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 -
People only commit crimes due to poverty when they are truly desperate. A person who has no food may steal, even if they are a mentally sound and moral person.
People who commit crimes in welfare states are criminals either because of mental issues such as low Iq, low impulse control and psychopathy, or they want status. The young man who gets into a violent fit of rage and stabs someone when someone cut in front of a line at a night club isn't going to be less violent with more money. The factor that is commonly ignored is social status. A young man with no money, who lives in a ghetto, has poor academic results, has never travelled and doesn't have the looks for instagram is going to be the ultimate low status loser. Imagine using tinder as a cleaner, living with three friends in a dumpy apartment on the wrong side of town. In Sweden, members of this class often have the added disadvantage of being immigrants from countries with an average height well below the average height in Sweden and speaking subpar Swedish. If that guy becomes a gangster, he is a somebody. People will respect him, women will like him, and he will walk past the bouncers who used to reject him.
The welfare state can never give people status. They can give food and some basic entertainment, but it will never make people happy or satisfied. It reduces underclass men to being rescue dogs and ersatz children for middle class girls with sociology degrees. That might be enough for someone who was recently freezing to death on the streets, but it isn't going to satisfy a 24-year-old pizza delivery man.
Or out of opportunity. lenient sentences creates an incentive to commit crime, too.
The expectation of not being caught is the key incentive, not the lenient sentence if you are caught (at least with sentencing policies within the Overton window). A night in the cells is enough to make shoplifting not worth it if you expect to get caught.
maybe for a 14-year-old who stole on an impulse. for a career criminals, i am sure a long sentence is way worse than a night in the cell.
Most career criminals have the mental capabilities of 14 year olds.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's more complicated than that. Otherwise the solution would be to mandate the death penalty for every crime out there.
there is a middle ground between do nothing and the death penalty though
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The welfare state can never give people status, but it can reduce the status of low skill men who are more inclined to be providers and caregivers. Without the welfare state, lower class women have to make a trade-off between sexy bad boys and dependable good guys. With the welfare state, they don't.
Women always had the option of working to support themselves in lieu of getting married- and lower class women in most of history expected to both work(sometimes from home) and marry, social inequality and poverty are a hell of a drug. They just didn’t, pre-welfare state, have the option of becoming a single mom.
And I want to pause here- being a single mom is bad. It’s bad for the woman(although I suppose basing policy decisions on saving people from their own bad decisions isn’t great), it’s bad for the kid(s), it’s hard on the extended family and broader society. It actually is a major fault of the welfare state that the option of becoming a single mom becomes relatively more appealing.
To women, marriage itself is a sign of a high status woman. The welfare state only made it economically feasible to get by without a man, but the loss of cultural stigmatization was what legitimized single motherhood.
The revealed behavior by women seems to show that they prefer single motherhood over marrying below their station of at least, the station they believe they have.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If so, we'd be seeing more crimes in the advanced welfare states than in other states, which we aren't seeing.
Except the comparison point would have to be (welfare state with X GDP and Y demographics) vs (no welfare state with X GDP and Y demographics). Is there even a similar set of states we can compare? Given the impact of demographics and wealth on the type of state that the public builds, is it even possible to have one?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The liberation of women from the age-old dilemma of "marry this guy and have six of his kids or become a prostitute" is one of the greatest triumphs of human history, on par with the elimination of smallpox and possibly the invention of agriculture. Thank you industrial revolution and twentieth century social democracy.
Give it another century and I think the opposite will prove true. If social trends are any indication, the most liberated generation in history would tell me that OnlyFans and soft prostitution will always be their highest aspiration in life. Their words. Not mine.
The dichotomy you presented that's imposed on them by their biology, is just the unfortunate tragedy of being female. And it's even more unfortunate to accept that society can get along just fine without women's happiness or independence. It can't survive without mans participation. And those two things directly oppose each other on almost every point.
More options
Context Copy link
I agree it is one of the greatest triumphs of human history and we can thank the industrial revolution for that, but you don't need social democracy for it, even in modern day China women can freely not marry or become a prostitute but be extremely successful.
There's also a large amount of sex trafficking in places like Seattle and San Francisco, supposed bastions of liberal democracy.
