site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Insofar as I've understood, while Ukrainian has always been widely spoken in the countryside,

This certainly has been true in the western Ukraine, but I don’t think it has been true in the East. Pre-war, less than 20% of population of Donetsk Oblast spoke Ukrainian at all. Given that pretty much all Ukrainian speakers spoke Russian too, probably less than 10% of all conversations happened in Ukrainian.

If your definition of "East" is mostly just the specific areas that were taken by separatists/Russia in 2014 then sure - if you go by a map like this, the areas where Russian was given as the main language in the census outside of the cities pretty much cover those areas, with an additional zone in the Zaporozhye oblast.

Presumably many of those answering that they're Ukrainian-speaking would have indeed used mostly Russian in their daily lives, but that's precisely the difference between a prestige language and a non-prestige language. If Ukrainian-speakers have to become fluent in Russian to get by in life but the Russian-speakers feel it's not their duty to tarnish their mouths with what they see as a peasant dialect, it's Russian that gets spoken, and increasingly so as the years pass by, unless there's a concrete intervention to this matter.