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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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I feel the urge to nitpick(although mostly because I've met people who insisted that their tamed raccoons and bobcats make excellent pets. I recall these animals giving no evidence to the contrary, although I didn't interact with them extensively. Well, except for one of the bobcats. It was a while ago) before getting to my substantive contribution. I'll clearly mark where the nitpicking ends so you can skip there if you so desire.

The most comparable datapoint to domesticating raccoons is the Russian fox domestication experiment, which was able to produce individual domesticated foxes much faster than fifty generations-

The least domesticated foxes, those that flee from experimenters or bite when stroked or handled, are assigned to Class III. Foxes in Class II let themselves be petted and handled but show no emotionally friendly response to experimenters. Foxes in Class I are friendly toward experimenters, wagging their tails and whining. In the sixth generation bred for tameness we had to add an even higher-scoring category. Members of Class IE, the "domesticated elite", are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs. They start displaying this kind of behavior before they are one month old. By the tenth generation, 18 percent of fox pups were elite; by the 20th, the figure had reached 35 percent. Today elite foxes make up 70 to 80 percent of our experimentally selected population.[1]:{{{3}}}

And

No game of tennis ever resulted in a helpless human being squalling in my arms.

I think his point about technology was talking mostly about this part. Obviously birth control isn't perfectly effective, but high conscientiousness adults(which you'll notice is not a universal category) can get it pretty close.

Nitpicking ends here

You're totally correct about hardware/software- I almost suspect you've derived natural law from first principles. And obviously you can't selectively breed humans to not have the emotional consequences from sex; the need to pair bond is extremely strong and I'm wondering how that case of selective breeding would even work(just take the children of single mothers for generations?) assuming you can get it past an ethics committee. One does not have to look very hard to find people emotionally damaged by attempting to have casual sex, and acting out in terrible ways because of it. I think @BurdensomeCount, who certainly does not have an overly religious-influenced morality, has a lengthy effortpost somewhere about how most people should not be having casual sex because all they do is hurt people, in the first place themselves. And certainly as a society we shouldn't be setting norms about sexual behavior based on maximum freedom for a small minority of the population, but rather based on the good for the much larger majority. This is because norms, by definition, are not the actions of an atomized individual, they're aiming at setting the behavior for an entire society.

And, although I obviously can't prove this, I suspect that the norm of casual sex is poisonous for honest attempts to bond; it makes women paranoid and reactive, dispirits men and makes them think they need to constantly escalate, and at the end of the day, everyone's worse off. Zoomers are, to use your term, dabbling- fiddling with themselves and trying to bond with a screen, desperately unhappy at how hard it is to find a partner, reflexively raising expectations to cope with the obvious possibility for disappointment.

I'll caveat that the Russian Fox domestication is somewhat controversial when it comes to exact numbers -- there's a plausible argument that the source stock had been partially domestically, if under weaker and unintentional pressures, since they were previously used for furs, and some of the traits showed up before the official domestication project -- though my gut check's that it's probably closer to real than not.

I think the historical (and... Certain Current Subculture) case for an unavoidable 'natural law' pair-bonding behavior is less clear than people would expect, though my personal and closely observed experience tends to be more in the M/M spaces such that I'm a little hesitant to generalize. But even for the hets, that (for almost the last hundred years) almost all of your visible population will also spend an unrivaled amount of time with their sexual partners is a big confounder.