I wonder which country has a higher percentage of women being forced into prostitution - China or the United States?
My guess would be the United States but low confidence.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Such a dilemma never existed. There's a reason that 'spinster' is a word used in English to describe a single woman. It's how they very often supported themselves. If we take England in 1377 as an example, a full third of adult women were single, and 10-20% never married at all. The idea that the only options were marriage or prostitution is a fantasy, formed (as far as I can tell) by people extrapolating the experience of the midcentury American housewife far off into the past and across the planet.
In 1300 AD, London had 18 brothels employing hundreds of prostitutes. These brothels were regulated, incredibly, by the Bishop of Winchester.
As the entire population of London was less 30,000 we can infer that perhaps 5-10% of the women in London at the time were prostitutes.
Prostitution was certainly a much more common career path during the Middle Ages. And life expectancy for prostitutes was very short. So I would say that, yes, many women were facing awful choices at the time. This shouldn't be surprising. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, Malthusian conditions applied more often than not. A large percentage of people, both men and women, did not get enough to eat.
...for the small minority of women who lived in London and/or other major cities. By far the most common occupation for both men and women would have been "small-scale subsistence farmer"
More options
Context Copy link
Actually almost 5 million! But it would crash to under 2 million by 1450 thanks to the Black Death and its many echoes. The ones who survived the plague enjoyed much higher quality of life as Malthusian constraints were lifted.
I think you're probably right. But what a revealing statement. Things were so bad that women who might have wanted to resort to prostitution couldn't because there weren't enough clients with means to pay!
It just shows that rich men were concentrated in cities, and their extra wealth was greater than the higher cost of living of the city.
What do you find revealing about this? Is the idea that there were huge wealth disparities in the past a revelation to you?
More options
Context Copy link
Isn’t this an (odd) interpretation of virtually any supply and demand curve? The only thing stopping me from stripping naked on public TV is that nobody is willing to pay me a billion dollars to do it.
We've already established what kind of person you are @you-get-an-upvote. Now we're just haggling over the price.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More like 5-7 million.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Reliable statistics from the medieval era are pretty non-existent but 10% actually seems to be about the rate at which women became prostitutes in the 19th century. It was quite common. Significantly higher than say, uptake on OnlyFans is today. You can also swap "prostitute" for "indigent." Nobody ever accused spinsters of living comfortably.
I've said it before and I'll say it again about this particular factoid - 10% of women or 10% of urban women? We are talking about societies which were 80-90% rural, and the brothels were in the towns - and mostly in the large towns and cities. So 5-10% of women in London per jeroboam (and presumably less in smaller towns) being prostitutes equals 1% or slightly less of all women being prostitutes.
10% of all women being prostitutes in the 19th century (where? it matters!) per To_Mandalay would mean that either 30% or more were prostitutes in the big cities, which I don't think anyone has suggested, or that there was a culture of prostitution even in village-sized communities.
Some people did actually. I was thinking not of London but of 19th century New York. According to this book estimates of the percentage of young women in NY who were prostitutes over the 19th century ranged from 1% all the way to 40%. The author says that 5 - 10% seems likely because the police tended to lowball their figures and reformist societies to overstate them. He also suggests that during economic downturns the number may have gone above 10%. Obviously the numbers are extremely uncertain because moralists had a motive to exaggerate them, and at the same time a lot of prostitution was part-time and freelance, and so slipped under the radar. What seems clear is that women being driven to prostitution out of economic desperation was many times more common than it is today.
I have no idea what prostitution looked like in village communities or to what extent it existed. In the 19th century medium-to-large towns and cities in the USA and Western Europe are pretty much the only places with anything resembling reliable statistics.
In modern times we still see that prostitutes tend to concentrate in cities and that rural men will travel to cities to use their services. So the percentage of prostitutes among the rural populace was likely far lower than in the city.
Everyone in this discussion seems to ignore the social issues with prostitutes in small communities, where people are much more aware of the behavior of people in the community than in the city.
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
And most developed countries now are below replacement fertility, great success!
Don't worry we will get the non-developed countries. Sub-Saharan Africa is the last holdout, but we're coming for them too.
Are you a misanthrope? An antinatalist?
