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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24008 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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I've been really thinking about this tweet.

Forcibly draft men to die for their country and no one bats an eye

Suggest that women have children for their country and suddenly everyone starts freaking out

We can force men to die, but can't even ask women to become mothers

This point is interesting, and I think rather noteworthy. There were many protests over the Vietnam conscription, Muhammad Ali's being the most famous example, so perhaps saying no backlash at all is a bit hastey. And who could forget our poor friends in Ukraine.

Still, I think she raises an interesting point. Most men still, (both legally and socially). Have to abide by the traditional man script. And this pressure is more on them then womens end of the social contract, which (from what I can see) is basically non existent.

Now the easiest explanation for this double standard is probably just gender bias: we simply have less empathy for men as a whole.

The way I see it, there are a couple of plausible solutions to make things for fair or consistent(any additional ones are welcome):

  1. Gender "Equality". Extend "bodily autonomy" rights (for those who are actually consistent and believe in the concept, as a side note, I believe this is just a silly excuse) to men and end the draft, eliminate male disposability. Both men and women ask each other out. Stop valueing men as pure economic units. Men aren't wallets or soldiers, their people! Ect. Basically "Masculism" or some variation of MRA movement.

  2. Extend the social contract obligations to women, and all that entails. Basically bring back some (or all) of the "patriarchy".

From what I can tell, 1 has kinda been tried, and has basically failed, probably due to the gender bias mentioned. I imagine Lauren favors the 2nd option, (& I kinda do). Implementing it may be unrealistic, however, due to various political and environmental constraints. I think realistically though, we are probably gonna have take a hard examination at the female end of the social contract at some-point, when birth rates and their implications become more severe and un-ignorable. Maybe we get lucky technology bails us out, but fundementally, I find the prospect of a society with no children, no families, etc, to be deeply dystopian.

I think one thing conscription shows (and the fact that many societies have it) is that, no society really wants to cease to exist. Nor should we. There is something valuable about societies existing, and continuing on into the future, even if we have to make some sacrifices for it. I think one can make a case (and many indeed do!) for extending some modified version of the social contract/roles to women. I've been deep thought about if societies might attempt this in the future, or what a modified variation of feminine roles/obilgations would look like. What do you think?

Underlying the original tweet, is a denial of the fact that women, as a group, are fundamentally incompetent in the 3d meatspace. Men, as a group, are competent in the realm of 3d meatspace. The reason society asks men to do things like go to war and die, is because it is sometimes necessary for people to fight and die to preserve a society. And if that is necessary, competence is required. Women, being incompetent, are not asked to bear that burden.

In the past, women birthed many children because a man with agency and competence found some woman and impregnated her. She often had little, or at least less of a, say in the matter. We have divorced ourselves from our biological realities, stuck our fingers in our ears and covered our eyes, and gave women an equal amount of power in the matters that actually matter. So now we struggle with problems that do not need to be problems.

We can force men to die, but can't even ask women to become mothers

Veteran vs Mother is great like for like comparison. Fairly obvious that mothers get a worse deal.

War sucks. Therefore, social norms and economic incentives are disproportionately generous towards veterans. Doesn't matter if they never saw action. Doesn't matter if the profession has lower mortality rates than logging or fisheries. They're heroes and must be thanked for their service every 5 minutes. They get holidays, movies, medals and awards. Free healthcare, free college, VA checks as pension and discounts at every store.

What do mothers get ? A mother loses between 5-20 years of her life depending on her involvement with the kids. Career women are forced into a ceiling. Pretty women lose their beauty. Complicated pregnancies can come with a lifetime of physical and emotional trauma. We used to treat mothers like heroes. Communities pitched in to help during the difficult years. To raise your children into well-adjusted adults was a source of pride. Not anymore. Now, the incentives have reversed. Media has stopped portraying motherhood in a positive light and perceived standards for parenting have reached impossible levels.

Now the easiest explanation for this double standard is probably just gender bias: we simply have less empathy for men as a whole.

women != mothers. Society has empathy for beautiful young women, not for neurotic mothers who're at their wits end.

It's carrots and sticks. We can talk about sticks that coerce young women into become mothers. But, there need to be more carrots for mothers. Maybe we need stop asking what mothers can do for society, and start asking society what it can do for mothers.

This actually a really good write up, and not something I thought about. I dont think mothers get a worse deal, but they are definitely under appreciated!

Being a mother is supposed to be a rewarding activity in and of itself. She does not "lose" years of her life. She spends them caring for her children, watching them grow and teaching them about the world. Time will pass however she choses to spend it. The soldier is the one making a sacrifice.

But as you say, the narrative has shifted. What matters now is travelling, partying, and getting a degree. Doing this is freedom. Parenthood (for both sexes really) is something to be postponed for as long as possible while adolescence is romanticized.

I doubt forcing women into pregnancy would do anything except cement the idea of motherhood as a prison. The implication being that it is so bad that no sane person would do it voluntarily. But it does sadden me that so many seem to see family and adulthood as antagonistic to enjoyment and self actualization.

They get holidays, movies, medals and awards. Free healthcare, free college, VA checks as pension and discounts at every store.

In the US, at least, this is not true. The GI Bill is not "free college", you only get (cheap) healthcare and a pension if you did a full 20 years ( or are classified as disabled,.which granted, has turned into widespread grift), and "discounts at every store" is a gross exaggeration. Maybe a free coffee on Veterans Day.

The reflexive "Thank you for your service" does annoy the hell out of me.

I of course favor One, but it is a hard sell.

Most men are too emotionally weak and bitchmade at the soul level to survive one other dude calling them a fag; imagine the difficulty if all of society is pushing down on you to be more manly.

I think that's the reason the dudes who decide to not lower their heads and take what they are given are so wildly out there as a rule; degenerate coded puppy play kink at pride Fuck You if you don't like it you can eat shit and die types, they are reacting against the immense pressure to do this set of masculine things or you are ...

Effeminate! what could be worse than that, you wouldn't want people to think you weren't a manly manly man, you should think about it all the time, you should neurotically worry about it all the time, you should punish other men for not aligning with the vague societal view of manliness, you should in fact die about it instead of acting one degree off the course society has set for you. Now go back to pretending to work at the mines or yer gay.

It's why I find the alpha male manly man types personally disgusting: Weakness is contemptible, and there is nothing that signals weakness more than letting the idea that people might tut tut at you dictate your entire fucking existence. Ford f250 in the marketing firm parking lot ass

Isn't this post a contradiction? The manosphere/machismo culture guys make a pitch that is a variant of: "You are weak and that is contemptible. Follow my view of how you should be, and you will no longer be weak and contemptible." You are basically making the same pitch, just swapping out what actions/beliefs are indicative of weakness. The core part is that both this post and the machismo ideology relies on shaming men for being weak, thus implicitly asserting that to be a good man you must be strong. That is an enforced gender role.

Here are your last two paragraphs, changed to be something a manosphere guy would say.

Chud! what could be worse than that, you wouldn't want people to think you weren't an ally, you should think about it all the time, you should neurotically worry about it all the time, you should punish other men for not aligning with the oppressed, you should in fact die about it instead of acting one degree off the course history has set for you. Now go back to pretending to respect women or yer cancelled.

It's why I find the male feminist types personally disgusting: Weakness is contemptible, and there is nothing that signals weakness more than letting the idea that people might tut tut at you dictate your entire fucking existence. HR Karen following ass

It's an established retort, analogous to saying that the manliest cocktails are the pink sweet ones because they prove that you have nothing to prove to anyone and drinking some pure vodka or whiskey is just insecure posing, or that driving a big truck/car is compensation for your dick size.

This is of course just counter-signaling, which is a form of signaling itself.

What they missed though is that the core manliness is not the lumberjack clothes and beard and whiskey and trucks and football stuff, but self-reliance, goal-oriented vision and ambition (knowing what you want), decision power and effectiveness (getting shit done), keeping one's word and honor (reliability and role in a community), standing up for one's dependents and friends, etc. etc. These can have some outward appearances but they aren't the core. It will still be countersignalled of course, because it looks even more secure and settled to say that you just don't even have to think about whether you are effective and ambitious, in fact you can self-deprecate and joke about how much you aren't, because in fact you know that everyone sees how successful you are in your life trajectory that you can even afford to downplay it.

As to the draft specifically my preference is that we abolish it entirely or, in the alternative, draft men and women equally. The way war is fought today it seems to me women could substantially contribute in a way that was much less true before the industrialization of war. Especially in an existential context, it would seem foolish not to bend all society's available capacity towards survival. I find some amusement in the fact that, historically, this has been the more feminist/leftist position on the draft while the more conservative position has been keeping a gender-segregated draft.

Extend the social contract obligations to women, and all that entails. Basically bring back some (or all) of the "patriarchy".

What, exactly, does this entail? Are we going to restrict women's ability to work outside the home? Bring back a form of coverture? To me this reads like another of those situations where a hypothetical burden on men, regardless of its actualization, is used to justify oppressing women in a way that does not seem, to me, very justifiable.

To me this reads like another of those situations where a hypothetical burden on men, regardless of its actualization, is used to justify oppressing women in a way that does not seem, to me, very justifiable.

According to pew research, Men do feel the pressures of masculinity as mentioned, and they are punished more by society for stepping out the gender expectations. (And yes, women do have the whole "expectations to an involved parent" situation, but I'd wager thats more for a person already in the parenthood position - not having the kids itself.)

The primary point of what bothers me here is this: If you want to remove gendered roles and expectations, ok, we can discuss that (not something I'd agree with but still). But it seems to me that many don't want to be rid of the "patriarchy" and gender norms in reality. Switzerland, for example, had an opportunity to remove the draft via ballot measure, it failed. People like gender norms when it benefits them (or when they benefit women), and actively dislike them when they hurt them (or women). It basically ends in a situation where mens rights are up for grabs, while womens are off limits, because reasons.

Its "justifiable" if you look at it from a fairness standpoint. Either everyone has gendered roles and expectations or no one does.

And for the record here, I'm not in agreement with any crazy islamic style patriarchy, if thats your primary concern.

According to pew research, Men do feel the pressures of masculinity as mentioned, and they are punished more by society for stepping out the gender expectations

Funny enough, that's just the concept of "toxic masculinity". It's a stupid name but it's literally just about masculine gender roles and how they lock men into having to always play the hero and hide their human vulnerability and complaints.

Of course, in practice the concept of "toxic masculinity" is usually limited to just those expressions of masculine gender roles that the analyst finds toxic rather than those the men they are addressing do. Which conveniently allows them to lock men into "always playing the hero and hiding their human vulnerability and complaints" while claiming not to. EDIT: The goal of those who talk about "toxic masculinity" is never to liberate men, but to coerce them into behavior more beneficial to the speaker.

As to the draft specifically my preference is that we abolish it entirely or, in the alternative, draft men and women equally.

If we abolish the draft entirely then authoritarian states with less scruples would eventually overpower and dominate all the countries that tried to do so. Then they'd do things like what Russia did with the Donbass and use their subjugated lands to go after their next round of conquests.

If we instead drafted men and women equally, this would almost certainly devolve into mere performative equality where women are mostly given noncombat roles.

If we were really committed to equality then we'd run up against the reality that women don't make great frontline soldiers, and would face even greater risk of abuse if they were ever captured.

Evolution has made men into warriors and women into childbearers. You can try to push against that but you'll always come up against biological realities.

This entirely theoretical though as all the major Western powers don't have a draft and America which has the most powerful military in the world is also all volunteer, so is China btw.

Because there's no war currently happening that the major Western nations are a part of. But the international situation is looking darker every year. The threat still looms.

State-mandated pregnancies would not be required if the fertility rate was naturally >2.1, so there's symmetry in that the government only uses these options when necessary.

Necessary for whom?

Evolution has made men into warriors and women into childbearers. You can try to push against that but you'll always come up against biological realities.

Evolution makes everyone into a warrior. Males may be generally better, but one glance at the dangerous wild and how basically all other species operates tells us that females will fight too when needed.. The world was and is not kind enough to let anyone coast through so easily.

But even more importantly, modern warfare just doesnt really care as much about your physical capabilities as nature did, what wins war isn't manly men with thick abs swinging their muscular fists at each other anymore. Instead what truly wins modern wars (if things are even "winnable" traditionally now) is the logistics and science, even Rambo has no defense against a drone swarm.

Ukraine hasn't turned the tides on Russia because they sent ther men to the gym, but because they've engineered incredible new advancements in weapons systems and made tons of logistical optimizations. Just recently they even took over a Russian position without a single boot on the ground. And it's only going to get more and more common.

Even Israel doesn't generally allow women in to frontline combat duty. Women simply do not fight well unless defending young- Mulan was a folk tale and not someone who actually existed, and the Trang sisters had a baby strapped to their back, and Joan of Arc didn't personally fight, she used psychic powers to make command decisions- and we're definitely not going to have a kindergarten class hanging out in trenches.

Yes, Kipling said the female is more dangerous than the male- because cows have calves with them, and bulls don't. I 100% believe that a mama would kill a bear in family defense at equal efficacy to a dad, given the aid of modern technology- but that isn't the problem militaries are trying to solve.

Even Israel doesn't generally allow women in to frontline combat duty. Women simply do not fight well unless defending young- Mulan was a folk tale and not someone who actually existed, and the Trang sisters had a baby strapped to their back, and Joan of Arc didn't personally fight, she used psychic powers to make command decisions- and we're definitely not going to have a kindergarten class hanging out in trenches.

Of course, psychic powers aren't real so women aren't beating men with them.

Instead, in real life, a woman can kill you from thousands of miles away using technology.

Yes, Kipling said the female is more dangerous than the male, because

the way a woman commits violence is by convincing a man to do it on her behalf. Therefore, as someone who does not know (or need to care) about what that actually costs, it's more likely she will seek a violent solution and cheer it on.

Women shouldn't have a say in foreign policy if it's not them who will be sent to die over it. This is merely controlling a moral hazard- violence is very literally sex work (as in, "work performed by one's sex") and in a fair system should be treated as such.

Women shouldn't have a say in foreign policy if it's not them who will be sent to die over it.

You don't need to be sent anywhere. For most countries that aren't America or nestled under it or someone else's nuclear umbrella the consequences of bad foreign policy can find you at home.

Bad German foreign policy, for example, let to the widespread rape of German women when the Soviets came to collect.

In Western countries no one is being sent to die, it's an all volunteer military. And in the US even during the height of the GWOT it remained so. As well that the feminists back then were arguing for allowing women to serve in combat arms units and the traditionalists were against. The vast majority of politicians also don't know what war costs how many of them were ever lower enlisted? Also the causality rates for the entire GWOT terror were a rounding error lower then a single major battle in WW2 or WW1. Also since no Western country is ever going "ban women from making foreign policy" Even medieval kingdoms didn't do that. It seems like then it makes sense based on your logic to demand more women in combat arms not less since then they would have "skin in the game" but realistically the Western political class is so removed from military service anyway I think this argument just doesn't have legs, unless you want to go full Heinlein which is also not going to happen. If you really view this as an unacceptable moral hazard 50 50 combat arms gender ratios are the only feasible way to solve it.

I don't think it is. I don't think hyper aggressive women unaware of the cost of violence is an issue. I think our political class using the military too easily is an issue. But Bush, Obama and Trump II have done plenty of that despite having penises and I have a hard time seeing how a woman could have been worse then Bush in terms of cavalierly using the military.

All else aside, by the time a society is at war we've kinda already chosen violence, deciding women aren't gonna get a say in it anymore won't magically fix that. Last I checked the (male)leaders of Russia and Ukraine, or Israel and... multiple other places, haven't hammered out a peace agreement.

