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Can we talk about Rebekah Jones? Should we? I'm honestly incredibly conflicted about these questions. One of the rules of the Motte is that we shouldn't weakman:
Discussing Jones feels like walking a tightrope (called "meaningful cultural and political issues") that has been strung over an open toxic waste pit (called "are my political opponents just mentally ill?"). Out of sheer both-sides-ism I want to say "there are surely equally bizarre figures in right wing politics" but I can't actually find any. The best I can do is to say, suppose you combined Marjorie Taylor Greene's extremism with George Santos' fabulism, then made the resulting chimera guilty of the things Matt Gaetz was only ever rumored to have been guilty of doing--that would get you pretty close to Jones, I think. Except that MTG and Santos and Gaetz aren't darlings of reddit and don't command fawning loyalty from major media outlets, which Jones also does.
As a refresher, I first learned of Jones back in the old subreddit, when someone posted about her COVID activism. I don't remember when I learned of her criminal activities, but to simply quote the Wikipedia:
Jones went on to say she was going to run for office in Maryland (IIRC), but when that didn't pan out for unclear reasons, she returned to Florida. I don't know how much she has received in crowdfunding from the anti-DeSantis crowd at this point, but two early efforts pulled over half a million dollars. Jones has continued to hold herself out as a "whistleblower," specifically against the DeSantis administration in Florida, even though these claims appear pretty thoroughly debunked.
"Aha!" You might say. "PolitiFact leans left, and debunks Jones, so even the Left is willing to disavow this nut!"
Sure, maybe, to some extent. She went on to win the 2022 Democrat primary to challenge Matt Gaetz for his seat in the House of Representatives, so at least 16,000 Democrats still preferred Jones to someone with an actual legal education and genuinely relevant experience. And yes--by this logic, some 50,000 Republicans preferred the candidate who was under investigation for sex trafficking minors! It's baffling, I agree. But this is one of those "meaningful cultural and political issues" I mentioned--the only way I can make sense of any of this is to take a deep breath and remind myself that most people lack anything approaching coherent principles, they don't care about these details--they only care to win.
Anyway, that's all just the background!
This morning I woke up with this in my feeds.
If you don't want to read "WhitePeopleTwitter" (and I wouldn't blame you), it is a tweet from Rebekah Jones, followed by others, which I have partly reproduced here:
Naturally, Jones also provides links to her crowdfunding platforms of choice. The reddit "discussion" is... predictable? Outrage, occasional people (mostly, but not always, downvoted) asking whether this is legit, very few people posting actual information. Well, proles gonna prole I guess. But the headline in the Miami Herald?
So, that sounds bad! But is it really why he was arrested? In fact it is not. He was arrested for posting stuff like this:
As this information was coming out, Jones added to her tweetstorm:
It's not clear when these events are supposed to have occurred; Max Nordau shared video of Jones delivering her son to the police station. Rather, as this tweet suggests, it appears that "Rebekah Jones tried to blame DeSantis and RAISE MONEY off law enforcement stopping a possible school shooting."
I don't know what Jones' problem ultimately is. Narcissism? Paranoia? DeSantis Derangement Syndrome? That she is a habitual fabulist is well-established. That she has profited substantially from vocal opposition to all things DeSantis is a matter of public record. She is a sufficiently shady known quantity that most really big national news outlets seem reluctant to continue signal-boosting her, but the Miami Herald (by circulation, reportedly Florida's seventh-largest paper) still seems happy to run false headlines at her mere behest.
This seems discussion-worthy, and yet part of me wants to just not even post about it because it seems wrong, somehow, to even discuss Rebekah Jones. Giving her any attention at all feels a bit like encouraging a delusional person to persist in their delusions; she clearly wants notoriety, she doesn't seem capable of handling notoriety in a healthy way, surely it would be best to just stop paying attention to her?
But also, this is a kid talking about doing violence at school, with guns or knives. Is narcissism hereditary? Did his home environment contribute to this? [CONTINUED BELOW]
I think that violence is, if not necessarily a good reaction, at least an understandable reaction to being forced by the state to spend eight hours a day at a containment center run by a bunch of glorified babysitters. Of course in practice, many school shooters target not just school staff but also their fellow students, often not even because of any justified personal grievances against them.
This comment has received at least three reports, with some commenters saying they've reported this comment.
I am responding with a modhat to remind the reporters that this is a forum for testing shady thinking, which means that by default even shady thinking is allowed. While concrete threats of violence are in many instances illegal and would in any event violate our ruleset (at minimum by excluding the targets of such threats from the discussion), opinions regarding what might arguably justify violence are not the same as threats of violence.
