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 -
A bit of heat generated by Trump dubbing Nikki Haley "Nimbra", a butchering of her Indian birth name:
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4420434-trump-on-mocking-haleys-birth-name-its-just-something-that-came/
I'm not sure who the media controversy is aimed at. His base is absolutely going to love it, the normal Repubs have no choice but to vote for him, and his enemies can't hate him more than they already do.
I predict if her numbers continue to climb, he's gonna mention her daughter's married to a black guy. Way too tempting for a guy like Trump.
On that, a surprising number of the establishment Republicans have kids married to black people. Haley, McCain, Boehner, etc. What's with that?
Because they're not Aryan race warriors. Nor are other normie republicans.
More options
Context Copy link
No bet on mentioning the daughter.
As for the marriage rate, a lot of prominent Republicans are from the South. There are a lot more black people in the South. Case closed?
At least if this graphic is to be believed, the Deep South has pretty low intermarriage rates.
On the other hand, I'm not even sure the premise that an exceptional number of GOP figures have black in-laws is correct.
More options
Context Copy link
I would've thought that would be anti-correlated with likelihood to intermarry.
Not really- there's not a lot of evidence that post-1990 Southern Whites are any more racist than Northerners, and historically Southern racism has been less concerned about maintaining distance and more concerned with the hierarchy anyways.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The Hill liked this line so much they copied it verbatim from their last article on this. But the article prior to that was different:
It's a good thing The Hill is here to remind everyone of the racial angle, since Haley so stubbornly refuses to.
I’m rather surprised, if this was him trying to find an insult rather than him just screwing up her name, that he didn’t just go for the obvious “Nimrod Nikki Haley” which sounds very Trumpy.
He's called her "Nimrada" before. It's clever, but not actually effective, and didn't stick, which is why nobody remembers it.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah nimbra seems kind of weak for Trump, it sounds like he flubbed the line even. And nimrod would have been great. I think any appearance of hostility between them is just campaigning - Haley isn't going to be president and wants in on the administration and Trump may or may not want her back, but he knows she's a good politician and wants her on side.
More options
Context Copy link
Trump is too well versed in Greek mythology to make such a low brow reference.
Nimrod is probably the biblical name for Sargon of Akkad and has nothing to do with Greek mythology.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
He probably is vaguely aware that "Nimrod" is not an insult, or maybe he was going for that and misremembered the word.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, more or less than 13% of all establishment Republican kids?
The percentage of white Americans with a black spouse is surely much less than 13%.
More options
Context Copy link
That would be higher than average because people tend to marry intra-race at a higher rate than the population mix.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think it's very unlikely he will do this, simply because neither Trump nor most of his supporters care about this. I think you are making the same mistake as the media by assuming "Nimra" is a racist dogwhistle. It's not, it's serving a different set of purposes:
It calls attention to the fact that she doesn't use her real name, which makes her seem fake and insecure.
Like all Trump nicknames, it's a power play. If you can give someone a nickname and make it stick, it reveals a kind of power you have over them. And I think it's clear that Haley could not do the same to Trump in reverse -- all prior attempts at nicknames (Drumpf, Cheeto, etc.) have failed to stick.
Yeah, it is interesting. I think it’s that most attempts (which, to be fair, often did stick amongst Democrats; you still see plenty of Drumpf/Cheeto mentions in Reddit and Facebook/IG comments) on Trump weren’t really insults, just kind of babyish name stuff. ‘Crooked Hillary’ at least kind of implies why you don’t like her, ‘Cheeto’ doesn’t.
I think if I was an opposing politician and had to pick some kind of insult for Trump it would just be calling him “fatty” or something. Just go ultra-low, “shut up fatty” in the debates tier. People might laugh, who knows? The second you go from “moron” to “orange moron” you become le epic cheeto cringe etc.
Rule 1 of fighting nationalists - don’t let them become proxies for their supporters. Lots of Americans are fat, lots of them have bad tans.
Nicola Sturgeon, erstwhile head of the Scottish Nationalist Party, withered away very quickly when it became known that she was embezzling donated funds. Attacking her for being too left-wing, too vague on the details of separation, or anti-English did nothing, because so are her supporters.
Likewise, Boris Johnson collapsed because he lied and went to parties during lockdown. For a populace which considers fairness and playing by the rules one of its defining traits, that immediately re designated him from “one of us” to “other”.