Do the female soldiers who joined the military get an exemption in your book? The thousands of Soviet, Polish, French, Dutch etc women who died fighting the Nazis in WW2, some executed, some tortured to death, some thrown in concentration camps? Women like Valeriya Gnarovskaya who threw herself under a tank with a bag of grenades to save the wounded soldiers she was treating? The 153 American female soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, many from IEDs?

thousands during WW2

How many men died? Just an order of magnitude estimate will do.

Not that this is even necessary; men are more than willing to vote themselves into going to war even without universal sufferage re: WW1, or revoke their own ability to resist being conscripted like they did in Russia (not that it would helped; WW2 was existential for them).

Do the female soldiers who joined the military get an exemption in your book?

In aggregate (which, let's be clear, is what we're talking about here) they do not. It's not even limited to protecting against foreign enemies; women more than men support things like decarceration, because the consequences (that being more violent crime) are disproportionately unlikely to affect them. That's what "moral hazard" means- no skin in the game means the freedom to make stupid choices.

I’m against treating people based on the aggregate of their various identities, as much as possible, as a moral principle. Otherwise this leads to identity politics, collective guilt, and ideology that’s toxic whether it’s from the left or right. You have to answer for the sins of your fellow white males/kulaks/women/[ethnic group], regardless of whether you, an individual, are guilty or innocent.

If you went all Starship Troopers and said military service guarantees citizenships, and women happened to be 0.1% of soldiers, I could respect that, even if I disagreed with it. But your point is to deny people rights based on what their identity group tends to do, regardless of how they themselves act.

You’d block an individual woman who volunteered in the military and risked her life to save others from voting, but allow a man who bribed a doctor to get a draft exemption, or got a cushy desk position out of danger thanks to his family connections, the ability to vote?

You blame women, yet wealthy, powerful men, from politicians to billionaires, are the ones actually deciding foreign policy while poor men get sent out to die. What personal risk did Donald Trump have when he decided to invade Iran? He evaded the draft, and he’ll carry on living in luxury without giving a damn about gas prices or electricity or skyrocketing cost of living. Meanwhile three American female soldiers died in the war in Iran, two in a plane crash, one in an air strike. They had far more skin in the game than Donald Trump and his cabinet.

The military is physically grueling beyond simply swinging a sword. There's a reason the Nazis and Soviets didn't bother drafting a large amount of their women into frontline combat despite both sides believing they were in an existential conflict and that the loser could very well be on the receiving end of genocide. From a trite view a women should be about as good as a man when it comes to shooting a gun or piloting a tank. Marching long distances under load, digging trenches, enduring cold and wetness, dragging wounded men -- all of these are things frontline soldiers had to and have to be able to deal with. And that's not even getting into the reflexes advantage men have as evidenced by esports competitions that others have cited below.

Maybe one day manpower will be fully replaceable with metal, but as of now that's not the case. Men are indispensable to manning frontlines even as (man-controlled) drones do most of the killing.

While not as many, a lot of women (hundreds of thousands) were still conscripted by the soviets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_Soviet_Union

By the end of the war, the air defence force was more than 1/4 female, with 300,000 women, both volunteers and conscripts serving as communicators, machine gunners, pilots and medical personnel. Most female conscripts served behind the front lines in secondary positions and roles in an attempt to free up more men for front line duty. However it is believed that many women also served in combat positions, such as in tank regiments or along the front line.

Likewise the Nazis while against conscripting women for their idealogical beliefs, also turned to drafting a lot of women at the end

Women also fought in the Volkssturm near the end of World War Two. Girls as young as 14 years were trained in the use of small arms, panzerfaust, machine guns, and hand grenades from December 1944 through May 1945.

And both sides still had women doing other military related jobs https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/women-in-the-third-reich

By war’s end, the number of female auxiliaries in the German armed forces approached 500,000, including some 3,700 women who served as guards in the Nazi camp system.

So yeah, when push came to shove even the Nazis were like "fuck it, teenage girls take these guns and fight"

Maybe one day manpower will be fully replaceable with metal, but as of now that's not the case. Men are indispensable to manning frontlines even as (man-controlled) drones do most of the killing.

Yep, but that day is getting closer and closer. Might even be within a decade from now if AGI predictions pan out and we have another tech explosion from them.

Sure, women were a small percentage of the armed forces of some of the countries that fought in WW2. But they were overwhelmingly not on the frontline, and most were entirely noncombat. As I said in my first comment you responded to, I don't see noncombat roles as being anywhere close to as awful as frontline combat duty where the risk of being killed is far higher. If people wanted to subject women to the draft out of a sense of equality, but then the women ended up mostly just getting noncombat roles, I would call that performative equality.

But that's the thing, noncombat roles have become increasingly more important and likely at some point soon will be the only thing important when attempts to use armies of humans just swarmed by autonomous drones. Human soldier morale is going to plummet even harder and they'll fight back conscription more too when using them becomes even more guaranteed death compared to just making another bot.

We're not there yet though.

But assuming we get there in our lifetimes then that would eliminate the fairness argument for state-mandated pregnancy in terms of the gender balance. However, there would still be the state-interest argument for state-mandated pregnancies that conscription originally relied on.

Hopefully eventually that would also go away with the advent of artificial wombs.

Just recently they even took over a Russian position without a single boot on the ground.

I don't know if you're intentionally spreading propaganda or just clueless about the war. Ukraine is lucky to benefit from modern tech--which they emphatically did not invent--in the sense that modern maneuver warfare became nigh-impossible. They also benefit from press-ganging their male population into vans and sending them to die on the frontlines, which Russia doesn't want to do. Russia has been far more innovative (Geran, fiber optic FPVs, Oreshnik, bla bla).

Ukraine is lucky to benefit from modern tech--which they emphatically did not invent--in the sense that modern maneuver warfare became nigh-impossible.

Ukranian tech is so good that the US is going to them for it. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-19/ukraine-sees-us-looking-for-technology-transfers-in-drone-deal

They also benefit from press-ganging their male population into vans and sending them to die on the frontlines, which Russia doesn't want to do.

Over a million Russian casualties for basically no gain, yeah sure dude they totally care.

Russia has been far more innovative (Geran, fiber optic FPVs, Oreshnik, bla bla).

Yeah, they've been so great at innovation that they're currently losing ground (after drawing it out for years without much advancement) in a war that was expected to be an easy operation that would only take a few days. The underdog is becoming the winner, Moscow is even facing major strikes now something considered pretty unimaginable back in 2022.

But even more importantly, modern warfare just doesnt really care as much about your physical capabilities as nature did. What wins war isn't manly men with thick abs swinging their muscular fists at each other anymore. What truly wins modern wars (if things are even "winnable" traditionally now) is the logistics and science, even Rambo has no defense against a drone swarm.

Women also get btfo'd in hand-eye coordination contests, which doesn't bode well for female drone pilots, and logistics games are probably one of the most male-skewed hobbies on the planet.

Women also get btfo'd in hand-eye coordination contests

What is the gap here in comparison to e.g. the grip strength gap?

I've seen lots of hemming and hawing as to why there's a difference, but not many attempts to quantify it. I suppose someone could go over various pool, darts, or e-sports tournaments and compare scores between leagues, but that's a bit too much work for me.

At least according to the Google AI slop response (can't be bothered to dig into the sources to verify) the typical female world championship darts game has a score of 72 to 92, while the typical male world championship game is 95 to 105.

It would seem that women and men have very similar performance in Olympic shooting, which has got to be pretty coordination loaded. I'm not convinced that there's much of a gap after all. Esports gaps are easily attributed to the well known gender autism gap.

I absolutely despise modern journalism and it's inability to present information, but hey, turns out you're actually right. On the other hand - darts. I tried to find results for pool / snooker, but that only yielded a lot of mewling from journos. So it's not a clear "no differences in hand-eye coordination" thing, but it turns out Samuel Colt did, in fact, make us equal.

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Yeah, the winning combo for Total War is to have the women in manufacturing and food production so men can fight. If we want this to be "drafted' as well out of a sense of fairness then that's fine, there can be separate female draft where if your number gets pulled you move to a potato processing facility in Idaho (if you don't have a kid under 2).

And that is exactly what happened in WWII. Famously even queen Elizabeth II(RIP) spent time in conscripted service as an auxiliary. Soviet women hitched themselves to plows because the army was using 100% of the fuel and machinery.

Women also get btfo'd in hand-eye coordination contests, which doesn't bode well for female drone pilots,

Oh don't worry about that, way things are going it seems that drone pilots won't be nearly as good as the automated AI systems in the near future either. They're already better at driving (most relevant given it's direct proof that automated systems are better at controlling machines already and they're just gonna need to figure out the proper parameters for war), at diagnosing people, and apparently even at appearing to be human. Human operated full drone warfare will be a really short part of history.

Sorry, I was under the impression you were making the argument that women can contribute to warfare nearly equally to men, not that Skynet will eat us for breakfast.

Sorry, I was under the impression you were making the argument that women can contribute to warfare nearly equally to men, not that Skynet will eat us for breakfast.

Well those are the same thing. Man or woman, they both will die to a drone coming for them. Just like how it makes no difference if the ant you squash under your foot is the strongest ant alive. It's dead anyway, and you didn't even notice.

Well those are the same thing.

Hardly. It clearly means if you're organizing opposition against Skynet, you still should put men in charge of the military affairs. We may ultimately lose, but "we'll all die anyway, so it doesn't matter" is a very defeatist attitude.

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AI systems are going to make riflemen into effective anti-drone marksmen much faster than they are going to equalize the differences between men and women in combat.

And since AI systems are easily fooled by anyone who has played Metal Gear, we won't be getting rid of the infantrymen any time soon, either.

AI systems are going to make riflemen into effective anti-drone marksmen much faster than they are going to equalize the differences between men and women in combat.

Your argument is that warfare descending into AI machines vs AI machines doesn't help to equalize biological differences?

And since AI systems are easily fooled by anyone who has played Metal Gear, we won't be getting rid of the infantrymen any time soon, either.

They aren't perfect absolutely not, but these types of arguments are increasingly looking like the ones used against self driving cars where someone will say "But look, it accidently hit a cat this one time!" while ignoring the many many many other areas, and the general statistics where technology has matched or even improved over humans.

We saw this in practice already, a real life position was just taken from boots on the ground by machines. And again remember it's gonna keep getting better.

Your argument is that warfare descending into AI machines vs AI machines doesn't help to equalize biological differences?

Warfare is more going to iterate to machine-assisted humans versus machine-assisted humans. On the ground, things like reaction time and muscle mass will still matter for the foreseeable future.

self driving cars where someone will say "But look, it accidently hit a cat this one time!" while ignoring the many many many other areas

Self driving cars are actually a decent example of the direction warfare is headed, because they are not fully autonomous. Rather, self-driving cars are "human in the loop" technology that operate with the aid of human guidance. You should think of this less as replacing humans directly and more pushing them into a different, ideally more efficient line of work.

Arguably Waymo is behind the military; the US fielded long-range fire-and-forget computer-controlled missiles in the 1970s and the Phalanx CIWS in the 1980s, and both systems can operate fully autonomously once human guidance is released, something it seems self-driving cars still struggle with.

Ukrainian unmanned ground vehicles are similar, inasmuch as they are not supposed to replace troops wholesale, but rather allow them to operate more safely. Most UGVs in Ukraine are assigned to logistics tasks, not combat.

We saw this in practice already, a real life position was just taken from boots on the ground by machines. And again remember it's gonna keep getting better.

Firstly, Ukrainian war marketing propaganda, even if accurate, has little evidentiary value without context which even the Ukrainians likely lack - "a real life position was just taken from boots on the ground by machines" could simply be a case of "the Russians decided to abandon their position because it had become an untenable logistically" or "the Russians wanted to bait Ukraine into moving troops into it so they could plaster them with glide bombs."

Secondly, while the position might have been taken by "machines," it was not taken by "AI," it was taken by humans using remote control. This is World War Two-era technology that is probably well suited for Ukraine's needs because of the specifics of its military situation, but may be less (or differently) relevant in other, more battlespaces. Remote-controlled cars that cannot do things like "scale a fence" or "open a door" are not on the cusp of replacing grunts.

(The article you linked to references the TerMIT, Zmiy, and Protector; none of these appear to be autonomous vehicles.)

I'm not saying or suggesting that "robots won't come to the military." To an under-appreciated degree, the (US) military has had substantially autonomous systems for longer than I am alive, and we will continue to see systems with various degrees of autonomy proliferate. In the US military, likely to a degree greatly exceeding the military of Ukraine, AI already is allowed to execute on human decisions with autonomy (any self-guiding weapon) and assist human judgment (most aircraft, submarines, etc. have AI-assisted sensor filters). These technologies have not filtered down to dismounts to the degree that they have to high-end weapons systems, and that is likely to happen before infantry are replaced by machines, if only because the combination of intelligence, endurance, and mobility in a human-sized package is extremely expensive at best, even if infantry-bot does not need to carry out the many secondary peacetime operations that are required of troops.

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these types of arguments are increasingly looking like the ones used against self driving cars

As someone peripherally close to this field, I think there is a categorical distinction between a self-driving car tuned to drive against random road occurrences and an adversarial model that is actively looking for weaknesses and forcing the worst decisionmaking situations. As a concrete example, self driving cars of today probably don't worry about murals of tunnels adjacent to roadways (Roadrunner style): it's not a common occurrence. But in war you'd absolutely want your self-driving tank to not drive into such traps, and you'd expect your enemy to mass deploy paint to make it happen all at once.

A bunch of traffic cones on hoods seems able to stop Waymos, for example.

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Women also get btfo'd in hand-eye coordination contests

Yeah, it's pretty much a meme that if you see a female name on an e-sports leaderboard, the person attached still has a Y chromosome.

It's worth noting that the UK did draft women for war work in WW2 - including heavy manual work that was close to the limit of what women were physically capable of. My grandmother was drafted into the Women's Land Army at 17, and did a farm job that would have been done by a man in peacetime, and that essentially no woman would have done voluntarily.

I honestly think this is a pretty reasonable take. A lot of people are attacking the claim that drafting people isn't controversial. It obviously is, but the majority of society still sees it as a necessary evil, as without it the nation could be overrun by other states that are less scrupulous. This is less of an issue for the USA that only has two relatively weak neighbors, but the principle is sound in general. Ukraine would have collapsed to Russian aggression long ago if it didn't draft its population to fight, and yes it's very controversial in that country with there being many examples of draft dodging enforcement actions that look more like kidnappings, but again it's still necessary.

Childbirth is extremely invasive for women of course, but it's also very invasive to be enslaved by the military and potentially shot to death. While death in childbirth can happen, it's fairly rare with modern medicine. Death in war on the other hand is an expected outcome for thousands or millions of men. If women were told that raising the children was optional after birth, then they'd only need to go through the pregnancy for 9 months, give birth, and then they'd be done which compares to the years-long requirements for many draftees, with unclear end dates. If I was behind the veil of ignorance and told I either had to be either a man reborn to be drafted in Ukraine's war, or a woman forced to bear a child for the state, I'd choose the latter pretty easily.

The main 2 differences I can see between drafting and forced childbirth are the following:

  1. Forced childbirth hasn't been seen as necessary historically since natural birthrates had been sufficient.
  2. The idea of forcing women to bear a large share of societal costs is seen as far more heinous than asking men to do the same.

Neither of these is very compelling in our current situation.

Childbirth is extremely invasive for women of course, but it's also very invasive to be enslaved by the military and potentially shot to death

I think you're underselling the "invasive" point. The idea of forcing someone to go through pregnancy triggers a particular kind of disgust and sympathy in me - it might not be more harmful or evil than forcing someone to fight in a war in an 'objective' sense, but it feels debased and inhumane, belonging to the same category as rape or Mengele-style medical experimentation. Certainly, a legal mandate of pregnancy, at least one that's not enforced through direct sexual violence, would be on the milder end of that spectrum - but the violation of bodily autonomy is still a very particular kind of harm, and one can have a moral intuition that the entire category should be strictly taboo in a civilized society, regardless of what other kinds of harm the government is sometimes empowered to inflict for the greater good.

