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 -
The gender ideology movement sort of feels out of the news cycle where I live, but remains very top of mind for me.
As I see it, the whole umbrella is actually multiple, almost unrelated strands, queerying category activists, social engineering progressives, AGPs, internet cults, all underpinned by unthinking legal activism and of course corporate profiteering. Did I mention an overtly political and enabling media environment bereft of any journalistic values?
I am fascinated by all these things but mainly I want to talk about the social mania aspect. I'm very interested in how smart people, who would inevitably class themselves as above-average in rationality and morality, are able to brush off child-safeguarding concerns, discarding the previous medical ethics consensus (first do no harm, evidence based medicine) in favour of ideas that barely existed even 15-20 years ago.
I have been looking into previous social manias such as the satanic panic and the child care workers given wrongful convictions and it's shocking how difficult it is to reverse the tide of mania once it's begun. Parents, police, the justice system, and media all fall into lockstep and condemn innocent people to terrible fates they and their families bear in almost total isolation, with only a few supporters able to parse the information in front of them and figure out what is going on.
I mean this is just human behaviour - we make movies about the Salem witch trials, we are modern people and have access to perspectives of humans across evolutionary time. Is it really true that people still don't know who we are, how we behave in herds?
I understand apathy, I understand things moving out of the news cycles, but I can't understand how people can maintain a neutral view on unnecessary surgeries on minors. When institutions such as medical bodies fail in their basic safeguarding responsibilities, suppressing dissent within their ranks, it is not hard to work out what is going on. How many manias does history need to present before people learn what we are?
A failure of courage I understand in any given context but the neutral middle doesn't even seem curious in private.
Can anybody enlighten me why people aren't more curious, why they're happy for children to be groomed into lifelong medicalisation, with their life choices pre-emptively narrowed before they even understand what consent means? The true-believers I understand, it's supposedly smart, moral people that aren't engaged that I'm confused about. Are they secretly true believers but just don't want to say?
Plain old cognitive dissonance?
The one thing that unites everyone I know, ranging from the most hardcore SJWs to alt-right RETVRN types, is that nobody cares about children at all, especially not more than our respective political convictions, and especially not the abstract children of others. If you come from a genuinely more old-fashioned or natalist bubble, you may underestimate just how insignificant children have become in younger elite circles; on a gut-feeling level it is genuinely difficult for me to imagine how someone would pretend to care about children for any reason other than as a mysterious ancestral ritual that may score points against the outgroup.
(It may not be surprising that birthrates in my mid-30s cohort are very low, and the few people who did reproduce have largely dropped out socially - not, as far as I can tell, to socialise with other people, but to be alone.)
Can you expand on that? Most of my formerly-alt-right acquaintances have children or want to have them. How do they even rationalize it?
That's still caring tho, isn't it?
More options
Context Copy link
This is only true if you’re a tech twink in the laptop class. The majority of 30-somethings I know have started families. Many have children already in their teens.
The decision not to have children is a symptom of extended adolescence. Men and women who remain in education through their early 20s and don’t enter the workforce until their mid-20s or later rarely have children at the optimal age (<25). This compounds as they decide their 20s are meant to be spent in a hedonistic reverie rather than thinking or planning for their future.
In other words, you’ve fallen victim to an echo chamber within your bubble. Normal people still have and care about children.
It may well be that this is a feature of what you describe as "tech twinks in the laptop class", but then the crux is that opinions and trends (that OP is exposed to) are largely set by what you would describe as such because most culture nowadays is produced by twinks teching on their laptops. (On that matter, the circumstance that you associate it with tech and laptops may be suggestive of you underestimating the size and reach of the bubble that is not yours in other ways: my parents had me in their mid-30s too, as did most of their circle of Soviet academics that had children at all, and I recall the kids of their Western European peers also being in my age bracket.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well that's sad to me but I sense it, and it becomes reinforcing- as less people are having children society seems to have also become less accommodating of having children. I have to say it's a stressful business in the current age.
How much is fear of global catastrophe? I wonder if all the environmentalism has curbed the instinct, or is it that we've become more online and less physically connected.
American society is 50/50 on things like "12 year olds shouldn't be permitted outside the home unsupervised". 100 years ago, they'd be walking home from their jobs; clearly, modern children are defective and deserve how we treat them.
So that's the room temperature. It is not a surprise any adult would refuse to make themselves vulnerable- to subject themselves and their kids to an increasingly insane society, one where one's neighbors (and their collective corporate arm, called "government and bureaucracy") have basically totalitarian control should they deign to exercise it.
