site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9454 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 12, 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.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I'd like to contrast two opinions that were posted here a while back to hopefully make a larger point.

Below there are arguments from @Southkraut posted in this chain of discussion:

By the right wing in a political spectrum that has shifted so far left that even the most tepid immigration control measures are considered the extreme of permissible politics. I'm sorry, but no, this movement to the right in no way proves that the left is not in firm control. Their electoral setbacks are, in the greater scheme of things, temporary and minor, while their social and demographic victories are permanent and far-reaching. Yes they overreached, did too much too quickly and alienated voters that way, but the left needing to spend some time without control of this or that executive or legislative and seeing a small fraction of their accomplishments rolled back is not proof of the lasting ascendancy of the right.

Even if this should be the full awakening of the natives to their intentional replacement and the imminent grab for power of the right over all the governments of Europe and even the end of all immigration, the demographic damage is done. The left can afford to let go of the reins of states for a while, or maybe even altogether. It won't change the fate of the continent at this point.

Yes we currently have an upswing of right-wing sentiment as the leftist strangelhold on public discourse slackens, but that's because the leftists, in their time of triumph, overreached somewhat while already on the finishing line. But it's only a stumble; they can and most likely will recover, and if the footrace metaphor holds, then this stumble makes no difference because the right is crawling along far behind with its legs hacked off and bleeding out.

The left has already won. The takeover happened, and it held, and still holds. All public institutions all over Europe are firmly in the hands of leftist partisans. All the predominant narratives that public discourse rests on are shaped by leftist framing. And above all, greatest accomplishment and final victory of the left, demographics are a done deal. The natives are on an inescapable track towards becoming minorities in their own countries, and foreigners will become the majority in Europe within this century. There is no fixing this, and there is no suriviving it for the right.

And below is a comment by @MaiqTheTrue:

My thoughts are that this stems directly from their view of the world. To them America and the West are a dystopian nightmare.

White Guilt, and present militarism

In Liberal circles, white people, and particularly white Americans, are racist, militaristic, and colonial. They also perceive that none of it is changing even a little bit. We support Israel which is racist and genocidal, we hold down minorities, and enrich ourselves at the expense of the non-whites of the world. And they see it as nobody aside from them actually caring.

Environment

Liberals believe that Earth will be literally uninhabitable within their lifetime. The air will be choked with pollution, the rivers poisoned, global warming creating deserts and rain forests and making things too hot. Nobody wants to do enough to fix it, and quite often want to go in the other direction. They see that nobody aside from them cares.

Capitalism

The rich run the world for the rich and everyone else suffers. Poverty is common, and all the things that should be free are instead not free. College costs too much. Health care costs too much. And again, none of this is noticed by anyone else, so nothing will change.

Trump

You might not notice, but we elected Literally Hitler in November. He’s going to build work camps. He’s going to round people up and either imprison them or deport them. The Handmaid’s Tale is going to happen. Again, nobody notices or cares and worse, half the country likes it. Which proves that white people are evil.

All of this is a profoundly negative world view. Dystopian even. Everything is terrible, and at best going to stay terrible forever, and very likely to get worse. If this is how you really see the world, obviously that’s going to give you anxiety and depression, especially if you’re hanging around others who share this view, and have few or no outside interests.

As far as I'm concerned one can also add "Sexism" and "Social media" to that list. (We can certainly say, for example, that the Blue Tribe mainly blames supposedly harmful social media trends - basically the fatal lack of external censorship and repression - for Trump's election victories in 2016 and 2024 and for Brexit as well.) And as far as the anti-anti-Zionist liberals are concerned, their attitude towards anti-Semitism is the same. Either way, this summary does strike me as spot on. Whenever I encounter members of the Blue Tribe online or even offline it's undoubtedly this pessimistic, doomerist, resentful, even elegiac vibe I'm getting most of the time, especially from single women. And this seems to have been a cultural trend since Gamergate. In contrast, I think the victories of modern liberalism have mainly stemmed from its image of representing not an ideology but the consensus among cool and smart people promoting the vision of a better tomorrow, basically someone like your cool and cheerful wine-drinking, pot-smoking aunt/uncle. It was this vibe that helped them gain electoral victories as well and now this vibe is completely dead. Now we're at a point where the political parties in the EU representing Blue Tribe normies are basically campaigning with the message to having to fight yet another great Eastern European war in the very near future which is supposedly necessary to avert some even bigger disaster or something.