(Intuitions may differ about whether forced pregnancy falls into that category, but I do think the vast majority of humans would agree that there are particularly 'unclean' kinds of harm that the government should never implement, even in pursuit of its self-preservation; that there are actions so vile that if it's a choice between death and performing them, death is the nobler choice. If a maniac demanded that you rape your preteen daughter or else he'd kill your family, what would you choose? The view that the government cannot compel women to bear children is, IMO, a perfectly straightforward example of that: "if it comes to that, better to be a demographically dwindling nation than a nation of institutional rapists".)

If a maniac demanded that you rape your preteen daughter or else he'd kill your family, what would you choose?

Its intresting, because I think rape (particularly child rape) might just be a special case. If it was "let me harvest your daughters lung and kidney" or "let me chop off your sons leg", you might get greyer results. And in most cases, as far as I'm aware, murder is punished more severly than organ harvesting, and its about equal to rape in terms of maximum sentencing. The psychological effects of rape are probably what make it really bad, not necessarily the violation of bodily autonomy.

I think you're underselling the "invasive" point.

Compared to the reality of being drafted where a man might at any point have their leg blown off?

that there are actions so vile that if it's a choice between death and performing them, death is the nobler choice

I don't see why you're claiming that pregnancy is so much vastly worse than warfare. I don't think your sentiment is uncommon, but I'd think it comes from 1) this hasn't been done before, so the Overton window still sees it as beyond the pale, and 2) it would be done against women, and humans naturally want to protect women from everything.

These are not particularly compelling reasons.

I'd think it comes from 1) this hasn't been done before, so the Overton window still sees it as beyond the pale, and 2) it would be done against women, and humans naturally want to protect women from everything.

No - again, I think it comes from a deep-seated intuition that the body is a temple, something private and sacred; that it would be unclean and abominable for anyone to invade or modify your body without your consent. I am struggling to explain this without repeating myself - but a substantial portion of mankind finds it intuitive that having your body interfered with is traumatizing and wrong in a kind of metaphysical way that you can't crush down into utils and compare to other forms of harm. Throughout history, it has been considered self-evident that an honorable woman would rather die than be raped - that a woman who has been raped, even if there is no pregnancy, even if there is no social shame, has suffered a much more grievous and deeper harm than the amount of physical pain endured during the act.

Ergo, it seems intuitively, primally obvious to me that forcing a woman to bear something within her womb, within her most private organs, against her will, is wrong, disgusting, taboo, in a way that's not just quantitatively but qualitatively different from forcing a male or female soldier to risk his/her life in battle. I would feel the same disgust if a mad scientist tried to implant a fetus inside a non-consenting man.

that it would be unclean and abominable for anyone to invade or modify your body without your consent

And yet, fascinatingly enough, female genital mutilation is considered evil and immoral, but circumcision is regularly practiced. Tells me all I need to know about the "body is a temple" argument.

Join the army and try making a bodily autonomy argument at any point, see how it goes.

I'm not suggesting you actually run this experiment, and I don't support some sort of forced pregnancy regime(although there are, on the contrary, lots of lower hanging fruit coercive options available to western societies. Forced marriage for cohabiting couples makes a lot more sense, statistically most women have babies once they get that ring).

And I'm saying again that the realities of being drafted mean men are already subjected to violation of the body as a temple. Sure, having the government inseminate women would be gross and weird and terrible. But it's also terrible to have the government say that men have to go to the frontline where enemies can shoot them full of holes.

Personally, I could barely tolerate my son being drafted against his will, abused as cannon fodder and killed during a war. I'd help him dodge the draft, depending on the circumstances.

But if someone drafted my daughter's womb against her will, I'd try to kill the enforcers or inseminators. I feel this is a natural, typical instinct for most fathers, population TFR be damned. This is why drafting women's wombs is impossible, most fathers would perceive it as rape of their daughters.

And the fact most mothers do not perceive what you've described as rape of their sons is the entire problem.

It's either genetic or embedded deep within all major cultures. The mothers of a tribe that kept their sons away from war were conquered by their neighbors. The genes or cultures that did not see male drafting as rape survived as they had bigger armies, the losers were enslaved or assimilated into the conquerers.

Apparently soldiers had a 1.8% chance of being killed in WWII, 0.5% in the Vietnam War.

Gestating and giving birth to an infant historically imposed an equivalent or greater mortality risk; today it still entails some risk of death plus a far more substantial risk of serious long-term illness and chronic pain but also a 100% chance of:

  • existing for nearly a year with a large foreign organism living inside your abdomen, whom you can feel displacing your innards, rolling around, stretching and thrashing, scratching, eventually squeezing the air out of you, and you cannot stop it doing this or get a break for even a minute

  • Having your cognitive and motivational systems irreversibly remodeled, on a basic biochemical level, in ways decidedly not aligned with your own individual flourishing

  • Being forced into an unwilled emotional bond that will break your heart many times whether you raise the child or not

  • Having your body permanently physically disfigured and reduced in function, including your metabolism and capacity for sleep

  • Having your tissues contaminated with someone else's cells, which will stay there and fuck with you for the rest of your life

Don't get me wrong, I've done this several times and it was worth it with someone I loved and chose. But to have been forcibly impregnated with some random guy's state-created offspring would have been nightmarish and life-ruining. To match those levels of "gross and weird and terrible," the male draft would have to look more like The Human Centipede than Band of Brothers.

This comparison describes pregnancy from the inside in the most visceral possible terms, but then describes the draft from the outside as "only a 0.5–1.8% death risk."

But the horror of conscription is not exhausted by your chance of being killed. Being drafted means the state seizes your body, removes your freedom, ships you away from your family, subjects you to total institutional discipline, and may order you to kill strangers, watch friends be dismembered, be shelled, step on mines, burn, drown, lose limbs, suffer brain injury, be captured, tortured, or come home with permanent psychological damage and moral injury. It also means you may be forced to participate in acts you find evil under threat of prison or execution.

So I don't disagree with you that forced pregnancy is horrific. But I'd argue that conscription still comes out handily ahead as the most extreme violation of bodily autonomy states have ever imposed, ahead of mandated pregnancies if they were to be implemented.

I'd argue that conscription still comes out handily ahead

I feel like the slapfight over the comparative suffering of forced pregnancy (on average) versus forced conscription is emerging as a dead-end - partly because we naturally underweight suffering that applies only to other people,, but also because I was trying to argue that forced pregnancy is a qualitatively different and morally reprehensible category of atrocity, similar to forms of intimate violation that are also off-limits for the state to impose on male draftees (like institutionalized rape or brain implants or invasive medical experimentation). You can squint and describe any unwanted experience as a "violation of bodily autonomy," but there's a meaningful difference. Spartan-style "all draftees owe their CO two rounds of bottoming" would never fly as official policy, even if the colonel promises he'll be gentle and make it fun.

Can I follow up, though, on this point?

order you to kill strangers, watch friends be dismembered, be shelled, step on mines, burn, drown, lose limbs, suffer brain injury, be captured, tortured, or come home with permanent psychological damage and moral injury. It also means you may be forced to participate in acts you find evil under threat of prison or execution.

On one level, I fully agree that this would be horrible to be asked to do - less the physical risk of severe injury in defense of those you love (which women should also be willing to do), but certainly the moral injury part. On the other hand, I also feel as though "Aggression and physical violence are very wrong, and harm the perpetrators as much as the victims" is a surprisingly feminist talking point? (Patriarchy Hurts Men, Too!)

If most men really find it horrific to be asked to do violence, risk injury and physically harm or kill enemies, how do we account for the fact that they voluntarily spend hours and $$$ fantasizing about this in videogames, or that Fight Club remains a middle-aged male fantasy, or that little boys find ways to make toys violent and play at injuring others? "They can't insult us like that, let's get our weapons and go fuck them up" is like the purest young man's instinct ever: in general, one of the most consistent behaviors among men everywhere, from Papua New Guinea to downtown LA to ancient Greece, is their spontaneous formation of violence gangs to do organized lethal violence on other people. As I pointed out below, the existence of war itself suggests a strong revealed preference of men to perform warfare, because these things are very expensive and it sure as hell isn't women organizing them.

So, say we accept as true your claim that for a man, being made to fight physically alongside other men, to risk injury and hurt and kill enemies is a horrifying, extreme violation, the worst thing imaginable. Then why do y'all so consistently and avidly seek out this experience? That's a genuine question, not a gotcha: I really would love a male perspective on the question.

(The parallel spontaneous instinct in many women is for taking care of small children, I guess. You could readily get approval for draconian legislation drafting women into the Baby and Toddler Minding Corps. But virtually no little girls have a parallel draw toward experiencing physical pregnancy or going into labor.)

Apparently soldiers had a 1.8% chance of being killed in WWII, 0.5% in the Vietnam War.

No, 2.7% Rather higher than maternal mortality rates, even pre-industrial.

As for the rest, how about existing for years in, well, the jungles of Vietnam? Or some godforsaken island in the Pacific? How about the whole military training process, designed to break your spirit and break down your personality so you can be rebuilt into the military mold? Unwilling emotional bond with your squadmates? Yep, that too.

And you think Band of Brothers wasn't terrible enough? The original Easy Company had almost 47% killed in action.

No, 2.7% Rather higher than maternal mortality rates, even pre-industrial.

That's a politicized-looking source, so I think it'd be worth investigating both sites' math to figure out how one is getting .5% and the other 2.7%. However, even if you accept the higher figure, built into the desired >2.1 TFR is the expectation that women will undergo multiple pregnancies. Even if per-pregnancy mortality is at the premodern standard ~1.5-2%, you'd have been looking at 5-6%+ mortality over three or more pregnancies. I'm not aware of many men having been drafted into multiple wars in succession over their lifetime.

As for the rest, how about existing for years in, well, the jungles of Vietnam? Or some godforsaken island in the Pacific? How about the whole military training process, designed to break your spirit and break down your personality so you can be rebuilt into the military mold? Unwilling emotional bond with your squadmates?

Although we should note that plenty of people are actually born in rural Vietnam and live there perforce their whole lives, still "getting drafted was no big deal" will never be a position I endorse. Nonetheless I think there's a fundamental moral difference between discomfort, threat or suffering and violation in the sense of being dehumanized and fully robbed of agency through tan extended, unnatural cancellation of your bodily or mental boundaries.

You can consider the difference for yourself by asking whether it'd be acceptable if the draft officially entailed male draftees getting raped for months by officers, or chemically brainwashed/ mind-control-chipped for life, or forced to incubate botflies and tapeworms for some military project. Perhaps none of those things would be even as uncomfortable as boot camp, but I think there would be widespread rejection of drafting for those purposes.

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Great. Let's agree on this: every one of you men go off to war every year, while every woman gets pregnant every year. Happy with the bargain?

you can't enforce any social norms on women unless you do total militarism

A chi la vittoria? A chi la morte? A chi l'Italia?

No? That would presumably lead to an absurd amount of unnecessary wars and would flip the underpopulation problem into an overpopulation problem.

Well, the flip answers on here don't seem to be based in reality, so why not throw one more stupid log on the bonfire of stupidity?

I work in a place that is 99.9% female and, surprise surprise, from time to time staff members get pregnant. There is currently one girl ("girl" from my POV, she's in her early to mid twenties) who is having her first child and she's very sick with it.

The guys on here have little to no conception (ha!) of the reality of pregnancy or the kind of physical toll it exacts. I'm not pro-contraception and I'm staunchly anti-abortion, but becoming and being pregnant is not "fulfil biological imperative" as easily as "I'm hungry, I need to eat something". There's a lot goes into creating and growing a new human being out of your own body, which never seems to be taken into consideration.

Do men who are subject to the draft have to turn up every week to a boot camp training them in case of war? Because "men = draft: women = pregnant" would be more like that in reality.

Dang it, all the guys on here carelessly proclaiming women are selfish carousel riders who should be compelled by the government weaponising social disapproval into having babies should have to undergo compulsory couvade linked to a real pregnancy (might be your spouse, a family member, or just at random out of the general population if you haven't managed to persuade some woman to throw her lot in with you). Get AI to work on how we can make that happen.

Once you, Dear Reader who suggests women should be barred from higher education and work and steered into getting married to man of parents' choice as soon as she leaves school at eighteen to be pregnant by twenty at the latest, experience the joys of pregnancy and childbirth in your own body, we'll see how enthusiastic you are about "women need to have their liberty stripped and be directed into Fulfil Biological Destiny", more than once.

Women of past generations had anything from six to thirteen children. I want you to go through eight couvades and then tell me you'll sign up for a ninth.

The guys on here have little to no conception (ha!) of the reality of pregnancy or the kind of physical toll it exacts.

I've read a lot of what other people have been writing in this thread, and I can't find anyone who's asserting that pregnancy is a walk in the park. Obviously it's extremely rough on women's bodies in a number of ways.

But we're not looking at in a vacuum though. We're comparing it to war, and saying pregnancy is clearly worse than being a frontline infantryman is where my credulity strains. My response to this comment can be cross-applied here pretty much as-is.

saying pregnancy is clearly worse than being a frontline infantryman is where my credulity strains.

My credulity is strained by "men are compulsorily enrolled for the draft, so women should be compulsorily enrolled for pregnancy".

If you're supposed to get pregnant, this is not the same thing as "well I might get called up for a war but probably not unless things get really bad". If the guys are all being frontline infantrymen in shooting wars, then yes that's equivalent (even Chesterton made the same equivalence!)

But that's not what is being presented.

Not if enough men die in the wars.

You'd have to fuck up a whole lot to manage that, I think, if you're the US. Basically do literally 1984-esque makework war (makewar) without even trying to be effective. At this point just drop the pretense and execute whatever surplus unnecessary males you think there are.

What?

It's not an overpopulation problem if enough people get killed in the wars. I mean, you've got other demographic problems them, but no longer overpopulation.

I guess? But having a bunch of people die in pointless wars would be bad in and of itself.

Depends on the opportunity cost.

Wouldn't call it "happy", but of that's what it takes, I can take one for the team.

It's worth noting there has also been the additional "end of history" meme where people seem to broadly think "wars requiring a draft" are a thing left behind in last century. Obviously there are examples like Ukraine even today, but I don't think the modal Western man realistically fears being called up by the draft board. And I'd like to think that such fear would be misplaced --- obviously the ending there is not yet written --- and it seems drones may fill a large fraction of that role going forward (see Ukraine).

In that context, specifically, "but men have the draft" seems a hard-to-win equality argument.

Drafts are not really a universal feature of history in the first place. The draft as the concept we see it as today, military service compelled by the State on penalty of death, is something that did happen but is far less common than privileges associated with service or simply fines/tax exemptions for service. A random person in history is probably far more likely to regard it as tyrannical and callous rather than legitimate and normal.

Greek city states had various levels of enforcement and tied it to political rights. Romans had a huge variation depending on the times, from entirely voluntary or even selective military service to drafts as such. And the Renaissance probably strayed furthest from mandatory service than any era, having largely mercenary armies.

For all we know we could be headed for far less compulsory militaries than ever. It all depends on state capacity, demographics and the needs of the battlespace.

There are many Western countries that have active drafts (or, like Germany, appear to be considering one). For young men in those countries, the draft is less a fear and more a certainty.

And of course, the Ukraine situation where men are marched to their deaths by the hundreds of thousands, is evidently possible. Even some risk of that should count for quite a lot.

