous white British people to less-indigenous white British people - either Welsh/Scottish/Cornish Celts to the Anglo-Saxon invaders, or the English to Norman invaders. We have deep enough recorded history that people whose family came over less than 1000 years ago don't generally self-identify as any of those things.

Native (in the proper sense of the word) British English speakers who want to draw the distinction DHH is making just say "White British" which is in practice unambiguous. I have heard "Indigenous British" used as by intelligent racists as a deliberate trolling of anti-colonialist types. "Native Brit" as used by DHH is mostly a tell that DHH himself isn't one.

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