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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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An elegant solution to all the male crisises, embryonic sex selection. https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/the-y-chromosome-is-dysgenic

Men commit far more crime than women, they are more prone to diseases and they live shorter lives.

There may be more variation in men's IQ scores and they are more common in STEM, so we would certainly need some men for new discoveries and the like but what is the need for 1:1 sex ratio?

Most people don't work on intellectual tasks in civilization which need constant innovation and incredible time spent on them with a singular focus. Most jobs are mundane and of maintaince variety. We can just have few men which work on hard research type jobs where vast majority of population is women. Maybe with lack of men female researchers would lead. Besides if super intelligence arrives we may not need men working at these jobs at all.

This would solve the incel problem since men are rarer, this would solve the problem of dangerous men preying on women.

Note I am not serious here, but talking about this hypothetical seems like fun. It does seem obviously wrong but I can't pinpoint any specific moral principle it might violate.

Surely there is something wrong with this argument but what is it? It seems fine from an purely utalitarian perspective.

Edit: i am again restating that I am not seriously considering this. It's starting prompt for philosophy and a fun writing excercise.

I can't tell if this is an exceptionally well crafted troll effort or yet another exhibit of just how broken and toxically effeminate the culture of the liberal striver class has become. The warnings in CS Lewis' Abolition of Man reframed as imperatives. Forget making "men without chests" what we really need to do is make no men at all!

It'd be funny if there wasn't a vocal population who seem to genuinely think like this.

Surely there is something wrong with this argument but what is it? It seems fine from an purely utalitarian perspective.

This where the absence of luminaries like DavidFriedman, BarnabyCajones, Ame_Damnee, Et Al are most sorely felt. As one of their rants on different moral systems, reframing of sin as virtue, or the pernicious evils of utilitarian thinking is what this thread really needs.

From a purely utilitarian perspective Nazi medical experimentation on live prisoners was an unalloyed good as they greatly expanded our understanding of phenomena like Shock and Hypothermia. This understanding has, without doubt, saved many more lives than those experiments consumed. Now you can take this one of too ways, as an argument in favor Nazi style death camps. or as an argument against Utilitarianism. I take it as the latter. To me, utilitarianism looks like a philosophy that was specifically designed for the purpose of allowing high-functioning sociopaths to justify and excuse horrible behavior.

From a purely utilitarian perspective Nazi medical experimentation on live prisoners was an unalloyed good as they greatly expanded our understanding of phenomena like Shock and Hypothermia. This understanding has, without doubt, saved many more lives than those experiments consumed.

I realize I'm going off topic here but the idea the Nazi medical experiments provided some amazing medical advances is a but of a myth based on the just world fallacy. You're right about them helping us understand shock and hypothermia. However, most of their experiments were closer to macabre torture porn then proper science. The vast majority of their experiments weren't rigorous or documented enough to be of any use.

I can't tell if this is an exceptionally well crafted troll effort or yet another exhibit of just how broken and toxically effeminate the culture of the liberal striver class has become. The warnings in CS Lewis' Abolition of Man reframed as imperatives. Forget making "men without chests" what we really need to do is make no men at all!

Incels often float the idea of getting rid of women once there are artificial wombs. I propose a competition: one country gets rid of their men, and the other their women. Which country wins?

I don't like this tendency to insinuate that posters with outrageous theses must be trolling/dishonest. If this is not the place to discuss outrageous proposals at face value, what is? Moreover, to begin with, if it generates interesting discussion and the original proposer follows conversational decorum, does it even matter whether it's trolling? Your interlocutor might be honest; he might also internally laugh at you; he might also be a p-zombie and have no internal experience at all. If on the other hand the proposal is so offensive to you that you can't engage normally, that's on you.

does it even matter whether it's trolling?

I would argue that yes, it does matter. and that the failure to police bad actors is often one of the most visible manifestations of "toxic femininity". See Theodore Dalrymple's the rush from Judgment.

I did say in the post itself that I wasn't serious.

Note I am not serious here

I mostly wrote it to hear intresting moral arguments against it or for it.