It was very much a worry in the Cold War era. It was less of a worry during the Liberal Peace of the 90s, 2000s, and 2010s, but that was a mere few-decade aberration.

The principle is "help your country in times of need, whether you want to or not." Warfare, which is men's duty, is a perennial issue. Birthrates, which are women's duty, is probably the same.

The only reason we don’t have a draft today is because we’re able to get by on a strictly volunteer basis. But I recall in the last few years there was a real worry within the US military because recruitment drives had been massively down. Most of the enthusiastic new blood comes out of red states and the cultural shift in favor of blue policies left a lot of the youth feeling apathetic. Trump’s election a second time (or rather Kamala’s loss perhaps) was able to buck the trend a bit, and you saw recruitment spike back up.

One could also make the argument that any war requiring a mandatory draft is unjust. If the citizens are unwilling to fight for their country unless threatened with imprisonment or death, then you should allow them to surrender instead.

This feels like the male Feminist version of They Very Much Did Kill Jesus.

There's never been a draft in recorded history that wasn't opposed, protested, dodged, avoided, manipulated. People very much did bat some eyes during the Civil War in NYC, lynching some unfortunate blacks who happened to be on hand because they didn't want to fight for them. In WWI, gangster Lucky Luciano famously intentionally contracted gonorrhea to fail his draft board. Others overate to come into the exam obese, or paid off local doctors to diagnose bone spurs which kept them out of the army but didn't affect their athletic careers. Politicians sons who supported the war joined the National Guard to avoid service in Vietnam, and in more serious wars there is of course a long history of politicians and their friends landing desk jobs that mostly avoided combat while still getting a pretty uniform to pose in.

History is full of people who flee the country, change their name, desert the army, fake injuries, malinger, goldbrick to get out of military service. We can find evidence of it going back thousands of years. If they didn't, the draft wouldn't be necessary. The whole point of a draft is because sending men to die for their country, in that particular war, is not popular enough to draw volunteers.

Donc, continuing our parallel for a second, the key ingredient to convincing men and women to sacrifice their lives for your civilization is making sure your civilization has a good enough story to make it worthwhile. You aren't getting a million zoomer boys into Iran without a draft, you aren't getting millions of babies out of zoomer girls without explaining to them a positive vision of what they are having those babies for.

Agreed with your points. One point I like to expand on is the following:

Politicians sons who supported the war joined the National Guard to avoid service in Vietnam, and in more serious wars there is of course a long history of politicians and their friends landing desk jobs that mostly avoided combat while still getting a pretty uniform to pose in.

While draft dodging is the most visible part of avoiding service, probably even more common in history is manipulating exactly which job a person gets in the military to avoid the worst of combat. As an example, my granddad was actually considered unfit for service medically during WW2 but, since he knew not serving would be socially problematic post war, he became a military policeman stateside and went to dance halls with the wives of servicemen who actually risked life and limb for their country. This is also played out in propaganda since it's honestly true; while the infantryman faces the worst odds and dangers, more socially connected people generally get better postings and often get to stay behind. Even in states engaged in 'existential wars', you see this effect. Draft substitution in the Confederacy, connected people getting better positions in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

Overall, I suspect the man who actually 'does his duty' and faces maximal physical danger is a minority phenomenon; the big bulk of soldiers historically were coerced to a greater or lesser extent. I'll note in the US Civil War once people realized the war wasn't going to be short and that modern combat is very bloody, both sides immediately had to switch over to drafting people since volunteers were insufficient.

Undoubtedly people with influence manipulate the system to get their desired assignment. Some prefer to avoid danger as much as possible. But it's also not uncommon for ambitious young men to seek out roles with a degree of danger precisely because they want to be seen doing their part. Note that in the linked example, LBJ volunteered to fly as an observer on a bomber mission because he felt it was necessary to show his courage.

The British aristocracy were over-represented among the dead in WW1 and WW2 (and, as far as I am aware, in most of the 19th century wars). That is, of course, to be expected for a group that justifies its privileges by claiming to be a warrior elite. As far as I am aware, the same was true for the Germans. (The Prussian aristocracy was uncomplicatedly a real warrior elite in WW1. In WW2 the Waffen SS did more dangerous stuff than the Reichswehr, and Nazi elites' sons were more likely to be in it).

That the planter class in the Confederacy widely dodged the draft would be surprising to me, if true. They tended (as do their descendants in the red tribe elite) to see themselves as a warrior elite.

The British aristocracy were over-represented among the dead in WW1 and WW2 (and, as far as I am aware, in most of the 19th century wars). That is, of course, to be expected for a group that justifies its privileges by claiming to be a warrior elite. As far as I am aware, the same was true for the Germans. (The Prussian aristocracy was uncomplicatedly a real warrior elite in WW1. In WW2 the Waffen SS did more dangerous stuff than the Reichswehr, and Nazi elites' sons were more likely to be in it).

I've looked into this, and those are good counterexamples to the rule I posited in the above post. I suppose feudalism would be another case where the 2nd estate did most of the fighting despite being the ruling class. The early 20th century US was another example of all classes sharing a similar burden in terms of military service.

My point about more powerful people in society avoiding service, or altering their service to make it better, probably needs a bit more refinement and may be more circumstantial than universal. I do think my central point about coercion still stands though; all agrarian and industrial societies I know of relied on coercing a lot of men to do their gender roles in regards to military. People skirting those requirements is a perennial source of complaints.

That the planter class in the Confederacy widely dodged the draft would be surprising to me, if true. They tended (as do their descendants in the red tribe elite) to see themselves as a warrior elite.

They didn't really engage in illegal draft dodging; it was primarily about abusing legal ways of avoiding service, or making your service better. Substitution, being employed in an essential industry, and volunteering for a better assignment were common ways it was done. I don't know if statistically the planters were more likely to do this than the middle class or, when they were able to, the lower class, but it was a source of resentment that many Confederate men were able to skirt the draft and avoid the worst service.

Women, as a distinct sex, exist to bear children. Feminism and antinatalism are social dead ends. Let it take a few more generations or a thousand years - the societies that come out the other end of this particular bit of natural selection will have immunity to those memes.

Women, as a distinct sex, exist to bear children. Feminism and antinatalism are social dead ends. Let it take a few more generations or a thousand years - the societies that come out the other end of this particular bit of natural selection will have immunity to those memes.

I tend to agree with this, although I think it's worth noting that as the saying goes, predictions are hard, especially about the future. It's highly likely that within the next 30-50 years, one or more game-changing technologies will emerge which confound a lot of predictions which were reasonable at the time.

This seems really reductionist. The power of a nation is not so much in its population size now, so returning to a society where everyone has 5 kids has limited benefits (if any) and lots of negatives. What makes a nation powerful now is its economic engine, and that includes having women work. Obviously the current system is a failure as well, but when you say feminism is a failure, you need to remember its been a gradual change since the 1800s. Maybe the current additions are failures (I would argue so) but women joining the workforce and participating in society in at least some different ways is hard to make a rational case again.

but women joining the workforce and participating in society in at least some different ways is hard to make a rational case again.

A bit of a nitpick, but I don't think women working is necessarily feminist. Women work in the informal economy is practically every single nation in the world. The labor force participation rate for women going up is seen as a positive in the third world less in terms of 'women working is good' and more that a higher LFPR for women means more women in the formal economy, which provides a lot more protections than working in the informal economy.

Patriarchy historically tends to be more about restricting women's ability to get into certain, often high status, jobs rather than restricting their employment in general.

hard to make a rational case

There are economic benefits to keeping women out of work but they have never been robustly measured due to ethics and feasibility. Studies show that primates separated from their mother early receive lifelong mental illness and worse learning outcomes, and we are arguably in a mental illness crisis nowadays, so it’s reasonable to assume it has something to do with the eradication of the mother-child bond. Early life is important for future outcomes, and women are inherently invested in teaching their children lessons unlike Random Bureaucrat #183729, so we are impairing the learning of our whole population. There are important emotional and social lessons that only a mother can supply to her child at a young age, and a mother will supply hundreds of such lessons a day with very salient terms of reinforcement and punishment (for a child, nothing is more reinforcing than love, or punishing than alienation thereof). A child is supposed to be breastfed for 3-4 years, and this is good for their future health. Stressed women produce worse kids with worse health, and work stresses women. Because of social contagion, a peaceful and relaxed woman relaxes her husband and her kids, which means that working husbands perform better at work if their wife is relaxed at home. When women stay with their children all day it keeps them occupied and away from the computer where they might promote really bad things that destroy civilization like affirmative action. Keeping a woman at home and away from work means that everyone in the family can eat better and has clean living conditions, which affects health for the next generations.

Good luck trying to measure any of this in studies, ripping twins away from mothers and measuring the outcomes unto the third generation. Stress and poor health are exorbitantly expensive. Antisocial behavior is expensive. This comes from working moms. And if we were able to make pronatality a status symbol, then the smartest people would have the most children (as they would see it as a mark of success, and a smart choice, maybe even a problem to solve, and they could afford it). So in the 1960 cohort, the smartest men and women would have 64 grandchildren by now, instead of their meager four. Imagine 16x the number of geniuses just from the 1960 cohort, and then 65x for the generation after ours. Imagine 65x the Terence Taos or John Carmacks. This is bad for the economy!

So in the 1960 cohort, the smartest men and women would have 64 grandchildren by now, instead of their meager four. Imagine 16x the number of geniuses just from the 1960 cohort, and then 65x for the generation after ours. Imagine 65x the Terence Taos or John Carmacks. This is bad for the economy!

I don't know if this was facetious or serious, but that's obviously not how that works. IQ is inheritable, but it's not THAT inheritable (probably 30-50% IIRC) and there's also a regression to the mean every generation. So the smartest man's grandchildren will probably be pretty average assuming there isn't a cultural component being transmitted.

Good luck trying to measure any of this in studies

I mean, there are plenty of studies that measure stay at home vs working mom's children. The difference is there, but it's not huge. I think the premise that mom is better than a bureaucrat is wrong not because she isn't (obviously she is) but just that the bureaucrat doesn't have much influence on the child in the end while mom and dad always do.

Hear, hear!

I think there are basically 3 critiques, in general, of the progressive fixation with metrics and their optimization. Take, for examples, “the economy” (GDP, I guess) as you mentioned, or Scott’s recent-ish post on how crime levels are ackshully not historically anomalous.

(1) “Number Go Up, yes, but is Number all that matters?”

As the old meme goes, “Yes, the planet was destroyed, but for a brief moment in time, we created a lot of shareholder value!”

(2) “Number Go Up, but it’s No True Number”

This was the basis of the (IMHO richly deserved) dogpiling of Scott’s crime post: perhaps headline crime statistics are down on paper, but my own lying eyes can see that I used to be able to take the subway without being accosted by drug-addled lunatics; I used to be able to walk into a pharmacy, pick something off the shelf, and take it to the checkout counter without waiting for an employee to unlock a plastic cage. The cheap, convenient subway ticket forgone for an exorbitant taxi fare; the quick trip to 7-11 replaced by an expensive, slower DoorDash order—you’ll never see those costs in the NCVS data, but are they not equally costs of crime?

(3) “You are not actually optimizing your own stated Number”

You are here.

Women’s participation in the formal, wage-earning economy plausibly gets us towards a locally optimal Number, but consider the counterfactual world where, over the past several decades, highly-talented women had more children instead of working for pay. As you said, that is the world where we have 64x as many von Neumanns, Taos, and Rockefellers. I don’t even contest the definition of Number, or whether it’s all we should care about; I merely ask, mightn’t this counterfactual world easily have higher Number than ours?

Because of social contagion, a peaceful and relaxed woman relaxes her husband and her kids, which means that working husbands perform better at work if their wife is relaxed at home.

The problem is that in the 21st century, a housewife and mother of three is not going to be relaxed; she's going to be perpetually stressed and exhausted. Servants are the missing variable in these arguments. The old system presupposed that anyone middle-class or above would have at least part-time servants to do the cleaning and look after the very young (and even for the poor, to a certain extent it presumed big family clans where retired members could be put to "work" for household and childrearing stuff, though it also largely presumed that it was okay if poor women's mental health was a horror show).

But we have appliances, which drastically reduce the need for servants. We don't wash clothes by hand or, for the most part, even have to iron them. You can put food in the oven and come back to check on it until it is done(and before modern, thermostatically controlled ovens, you could not). Medieval housewives didn't just have to bake their own bread, they had to grind the grain for it, on top of making all of the household's clothes from raw fiber.

Women are relaxed around children. Female school teachers for young grades are like the most relaxed women in the world, and those aren’t even her kids and she isn’t at home. There is a biological reason for why a woman would be stressed after being severed from her child but no reason why she would be stressed being in a homemaking environment. When women want to relax they often play a simulation game of nurturing people and doing chores (Stardew, Animal Crossing, SIMs). There’s also a study showing Amish women are significantly less stressed than normal Americans, and they have eight kids. There are a lot of different compelling reasons to believe that a mother with her child is the least stressed version of woman, provided she isn’t also laboring for eight hours a day away from her kid.

Women are relaxed around children.

You don't actually have a wife and kids, do you?

When women want to relax they often play a simulation game of nurturing people and doing chores (Stardew, Animal Crossing, SIMs).

Notably, these games can be paused when you get tired of them.

Can a woman pause her work when she gets tired of it? Do you think SAHMs play “excel simulator” to relax? Preferences are revealed.

Okay, no wife, no kids. That explains a lot.

Can a woman pause her work when she gets tired of it? Do you think SAHMs play “excel simulator” to relax?

What does this have to do with anything? Did anyone make the ludicrous claim that work is relaxing?

Preferences are revealed.

Pal, I don't know if you want to go down the revealed preferences route given the revealed preferences women apparently have around marriage and number of children. Your whole argument revolves around how women would be happier if they did something other than they do - i.e. a denial of the validity of the revealed preferences.

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I see women with children from time to time and from what I recall they are relaxed less often that when alone. The child cries or acts in an annoying way and they shout at them or seem stressed.

How many of those moms are actual SAHMs, that didn’t work in the crucial months of pregnancy? Statistically, you are more likely seeing stressed women who gave birth to stressed kids, who stopped breastfeeding after six months, who had their attachment severed way too early with daycare, and who never learned a single important thing about childrearing in their adolescence. If you want to see what a SAHM family is like, travel to Lancaster or walk through Williamsburg and you will see calm unstressed women with happy children that don’t cry as much.

I think Kraut was referring to the population pyramid, not population size.

I've been trying to, in the kindest possible way, put some effort into writing a response to you in a way that makes it seem like I'm not being entirely dismissive of your arguments and thoughts, because I still to some level think you are a highly committed troll of some sort here to make the quokkas look dumber. I'm low-trust, it's my default setting.

What, on God's green earth, would make you think that people want things to be fair or consistent? This is something you want, this is something autistic people want, this is something scientists want when running experiments and even then you'd need something to act as a control. The state of the world is not fair; this is the way of the world. Nature is red in tooth and claw, the systems we build around her as superior broken apes who are above it all are designed around it and the more of us there are the more you have to design for edge cases.

Life isn't fair, and the people who benefit from that arrangement would very much like to keep it that way. Hell, it's not fair that you get to exist while thousands of people got droned to death in Ukraine, is that fair? What possible recompense, what possible thing could you, you personally, offer on the altar, that would balance the scales? And that's just one case caused by two or more countries playing at great power games. What on earth do you expect to be a plausible - forget plausible - workable and practical solution to make women die in wars the same way and in same numbers as men? Even if you enforce gender neutral conscription, they will not occupy the same roles as men, they will not perform the same and excel in the same roles, they will not be treated in combat the same as the men by any opposing enemy force by dint of the fact that sperm is cheap and ovaries are not.