I'd argue that it's actually the profound pessimism of Blue Tribe messaging and its political consequences that Southkraut's pessimism is not taking into account.

I wonder if it will ever be possible again to get a proper, ideological-Turing-test-passing account of the Blue worldview on this website, because your quote from @MaiqTheTrue for sure is not. You depict a right-winger being dramatic over an essentially true development, and imagine lined up against him an array of left-wing delusions. How easy it would be, if only we could get our opponents to see reality! (Maybe they just need to go outside and touch some grass.)

The actual fundamental disconnect between Right and Left that your juxtaposition fails to capture is that both are driven by real urgencies based on their respective circles of concern, in a way that relief is mutually exclusive. Just zooming in on immigration concerns, the right-wing doomer view is essentially something like "are there no brakes on the replacement train at all? You already got like 20% Muslims or something in and we understand that in practical terms those 20% will never leave or decrease, why can't you even have so much grace as to pause and let us see the consequences?". In this lament, the left-wing doomer hears something like: "of all the people that are actively living and dying in misery at our hands as we speak, you have managed to save some. This horrifies us. Can't you at least take a break for a few years where you let them all die?". The Right watches in horror the irreversible ratchet of their nation being diluted; the Left watches the irreversible ratchet of lives being wasted.

Perhaps a comparison with abortion would be apt. Third-world immigrants are to right-wingers roughly as fetuses are to left-wingers. One sees a group they care about (natives/women) enslaved and oppressed for the benefit of some prop that has negligible moral value (uncivilised foreigners/lumps of cells). The other one sees uniquely vulnerable human beings who they have a special duty to protect (babies/victims of their ancestors' cupidity) being callously left to die for the comfort of the spoiled and morally reprehensible (slutty women/narrow-minded nativists). The right-wing perspective, to the Left, then winds up sounding about as monstrous as "you have already forced so many women to give birth unwillingly. Can't we at least take a break for a few years where we abort all/most of the pregnancies?"

The Right watches in horror the irreversible ratchet of their nation being diluted; the Left watches the irreversible ratchet of lives being wasted.

There's an obvious solution for this of course. If the resource on Western Goodness in certain territory is limited, we need to produce more Western Goodness in another territories, so that the lives could be saved there without being constrained by the limited supplies of a single country or small set of countries. But, of course, this obvious solution is considered the worst of all possible evils. That's where the symmetry breaks - the Left doesn't just want to save the lives, they want to save the lives in a way that would precisely replicate the conditions which made it necessary for the lives to be saved in the first place! If we take your abortion analogy, it's be as if the pro-lifers would insist on the act of birth never ever happening - while the life of the fetus is sacred, it can never be born and become a full-responsible human. Imagine there was a technical way to prolong the pregnancy indefinitely - and imagine pro-life movement that would insist on banning both abortions and births.

It is mostly about being a good person and treating others well even if doing so requires self sacrifice. Humans are humans regardless of where they live. Instead of seeing the world as different tribes which you are tied to by blood and culture, the world is a global village. And those who possess wealth and power have a duty to help those who do not.

Instead of "my group versus your group" (although human nature being what is, this is often what it turns into) it is closer to "selflessnes vs selfish greed". The latter being people with resources to spare, who either refuse to help those in need, or use their resources to straight up harm others. Whether it be through blocking health care for trans people or refusing entry for refugees. There is a consensus that the resources of the world will do much more good if they are spread evenly among humanity, rather than being centralized in the hands of billionaires who waste money on pointless luxuries or simply hoard it in their bank accounts.

