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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Abortion is in my mind due to the debate last night which has led me to this article:
https://thedispatch.com/article/claims-about-children-born-alive-after-abortion-attempts-in-minnesota-are-true/
The gist is: in Minnesota, if a baby was born you were required to care for it to keep it alive. Sometimes an abortion would result in a living baby being born, and doctors were required to give that baby supportive care (they were likely premature, so wouldn’t necessarily survive, although premature babies born wrong 23 weeks survive frequently, that said none of the cited instances of this led to a baby surviving).
In 2019 this was changed to allow doctors to let a baby sit there until it just dies on its own.
Here’s some thoughts about this:
At the point where this is even a question, you’re clearly talking about a living human being.
Simply ignoring a baby until they die is the way that infanticide (usually killing baby girls) is done all over the world
This is another instance of “conservative politician says something that gets immediately ‘fact checked’, but it turns out is at least directionally and likely just literally true.
We should be caring for living human babies whether the mother wants to kill them or not. “Oops I meant to kill it before I could see it out here in the world” is not a valid excuse.
If anything the fact that there were so many cases of this in a single state in such a small period of time moves my needle even further towards being aggressively anti abortion, up to jailing the doctors doing this and charging them with murder.
Abortion is probably the major break between the "dissident" right and the traditional mainstream socially conservative/fundamentalist right. Despite considerable overlap on most other policy positions, abortion is a serious wedge issue. My take is that abortion is almost universally eugenic: even outside obvious cases like screened-for genetic diseases, you can just look at abortion rates by race. (From Vox: Out of 629,898 abortions reported to the CDC for 2019, Black women accounted for 38.4 percent of them. By comparison, white women made up 33.4 percent of those abortions.) What percent of aborted children would ever become net taxpayers, had they not been aborted? Given that abortions are correlated with low socioeconomic status, promiscuity, high time preference, and a whole slate of other negative things, many of which are heritable, my suspicion is the number is quite low.
When your political enemies are sacrificing their children to Baal, I don't know that trying to stop them is a winning long-term strategy. Ironically this particular savior complex pattern matches well to the self-destructive white guilt that characterizes much of the left. Any moral system that insists you have some obligation to black crack babies across the country is trivially extendible to cover unfortunates all across the world and I suspect there's cognitive dissonance in not doing so.
This is also why I’m pro-abortion.
Abortion getters are disproportionately composed of those low in IQ and high in time preference, those of a population high in violent criminality and net-tax consumption, and/or those who favor practices and policies that are negative to me and my descendants. If there are some means by which these people create fewer additional versions of themselves, I’m more than happy to have such means be common, and I mostly only care if such means are safe and legal to the extent it helps them be common.
How far does this extend? I bet plenty such people would at least occasionally, circumstantially be happy to off their two year olds.
Why would it need to extend? Abortion and infanticide are not necessarily a packaged deal.
Infanticide does strike me as more distasteful than abortion, but I imagine the fraction of such people willing to Gregor Clegane-away their already-born children (or leave them perishing due to neglect) are a fraction of those willing to abort a pregnancy, so the effect size is relatively paltry and the hypothetical is not particularly relevant. In any case, such people Cleganing-away their offspring or leaving them perishing to neglect is no skin off my back.
Not my circus; not my monkeys. Especially when such offspring would be deleterious to me and my own family, and families like us.
Historically no. Infanticide was rampant in the ancient world and much of human history up until surprisingly recent times.
Baby farming - i.e. infanticide for profit by plausibly deniable neglect as a service - was commonplace in the UK until we got rich enough to be concerned about it in the 1870s-1890s.
The idea that we should keep unwanted babies alive comes after the idea that we can keep wanted babies alive. And that requires industrial civilisation.
Having read the link, the baby farmers neglecting or killing the children they adopted was not societally acceptable. That wasn't the point, the actual point was a decentralized societal foster care system. It certainly seems to be the case that the vast majority of children fostered this way were not deliberately killed or died of neglect.
More options
Context Copy link
This strikes me as absurd, and thankfully @FlyingLionWithABook already came by to say why.
But I wanted to thank you for the link about baby farming. New to me.
More options
Context Copy link
I dunno, one of the main things that marked Christians out in the first and second centuries was that they took in babies left out to die. That's a long time before 1890.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link