This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
An influencer couple announced that they aborted their pregnancy because the fetus had Down syndrome. This upset a lot of people including some fine congressmen.
However, it's actually very common. Screening for genetic disorders is generally performed between 10 and 20 weeks, giving plenty of time for a reasonably early choice. "As a result of these elective terminations in the U.S., there was a 37% reduction in the numbers of babies with Down syndrome born in 2018. This means that in recent years there were 37% fewer babies with Down syndrome than could have been born". In Iceland, almost all such diagnosed pregnancies are aborted after testing.
People with Down syndrome are clearly generally capable of living "happy" lives. They have the equivalent intelligence of an 8 to 9 year old. Most 8 to 9 year olds seem happy enough to me, and it would not be a horrible curse to live decades in such a condition. Perhaps we might ask if such a life is fulfilling, but a young child can't comprehend what that means; as well ask your dog if he's fulfilled by sniffing butts and digging holes.
For the caretakers of course, life may not be so rosy. Taking care of a small child indefinitely, knowing all of the joys and sorrows of adulthood that they will never experience, does not sound fulfilling, to say nothing of the physical and monetary toll. It's therefore unsurprising that most parents choose not to condemn themselves to such a future.
God in His infinite wisdom creates babies with far worse afflictions. Most people would agree that it is ethical, perhaps mandatory, to abort nonviable children who will live only hours in agonizing pain after birth. Down syndrome, as a patently survivable condition, lies on the edge of this boundary.
I was hoping someone had already posted about this so I can ride on it. Let's say they did have the downer, what would happen?
Let's now talk for a second about suicidal empathy. I think suicidal empathy is just christianity + technology. For example, Jesus says "love your neighbor", this works fine in his time because "your neighbor" is literally your neighbor and it's probably societally adaptive. Better to help someone when they are down on their luck, it's probably temporary, it probably helps the whole village not to let them die for a temporary thing. The upside is probably worth the downside of helping irredemable people some of the time.
Your neighbor now is everyone who lives in a 10000ft radius of the earth surface. You can easily know how they are doing no matter where they are, you can go there within a day or two at a (relatively) irrisory price and you can also make them come to you at the same low price. The somalian sitting of the coast of lybia in a repurposed fishing boat? Your neighbor. The same somalian living in your country definitely your neighbor. His family? Your family's neighbor. Kicking them out as illegals? Definitely not helping them.
And that's how the Catholic Church pushed for regularizing half a million immigrants to spain this year.
This and the downer's story are actually the same category of error. Had the downer been born in the Christian Dark Ages the downer would have died of some retarded accident within 10 years and if not he would have been given the, relatively cheap, life of the beast of burden, not the simulacron of life of an intellectual that we try to give them now.
Euthanasia is also in the same category. Not killing the sick is a good idea because sometimes they get better and otherwise it's like, an extra two weeks. Not so much when we can keep them alive for 60 more years without much effort. Christianity + technology = suicidal empathy.
What's the solution to suicidal empathy? More cruelty, we need to start liking cruelty. The problem is that nobody is willing to do it, you have to trick people by saying "you're not helping them IT'S AN INVASION!!!!1!!!!!!1!!!11!!11!!!!". But it only goes so far. The downer would basically be happy we have to give as much as we can to the downer.
More options
Context Copy link
Down Syndrome's kind of a funny spot in terms of aborting disability since they generally land in a spot of sufficient mental and physical development to be 'happy', though I feel like people are also not comprehending how much public investment goes into keeping a down syndrome person alive. IIRC they generally need several open-heart natal surgeries plus lifetime care.
More options
Context Copy link
Maybe aborting your downs-y fetus is something you should do in private. This is intentionally trying to court controversy.
They already made a video announcing the pregnancy, so they couldn't just pretend that nothing happened.
Just heavily imply it was a spontaneous miscarriage. Nobody is going to pry much deeper
More options
Context Copy link
I think that as a practical matter, they could. If a few months later the woman was not visibly pregnant, very few people would ask what happened. And if someone did ask, the response "it didn't work out" would generally be accepted.
Yeah. Miscarriages happen and there's a layer of social propriety around this matter where people aren't going to pry.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This question hits differently having just returned from a date with a woman who would be well into her mid-30s at motherhood on any reasonable projected timescale. I’m pretty sure it’s not even legal to abort downies in Texas. I can’t imagine traveling hundreds of miles for the sole purpose of killing my own child. The thought has me physically sick. I also wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life babysitting my infertile dead-end offspring.
