site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12315 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.

Surfacing a maybe slightly more obscure reaction to the Lesbian Bar SNAFU discussed below, a comment from MetaFilter (bolding mine):

It doesn't seem like anything productive is being accomplished by this process. I think it is important that people stand up for justice, but I think there is more to it than just tearing down people you disagree with. The idea a process can be rejected out of hand because someone can dream of a hypothetical situation (e.g., mediator somehow having power to get participants institutionalized) seems really counterproductive. Anyone could be accused of anything, especially if the bar is just hypotheticals or vibes.

It seems like the outcome will inevitably be that no one finds it worthwhile to try to create anything. It's not unlike a web forum where are reluctant to make posts because so many of the comments nitpick every aspect of it.

This commenter nailed one of the main points of disagreement I have with the broader left, i.e., the whole "being charitable" thing, the rejection of the arguments-as-soldiers doctrine. And of course it's good to see a comment like this being heavily upvoted in a de facto progressive space that is still worried about COVID. I'd love to ask that commenter, as well as anyone who upvoted this comment: who has been cultivating the unproductive environment you are describing?

From where I stand, almost every leftist space inevitably ends up doing witch hunts, cancelling people for benign shit (recently DHH and Ed Sheeran, and I can imagine a gorillion other examples), essentially harming their own in the name of the greater good. There's a danger that is, to me, more urgent than COVID: a large portion of people in the West have a culture that incentivizes and perpetuates the same pattern, the outcome of which will inevitably be that no one finds it worthwhile to try to create anything.

This culture is what makes people so eager to ban cops from the bar but not the Soe Noire person, who effectively nuked whatever slim chance Matellian had of keeping the business running, all because Noire paints himself as a victim. Well, cops are ontologically evil, while Noire has a lot of intersectional points in his bag so...

Care for another MetaFilter comment?

Once again the looney leftists are trying to push their unpopular, impractical ideas on the rest of society, like wearing masks, or abolishing ICE, or calling the war in Gaza a genocide, or ending the war in Iran, or letting transwomen use women's restrooms, or prohibiting data centers, or solar panels, or bike lanes, or indoor public smoking bans, or legal abortions, or seat belt laws, or Medicaid for All, or airbags, or ending the war in Iraq, or network neutrality, or the ADA, or free school lunches, or ending the transatlantic slave trade. America is not a playground for their dangerous political experiments!

I'm glad that we have billionaires like John W. Henry who can direct their newspapers to take advantage of this Instagram drama to bring it to a national audience and cast these communist liberals as hysterical Chicken Littles. These rabid Maoists have splintered Greenfield, Massachusetts to its very core, just as they have polarized our country with their divisive rhetoric. I just wish this country would listen to anti-maskers for once.

I'm not posting this comment to sneer, I just want to talk to the person who posted it. Imagine I'm talking to them, maybe on my knees, pleading.

Like, okay, the problems you described can be fairly debated. Maybe I agree with some and disagree with others, but aren't you at least a little bit curious about the batshit-insane, hostile environment that produced a situation IN YOUR OWN CAMP where NOBODY won? The owners of the bar didn't win - duh. The scarce clientele they had didn't win. I lost brain cells while reading this article, so I guess I didn't win either. People of your tribe showed how they solve problems (and I repeat, this problem appears within ALL leftist spaces; it doesn't just manifest as cancelling): they sat down for three hours and failed to hash out a simple disagreement that maybe should've been an email - or, ideally, there shouldn't have been a disagreement in the first place, because adults understand that a bar has to make money. As for all the more important problems you profess to care about, did the insanity described in the article help you solve them, or are you worse off? And are they really not behaving like "rabid Maoists"?

I don't know, folks. Maybe another one?

I think concentrating on the mask issue is a red herring because it's clear that there were people involved here who did not approach this situation with any semblance of good faith. If the number of regular attendees of the events was even a reasonable fraction of the people commenting, and a majority of them could pay the cover charge, the bar wouldn't be in this situation.

The people fiscally responsible for the venue can't continue to run it, so they needed some alternate ideas to get more traffic. They proposed an idea with what seems like good intentions. People showed up online to tear them down while offering no ideas of their own. That's not community, that's wrecker shit. Some people live for wrecker shit, and inclusive spaces often have trouble figuring out how to address that without appearing exclusive.

Of course, it's "wrecker shit"! How could I have thought that this pattern exists? It's "wrecker shit".

One person should be able to have a disagreement with another, but in leftist spaces we see, time after time, people taking disagreements personally and painting themselves as victims to get others on their side, like Soe Noire does. You did a racism is five years old. Gamergate, whose main character was a professional victim, is more than ten. Is this all "wrecker shit"? It's not - I swear, it's not. It's the same thing, it's the same cultural thing, it's the same thing as with the lesbian bar. How long can we pretend not to notice that good faith is abandoned as soon as it becomes inconvenient?

If you can't describe a problem accurately, you can't solve it. At this point, I just have to conclude that maybe they don't want to solve it.

prohibiting data centers

Didn’t know they cared so much about forcing businesses to move their hosting on-prem but okay!

Or would any commercial servers be banned and we’d have to rely on people self-hosting everything for everything? Will I get branded a digital kulak for having over 3 petaflops of compute at home?

If you're not going into a scenic rural area and building a facility the size of six football fields that employees fifteen people they don't have a problem with it.

Six football fields would be about 8 acres. Your typical cornfield (not farm, one field) is about 100 (and employs maybe 1/10 worker). There's about 100 million acres planted for corn alone. The stuff about land is nonsense.

A solar farm (with or without grid-scale batteries) that size probably doesn't even employ fifteen.

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