No, but I don’t have “number (of humans) go up” as a terminal value. I think most people wouldn’t be thrilled about high or even replacement level fertility if all of those children being born were going to spend the their entire lives in conditions equivalent to a Soviet gulag or a Caribbean sugar plantation. That’s how I feel about high fertility in a context in which the children being born will spend their lives in societies like those which prevailed before the 20th century.
I don’t view falling fertility rates as good in and of themselves, simply as markers of things I DO view as good, such as female emancipation, wealth, literacy, the demolition of traditional clan-kinship structures, etc.
Declining population is bad for a society.
but if the rat utopia is any indication, it is also inevitable.
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
Unless you have a very wide definition of "welfare state", modern countries tend to be below that whether they are welfare states or not, and many of them first dipped below replacement in the interwar period already.
What countries wouldn't you consider as welfare states? For me, maybe China, I'm not 100% sure. US and European countries redistribute a fuckton of money for sure.
Singapore and Korea? They're not welfare states, are amongst the richest places on Earth, and have the lowest fertility in the world.
The problem is the middle road between patriarchy and equiality. Either don't give women access education and work, or equalize social expectations and have husbands to take an equal share of chores, housework, childcare, etc.
The middle ground puts too much stress on women, and pushes the most agentic out of the country.
In response to all the discussions below, I'd like to submit this Aporia piece on the Baby Boom:
…
…
…
…
…
…
…
I think the whole thing is worth a read for those debating here.
I read this a few days ago.
1 - The author's conclusion is "we need to make women poorer so they will be desperate enough to fuck and marry men they don't otherwise want to fuck and marry." This is a value judgment not an empirical statement, so I can't say it's incorrect as a matter of fact, but it's certainly an unappealing suggestion to me and everyone else who isn't already all-in on RETVRNING.
2 - The author says:
Regardless of pre-twentieth century infant mortality, people's behavior was still changing to result in fewer children being born, whether or not some of those children died before adulthood doesn't really matter. The point in the first half of the 20th century where people were having about three children and all of those children survived just seems to be the point where declining fertility rates intersected with advancing medical technology which allowed for near 100% childhood survival rates.
3 -
I was waiting for the author to mention this. He just handwaves the impact of this transition with "well there's affirmative action and feminist initiatives." He doesn't attempt any kind of analysis to quantify what kind of impact affirmative action and feminist initiatives have or have not actually had on women's earning power. That's unfortunate, because his thesis stands or falls on this. The question is whether the M:F income ratio would still have shrunken in the absence of such efforts, and to what extent. The transition from an industrial economy meant that, in developed countries, manual labor was less important than ever. Since upper-body strength is the single biggest advantage men hold over women, it would be quite shocking if the decreasing importance of jobs requiring upper body strength did not result in a narrowing of the M-F income gap. And if much or most of this narrowing would have taken place purely as a material consequence of this transition, then just getting rid of AA and feminism wouldn't actually have the desired effect, you would have to artificially restrict the labor market to LARP as if the economic foundation of the western world is the same as it was in 1950.
4 - One imperfect but perhaps useful way to test the "M-F income gap make fertility go up" thesis would be to compare across nations, and see if developed countries with larger income gaps in favor of men have higher fertility rates. Let's see what fertility rates look like in the OECD country with the largest income disparity between men and wome - oh no
One more nitpick:
It doesn't actually mean that. The manosphere loves these horror stories but alimony is awarded only in a minority of divorce cases, about 10%. Women tend to wind up significantly poorer after divorce, not richer.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Everyone knows the answer to this question and is always cognizantly, tiptoeing around the solution. There is no straddling a middle ground between achieving the objectives of equality and keeping to more natalist, patriarchal norms. Short of imposing an Afghanistan style, Islamic theocracy on women (the part everyone is too afraid to mention in public), you're not likely to see a resolution to this issue.
Financial incentives and social support aren't likely to offer a path to a solution either. The poorest societies in the world have the highest rates of fertility and childbirth. Ed Dutton wrote an interesting piece on this.
More options
Context Copy link
What country has gotten its fertility above replacement again by equalizing social expectations? Israel, Saudi, and Argentina are the developed countries which have had above replacement tfr recently and neither is especially feminist by developed world standards.