The tweet you are talking about deserves no more thought. It is a whine, someone complaining that the world isn't fair, it is cope that men and women are not viewed and treated the same. And there are very, very good reasons they are not, whatever mouth noises the gender equality brigade make don't hold up to scrutiny under reality.

There is a long list of things that people refuse to do for their country of birth, let alone their country of emigre, and drafts also have significant carveouts or people fleeing the draft every time it's been attempted. Countries not at war that have mandatory military service still have issues with people going to some lengths to dodge the service. How anyone possibly thinks they will get rapturous applause for advocating women surrendering their bodily autonomy for nine months to what will become a fully sentient human being makes me worry about that person's intelligence.

Yes, life isn't fair, but it should be and so we should force it to be is the thought mode of tyrants. While I am not excusing inaction, an incomplete understanding of tradeoffs for actions and what it means to go up against people who are Winning and don't want to Lose just so a new bunch of people can Win should be properly accounted for in any model of the world.

Edit: This might be instructive. Here is a comedian talking about how he asked for consistent metrics to hit to try and score a deal. He knows if they gave him a metric, he could meet that metric and then get the deal. Rejecting him was the point, expecting the people he was dealing with to act with any sort of consistency was the problem. Any metric can and will be gamed by people who can meet it, and people know this. The goal is not to meet the metric, the goal is to do what you wanted in the first place. You're asking what color the car is, while ignoring the point that people weren't really talking about cars.

This whole post against fairness as a cardinal virtue is about how it's bad for things to be unfair.

See the bit about nature, red in tooth and claw, the ultimate copout Hobbes introduced into the world for people who enjoy the current structure to use against anyone who tries to change it.

See the bit about Tyrants trying to enforce fairness. This is another appeal to nature, to the idea that the current state of the world is preferable in some way because it is natural, and it would be what, bad? Unfair? To try to change it.

If the world was actually the way it these ideas said it was, nobody would be able to write this post about it. There would be no wringing of hands about tyrants forcing society at gunpoint to allow women the right to vote and own property, as if property and voting sprung for nature. You would instead be living in Rousseau's state of nature, a solitary wanderer in the woods.

All those appeals to the past, or the future, or nature, are also appeals to emotion specifically the feeling you get when someone switches something on you or cuts in line, appeals to the feeling you get when it kinda seems unfair.

You can't avoid it. Much like UNO came with your Xbox, fairness came packaged with your prefrontal cortex.

So what is your defense against people and their prefrontal cortexes acting on the impulse that it's fair to destroy you? Obviously you'd do something to stop or prevent this from happening.

That which should be destroyed by fairness should be?

What, on God's green earth, would make you think that people want things to be fair or consistent? This is something you want, this is something autistic people want, this is something scientists want when running experiments and even then you'd need something to act as a control. The state of the world is not fair; this is the way of the world. Nature is red in tooth and claw, the systems we build around her as superior broken apes who are above it all are designed around it and the more of us there are the more you have to design for edge cases.

What do you think laws are for?

I have to point out that "everyone is equal before the law" has largely been only a hypothesis everywhere.

If life isn’t fair, and we shouldn’t care that it’s unfair, then how can anyone criticize —

women surrendering their bodily autonomy for nine months,

as there is no longer a basis for arguing against it on moral grounds? How could you criticize the policy goal of, say, making women the property of their fathers and then husbands again, if we no longer care about unfairness? It can’t just be unfair for men because life is unfair, sorry men, as there are many cultures where it is unfair for women because life is unfair, sorry women, yet these cultures have children.

Why would I even care about criticizing the policy goal on any grounds whatsoever?

It would be secondary to what people actually wanted to do. Societies that want to make women male property can and will do it regardless of any arguments to the contrary. If they haven't done it, it's because they don't want to.

I think the correct summary is: society accepts unfairness as long as it benefits women.

Fairness being something only autistic people want is something someone came up with here but it's not really correct in the sense that only autistic people care about fairness; autistic people merely care more about mechanical rules rather than things like inclusivity or reciprocity, but people still deeply care about their notions of what their deserts should be, that they get a decent deal. The entire edifice of western thought and society is built upon some idea of (Christian) fairness. Fairness is so important to people that income inequality, etc. is the biggest topic du jour. All this stuff is about fairness. The entire idea of bodily autonomy you cite is downstream of that.

The ultimate question is, to paraphrase a book title, whose justice, whose notion of fairness? Or if we forgo fairness entirely, then what? What virtues, what values is your post-fairness society based on? It used to be Christian-adjacent virtues, but I guess now it's post-Christian "woke" virtues like racial equity (is that not fairness?) and "bodily autonomy".

A very common bias or tendency I see among ideologues of different stripes is that they implicitly carry a value system and expect everyone to abide by it and just not care about "what's in it for me". But people do care about that. You have to think about what your value system actually is, what it's based on, what are its precepts. Otherwise people will defect, your system will lose alignment, bad actors will fill the vacuum.

If we go with a value system of "nature is unfair", then we move past our corpse of Christian morality straight into "the weak suffer what they must, the strong take what they can". Which is a value system you see and which exists, like as Judge Holden articulates in Blood Meridian or more broadly a sort of law of the jungle. Or maybe you have some sort of gynocracy in mind. Or maybe you think AI will save us all. We shall see. But it's not a value system which would tend to place women's suffering or bodily autonomy very highly at all.

Things don't happen until they do. If a war happens then your value system of women's bodily autonomy being the prime concern of society might collide with weak armies and men fleeing (as they did in Syria, Ukraine, etc.) and the barbarians raping all your women (or worse, like what happened to German women after WW2). Then nature will truly assert itself. That is also a value system not based on fairness.

I guess you might just say your value system includes noble male self-sacrifice in return for nothing. Again, you might find it a bit hard to get buy-in for that.

I would go further.

The COVID case taught people nothing. Lockdowns were important, until they weren't, until they were again. Masks were useful, except they weren't, except they were and you should stop buying them so there are less shortages. And that was a pandemic.

People got frustrated about it like they expected consistency. Normies simply did what they wanted to do anyway. I lost count of the people heckling each other for not social distancing while making carveouts for their own personal visits and social parties; the only people who went reee about laws and hypocrisy like it meant anything were looking for people to blame and attack for negative consequences or genuinely expected consistent rules equally applied. If it wasn't the BLM protests, it could have just as easily been something else that everyone would suddenly decide was more important than a global pandemic.

The gigabrained insist that being able to believe two contradictory things at once is a flaw, something to be corrected, a hypocrisy. The rest don't even notice or care, at least until the negative effects hit them personally, at which point they'll simply pull a new hotpatch and run the new process on top of the old.

Fairness being something only autistic people want is something someone came up with here but it's not really correct in the sense that only autistic people care about fairness; autistic people merely care more about mechanical rules rather than things like inclusivity or reciprocity, but people still deeply care about their notions of what their deserts should be, that they get a decent deal.

I tend to agree with this. In public policy debates, we constantly hear arguments about fairness. The basic argument is either that fairness is good for it's own sake or that a fair system encourages people to put faith in the system.

In fact, it seems pretty common for fairness (explicitly or implicitly) to feature prominently in arguments about public policy. So much so, that when "don't bother me with fairness" is used to dismiss an argument about gynocentrism, patriarchy, and sex roles, to me it smacks of special pleading.

In fact, it seems pretty common for fairness (explicitly or implicitly) to feature prominently in arguments about public policy.

I think this may reflect that it's very common to convincingly appear as if one cares about fairness (even, possibly, to one's own conscious mind) in order to get advantages for oneself. It's a kayfabe that, by its very nature, must never be acknowledged or talked about, as doing so impacts how convincingly one appears to care about fairness. It's only weird autists like us on this website who either believe it or try to penetrate through the layers of deception to get at what people actually care about.

This seems backwards to me. Sure you might be right it’s laudable but if you can point out they aren’t being fair, then they either need to be fair or drop the kayfabe. Force the contradiction.

You can't, if they have the social standing, "they'll kick you and they'll beat you and they'll tell you it’s fair", and everyone will believe them.

Sure you might be right it’s laudable but if you can point out they aren’t being fair, then they either need to be fair or drop the kayfabe.

Either that, or they develop extra epicycles - and, in the long run, entire industries that generate more and more epicycles - for why all the people pointing out that they aren't being fair are actually wrong.

I think this may reflect that it's very common to convincingly appear as if one cares about fairness (even, possibly, to one's own conscious mind) in order to get advantages for oneself. It's a kayfabe that, by its very nature, must never be acknowledged or talked about, as doing so impacts how convincingly one appears to care about fairness.

I'm not sure I understand your point here.

Suppose a left-wing demagogue gets on the stage and says something like "The rich hardly pay any taxes at all while the rest of us pay through the nose!!" Alternatively, suppose a right-wing demagogue gets on the stage and says something like "Illegal immigrants have their housing and healthcare paid for by the government, while you and I must pay our own way!"

Both of these arguments are implicit appeals to fairness. And they could easily be made explicit by simply tacking on "How is that fair!?" to the end.

Moreover, these types of arguments are very common in public dialogue.

Ok, so are you saying that the people who make these arguments don't actually care about fairness, they are only pretending in order to enhance their credibility?

No, even pretending to care about fairness is a level above what I'm talking about.

In your hypothetical, a left-wing demagogue is complaining about the rich not paying taxes while the not-as-rich do. He or she might genuinely believe this. I'm not saying they're all actors. But this same demagogue will, even unconsciously, leave themselves out of the complaint, even if they themselves are one of the rich. What this person wants to do is attack the rich/gain points with their own side, the exact terms of the argument aren't important.

There are some true believers, some people who are rich and would call for higher taxes on themselves, and I'm saying those people are weird or have some consistent belief in equal laws and an equally applied moral system that makes them essentially aliens and outcasts.

There are some true believers, some people who are rich and would call for higher taxes on themselves, and I'm saying those people are weird or have some consistent belief in equal laws and an equally applied moral system that makes them essentially aliens and outcasts.

Would you be able to offer a test to distinguish between (1) an alien or outcast; and (2) everyone else (I guess you could say "normie" for lack of a better word)?

I don't know about a test, per se, but this is where I value the concept of a costly signal. Someone who is (1) will be able to (and, in practice, will do so) send a signal that they belong in (1) by engaging in an activity that benefits whatever principle they're pushing forward while it costs him something, i.e. causes him to suffer. This, too, can be faked, and so it's not a true test, but it's perhaps one piece of evidence among many that one can look at when trying to ascertain someone's categorization. E.g. a man who decides to castrate himself because he believes that the types of behaviors that testosterone tends to cause in men really are evil and toxic could likely be trusted as someone who truly believes in what feminists are saying, because castration is a very costly action that benefits this cause.

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Ok, so are you saying that the people who make these arguments don't actually care about fairness, they are only pretending in order to enhance their credibility?

Something like that. Furthermore, the voters who find these arguments convincing and decide to vote for them (or vote for the demagogues' preferred politicians or policies, etc.) are also pretending to care about fairness, possibly even to their own conscious mind, so that they can honestly, genuinely believe that they care about some sort of higher order principles beyond naked self interest.

Something like that. Furthermore, the voters who find these arguments convincing and decide to vote for them (or vote for the demagogues' preferred politicians or policies, etc.) are also pretending to care about fairness, possibly even to their own conscious mind, so that they can honestly, genuinely believe that they care about some sort of higher order principles beyond naked self interest.

Ok, I pretty much agree with that. But I think the basic point still stands: The appeal to fairness of @Nerd appears -- to me -- to be fundamentally no different from those of anyone else.

(…) pretending to care about fairness, possibly even to their own conscious mind, so that they can honestly, genuinely believe that they care about some sort of higher order principles beyond naked self interest.

But that's passing the buck. Why do they need to lie to themselves in their own minds unless they actually have a real conscience somewhere in there that recognizes fairness is better than pure selfishness, and makes them feel bad if they recognize themselves to be falling short of that ideal?

Why do they need to lie themselves in their own minds unless they actually have a real conscience somewhere in there that recognizes fairness is better than pure selfishness

This is an excellent point, and, as with all things involving subconscious motivations, I don't think there's a real rigorous way to confirm any of this. My current hypothesis is that it feels better to believe oneself to care about being fair than to believe oneself to be purely selfish which is distinct from believing that fairness is better than pure selfishness. Of course, one could argue that "feeling better when one believes oneself to be X rather than Y means that they believe that X is better than Y," but I'd posit that believing that caring about something isn't a feeling, it's an action. When one acts in naked self interest while feeling really really bad about it and internally beating themselves up in their minds about how bad they're being for not caring about fairness or performing Olympics-level mental gymnastics to believe that they're actually being fair despite the naked self interest, one is clearly caring about naked self interest and basically not at all caring about fairness.

The thing with pretense is that humans are generally terrible liars, who can't credibly pretend to anything without gradually coming to actually believe it to some degree. The people pretending to care about fairness can be casually motivated by the most brazen self-interest, but the result of all the pretending tends to be that if you then take a sufficiently powerful psychological steamroller (argumentation, rhetoric, propaganda, ritual, fancy buildings with statues of blindfolded matrons) to persuade them that forfeiting their self-interest would be fair, they by and large give up.

This is why justice and organised society works at all. Without this mechanism you just get something that looks like Somalia, and even in Somalia I gather that the tribal courts actually talk people into a lot of self-destructive ingroup altruism.

Conscripting women to die in wars is gonna be a hard sell, but I can easily imagine a western government conscripting women for the kind of non-military national service that Israel does for its Orthodox women. The young men go to learn and fight wars, while the young women go and work in hospitals and care homes. They could even frame it as feminist!

Of course, conscripting women for motherhood is gonna be tough, given that the birth rate decline is being caused by less coupling, and not by mothers having fewer children. You would also need to conscript men for fatherhood. Basically, you'd need forced marriages, organised by the state.

given that the birth rate decline is being caused by less coupling, and not by mothers having fewer children.

It's all of those, right? There's women who want children but lack partners; but there's also women who have stable partners and never end up having children anyway; and women who have children, but stop after 1/2 - either because they started to late, or because of lifestyle choices (housing/career/hobbies being in conflict with having a larger family). I suspect each of those groups to be significant. "Conscription" could help with the latter two.

Of course, conscripting women for motherhood is gonna be tough

I think there's pragmatic ways. Allow women to delay their non-military national service until they're 25, and wave it if they have children by then. Hell, do the same for men. Allow the women to drop out immediately upon reaching the second trimester while still maintaining their pay. Have the non-military national service use mandatory barracks for unmarried personell, and co-locate those with the military bases that do basic training for the conscripts. Don't actively hinder the inevitable parties to much.

Still, no way this gets you TFR > 2. That requires a pretty radical social change. I suspect making parenthood high status might be the only way.

It's all of those, right?

In the sense that most mothers or wives could always have one more child, yes. But in terms of what has changed recently, no. Mothers in America have more children today than mothers did in the 1990s. There are just fewer of them, because there are fewer young people coupling up and marrying.

Allow women to delay their non-military national service until they're 25, and wave it if they have children by then

As a 'stick' that could well work. Deferments for getting drafted to Vietnam did in fact increase fertility by driving up the number of first births. Then when Nixon removed the exemption they went down again.

and women who have children, but stop after 1/2

Didn't Israel under King Solomon have a policy like that?

given that the birth rate decline is being caused by less coupling, and not by mothers having fewer children.

I thought that was precisely what the main problem was: mothers stopping at 1-2 when they should be having 3+.

Nope. Mothers in America have more children today than they did 30 years ago. But coupling (and therefore fertility) has been falling worldwide, driving down fertility.

