site banner
PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   33039 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 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
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Mainstream? As in, I'll turn on CNN and see it?

Yes, the internet has allowed thousands of people who would otherwise never know one another to share stupid antisemitic memes, but that hardly counts as entering the mainstream.

Ah so we are at the "it's just a bunch of weird college kids nobody cares about in the Real Worldtm and it doesn't matter" step of the cycle we saw Woke messaging go through.

The vast and dishonest Zionist campaign in media and astroturfed across the internet to pretend that nothing was happening in Gaza and if it was happening it was a good thing was the best thing that happened to Holocaust Denial since, well, the Holocaust. Because suddenly a lot of people arguing on the internet, like me, found themselves agreeing with people like SecureSignals. Over and over. And a lot of them are probably going to look into things that SecureSignals says otherwise, and start to give them a chance they might not have before.

Wait, where was there a vast media conspiracy to say that nothing bad was happening in Gaza?

That sounds like the opposite of how I remember the last year and a half. On the contrary, it seems to me that the mainstream media has been obsessed with Gaza in a manner totally disproportionate to its actual importance. There has been a constant feed of events from Gaza, especially those critical of Israel - I remember a few weeks when the media could not stop talking about one specific hospital building that the IDF attacked.

If you compare coverage of Gaza to, say, coverage of Artsakh, which happened around the same time as October 7 and was much more unquestionably a genocide, the difference is stark. I suspect Gaza is that way because firstly there's more direct American involvement with Israel, secondly there's a large constituency in Western countries that cares about it (i.e. Jews, who are both wealthier and more influential than the Armenian diaspora), thirdly pro-Palestine activism has been a cause of the left for decades so there's a pre-existing infrastructure, and fourthly Gaza is just ambiguous enough to be spicy. A more obvious or unambiguous genocide doesn't mobilise the existing political coalitions, one to defend and one to attack. It has to be in the just-right zone, bad enough to mobilise people against it, but not so bad that people won't defend it. Gaza is in the zone - just ambiguous enough to be one movie and two screens, just enough for "Israel is committing a genocide!" and "Israel is defending itself from murderous fanatics!" to be both more-or-less defensible claims.

Artsakh wasn’t a genocide. The territory was captured and its inhabitants fled due to the (probably accurate)belief that they would be ethnically cleansed if they didn’t. Azerbaijan didn’t have to do anything, and nor did it.

I believe most definitions of genocide include occupying a territory and forcing all of its inhabitants to leave.

I think there was already a big debate on this forum a few months ago regarding how "genocide" (killing people of the wrong ethnicity) and "ethnic cleansing" (forcing people of the wrong ethnicity to evacuate) are not the same thing and should not be considered as having the same gravity.

United Nations page:

Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(1) Killing members of the group;

(2) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(3) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(4) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(5) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

As ethnic cleansing has not been recognized as an independent crime under international law, there is no precise definition of this concept or the exact acts to be qualified as ethnic cleansing. A United Nations Commission of Experts mandated to look into violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia defined ethnic cleansing in its interim report S/25274 as "rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area". In its final report S/1994/674, the same Commission described ethnic cleansing as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas”.

I think that the Artsakh situation (people of the wrong ethnicity evacuate voluntarily) meets neither of those definitions. On the other hand, though, this Reuters article does cite "several international experts" who say that the Artsakh situation does count as "ethnic cleansing", because "Azerbaijan's destruction of essential supplies" counts as intentionally forcing the Armenians to leave.

The territory was captured and its inhabitants fled due to the (probably accurate)belief that they would be ethnically cleansed if they didn’t.

We have a term for this. It's called "ethnic cleansing."

The vast and dishonest Zionist campaign in media and astroturfed across the internet to pretend that nothing was happening in Gaza

This is curious to me and could probably be the basis for a much longer post about how differently people perceive the form and content of "mainstream media".

Case in point: unlike you, it seemed like every time I turned on the news in the months following October 7, I was greeted with videos of bombs falling on Gaza and children crying out in terror; when I read the NYT, pictures of bombed out hospitals and more dead children were plastered over the front page; when I tuned into NPR on my way to work, I was treated to interviews like this on a daily basis:

"I've seen a lot, and I never compare conflicts, but that's got to be the most nightmarish thing I've ever seen. And the most, one of the most, inhumane and cruel things I'll ever see," Jilani says in a voice memo about an 11-year-old girl in the emergency room at al-Aqsa who was severely burned in an explosive blast.

The message was clear: something terrible, uniquely terrible, was happening in Gaza and Israel was responsible.

Was there a campaign by Israel to downplay what was happening? I have no doubt, but I, the everyday consumer of news, was inundated with what appeared to be atrocity after atrocity, as if every other conflict happening in the world had paused or was insignificant in comparison.

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