site banner
PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   29562 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.

Dominant ideologies can afford to gatekeep; weaker ideologies can’t. The far left struggles because in some ways it is both strong (it largely agreed with the liberal consensus on social issues, tolerance, immigration, identity, prisons/justice etc) and in other ways it is weak (private property, capitalism, the existence of rich people). As you note, this means it struggles to build an electoral coalition beyond young middle class students who agree with the liberals on social issues but who are personally poor, and therefore sympathetic to leftist arguments around redistribution.

And it’s worth noting that the ‘adults in the room’ in the DNC seem to know what they need to do to be electorally competitive. They just can’t get the party to moderate on trans and immigration.

And it’s worth noting that the ‘adults in the room’ in the DNC seem to know what they need to do to be electorally competitive. They just can’t get the party to moderate on trans and immigration.

I don't think that that's their biggest issue so much as the part where they're utterly unwilling to pursue any policies benefiting the common people if such would slightly inconvenience their Wall-Street donors....

This doesn’t seem to hold republicans back too much, so it’s probably not that.

Biden pursued a lot of what the left sees as "policies benefitting the common people" (expanded child tax credit, student loan forgiveness, left-friendly reindustialisation like the CHIPS act, big infrastructure bill, a more pro-union NLRB and a more anti-big-business FTC). And this worked - the Biden administration saw the fastest low-end real wage growth, lowest unemployment, and highest employment since the Clinton boom.

Neither the left nor the common people gave him any credit for it. In the case of the left, this was because the American left (apart from AOC) are retarded. In the case of the common people it was because the typical voter (who is increasingly likely to be retired) is more bothered by modest-by-1970's standards inflation than they are by poor labour market performance for people less fortunate than themselves. This 2012 blog post by Steve Randy Waldman was prophetic - when offered a full employment economy, the voters hated it.

This 2012 blog post by Steve Randy Waldman

Any suggestions of similar, still running blogs or communities?

There's a perception that Democratic politicians are particularly fringe or loony with respect to trans issues or immigration and in general they're not. The problem is that the people who are extreme are uniformly Democrats, and that gets projected on to the rest of the party. It doesn't help that these people tend to, by their nature, be the most motivated, loudest, and most likely to get signal-boosted by their political opponents.

I think the equivalent trend for Republicans is something like racism. Most Republican politicians are not racist, certainly not in the good ol' boy kind of way. But for Americans who personally know racists or look on social media and see examples of politicians who are overtly racist it's uniformly Republicans.

There's a perception that Democratic politicians are particularly fringe or loony with respect to trans issues or immigration and in general they're not.

Maybe on a personal level, but as political figures, there was and largely still is an absolute consensus within the Democratic party on these issues or at least the supposed core beliefs underlying them. The fact that there is a diversity hire Supreme Court Justice who was literally unable to define the word "woman" during her Senate hearings and was voted in unanimously by the Democrats should attest to this. I'm sure quite a few Senators privately think she's a moron, but their political actions are what determines their politics, not what might be whispered behind closed doors.

But for Americans who personally know racists or look on social media and see examples of politicians who are overtly racist it's uniformly Republicans.

If you define racism as "being resentful of black people", sure. But if I consider racism as any undue or malicious injection of race as a marker of superiority or inferiority as pertaining to a political issue, it's most certainly been the left-liberal wing of the spectrum that's by far the most common offender. I actually remember very little hostile discussions of race in Western politics growing up - there was a kind of consensus that fixating on race was low-class skinhead behaviour and that the most one should do is be courteous and non-judgemental. Every now and then you'd get a "George Bush doesn't care about black people" moment, but those seemed more like rebellious provocations and tabloid scandals than any kind of real societal divide. Here in Europe, the big topic around race 15+ years ago was football fans making monkey noises when black players of the opposing team were on the field - again, condemned as low class, provincial behaviour mainly driven by stupidity and a lack of education rather than any kind of malice or "institutional oppression".

The vast majority of Democrat politicians will dutifully vote for secretly transing kids in schools and installing backdoors to enable unlimited third world migration. The official position of the party is the loony, and they do not tolerate dissent.

Even the slimmest Democrat state trifecta in a competitive state will result in them speedrunning the california experience (sorry I don't have links, I remember lib fake news gushing about how good this is) https://prospect.org/politics/2023-05-22-new-minnesota-vikings/

That changed in 2022, when the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) gained three Senate seats to win a one-seat majority. ...

