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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11043 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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This post is a follow-on from a conversation with @Amadan, who observed that I wasn't reading his posts correctly. I thought that hiding an apology behind a button most wouldn't click through would be what the kids used to call a bitch move, so I decided to make it a top level post.

^^^I ^^^also ^^^didn't ^^^want ^^^the ^^^effort ^^^to ^^^go ^^^to ^^^waste

You know what, I went back and read through the thread and it turns out I was misremembering the order of things. I thought you rejected faceh's proposal about tightening college admissions with the browbeating comment. My mind gets a little clouded with this subject sometimes. I think I owe you an apology in the form of a bit more effort, so here goes:

My belief is that the TFR crisis can be broadly understood in terms of basic economics. Sure, there are a million billion variables that go in to the exact shape of the curves, but I believe the fundamental problem is that the supply and demand curves don't meet at a point that produces a longitudinally viable volume. Therefore, any proposed policy must influence those lines to move TFR upward. To put it bluntly, this involves coercing either bid up or ask down. Browbeating. And we need to do it while remembering the goal isn't just more children, but ones raised in wholesome environments that set them up for the social and economic success we need to operate our societies, so "pay women billion dollars per child" is out. I'll note that some of these solutions involve catching women up to around the level of browbeating that men currently experience, and I hope this doesn't run afoul of the standard because it doesn't involve much additional browbeating on men. Lastly, I'd comment that these are not my preferred solutions, mostly because they involve coercion, which is a game I believe when played under real cultural and political conditions will result in much male loss and few additional births to show for it—but more pragmatically because I believe they are impossible to implement on a timescale that matters. I think the only real way out is to quintuple down on our current strategy of hoping for technology deux ex machina.

However, if we were willing to implement some painful measures to buy ourselves some more time, here's what that might look like if it were up to me:

Demand side measures, or, how to sweeten the deal for men:

  • Wholesale refactoring of no-fault divorce and the "best interests of children" doctrine. This is of special interest to men, who under current conditions hold virtually no protection against their investments into family being stripped away from them at any time and for any reason. Solutions to achieve this could be a list onto itself, but I believe the core of the idea needs to involve a rather humble proposition: what if we reformulated the doctrine of "the best interests of children" to take into account that save for extreme circumstances divorce is not in the best interests of children. The doctrine needs to be modified in whatever way necessary to accommodate this and to allow for the application of active deterrence against divorce. Sure, you can still divorce on a whim without any fault, but you're probably not going to like the terms if children are involved. To freestyle a lighter measure example off the dome, this could involve requiring filing parties to attend a humiliation ritual wherein they are browbeaten with every stat and fact known to mankind about how bad divorce is for children, and they must affirm personally and publicly: "yes, I am a complete piece of human shit, afflict all of these maladies on to my own flesh and blood for my own selfish gain".
  • Wholesale refactoring of filial duty and the taxation model used to achieve it. This is of special interest to men, whose earthly contributions to the human union lean more heavily in the direction of provisioning. Put simply, social security and other forms of elder welfare need to be either phased out or replaced with something far less permissive to the old and intrusive to the young. Obligations should be limited to flow within the family unit as much as possible. This would both incentivize family formation and grant more interpersonal and civilizational stake to the reproductive generation, something sorely lacking under current conditions.
  • Requiring of female duty to the well-being of children, in basically any form whatsoever. As it stands, there's very little from women our civilization actually demands for the benefit of children. She can drink, snort, and smoke however much as she likes while carrying her child and nobody can actually stop her. I'm gonna be honest with you guys, I don't know what moral platform our society thinks it has to demand even a single hair off a man's head while it tolerates this behavior from women. The benefits to children are straightforwardly obvious, but it would probably also do well for the morale of men to know that women's participation is an adamant expectation rather than a whispered plea. This would extend to limiting the provision of single mother benefits to the worthy.
  • A sea change in the tone by which our society speaks to men regarding their place in it, particularly in how it relates to his role as husband and father. I'm not going to start enumerating examples because once I do I'll never stop, but I'll point you in the general direction of concepts like the man cave and the world not owing you (male) anything.

Supply side measures, or, how to sweeten the deal for women:

  • Far steeper penalties for dereliction by men. The penalties are already plenty steep if you compare them to what women presently suffer, but not nearly steep enough if the aim is to make women's investment into family formation less scary and shield children from harm. The penalties for up and leaving should be made ruinous and inescapable. Again, measures to this end could form a list onto itself. Would essentially be a modern form of shotgun wedding, but done by faceless bureaucracy instead of by patriarch, so much easier on modern sensibilities.
  • Child support needs to be massively increased in the average case. This can be done by calculating support based on a basket of goods agreed necessary or beneficial to children's developmental success, rather than income. Some men won't be able to afford it. As I've remarked in the past, we have a persistent need for materials such as lithium and rare earth metals, and I think these men can help mine it.
  • In lieu of ill-advised cash bonuses per birth, subsidies for necessities that improve the lives of both women and children, such as housing and food stipends, attached to the child and their guardian, of course. These interventions need to be both greater in volume and more selective than current programs, in order to maximize both reproductive incentive to adults and benefit to children. This is of special interest to women, who due to reasons of physicality are often most impacted by these needs.
  • Expansion of pregnancy-related protections. Needless to say, measures where the well-being of mother and child intersect should be expedited. Regionally, however healthcare ultimately shakes out in the US, women should be exempt from whatever the hell is causing them to walk away from hospitals with not just a child but tens of thousands of debt. Due to the defined scope of this exercise and the well documented negative fertility interactions, measures where women and employment intersect should be deemphasized. If we do anything at this intersection, it should involve keeping women out of the workplace for longer during and after pregnancy, but in a way that doesn't involve direct subsidy by unrelated men. Ideally this should range not just from the big stuff but also to the small stuff like being allowed to park in disabled spaces and drive in carpool lanes; we ought to search wide for easy opportunities where slipping such privileges into existing infrastructure would be sensible, beneficial, and dignified for all parties.

If you haven't noticed, there's a strong pair of themes that run through these propositions. They mostly involve offering men a more durable ownership share in family formation, and women more durable guarantees regarding child-rearing. I know some readers are probably bursting at the seams to point out that a lot of this is just traditional marriage and romantic norms with extra steps. Why don't we just stop beating around the bush and go back to what works? Uh huh. How's that been working out? Mainstream conservatism has taken notice to how unpopular this position is and has largely adapted to this reality by promoting what I've take to calling neotraditionalism: offering a model of male obligation without the durable ownership. Good luck with that.

But this does cut to what I believe is the core of the issue. I think that advocating for any program that even smells like the above would get you accused of being a cryptopatriarch in a cool minute. The basic problem is that our civilization is emotionally allergic to a key active ingredient of the medicine, and that's not something any amount of sugar-coating can help. Take the religious shell away and put it in a container that's as secular and facelessly bureaucratic as we are, and I don't think it makes a difference to the overall reaction. There's also the question of societal patience. This is separate from the consideration of TFR and its consequences. As many including some here have contentedly noted, the current crop of men don't seem to bear an eagerness to form and maintain families that's just waiting to burst out given a few tweaks in policy and culture. This isn't something my program would change. I don't think any ever could. Men as a class have been subject to a campaign of demoralization and dispossession that began decades before I was born. Undoing this may very well require awaiting a completely new generation of men to come of age. This would require a level of patience with the male sex our civilization transparently does not possess, not even remotely close.

These are insurmountable problems. There's nothing to be done.

Would you like to hear about my $100T longevity moonshot instead?

I like the way both you and @Amadan are approaching this problem, but as long as we are restructuring society, I propose working from the following first principles:

  1. One goal of family formation is the raising of healthy, resilient, intelligent children.
  2. It is best for children if mothers are not drinking, smoking, or toking. Even caffeine is suspect (although research on caffeine is heavily confounded by mothers who drink coffee also smoking.)
  3. It is best medically for children if they are breastfed to age 1 or so. (Failure to do this leads to improper palete formation (mouthbreathing, dental issues), and greater incidence of leaky gut.)
  4. It is best psychologically for children if they are cared for by their parents nearly fulltime to age 3 or so. (Failure to do this leads to ADHD and attachment disorders.)
  5. It is best for children if they are raised by their biological parents (non-biological parents have a much higher rate of child abuse) and their families are stable.
  6. Women are hypergamous, and so stable families will be those in which the father has above-average social status and/or the woman has limited opportunities to meet other men with higher social status.
  7. Men are promiscuous, and so stable families will be those in which the man has limited opportunities to meet other women.
  8. Overall biological fertility is dropping precipitously (-2% per year), and it looks like the drop is due to environmental factors (food contaminants, screens, poor sleep), especially exposure to estrogenic compounds in utero around gestational age 6-8 weeks.

I propose the following interventions for maximizing fertility and child wellbeing:

  1. As a society, we desperately need to re-taboo drinking, smoking, toking, and adultery.
  2. We need to ban estrogenic compounds everywhere the modern consumer is exposed to them. (Which means in everything from plastic food containers and airborne pesticides to polyester carpeting.) We should take a precautionary approach to new compounds rather than the "generally recognized as safe" approach.
  3. Marriage should be encouraged and divorce should be strongly discouraged while there are minor children in the home.
  4. Women should be forbidden from working (or part-time WFH only) while they have children ages 0-3. I agree with @Amandan that this should be funded by fathers.
  5. We should re-segregate society so that married men and women are no longer exposed to temptations outside of the home. (Which includes gender-segregated social circles, workplaces, and social media.)
  6. Married workers should be discouraged from jobs involving heavy travel.
  7. Biological fathers should be forced into shotgun weddings. Single mothers should be shamed. Widows and widowers should be supported on the public purse, but forbidden from marrying/dating while they have minor children.
  8. Fathers should be paid more for their work to compensate for interventions (3) and (6). This should be paired with commensurate increase in responsibiliites.

Overall, I think that interventions 4-6 mean that married women are going to be doing more WFH jobs, married men are going to be doing more field jobs, and the unmarried will be doing more travelling.

Of course, this has no chance in hell of being a popularly selected policy. The game-theoretic self-interest of hypergamous women is to vote for social support so they can have more babies out of wedlock with cads (paid for by taxpayers), no matter how much having babies out of wedlock harms the children.

In order to counteract this failure mode, I suggest the following initial (moderately sneaky) political platform:

  1. uniform paternity testing in hospitals (can be mandated under testing for genetic diseases)
  2. expand maternity leave to 3 yrs from the birth of the child at half- or one-third pay (probably quite popular?)
  3. legalize sex-based segregation and discrimination in the workplace
  4. reduce economic support to "single mothers"
  5. increase child support burden based on (1), if married
  6. build more mini (sub-1000 sqft) starter homes, depressing housing prices to make childrearing more affordable
  7. gradually license more doctors, nurses, and midwives, depressing medical wages to make childbearing more affordable
  8. make divorce legal only in the case that it serves the best interests of the child, and make divorce cases self-represented like small claims court to remove the economic incentives of lawyers to promote divorce. Compensate existing divorce lawyers with large sums for their early retirement.

The effect of (1) and (4) will be to make life harder for cheaters and cads. The effect of (2) will be to depress hiring of mothers, and the effect of (3) will be to raise wages for men and limit mixing of men and women outside of the home. (1) and (5) will increase the prevalence of "shotgun" weddings. (6) and (7) are attacking cost disease to make marriage more affordable. (8) is to reduce the rate of divorces to those that are really necessary for child wellbeing.

As a society, we desperately need to re-taboo drinking, smoking, toking, and adultery.

At least all but toking are positively associated with the creation of children. (Maybe toking too)

We should take a precautionary approach to new compounds rather than the "generally recognized as safe" approach.

A precautionary approach means stagnation and ultimately being defeated by those who do not take it.

We should re-segregate society so that married men and women are no longer exposed to temptations outside of the home. (Which includes gender-segregated social circles, workplaces, and social media.)

So people who get married are required to lose half their social circle? Since if we have segregation BEFORE marriage, it's going to be a bit hard to make marriages come about.

You're going after the wrong problems. It isn't smoking, drinking, or adultery which is holding down TFR. Probably isn't estrogenic compounds either. TFR was higher before prohibition when the saloon culture existed, and higher during the 50s-70s when people smoked like chimneys.

higher during the 50s-70s when people smoked like chimneys.

Which is really funny because (if I recall correctly) there's at least some evidence that nicotine is not great for fertility; if smoking was wide(r)spread today it would absolutely be Culprit #1 for reduced fertility.

Nicotine may be bad for fertility-per-sex-act, but I'll bet smoking is good for sex-act-per-unit-time. And drinking is good for increasing number of sex acts (up to a point, whiskey dick helps no one) and skipping contraception.

I also wonder if nicotine ends up being a net win for the former (and the latter) over a large population over time due to its tendency to keep smokers thin.

Not a nicotine user myself and wouldn't encourage it. But I think we are (as a collective society, or, if you prefer, the state is) often shortsighted in perceiving the effects our actions will take. Which makes stuff like "boosting TFR" very tricky.

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