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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8134 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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Is the slippery slope really a fallacy?

A story from Canada today that, by its very nature, maximizes heat. I will try to keep my own emotions about this story in check. Sitting at the intersection of gay rights, abortion rights, surrogacy rights, and ultimately the violence upon which all government force is founded, I bring you: Couple sues surrogate who refused to abort their baby over a minor birth defect

https://nypost.com/2026/07/14/world-news/couple-sues-surrogate-who-refused-to-abort-their-baby-over-a-minor-birth-defect/

Long story short, the baby had a minor heart defect (the article doesn't specify what) and a cleft palate, and the adoptive men wish their now two year old child had been murdered and are suing the birth mother for failing to do so (there are also claims that she failed to keep them informed in a timely manner about these issues). Last I'll say of my own emotions on this is that this strikes me as outright demonic behavior and if I say anything more about my feelings I'm going to drift into fedposting so I'll stop here.

The main point I can take away from this is that all of the Christian right that warned about various slippery slopes have been validated over, and over, and over again. The slippery slope is technically a fallacy, yes. But Christians repeatedly pointed out "There is no limiting principle here, and the arguments you nake to support degenerate behavior X are just as applicable to degenerate behaviors Y and Z and there is nothing except public sentiment (and not even that if a judge somewhere says otherwise) preventing the awful things we're talking about from becoming reality."

For those who lived through the culture wars over abortion, gay rights, and similar issues, have your feelings on the matter changed in anyway whatsoever over the last decade or two, and in which direction? And why, if you're able to articulate. For me at least, to quote the meme an old friend shared in our edgy groupchat the other day, "Upon further consideration I have decided to become more extreme in my religious beliefs".

The briefest glimpse of surrogacy will show it's an utter house of horrors, and seeing all the nicey-nicey finger-wagging progressives and liberals defend it, was when the last bits of rationalism and liberalism left my body. It was oddly liberating, too. To think I spent all this time worrying about the moral judgement of people who don't bat an eye at a child being sold, and literal Handmaiden's Tale stans who somehow see no issue with it.

For those who lived through the culture wars over abortion, gay rights, and similar issues, have your feelings on the matter changed in anyway whatsoever over the last decade or two, and in which direction?

I lost quite a bit of patience with "gay rights" when "love is love" and "they're just like us" crashed into the reinforced concrete wall of meeting actual gay people. I especially don't want to hear another word about the "AIDS """crisis"""", but all things considered I can still get behind the idea of tolerance.

Abortion is an interesting one. I was never a fan of it, but being libertarian for a good chunk of my life, I figured it's best to "keep the government out of it". Cases like this are interesting, because they show the Garden of Earthly Delights-esque path from "anything goes between consenting adults" and "my body, my choice" to "women are just incubators" - the very thing feminists thought pro-life thought implies.

literal Handmaiden's Tale stans who somehow see no issue with it.

Handmaid's Tale isn't horror, it's porn. Wishcasting. Subverting itself. A dystopian low-fertility future in which any random chick who can pop out a kid is a precious resource to be hoarded by the nearest warlord? Why that's just like the Old Days.

“Handmaid’s Tale is meant to reassure every wretched office-worker who goes home to a cat, a VCR, and Pizza-for-one that her life is noble and progressive. Handmaid’s Tale is fun horror-fiction for women who work in the American-style cubicle-world precisely because it’s so utterly unrelated to the miseries and terrors of their own lives. No one wants to force middle-class American women to have babies. In fact, it’s almost impossible for them to contemplate having kids, because they’re terrified that it might set them back in their careers, and their rivals in the adjacent cubicles would grab their parking spaces and health plans. Nobody wants to use their bodies. That’s precisely the horror with which they live: no one wants to mate with them because in their world, every single striver must fear every other, and the sort of joint action involved in mating and rearing one’s young is impossible, laughable, a thing which only those who have abandoned the hope of A Career can contemplate. So in their minds, mating and rearing children moves down in class, becoming a thing for rednecks and (though they’ll never say this part out loud) immigrants-of-color. The desire to have children gets bounced outside oneself, onto these lesser beings, and returns, courtesy of Atwood, in demonized form, as the tyranny of procreation, family values and the Patriarchy. It’s the horror they love to fear.”

Except from one of my favorite book reviews of all time, from Exiled a defunct Russian online magazine in the year 2000.

Funny enough they made an episode of the TV show recently called “exile” which made searching online for this review extra difficult and I’m almost certain that was done purposely because this review, and in particular this excerpt, has been shared online amongst literary types for years and years.

Took me like thirty minutes to find it when it used to be one of the top links on any search engine.

Edit: @TIRM, I see you’re a man of culture as well.

You can filter google results from before a certain year. Add before:2019 or before:xxxx date to your search query and it will return results that have not been updated since that date.

Thank you that’s very helpful, I’m pretty bad at these sorts of things.

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