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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6361 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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The more I think about politics, I always end up coming back to this quote from a very good video (from a very good youtuber!).

A common bait-and-switch happens so quickly you might miss it, and it occurs very frequently. Pinker lines up a number of things that involve good fact-checking, methodological research, and asking questions, but these are not the reasons why we have core disagreements about values—they simply aren’t. There isn’t a scientific problem that is going to convert a Democrat into a Republican, and the insinuation that we can just “use science” to solve these problems is misleading.

A great example is abortion. This is largely a question about choice, life, and volition. While science can show developmental details about what a fetus is, or whether it has certain cognitive abilities, the core belief revolves around whether there is a responsibility to preserve that life, whether it has inherent value, and whether society recognizes a duty toward it. That is what governs the debate—not the microscopic details. So regardless of how much information we gather about the fetus, the abortion issue does not fundamentally change. It won’t be resolved by higher-resolution data; the question is about the value we assign, and science alone cannot determine that.

I think in most cases, politics are about values. To piggy back off the abortion example. The go to argument surrounding this typically is bodily autonomy, and although one could argue that this isn't really consistent on a factual, legal level. If I were in the room debating a pro-choice person on the issue, here is how it would go.

PC Person

The fetus is not entitled to its mothers body, consider the court case McFall v Shimp: McFall suffered from a life-threatening bone marrow disease and his cousin, Shimp, was a compatible bone marrow donor. Shimp refused to donate bone marrow. McFall requested Shimp be compelled to donate. The Court considered Shimp’s refusal “morally indefensible,” but still ruled in Shimp’s favor, explaining,

“For a society which respects the rights of one individual, to sink its teeth into the jugular vein or neck of one of its members and suck from it sustenance for another member, is revolting to our hard-wrought concepts of jurisprudence. Forcible extraction of living body tissue causes revulsion to the judicial mind.”

Judith Jarvis Thomson tackles the issues of bodily integrity and moral obligations in her essay, “A Defense of Abortion.” Thomson asks us to imagine a famous violinist with a fatal kidney ailment. One day a bunch of music lovers kidnap you and hook your kidneys up to the violinist’s circulatory system. In nine months the violinist will have recovered, but if you disconnect yourself prematurely the violinist will die. Thomson asks, “Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation?”

When you drive (have sex), you know there’s a possibility you could crash into someone (conceive). Even when you drive very cautiously (use contraception), there is still a chance of a car accident. Should you be in a car crash in which the victim’s life is at stake, the law does not compel you to donate blood or organs to save the victim. While it would be admirable for you to donate, you are not required to do so."

Me:

"Thats cool. Lets say you, for whatever reason, are a psychopath who enjoys taking children, draining them of their blood, hospitalizing them and or possibly killing. If I was king for a day, and assuming your blood was a match, I would sentence you to life in prison, and then order that your blood be drained and given to the remaining children to save them. Fight Me"

I don't find this to be unreasonable, given that we would already use lethal injection for these kinds of people (also a violation of "bodily autonomy"). Draining someone of their blood would be no less worse than forcefully injecting them.

You are free to think I'm a crazy person, fine. But that's not my main point. The same problem exists for issues like nationalism & immigration. You can scream all day about how immigrants are a net gain to the economy, or how they commit less crime. But a ethno-nationalist will simply go "No, I value the culture and heritage of the green people, and I'd rather them go extinct than to have our way of life polluted by the purples.".

Another explicit example of what im talking about is race. A black person does not vote democrat because they are factually good for the economy (whether or not they are is besides the point). If you asked average black voter to produce a study about specific policies that cite this, they would come up short. Support for democrats comes from the idea of racial solidarity, and the fact that black people value the black race, and would like to advance black interest.

I have no clue how one would even go about resolving this. Morals & values are not empirical - you cant prove bodily autonomy and cultural heritage are good in the same way you can prove what foods are and aren't healthy. These things are based on moral intuitions that are fundamentally subjective. I don't think I could ever change my personal mind on that issue to be completely honest, but on a societal scale, this is obviously not sustainable. There needs to be some way to reconcile a difference in moral values.

Genuine value differences are real, but surprisingly often they're not the source of political disagreements, at least on a surface-level analysis.

Consider rent control: (some) leftists think it improves affordable housing availability. (Most) rightists think it does the opposite. Leftists and rightists may place different amounts of value on the availability of affordable housing (and do, to a limited extent, though I don't most rightists are actually opposed in principle), but is that core to the disagreement? If a leftist could be convinced that rent control actually harms their terminal goals (as a good chunk have), then the question is resolved with no value shift.

Consider BLM: there's that infamous survey where a good chunk of BLM supporters said they believed that the police kill not ten unarmed black men each year (roughly accurate) but ten thousand. If I thought that I'd be right there beside them! I'm less confident they'd change their mind if they heard the right number -- being that wrong suggests near-total scope insensitivity -- but the actual fact of the matter can change minds.

There's a lot more: rightists think that housing-first homeless assistance programs don't work, that safe injection sites increase overdose deaths, that gay couples are much more likely to abuse their (adopted) kids, that racial achievement gaps in education can't be solved by shoveling money at inner city schools. Leftists think that Christianity is false and harmful, that permitting hateful speech will inevitably lead to genocide, that adding highway lanes increases traffic, that universal healthcare would dramatically reduce costs. I think a reasonable person on either side of the isle, were they convinced of the other side's claims of fact, might switch sides on any of these issues.

It's definitely worth considering whether the factual disagreement is just cover for a values disagreement -- who was it that noted that people who think that torture would be morally unacceptable if it did work are much more likely to believe that torture doesn't work? -- but I don't think it always is. Now other questions, like abortion, are much closer to genuinely irreconcilable value differences; at least, the Thomson-level pro-choice advocates wouldn't be swayed by learning fetuses are fully conscious/have souls/can feel pain... But why worry about those hard disagreements when we can't even solve the easy ones? Well, we have solved some of them: they stop being political issues when every agrees, so you just stop hearing about it. But there's still plenty more out there.

Consider rent control: (some) leftists think it improves affordable housing availability. (Most) rightists think it does the opposite. Leftists and rightists may place different amounts of value on the availability of affordable housing (and do, to a limited extent, though I don't most rightists are actually opposed in principle), but is that core to the disagreement? If a leftist could be convinced that rent control actually harms their terminal goals (as a good chunk have), then the question is resolved with no value shift.

