site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 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.

6
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Giving special quotas and handouts to females would be more blatantly discriminatory

Then the purpose of this system of divorcing "female" and "woman"- what it does- is to launder this exact thing through "if you're willing to deny the truth in a way that suits our orthodoxy you too can have some of the gibs".

Note that the group most opposed to this, that being a particular subset of 'females', are generally opposed to the fact this allows males to assume privileges currently granted to females, but not generally opposed to those [blatantly discriminatory] privileges existing in the first place.

Women who are opposed to those privileges existing are generally understood as gender traitors, much like how a white person in 1950 opposed to institutional privilege would be considered a race traitor. Those who believe in gyno-supremacy usually consider these types a lost cause outside of the occasional think-piece about cheating being good for you.

And saying that "males are trash" would be a lot more obviously hateful than "men are trash"

Gynosupremacists (when they retreat to their motte they call themselves 'feminist') use these words interchangeably for a reason; when they say the latter, they mean the former, as a worldview founded on sexism predicts.