site banner
PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   32826 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 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.

I was going to make this a top-level, but since it’s apparently topical…I was digging through my post history for something and ran into this based on a different @2rafa comment.

Enlisting is an employer of last resort. There were a lot more people at their last resorts in 2008-2012, a lot of people who really needed a competitive paycheck and a comprehensive insurance policy. In 2024, that’s not necessarily the case. We’re coming off a couple years of COVID distortions and zero-interest-rate phenomena. That has a way of making boot camp less appealing.

So, Conspiracy Theory of the Week: Trump is intentionally trying to trigger a recession to bolster U.S. military recruitment.

If the economy crashes, more young American men will choose the military. If it crashes faster than the housing market, even more so. And if it crashes in the midst of a publicized house-cleaning session, well, the new recruits are more likely to endorse the Trump party line.

HHS has already lost more employees than the DoD despite the latter being 10x larger. (Numbers could be off; it’s hard to find coverage that isn’t hysterical about the whole process.) Meanwhile, USMEPCOM is one of the few exemptions to the DoD hiring freeze. Can’t recruit new troops if there’s no one running the stations!

There’s the whole bit where he’s slashing the VA, but this doesn’t actually disprove anything. After all, who hates the VA more than veterans?

This is stupid and I don’t actually believe it. There’s no advantage over simpler theories which don’t assume a 5D mastermind.

To wit, Trump policy is governed almost exclusively by his aesthetic sensibilities, and he’s mashing whichever buttons look like they might steer us in that direction. Military reform is somewhere in the pile. High enough to give the DoD a better deal than DEd or HHS; not nearly enough to intentionally tank the stock market.

We don't more men to join the military, we need a defense industrial and procurement sector that actually works at delivering lethal weaponry.

Would take a massive culture shift. Default response in tech industry spaces to "we need a defense industry" is "die fascist, you don't belong in this world!" Those guys almost never get moderated either. Kids grow up reading this stuff everywhere and take it for social truth.

Palmer Lucky is building AI powered kill drones in Costa Mesa. Seems fine tbqh.

But anyway what's missing isn't the tech industry per-se, it's a journeyman commitment to a a working product. Lockheed, Raytheon and all them are just mooches.

Needs several large defense conglomerates to be broken up. In the 1980s there were hundreds of defense contractors. Now there are a handful.

Oh that sort of thing shifts overnight. In 1940 American leftists were singing songs about how the US entering the war was a capitalist conspiracy to kill surplus American workers, because Germany and the USSR were allied (Pete Seeger's "plow the 4th one under').
A month after Barbarossa their Soviet handlers had them singing about the glory of war and crushing fascism. And days after Pearl Harbor they were doing war bond tours.

Just needs the right mini series on Netflix and you'll have Googlers happily coding automated killbots to identify target ethnicities.

Isn't there a "defense tech bro" scene in some other part of California, though? I think there has been a culture shift occurring, though somewhat slowly and silently.

You're thinking of the scene around Anduril -- down near LA.

And yeah, it's silent. But also loud -- he named the company after a LOTR sword, that's not subtle.

There's another entire tech ecosystem based around defense, mostly not in California but rather in the DC area (though with outposts in a lot of places). A lot of California tech people don't even realize it exists; I don't think there's a huge amount of flow.

'Trump' and '5D chess' go together like... well they don't go together. Not to mention that the NEETs and gig workers not in the conventional labor force are mostly young men the military doesn't want anyways.

People often think Trump is playing 5D chess, but he's usually playing checkers... it's just that he cheats.

I think Trump and Musk would gladly cut the military but Trump has smart political instincts and knows (a) that many red tribe normal Republican voters like the military, have relatives who serve or have served and enjoy a certain feeling of power that comes from American military supremacy and (b) that a lot of Republican senators and representatives feel the same way and/or represent places that rely in part of DoD spending.

I think Trump is on some level afraid of war, and even though he might stumble into it or be baited into it by real or perceived enemies, he doesn’t relish it.

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