The core of the disagreement is that those on the right believe the landlord owns the property and the tenant rents it, whereas those on the left basically feel the tenants own the property and the landlord is an employee who maintains it for them. This is typically covered up by a lot of verbiage, but the rhetoric from the left is sometimes quite clear on this point.

There's a lot more: rightists think that housing-first homeless assistance programs don't work, that safe injection sites increase overdose deaths, that gay couples are much more likely to abuse their (adopted) kids, that racial achievement gaps in education can't be solved by shoveling money at inner city schools.

And leftists don't care if any of that is true, they want them anyway. That's the conflict-theory explanation, anyway.

I think a reasonable person on either side of the isle, were they convinced of the other side's claims of fact, might switch sides on any of these issues.

The conflict theorist would say no, would point to evidence, and would point to faked evidence of the opposite from the other side. If the other side is willing to falsify their claims of fact, those claims of fact are not the reason for the belief. In fact, I (a conflict theorist) suggest that a good deal of the reproducibility crisis is caused by researchers using their scientific know-how not to find the truth, but to produce "evidence" for political reasons.

There needs to be some way to reconcile a difference in moral values.

There is, it's called war and subjugation. There's even alternatives, other ways, like segregation and population transfer. Decentralization, which works well with segregation, so that those people over there that you hate so much can't tell you what to do, and certainly aren't coming over here.

Divination can be peaceful if both sides recognize an authority. We can then have rituals like reading entrails, casting suffrage or asking the Pope. But the inherent danger of pluralism is that sometimes the only common authority is that from which all others derive.

There needs to be some way to reconcile a difference in moral values.

Patchwork. All the people with value X live in X-land and all the people with value Y live in Y-land. Then we can see which one is better in the long run. Gigantic continent sized super-state is a terrible idea.

Then we can see which one is better in the long run.

Except the problem that my giant somewhat shitshow-y country of people A+B can use that scale to eat county X and then use the combined scale of A+B+X to eat Y.

Quantity has a quality all on its own.

Definitely, we could call it the Quantity Problem. How do we solve it? Not sure but thinking in a qualitarian/elitist way is a start.

Unfortunately one of the sides of this debate seems to have decided on universalism and declared their position on the matter a human right and attempted to make it apply to the whole country.

I suspect parts of the other side also would prefer dominion. But you can't have a federation of even one side wants an empire.

Both sides of this debate have decided on a universal stance. Both want their moral system to apply to everyone, even people that aren't buying into it. They both want dominion and to ban the other.

Then we can see which one is better in the long run

I still think this would be fundamentally subjective, no? Is Japan "worse" for being an ethno-state compared to Canada, which is cosmopolitan? From just the outside looking in, they both are functional countries, with functional governments.

Lengthen the run. If Japan gets their TFR up past 2 then yes, they will exist in the future while the original Canadians will not.

the original Canadians

You're assuming the conclusion. If you think the long-term welfare of "the original Canadians" as an ethnic group is the paramount metric of success for the country, then you've already decided you like ethnostates better than cosmopolitanism and looking at outcomes on any time scale becomes redundant.

Japan is infamous for not being able to do this, though. Not that Canada is good at it either, mind, but still.

I'm holding out hoping that one day they will start treating romance anime like an instruction manual instead of just entertainment. A man can dream ...

That's a pretty load bearing "if" given the trend of both their birth rate and the overall trend of birth rates in nearly every other nation

If the standard is just survival of the fittest then why would you object to a super state?

Robin Hanson has been blogging about this recently. It collapses cultural selection.

I never liked the proverb that goes like hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue (why is paying a tribute a compelling metaphor here?), but the underlying sentiment is somewhat relevant. Specifically, (1) unlike the rat-adjacent crowd, most people don't have absolute, immutable values nor are even particularly disturbed by the prospect of value drift; (2) they experience "conflicting" values/terms in their value function (ones that you can't maximise simultaneously) not as a fun math problem but as painful and embarrassing; (3) if a pair of values they hold keeps causing problems as in 2., they will happily gradually do away with one of them as in 1. (At some point vice is driven to default?)

Now, add to this that most people also, apart from any other values, hold pragmatism and reasonableness as a value, as well as (more cynically) being perceived as following universal, elegant principles of the kind that get mentioned as a Philosophy in textbooks, as opposed to boring non-universalisable ones like "more power to my race". As a result, it's generally actually quite effective to promulgate the statement that some object-level aspect of your target's value system is inconsistent, impractical and/or non-universalisable. They will feel the tension between the "LARP as philosopher-king" value and whatever other value you are challenging (e.g. abortion views, religion, in-group favouritism) and often enough the other value will be the easier one for them to do away with.

(Of course, this also creates the continued demand for apologetics, * Studies and other word slop that basically serves to shield the object-level values from having to be traded off against the acting-reasonable value.)

I never liked the proverb that goes like hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue (why is paying a tribute a compelling metaphor here?)

I think "paying tribute" is here meant in the sense of "homage", not in the sense of a literal tax. The idea is that by aping the appearance of virtue, vice is implicitly praising virtue, i.e. paying homage to virtue, i.e. paying tribute to virtue.

I would be very interested in reading some effort posts that explore how people actually change their core moral principles. Off the top of my head, some of the historical examples that I don't fully understand are:

  1. how exactly did gay marriage and pro-choice become the default?
  2. how do religious groups reliably attract converts (or prevent deconversion)?
  3. how did America become anti-alcohol and then pro-alcohol so quickly in the Prohibition era? (These required Constitutional Amendments! I can't fathom 2/3rds of the population agreeing on something like this.)
  4. how did America change it's mind on eugenics / slavery / the Indian question / so many other political topics so abruptly?
  5. why did American fail to win the "hearts and minds" in Iraq / Afghanistan / Vietnam?

I have a decent sense of what happened for each of these topics individually, but I feel like there's a lot of commonalities / general principles that good be extracted here. I feel like this could provide a good sense of "epistemic hygiene" to help me from changing my mind when I don't intend to, help me better predict what future society will look like, and help me better convince people of my own moral intuitions. Maybe something like this already exists buried in the lesswrong archives?

I'm skeptical that there's a single story that hits all of these categories, without being so broad as to be useless. That said...

how exactly did gay marriage ... become the default?

