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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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Parents should own their children.

We're past the society where parents owning their children translated to direct economic benefits, though, such as help on the farm or apprenticing in your profession. How exactly do you propose the parents should extract the value from their children? Lifelong alimony?

Getting to decide when and who they marry, for one, in order to steer them towards the formation of productive and prosocial families that remain within reach and can thus support each other and the parents, rather than to have them move off each to a different end of the world never to be heard from again.

High-functioning parents won't need the law for their children to take their opinions into account. For others, it looks like the perfect way to go from filial disinterest to open revolt and spite.

How are you going to enforce this? What are you going to do when your kids want to marry someone you don't approve of? Disown them? Shoot them?

Arranged marriage with veto power backed by disownment is an entirely different thing from killing your child because they won't marry who you want them to...