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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   34874 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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Sam Altman and his husband had a kid.

Let me say outright I wish him, him, and the child well. Certainly growing up in a wealthy family affords a child many benefits that would not be had without that wealth, so good for the kid. Let me also say I am, as a person tangentially involved in medicine and medical science, not adamantly opposed to IVF, personally, though admittedly I have not spent a lot of time poring over the moral aspects of it. It seems like one of those things that generally contributes toward the good, inasmuch as it is creative, in the most literal sense of the word, and not destructive. My mind might be changed by a persuasive argument.

What irks me though, is that in the linked article there is no mention whatsoever of the mother of this child, the woman who carried the child in her womb, from whose egg the child generated (whether you view this as the mother or not is of course up to you.) It is as if the two men just somehow had a child, as if that is the most natural thing in the world, and there should be no questioning of it by anyone for to do so would be, I don't know, wrong or backward-ass.

Yet here I am, wondering. Should there not be at least a rhetorical nod toward the woman, a phrase in some sentence saying that the child was brought into the world via gestational surrogacy--a good way to introduce the term into people's vocabulary, the regular working men and women among us who may have never thought of the term. Yet there is nothing. Nada y pues nada. Can anyone steelman this beyond the assertion that it is a required newspeak in our Brave New World?

If I were to be dramatic, I'd say a woman has been literally erased here-- a maternal unpersoning. I know at least one woman (white, American) who "had" a child via gestational surrogacy--she is now both divorced and living about 4,800 miles (7,725 km) apart from her daughter. Life's a bitch. I never outright asked her about the woman who carried the child to term, though I know that this was a so-called "commercial surrogacy" and the woman who did carry the child was from India, probably without much financial means, and the whole affair was generally unpalatable to me. But I loved the (egg) mother as a sister, though she is unrelated to me, and still do, though she is a little nuts.

But Altman and Mulherin are both men, and thus the egg came from neither of them. I don't know, I just wish the goddam media would throw me a bone sometimes.

(Not directed at OP, just a general statement).

I cannot adequately express how vile I find this practice. To buy a child, to pay a woman to bring into this world a baby that (presumably) she doesn’t want so that you can take it from her breast forever, is to my mind one of the worst crimes that you can commit, and I can’t fathom why we don’t punish it accordingly.

It’s not much better if the buyers are an infertile male/female pair. Yes, at least the child will have a mother figure but you have knowingly taken it away from its actual mother, forever. As for the mother, a woman abandoning her child should be a tragic and rare fact of life, not a business practice.

And no, fucking around with eggs and sperm so that the child isn’t even related to the woman in whose womb it rests for 9 months doesn’t make it better. It’s a base practice designed to obfuscate the nature of the transaction.

Some people can’t have children. That’s just the way it is. ‘Solving’ it with prostitution and (from the child’s perspective) kidnapping is supremely selfish and from my perspective absolutely unacceptable in a society with any pretensions to morality.

stands awkwardly in infertility

In which case, you have my sympathy. As I said:

It’s looking like I won’t be able to have one myself, which tears me up inside. But that doesn’t mean that anything you do to have a child is right or justified.

It’s not what I’d hoped for either, but there are other ways to contribute to society.

I appreciate your sympathy, but I will not appreciate the sentiment that it “is what it is” and one of my options is a moral stain on society and I should go to jail or something. The sentiment of this “sanctity” between a birth mother and child is completely lost on me. My mother gave birth to me, I suckled on her breasts and came out of her womb blah, blah, blah, and there was not a single maternal aspect about her and no amount of biological relation did anything to help that or my proceeding siblings; if anything, I had a better shot of being raised not like a dog with literally anyone else. And observing this pattern repeatedly among my friends and even my boyfriend makes the notion of biological motherhood being superior above all else a joke to me. I’ve seen enough mothers give birth to children they have as much maternal attachment to as a toddler does to their toy to be rid of the notion there’s something special made between a biological mother and her children that can’t be replicated in any other parenting situation.

You say youre not a troll, but this is a very wordy version of "Conservatism is bad because I hate my family.".

…how so?

It looks more like someone giving a counter example to a proposed definition. Nor does it say anything about the general principle of conservatism.

What definition? Im pretty sure the disagreement is substantive. And yes, she doesnt say anything about conservatism in general - various ways of hating your family are deployed against various parts of social conservatism, and this is one of them. Maybe it would have been clearer to say "instance" instead of "version"?

Yes, at least the child will have a mother figure but you have knowingly taken it away from its actual mother, forever.

I figured they were fighting over that bit: whether or not giving birth is enough to get the special status of “actual mother.” It’s a substantive disagreement but also a definitional one.