There are three competing narratives, here:

  • Mistake theory. In this model, the median person who opposed gay marriage or homosexuality before 2000 had a bad model of what that meant. Over time, increased exposure, through the internet, the media representation, and especially through people discovering people in their own lives were gay, corrected those mistakes - not making two men kissing each other more interesting, but enough that it wasn't alien, just Those Weirdos Doing That Weird Thing. In some, this just made their discomfort a lower-priority matter; in others, it showed them people who would have direct benefit from the change in policy and who they wanted to benefit.
  • The Deluge. In this model, the gay rights movement had spent thirty-plus years building political infrastructure, and it hit a turning point and was able to overcome other external forces that prevented that force from being used. Some of those changes were legal (reduced mail censorship, cable media and internet avoiding broadcast censorship), some were social (actors coming out, cheaper transportation, easier small publication efforts), and some were both (there was a national movement for school teachers to come out, focused around teacher's union and their ability to fight firings). This force was brought to persuade or replace leadership, which brought changes to policy, and then people agreed with whatever became the new normal.
  • The Crush. In this model, the gay rights movement was able to bring the weight of institutions down, hard, on anyone who disagreed, with any and all tools available. This both made disagreeing more difficult, but more critically also removed the actual disagreements from public space, such that by Obergefell no one in Blue Tribe spaces (and even many people in Red Tribe spaces!) hadn't heard the full form of any strong policy arguments in the better part of a decade.

The real answer is a mix of all three (and probably one feeding into another), but the proportions matter. I hope for the mistake theory, but the more cynical I'm feeling the more The Crush seems plausible - not helped by the extreme unwillingness of anyone serious to engage with the possibility, even to recognize its failure in the trans stuff.

I hope for the mistake theory, but the more cynical I'm feeling the more The Crush seems plausible - not helped by the extreme unwillingness of anyone serious to engage with the possibility, even to recognize its failure in the trans stuff.

To temper that cynicism a little, I’d think that the “crush” scenario can only work, or at least only be really durable, when the “mistake theory” is also true (and probably with a “deluge” period in between). By the time “crush” factors were meaningfully coming into play, the overwhelming majority of the public was already on board with gay rights broadly, or at least cared so little about the issue that the opposition seemed at least as out-there as the supporters. This meant the only people being meaningfully “crushed” were easily written off by a supermajority of the public as wingnuts and weirdos. Certainly homophobia, especially the really hardcore type, has become drastically rarer in the US compared to, say, the 1980s, or even the 2000s. That win is organic and durable.

One could argue that this frame also describes the relative failure of the trans rights movement: trying to speedrun the deluge and ride the momentum straight into a crush, while skipping entirely over the long slog of boring acceptance into society which made the deluge -> crush political strategy actually work for gay rights.

how exactly did gay marriage and pro-choice become the default?

Our appointed, highest legislative body decided it shall be so

For gay marriage?

In legal terms, in the USA, kinda. A dozen-ish states had already made gay marriage legal by legislation or referendum before Obergefell, and dozens more had already legalized it based on state court or lower federal court rulings, but Obergefell did cover a third of the country in one swoop.

In terms of core moral principles, no. Support for gay marriage in America went from 27% in the 1996 up to 60% right before Obergefell, and it kept going up along basically the same linear trend with no significant disruption one way or the other for 6 or 7 years afterward, before leveling off or declining a bit in the last few years.

how exactly did gay marriage and pro-choice become the default?

Mostly cohort effects, meaning new people and not existing people changing.

how do religious groups reliably attract converts (or prevent deconversion)?

Religions do not necessarily change moral intuitions. Instead, they appeal to existing intuitions and create Schelling points around doctrines which promote those existing intuitions.

how did America become anti-alcohol and then pro-alcohol so quickly in the Prohibition era? (These required Constitutional Amendments! I can't fathom 2/3rds of the population agreeing on something like this.)

Probably like anti-smoking. Had to do with empirical beliefs about alcohol, not moral intuition. The United States is still the most deeply anti-alcohol country in the West.

how did America change it's mind on eugenics / slavery / the Indian question / so many other political topics so abruptly?

Cohort effects.

why did American fail to win the "hearts and minds" in Iraq / Afghanistan / Vietnam?

Iraqi, Pashtun, and Vietnamese moral intuitions are contra Anglo people's democracy.

Yes, every moderately educated person knows all of this. I want a grand unified theory of mind change that simultaneously explains all of these historical effects and simultaneously makes predictions about the future.

Most moderately educated people actually think all of this was just some kind of vague arc of justice bending towards equality, culturally of course. A minority of educated people might suspect a clearer image, but they can't prove it with certainty.

I want a grand unified theory of mind change that simultaneously explains all of these historical effects and simultaneously makes predictions about the future.

Great. That sounds really interesting. Are you prepared for it to be extremely politically incorrect, philosophically alienating, and mathematically dry? What you're asking for will look like a poison mixture of HBD, free will denial, and quantitative modeling at least at the level of stochastic calculus, which is generally considered post-grad and too hard for 90% or more of people to understand. Making something like this would take a lot of effort, potentially result in cancellation, ostracization, and denialism, to whatever extent it wouldn't just be ignored. Because the free marketplace of ideas hates hereditarianism, human instrumentalism, and math.

I want a grand unified theory of mind change that simultaneously explains all of these historical effects and simultaneously makes predictions about the future.

"Cthulhu always swims left"

Mostly cohort effects, meaning new people and not existing people changing.

The rate of "should be valid" answers to the question "Do you think marriages between same-sex couples should or should not be recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages?" went steadily from 27% in 1996 to 70% in 2021, faster than the old "one funeral at a time" method of changing people's minds would allow. Although the results vary with age in the direction you'd expect, the 50-64 and 65+ groups are still at around 60%. The difference between retirees and young adults today is lower than the difference between Republicans and Democrats.

Iraqi, Pashtun, and Vietnamese moral intuitions are contra Anglo people's democracy.

Views toward America in Vietnam were 84% favorable vs 11% unfavorable in the latest large-scale survey I could find; 84% was higher than in any of the other 36 countries being polled. Part of this is probably that they weren't as disappointed by Trump as most, but the favorable/unfavorable margin for America there was still nearly double their margin on confidence in Trump. 69% specifically said they like "American ideas about democracy", higher than any other country polled except South Korea.

faster than the old "one funeral at a time" method of changing people's minds would allow.

Citation needed. This paper suggests cohort effects can explain a super majority of the shift. Very likely, there's a cohort effect kernel driving the change, with smaller period effects following as a result of mimesis dragging everyone closer to the new cohort mean.

Citation needed.