More options
Context Copy link
This is a pretty interesting debate as it demonstrates a real fracture point between the "alt-right" NRx folk (such that still exist) and the "trads" who might otherwise be allies of convenience. We can joke about 13/52 and find common ground on e.g., the execution of rapists, murderers, and child molesters; plausibly agree on the utility of racial profiling, nativism and remigration, and broadly reject blank slatism in all its forms -- but god forbid (and, I suppose, God forbids) we proactively prune a few fetuses with extra chromosomes.
The religious right will, of course, construct their Jenga tower of cope re: why their ideology doesn't immediately collapse back down into leftist slave morality, but ultimately, they protect them because they are pitiful, and that is indistinguishable from progressivism. I have no faith that these "allies" would be willing to bar the gates and sink the ships in a Camp of the Saints-style dystopia; it's all just LARP.
Also a funny take on Twitter when some people came out as pro-choice except for in this case since 'this is eugenics'. The position that a person should be entitled to abort their children for any reason unless the child is maximally inconvenient for them is pretty amusing.
More options
Context Copy link
Isn't this just generic "boo outgroup"?
It seems to me that the religious right take a very consistent position on this - it is wrong to kill an innocent person. If the alt-right carve out exceptions, like it's okay to kill pre-natal people, or it's okay to kill people with genetic disorders, or even (implicitly?) it's okay to kill people who are genetically inferior in some other sense, well, they're the ones who would seem to need to justify the inconsistency.
The true religious right, the socially conservative right, has a principle. Do not commit murder. They have stated that principle openly for a long time. For the small, historically new or young group of weirdos constituting the alt-right, or neoreaction, to accuse the conservative right of 'LARP' or of being 'leftists' is surely absurd.
If anything I think the religious right could more plausibly argue that it's the alt-right, as you describe them, who are pseudo-leftists. If you're going to accuse the religious right of being 'leftists' because they're anti-eugenics, I think they're just as much at liberty to say that you're leftist because you're pro-eugenics, and eugenics was obviously a progressive movement going all the way back to the late 19th century.
Do the alt-right agree that "pre-natal people" are a thing, to begin with? The maximalist pro-abortion position does not seem any less consistent to me (as someone who holds it): something that does not have a record of autonomous human experience does not count as a "person", and if anything is wrong with killing it, it's not in the same category as what is wrong with killing people. (I can see an argument for not pulling the plug on the braindead from the perspective of "surviving relatives have sentimental attachment to the body" only.)
(Incidentally, I've been wondering, is there a literalist Biblical case in Christianity for the personhood of fetuses, or is this something that has been coloured in retroactively by modern analysis/apologetics "through a Christian lens"?)
I think there's a great case to be made that Christianity and Leftism are closely related, which only rubs people the wrong way because in the US the majority of those who identify with the respective movements have evolved to be mutually disgusted tribal archenemies. It seems kind of like what happens when you point out to modern Greeks all the ways in which their culture, genetics and language have been influenced by the Turks.
Alt-righters, whose LARP of choice more often than not is some sort of BAP-style Classical elitism, seem to be one group that definitively has the right to call Christians "left-wing", because the thing they are LARPing in doing so (Classical Antiquity) was overturned by Christianity with a memetic package that through a modern lens very much parses as such.
There isn't but there is a long history all the way back to the 2nd? 3rd? century of christians opposing abortion. Some people speculate that it was because they were accused of eating children or something like that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I remain frustrated that so much of the abortion debate ignores adoption as a possibility. It's so ignored that OP might think it's an unrelated point, but without addressing adoption, statements like...
are a red herring to me, at least for the USA.
(In all 50 states (and possibly in most non-USAmerican countries as well -IDK), there are Safe Haven laws allowing no-penalty surrender of newborns.)
I want to say this with no offense to OP, because what I'm complaining about is so common.
Adoption would be a realistic solution if there wasn't an oversupply and under demand for adoptable foster kids as is. And considering these severely disabled children that require constant dedication for the rest of their lifetime would be far less wanted than even the typical foster child.
I know I'm being analytical about an emotional situation in saying this, but, for the parents, which was the focus of the original sentence, adoption is a complete solution.
