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.
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.
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.
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.
London was a pretty huge outlier in a lot of ways though. You probably had what, 2-3 million people in England? And there were only a handful of cities with London being the biggest by far. Nowhere else would have even close to that concentration of people who had enough money to hire a prostitute.
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!
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 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