site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 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.

young non hispanic white men are no longer even a majority of young men if you look at gen alpha.

They're still a massive plurality, and might be a majority depending on how the "hispanic"-identification shakes out (if you're the product of a mixed family, are roughly the same color as Taylor Lautner and have the surname "Lopez" are you hispanic or white? It's not immediately obvious absent cultural signifiers which are malleable to self-ID and incentive).

Also, pointing to black women isn't the flex you think it is, because they wield massive political power in the Democratic party, which very much has a puncher's chance of winning any given elections despite being a dysfunctional krazy-glue ethnic spoils coalition. Even gen alpha white men are a much larger and higher-earning-potential demographic.

if you're the product of a mixed family, are roughly the same color as Taylor Lautner and have the surname "Lopez" are you hispanic or white?

There have been a number of shifts in the common definition of "white" (which has occasionally gone by other terms like "WASP") that generally get swept under the rug by partisans. In the late 1800s, it didn't include Italians. Catholics more broadly were probably excluded until maybe the JFK administration.

I sometimes wonder if we'd all get along better if we actively tried to culturally expand that definition to include all Americans, rather than focusing on divisive "hyphenated Americans" (a term which dates back to the late 1800s). But it seems an unpopular idea in political activist circles.

There have been a number of shifts in the common definition of "white" (which has occasionally gone by other terms like "WASP")

I don't think WASPs ever self-described as such. My (boomer WASP) relatives tell me that they had never heard the term until they went to college in the 60's, where it was used in a half-joking, half-derogatory sense by their Jewish classmates i.e. "we have a slur for every other group, so we need one for you guys too." "Anglo-Saxon" was definitely used in the past, but it wasn't meant to imply that non-Anglo-Saxons weren't white (yes, Ben Franklin once wrote the 18th century equivalent of a Twitter shitpost arguing this position, but I've never seen any other evidence that this was a widespread opinion in his day or afterwards).

I sometimes wonder if we'd all get along better if we actively tried to culturally expand that definition to include all Americans, rather than focusing on divisive "hyphenated Americans" (a term which dates back to the late 1800s). But it seems an unpopular idea in political activist circles.

Calling everyone white would be needlessly confusing when we already have the word American. Sure, Spanish-speakers and heritage American ethnic nationalists will be upset that we aren't conforming to their definitions of the word, but this is already how 90% of the population is using it so at this point it's just descriptive linguistics.