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 -
The Culture War Singularity is already here
I was once very interested in the culture war, and in many aspects of the culture war. I am a staunch atheist so I cut my teeth in online debates arguing about evolution and the existence of god in the early 2000's. That felt like a side topic to all the important policy debates at the time. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The national debt. Censorship of free speech by the religious right. How to deal with islamic terrorism. George Bush and Dick Cheney. The military industrial complex.
Many of these overlapped, but they also generally felt like separate and distinct things. I ended up stumbling across libertarianism because I ran into someone complaining about government spending, and anti-war. I felt like they kicked my but in a debate simply because they didn't allow for my easy auto win argument at the time "oh you care about government spending, then why don't you care about the massively expensive war in the middle east?"
Nowadays it feels like the culture war is collapsing. Not like a structure collapsing into the ground, but a star collapsing into a black hole. Everything is funneling into fewer and fewer topics. The main two that have come out of it all are Donald Trump and AI. You can collapse most people's views into what they think about Donald Trump. If you know that you basically know all the rest of what they think about political topics. For the few where this is not true, the dividing line is instead AI.
I find myself ambivalent/uncertain on both topics. But my ambivalence is not a path out of the stereotyping. It just leads to a different set of assumptions about me, and most of them are probably pretty accurate.
Both topics feel like they will either come to a conclusion by 2028 or implode in such an epic catastrophe that they will continue mattering for the next century at a minimum.
Or is this all just me becoming jaded and bored with the culture war? Ignoring topics like Transgender, feminism, race relations, metoo, and global conflict to shoehorn my pet theory into the world.
Donald Trump's personal approval ratings poll at minus a gazillion, but the GOP is still going to get well over 40% of the vote in the midterms. There are a lot of double haters out there, many of whom voted for Trump in 2024 and some of whom will vote for their local Republican in 2026, and an even larger number of grillpilled normies.
In real politics, there is no shortage of centrist Democrats who either signed the Harper's letter condemning wokestupid or secretly wanted to, and the only reason why there are so few NeverTrump Republicans and conservatives is that MAGA successfully purged them from the movement.
Something about the current online environment (probably the algorithmically mediated impact of what midwit political junkies click on) tends to turn online political spaces either 100% wokestupid or 100% MAGAtarded. The Motte isn't immune, although we are holding out better than 99% of the competition.
Trump does not poll at minus gazillion, nor are his polls an outlier among recent second term Presidents.
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/trump-obama-bush-second-term
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link