Okay, I see what you mean by “instance.”

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Honest question for religious conservatives here, why shouldn't secular people just straight up make your religion illegal, shut down your churches, burn your bibles, etc? Sure, advocating that would lead to a politically damaging public backlash. But is there a principled reason why they shouldn't do those things?

But is there a principled reason why they shouldn't do those things?

Yes. My religion is correct. Accordingly, doing any of that is evil.

But ignoring that, as hydroacetylene says, a classical liberal might think that it would be morally wrong to do that. Further, it's not like everyone will stop if you just ask nicely. You're going to have to kill a bunch of people. What benefit do you have that's worth killing a bunch of productive citizens?

Further, it's not like everyone will stop if you just ask nicely. You're going to have to kill a bunch of people. What benefit do you have that's worth killing a bunch of productive citizens?

This is correct. You should always consider that the people you try to repress might retaliate against you violently. Religious fundamentalists should likewise consider this before trying to force their religious morality on secular people. Some people here have said that physicians in Texas are refusing to treat pregnant women as part of some pro-choice political agenda. I doubt this, but if it's true I say, what'd you expect? You think they're demonic, well, the demonic people don't feel like giving you medical treatment.

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I wonder why you wrote this here?

Under a classical liberal framework? Yes, the same principled reasons that it shouldn’t violently repress dozens or hundreds of other groups.

Under an NrX framework? Because we make good citizens and have demands compatible with flourishing societies. This doesn’t necessarily apply to other religions, but it seems to for Christianity.

Under a one-truth exclusivist framework, that reason would be ‘because we are right and you are wrong’. Obviously, you disagree. But that disagreement goes both ways.

Under a progressive move away from classical liberalism, even Scandinavia and the Netherlands prefer to tolerate their fundamentalist Christian minorities. I suspect a society willing/able to repress Christian fundamentalism is one you do not wish to live in; it probably takes China-tier totalitarianism.

I suspect a society willing/able to repress Christian fundamentalism is one you do not wish to live in; it probably takes China-tier totalitarianism.

This slippery-slope objection never seems to stop religious fundamentalists from demanding their morality be the basis of state policy, so you'll forgive me if I wonder whether it's being put fourth in good faith.

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We're several years past Blue Tribe presidential candidates running on taxing religions they don't like. And of course, Japan successfully suppressed Christianity in the 1600s, Russia in the 1900s and China in the 1950s. In the more limited context of this forum, one of the things that beat the liberalism out of me was the multiple iterations of the circumcision argument, where my opposites argued that religions have conformed themselves to society before, and therefore there's no reason not to use state power to force them to conform arbitrarily in the future. Nor is my opposition to this attitude principled; I'm happy to argue on behalf of the Jews, but I would not be willing to extend the same toleration for the more extreme forms of female genital mutilation, much less Aztec blood sacrifice.

It is entirely obvious that there is no secular, materialist reason not to ban a given religion. We ban harmful things all the time, always have and always will, and there is no objective definition of "harm" for people to resort to in situations of disagreement. It is trivial to generate a definition where conservative Christianity (or drinking alcohol, or playing video games, or teaching women to read, & etc) are serious threats that require the power of the state to suppress.

More generally, tolerance is not a moral precept. There are many good contingent arguments why suppressing conservative Christianity would be a poor idea; Christians are pretty near the core of good citizens, at least under a standard of "good citizen" that has prevailed until recently, and also they are a very old and thus fairly well-understood phenomenon, so there's an argument to stick to the devil you know, as it were. Ultimately, however, toleration is a question of value, and values observably change over time. If your values have changed sufficiently that toleration of conservative Christians no longer seems like a good idea, that's sorta the whole ball game, isn't it? It's sort of like architecture: at the point where you have to expend constant effort to keep the building from falling down, it's probably coming down one way or the other.

Liberalism was built on the assumption that the values held by its founders were something approximating a universal constant, that all humans would hold something approximating those values more or less indefinitely. This assumption is false, and once that realization settles in, Liberalism becomes completely incoherent. Moreover, it is likely that its development and influence were necessarily path-dependent, that it only worked as long as it did because no one had really tried it at scale before, and so the results were unknown. The results now being known, it seems unlikely that it will persist, much less revive.

There are many good contingent arguments why suppressing conservative Christianity would be a poor idea; Christians are pretty near the core of good citizens, at least under a standard of "good citizen" that has prevailed until recently, and also they are a very old and thus fairly well-understood phenomenon, so there's an argument to stick to the devil you know, as it were. Ultimately, however, toleration is a question of value, and values observably change over time. If your values have changed sufficiently that toleration of conservative Christians no longer seems like a good idea, that's sorta the whole ball game, isn't it?