The DFL promptly set to work, passing a sweeping set of reforms that puts deeper-blue states like California, Massachusetts, or New York to shame.

All told, it’s quite the record of accomplishment—all done in less than half a year

Democrats never slow down, and they never defect.

There's a perception that Democratic politicians are particularly fringe or loony with respect to trans issues or immigration and in general they're not. The problem is that the people who are extreme are uniformly Democrats, and that gets projected on to the rest of the party. It doesn't help that these people tend to, by their nature, be the most motivated, loudest, and most likely to get signal-boosted by their political opponents.

Is this actually true? Who was the Democrat governor banning puberty blockers in kids in 2021? Who was the Senate Democrat voting for the wall in 2018? And Biden officials? Come on. They put trans people in multiple positions, had the crossdressing airport thief, and their border policy intentionally massively increased both illegal immigration as well as net of the "asylum claims" that no one actually thinks are legitimate.

Well, there's Gavin Newsom's post-election switch to opposing trans athletes in women's sports.

You can take a kind of functionalist position and say that Democratic politicians are what they do, and so in 2020 they were radical trans ideologues. Sure. But it doesn't give much insight into how they will respond to changing circumstances. Democratic electeds don't have deeply held principles (no more than Republicans do): they react to incentives, around easily understood things like power, money, and status.

The extremists driving the unpopular trans positions, on the other hand, are not going to suddenly abandon their views once they start costing them power, money, and status. (And the broader Democratic base will shift to supporting whatever Democratic leadership and media tells them to.)

You can take a kind of functionalist position and say that Democratic politicians are what they do, and so in 2020 they were radical trans ideologues. Sure. But it doesn't give much insight into how they will respond to changing circumstances.

You have to do the former and be skeptical of the latter, because every Democrat in my lifetime in a major statewide or national race has ran to the center, only to govern far to the left of their campaign positions.

You can take a kind of functionalist position and say that Democratic politicians are what they do, and so in 2020 they were radical trans ideologues. Sure.

Honest question : how else would you qualify someone's politics, other than by their voluntary political actions?

The incentives they experience and respond to. You might have two different people and, at a particular moment of time, they respond the same way to the incentives they face. But if the landscape of incentives change, their actions might diverge.

E.g. if your mental model of Gavin Newsom involves him being deeply ideological on trans issues, then you wouldn't have been able to predict he'd switch to moderating his positions when his party was faced with a broad electoral loss (and wanting to prepare himself for a national run).

And, on the other side, until Trump came most Republican politicians would have condemned broad tariffs and been pro-war. But change the political landscape, and they change their positions.

You can take a kind of functionalist position and say that Democratic politicians are what they do, and so in 2020 they were radical trans ideologues. Sure. But it doesn't give much insight into how they will respond to changing circumstances.

The direct implication of this is that we don't know if they won't come right back to sending trans women to women's sports and prisons the moment they win.

We don't know. But it's not guaranteed they will, and what determines whether Democrats will are how powerful trans activists are when Democrats win, not past actions or politicians' stated values at one moment.

A downside of this framework is that power is opaque, and the clearest way to seeing whether trans groups are powerful is whether they can cause Democratic politicians to send trans people to women's sports and prisons. Beyond that, we have to read tea leaves: how does media treat trans issues? Do tech platforms give them full censorship rights?

There are definitely high-profile Americans who are both Democrats and frequently regarded as racist. Mostly involving antisemitism. To name one example, Hasan Piker.

Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are not true believers. But they don’t push back against the true believers running the party.

Like republicans may not be politically correct about race but they’re visibly uncomfortable with racism. Governors and senators do not retweet the 14 words and happily condemn neoNazis(yes, I’m sure you can dig up state legislators, but my point is that among democrats extremism on trans and immigration is not limited to state legislators).

In my state, Gilberto Hinojosa was ousted as state party chair not when he proved incompetent but when he opined that the party should take a chill pill on trans, purely for electoral reasons.

My issue is that on the left, there’s zero pushback. When trans activists host preschool events in drag at the library, the pushback comes from Republicans, but not liberals. When BLM was burning down parts of major cities, not only were democrats not doing anything to stop it, but were giving bail money and public support to the movement. Right now in the great Tesla burnings, I’ve yet to hear one person on the left say “this has gone too far. We don’t support vandalism, and don’t harass people who own a Tesla.”

