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 -
So anyway, I was discussing the great replacement theory with a far-righter earlier, and I said that immigration had little to no effect on native birthrates, citing Japan and Korea as examples.
That pointed to a far more likely culprit, education as a whole (not just women’s). South Korea and Japan can’t seem to stop "investing in the future" by making their and their kids’ lives hell. Naturally, to escape the vicious cycle, they end up abolishing the future.
Isn’t it weird that a prominent justification for making money in our society is ‘sending my kids to college’? Anyone who refuses to do so is shamed with accusations of selfishness and not wanting their kids to succeed. They then choose the alternative path where kids aren’t even in the picture, so they’re free to be selfish in peace. We’re copenhagen ethics-ing humanity into slow painless extinction.
Trads like to assign the blame to female education, but most of the arguments apply to men as well. People are wasting 5-15 years of their lives on a very expensive vacation, at best, when they could be having kids. We want them to make that important decision early, and nothing sobers a young man quicker than staring decades of drudgery in the face.
It’s time to abandon our rosy view of Education as just an intolerable burden on the living. The unborn are its primary victims. Your children cry out: “Mum! Dad! Why do you let my Evil Professor keep me here? Why can’t I liiive? “
Say No To School. Choose Life.
Meritocracy is unsustainable. The idea that one could skip competing in life and get a low paying job and have kids ignores the fact that you would likely end up with an unattractive partner. A master's degree and a senior dev title at a respectable firm combined with the apartment that is barely affordable with that salary greatly increases one's attractiveness on the dating market. Getting a job at a hardware store and living in something affordable with that income would be the equivalent to a shadowban on tinder. You aren't getting an iq 120 woman with a beautiful body and high general factor of personality if your life is mediocre.
In traditional societies, people didn't have to worry about competing to the same degree. If your father farmed you farmed, if your dad was a blacksmith you became a blacksmith. Instead, we spend 20 years fighting a zero-sum game for who can post the most travel photos in tropical countries, get the most educational prestige, get an attractive apartment etc. If you can't get into a good college, you can get a master's degree. If you didn't get the top job after graduating, you can become a middle manager at a mediocre firm and outrank the junior at a good one. By trading time for status in a zero-sum game, people are incentivized to push life ahead of them and not settle.
Eating disorders are a lot rarer in traditional societies. Lip fillers, overtly sexualized social media and obsession over appearance are having a ruinous influence on women's mental health. Instead of marrying one of the guys next door, they are either going to absurd lengths to compete or having poor self-esteem for not looking like a tiktok model. Instead of giving people a place in the world and treating with them respect for filling the role that place fulfills, we have a race in which we judge people's worth and moral value on their place in it.
Fascinating assertion. How many bay area tech wives have you met?
If they were working at gamestop how would their dating life be?
Anecdotally? Not as bad as you might think.
My first Serious Girlfriend was a cute goth chick who was working the pretzel stand at the local mall while I was working at the video store across the way.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not true in the real world. There are plenty of senior devs with master's degrees at respectable firms in expensive apartments who aren't getting any at all. At best, they'll get a 36 year old polyamorous woman, and this incites burning rage in Mottizens.
Meanwhile, plenty of fit, funny, socially-skilled guys who stayed in their home town to work at the hardware store seem to have kids, often with multiple women.
Yeah. I've heard lots of tales of fit multimillionaire virgins in Silicon Valley.
Pretty sure you're an order of magnitude off.
Yeah. Although I'm a bit surprised that said senior devs can't find gold diggers willing to hold their noses for the money.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Sorry if this comes across as edgy, but have you considered the possibility that the "travel photos in tropical countries", or at least that which they are a proxy for, are not zero-sum because travelling to tropical countries is actually enjoyable for many people? Personally I'm also partial towards apartments that do not come with black mold in the bathroom and an air-blowing heater-cum-AC that has the noise level of living next to a busy airport like the first one that I had to live in in the US did.
I often see the internet right work off of a model of humans that leans in the general direction of "the serfs would still be happily plowing the fields while wearing potato sacks; anything more they get is useless for them and just part of a zero-sum competition for status". To the extent this claim is not just an unfalsifiable value assertion that denies agency to vast numbers of people, it is sufficiently at odds with people's self-reports and intuition that it needs more evidence than vaguely pointing at eating disorders and Instagram anxiety and claiming that these are sufficient proxies to compare the all-around utility of the present unfavourably to that the past.
