site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   22746 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 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.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Meh. Was the strike intended to kill people or to make a point?

A strike that doesn't kill the people it's aimed at doesn't make a point (or at least, it doesn't make the point you'd want to make by launching it).

We've been bombing the Houthis to Make a Point; it would seem charitable to assume that these strikes were intended to inflict material losses, not simply remind them that we still have airplanes.

The US/UAE/Israel droped a tactical nuke on a Yemen city a few years back ( yes complete with camera CCD scintillation ). So at this point anything's possible.

  • -18

On line I find stories which claim this. Some claim there is CCD scintillation... but none shows it and there's at least one which says it's there and then that it isn't. Whether the people claiming this could distinguish radiation effects from plain overload from too much light I doubt also.

Yeah, I think conventional explosions could still cause blindness, assuming sufficient yield, no neutrons necessary.

[citation needed]

Particularly with the UAE having a nuke- I have no doubt that the UAE, Saudi, etc could buy a paki nuke for money, but the likelihood they would do so to use against some goat herders is low. Israel, likewise, had no reason to care about the Houthis until recently. And while the USA sold Saudi weapons, we weren’t involved in the war.

I think the proposition that the US and allies secretly used a tactical nuke in combat (on a mostly-civilian target, in the 21st century, with no outcry from the UN, Russia, China, watchdog NGOs, or anyone else) falls firmly in the realm of “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” So, let’s see it. Because on its face this claim is ludicrously implausible, to put it mildly.

Could you please Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.?

The atmospheric detonation of nuclear weapons is impossible to hide from any industrial nation which chooses to investigate or any number of NGOs. Any theory which claims a nuke was dropped on the Houti would also need to explain why this did not lead to Iran and Russia making claims to that effect, and why fricking Greenpeace as well as dozens of other Western NGOs decided to sweep it under the rug. By the time you have added all the required epicycles, you might as well claim that the nuclear strike was coordinated by lizardmen who were combating space aliens.

Also, scintillation is a process in which ionizing radiation excites (roughly visible wave-length) photons in a material. What happens in CCD sensors is different, you get pixel noise as gamma rays, neutrons or charged particles produce electron-hole-pairs in the pixels which lead to a depletion of the charge of the pixel, just as light does. The camera acts as a semiconductor detector.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6LDFD02-Utc

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9QSi0R2HEcs

Can't find the exact videos with the little dots as the explosion happens, some of the ones I had saved seem to have been scrubbed from youtube. Belive me. It was there, I was watching that shit as it unfolded and videos were posted on 4chan and other sites. The little dots were hitting the cameras, the artefacts centered around the explosion point.

Edit: Specifically, there was a video from much closer to the explosion, with a woman wailing that showed the little particles striking the ccd at and around the center of the explosion.

Context please.

What?!

Seconded. This sounds like bullshit.

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