Exactly. You can't call him "fatty" because that's endearing and relatable to many Americans. You have to call him "gold toilet" or "Epstein island" or something. Something that makes him seem out of touch and elitist.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's like saying "DEMONcrats" or "RepubliKKKans". People who say such things, unironically, show they have such bad taste they cannot be taken seriously. People who say "Drumpf" or "Cheeto" or "Mango Mussolini" look ridiculous. This doesn't happen with names that do stick, to name a few: "The Iron Lady," "Slick Willie," "Dubya," "Governor Moonbeam," "Tricky Dick," "Old Hickory," "Honest Abe," "Landslide Lyndon," "Papa Doc," "BoJo," "The Gipper".
Consider the following comparison: "Moscow Mitch"; "Cocaine Mitch". Both of those names are in use, but only one has "stuck". The other makes the speaker sound like a hack. I need hardly say which.
Trump himself is pretty good at this. His epithets stick. It helps that he comes up with so many of them and most of them aren't very good. But consider: "Little Adam Schiff," "Sleepy Joe," "Little Marco," "Rocket Man," "Pocahontas," "Ron DeSanctimonious". "Lyin' Ted" was has never gone away. "Low Energy Jeb" was so powerful it effectively ended Jeb's political career. "Crooked Hillary," however cornball and unserious it is, worked.
I've often thought Trump could have ended the primary months ago and cornered the Zoomer vote by decisively calling DeSantis "No Rizz Ron".
In all serious DeSadness would've been way better than DeSanctimonious, that was one of his weakest yet.
More options
Context Copy link
It doesn’t stick because they came directly from comedy TV. It’s not organic it’s something that they heard on TV and repeated. Drumpf came directly from Last Week Tonight and is the last name that the Trump family had from immigration to America from Germany. It’s not only uncreative but it’s astroturfed.
It's not really funny, the only insult in it is that it vaguely sounds a little like 'Dumb' (but not much).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Because Trump is willing to repeat them ad nauseum as a supposedly serious candidate. He has zero shame. Democrats and Haley fail for the same reason: they're in the wrong genre.
They try for gravitas and authority - "when they go low"...- instead of just being funny and hammering the joke in. It's Head of State, not House of Cards.
I get your point. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine any Democrat pol would’ve been able to make “Drumpf” stick no matter how many times he repeated it.
"Drumpf" has the additional constraint that it's not as good as any of Trump's bangers in terms of playground insult succinctness and is pretty weird for the pro-migrant Democrats to try to make happen.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The problem is that most Americans are fat.
More options
Context Copy link
I would go for "Deadbeat Don". Four bankruptcies and all that. "Deadbeat Donnie" if I was taller than him.
More options
Context Copy link
Look, Fat
Natural hilarity overshadowed by Trump’s, but still a regularly entertaining fellow.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Those people happened to find that a black person was the right person for them to marry. Why the heck would there be anything else?
More options
Context Copy link
I'll absolutely take the opposite on that bet. When has Trump ever implied this kind of animus toward black Americans?
I'll also take a bet on Nikki's numbers "continuing to rise" if one's available (she'll lose New Hampshire and have to concede).
I feel like this is a good example of the two-screens thing. Not because of the real estate cases or any specific evidence, but because of how this action gels with one’s mental model of Trump.
My gut instinct was that yeah, an off-the-cuff mention of race is the exact sort of remark trump is known for. Nothing derogatory—he’s not going to get caught with a Martha Stewart hot mic. Just his usual rambling on a subject which happens to meander past his opponent’s family.
On the other hand, if one is very used to hearing accusations of dog whistling, this probably comes across as the same sort of attack, and is easy to dismiss. Trump has definitely avoided showing that animus.
I think you’re right on Haley, too.
I don’t see trump mentioning or taking notice of that- he’s going to ramble on about her infidelity, but anti-black racism has never been a hobby horse of his.
More options
Context Copy link
A lot of Trump's remarks exist in this casual blase dual-screen world where each side parses them differently. I don't think Trump just said anything racist or meant anything racist. I understand why someone primed to see things that way, or operating on a different definiton of racism, would disagree.