Just like a mass shooting, when you get the news of one kid arrested off their front lawn for the crime of existing in a place they had a right to be, you impose an utterly massive outsized chilling effect on everyone else.
Same thing with the Satanic Panic, which I'd argue should be more properly seen as a coup d'etat, where the
matriarchybureaucracy would proceed to depose and replace thepatriarchymeritocracy that came before. Anyone having children after that time does not know peace from the mostly-invisible civil war; any child does not know what came before nor are they encouraged, nay, permitted to develop into a proper adult until the time for development has long passed (and their growth and standards permanently stunted as a result).More options
Context Copy link
I haven't encountered an authentic version of the "I don't want children because they will have to suffer through the warming apocalypse" sentiment in the wild, but then for myself a certain general feeling that I can't imagine a life on earth 50 years hence that will be worth living (though my blackpill of choice is more about AI and/or technologically fueled turbo-authoritarianism) certainly has been tipping the scales further against having children, so perhaps the general sentiment is not so rare. I think that the most pervasive cause is still that none of us have any mental conception of a (capital-g,l?) good life that features children. A parental generation that was never shy to resort to guilt-tripping over all the sacrifices they made to raise us certainly isn't helping there, but the understanding that millennials value experiences (which children get in the way of) over things (which children don't get in the way of as much) has been around for a while too.
What could be more an experience than raising a being you helped create? Is it jet setting? No. Is it rich in experience? Absolutely.
I guess for many people of my generation and younger, sure it's an experience, but it's one you can't interrupt and that locks you out of other experiences to some extent. That kind of committment is scary.
They don't know if they want it or not because they haven't experienced the light version of it of taking care of younger siblings / extended family that used to be the norm, and by the time they realize they aren't really going to live out their jet-setting/big city sitcom fantasy anyway they are late, sometimes too late, to pivot to parenthood.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I agree that this is a big reason, but imo it's so much more than that. Our society strongly incentives childlessness through multiple channels: Companies actively try to punish you for having children as far as the legal system allows, the government itself guarantees a pension for childless people that we barely can afford, both the culture and the government work hand-in-hand see it as their prerogative to judge parents as they see fit and take away parental rights if need be and finally, possibly most of all, the culture strongly pushes teens and young adults to delay pregnancy and in fact most contact with younger children until both their biological fitness has atrophied so much that a decent percentage of people struggle to have kids despite wanting to, while another part has, as you point out, no conception whatsoever what a life with children actually looks like. It doesn't help that media very consistently pushes an image of children as just getting in the way of the adventure that is usually central to the plot.
And I think another big issue is that society pushes exceptionalism in general - everyone is supposed to find their one true calling, be it an amazing career, true love, personal self-realisation (which conveniently always ends up to be some kind of hedonism) etc. Children are not only too mundane to fit the bill, they also make many of those things very difficult to achieve, especially with the limitations modern life heaps on parents.
Imo doomerism has always seemed much to convenient to me. Most people, especially women, know that not having kids is a thoroughly antisocial choice in general (there are exceptions of course, such as having serious genetic disorders), so doomerism allows them to reclaim the moral high ground. They get to continue their life of short-sighted hedonism while also feeling morally superior. Of course, there are people whom I believe their doomerism to be sincere, but it's quite rare. Much more common is partying all the time, except the parties are totally for a cause and not just for fun. Perfect example is fridays for future, which consisted of 99% getting to skip school and 1% thinly-veiled excuses how that's the moral thing to do.
Ironically this is a great example of your earlier point. As a parent, I'd actually say it's the opposite: With kids, you get a ton of amazing experiences entirely for free, so much that experiences you used to enjoy such as travelling start to become boring & pointless in comparison. On the other hand, kids are genuinely expensive, so you can afford a lot less things.
Protests themselves are a fun group activity, when they're not outright parties/festivals.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I have plenty of generalised anxiety of the future myself though now that I'm in deep with kids of my own, the immediacy of their care reduces that background. I do feel a bit bad for them sometimes with the uncertainty in the world but of course other generations had their thing and the characteristics I hope to instill are removed from time. Resilience will always be useful.
While I have probably always wanted kids or thought I'd have them eventually it was my partners ticking biological clock that got me over the line :) Are biological clocks no longer ticking?
My parents had us young and warned us against doing the same with some of their thwarted ambitions. But then I've gone the other way and wish I'd started earlier.