From the reports, @Goodguy stands accused of being "pro shooting up schools" and sounding "really unhinged." From @NolanE's comment on the other reported comment:
But this is uncharitable and suggests an aversion to thinking charitably about the motives of violent people, which--if we actually want to prevent school shootings, or even threats of school shootings--it might be helpful for us to think about clearly and accurately. @Goodguy says that violence is "not necessarily a good reaction" but an "understandable" one. This is supported with a characterization of public education that many people disagree with (some, here in the comments), but not one that is presented as the only or even the correct perspective. Nothing about this comment "justifies" school shootings--only attempts to explain them.
There is a famous story about John Adams defending British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trials. It has become the center of essays, books, television productions... Adams does not seem to have even been excessively sympathetic toward the soldiers, though he was certainly accused of such sympathies. Rather, he just regarded it as an injustice for the soldiers to go to trial unrepresented, and he had some rational doubts about the stories he was hearing. In the end, many of the soldiers were actually acquitted, because there was good evidence that they weren't involved or at fault, but this evidence would not have come to light had public opinion prevailed and the soldiers simply been lynched. Still, there were some people who continued to regard Jon Adams as "pro shooting up Americans" as a result.
In hopes of throwing reporters a bit of a bone, I want to say something like "@Goodguy's comment could be higher effort," but even that I think would not be quite right. If @Goodguy had written a higher-effort version of this comment, I think it would only have strengthened the objections; the comment as written does not excuse or defend school shootings, only explains (some of) them in a way that could potentially be probative of root causes. That it does so succinctly helps, rhetorically, to strengthen the idea that shooters are not being defended as, well, the "good guys"--just as humans responding to an arguably coercive environment.
If anyone using this website ever turns out to commit a serious crime, I will be very sad about that! But I'm not going to moderate people for trying to understand violence, on grounds that understanding violence might lead to violence. Because I think the opposite is at least as likely to be true--that honest attempts to understand violence could help us to prevent it.
Obviously that’s rubbish. School shootings are neither justifiable nor “understandable” by any sane metric, and there is in fact no real distinction between those two phrases.
How can anybody “understand” an adult shooting a few 6 year olds, based on “workplace hostility” is beyond me. They aren’t workers for one thing. The shooter often has no relationship to the school.
(Maybe @Goodguy wanted to talk about workspaces in particular he didn’t. He preferred to understand school shooters.)
You vaguely admit that he has no real justification when you say were he try to explain his position it would be worse for him.
Nice piece about John Adams though, albeit totally unrelated. After all I didn’t suggest a mob take out @Goodguy, or that there be an online lynching, but reported him to whatever travesty of due process this site enforces. I myself got a 2 day ban for a perfectly good analogy a while back. So banning can be done. You can do if you try.
And the whole lecturing tone is a bit off, isn’t it? The weird defense of goodguy’s post could perhaps be a bit less verbose, and not dwell all that much on rather irrelevant American history, but it drips with unearned condescension.
Anyways I don’t see any way to delete myself from this community, so feel free to ban me. This is to be clear because I don’t want to be associated with y’all. I can see why Scott cut the posters here out of the loop.
There is a huge difference between "justifiable" and "understandable." We often understand why people do things without believing they were justified.
You caught a ban for offering your "analogy" in bad faith.
You know you can just... go away, right?
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Honestly, it seems to me that you have taken an impractically high degree of offense at Goodguys post. I think it takes only a small helping of charity to see his post as reasonable and motte-adequate. What exactly did he do wrong? Are school schootings a unique evil where one may not play devils advocate even on the motte?
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Scott is still on good terms with The Motte AFAIK. He even offered to host ads for the site after our migration. We parted ways because people who disliked the Culture War thread harassed him and IRL swatted him.
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How often do comments get reported here? I feel like I pretty often seen thinly disguised calls and sometimes undisguised calls for violence here.
Actually I am a bit surprised given this site's political leanings that anyone on this site cares about school shootings enough to be upset by something that describes them as in some cases understandable. But then, I like being surprised by this place.
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If I were to summarize my objection to the op comment - "extraordinary cllaims require extraordinary evidence". I can understand why OJ Simpson would kill his wife. But i think there is a lot of information missing before I can come to the conclusion of "of course he would shoot up the school".
Well, OP's suggestion was:
And the conclusion was not "of course"--the conclusion was "I understand."
