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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Idiocracy: The Motte Post Adaptation

But seriously:

The main issue with your Tutsi and Hutu example, and the first part of your argument is you completely sidestep liberalism. If you're going to discuss this issue you really need to address liberalism directly at some point. Your argument is predicated on the primacy of the social group collectively. The classical liberal perspective have very little to say about groups or identity, and pretty much exclusively focused on the individual. So what if there are less Tutsis? Ethnic social categories like Tutsi and Hutu are (or rather, wishfully) obsolete under the liberal framework. There is merely the primacy of the individual. You need to rebut liberalism. Why, when we live in a liberal world, should we care about things 'cultural, behavioral, and genetic legacy'. They do nothing for me as an individual, except what utility they can provide me in the here and now, not when I'm dead. The future belongs to those who show up, and who shows up depends on who cares who shows up when you're gone.

Secondly, the people who 'did everything right' actually didn't do everything right. They forgot to have children. You're kind of using 'everything right' here to have two meanings. You're using it to be tongue-in-cheek by using the word 'right' to mean 'everything society told them was right'. Which fair enough, I think people have been deceived into an atomized, individualistic, hedonistic lifestyle that I think is both morally wrong and ultimately unfulfilling. But they also bear some personal responsibility in the path that they have chosen.

But you also seem to be unironically using 'right' to mean actually morally right, because you actually do seem to think they are right by evidence by your distain of those who actually do have children as lessers. They can't have it both ways. Either they're an atomized liberal individual who doesn't care about their 'legacy' or social units other than the self, making your whole point moot, or they do care about those things, so they should and probably will actually have children then. Your complaint seems to be that the educated, liberal, intelligent people aren't having enough kids. In that case your focus should be telling them them to go have kids rather than just complaining about 'fecund privilege' that the 'lessers' are actually doing the right thing by having kids.