The whole idea that the problem is too much stress on women is risable anyway. Women have gotten more freedom while men have retained their duties and more has been demanded of them. Supermarket-tabloid feminist articles constantly complain that men don't do enough chores/housework/childcare, but never mention that married men still bring in a lot more money.
More options
Context Copy link
Sweden? The TFR was pushed up above 2.1 in the 80-90s after some reforms.
The swing up started too early to just be due to the boomers and our baby boom was kind of tiny.
There might be other explanations as well such as people who delayed childbirth finally got around to it (maybe due to better conditions?), which then didn't translate to sustained higher rates as the fertility then went down again.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The issue here is that the low status men aren't dependable, they are losers in every sense of the word, otherwise they wouldn't be low income. Getting a decent income (and keeping it) is piss easy and if you don't then there is something seriously wrong with you, and why would women want to date that? And even in this case you can easily get a mail-order bride, I know people who have. It's not hard and you don't need even a median income.
Moderately successful men on the spectrum with poor social skills that fail in the dating market is an entirely different issue.
This is ridiculous. The overwhelming majority of work that is done to maintain and perpetuate civilization, is done by men who are "low status," on the lower end of the middle class, marginalized and almost never get respected or acknowledged for the work they do. Unless you consider engineers, garbage men, clergy, abused IT workers, overworked nurses, underpaid professors, unpaid researchers (need I go on?) as not contributing to the upkeep of society, then this argument holds.
I think you've confused low status with being a 'deadbeat', the latter of which earn men a higher status with women in virtue of them being an 'outlaw' and disregarding society's rules. Which is part of the problem.
Sorry, I meant low income (and low status) men.
It followed from talking about 'underclass men' and then 'dependable men'. I only used low status once and then talked about low income.
I agree that much of society depends on the labour of low status men, but that isn't poorly compensated and these people aren't underclass. The criminals don't come from the economic middle/lower middle class or working class, they come from the underclass.
Well, my apologies then if I misunderstood. If that's how I was meant to understand you, then I agree with you.
Sorry for being unclear.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, yes. In a post-patriarchal welfare state, low-status, average midwit men are less likely to be dependable (i.e. eligible to become responsible husbands and fathers), because the incentives are meager. In a patriarchal society, they have every conceivable incentive to be so. Everything is interconnected, and incentives matter.
More options
Context Copy link
There are low status and low income men who aren't especially criminally inclined and are relatively more stable and dependable. There may be relatively fewer of them than historically, but they still exist. Welfare makes them less desirable, and on the margin incentivizes more short-term mating preferences and competition from everyone.
Have you actually interacted with these men at all? They are not dependable. At some point people become a negative value proposition for anyone that isn't desperate and it isn't the welfare state thats making women not desperate, its being able to work.
Yes I have. Have you?
I could tell any young woman coming of age in high school what her dating prospects should be, as far as finding a decent young man go, with a single datum. Let me see the suitors report cards and I can tell you which one probably has the better future ahead of him. You think that kid has a lower or higher 'status' than the football star who'll end up beating her and who's been a serial cheater from day 1?
Now tell me which one has more real 'value' to society?
Yes, half my family is working class or lower middle class. Some have fallen down to be underclass adjacent. I have also lived in underclass areas and worked jobs with the underclass.
Compared to what? The intermittent pizza delivery or Uber driver? The guy that has issues holding down a job as a hospice care giver? The guy occasionally cleaning subway cars at night? The part time gas station attendant? Almost all of them drug users and video game addicts? This is the underclass, not the construction workers or guys employed in the manufacturing industry. Those guys don't end up single or criminal either by the way, they're doing fine.
The football star that beats her might very well be the better option. And what's to say the other guys dont beat their spouses as well?
Neither of the groups have any value at present but one at least did something at some point in his life. There is some capacity there that might transfer to a kid.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, frequently. I live embedded in a very poor region of the deep south. In fact, by the standards of most people here, I am a poor lower class blue collar guy.
If you're in a poor part of the US, it seems like a complication in the trend that American welfare laws effectively pay poor women not to get married.
What?
The US welfare system is most generous for single mothers to the point of effectively incentivizing poor women to do their childbearing out of wedlock. It’s called the marriage penalty.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link