"Are sexual relations between two adults of the same sex not wrong at all?" is not exactly the same question as "should same-sex marriage be legal" in logical terms, but the societal changes track pretty well, and we have a longer history of finer-grained data on the former via the General Social Survey. Figure 1(a) here gives some estimates of the magnitudes of intra-cohort changes. Before around 1990 there was no trend at all; afterwards every cohort who were adults in 1990 but still young enough to have a complete sample by 2005 shows some upswing; the ones still adults with a large sample size past 2020 show roughly 40% swings. That's a clear supermajority of the roughly 50% swing for the country as a whole. Each cohort usually starts out with more "not wrong at all" responses than their next-nearest-age peers, but by a few percent, not a few tens of percent.

Very likely, there's a cohort effect kernel driving the change, with smaller period effects following as a result of mimesis dragging everyone closer to the new cohort mean.

You mean the new total mean? "50 year olds' opinions are changing to better match the opinions of 50 year olds" wouldn't have any effect.

But the total mean can't be affecting everyone - 35-49 year olds have been tracking right around the mean, and 18-34 year olds have been steadily moving away from it.

How do you come up with "very likely"? The data seems to match "peoples opinions are all being affected by their environment, but the older you are the farther back your environment goes" just as well.

I can't rule out that 50-year-olds are trying to mimic 25-year-olds' views specifically, except by anecdote (does the phrase "kids these days" sound like it's going somewhere positive, or somewhere negative?), but I'll note that even if this were true, it isn't what people generally mean by "cohort effects"; it would be something much more strange and interesting.

gay marriage

I was around when Obergefell v. Hodges was ruled on. What happened in a nut-shell was that there was an entire campaign to convince people that being gay was ok. It took family members coming out to each other on a personal level, the whole "born this way narrative" trying to indicate that this wasn't a choice. I especially think the fact that friends and family were gay really made the issue salient: should I really be against my brother, uncle, etc. Marrying another man if thats what they like? In particular, I also think most of the arguments against being gay or gay marriage itself are kinda ass.

But another factor that is likely worth taking into consideration is demographic shifts. We simply are a less religious society as we were before, and younger generations tend to be more liberal than older ones. Its just plain old demographic replacement. As to why the young are more liberal than the old - I couldnt tell you.

Like I said in my post:

I have a decent sense of what happened for each of these topics individually

I'm not looking for individualized explanations of these events. I'm looking for a grand overarching theory of society mind changes that can simultaneously explain all of them.

Explainability/Interpretability in modelling is often directly anti-correlated with predictability. Modern AI/ML is a very good example of this. Highly flexible models often gain predictive power by learning complex, distributed, nonlinear structure that is hard for humans to summarize cleanly.

I'm looking for a grand overarching theory of society

Societal Genetic Algorithms and Multi-Agent Game theory is probably your best starting point. Assume the fitness function is the resilience of such a system to survive + the desire of participants to propagate it/adopt it/live in it. Develop the theory from there.

Is it hypocrisy to realize some values require compromises to achieve others? Robin Hanson wrote a good book years ago that I think did an excellent job in explaining what really motivates our outward value displays and the stories we love to tell about ourselves; and more specifically just how completely out of register it often is with the truth.

There are ways of being consistent and ways of not being consistent. Human beings tend to flout their values however when they feel they’re powerful enough to do so and believe there’s no blowback to getting away with it.

Even theologically, deontological ethics reduces to consequentialist ones. You can’t go up to someone and say “You’re going to Hell if you don’t X, Y, or Z.” If that person has no desire to avoid Hell, that argument will have no effect on them; it’s essentially meaningless. In every day life, people fear reprisal for not sufficiently conforming to the prevailing values and attitudes. When you see cracks bleed through the value systems are the seams, IMO it’s less about individuals being corrupted by some influence. You’re seeing their real values of naked self-interest at work trying to quickly snatch something for the present moment.

I rather believe something like the converse - most instances of what we consider "hypocrisy" are actually mostly tradeoffs between values, perhaps more specifically outwardly displayed ones and embarrassing/"naked self-interest" ones that are kept concealed. I don't think "naked self-interest" is a clearly delineated, distinct category of values anyway.

I don't find this to be unreasonable, given that we would already use lethal injection for these kinds of people (also a violation of "bodily autonomy"). Draining someone of their blood would be no less worse than forcefully injecting them.

It would be a conflict of interest to put someone in jail and also profit from it. We shouldn't be getting anything of value from prisoners except the fact that they're off the streets so they aren't committing crime any more. If you need an exception for restitution, it should be limited enough that you don't get to do arbitrary things to prisoners to get your restitution--if you have to have some conflict of interest, that doesn't mean it should be unlimited.

It would be a conflict of interest to put someone in jail and also profit from it. We shouldn't be getting anything of value from prisoners except the fact that they're off the streets so they aren't committing crime any more.

Well said, its why the Kids for cash thing was so horrifying.

That is what governs the debate—not the microscopic details. So regardless of how much information we gather about the fetus, the abortion issue does not fundamentally change. It won’t be resolved by higher-resolution data; the question is about the value we assign, and science alone cannot determine that.

Science alone can't determine that, but to be a bit cheeky about 'higher resolution'- there's a reason that pro-life types campaign for pre-abortion ultrasounds, and pro-choice types fight that tooth and nail.

I think they are correct to fight it. Any sort of seemingly soft barrier can be turned into a hard barrier.

"You must look at an ultrasound of the baby before abortion" is how it starts. And then suddenly the state also makes it very difficult to get ultrasounds at abortion clinics. Or restricts and regulates who can give ultrasounds.

Similar things play out in other areas of regulation. "You need to make sure this building isn't harming the environment" becomes 'you need a specialist environmental inspector that we license and regulate into obscurity and the waiting list is years long to see one'. Or "You need to have firearms training before you are allowed to own one" ... and only police or police in training can actually visit the firing ranges where they do firearms training.

The power to tax and regulate is the power to destroy. When the goal of your political opponents is to fully ban a thing it is correct to be suspicious of them proposing a "small" barrier.

… The power to tax and regulate is the power to destroy...

You saw that happen with dispensaries in California after weed became legal. Once the state went in on the industry it started over regulating the hell out of the market such that some resellers were left scratching their heads and wondering if they should go back to the underground market for dealing since it was less burdensome and more profitable.

I think they are correct to fight it. Any sort of seemingly soft barrier can be turned into a hard barrier.

Fair enough.

I was gesturing towards how science (better ultrasound) contributes to a non-science value judgement, or rather, undercuts a theoretical judgement: I hear it's much harder to go through with an abortion once you see the heartbeat or fingers or face, than if you keep it a pleasantly theoretical "clump of cells."

