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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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We can have a free, fair, open, educated society in which women and kids aren't threatened every time they walk a street or attend a school, or we can let women vote and participate in the workplace.

Does "We" mean men, or do you think that removing women's liberties is compatible with a free society?

As for safety, I'm living in a massive, diverse, multicultural city where families can hang out safely in amazing public parks late into the night, and a hot woman can walk down the darkest, dingiest alleyway at 3 am in the morning without as much as fearing being cat-called. On the other hand, it's also a society run by rich people unprincipled enough to work with commies, whose main legitimation from the socially conservative masses is that the police will be badasses if someone does as much as play loud music too late at night in a ghetto, and even the dumbest semi-disabled old man can (and probably must) get a job sweeping leaves under the supervision of a pedantic harpy or something similarly simple in those amazing public parks.

In short, there are many social models, but there isn't one which is both free and massively restricts the freedom of 49% of the population.

I agree with you that modern society is overly empathetic, but this is a trend that goes back to the 18th century, as the intellectual classes began to promote the idea that benevolence is the ultimate virtue. It predates the decline of patriarchy and organised religion, and it's at least as notable in e.g. the upper echelons of the Catholic Church hierarchy (all-male and all-religious, more or less) as in a multi-gender corporate boardroom.

Additionally, as I recall personality psychology, the vast majority of men are about as empathetic as most women. The aggregate differences are at the margins, e.g. highly trait-disagreeable people are overwhelmingly men.

According to Wiki, HK is 92% Chinese. This doesn’t read as particularly diverse from an outside perspective. Moreover, the source link said that ~89% of the population spoke Cantonese at home.

This doesn’t read as particularly diverse from an outside perspective.

I suppose it depends on your perspective, since I come from a less diverse place. Also, I spend a lot of time in Kowloon, which is one of the more foreigner-heavy parts of HK, along with HK Island and some of the coastal towns in the New Territories.