This assumes that Christians are the ones standing still and others are the ones whose values are changing. This does not fit with the last few years, where people who previously didn't know what IVF was have made opposition to it central to their politics. As you say, the question of whether a religion should be tolerated depends on what it's actually doing, and that can change over time.

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I'm not a religious conservative, but of course there is - people need ways to maintain and improve their spiritual health. Is there an atheist materialist reason? No, because religious people aren't atheist materialists.

And more simply, the suppression of true religion is opposition to God himself. That is bad.

Atheistically, if you care about modern liberalism, that would suffice as a reason, what with tolerance being worthwhile and all.

There are a lot of ways you could have rebutted an argument from personal experience without taking cheap shots like this.

If you just mean you get a bad vibe, then fine, but I dont see which rule it breaks. There are other rebuttals that could be made, but I dont want to make a rebuttal - my point isnt even that its right or wrong, its a) this comment is 4x as long as it needs to b) if it wasnt plushed up, you might notice its an extremely klischee point and try to do more than reenact arguments weve seen a 1000 times.

It’s a legit point. The conservative project relies on an idyllic view of the past and of conservative families, which can be hard to maintain when you’ve seen it from the inside. My grandparents ‘s generation were all very religious, and so it was common for spouses to hate each other all their life.

Plus, a lot of straightforward claims conservatives make like ‘all mothers love their children’, ‘all men feel the need to protect women and children’, ‘all people have a god-shaped hole’, etc, can be refuted through a single anecdote.

The conservative project relies on an idyllic view of the past and of conservative families, which can be hard to maintain when you’ve seen it from the inside. My grandparents ‘s generation were all very religious, and so it was common for spouses to hate each other all their life.

But certainly not all families are like that. I was raised in a happy family, and, to my knowledge, have mostly encountered happy families at church and so forth.

Do conservatives usually say that these things just happen by default? I'm more used to conceptualizing things as natural tendencies or roles, which we then have a responsibility and a duty to actually carry out.

The conservative project relies on an idyllic view of the past and of conservative families

Well, no. I don't know what you mean by "conservative project" but conservatives don't simply register the past as "idyllic" as a rule. There's plenty of bad stuff in there! Communism, Nazism, the origin point of modern conservatism was Burke's response to the French Revolution.

The point is that conservatives point to pro-social behaviors, practices, and traditions that over hundreds and thousands of years have repeatedly shown themselves to be unquestionably beneficial to humanity and society. These are the very concepts, ideas, and traditions we seek to conserve. We don't believe in radical and accelerated experimentation with these. Within living memory, we went from "boys shouldn't hit girls" to arguing that more boys should be allowed to pummel girls for money.

My grandparents ‘s generation were all very religious, and so it was common for spouses to hate each other all their life.

Then I'd argue they weren't people of genuine faith, but scrupulous virtue signalers who used organized religious practices - and voiced adherence of them - to assuage their guilt for being shitbags. This is extremely common in evangelical circles and in the online RadTrad and OrthoBro spaces. It is astonishing how people who truly, deeply live the principles of their faith come across as intensely normal, pleasant, and happy people.

‘all mothers love their children’

This is not a core conservative claim unless you add in "should" between "mothers" and "love"

‘all men feel the need to protect women and children’

See above.

‘all people have a god-shaped hole’

Ah, well, credit where it is due. I think this is probably a core conservative claim and one of the big wedges between conservatives and "libertarians" (although, personally, I find the term "libertarian" to be close to meaningless.) For instance, one can't help but smirk at the fact that the "Rational" community has re-invented the concept of Satan as Moloch....when Moloch is literally a Biblical demon.

I'm not saying those are core claims, just what garden-variety conservatives frequently say at the dinner table. I don't consider anecdotes like justawoman's to be refutations of serious conservative thought. But they are not "trolling".

It is astonishing how people who truly, deeply live the principles of their faith come across as intensely normal, pleasant, and happy people.

I'm trying to avoid debating the entirety of conservatism, but that's obviously a No True Christian fallacy.

Other ideologies have their own idealizations of an imagined past or an imagined future, of course. And simplistic stuff they say at the dinner table.

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Its legit to the extent to which you agree with the complainer that it was the family rather than them that was at fault. Obviously, it is hard to provide evidence for this without doxxing yourself, but that comment didnt even make an attempt, it doesnt even describe any concrete event, only how she feels about things generally.

Say it again, that made me tickle.

  • -10

Okay, look, I get that you get dogpiled a lot and it's tempting to respond with taunting and snark, but don't. I am demanding that other people stop with the cheap shots, and I'm demanding that you stop responding to cheap shots with "Nyah nyah didn't even hurt me!"

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