If we're going to move the discussion to a solution for society in general, I'd say that even if the high demand for infants pointed out down thread doesn't apply to Down Syndrome infants, charity or something charity-adjacent (like foster care) has always been the best solution we have.
AFAIK Down Syndrome pregnancies have higher risks of complications that can impact the mother than typical pregnancies so it's not like it's purely a matter of 'assuming the infant is instantaneously adopted then it has no welfare impacts on the birthing mother'. There's still substantive risks and costs.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
People also underplaying just how expensive this is for the state since a lot of the costs are covered by subsidies. From what I can see out of pocket for a Down Syndrome child's care is generally 100k+ a year and that's tip of a far larger iceberg of tax money being deleted.
More options
Context Copy link
Depends what your threshold for 'adoptable' is. The internet tells me there are 36 couples for every child available for adoption so evidently the market must be clearing at a pretty low 'price'. I assume downs kids would be in less demand, but with 36 couples per child, beggars can't be choosers.
36 couples who have qualified and passed the associated screening? Like it wouldn't shock me if there was a CRM with 36 expressions of interest for a healthy infant adoption but my understanding of adoption is that it's a long and messy process
The process may well be long and messy, but a ratio of 36 couples to one child is not a shortage of parents or an oversupply of kids.
Even overseas adoption has dropped to almost nothing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There's an oversupply of adoptable foster kids, but an undersupply of adoptable babies. Most people who want to adopt want a baby.
What I've heard from couples trying to adopt kids 5 - 12 is that the state's priority is to reunite them with relatives, and even if they've been with a new family for a year, if they find someone in another state who's related and take them in, or their older sibling reaches the age of majority, the state will move them and place them there instead.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This isn't directly related, but - I'm always vaguely amused by this sort of language.
Of course, the Internet has done more to "have people with intellectual disability publicly visible" than this variety of activist ever will - and people's reactions haven't been positive, to say the least. Nor are the activists uncounted, or even uncommon, among that howling crowd.
And of course, they'll say "mental illness doesn't do that!" But they'd still very much like a ... let's say, "more permanent solution."
One can't imagine them ever being happy getting what they're asking for.
More options
Context Copy link
Personal subject for me, my next oldest brother has Downs. He's a great guy, extremely high functioning, but he is limited in his life options, and he knows it. He wants the same things most guys want, a family, which he can't have. He's been an immense amount of work for my parents, who have been very supportive of him and his relative independence. He was a fair bit of work for me when we were children, as well as being a source of conflict between me and kids looking to pick on the tard. Not a bit of which do I begrudge him, he's absolutely worth it.
But in the larger sense, this option is not a reasonable one for many parents and I don't fault anyone who doesn't have that drive and faith for that sort of thing. I don't have any fundamental moral compunction with soft eugenics at the individual level. Pro-lifers are framing the debate correctly, but they have the wrong answer. I'll bite the bullet, the correct number of dead (proto)infants isn't zero. Death is not the worst of outcomes. Obviously there will be disagreement over what counts as worse.
I love my brother, and my life is better, and I am a better person for having him. But I'm not going to moralfag about the real costs of that and people who don't want that for themselves or their retard-to-be kid. Those are the sort of life and death choices we have to make about family. When is it time to pull the plug on Grandma? How big a retard do we think we can raise? Nothing the law or the priests or the redditors say is going to remove the responsibility for these choices.
Ultimately, the abortion issue is, like most hot-button political things, just a way to moralfag over who is killing kids, raping kids, shooting kids etc. etc. Meanwhile, basically everyone is on the same page in practical terms. 80%+ of the electorate, including supermajorities of both parties are fine with restricting late-term or partial-birth abortion, but want it legal up to some point and for emergencies, etc. In practical terms, this is the reality in most states. There is no political conflict underneath that except the most extreme five percent on each side trying to either make all abortion illegal or legal after actual live birth.
Yes, there is legitimacy in thinking about the issues as a moral exercise in where exactly we draw the lines for questions like this, of life and death. But the politics of it is just pure bullshit. The underlying problem is not one with a simple answer, but our current system is far from outrageous.
Could you unpack that? My tentative reading is that you agree that abortion is the killing of an innocent human being but that you also hold utilitarian principles which allow that sort of thing.
Of course most pro-lifers are not utilitarians, and I'm no exception. I also have a relative with Down syndrome, though not so close a relative as your brother. He is blessed with excellent parents. But if they had killed him in utero they would be no less guilty of his blood than if they killed him today.
