site banner
PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   23068 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I do think there are some technological solutions, but many of them have nothing to do with pregnancy. From my perspective as a stay at home dad and parent of 3, in a neighborhood full of kids, I think most parents are accurately estimating the number of kids they can have and then having that many kids.

Shout-out to @HereAndGone2's post below pointing out the difficulties involved in potential surgery options. Throwing out surgery options feels easy, but actually going through with it is generally scary.

I'll go through the list of blockers and how I think Tech is impacting them:

  1. Conception. I've known plenty of couples that have fertility problems. There does however seem to be some kind of "breaking the seal" effect. Where a woman gets pregnant once and then it is much easier to conceive after that. Its stopped very few that I know of. Mostly it slows them down on having an initial kid. Tech - is being used to alleviate this problem already. Don't think you get much delta out of increased tech.
  2. Pregnancy. It absolutely sucks for some women. Worst case scenario its as bad as going through Chemo. Nausea and vomiting in 1st trimester is likely, lingering effects less likely. 3rd trimester is physical discomfort and limited mobility. For working women this means burning a bunch of PTO or sick leave before the baby even arrives. Typically pregnancies seem to be the same level of struggle across multiple kids for one woman. So if you have one really shitty pregancy experience, its likely gonna happen again for other kids. Tech - limited in this area, dangerous to do medical experiments on women with children. Having babies via pods or external wombs is like far future tech that could help a lot.
  3. Birth. As they get older it gets more and more dangerous to have kids. Modern medicine does a hell of a job of keeping them alive, but its still scary as hell for everyone remotely involved. My wife lost one of her childhood friends when she was giving birth (some kind of infection that killed the mother and child). I have multiple friends where the mother had to be taken in for emergency C-sections for various complications. Having kids younger is maybe safer in the sense that having major surgery while younger is safer. But having major surgery is still a base level of dangerous and scary. Tech - already heavily deployed in this area. Modern medicine is really a miracle. We are probably close to maxed out on this.
  4. Transportation. Car seats are a hassle. The number you can fit in a car is way less than the total seats. Lots of cars claim three seats per middle/back row. Only two car seats can fit in a row, even in very large American cars. Car seats as contraception is a known issue. Tech - is decent on this but its mostly a regulatory issue. Car designs are limited by safety concerns. Car seats are required.
  5. 0-6 months child care. Baby is not very mobile. Is very dependent on caregivers for everything. Feeding, clothing, diapers, etc. Tech - mostly still primitive here. Plenty of parents and adults enjoy this part of raising a baby so there aren't really attempts to automate it away. The main difficulty is that it is a 24hr job. A humanoid robot nanny might be really effective here at minimum just to turn it into a 16 hour job instead of 24. Price of them would have to come way down, and safety would be a massive concern.
  6. 0.5 - 3 years child care. Kid is mobile, still in diapers for most or all of this time. Will start communicating, but communication is not super useful. Tech - this is where things get interesting. I think the biggest innovation in recent years has been remote work. This is a good age where you can set the kid down in a play area they can have fun with toys and entertain themselves to some extent (or sibilings around the same age can entertain each other). They need periodic supervision and help with meals and diapers. Some work can get done in those periods, maybe half as much as an unencumbered adult. But we aren't well setup to have employees doing 4 hours of money work in an 8 hour time period. Or you burn out the parent and have them do 8hr of money work and 8hr of parenting work in a 16 hour period. The latter is a hurdle and leads to less kids, the former is not generally available. Cheaper gadgets and devices that can entertain the kids helps a little. Cheaper and easier meal prep helps.
  7. 4-6 years child care. Out of diapers, more independant, but also with growing social needs. pre-school and day care costs a lot of money Tech - mostly still primitive here. Some help from internet stuff that has made coordination and finding childcare for this age easier. AI humanoid robots that could serve as guardians would be helpful. But there is also a significant contingent of adults that like kids in this age range. Mostly women of course, but certainly enough of them that the wages for this job have been driven into the dirt.
  8. Older kid transportation. Kids start having a bunch of activities all over the place that they need to get to. With more kids they are also in more locations. I spend some activity days driving for 2 hours. Nothing is more than 10 miles away from my house. Traffic is not great, but even if it was gone that might only shave off thirty minutes. Tech - 19th century tech, the solution is just drive everywhere. Self driving cars might help, but usually a parent still need to accompany the kids up into the mid teens. Possibly some version of vr tech might help here (so they don't have to go anywhere and can do activities at home). But so would having larger homes.
  9. Bureaucracy and existing. Just having your kid exist on paper is a challenge. Adults have this challenge too. Things to sign up for, accounts to manage, healthcare signup stuff, etc. If you love filling out forms this is great, for everyone else it sucks. Tech online signup has made a lot of life way easier, but its also made it easier for everyone to expect more information, more release forms etc etc. LLM AI agents seem like they might be a solution, but I think it will be the same as the internet, they won't lower the burden on the parents, they will just make organizations more comfortable asking for more stuff up until the burden on the parents is similar.
  10. Everything and everyone else. This list is getting too long, but this is really important. Parents are a subset of everyone. If you make life easier for everyone you also make it easier for parents. Especially when there are time savings. tech - Delivery services are great. Grocery delivery is amazing. Online shopping is super easy. Remote work reducing commutes has been awesome.