The Distributist used to make some pretty good videos but now he just goes on screen and rambles. But he did get married and have a kid so I get it.

Yeah, i definitely miss his older content! Dude incredibly intelligent and a goldmine!

"...Should you be in a car crash in which the victim’s life is at stake, the law does not compel you to donate blood or organs to save the victim. While it would be admirable for you to donate, you are not required to do so."

Are they sure about that? To me, it looks like the difference between manslaughter (if they die) and not (if they live). You can say that the law doesn't "require" you to save the victim, but the prison sentence on the other side of that choice doesn't make it very convincing.

The assumption that babies simply appear from the ether has weirded me out since I noticed the framing. You weren't kidnapped by a music lover and forced to give life support to another human (unless you were, in which case I support the right to abortion in cases of rape). "Where babies come from" has well-understood causality. If you sign up for baby-making, then you can't act shocked when you make a baby.

The assumption that babies simply appear from the ether has weirded me out since I noticed the framing. You weren't kidnapped by a music lover and forced to give life support to another human (unless you were, in which case I support the right to abortion in cases of rape). "Where babies come from" has well-understood causality. If you sign up for baby-making, then you can't act shocked when you make a baby.

I’m split on the use of contraception, which obviously makes me a sinner as a Catholic, but I’m against abortion. It always struck me as disingenuous how the blue tribe seems to get collective amnesia and forget how to be literate when it comes to the matter or abortion. Yet they’ll run news coverage on the Mars rover pinpointing the location of a bacterium and declare to the world they’ve found “life” on another planet. The notion that a right to have sex isn’t a right to get pregnant is a fallacious argument when biology itself happens to disagree with you because, oh I don’t know people actually ‘get’ pregnant by doing it.

Yet they’ll run news coverage on the Mars rover pinpointing the location of a bacterium and declare to the world they’ve found “life” on another planet.

But they don't claim to have found people on another planet; a bacterium is alive, but it is not a person. Thus, I would phrase the question not as "When does life begin?" so much as "When does the developing life-form become a person?".

I think you’re going to find it very difficult to circumscribe the ontology of personhood in such a way that wouldn’t arbitrarily involve marking out large swathes of people for the same kind of treatment you would a fetus.

I find birth to be a natural and fitting Schelling point for when one's life becomes the business of society.

If you sign up for baby-making, then you can't act shocked when you make a baby.

I once saw someone on Tumblr (who, in their defense, was probably a teenager at the time), try to square this circle by arguing "I consented to having sex, I didn't consent to getting pregnant".

Pregnancy is a foreseeable consequence of sex in much the same way that lung cancer is a foreseeable consequence of smoking. If you're an adult who smokes a cigarette, you are consenting to the increased risk of lung cancer that might result.

"I consented to having sex, I didn't consent to getting pregnant".

I've always found this reasoning to be weakest of all possible arguments, for the simple fact that is doesn't follow on the male end of things. Can someone get out child support payments purely because they didn't "consent" to fathering the child? No! We give them the old adage of "Man Up" and "You play you pay", and rightfully so.

Can someone get out child support payments purely because they didn't "consent" to fathering the child? No! We give them the old adage of "Man Up" and "You play you pay", and rightfully so.

Just because the West is gynocentric and hypocritical about something doesn't mean the argument is wrong. Realistically Men should be able to opt out of child support if they didn't consent to pregnancy, assuming a world where abortion is legal. It logically and morally follows.

Sure, but nobody actually believes this, and a big chunk of that difference is less ra-ra manhating girlbossery and more the idea that the women getting abortions will raise criminals and make society pay for it.

make society pay for it.

Normies hate this one clever trick: Don't pay. An expansion of equal rights around this topic is perfectly compatible with a reduction in social welfare to disincentivize anti-social behavior.

nobody actually believes this

Nobody "mainstream" actually believes - I fixed it for you.

With easy available contraceptives, access to abortion, and equality around parental consent rights, if Alice wants to have Bob's baby to lock him down, and Bob withdraws is parental consent within an appropriately timely manner. Alice can chose to have an abortion or chose to carry the baby to term without the societal assistance of social hand outs, her choice.

Pregnancy is a foreseeable consequence of sex in much the same way that lung cancer is a foreseeable consequence of smoking.

These seem substantially different in that each time of having sex is an either/or of conceiving or not, but each instance of nicotine consumption only very marginally increases cancer risk. No one is going to get cancer because they tried smoking a couple of times, but they very easily could conceive a child on their first time having sex.

No one is going to get cancer because they tried smoking a couple of times

Why not? People get lung cancer without ever smoking as well. There very well could be some non-smokers whose lung cells were, just due to dumb luck and coincidence, 1 inhale away from becoming cancerous, and 1 puff triggered it. Probably not many, though.

Which, I think, gets at the issue that this argument is about quantity, not quality. Is sex -> pregnancy more like driving or smoking, where you could reasonably do it tens of thousands of times and still not get the consequence, or is it more like playing Russian Roulette with 6 bullets, where your odds of surviving is the odds of the bullet or gun being defective plus of your aim being off enough either to miss or cause non-fatal damage (actually 1-(1-(odds))*(1-odds)), I think, but that's a good-enough approximation), and by how much? I think most people place the line somewhere in between for determining the morality of elective abortion, and it's the different places where people put that line that cause conflict. Especially since many of those people don't even seem to recognize that they're placing such a line, much less where that line is for themselves.

I think a problem with the smoking metaphor is that it does seem like sex/pregnancy is closer to Russian roulette. Besides Russian roulette, a matching metaphor could be rock climbing/falling to your death; flying/plane crash; or driving a car and crashing it. While sometimes people have sex with the aim of conceiving, all of these other "bad" outcomes are things that would make people just never do a given activity if they thought it was at all likely to happen in that instance.

Pregnancy is a foreseeable consequence of sex in much the same way that lung cancer is a foreseeable consequence of smoking. If you're an adult who smokes a cigarette, you are consenting to the increased risk of lung cancer that might result.

There are a lot of foreseeable consequences to a lot of actions. We as a society don't stop people from trying to mitigate them or prevent them. In your own example, we don't deny care or deny the attempt to fix lung cancer from smokers.

Do you want to make a stand that any and all foreseeable consequences of actions now require you suffer them with no renumeration or mitigation allowed regardless of the situation?

No. My point is that it's meaningless to say you didn't "consent" to the entire foreseeable, biological consequences of pursuing a particular course of action. You might as well legislate against the tide.

So what if you didn't consent to getting pregnant? You are pregnant.