There are of course failure modes to this. Sometimes you let in people who genuinely wish you harm, or you give power and influence to people who have no business holding it. But ultimately, leftist ideology is optimistic about human nature and generally leans towards trusting others (especially the marginalized) until proven wrong. Keeping the wrong people from slipping through the cracks is much less important than giving aid to those in need.

Not sure if this is your position or not, but I think this is a pretty good steel man of the left's worldview.

The first sentence though already has a term that has been redefined by leftists: "good." The liberal progressive (leftist) framework narrows morality (or what is "good") to a subset of what most human traditions have counted as good. The word "good" carries a ton of rhetorical weight for them. It's often worded as though no reasonable person could weigh loyalty, duty, or rootedness as moral goods rather than as selfishness.

Note that "good" for progressives is very much a moving target, and that previously-good things sometimes become "bad". Not usually overnight, but see how "ending the drug war" was going to solve all our drug problems two decades ago, and compare to today when many municipalities and states have effectively unilaterally withdrawn from it. This has led to excesses that we hear a lot about today, and the vibe, from what I can tell, is shifting towards "maybe letting all this chaos happen in cities hasn't been compassionate" and even "the trains and busses should be safe and run on time". A century ago, progressivism was pushing Prohibition, because alcohol was "bad", although given cultural shifts in drinking before/after, I'm not sure I can easily judge that, honestly.

To be a bit generous, the worst excesses here seem to happen in areas for which there seems to be no good answer: it's nice to think that restricting the police will reduce violence and let drug addicts hold down jobs. But it's also naive to think that will wholesale fix our problems. And a lot of the excesses seem to be assumptions that going harder on the "nice" idea will fix it, when we're well beyond the diminishing point of return: "more school funding" when our failing schools already have 2-3x the per capita budget of the rest.

It is my position and it isn't. I like the broad idea, and I don't think that I straight up disagree with any of what I wrote. But I do believe that in practice it is overly idealistic, and I think that identifying as a leftist easily leads to a dangerously simplified worldview. Besides, I have too many problems with leftist activists and leaders to really see myself in that movement at this point.

I do wonder whether true steelmanning is really possible.

For me, it would be easy to write a good steelman of many leftist positions if I started with the same assumptions that the left does.

But the reason I'm not a leftist is that I believe those assumptions to be untrue. Yeah, if all racial groups are the same genetically, then it's difficult to explain differences in group outcome other than racism. But writing a steelman based on an assumption I know to be false doesn't feel like charity to me, it just feels like lying.

That isn't to say that strawmanning is a good thing. We shouldn't invent assumptions for the opposing groups that they don't have.

But writing a steelman based on an assumption I know to be false doesn't feel like charity to me, it just feels like lying.

Correct. This is why I hate steelmanning. At best you end up inventing an argument that you're willing to accept for X but isn't actually held by any real people on that side. Inhabiting an alien morality is impossible. You can pretend, you might even pretend pretty well, but you can't really do it.

We shouldn't invent assumptions for the opposing groups that they don't have.

The problem here being that most people are not remotely systematic in their thinking, and the average person- a phrase which here may include anyone from Joe Burgerflipper to David Columnist to Jane Congresswoman- can easily be a 'living strawperson' who just believes any given ridiculous thing because it's popular to believe it, not because they've constructed some bulletproof apologetic for it. There are times, quite commonly I believe, that the motivation to not strawman, the motivation to find some reason that isn't stupidly flimsy and inconsistent, itself leads one astray when trying to understand popular morality.

I also think there's a lot of things that are more like shorthand statements than intentional strawmen that get dismissed on those grounds, and people just have to suck it up and say the long version if they want to avoid the accusation. I don't think "liberals support open borders" is a strawman exactly, but it's phrased in a manner too spare to capture the actual motivation so it gets accused of being one.

of all the people that are actively living and dying in misery at our hands

I'm assuming this is meant to refer to victims of global warming and colonialism?

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