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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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The person too busy with Warhammer to date, the person who uses birth control, the person having abortions whenever she gets pregnant and the person who just murders her babies are all preventing new persons from coming into existence despite there being a potential if they made different choices.

I do not have a high opinion of NEET Otakus(which is what I consider warhammer fans to be, regardless of the japanese-ness of warhammer- it's nerd shit and that's that). Otherwise eligible men who are too busy with videogames should quit the gaming and start dating seriously. Married couples should be having regular sex unless medically contraindicated.

Religious and clergy are different, of course, but every society in history has had to deal with a class of men that would prefer cheap sexual vices(in our case, porn), gambling(on sports in our case), and entertainment(mostly videogames today) to marriage. The RCC has not, historically, had a high opinion of this class, and most societies in history have attempted to discourage it.

Otherwise eligible men who are too busy with videogames should quit the gaming and start dating seriously.

most societies in history have attempted to discourage it.

I will note that unlike most societies in history, a lot of this class can't "just get a GF" at present. We've broken matchmaking by moving it onto dating sites, which are a lemon market. We've encouraged women not to settle until their biological clock's nearly run out. "Beatings will continue until X" only actually works if the person you're beating is the one who chooses if X happens.

I think that my argument, which was clearly meant to highlight the absurdity of treating potential persons the same as actual persons, rhymes with beliefs of the pro-natalist crowd (which you hold for other reasons than wanting to maximize future persons). One man's modus tollens being another man's modus ponens and all that.

Let me rephrase my argument a bit. Our premise is that baby-killing is wrong because it denies the existence of a future person. As far as that reason is concerned, anything else which denies the existence of a future person should be just as wrong.

Take the perspective of a healthy female person, which turns out to be a bottleneck for making new homo sapiens persons. When she optimizes for the number of persons produced during her fertile life span, she can probably get pregnant 15 times or so, and given medical advances in treating underweight newborns I would assume that having twins each time (not hard to do with IVF) might give the highest expected value of babies which will live to personhood age, perhaps 28 kids or so.

So while both the conservative natalist and the future-persons-maximizer agree that a woman who decides not to have kids for personal reasons is wrong, their assessment of a woman who marries at age 25 and then proceeds to have six children would be very different. I am assuming that from a conservative perspective, that woman would be a role model. The future persons-maximizer would still consider her rather horrible. She wasted her first fertile decade, for one thing. "So you just did the equivalent of murdering 22 potential persons instead of 28. Do you want a medal for that?"

The utopia of the future-persons-maximizer is the repugnant conclusion, a world so overcrowded with human persons (and their babies) that their lives are barely worth living.

This is entirely fair- I do think unborn babies are people and not potential people. You caught me, my opposition to abortion is not about maximizing future population.