No. My point is that it's meaningless to say you didn't "consent" to the entire foreseeable, biological consequences of pursuing a particular course of action. You might as well legislate against the tide.

Pregnancy is a risk of sex but it is not a 1:1 relationship.

So what if you didn't consent to getting pregnant? You are pregnant. -> "ok doc what are my options to get rid of this pregnancy"

So what if you didn't consent to lung cancer, you have lung cancer. -> "ok doc what are my options to get rid of lung cancer"

For reference, I voted in favour of legalising abortion in Ireland. This is one of those "there's nothing I hate more than bad arguments for views I hold dear" situations.

Regardless of whether one believes a fetus is "alive" – unlike a tumour in one's lungs, it has the potential to develop into a sentient human being. Removing a malignant tumour presents no moral quandaries even if the presence of the tumour is the direct result of actions you freely undertook. You can't escape the moral quandary associated with abortion just by saying you never consented to getting pregnant.

Maybe lung cancer is a bad example. Supposing Alice has a lot to drink and knowingly gets in the driver's seat of her car, fully cognisant of the fact that she's too inebriated to drive safely. Predictably, they have an accident in which a pedestrian, Bob, is killed. Upon their arrest, Alice defends herself by claiming that, while she did drive drunk of her own volition, she never consented to hitting Bob with her car, so she can't be held responsible for it.

No one would be persuaded by this reasoning: the entire reason drink-driving is illegal is because it makes motor accidents vastly more likely. Choosing to drive drunk entails choosing the likely consequences of driving drunk. Choosing to have unprotected sex entails choosing the likely consequences of unprotected sex. As a society we might still determine that abortion should be legal, but the idea that we can just dissolve the ethical dilemma by announcing "I never consented to getting pregnant, so you have to let me do whatever I want" strikes me as exactly insane as letting Alice off the hook because she never consented to hitting Bob with her car.

In your own example, we don't deny care or deny the attempt to fix lung cancer from smokers.

We do, at the margins, because we make smokers pay higher health insurance premiums, which reduces their access to care that would fix lung cancer. Similar is the case for car accidents as well, since a track record of reckless driving increases auto insurance premiums, which reduces one's access to mitigate the consequences of auto accidents one gets into.

Given that pregnancy and abortion are more all-or-none things rather than near-continuous like insurance premiums and payouts, I think the analogy breaks down here, though.

I'd be curious to know if there are serial abortion users. If the average user of an abortion is 1-2 times in the life it makes it really hard to track historical usage for insurance to be an applicable analogy.

The problem with bringing in insurance is that insurance is a pool of other people's money. If you were a smoker and you could self-finance your chemo we would absolutely treat it. We just draw the line at paying for care of people engaging in risky behaviors with known risks continuously, from the group/collective funds. By that logic, medicare/universal medicine will not pay for your abortion if you engage in known risky practices, like sex without contraception, but you may finance it on your own. I think that is a fairly acceptable stance, and consistent. But it's not really engaging with the general moral fault line here.

If there were laws on the books that forced smokers to suffer lung cancer and we refused to treat them, that would be more akin to the anti-abortion argument. I'm sure I could come up with dozen more foreseeable situations with risks that people would really dislike care being denied for.

It’s a way of trying to dismantle the notion that actions have consequences and to the extent one ever becomes separable from the other, there’s a moral obligation to make it so. I also never consented to being compelled to live in the same country as said Tumblr moron. Does that give me a right to knock them out, euthanize them when they’re unconscious and give away their organs?

In the case of the latter, there’s a concept in civil law called “duty of care,” that is taught to doctors in medical school. Doctors have a duty of care to their patients such that, if patients knew that at any point in a medical facility they could be knocked out and euthanized, they would never go there and therefore the utility function of hospitals would be destroyed. In the former it creates ethical conflicts between a doctor’s commitment to protecting life when it’s between the fetus and a patient; especially when it doesn’t explicitly involve the health of the mother.

Congratulations, by driving in a car you have now signed up for a lifetime as a quadriplegic due to an accident. It was a risk you knew was possible. Please don't do anything but accept the consequences of your choice.

Sex != baby-making. Sex carries the risk of baby making.

Yes, when taking part in risky activities I accept the risk. I’m not sure what the alternative would be?

In the framework you gave, abortion for an accidental pregnancy would be permissible, but one for an intentional pregnancy would not.

In the framework you gave, abortion for an accidental pregnancy would be permissible, but one for an intentional pregnancy would not.

I fail to see how this is different than the current accepted practice? People intentionally getting pregnant don't then go get abortions. Abortions happen when pregnancy occurs accidentally (due to risks) or when the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother.

Or in cases of fetal abnormality. These span a spectrum from absolutely non-viable cases (like anencephaly) to clearly viable babies who are likely to be severely disabled (like Down's) but Christian pro-lifers want abortion to be illegal in almost all of them and normies with an ick about abortion think they are some of the good examples of legitimate abortions.

clearly viable babies who are likely to be severely disabled (like Down's) but Christian pro-lifers want abortion to be illegal in almost all of them

I'd assume Christians are also against euthanasia of infants in these cases, so...

I suppose one can contrive a scenario where a woman could have an elective abortion refused because her prior actions indicate the pregnancy was intentional. For instance, if she took active steps to restore her fertility not long before the pregnancy; not just forgetting to take a pill or not wearing a condom, but something like reversing a tubal ligation or removing an IUD without a medical justification.

I have to wonder how rare those scenarios are though.

I think that would be an actually interesting philosophical question, especially if we examine our response to other situations where people engage in actions intentionally that effect other people but then change their mind. In some situations like contract law, we enforce the prior agreement, but in others like a promise to aid or a charitable donation we don't enforce compliance.

It's a question of how much bodily autonomy you have depending on the cost of your bodily autonomy on other people.

I’m guessing some number of abortions are because the mother changes her mind, and it seems very counterintuitive to say that the intent of the parents influences the morality of the abortion.

To be clear, I’m broadly pro-choice, but I don’t think sex and pregnancy can be neatly decoupled, any more than driving and car crashes can.

I mean I don't think they can be neatly decoupled, one is a risk that is of the other. But we as a society accept other risk pairings as both legally correct and morally ok. This idea that babies are the direct and singular causal response to sex is just not based in reality. Pretending it is, is an attempt at motivated reasoning. Which I was calling out.

EDIT:

I’m guessing some number of abortions are because the mother changes her mind

I suppose this is probably true, I do wonder what the breakdown in cases between the three would be. Regardless I am pretty pro-choice from a fairly radical bodily autonomy perspective.