Just to add that the payoff for children for me has been meaning, I get connection to meaning.
You're told that you can put it off until you're ready (with no firm definition as to what constitutes readiness). Medical technology is amazing! If you have trouble conceiving, you can always go the IVF route, and if that doesn't work then there is surrogacy. Apple caused some comment a few years back by proposing to pay for female staff to have their eggs frozen - can't have mere kids and family interfering with the precious and sacred bond of career and your employer extracting maximum value from you, so put off your own life until you're old and used-up and they can't squeeze any more benefit out of you - and now I see that this is deemed a perk that employers should offer, what circle of Hell are we in now?
While I don't think you should start having babies the second you turn 20 years old, the notion that "I have to wait till I'm 50 and my employer is ready to scrap-heap me before I can even think of having children" is even more obnoxious.
One element I feel gets ignored and/or glossed over is the cost. IVF procedures in America cost anywhere from 10k to 30k - there seems to be a wide gap involved, and IIRC, the cost a friend of mine paid was much, much more.
There's also no guarantee the procedure will take, and the longer a woman puts it off, the longer possible existing complications can remain undiscovered(again, this is what happened to the same friend.)
Thankfully, they were able to go oversees to have the procedure done again, but staying a month in Turkey is abit beyond the means of most people.
I wish people were taught better about this, but I worry we've moved to the point where the majority just assumes medical science is basically a magic wand that automatically fixes everything.
There are fertility clinics that say "you can do it here in the USA oh but also we have clinics in Mexico/overseas which are way cheaper".
If you have fertility problems, it's expensive procedures. There are European countries which pay for it on the national health system (now including my own) but they may only pay for one round and if that doesn't take, too bad.
People have indeed been given expectations that they can control their fertility, and that means not getting pregnant until they want to get pregnant (and if they do, then abortion is healthcare and a human right to fix that little problem) and once they want to get pregnant, regardless of age, they should be able to do so and it's the job of the medical system to fix it if they can't.
We're still not totally in control of our own biology, but nobody really wants to face that, because all of us have been sold the promise of Science, Technology, Progress unending and forever and solving all problems.
More options
Context Copy link
The other thing that gets ignored is the chance that it doesn't work:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You are right; better to get started as teenagers.
I think mid-twenties is the sensible compromise; you should be able to be treated as an adult by then and marry and have a couple of kids between then and your thirties. Old enough to have sense, young enough to be able to cope with babies and small children.
The notion of "career first" is pushing a lot of people, men and women, to put off marriage and children further and further down the line, and of course the longer this goes on, the less interest you may have in changing your established life with the disruption of having kids (unless one or both of the spouses hears the ticking of the biological clock and very much wants kids). "We'll start our family when we're thirty. When we're thirty-five. When we're forty..." but then time is not on your side and trying for a baby gets harder and more expensive as you may need medical intervention.
Men, of course, can father children at almost any age (unless they have fertility issues) but while Bill may be able to wait until he's seventy to have a kid, Susie hasn't that luxury.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The big lie is that the clock isn’t ticking as fast as it used to tick.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
"Not caring" generally is one thing, turning a blind eye to an ongoing social and medical experiment that involves them is another.
Many more people starve or die violent deaths. By "not care", I mean that children cease registering as an either morally privileged or familiar category; in a way the adult Palestinian civilian feels more relatable and his hardships therefore like more of a concern, because he's a fellow adult and I also think I've interacted more with Palestinians than children in the last 5 years.
(Have you ever used vi, the text editor? Did the "Help poor children in Uganda!" line on the startup screen make it past your mental spam filter? I would guess that for most people, it got filtered well before the current situation I am talking about set in. It's just that for us, all children might as well be poor children in Uganda.)
Constantly, god I love (neo)vi(m). Unintentional buttmoji possibly related...
Never made it past my filter, no. I didn't look into it, let alone donate. I thought it was a bit crass, but at least it was static text, pretty unobtrusive really.
I use it all the time too, and this is the first time I even saw it. Not because it didn't make past the filter, I just don't start it with no file to open.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You, your friends, and / or the people OP is criticizing, aren't being criticized for not doing anything about the issue, that's par for the course. As you noted, I haven't done anything to help starving African children, but when someone does bring them up, I don't think I ever said anything like "ho hum, it's complicated", or "starvation good, actually", and this is what is happening with the trans issue. "Not caring" does not explain those dynamics.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link