People think they can find pragmatic, utilitarian compromises with reasonable stopping points. But over the generations things don't work out that way. Rare abortions in difficult cases became abortion on demand, which greased the slope for doctor-assisted suicide, and the Netherlands and Canada are showing us how that goes.
There's now a whole social media genre of posts acknowledging that the socons were right and slopes were in fact slippery. People had believed that they would handle this or that loosening of the moral law responsibly because their culture took the issues seriously. But the culture only took the issues seriously because of its residual Christian understanding of the moral law, which that loosening eroded.
To the Christian this sounds a lot like the situation in Romans 1, where men denied God despite their knowledge and he gave them over to their sinful desires. But, Christian or not, experience shows that utilitarian principles won't hold you on the middle of the slope.
Good?
How can you argue from Christianity and also argue the fetus is innocent? It has as much expected original sin as you do.
How do you believe in the hereafter and still attach so much sentimentality to the body here and now?
There are many examples in the Bible of God commanding people to kill. Murder is a particular type of killing that doesn't seem to apply to voluntary euthanasia or abortion of people who would not want to live anyway.
Original Sin isn't a universal Christian belief.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What do you think is happening there
More options
Context Copy link
People think they can enforce their bright-line morality, but it won't work. You can denounce the "blood guilt" of others, but we all kill to live. We all kill those we love, and some of us kill quite a bit more than that. It works at the other end for assisted suicide too. Taken to the logical conclusion, we must all bankrupt ourselves every generation to eke even a single moment of continued brain activity because every nanosecond of life is so precious as to dwarf the world economy. Compromises with reality will be made, and if your morality can't handle reality, then it's not much use to anyone.
The slopes both ways are always slick.
I see no circumstances under which the principle "Don't murder innocents" must be compromised in order to live. Unless you're trying to make some weird point about how supporting some policy or other will cause X deaths or destroy Y QALYs or something like that, I really have no idea what you're trying to say here.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
For whatever reason, my gut feeling of my friends is that the ones who are most vocal about being pro-abortion are also the most vocal about being anti-screening. It seems like "abortions are no problem, unless you're doing so because the future child would have a disability". I guess it's reconcilable as being against dehumanizing people with disabilities?
Yeah there were a bunch of people on twitter pushing the 'Abortion for any reason is fine, unless it's disability at which point you are committing a hecking eugenics' which creates this funny moral situation where you can supposedly abort out of mere potential inconvenience but also the like maximally inconvenient child cannot be aborted.
More options
Context Copy link
That's interesting, and exactly opposite my intuitions. I think that abortion in general is wrong, but that abortion for a life long disability is much more relatable and grey than abortion because the mother doesn't want to give birth to it (assuming the pregnancy and mother are generally healthy and normal).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The minority who sees abortion as murder would disagree, I think, as they are also very anti-MAID as a general rule.
Personally, I see a fetus as replaceable and thus am happy to leave the choice with the pregnant woman. Typically, a couple which became pregnant by choice and aborted for medical reasons will simply try again. So another way to phrase this would be to say that the people in Iceland are replacing Down syndrome babies with healthy babies. This is the closest we will get to a cure of trisomia 21 this side of the singularity.
I think this was a point of contention over at ACX at some time, where (IIRC) Scott was basically saying that schizophrenia can be 'cured' through genetic testing. I tend to agree. Sure, if my parents had access to genetic testing, they might have decided to pick a fetus which less prone to depression than I am -- and I am fine with that, because back then I did not have interests of my own.
Also, the people getting upset about medical abortions could probably easily prevent them by pledging to adopt and raise Down children.
I feel like this is all a sliding scale, though. Downs is the perfect point for debate since it's common enough, visible enough and you can easily say that people with it are capable of living happy lives (albeit at massive cost to the state and those around them). If it's some severe abnormality where the organs are on the outside of the body and the chances of making it 24 hours outside of the window is 0% and the risks of the mother carrying the baby to term are immense that's a completely different conversation. I've got 2 kids and I'd abort a potential future severely disabled fetus despite generally being pro-life (or seeing it as a very weighty decision that shouldn't be made frivolously)
More options
Context Copy link
Probably not, since from the point of view of a woman who wants children, but not this child, the recovery is much shorter for abortion than giving birth full term, and it's more common amongst older mothers, who have less time to lose.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link