Are you saying that driving != getting into accidents?

I'm saying that driving carries the risk of getting into accidents. But yes that driving != getting into accidents. Sex is to Pregnancy as Driving is to Accidents.

Yeah, not everyone having sex “intends” to get pregnant. But the passenger in the vehicle doesn’t intend on winding up in a clinic with a medical certificate attached to his/her name either.

I think the passenger analogy doesn't really apply well here because the passenger in a car still displayed agency in determining the risk/reward of getting into the car. A baby doesn't display any agency on being conceived.

But if you want me to stake a position, then even if the passenger in my car accident I caused was in needed an organ donation from me. I still have the bodily autonomy to say no. It's my body and you can't morally compel me to use it.

Of course a baby doesn’t display agency, because it ‘can’t’. Therein lies the problem.

… even if the passenger in my car accident I caused was in needed an organ donation from me. I still have the bodily autonomy to say no.

The baby didn’t stake an original claim on your body. You’re the one who chose to commit the act. What it’s “fighting” for is on behalf of its own existence.

The baby didn’t stake an original claim on your body.

The baby is dependent on me for survival. If I wish to use my body for something other than its survival and would like to remove it, I am within my rights to remove it. If someone else would like to put it in their body or test tube for its survival they may. It's not my concern. If the baby would like to form a contract with me to exchange value for its continued use of my body, then it should make an offer.

You’re the one who chose to commit the act.

I chose to take a risk. Much like when I decided to smoke a cigarette. Just because the lung cancer became a sentient clump of cells doesn't entitled it to my body or preventing me from attempting to get rid of it.

What it’s “fighting” for is on behalf of its own existence.

I forgot the "fighting for existence" is such a moral rectitude that it permits the overriding of any other beings rights. Let me quickly go tell my boss he needs to pay me a bajillion dollars because I am "fighting for my existence"

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This is just patently false.

Driving exists to get you from place to place.

Sex exists to reproduce life.

Sex is literally FOR babies, and the feeling good is a side effect. Driving, on the other hand, is literally FOR moving around, not crashing.

Sex is literally FOR babies,

I must have missed the part of health class where they discussed how human females are fertile 24/7 365 days a year. Instead of the short window around the ovulation cycle. Or that how when females are not fertile it is not possible to have sex with them. You should submit your new revolutionary information to the latest medical journal, this could be a major breakthrough on human bodily functions!!

Sarcasm aside, you are smuggling in a moral argument to a functional argument that does not follow it. Just because you believe that sex = babies doesn't mean its actually true from a purely biological functionality fact(which you are also wrong about). I think I could construct several purely biological functional arguments for various other things that you would strongly disagree with.

You are essentially using arguments as soldiers for principles you don't actually care about. Make your real argument that God/bible says abortion is wrong and be done with it.

Ok, but before there were women, there were apes, and before there were apes there were mammals, and before...

Sex is for reproduction. Different animals graft different parts to the single most important drive in the living world.

Sex came first, and sex is for reproduction. But sex isn't the only way to reproduce. We could be pollinators, or reproduce like fish by spraying semen everywhere, or another strategy altogether. We could be crystalline entities forming and reforming in patterns as we reshape the strata in an ever-expanding zone. But not for us, not for this particular class of mammalian vertebrates. We have sex, and we have babies.

Make your real argument that God/bible says abortion is wrong and be done with it.

I mean, Thou Shall Not Kill is right there, but I'm OK killing people who deserve to be killed, I just don't think they should be innocent children. That's the real argument: yes, it's killing, and no, you don't have cause to kill someone because you simply choose to.

Ok, but before there were women, there were apes, and before there were apes there were mammals, and before...

Nonsense the bible says the earth is 6,000 years old and humans were formed directly by God in the garden of Eden. The only ancestor of human women is Adam's rib. Stop cherry picking the bible...

Sex came first, and sex is for reproduction

Then why don't humans have a 24/7 365 fertility window. Other animals have it. Obviously sex is ONLY for reproduction. Except apparently not. Listing different forms of reproduction isn't really an argument. You've made a claim that sex is only for reproduction, give some evidence of this, listing a risk/probabilistic outcome of sex doesn't suddenly prove that.

but I'm OK killing people who deserve to be killed, I just don't think they should be innocent children.

And besides a sky-hook, what moral evidence do you have that this view is the moral correct one. It's not like Christians have never killed children either. Why are children considered so innocent that they demand special consideration? Would Alien Children warrant the same consideration?

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Driving exists to burn gasoline in the engine. Making wheels roll is just a useful side effect.

This is according to the base function that a mechanism can be stripped down to.

According to "the purpose of a system is what it does", the vast majority of sex acts are for pleasure while minimizing the possibility of conceiving, while the vast majority of driving is for getting from place to place while minimizing the possibility of crashing.

According to God or other source of objective telos, well, you can quote them once you present them.

Is playing Russian roulette != blowing a hole in your skull?

Yes... Would you say that "Blowing a hole in your skull" is the singular causal outcome of playing Russian roulette? Or just a risk?

I'd say a statement like "I didn't mean to shoot myself in the head, I was just playing Russian roulette" sounds pretty dumb.

Probably because a 1/6 chance of killing yourself is a risk that most people think is too much. Especially when there is only a marginal reward.

I don't think that risk/reward ratio really applies in Sex or Driving.

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"Where babies come from" has well-understood causality. If you sign up for baby-making, then you can't act shocked when you make a baby.

Someone taking reasonable measures to not produce a baby has not signed up for baby-making. The fact that it is a possible result doesn't mean they signed up for it; we don't use that standard anywhere else. "There's some chance that any human will go berserk and turn into a serial killer, so by living among humans, you've signed up for the possibility that a serial killer will kill you".

"There's some chance that any human will go berserk and turn into a serial killer, so by living among humans, you've signed up for the possibility that a serial killer will kill you"

Isn't this basically true, though? It's certainly not ideal, but people are generally against constructing the sort of society in which this statement isn't true. See regular political fights over gun control, or even driving laws. Lots of people (tens of thousands in the US) die annually at the hands of plain 'ol human failure modes.

Even if you could semi-reliably identify those that will "go berserk", you'd have to wade through a bunch of legal questions to actually do something about it under current law.

Isn't this basically true, though?

We don't say "you assumed this risk by deciding to live in a place full of humans". It's entirely the fault of the serial killer, and the fact that someone "signed up for the possibility" of living next to a serial killer is not taken into consideration at all.

