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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24776 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?

Why not just offer affirmative action to married couples with children?

Want a promotion in your white collar job? Have a husband/wife and have children!

Want your kids to get into a good university? Have more children!

This would efficiently target the most valuable, productive, ambitious people too, rather than the welfare class who don't really want to go to university, don't have anywhere near the necessary marks and aren't in line for promotion anyway.

This would efficiently target the most valuable, productive, ambitious people too, rather than the welfare class who don't really want to go to university, don't have anywhere near the necessary marks and aren't in line for promotion anyway.

The whole criticism of affirmative action is that it promotes non-meritocratic people. I don't really want my surgeon being selected for having four kids any more than I want her being selected for being a neurodivergent woman, or something. And if we started offering affirmative action for people who have kids, I don't know how it would stop otherwise-low-performing people from having kids to game the system. It probably would boost TFR but I don't think it would efficiently target the most productive or ambitious people any more than current AA policies do.

And if we started offering affirmative action for people who have kids, I don't know how it would stop otherwise-low-performing people from having kids to game the system

Well in the fantasy world where this policy is implemented, I'd block low-performers from taking advantage of it. Right now the affirmative action system doles out money and jobs to people of the right (wrong) race, I'm conceptualizing a system where it doles out money and jobs to married couples who meet certain baseline standards - their children aren't menaces, they work in more skill-intensive occupations, good character...

There's always going to be gaming of all government systems and there'd be gaming of this too but the system would be designed with perverse incentives in mind, not as a political patronage system.

If we just meritocracy-max then we're back to IQ-shredding, there needs to be a balance.

Only targets a small slice of the population, so unlikely to generate results worth the amount of aggro it will pull, which is what I was aiming for with my proposals. That's why I tried to make them as broad as possible while minimizing inflammation as much as possible while retaining effectiveness.

That's why I didn't recommend outright banning no fault divorce; that's a coup-complete solution.

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.

You do want to slash pensions though. I also want to slash pensions, I think it's a good idea. But it's incredibly toxic, since you'd also need to disenfranchise the olds. They will always vote for loot now and consequences later. While we're disenfranchising, may as well keep going and remake the entire political system...

None of our political solutions are at all likely to happen without a major transformation of the system, something comparable to a coup. So I also agree on the importance of a technological fix.

The fact that the pension is sitting in the bank account of someone other than the recipient is just a paperwork issue. It should be treated the same as if it was sitting in the bank account of the recipient. Taking it is equivalent to taxing the old on savings. You may wish to tax the old on savings anyway, but admit that that's what you're doing.

Except they aren't savings. It's not like the money they contributed was put into a fund somewhere to accrue interest and now they are getting it back. Their money was spent to pay out pensions to the old before, and their current pensions are being paid by current contributions from the young, with no relationship between how much they contributed and how much they get paid back out (pensions pay out much more than was ever paid into them and were only ever possible because of an exponentially increasing population of young people to fund them; when fertility collapsed, the pensions became unsustainable).

No, that's not how it works at all.

A state pension means that the government is taking from taxpayers and paying the old.

Pensions are provided because the old don't have savings (or because they don't have 'enough' savings, after they've fiddled the figures to ensure they don't).

I have no problem with people saving their own money, my issue is with the government subsidizing the lifestyle of the old at the expense of the young. Welfare /= savings.

A state pension means that the government is taking from taxpayers and paying the old.

A "pension" in the US is deferred compensation, generally the term implies a defined benefits plan. Once you've been employed for the requisite period, the employer (whether public or private) is obliged to make the payments when you get old. At a cash accounting level this is the same as taking from the taxpayers and paying the old, but it's a matter of paying a debt owed, not a subsidy.

This is complicated by the way some of the public pensions were attained -- union delivers votes to politicians in exchange for pension benefits -- which taints the process, but barring things like that, a pension is an obligation owed the former employee.

In most other Anglophone countries what the US calls "social security" is called a "pension".

Good definitional clarification, I understand where Jiro was coming from now, not being American myself.

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