site banner
PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   32189 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 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
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Is there a typo somewhere in your post? You said we spend $892 million on the military and Trump wants to go to $1 trillion. Elsewhere people are talking about a 10% increase in spending. But going from 900 million to 1 trillion would be way, way more than 10% to say the least. So I figure one of the numbers has to be in error here.

Oops, typo. Now corrected.

This is the most passive aggressive way to point out a typo I have ever seen, the online equivalent of 'bless your heart'. Everyone knows US military spending is in the high hundreds of billions, with a B.

It's not passive aggressive, and I did not in fact know that. I'm not sure why you would expect most people, let alone everyone, to have the faintest idea what US military spending is.

For what it's worth, I didn't read your comment as passive-agressive.

I can sort of understand if you didn’t think about the semantic content of what you wrote, but there’s a baseline level of general quantitative knowledge that one needs to know in order to meaningfully partake in discussions of civic importance. The all-inclusive annual cost of having an employee in a first-world country is about $50,000 - $100,000. The US military has a lot more than 15,000 active duty personnel. You don’t have to know anything about how much ships, tanks, or planes cost to know that $892 million will not come close to covering US military expenses.

Like, if you saw a headline tomorrow saying, “Trump to buy Greenland for 50 trillion dollars”, you should know immediately that that isn’t true. Even if Trump said those words, that would be orders of magnitude more than anyone has ever paid for anything ever.

there’s a baseline level of general quantitative knowledge that one needs to know in order to meaningfully partake in discussions of civic importance.

I'm not sure if I agree with that, but I certainly don't agree this is one such case.

The all-inclusive annual cost of having an employee in a first-world country is about $50,000 - $100,000. The US military has a lot more than 15,000 active duty personnel. You don’t have to know anything about how much ships, tanks, or planes cost to know that $892 million will not come close to covering US military expenses.

But you do need to know that the military has that many people. I certainly don't, and said as much.

Also bear in mind the context of this whole sub-thread. I never claimed to be good at estimating what the military budget is. Hell, I never claimed to be good at anything. Hydroacetalyne is the one who accused me of being passive-aggressive, on the basis that "everyone knows" the military budget is way bigger than $892m. All I'm saying here is that everyone does not know that, nor is it realistic to expect them to.

For calibration, $892 million is less than two large US Coast Guard cutters. But it's definitely easy to not think about just how large numbers/fundings are if you don't work with them on a regular basis, I'll agree with that.

Thanks, that does put things into perspective. Like you said, I don't work with these kinds of numbers at all so I really had no idea how much this stuff costs.

Yeah, military procurement is mind boggling -- sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not so good. Even a single missile is costing at least $100k, sometimes more than a million. And that's only procurement, not the costs of fuel or personnel or maintenance or infrastructure.

You thought 'the US spends less than a billion dollars on defense in total, yet also more than the next eight countries' defense budgets combined' passed the smell test?

Why on earth would I have any more idea what other countries spend on defense than I do with the US? I don't think you're factoring in how little basis for comparison the average person has here. To an individual, $892 million is an enormous amount of money. Even if I lived 100 times as long as I will, I still wouldn't come close to having that kind of money (I've done the math and figured I'll make about $2 million in my lifetime if things go well). I have no idea how much military equipment costs. I don't even have any idea how many people the military employs. So I don't even have figures I could use to try to make a rough estimate (not that I would've bothered, because I could just look it up easier than that). This is simply not a topic which your average person would have any reason to know about.

Oh, give him a break. Most people are bad at math, especially when dealing with such large numbers.

official sources say $892 billion https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/07/hegseth-trump-1-trillion-defense-budget-00007147

million would not make sense

Thank you. I had no idea what the spending actually was, so I didn't have a frame of reference to judge numbers as making sense or not.

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