The gradual long-term decline in fertility from the Baby Boom until things stabilised around 2000, which was manageable in the west and only civilisation-threatening in first-world Asia, was mostly couples who would previously have 3-4 stopping at 2. It appears to be multi-causal, with child seat laws being a surprisingly large contributor (because they mean that if you want 3 kids in the burbs you need 3 child seats, and therefore a minivan). The post-2010 collapse in fertility is mostly due to less coupling, with increasingly conventional wisdom that smartphones and social media are at fault.

No, you can absolutely fit three child seats into a standard SUV.

Would free minivans to all families with 2 kids help?

I someone gave me a minivan, I would have considered a fourth child, though really getting married two years sooner would have helped more with that.

Couldn't you just... buy a minivan?

No.

If you can afford one. Yes minivans are cheaper than total childcare costs but that's not how families make budgeting decisions.

We have state funded childcare.

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Given how the used car market in the United States has lost it's goddamn mind, possibly not. But I haven't been pricing minivans as of late.

We have a small SUV that fits three carseats abreast, but had to buy it new, because the used car marked was completely absurd at the time. I haven't checked on it since, as we are still paying for the existing vehicle.

Not in the UK, because it doesn't cover the additional cost of fuelling a minivan (at £1.30 or more a litre) compared to a small family car.

Not in the US, because the problem with minivans is stigma and not cost, in a country where what you drive is the main way you express your identity and social status in public.

You just need to lower the upper age limit for mandatory child seats.

How does that particular stigma manifest?

Driving a minivan when you have kids is not stigmatized in the US, although it's lower status for dad than a pickup truck 'it's my wife's car' is a totally acceptable excuse.

The huge SUVs can fit 6 people and aren't looked down on in the US. It's like driving a truck, except there are seats instead of the truck bed.

Yes. This is the same data I have previously seen posted on Marginal Revolution, for example. Demographic implosion has been happening for decades and is continuing, but the causes have changed.

You'll have better luck drafting women for war, especially since it's rare even for men.

The more society pushes women to act like men, the more like men they will act. Much of modern society heavily encourages women to act more like men in a variety of ways. Their education should be masculine, STEM oriented, and in co-ed settings. They should wear jeans and t-shirts most of the time. They should sleep around a fair bit in their 20s, and get the same jobs as their male peers. If they do choose to give birth, they should work those same jobs that are also worked by men right up until they're having contractions, and should come back when their babies are six weeks old. This is even true of women heavy professions like teaching! They're leaving their two month old infants with strangers all day to go to work. This is not appealing! But women who take a year or two off to raise their infants are also isolated, because we have no villages in much of the West. Societies that show such distain for motherhood don't deserve babies.

I suppose we could trial a military base for new mothers, where pregnant women are assigned a cohort to bond with, do exercise and nutrition classes together, and they get a housing discount or can move to a government compound with their husbands. They and their husband and baby can move around to various places where the US has interests every few years until their babies are all old enough for school. I might have signed up for that deal.

Their education should be masculine, STEM oriented, and in co-ed settings.

That gets things entirely wrong. It's not that women have been masculinized and gone into masculine roles; it's that institutions have been feminized, offering roles that are much less competitive and much more about your social standing. Universities now are scared to grade on a curve that might imply some people perform better than others; you turn up, and you get an A. It's much more about consistency and the kind of conscientiousness that women excel at.

I'd be willing to say they've been androgenized.

The current educational system isn't particularly well suited to women, as is seen by it instilling the idea they aren't ready to have children until they're 30.

Citation needed, for such a bold sweeping claim. I have taught CS at a fairly high-tier US school for a long enough period of time, and we did not hand out As if you just "turn up". The curve was more generous than I would have liked, sure, and there were a lot of loopholes and "accommodations" and second chances; a lot of those also turned out to primarily benefit those who lacked consistency and conscientiousness, as at a "more hardcore" university you would not have gotten the allowance to strike out your lowest homework grade or have a TA dispatched to invigilate your stinky two weeks unshowered self in a separate room taking the exam two hours later than everyone else because you overslept.

You can maybe make the "feminisation" claim about school (K-12, for Americans), but even there the story seems complicated: at first glance not being smacked with a ruler if you fail to sit upright with your back straight or have crooked handwriting anymore surely makes less of a difference for the conscientious and obedient girls. I'm more on board with the "boys used to be able to engage in fistfights during recess without having the cops called, which helped them sit still later" explanation.

Citation needed, for such a bold sweeping claim. I have taught CS at a fairly high-tier US school for a long enough period of time, and we did not hand out As if you just "turn up".

Maybe not at your school, but Harvard (hardly a no-name example) currently awards something like 85% of its grades as 'A's. It's gotten bad enough that the faculty plan on capping the number of 'A' grades handed out starting next year, which has spilled a nontrivial amount of ink in arguments back and forth. Yale is also considering similar actions.

I don't think it's quite universal (it seems more an issue at top-tier schools), but it is often acknowledged as a problem.

I think that's silly. Universities should teach material, not create rat races. If too many of your students pass the material, teach harder material.

If too many of your students pass the material, teach harder material.

Well, yes, and capping the number of As seems to be the means by which one incentivizes the professors to do so. I went to a semi-elite college in the mid-00s, and grade inflation in elite colleges (we considered our college elite, even though it really was only semi-, because of course we wanted to think we were peers to the Ivies) was an actively talked-about problem back then, as something like 40%+ of all grades were As. As best as I can tell, school administrations have tried to address the problem by telling professors really really hard over the last 20 years, and it has resulted in things only getting worse. So telling professors to make their material harder such that grade inflation doesn't happen doesn't seem to have any real impact; it appears that they need actual incentives.

Now, who's to say if a professor, especially a tenured one, will face any consequences if they make their material so easy as to give out more As than the cap allows? Talk is cheap, after all. But if properly enforced, it seems significantly more likely to cause professors to teach harder material than just telling them really really hard to make their material harder.

Perhaps a cap-and-trade system like with pollutants might be better still? Not sure exactly how it would work, but a humanities professor might want to "buy" the right to give out more As from a STEM professor. Not sure what the currency would be, though, to create the right incentives.

The college system desperately needs reform, but capping As is a bad solution which can make it even worse.

I took a class where As were capped via a downward curve. If you knew the material, but made a few careless mistakes or struggled early in the semester, you’d end with a bad grade.

Another class, the material was easy, but the exams were difficult in ways that would never matter in the real world, like convoluted phrasing.

In both cases, giving everyone As would’ve better reflected their competence, and not caused unnecessary stress.

The best option is to have a class-based pass/fail, and then leave actual ‘class rank’ as a provided metric that exists solely for dean’s list stuff and a student’s own reference / pride.

If you want to put on your Goldman Sachs internship application that you were first in whatever linear algebra class, or in political science 101 out of 200 students, then you can, but it’s up to you.

Employers are free to ask for it if they want (I think for law they do this pretty often). But it’s not grade. It’s provided as a rank, 27/31 style, you can compute the percentile if you’d like.

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The university system hasn’t made it harder. In fact they’ve been actively dumbing down the curriculum. Study time haas been dropping since 1961 (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w15954/w15954.pdf) and if the share of A’s has been going up as well, those A’s are easier to earn in 2026 than in 1966.

I think the only thing that would solve the problem is to have students forced to take national exams to show competence. If you’re giving A’s to kids that don’t study, you will get caught when your school gave them A’s in science and they don’t understand very basic science like germ theory.

As best as I can tell, school administrations have tried to address the problem by telling professors really really hard over the last 20 years, and it has resulted in things only getting worse.

A friend of mine was working as a graduate TA of a freshman physics class a couple years ago at a prestige university, and they had a fairly reasonable initial grade distribution. School administrators yelled at the professor and told him he had to give more As.

Professors generally respect intellectual effort and accomplishment and want grades to reflect that. But when admins, students, parents (sigh) are all on the opposite side pushing for inflation, the easiest path is to lower standards.

The main ethical difference I can see between conscription and 'forced' childrearing is the immediacy of the consequences and the duration of the commitment.

If a nation is faced with an invading force or a war over critical resources and can't front enough manpower into the fight, they will very likely cease to exist. So the country, or perhaps the state the governs it, if it considers preservation of its people a priority, has a strong basis for forcibly recruiting men if there's insufficient volunteers. "If we don't make you fight, then we're all going to die."

By comparison, if women start abandoning or delaying the childbearing role, there's no immediate danger, you won't even feel the pinch for decades. There's no enemy that will march over you in the end. And likewise, conscripting them doesn't mean sending them to a distant battlefield to fight on a frontline. They would continue to exist in your society, living fairly normal lives for the 20+ years it takes to raise all those kids.

Plus, the Faustian bargain it presents has some upsides: more women in the workforce means more economic productivity, and more money to spend on luxuries. And hell, fold sexual revolution into the deal and you get more sex for pleasure, with fewer duties tied to it, and able to optimize the activity for things other than procreation.

By the time anyone asks "wait, who is raising the next generation to carry us into the future" you've already reconfigured your whole economy around other pursuits.

So there's a legitimate question: if the threat is not immediate, at what point are you actually justified in pressing women into service? How dire must things appear? How much foresight are you allowed to use?

And something small to consider: if some men will go to pretty serious lengths to get out of a draft, what might women do to render themselves ineligible as brood mares?

The main ethical difference I can see between conscription and 'forced' childrearing is the immediacy of the consequences and the duration of the commitment.

If a nation is faced with an invading force or a war over critical resources and can't front enough manpower into the fight, they will very likely cease to exist. So the country, or perhaps the state the governs it, if it considers preservation of its people a priority, has a strong basis for forcibly recruiting men if there's insufficient volunteers. "If we don't make you fight, then we're all going to die."

So there's a legitimate question: if the threat is not immediate, at what point are you actually justified in pressing women into service? How dire must things appear? How much foresight are you allowed to use?

There are many countries that have conscription during peacetime, with varying levels of invasion threat. The difference you refer to doesn't actually exist.

Yes there's mandatory military service in a number of countries, some of whom haven't been to war in a long time.

But I note that "service during peacetime", BY DEFINITION, has far lower risk of death, so the costs/consequences are much less severe for the males involved anyway.

Far lower risk of death than what? Especially considering that peacetime may turn into war quite suddenly.

Nevertheless, my point against your original argument stands. Conscription doesn't require immediate threat, so why should childbearing service?

I mean, you just said it. "Peacetime may turn into war quite suddenly."

You don't know precisely when you might need your standing army. So the threat is also uncertain, but when it arrives, it is immediate.

I can't easily imagine a scenario where there's some clear and present need to start pumping out kids to deal with population shortfall. Its always going to be some abstract risk in the future... there's no enemy that can choose to attack at any time that you're hedging against.

Its specifically this factor that makes the problem pernicious.

Note, I'm not ethically in favor of conscription, either.

So there's a legitimate question: if the threat is not immediate, at what point are you actually justified in pressing women into service? How dire must things appear? How much foresight are you allowed to use?

As I pointed out with my comment, there's also a big question of convincing people the threat even exists to begin with. Right now more Americans believe the opposite is true and that overpopulation is a larger threat than low birth rates. Large amounts of people fundamentally believe in a limited amount of wealth and resources in society and that having more people just cuts into their own share. Even conservatives (who are more sided towards birth rates being an issue but still 40% believe in overpopulation more) do it when they complain about immigrants "taking jobs", so I'm pretty sure this divide is just because birth rates has become memetic among parts of the online right and not reflecting a deeper view about growing the pie.

Meaning even if you convince society to press women into some sort of top down birthing related authoritarianism, it's likely going to be getting them into having even less kids.

"Even conservatives (who are more sided towards birth rates being an issue but still 40% believe in overpopulation more) do it when they complain about immigrants "taking jobs""

This seems very obviously false. Do you actually believe this? That conservatives who complain about immigrants taking jobs are concerned about sharing a fixed pie with more people rather than with immigrants who will do jobs for less money forcing the price of labour down. I'm far from a conservative, but I've heard the second plenty (from people on both sides) and never, even once, heard the first.

That conservatives who complain about immigrants taking jobs are concerned about sharing a fixed pie with more people rather than with immigrants who will do jobs for less money forcing the price of labour down.

Those are literally the same thing. If you believe immigrants working jobs will drive down prices like that then you believe the pie share of pay shrinks faster than the pie size grows when you add more people in. And this of course also is accompanied with the belief that the pie share shrinking on the employee end doesn't have a positive impact on the emplouee and consumer ends whose pie would grow from paying lower prices. Now the former can be true of specific industries if immigrants are more likely to work those but the corollary to that is that there are industries they're less likely to work in so society wise it should balance out unless you generally don't think the overall society pie scales to match additional labor.

Which of course is also another part of how nativism thinks the exact same way as the unionists where they don't understand, or just don't care, that rent seeking from workers has a negative impact on everyone else in the country. Although saying they "think the same way" is improper, greedy unionists and nativists are often the same exact group to begin with!

OK, as I explained to the other commenter, I think you're wrong, but I understand why you think they're the same. On first reading it seemed like you must have missed a sentence.

That conservatives who complain about immigrants taking jobs are concerned about sharing a fixed pie with more people rather than with immigrants who will do jobs for less money forcing the price of labour down.

office-theyre-the-same-picture.jpg

The price of labor will be forced down if the pie is fixed. If the pie is growing and immigrants are adding more jobs as well as more goods and services, it means that wages throughout the economy offer more buying power.

They're really not the same.

We have zero sum and non-zero sum relationships with everyone. Simplifying from a nation to a single company as an example:

Everyone from the owner down to janitor have a shared stake in the company staying solvent, but there are non zero sum relationships too. The owner would like to pay the janitor the smallest amount that still gets his floors cleaned and toilets unblocked. Part of the janitor's bargaining power is that while he won't work for a peanut, no one else will either. If the owner can pull some strings and get access to a bunch of workers who will work for a peanut then the janitor had better either accept the peanut or be out off a job. They are aligned in some ways, but not in others. This is true no matter how much value the new cheap workers add to the company or how much of the savings could potentially be passed on to the consumer.

If we dismiss the janitor's complaints as a dumb yokel failing to understand that immigrants are adding to the economy and increasing his buying power, we're the ones not understanding the whole picture.

Forcibly draft men to die for their country and no one bats an eye

I love these types of complaints so much because I can't tell if they just exist in a bubble or are being purposely stupid. Tons of people oppose drafting on a moral basis and whenever it gets done, even in immediately existential circumstances like literally defending your country from the approaching Russian hordes who are coming right now, right this moment with no time to ignore, there's still constant pushback and struggles in implementing it.

Like it's so filled with controversy that it's the literal first line on Wikipedia

Mobilization to the Armed Forces of Ukraine to combat the Russian invasion of Ukraine has resulted in military, political, and public controversies in the country.

The way I see it, there are a couple of plausible solutions to make things for fair or consistent(any additional ones are welcome):

Solution 3: They're obviously just different things and it's not a double standard to begin with so the idea of a "solution" for fairness doesn't make sense.

"The Russians are coming right now to destroy our country" is an obvious immediate direct threat. If we don't fight right now, it's over as a nation.

Meanwhile "in the next few generations we'll have the same population we did a few decades ago" both isn't obvious or immediate, and to many people isn't even seen as a threat. Tons of citizens would look at that as a good thing, they think that more people = more pie being divided up = smaller piece for them and don't grasp the concept that larger populations tend to grow the pie faster than the share of pie shrinks. If you employ the logic for high skill immigrants, then you should be able to easily understand their view point when it comes to having more youth!

Concerns about overpopulation isn't just common, it's the more believed view for the US itself and the large majority of belief when applied to the world for Americans.

This is true when Americans are asked about the U.S.: 47% say overpopulation in the U.S. is a very or somewhat serious problem and 41% say low birth rates are. And it's especially true when Americans are asked about the world as a whole: 62% say overpopulation is a big problem globally and 37% say low birth rates are.