If you ask those questions of me personally, the answer for most of them is "yes", based not just on what my understanding (through reading the occasional old text) of medieval peasants but also just comparing myself to members of my parent generation who have still inherited an older work ethic, scarcity-oriented life philosophy et cetera. For the general population, I'm not sure, but I'm not convinced that these are the right questions to ask either - is self-report actually the end-all measure of utility, or could we look at two equally happy people and say that the happiness of one of the two is actually more legitimate?
More importantly, even if we find no difference between the peasant and the modern youth in all of those criteria (or even a difference favouring the peasant), symmetry remains broken in the other direction in that scarcely a modern youth would be happy to trade places based on a description of the medieval life but almost any medieval peasant would be based on a description of the modern one. In fact, we can surmise (based on experience in the Cold War and social inequality within modern countries) that the mere presence of those who live the modern template causes any zeal, excitement and eudaimonia of those who live a life of back-breaking work to feed themselves to evaporate.
Considering that, doesn't it seem facile that theories such as the parent poster's always single out a form of society that just happens to align with their aesthetic preferences as the one that actually makes people happier? Communists also have a good case that the life of occasional deprivation and abuse under a planned economy - especially coupled with the occasional drives for purpose such as a push for space colonisation - would have been superior to our abundant anomie, and that the people living under it were merely rendered unhappy because the Capitalist West gratuitously flexed its abundance in their faces. In fact, in this way, perhaps the West is really to blame for the unhappiness of serfs anywhere, be they communist, feudalist, or the underclass in a capitalist society! Following down that train of thought may lead you to a very socialist place.
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, maybe, maybe not for the peasants who made it to 60, but there are billions of people alive today who would've either died in childbirth, of some random disease, or been sent off to die because some noble wanted 9 more square miles without a choice, and so on, and so forth.
Also, I just think people who think peasants were dumb, happy proles are kind of ignoring the actual history of medieval Europe, where not only did medieval peasants actually gain economic power because of plague rats, but there were multiple peasant uprisings and the like.
I'm just fundamentally against pastoral nostalgia for medieval times, whether it comes from edgy right-wingers who hate capitalism and think peasants in 1450 were happy, religious serfs or edgy left-wingers who hate capitalism who think peasants were happy laborers who worked less than they did.
More options
Context Copy link
I would much rather the life of a peasant, but it's not possible to live such a life now. They ate well, had well made (if fewer) clothes, and largely happy lives. But such prosperity depended on the existence of the commons, from which peasants could obtain firewood, fish, trap small animals, etc. Once enclosure made these illegal, the common people chose to move to the cities and become wage slaves. It was preferable to attempting to be peasants under the current private property regime. Given that they had direct experience with both realities, I trust their judgement that I would not want to be a peasant without access to a commons and a traditional community.
Said peasants also buried half their children because they didn't have germ theory, vaccines, or antibiotics.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, I'm pretty sure most of us here are self-aware enough to not hold "happiness" as the supreme/only metric for measuring the worth of one's life, and even those who claim otherwise don't usually act that way.
Taken to its logical extreme, that point of view advocates for wireheading, or at least doing as much fentanyl as you feasibly can.
I'm quite sure that I'm not alone in having values more complex than mere happiness, I value freedom, comfort, luxury, knowledge, health and myriad other things, all of which are certainly in better supply today than a medieval peasant could hope for. These might not reflect on my mood, because humans are cursed to run on hedonic treadmills, but they are still strictly superior to not having them.
As such, I can't even say that people are behaving irrationally (with reference to their preferences) when they prioritize their lifestyles over having kids, it's more of a coordination failure on a societal scale than a personal one. Sure, most women when polled want something like 3 kids as opposed to 1.5 or even a replacement 2.1, but how many of them would actually trade an upper middle class lifestyle for that?
I know I start sweating thinking about cost of living when my girlfriend wants 3 kids in London, but I don't really worry too much because society will likely be in utter turmoil by the time we have our first, let alone the third.
(I think I'd be pretty miserable as a peasant, all else said and done)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link