site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 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.

4
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I'm American, born here to Hungarian parents. I've was raised learning what the USSR, now Russia, has done for the past century from very personal stories. To state my biases, I'm really rather anti-Russian.

I come at this from a position of morality -- well, my own personal morality, which is about the best I can do. We've given a commitment to Ukraine in 1994 to provide security assurances, and we've reneged on this several times over. The just and moral thing to have done is step up in 2014 to protect her like we said we would, ideally diplomatically, but militarily if pressed. We didn't do that, so it's water under the bridge at this point.

It's pretty clear to me that we're not going to force Russia to capitulate. The next most moral thing (according to me), is to find peace somehow. Continuing to fight this stalemate is not moral.

I'm not a huge fan of Trump's way of conducting business, but this could well be the US opting out. It's certainly going to be a forcing function if the US stops sending over money and materiel. The best-case scenario is probably the EU doing the negotiating. I doubt that Zelenskyy is going to be on board with that though.

As much as I don't want Russia to get a win on this, losing a generation of men (on both sides of the conflict) is worse.