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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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I do, if they are of sufficient quality. You heard the hubbub about chinese millionaires paying dozens of american models to give birth to their kids? Those smart, rich, handsome kids have great net expected value to the state and to existing americans.

The problem with single moms is not that they're single moms; it's that they're poor and stupid, and their kids will be poor and stupid. The single mom who takes care of a millionaire's kid is fine.

Women who have less kids than they claim to want say the thing stopping them reproducing is a lack of male investment.

Yes, obviously they want more money, like the lawyer in Idiocracy. We have given them an awful lot already (legal and economic protections up the wazoo, free pointless education so they can have fun, free sinecures that look like prestigious jobs, 24/7 cultural programming blasting their awesomeness, etc), more than anyone ever had, and in return they have produced less and less children. When you're in a hole, stop digging.

But to do so is very low status, just as it always has been.

Right, it's more of a psychological problem that women have to overcome, nothing to do with resources. Certainly, giving women in general more status, like we've been doing, is not going to help, since status is relative. I am fine with raising the status of single moms who produce quality citizens, and its corollary, diminishing the status of voluntarily barren women. Although I'm not a big believer in 'changing status' solutions. I want laws changed, to be less (unfairly!) favourable to women.

If the single professional woman gets less goodies, the married and single mom will get more (relatively), creating an incentive to pair-up, because it's still easier to do the mom thing with dad help. I know the pro-fertility position gets caricatured as 'forcing women to breed' or something, but all I want is to take our hand off the scale favouring women, and let women freely choose from the fallen chips.


Let's try to make it simple: Women have three choices:

  1. professional childless woman

  2. single mother

  3. married mother

There are easy, cheap and fair ways to encourage option 3.

Cut off AA, scholarships, anti-discrimination law, free college, that encourage 1.

Make divorce fairer to the working partner by making the default 50/50 custody, no alimony etc , to encourage women to stay married.

You could limit welfare to single moms more, to get them from 2 to 3 - That's the idea of conservatives you criticize, although I personally I prefer outcome 2 to 1, so I'm not really on board.

The problem with single moms is not that they're single moms; it's that they're poor and stupid, and their kids will be poor and stupid. The single mom who takes care of a millionaire's kid is fine.

You're missing another failure mode, one very much inherent in single parenting and in some ways worsened by social justice.

Specifically, that there's no easy way to spot abuse in a single parent. There's by definition no other adult in the household, and abused kids have trouble noticing that their parent is a psycho because they have little basis of comparison and are highly susceptible to frame control (the single parent does, after all, have a very-large degree of control over the kid's environment and can argue circles around him/her).

I say that this is in some ways worsened by social justice because, well, social justice feminism does not exactly teach mothers not to abuse their sons, and it does tend to try to direct the police at the wrong target if and when they do become involved, complicating the issue even after official attention is drawn.

(I was starved as a teenager for the "sexist abuse" of "standing over" my foot-shorter mum. Eventually I went stark raving mad and started threatening to topple bookcases, she started dialing the police, I wrestled the phone away from her in a panic, she fled, and of course eventually she made it to a phone and the police reduced me to tears with a lecture about how I was going to grow up into a wifebeater and they expected most of my life to be spent in prisons and halfway houses (well, after making me put on underpants; I wasn't kidding about "stark"). Now, the fallout of that was actually mostly good - specifically, it was enough of a blowup that everybody working my case switched from "keep things from exploding" mode to "find me somewhere else to live" mode, and I wasn't actually arrested - and it's hard to blame the police given she wasn't lying (just delusional) and I was badly brainwashed to the point that I thought I was at least in large part in the wrong; spotting that in a short encounter is not actually trivial. But, y'know, I'd rather not make that situation, or that bad call by the police, happen more than necessary.)