Do you find stories of prison violence extraordinary? Do you think prison violence is an inescapable fact about imprisonment? You might object that schools are meaningfully distinct from prisons, but if you've never encountered comparisons between schools and prisons before, well, now you have--and I assure you that they are common comparisons. You might say "schools are meant to benefit children" but prisons are arguably meant to benefit criminals (through rehabilitation). You might say "school is not so unpleasant as to justify murder" and I'd say that's true! But no one in this thread has yet said "murder is justified." Only explained one thing that might drive a person to commit murder.
And sure, OP could have said more about it, but the difficulty there is, the more you say about it, the more it sounds like you are trying to claim that the violence is justified, rather than claiming that it is understandable. I didn't mind going to school as a child, but I undertstand that many people find the experience absolutely torturous.
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That's an uncharitable re-phrasing of the op comment. He simply calls it "an understandable reaction" to what some would consider involuntary capture, but then qualifies it with the observation that many school shooters appear to kill not only their "captors" but random fellow "inmates" (implying that op believes there's a good chance these shooters are simply unhinged people).
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Reported this too.
Reported for what, exactly? @Goodguy is not advocating violence, just expressing that he empathizes with (understands) the motivations of school shooters. Understanding, especially regarding unpopular opinions, is why many of us are here. If your goal is to reduce school shootings, you should be spending even more time trying to understand this failure mode of young men.
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Once again, you are making low-effort snide comments that individually are just mildly annoying and detrimental to discussion, but the fact that you keep doing it every time you come back from your last ban indicates that this just your thing. You think you're clever and witty and really getting some zingers in, and that's why you're here.
You are in the wrong place.
Banned for two weeks this time. Next time probably goes to a much longer or permanent ban.
Saw this in the volunteer modqueue, like 1 in 5 posts are moderation-related. Would be good to just not have mod posts in the queue imo
I also got it in the janitor queue, and I'll repeat my (supportive) comment from here:
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I don't understand, explain it to me please. As a person who spent school years in soviet union I have NEVER thought about school in this way.
Grade school was in a bad neighborhood and rough. There was bullying and fights. I got used to it because I felt like I had no other option. High school was in a different neighborhood and much more peaceful. I was a teacher's pet so I did not feel confined, I enjoyed getting out of the house and often enjoyed interacting with other people. The schoolwork was easy so it was a pretty mellow time. It was later that I looked back and started to think that high school, too, was an unjustified waste of time. Even the nice teachers were part of a system of compulsion. My opinions about education really got cemented when I myself did teaching work for some time and so for the first time had to be the one doing the compelling. I am very glad that I got out of that way of making money. I find it viscerally disgusting on some level to make kids' lives more boring to shape them into something that their parents and other usually stupid authority figures think they should be. When I was a captive of the education system myself, once I got away from the violent school, my intellectual talents and easy ability to charm adults made me enjoy a lot about school but when I spent time as one of the captors I saw many bad examples of what forced education can do to fuck up a sensitive kid. From what I can remember, that is when I really started to hate the whole thing whole-heartedly.
Some might argue that this is bullshit because when I was in grade school I did not hate it, when I was in high school I did not hate it, so how can I speak about the issue?
Well, in grade school the immediate jungle reality of being around hundreds and hundreds of volatile young people and the occasional fear of getting assaulted were enough to keep any more abstract hate of the enabling system out of my consciousness.
And though I enjoyed high school to some extent, well, I suppose that there are also soldiers who enjoyed war and then became anti-war years later. That they enjoyed war does not invalidate their criticisms of it.
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You have to remember that this site/former subreddit heavily leans toward the type of person who despised going to high school. The median person, while thankful they're no longer in high school, doesn't think of it as some evil prison. Like, as an actual poor-ish kid who was in honor/AP classes, I actually largely enjoyed school (outside of math, because I wasn't great at it).
I thought that the "kid who was in honor/AP classes" was sort-of the majority of the people here, so why would they despise going to the high-school?
And now I noticed that there is a distinction where you reference the time in "high-school" and the Goodguy just has "school" in his comment.
Former AP kid checking in. What a boring waste of time (most of) high school was. Just sitting in an uncomfortable chair hour after hour. Filling out some busy work worksheet in one class. Half paying attention to a lecture in another class while finishing all my homework. Reading novels in class. Getting told to put that book away, what are you doing, can you pay attention? But there's so little content that I'll ace the class without particularly focusing on in class lectures.
At the time I knew something valuable was being squandered by spending much of my teenage years sitting around bored.
I obviously learned valuable things in high school. But far too little content spread among hours of sitting around bored. As the beneficiary of a good public high school, taking all available honors and AP classes, getting an AP Scholar award, etc: I don't have fond memories of high school.
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Well there's a difference between being good at it and liking it.
I never did mind learning things, but doing pointless busywork and being under the unrestrained diktat of petty tyrants with no appeals? Yeah I was pretty mad about that. Getting fucked with by people who have authority over you with no recourse isn't fun.
I felt about school like I assume Russians did about the Soviet Union by the end. Just going through the motions because you're not going to change the damn thing whilst knowing it's mostly bullshit.
And much like in the Soviet Union, excellence can buy you the ability to not have to think about authority not liking you, so I tried to be Sergei Korolev as much as possible.
Still, I think I owe my enduring skepticism of institutional power at least in part to those early encounters with the possibility of its abuse. And I assume I'm not alone in that.
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Before I am tempted to make snarky comments about American schooling vis a vis the Soviet system, would you care to elaborate on what school life was like in those days? I'm curious what the experience was like.
To be quite honest - I forgot. I blame it never being the bad/horrible expirience.
Of course there was always outstanding moments(both good and bad).
I remember the subjects that I loved and teachers that were receptive to my zeal. Damn, history was my jam. Mathematics too, until we got to integrals in the last year(?) and I just couldn't grasp that and that hit me pretty hard with some sort of "imposter syndrome" that only got away in university. Some extracurricular clubs like a radio one that I joined for a year. Participated in a few competitions between schools that my teachers took seriously and we got a lot of knowledge to cram on a short notice.
Some pranks on a teachers, and getting punished in return. Gym class that everyone hated except of few people(like this guy) that thought "hey running 1.5km timed seems like a good idea". Even though you didn't have the time for shower afterwards and wet towel was the only thing saving you for next few lessons.
Overall I would describe my time in school as "busy". There was just enough time before the next thing and after that some activities and bus home took me like 30min, some homework and I spend the rest of the day outside with the neighborhood friends that mostly were going to different schools than me. I remember being absorbed quite frequently with a fantasy book that usually kept me awake till 2am, and then I realize that I can't get back to sleep anyway so might as well read until my eyes will close themselves.
The only regret I guess is that I didn't get a girlfriend during that time, so no romance stories. And then I learned that a few of girls were hitting on me but I was too thick to notice.
Edit: But I guess I'm glossing over your question so let me try to remember and describe my schedule on a weekday.
->waking at 7:30, light breakfast
->travel to school on a bus -30min
->arrive sometime before first lesson, have a chat in classroom with whoever in at the time, grab books/notes for next three lessons and leave the rest as to not drag the heavy backpack around.
->8:30 class start 45min long with 15min break between. Usually chatting amongst the classmates/friends from same age or 1year higher/lower form other classrooms nearby. Or talking to teachers while they are preparing for the lesson.
->11:30 long break for 30min (I think). Replace books/notes for next 2-3 lessons. Can get grub from cafeteria (I usually had sandwich from home for this time). Good time to go outside if weather permits.
->12 another 2-3 lessons in a row.
->about 15 do afterschool stuff if needed. Go to swimming pool for a practice on tue/thu. Or spend around 1 hour talking with friends that live near the school. Occasionally spent near a huge metal contraption that looked like two-story pyramid. Yes....we did have a game to try a knock each other off it.
->17 at home for quick homework and dinner
->18:30 outside time (unsupervised, heh)
->usually at 21 at home doing maybe other homework, reading books, pc time. (mostly because sun is down)
->22-23 go to sleep
I think your response is actually a good way to illustrate why school shooting makes sense in an American context and why it doesn't in a Russian/rest of the world context. Your summary of school is pretty unemotional, including a list of daily routines and focusing on the drudgeries of your daily life. You just mention girls for one line. When Americans are asked about their highschool experience, especially young men online, you're likely to get a lot more of an emotional response, with a more bombastic tone and a litany of perceived injustices that they experienced. Americans generally want to be the most successful and well liked and popular person in the school and they often can't stand accepting their place somewhere else on the totem pole. Young American men are driven to externalizing their problems, blaming the social situation rather than on themselves or something outside of everyone's control, so to punish the externalized enemies is more logical in the American context than in most countries. Any time the weak are able to be armed it's really no surprise that sometimes they will take the opportunity to try to claw back some dignity through violence.
Is that because American high schools are vastly different or is it American culture? The big difference I see between American culture in general is the sense of focus on indignities suffered, things that are lacking, or the bad feelings these things engender.
I think a large measure of violence, especially the spree-shooting type of violence is caused by the way Americans are taught to expect things and to focus on feelings of indignity, failure, and other negatives. There’s a pervading meme of entitlement in America, and as others have said, finding fault with the outside world when the promised good life fails to materialize. If there were a profile of the spree-shooter, it would go something like this:
A child of middle class parents, [shooter] had drifted in life, ending up with very few friends, a low wage job, often had failed out of college or trade school. He/she (most often a he) spent most of his time online, and had very few friends and no significant other. He/she often still lives at home.
The child has a problem of failure to launch or at least successfully launch. He’s been sold on the idea of the American dream, where he’s supposed to have a good job, a girlfriend, lots of friends, and their own place. They have none of that, they’re supposed to, but they don’t. And the other part of this is because of the growth of esteem culture (the idea that everyone is just naturally good and worthy without the need for growth and change), and therapeutic culture (the idea that all feelings are valid and true and you should fully welcome them and dwell on them) creates a toxic stew in people who for various reasons don’t have what they were promised, aren’t ever going to get it, and are doing exactly what society says to do — stew in the negative energy and negative feelings.
Now other cultures have done much better. Confucians believe in enjoying the moment, in looking to self-cultivation, and in fulfilling social obligation. Traditional religions say “this is God’s will”. Stoicism and Buddhism say that clinging to things is bad and makes you miserable. In any other system, the idea is not “rage against the world and the people who have wronged you,” that’s American culture where we see not getting our way less as a common part of the human experience, but as a sign of great injustice that must be fixed. Shooting people, essentially, is the equivalent of the child who throws a tantrum because mom wouldn’t buy him a toy at Walmart.
Yes. I agree with everything you said, but you put it more eloquently than I did. Thank you. The entitlement and immaturity of American people is really shocking after you've spent time away from it for a while, from my experience as an American.
When I was in Europe recently, people kept asking me about Karens in America. I didn't understand why everyone was so hung up on Karens, surely Europeans have Karens too? But then I realized that they really don't have the same culture of entitlement that America has, so they largely don't have Karens either. School shooters are basically operating with the same mindset as Karens but with guns instead of screaming at an Apple store employee. People in Europe also seem more secure in their place in society, it would be ridiculous for a rich Frenchwoman to scream at a clerk for example, it's just not done because people have internalized their own class and status in a way that America has yet to solidify.
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This is all interesting, thank you. Doesn't seem too radically different in terms of structure and substance from the Western way (at least, on the surface).
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I have somehow never really considered what schooling was like in the USSR, so if you ever care to write more about it, I'd be happy to read it!
The problem is that one would be comparing their memories of a Soviet school with the synthesized version of the generic American school from the media, which isn't what American schools are really like. You would want someone who went to both schools to compare their lived experiences.
And even then it wouldn't be fair. Russian designer Artemij Lebedev loves to mention how he spent the school year of 1990-1991 in the US and returned to what was still the USSR in August 1991 because the American school was terrible. The caveat is that he went to School 57 in Moscow, one of the best if not the best school in the country (think Thomas Jefferson High), and to Parkville High in the US, which is far from being the best school in Baltimore.
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Oh nooo..... I'm only in my 40s, so you can definitely say I embellished the time period, my life was disturbed by the USSR fall. Although I cannot even remember those times outside of watching some tv of Moscow Parliament being shelled from a tank.
Yet the mundane life at the time didn't change much. We went the next day and sat at our desks.
There were reforms targeted for schooling in the end, but we got them in "waves" as to not the rock the boat too much and teachers we're not changed....at all. I know my younger brother got caught between a few of them as the primary language was changing from russian to ukrainian.
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Even to this end, most of the shootings seem targeted towards people that would normally be considered "contributors to a toxic work environment" (with a possible devolution to random killing because, well, the penalty for
latenessmurder is already death).I guess that's why I really don't see them as much of an issue, and believe it in the interest of those predisposed to perpetrate that workplace toxicity to claim as loudly as possible that "it's totally random" (and ensure that the ones that are mostly random get elevated far beyond their normal range)- because it means a world where the victim has a final argument.
There's a further response here about how this generalizes across cultures but that's for another time.
What a strange comment. It seems to justify school shootings (including young children) because of workplace toxicity.
I’ve reported it. Let’s see.
They seriously need to explain what they mean by toxicity and how on earth that explains shooting a bunch of children, but I appreciate the Chen Sheng Wu Guang Uprising reference.
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