The right, to a fairly large degree rein in their radical wing. No GOP member would let a Proud Boy cover a mosque in bacon without condemning it. They don’t pay bail money for riots as a matter of course. If people March with Nazi flags, the right will scream at every opportunity from every available microphone, on every podcast and blog that they don’t support this nonsense.

And I think it’s the arrogance of having almost all of the cathedral on their side. They know they aren’t going to face blowback from the media and they know their districts are mostly safe. They don’t have to worry about their wings because they’re the ones in control.

if people March with Nazi flags, the right will scream at every opportunity from every available microphone, on every podcast and blog that they don’t support this nonsense.

Scott Aaronson keeps rightly lambasting Musk for not doing this about the salute thing.

  1. If anyone on the left had said that Tesla vandalism is going too far, do you think your media/info channels would tell you about it? What do you think the motivations are of the news sources covering this? My prior is that any right coded media source would downplay/ignore any such statements.

  2. Your statement about the right reining itself in seems pretty shaky to me. If people march with Nazi flags they'll scream from the rooftops but Elon Musk himself questionably, ambiguously does a Nazi salute on a huge stage, notably doesn't apologize or even acknowledge that this would be offensive to some people, even if it was initially accidental,and the right as a whole lets him off scot free? This doesn't support your argument. And neither does the bit about riots, unless you think everyone in the Capitol building on the 6th was actually no criminal at all. I recall lots of financial and legal support being thrown their way.

If people march with Nazi flags they'll scream from the rooftops but Elon Musk himself questionably, ambiguously does a Nazi salute on a huge stage, notably doesn't apologize or even acknowledge that this would be offensive to some people, even if it was initially accidental,and the right as a whole lets him off scot free?

If Musk's "Nazi salute" was a creation of the left-wing media, this becomes completely explainable.

The thing about Nazi flags is that you don't need to be politically biased to conclude that they are Nazi flags.

Tracing woodgrains has pushed back against the Tesla stuff.

Tracingwoodgrains also has a history of deliberate efforts to undercut the credibility or ability of political opponents to signal-boosting attestations of progressive political excesses, which includes things like the tesla stuff.

Tracing pushes back on a matter of success of tactics towards their preferred outcomes, not kind. Namely, when things are viewed as counter-productive to Tracing's preferences.

Trace also would never survive a DNC primary or a week as a host on CNN. So he is not a good example of the mainstream left.

The problem is that the people who are extreme are uniformly Democrats, and that gets projected on to the rest of the party. It doesn't help that these people tend to, by their nature, be the most motivated, loudest, and most likely to get signal-boosted by their political opponents.

Trace isn't on the left at all. He is a dissident conservative who is trying to build bridges to the centre-left because the centre-right in the US appears to no longer exist.

If the center right no longer exists (not true IMO) the center left hasn't for decades. So, I don't see the point of trying to make that point.

Oh please. Yeah, I heard his origin story of being a Mitt Romney republican, but there's nothing conservative about him. His entire posting history here indicates his goal boils down to 'tard-wrangling the hardcore progressives so they stop scaring away the hoes normies.

I'm also struggling to charitably respond to the assertion that a center-right no longer exists. The neocons don't get to define the center-right, and disagreeing with them doesn't mean you're "far-right".

I'm also struggling to charitably respond to the assertion that a center-right no longer exists. The neocons don't get to define the center-right, and disagreeing with them doesn't mean you're "far-right".

Common usage of the term "centre-right" is shorthand for "pro-establishment right". We all know what it is, and I think we both agree that it is currently politically irrelevant in the USA. I agree with you that "far-right" is an unhelpful term, but claiming that Trump is "centre-right" is obfuscatory linguistic prescriptivism. This is particularly obvious in countries with more than two political parties - we can argue about what to call parties like Reform UK/Rassemblement Nationale/AfD (I prefer "right-wing populist") but - again, as a matter of common usage - "centre-right" clearly refers to parties like Conservatives/les Republicains/CDU-CSU.

More comments

The problem is that the people who are extreme are uniformly Democrats, and that gets projected on to the rest of the party. It doesn't help that these people tend to, by their nature, be the most motivated, loudest, and most likely to get signal-boosted by their political opponents.

I'd say the biggest problem is that they get appointed to be the Secretary of the Public Health Service, where they hatch conspiracies to abolish age limits on "gender affirming procedures".

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