And weirdly enough, their logic is looking to actually become true in the near future if AGI and full automation actually happens. Each new person really does just become someone else to share the robots with in that scenario. Why would you ever want to encourage the population to grow if that just means you have to share more?

And weirdly enough, their logic is looking to actually become true in the near future if AGI and full automation actually happens. Each new person really does just become someone else to share the robots with in that scenario. Why would you ever want to encourage the population to grow if that just means you have to share more?

Would having to share even be relevant at that point? You could probably produce enough resources to satisfy pretty much everyone. We already produce enough food to solve world hunger several times over. The pie isn't some limited resource.

"The Russians are coming right now to destroy our country" is an obvious immediate direct threat. If we don't fight right now, it's over as a nation.

Meanwhile "in the next few generations we'll have the same population we did a few decades ago" both isn't obvious or immediate, and to many people isn't even seen as a threat.

Those individuals are wrong in my eyes. South Korea is on track to lose 85% of its population. This is pretty catastrophic, and has negative implications going forward primarily with civilizational downscaling like @professorgerm & @gattsuru has explained. And there isn't much reason to believe that not gonna keep going down the toilet.

For an analogy, here is how i see this. The draft is like getting a seizure, birth rates are like a being obese & eating unhealthy. Obviously, you need to treat a seizure right then there to save the person. But being obese, even if it doesn't end you immediately, is still something you ought to curve because obesity will catch up to you eventually.

But even besides the negative consequences, its just a net bad to see humans and families dwindle, in the same way many mourn and are sad about extinct animals.

Tons of citizens would look at that as a good thing, they think that more people = more pie being divided up = smaller piece for them and don't grasp the concept that larger populations tend to grow the pie faster than the share of pie shrinks.

Also they might be correct in that line of thinking. Several of the pies in our lives are of fixed sizes, like the nature and natural resources pies. Other pies are very slow to grow like housing supply.

Mmm, pie.

Solution 3: They're obviously just different things and it's not a double standard to begin with so the idea of a "solution" for fairness doesn't make sense.

It's obviously a double standard: Conscription affects men, there no corresponding duty for women, despite equality under the law being considered very important in other circumstances.

Conscription for everyone or no one would be trivial examples of a fair solution, the status quo isn't fair.

It's obviously a double standard: Conscription affects men, there no corresponding duty for women, despite equality under the law being considered very important in other circumstances.

Congrats, you've recreated the mainstream liberal feminist stance on it. The "women should register" crowd is one branch, and the "no draft should exist to begin with" crowd is another pretty loud. Here's the ACLU as well if you question it being mainstream. They've sued over the gendered draft on several occasions.

Funny enough this was debated even back when the equal rights amendment was being seriously considered, with opponents to the ERA saying that ending sex discrimination could one day lead to women in the military and the draft. One of the reasons it has stayed as just a proposal.

So, that's in a country that doesn't actually have active conscription now or anytime soon, so the stakes are low. In countries where conscription is active (or likely to become so in the near future), like Germany, Austria or Switzerland, there's a lot of feminist-rhetoric opposition to draft equality.

there's still constant pushback and struggles in implementing it.

And yet it's still implemented, eagerly and enforced by state violence against men by governments who are typically hyper-sensitive to the barest hint of coercion. Natural state of the world, I guess. While "birth conscription" is so far outside the Overton window that I can't say I've ever heard it seriously argued for. Scoffing loudly at the idea of something being a double standard doesn't make it not a double standard.

what a modified variation of feminine roles/obilgations would look like

It looks what we were doing before the mid 20th century. Young women are handed specific literature and media at a young age which makes them want to be mothers. In school, they take classes to help them to be mothers. They are told to behave in a way which is conducive to being mothers (meek, sensitive, humble, loving, &tc), and if they stray from that they are shamed. As they get older, they are looked down upon for not settling down. They are shown anti-spinster propaganda in female media. There were many Victorian guides for women penned, filled with pronatal propaganda. Women are sensitive to shame and so you don’t actually have to do a draft, you just have to successfully moralize natality. But that’s also a big difficulty, with all of our secular cultural institutions captured.

I think realistically though, we are probably gonna have take a hard examination at the female end of the social contract at some-point, when birth rates and their implications become more severe and un-ignorable. Maybe we get lucky technology bails us out, but fundementally, I find the prospect of a society with no children, no families, etc, to be deeply dystopian.

It's even worse than that, because we're at the stage of decline where a large chunk of sub-replacement fertility women are past childbearing age. Further, pretty much every traditional culture from the dawn of civilisation mandates that the elderly be respected, which, in the presence of modern pension schemes, just translates to "let others waste their life on kids that will have to support you anyway even though you're not related to them." Back in ye olden days, when all these norms were developed, they were more sustainable partly because the population pyramid was actually shaped like a pyramid in the first place, but also because in the absence of modern medical care, the elderly are quite cheap to care for: you just feed them a small amount of food each day until they die, and that's that. There was no way to blow the family inheritance on treatments to keep grandma alive for another 2 years, and certainly no state-mandated financial shenanigans to make this happen at scale even for grandmas that don't have grandkids.

Realistically, nothing will happen because our civilisation is not adapted to be able to address these questions and would rather end itself than do so.

I think realistically though, we are probably gonna have take a hard examination at the female end of the social contract at some-point, when birth rates and their implications become more severe and un-ignorable.

Will the implications ever become unignorable?

I'm actually a bit confused by a lot of the right wing concern about birth rates. The people who choose to have kids in the current environment have some combination of genes (personality traits, etc.) and memes that lead to them being more successful at reproducing.

If we do absolutely nothing, the whole problem will sort itself out, because each generation will have a higher share of the reproduction-in-industrialized-information-age genes and memes, and the less fit people with inferior genes and memes that don't lead to reproduction will die out. Why would we even want to dysgenically keep around genes that aren't well suited to reproduction in the current environment?

the whole problem will sort itself out

I've heard this sentiment before, and the central problem with it is that the time frame is ludicrous. Evolution can work quickly, but it needs at least a few generations in order to spread reproduction-conductive-genes throughout the population. Before our reproductive behaviour is done sorting itself out we'll already have a demographic collapse on our hands destabilizing enough to rock the foundations of every modern Western and Far Eastern state (not Africa, mind, which is rapidly making even the worst fears of overpopulation seem optimistic).

Now I can only speak for myself, but I quite like those states – I think they're the best, actually, and it'd be a shame to see them go.

A lot of people are not merely invested in humanity continuing to exist but in society as it exists now, or something close to it or better, to also continue forth. If you make it so only welfare-dependent religious nuts and low impulse control criminals get to reproduce you will get a society of low impulse control criminals after they have done away with all the meek welfare-dependent religious nuts.

You do have to be invested in a better future, though, or at least a not-so-bad future. If you don't have children yourself and you don't care that it will all go to shit after you're not around anymore then, yes, who cares.

In particular, the highest-fertility subpopulations in the west right now are the Amish and Haredim, neither of whom are able to sustain technological civilisation. The post-2010 social media driven fertility drop has pushed Mormons below replacement level, leaving Modern Orthodox Jews the only ethnic group with both above-replacement fertility and calculus.

Because we have agency in shaping that environment to a significant extent, and we can steer it towards (expected) outcomes that align with our values and preferences. Are you similarly confused about eco-conscious people who say we should e.g. try to consume less oil? Like, what's the big deal here, once the oil runs out or the Earth becomes uninhabitable the industrial economy causing this in the first place will collapse, so all's well, it's just selection at work, right? No, obviously most people would prefer that we could somehow alter conditions such that we aren't slaves to a selection process that will consume a lot of things that we value pretty strongly.

The danger is pension schemes result in a siphoning of scarce youth labour to subsidise the abundant elderly, rendering it even more difficult for the young generation to reproduce.

I think these cascading effects are very dangerous. People just assume the situation will sort itself out, but it can just… not. Civilisations and species can just be wiped off the face of the earth forever. It happens all the time.

siphoning of scarce youth labour to subsidise the abundant elderly,

This seems like the start of an argument to means test Social Security, which has historically been a very unpopular argument. But it may be one that has to be made, absent Fully Automated Gay Space Communism happening within my lifetime.

Yeah, the social security situation is bad because there is an implicit promise there that doesn't hold up: that the value of labour in boomers' time is equivalent (or close enough) to the value of labour in #currentyear. This assumption is broken because in grandpa's time, labour was cheap, because there was a better ratio of dependents to productive people. So the idea that "boomers paid into social security, therefore they should be able to take out what they put in" doesn't really hold to the extent a naive appeal to fairness would imply.

It will sort itself out, eventually. But for a period of a couple decades, things will be really rough. Since I'll be living and retired for those decades (and my kids will live through it!), I'm very concerned. Best case scenario, we take the iceberg approach to the elderly for the interregnum; worst case, we tax the kids to take the large majority of their income so the elderly can have a dedicated ass wiper.

That choice is kind of baked in at this point (unless AI saves us all), but maybe we can make it a bit less painful.

I'll make the non-standard argument that a lot of non-reproducing genes are good for other values, but that's probably just my own preferences.

The intermediate problem is that many of the environmental constraints here are less 'meme' or 'environment' and more result of TFR-buzzsaw policies. Whether they're intentional or not, they're probably not going to be as stable as human genetic code, and there's a non-zero chance they're going to just focus on the next least-desirable group.

The more serious problem is that modern industrial society doesn't scale down to one person, or ten thousand people, or a million, and I wouldn't want to bet too hard on a half-billion. Even assuming that the TFR-buzzaw ends somewhere, it might not stop at a point where we can still do things like 'build integrated circuits' or 'get to space' -- and if we fall below 'produce and refine fertilizer', you get some bad problems that might shove you down the path further. That's not a likely problem, but it's the sort of problem that comes up all at once.

"Minimum viable industrial society" is a very interesting question. What don't you think could scale down to that level?

Sorry, tangent, but this is really fascinating to me.

Semiconductors are the standard example. You can build a transistor in a cave with a box of scraps, but it's going to be pretty limited, and it's going to depend on material you can't just scrounge up in a random field somewhere. The actual production we do today involves collecting materials from 30+ sites around the globe, refining them with a few dozen different chemical processes each with their own feedstocks, and then brought through several layers of actual manufacturing of tools until eventually you get the final output.

Each individual step could theoretically scale down (though you'd have trouble trying to send One Dude or even Ten Dudes to run the extremely complex mine in the middle of nowhere, if only for 'and then they went stir crazy' problems. But there's still a ton of steps, they require drastically different areas of expertise, and in some cases they're just geographically separate. You don't just need a rare earths industry and quartz mining and a power plant and a metalworking field. You don't even just need the chemical feedstocks and mining tool production system and oil refining and tool development. You need all of them and hundreds more besides, and it's recursive.

Worse, the costs and initial creation are extreme, only made up because the unit price is low. If it takes 600 people to design, test, and implement a new generation of x86 processors, that's a low-end estimate of 120m investment in just personnel development costs -- great if you can amortorize it over 500m chips; terrible if there's only 1m users. Some stuff that might be possible might not be viable. Others get friction just because the level of demand changes: in our world, there's several people who have full-time jobs making nothing but M3x10 standard screws, phillips-head. Boring, but good work if you can get it. In a world of a 100 people, there's one guy who has to make every single necessary screw, and he's making up 1% of your workforce rather than 0.000000001% of your population even assuming he still has all the automation because he has to keep up with it and swap things out.

There are technical solutions or psuedo-solutions to some of these matters, but many of them have their own minimum threshold: if you want AI-powered robots, you need the semiconductor industry and TSMC and a whole industry of brushless motors and servos and yada; if you want to use genetic engineering to bypass some of the pharmaceutical industry's issues, you need a lot of infrastructure built toward that. ABS injection molding can be modeled as a tool for letting a small number of workers make a truly astronomical number of output parts, but requires its own (admittedly relatively small) industrial base... and it's also one that only make sense for unit sizes over 10k, because if you just need five of a thing, it takes more time to produce with ABS injection than it would to vacuum form, urethane cast, or cut with a CNC.

Some of these technical solutions are, in turn, their own problems in a 'minimum viable society' question. We take it a given the only 2-3% of society needs to work on farms in order to produce adequate food, but that's downstream of mechanization and automation, geographically distributed crop production, bulk-scale automated storage, so on. You don't need GPS to run tractors, but you probably do need GPS or RTK-likes ground-only solutions to run semi-automated tractors. You don't need exact rubbers or metal formulations, but you do need pretty exacting ones to make the modern super-sized tractors. You probably do need chemical fertilizers and widely-available forced-water hydration, which isn't a big ask but still takes somebody building it.

I'm not committed to the 500m number, or to any number. There's a real bad habit of people looking at the past to just assume that the western workforce of a time was necessary to produce that time, and that's clearly not true.

But I'm very skeptical that it's so not true that 'set up an isolated society on a convenient island' is possible without a continent, without massive compromises or drastic changes to quality of life.

If it takes 600 people to design, test, and implement a new generation of x86 processors, that's a low-end estimate of 120m investment in just personnel development costs -- great if you can amortorize it over 500m chips; terrible if there's only 1m users.

But why would you need to do this?

A modern industrial society arguably needs the ability to make microchips. Today we have a big race to the top to design and make newer and better microchips to make more powerful phones and better missile guidance systems, but does our hypothetical MVIS need the best microchips or the best phones or the best cruise missiles to be considered truly industrial?

It seems to me a society that was planning for, say, a Mars colonization, or a Pacific Island post-apocalyptic nation-state, would aim for the lower-hanging 80% capability 20% effort tools. If cell phone technology has to go back to what it was in 2006, are we saying they aren't really industrial?

I'm open to that argument! It just doesn't seem self-evident to me.

Worse, the costs and initial creation are extreme, only made up because the unit price is low.

I think a lot of the problems with things like "unit prices" and "production lines" are ~solved with additive manufacturing though, yeah? We don't use additive manufacturing to do everything today because

  • inertia, and
  • lots of times it is not the cheapest and fastest way to do things at scale

But if you aren't doing things at scale, your economy would collapse from "blender factory, toaster factory, microwave factory" to "home appliance fab" and the economy of scale (or lack thereof) would make those things much more expensive.

Similarly, there are entire swaths of jobs and industries we can cut and still be industrial. Nobody really needs 200 different kinds of fruits and nuts; if you've scaled down to a million people and you're really on your own, you likely don't need commercial trains, cars, and aircraft, or at least not at the scale we do today; either you have a somewhat dispersed population with cars or a close-knit population with subway.

And if you're inheriting our current tech and knowledge stack, there are large parts of the workforce you can probably eliminate. You'll never need people employed as entertainers ever again - that's not to say that your economy wouldn't support it (it might) but our efficient industrial economy allows for a lot of "slack" that we can take up in our scenario.

A massive amount of our population is involved in K-12 education, and frankly we can probably dispense with most of that, too. If we were in an oil rich part of the world, we could run our entire society off of oil and ignore the entire supply chain needed for solar/nuclear/etc. - we'd need maybe 20 million barrels annually? We can do that with 2 or 3 good offshore rigs.

We take it a given the only 2-3% of society needs to work on farms in order to produce adequate food

We can probably do it more efficiently with a smaller society, because our supply chain is plausibly smaller. If we're okay with eating POTATOES, we can have, what, 100 farmers feed a million people? (100 farmers x 1000 acres x 30,000 pounds of potatoes per acre = >8 pounds of potatoes per day). That's overly efficient, we're targeting 5 pounds per day, so some of those people can work on something else to make life interesting. People can hunt or fish for meat, and raise herb gardens.

But I'm very skeptical that it's so not true that 'set up an isolated society on a convenient island' is possible without a continent, without massive compromises or drastic changes to quality of life.