However, in this case, I think predicting Trump will attack Nikki's daughter for marrying a black man is wildly off-base. That's not some ambiguous remark that cuts across different ideas of what constitutes racism. That's suggestijg Trump just believes black men are inferior and it's risable to date them. Where would that even come from?
I’m saying the Trump skeptical screen doesn’t require him to believe/say that. He could just “mention her daughter’s married to a black man,” no commentary, no animosity.
He could say “lovely family” and Trump haters would take it as a dog whistle, proof of seething racism, a personal threat. Some subset of racists would also take it as a dog whistle, and chortle about how their guy Notices these things and obviously that means he cares for their cause in particular. Both of these groups would be reading too much into it.
The important thing is that might-be-controversy is kind of a hallmark of his campaign. Every time he opened his mouth, it got interpreted in three different ways. Does he hate veterans, or just McCain? Is he a misogynist, or was it all locker room talk? He’s a living Rorschach blot, and he’s very good at finding those situations. That’s why I found it plausible that he would make Haley’s son-in-law newsworthy without ever saying an explicit word about him.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
In 1973, in 1989, in 1992, and very often in between and since then?
I have to sometimes remind myself the most people didn't grow up in New York, and didn't have Trump as a looming political and cultural figure in their life for many decades before he showed up on The Apprentice or a ballot.
When you ask questions like that, it just strikes me as ignorance, of the type anyone who grew up with Trump in their local news on a regular basis would be baffled by. Yes, he has a long and well-documented history from before he started making campaign speeches. Yes, a legacy of racism, both structural and verbal, has been a part of that history since the very beginning.
Between this and your cheap shots elsewhere, you’re generating more heat than light. Take a day to cool off.
As for @Dean and @Rambler: yes, we know. Please refrain from attacks based on reputation. If you think someone is acting in bad faith, report it.
Copy that.
More options
Context Copy link
The awareness is for the members, not the moderators. The moderators are aware of Darwin's years of bad faith polemics and cheap shots, just as they are aware he will continue to continue them again after repeat offense whatever double or triple warning it is after triple or quadruple digit reports by now.
It's other posters who need to be aware of Darwin's well-worn character to best avoid engaging and responding in ways that provoke moderator punishments against them, as has more than occasionally happened in the last. Darwin is one of the classic cases of evaporative cooling, where bad-faith actors who tend to get more people who engaged with them riled and moderated than they themselves do. Per the failure state, the best way to mitigate the heat by such people is to warn others to not engage, and why, so they do not engage and get emotional in the face of bad faith.
The most succinct warning is what was given: guesswho aka Darwin is a progressive who is here to wage the culture war, and the level of quality has been characteristic.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Those three links are two stories. One of them is about some people at a Trump company who discriminated against a black guy one time. The other is about a long-disputed case from the 1970s (!) in which Trump never admitted guilt, and claimed he was not the only party sued. A reporter from the Washington Post is brandished to offer his interpretation of events as a fact-check. By this logic, since Biden said some racist remarks in the 70s, I predict he'll say the N-word live on TV. Maybe while wearing a sombrero and kissing Nick Fuentes.
When you say things like that, it just strikes me as stupidity. I think you have to be seriously illiterate to read the room and think Trump is about to attack someone's daughter for marrying a black man. I think that's hilarious.
Guess who is Darwin from the old site.
More options
Context Copy link
This is one of those "you don't hate journalists enough, you think you do but you don't" moments for me honestly. I sometimes forget that I have to retroactively apply my hate for journalism into the past, and this is a good reminder. Journalism as a whole really never was much better, it was just harder to see how bad they were. This is regarding the 1992 article of course.
More options
Context Copy link
guesswho is a long-term progressive cultural warrior, and this level of evidence is extremely typical of him.
On most forums, if you're a bad actor waging the culture war, it's probably a decent strategy to post a bunch of links like this that are ridiculous non-sequiturs. Most people are too lazy to follow them and have the (usually reasonable) assumption that what's said in them is being accurately represented. Fortunately, I think The Motte is better than that. Looking forward to guesswho's inevitable (re-)permabanning. We need good leftist posters, but he's not one.
I believe the semi-official position once upon a time was 'better a bad leftist poster than no leftist poster,' or something along the lines as a balance-of-ideology argument.
Leftist affirmative action was explicit policy at some point. I don’t think it’s been discussed recently, and I can assure you it’s not defining our relationship with guesswho.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link