Generally, we don't say that you "signed up for" something which you've taken reasonable (but not 100% certain) measures to avoid, particularly if avoiding it completely makes it hard to live a normal life.

Even if you could semi-reliably identify those that will "go berserk"

The analogy would be knowing which sexual acts (even with contraception) will result in a pregnancy, which you can't identify ahead of time either.

There needs to be some way to reconcile a difference in moral values.

There is. Violence. Might doesn't make right, but might determines whose right prevails in practice.

Might makes reality

I think in most cases, politics are about values.

I think that's a significant part of it, but there are other meaningful elements. The Green party in the UK has until recently attracted voters whose main issue is the environment, despite their very outspoken about anti-nuclear position, because environmentally-minded voters are attracted by the vibes of the party rather than their values (of course, you could get into a discussion about whether these voters' values are actually reduced carbon emissions or just the positive vibes themselves). Similarly, I know people who I don't think would ever vote for The Conservatives, even if they aligned with the party on most of their values, because of decades of conditioning by the left-wing media ecosystem telling them that such parties are evil.

You might be interested in checking out MacIntyre's After Virtue. He makes the same argument, although I think his solution is kind of ass.

There needs to be some way to reconcile a difference in moral values.

It's called death.

Each generation fights itself over different moral fault lines. Sometimes it drags on and the next generation inherits parts of the conflict, but they usually pick their own fights (or rather have them picked for them by some nebulous Zeitgeist egregore).

Sums up my opposition to longevity science and geriatric societies.

Death is the primary driver of change. Stubble burning is good for the health of a farm.

How will you meet your own end? Are you ready to go?

One thing is to peruse the concept on the menu and feel somewhat okay with it in theory, but when it's actually served to you, how will you really feel then? The permanent end of your body, mind, memories, and whatever help you give others? Perhaps your soul too, however you define it. Are you ready to give it all up?

As the great Schopenhauer wrote, from a purely empirical standpoint our existence after death appears to be identical to our existence before being born. Billions of years have passed during which none of us existed. Yet we never question or bemoan the fact that we did not exist in the past, only that we will no longer exist in the future. The only difference between these two periods is this current short intermezzo, and again from an empirical standpoint that barely amounts to a difference at all. I think this strongly suggests that we're overly fearful of death due to some quirk of biological psychology rather than rational reasons; and this suggests that we should temper our fear.

The fact that death causes an entire treasury of memory and a whole Weltanschauung, a whole individuality, to perish in an instant is indeed painful to ponder. But if you've left parts of that individuality behind in writing and deeds then it's not wholly gone; the best parts of us can live on for quite a while. And beyond this loss of individuality, I don't think death stings nearly as bad as one might think.

I'll die when I die. What's there in it ?

Maybe it's because I was raised in India. When everyone around you believes in rebirth, there is a certain societal comfort with death. I'd rather not die of a prolonged sickness. The suffering in the lead up to death sounds horrible, but the dying itself seems like someone else's problem. I am gone, its those who remain who will have to deal with it.

I'll extend an olive branch. As long as voting rights are limited to those aged 20-70, I'm fine with increasing lifespans.

What's there in it ?

What's your answer to this question? If you deeply imagine your own end. Do you personally believe in rebirth? What part in/of you gets passed on after death?

I don't need an olve branch. I don't have a dog in the longevity science debate. I'm just hijacking the thread with questions I think are very important to ponder, personally.

As long as voting rights are limited to those aged 20-70, I'm fine with increasing lifespans.

Will people outside that age range also not have to pay taxes, and not get punished if they commit crimes?

Ready or not, there's no way around it. No matter how horrible death may be; immortality remains fiction, longevity is possible only in the most modest terms, and the people saying otherwise are running on massive amounts of wishful thinking. We're all going to die, and chances are that nobody likes it, just like it's always been.

So, just taking on a stoic persona? That's your solution to dealing with life's biggest problem?

There is no solution for that particular problem.

You can't attain immortality of the body, but how you meet the end and how it's subjectively experienced can definitely be worked on.

These things are based on moral intuitions that are fundamentally subjective. I don't think I could ever change my personal mind on that issue to be completely honest, but on a societal scale, this is obviously not sustainable. There needs to be some way to reconcile a difference in moral values.

I don't know the solution to this, but I've long thought that one critically important step towards one must be that people both allow for and welcome the expression of values very different from - and explicitly contradictory to - their own, ideally in proportion to how much they disagree with it and how much those values would destroy them if actually adopted IRL. That's the only way, as I see it, that it's possible to reasonably adjudicate different moral values, though that hardly seems sufficient. Unfortunately, I don't know how to create a set of incentives that create this kind of behavior in society at large.

Assuming that one's values are permanent and universal is a common religious belief.

As Ft says, this is conflict/mistake theory and while mistakes are common, the mistakes mostly occur because of conflict that incentivizes them.

Any group of three people or more will have conflict. Any group of people will have conflict with other groups of people. That's why we join groups. The liberal really does believe that he needs every immigrant he can get to break the back of white supremacy, to make sure his group wins. His group is just not "American citizens" in the way the conservative privileges that identity.

Every identity conceals a hidden struggle, a compromise, a division. America is red tribe blue tribe, white and black, male and female. It is only by forging a common identity that supersedes those divisions that people can get on the same side. But that identity in turn needs opposition to form it. We are Americans, not Mexicans or Canadians. The conflict, resolved at a lower level, simply moves up the chain.

The reverse is also true. The removal or delegitimization of one's opponent can lead to reignition of internal struggles. As the Soviet Union failed, the US became more internally divided. Without a simple global opponent to threaten the American identity, our political divisions steadily widen, even as policy difference shrinks.

Every identity conceals a hidden struggle, a compromise, a division. America is red tribe blue tribe, white and black, male and female. It is only by forging a common identity that supersedes those divisions that people can get on the same side. But that identity in turn needs opposition to form it. We are Americans, not Mexicans or Canadians. The conflict, resolved at a lower level, simply moves up the chain.

What sort of global opponent, short of an alien invasion, would rebuild a strong American identity in the near term? The American left wing media seems to mostly be actively cheering on Iran ("Death to America" and all that) in the current conflict.

The online extreme left (Piker, et al) seems to be leaning that direction, but the left-leaning normies I know IRL think the conflict is dumb but wouldn't wish harm on US service members. Several of them are veterans or immediate families thereof, for one.

That's fair enough - that's the sort of perspective I don't have.

This is closely related to the distinction between conflict vs. mistake theory.

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