This I do tend to agree with. It would be a much poorer society! And I do think it would be extremely hard to get off the ground and rebuild an industrial society with just a million or 500 million people. But if we're talking about an attempt at an intentionally bootstrapped self-sufficiency scenario, I suspect the number could be lower than 500 million. Perhaps we're thinking of very different scenarios, though!

Consider the sheer volume of people you need to create, say, a viable rocket to reach the moon and return. Several different kinds of engineer to create the circuits and fuel and engine and craft, right? Support staff. Miners to mine coal and ore, refiners and smelters to make steel for parts and silicon for chips, drillers for oil and refiners for the fuel, construction workers to build their homes and the launch pads and everything else, farmers to grow food to feed all the miners/drillers/refiners/construction workers/support staff/engineers. Doctors to care for all of the above. Et cetera- what about entertainment? Other desires? Is reaching the moon the sole telos of this civilization, and every job aimed at that goal? If not, the scale balloons as people take other jobs towards other goals. And I've left off huge numbers of other factors and 'needs.' Some could be left out or leapfrogged, but not easily.

An industrial civilization is a massive pyramid. One can imagine an ideal civilization perfectly following a tech tree with no deviations and no waste at a smaller population number, but one can imagine six impossible things before breakfast.

There's some Greater Variability there too. Written language only developed independently a few times, so think of Sequoyah- once the idea was demonstrated he sat down and spent years developing the Cherokee syllabary. He had the ability to create written language, but not the spark. In the thousand years before him, how many of his people had the ability and not the spark, and how many lacked even the ability? A bigger population gives you more rolls of the dice to generate people who even have the possibility of doing new things.

Or look at the Congo and Empire of Dust. Or Google Maps of certain parts of Johannesburg 10 years ago versus today. Or Detroit, 1950 versus today (though in some ways it's recovered from rock bottom). Without the right kind of support, the right sort of culture, an industrial civilization decays quite rapidly, and maintaining that requires a lot of people.

Consider the sheer volume of people you need to create, say, a viable rocket to reach the moon and return

I am not sure that a society that can't do "moon mining" isn't an industrial society (...is Earth not industrialized today?) but I am not convinced doing that needs a large amount of people, either. Your minimum viable orbital rocket company (RocketLab) has less than 3,000 employees, a third of a percent of a million-person society. My assumption is that expertise is relatively resource-cheap - after a certain small point, more people are mostly doing things faster, not qualitatively differently.

As regards the supply chain: chip fabs don't need to be big, Polar Semiconductor is operating with staff in the hundreds (likely). Smallest viable mining, farming, and construction operation is a single guy, so that scales very efficiently. USA Rare Earth has less than 200 employees, so it's possible to do refining at a very small level. Doctors are not a high-density need, and neither is entertainment.

One can imagine an ideal civilization perfectly following a tech tree with no deviations and no waste at a smaller population number, but one can imagine six impossible things before breakfast.

I probably should have stipulated that I wasn't imagining a society built from the neolithic on up from scratch, although that's interesting too. More like "how few people could we export to a remote Pacific Island and have them run a vertically integrated industrial society." I think all of your concerns about "how would we produce an Einstein on a seven-digit population" are all worthy objections, but I am more interested in "now that we have Einstein and all the other guys, how far could we slide without losing that."

Realistically, I think the answer varies tremendously based on the population's demographic pyramid. But with a healthy or at least not inverted population pyramid I am not convinced the number is very large.

I am not sure that a society that can't do "moon mining" isn't an industrial society

I was building off Gattsuru's example with chips and rockets; Industrial Revolution era England is the eponymous industrial society with much lower requirements than a modern industrial society.

I am more interested in "now that we have Einstein and all the other guys, how far could we slide without losing that."

Maintenance is quite hard and some forms of knowledge are easier to lose than others. See again, the Congo and Empire of Dust. At the higher scale than that, high-quality machining is apparently quite difficult to automate and a form of knowledge that's easy to lose.

Precise details and Fermi estimates will depend on exactly what technologies you want the minimum viable industrial society to have, of course.

If we do absolutely nothing, the whole problem will sort itself out

You should not expect that we will do absolutely nothing, though, you should expect that we will continue to progressively structure society around the needs of the elderly as they age because a democratic society with an inverted population pyramid is a society where the elderly have the advantage of both wealth and rank and numbers. And so it will be that the children of the people who are having kids will be forced to support not only their parents but also the people who had no kids in their dotage as well. In so doing we will discourage the birth of further children, as those in their prime childbearing years are laden by heavier and heavier financial burdens to care for the needs of the aged, which increasingly will be thrown back on society as the generations that had children give way to generations that have no natural support in their old age.

I mean, generally speaking a child is an 18 year commitment (and socially this is not usually passed on to fathers); the most we asked from any drafted Vietnam soldier was what, a 13 month tour? Sure, WW2 if you were unlucky it was maybe 4 years at most, WWI was only like a year, and the Civil War was a 3 year commitment (which ended early). This is not a fair comparison at all and I cannot really get past that so I don't understand what use the rest of the conversation is. They also all involved a pretty serious national or international emergency.

the most we asked from any drafted Vietnam soldier was what, a 13 month tour?

If you die it's forever. You can use this to do a qualia calculation by pulling coefficients out of your ass as it's customary for this type of exercise.

Civil War was a 3 year commitment (which ended early)

The Civil War went from 1861 to 1865, 4 years by my math, so I don't see how that statement works. It was also the deadliest war in American history which I feel like might be relevant, but I am more concerned with how you came to this statement. Are you just thinking about those drafted in 1863 and ignoring the earlier soldiers?

A quick google was the source for the draft of 1863 yes, which was 3 years or the end of the war (whichever was first), which is obviously the right comparison because we're talking about a draft in the context of forcing men to do things against their will.

If you were a soldier in the North who signed up prior to the draft, it was highly dependent on when. Famously the first wave of volunteers only signed up for 90 days. And yes, many of them went home right after Bull Run when that expired and it became clear this might be bloody (which was a big issue). Pretty soon you could enlist for 3 years, standardized - which meant yes, you were stuck for 3 years (unless discharged) unless you were an officer who could technically resign a commission since you were not "enlisted" in the traditional sense. Still, this was a voluntary enlistment, not a draft, and "you can't leave the military once you join, at least for a while" is pretty normal historically, so I'm not ignoring them, they just aren't relevant to the point being made. Even then, it's notable that the enlistment duration was identical to the draft. If you signed up in 1861 and survived, you could go home in 1864, full stop (although of course, the army offered bounties and bonuses if you voluntarily re-enlisted). Sharp observers might notice that the draft was a thing right as the war was clearly ongoing for a while more and when the initial wave of 3-year enlistments running out would begin to be a concern - thus, a need for more men and obviously volunteers were largely tapped out by then.

The simple fact remains that the only post-WW2 era draft lasted 13 months which is orders of magnitude different from 18 years. Both are arguably full-time jobs.

There is the risk of death that you're leaving out. IIRC for a conscriptee to Vietnam it was around 1 in 40; the risk for women dying of pregnancy related complications is at least an order of magnitude lower, so in terms of QALYs, military conscription probably outweighs it.

That said, we will never conscript again, so conscription seems like a kind of fake issue to me: if it were abolished tomorrow, pretty much no one complaining about male gender roles would change their tune, because it's not really a primary or even secondary issue motivating people in their day-to-day lives.

Google suggests that <10% of American men served in Vietnam, of whom about 25% were drafted, whereas even now about 80% of women are having children. Apparently 10% - 15% of couples have fertility issues, though some of that might be age related. The easiest win is probably to re-normalize families with 3 - 4 kids.

The easiest win is probably to re-normalize families with 3 - 4 kids.

Nobody wants to lower the cost of that. Not just child seats as suggested above, but all the non-delegable (or extremely costly to delegate) labor that attitudes of child safety and enrichment has brought upon us. You can't just wish the K-selection spiral away.

Meh, I kinda see what you’re saying. But going to war and fighting is probably a lot worse morally and on the psyche compared to raising a child.

Yes but I think it's also pretty compelling to say that having a child has a larger overall impact on your life than going to war (assuming you survive). The unlucky, if you'll forgive me for being blunt, get lifelong PTSD, but the median soldier is able to readjust and have a normal life, whatever that means. Vets aren't usually defined by being veterans, but parents often are. Having a child is a fundamental and ongoing reshuffling of priorities, has a major and durable impact on finances and lifestyle, sense of self-identity, and more. This point is obviously abused by pro-choice people, but they aren't wrong exactly, assuming no adoption option.

Going to war against your children is even worse. Parents would do well to learn that the young generation always wins because the old generation dies. If you’re determined to go to war with your kids, don’t be surprised when they view you as the enemy if you’ve spent years hard at working achieving precisely that. Personally I love the idea of parenting. Yes it’s work but to me it’s also extremely fun. I’ve spent a good chunk of my life practically raising several people I know, being a positive force and influence in their lives, etc. I would love nothing more than that ideal.

I mean, generally speaking a child is an 18 year commitment (and socially this is not usually passed on to fathers)

We could do a Spartan-style thing, and only have women "drafted" for the duration of their pregnancy with the ability to give up the child for adoption, with the children being raised communally.

That said, I really don't think any of that is necessary one way or the other.

A few glaring problems. Who is the lucky man to fertilize the drafted uterus? We have organ transplants already going to the wealthy, expect the same type of corruption with drafted women.

Suppose the birth mother decides to keep and raise the child herself. We just reinvented the welfare single mother, with more steps. Because we're obviously not going to take away a baby from an unwilling mother to be raised communally.

Who is the lucky man to fertilize the drafted uterus

If it's a communal rearing then to defuse any specific parent bias a group of men should be 'drafted' at the same time.

I know this is a bit more off-topic, but it's been extremely hilarious to see various right-wing communities essentially suggest or re-invent the American left-wing commune (that actually has a very rich and deep history that doesn't even have much to do with communism exactly) from first principles. It's uncanny. Understandable, but still uncanny. I guess in some sense communitarian counterculture homesteading has intrinsic human appeal, but in another sense they don't spring up out of nowhere and so their presence I think usually says something about moral and socio-political climates, beyond just "horseshoe theory is correct".

If by “commune” you mean some bizarre, 1960’s hippy nudist colony up in Humboldt County somewhere, there’s no one on the right that I know that’s pushing that. Our lot has always been tightly community focused and proselytizing you could say. That’s why “organicism” and “primordialism” have always been two major themes in so much right-wing political thought and sociology, over a collection of “abstract rights.”

I specifically invoked the rich American history of pre-60s communes on purpose, so it's a bit entertaining to me that you seized on hippie nudist communes anyways. These communes don't always follow a neat left-right divide on that longer timescale. For example, I'm Mormon - early Mormon communities went through at least two separate phases of highly communitarian living in the 1830s and 1860s and also didn't neatly fall into a nice grouping (and obviously religion itself if not consistently right vs left coded historically). Again not all of them are going to be explicitly "we have common property" but developing a tight-knit smaller community that rejects popular standards in various ways inherently requires a high degree of local coordination that is often extremely similar. "Communitarianism" doesn't actually require common property.

For example right now there are a few strains of various types of this "commune" type thought:

  • You have eco-crazies, who try and find carbon neutral or negative ways to live in harmony with the land and sustainability

  • You have a strain of modern liberals who want to set up the kinds of super-walkable, livable utopic urban centers, some of which promote "cohousing" and might pool childcare, meals, tools, greenspace, etc.

  • You have a few offshoots of various Christian hospitality houses, halfway houses, charities, etc. which can in some cases form loose communitarian associations

  • You have deliberately "trad" Christian and other non-religious conservative communities that pool homeschooling, might generate a local mini-economy, and emphasize physical closeness, homogeneity, or even exclusiveness

  • You have associated prepper types who gather together for the obvious practical benefits of living off-grid but with a little bit of community redundancy

  • You have a few libertarian projects that are technically diametrically opposed to collectivism but for practical reasons find it helpful to cluster together in order to consistently enforce (or decline to enforce, lol) norms friendly to libertarianism

  • You have the liberal-ish (OK I think this is mostly libertarian but I think it draws from the slightly left-leaning crowd within them) aligned "startup cities" like Prospera in Honduras

  • Some more extreme versions of "polycules" start to look awfully familiar to a longer more historical kind of "free love" society, even if they are inherently smaller-scale

Donald Trump himself suggested selling private land to "Freedom Cities" that aren't necessarily communistic but fit the vibe of "designed community/society" which isn't far off, during the 2024 election.

Communes arent inherently leftwing. There is something very conservative about sticking with your own people and raising kids in a very orderly community based way. The problem of the left wing commune (and possibly Sparta, I am no expert on Greek history) is the intentional dissolution of family units which results in pedophilia, pederasty, and polyamory (with the associated bastardy) which are degenerate. A commune with strong families is just the Amish with electricity, and is a very strong social force indeed.

I mean yes, I agree and that's my point, I was just invoking the contemporary association of communes with purely left-wing establishments. A strong association as another commenter very clearly demonstrated. Obviously I made my point poorly or else you wouldn't be making this comment and I wouldn't be downvoted. Although I'm pretty sure most of the downvotes are a knee-jerk reaction because they read my comment on a surface level and went "he's booing me! downvote!!"

To be clear what I find hilarious is that many conservatives for many years mocked hippie communes as delusional and bad qua communes, not due to their inherent hippie-ness; thus the current crop of conservatives "inventing" the exact same thing and defending it as "totally not a commune, because communes are dirty liberal inventions". This is called hypocrisy.

More broadly this is because conservatives, if you'll permit me to speak broadly (especially Christian conservatives), wanted to dominate society entirely. Thus from a position of power, local enclaves are a threat or aberration. They now realize they can't (or rather, that they failed, or lost control, or however it's framed), and thus have conveniently changed the goal back to "let's dominate local communities instead" and local enclaves are back on the menu as something praiseworthy.

Amish with electricity have less use for the physical labor of men. The more technology we have, the less men's labor and protection is valuable to women, which devalues the average man as a worthwhile husband.

What starts as a strong natalist force will fade over time unless backed with a religious imperative to reproduce.

If you’re a secular conservative you’re pretty much just fucked. A friend of mine and I once tried approximating what country out there and in what period might have approached something like that, that was nationally large enough to matter. Best we came up with was Czechoslovakia. Although you could say the Nazis tried something like that. They had strange ideas when you read into their “blood and soil” notions. They were against what they called “biological pacifism,” and wanted a 4-child family, health passports, a 4-stage hierarchy of eugenic marriages between biologically fit individuals (Class I, Class II, Class III, Class IV) etc. Really strange stuff.

Communists to the left, communitarians to the right, pretty much no place for an individualist in this fallen world.

There is no mechanism available to "extend the social contract obligations to women, and all that entails." The male gender role is primarily constructed by social pressures, not through any kind of law or policy (hypothetical conscription notwithstanding). And the role that women collectively imagine for men forms something much more strongly coherent than the role men collectively imagine for women. Both can turn down their respective roles in an instant merely by choosing to; men face far more social consequence from that choice, though, so they choose not to and learn either to shut up and accept their role or to celebrate it.

That depends on the society. There have been plenty of social contracts and there are plenty of social contracts that have absolutely no problem placing obligations on women.

On the other hand, plenty of women actually like babies, especially their own. More than men who like war, probably.

Anyone will go to war for a cause they’re vested in. I’m not going to join the military to become a drone operator hunting for some hideout in Iran. If the Russians were about to invade my hometown, I’d become a first rate neocon on the other hand.

If the Russians were about to invade my hometown, I’d become a first rate neocon on the other hand.

It's a bit late at that point.

Pretty sure I’m not Ukrainian. They’d have a hard time setting one inch on our land.

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