I am not posting it to convince anyone to do it but because it's a good starting prompt for philosophy and a fun writing excercise.

It's an argument against Utilitarianism only if you ignore 2nd-order effects. (This happens a lot with arguments against Utilitarianism.)

Take the extreme variant of the trolley problem, where a doctor has 5 sick patients who each need a different organ transplant. In the doctor's waiting room, there's a healthy patient. Should the doctor kill the healthy patient and use their organs to save the 5 sick people? After all, it'll be saving 5 lives at the cost of one; Utilitarianism demands that you kill the healthy person, right? It's exactly the same as pulling a lever on the train track to save 5 people, right?

... except no, because no one wants to live in a society where at any moment you can be righteously murdered for your organs. That's an insane way for a society to function. Everyone would be terrified all the time. No one would set foot in a hospital. There'd be constant revenge killings against doctors. Everyone who could afford bodyguards would hire them. Everyone would carry whatever weapons they could get their hands on. Society would collapse in about two days. The outcome is: you get no organ transplants, because you've destroyed the mechanisms that allowed for organ transplants in the first place.

Same thing with Nazi experimentation on live prisoners. The Utilitarian argument against it isn't just "the prisoners suffering is bad", it's that plus "if your society has a policy of experimenting on live prisoners, that generates a bunch of horrific problems", such as:

  • Significantly increased terror among the population
  • Dehumanisation of prisoners and any social group they're drawn from
  • Slippery slope to even less humane treatment of people
  • Slippery slope to expanding the number of valid targets
  • General breaking of bright lines around things like bodily autonomy, torture, etc

... so it's very much not an "unalloyed good", even leaving the suffering of the prisoners aside. (For that matter, even if we ignore 2nd-order effects, I'm not sure that the medical advances necessarily do outweigh the suffering of the prisoners! Then there's also the fact that there's no single unambiguous way to add up "greatest utility for the greatest number". You can absolutely have a version of Utilitarianism that prioritises additional utils for people at the bottom. And then, on top of that, there's no single way to convert pain/pleasure/satisfaction/whatever into utility; pain might have a much stronger contribution than pleasure. The weakness of Utilitarianism IMO is that it's inherently flexible and ambiguous like this.)

It might well be possible to construct a situation where Utilitarianism does give an unacceptable answer. But I don't think this is it. And typically, when these arguments go "Utilitarian says we should do X, which we can all agree has bad consequences" -- that's almost intrinsically self-defeating, because Utiliarianism is all about weighing up the consequences and minimising the badness!

I can't tell if this is an exceptionally well crafted troll effort

It does read like something written by Dr. Strangelove.

I recall the Chinese did infant sex selection, and that it didn't require Nazi camps, merely incentives aligning the right way. Their efforts resulted in demographic horrors because they selected against female children, and women are the bottleneck for reproduction. I'd like to hear the actual arguments against OP's proposal without devolving into "that's Nazi shit", or else I would like to see actual Nazi shit such as proposals to expel Jews/blacks treated the same way.

Obviously it is an argument in favor of Nazi style death camps, minus the whole "killing 6 million Jews" bit. Your argument relies on conflating these things.

With regards to the OP, I have (only a little tongue-in-cheekly) argued in favor of various feminist "solutions" to low-fertility: gender ratio control like this poster suggests, and also taxation-based polygyny (see recent paper making the rounds on Rightwing Twitter). When I promote these, the purpose is to show that the solutions require horrendous measures.

You might call this "accelerationism but for the future incel uprising"

minus the whole "killing 6 million Jews" bit

Minus? There are 16.5 million Jews in the world, getting rid of most men among them would hit that number pretty reliably.

No it does not rely on conflation of those things.

It relies on the supposition that evil things are always evil, and that good things are always good. But like others here, you are so steeped in left-wing anti-western propaganda that you do not even see it.

Furthermore removing and replacing an approximate third of the US (never mind the world) population would quickly make "the whole killing 6 million Jews bit" look like rookie numbers.

I can't tell if this is an exceptionally well crafted troll effort

It's dated April 2, 2025, but it's possible that's a time zone issue and it is indeed a year-old April Fools post.