I'll just end with the general observation that if you give parents more money but there aren't areas where they can trade money for more time then the money doesn't help them. As a single person you might think of money as the incentive in and of itself. But the calculations change a bit when you are a parent. Money is fully a means to an end. The ends being providing childcare, and enjoying your children. Technology that allows for that tradeoff is good. Technology that cheapens that tradeoff rate is great. Technology that adds a new time burden as part of the rat race or through regulation is terrible.

its likely gonna happen again for other kids. Tech - limited in this area, dangerous to do medical experiments on women with children.

Is that really the case? I could see all kind of medical devices that would help, for example, implantable devices to support the pelvic floor. There's always that feminist argument that medications are not sufficiently tested on women. Probably because there is too much variability on hormonal profiles and so on, but with AI-enabled calculation power, it shouldn't be such a huge burden to take into account.

It's dangerous? So are oil fields, roofs, or highways. It's dangerous to the fetus? Not a concern when it's a woman's choice.

Perhaps we need some strong legislation and cash-in-hand to enable more widespread research into these issues. If the government was putting as much money into solving 'pregnancy is uncomfortable' as they do blowing up enemies of Israel, we'd have solutions.

Alternatively, if we want to get around this whole thing, we could just have a more painful culture. Get rid of probation or even detention in schools and replace them with cannings and lashings. If we want to get extreme, we could beat fornication, abortion and contraception out of people, but even without that, having experienced some physical pain and gotten over it would help young women get over the concept that childbirth is painful.

There's always that feminist argument that medications are not sufficiently tested on women. Probably because there is too much variability on hormonal profiles and so on

More likely that if the woman later gets pregnant, or turns out to be pregnant despite you not allowing pregnant women in your study, the child, who signed no waivers, has an unlimited right to sue.

Perhaps it's time for a total and complete shutdown of family law and birth-related regulations until our country's representatives can figure out what's going on.

Blue tribe just need a strong Dr Fauci-like leader and the usual media campaign to spin it into a world-ending emergency to exempt the relevant corporations from legal consequences. Shouldn't be a big deal, barely an inconvenience. 'We need bodies for Russia/China/Iran/...'

Your objections seem maximally hand wavey 'yeah just massively alter society to fit this new goal, democrats did it back during covid'

Collapsing birthrates are a much bigger problem than covid. You're the one who cares about democracy, presumably. You should use the available tools of democracy to further goals that allow democracy to exist in the future. I for one am fine with democracy-skeptical high-birth-rates minorities taking over the future.

Where did I say I care about democracy?

You mentioned a government would be unpopular for overriding a few individuals' rights for the sake of enabling the continuation of mankind. This implicit concern for a government's popularity made me think you care about democracy.

Women's attitudes to childbirth and child raising are not the civilization-ending threat that modern Westerners think it is. The most backwards desert-dwelling tribesmen solved it thousands of years ago, this should be no big deal for the owners of the most sophisticated brainwashing system ever conceived.

Let's recap this whole thread

  1. MC posts about the fertility crisis.
  2. Self made writes about technology being a solution to avoid hard political problems.
  3. I respond more specifically about which technologies I think might help the most.
  4. You respond to me disagreeing with the usefulness of a particular technology, and suggest that the government should just force people to accept the danger.
  5. I say I don't think the government will be able to do that.
  6. You say if I care about democracy I should figure out how to make the government do that.

You have repeatedly and increasingly centralized the discussion around government. Every step was you moving in that direction. I joined this specific thread to talk about technology effects on fertility.

There are like a dozen other posters that will be happy to defend and discuss government effects on fertility. I'm not one of them. I don't care to play "pretend to be an authoritarian in order to save democracy". I like neither system so roleplaying as one to save the other has no appeal to me.

Go have the discussion you are looking for with someone else I am not the one you want.

More comments

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats