Tree
10d ago
That only works if the right-wing barbarian agrees that there is any value left in those institutions. I’m not sure modern anthropology departments or modern hollywood clear that bar.
Empty museums are depressing. Close most of them, sell all the old coins, keep the mona lisa. If the people then clamor for more museums, just buy the stuff back. And if these so-called ‘public goods’ are only enjoyed by the rich, , like opera, let them pay. The rich and cultured get a perverse kick out of having the poor pay for the very class markers used to exclude them.
Tree
25d ago
Because it destabilizes any society in which it takes root.
The problem with assertion such as these is that modern society is really its own extraordinary thing. From his food to his health to his habits to his reproduction, man is unlike other animals, and modern man is unlike other men.
Male violence is centered on three things; money (or money producing commodities; drugs), social esteem (or "respect"), and intimate partner exclusivity.
Is this an established theory, or did you come up with that yourself? Either way, my objections are:
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assumes some rational reason for violence, when there are better ways to get money, respect, intimate partners. In modern society, the only people using interpersonal violence have low self control.
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It’s missing raw hatred of the other guy as motivation
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those are valid reasons for female killers as well
Adultery ought not be criminalized (and, on the other side of the coin, both divorce and marriage ought not have any financial incentive tied to them), but rampant promiscuity and adultery still ought to face social consequences because that simply means the society in which they occur is aware of the high stakes of promiscuity / adultery's likely outcomes.
This position of ‘no criminal, only social repercussions’, looks like an incoherent compromise to me. You don’t have the heart to beat your daughter and flog her suitors, so you unload the burden of your repressive sexual project onto society. The passive voice will do your dirty work, shunning perhaps. It’s like the woke saying ‘freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences’ – who will administer the consequences, exactly? If it’s you, and it surely won’t be me, then it’s not society.
Tree
25d ago
I don’t see why the default for promiscuity should be to forbid it rather than allow it. It is a strange kind of ‘control’ that leaves the decision to the ‘controlled’.
Tree
1mo ago
That's bullshit, Dean. You're always long-winded even when you have little to say. They would have taken east germany and showered it with money regardless of the the retirement benefits situation. East germany was full of pensioners anyway, so there was no relative gain to be had from the cheapness of the rest of the labor force. In your theory, east germany is both a cost and a profit, depending on what your theory needs it to be.
You weave these elaborate causal chains which bear no relation to reality. People never believe stuff, they 'have to' believe it, because random cause X is the true cause.
I disagree. They believed in neoliberalism, they believed in the productivity of syrian refugees, they believed that debt is a bad thing. Their opinions, like mine and yours and even the german people's, matter. When they're right, good things tend to happen, when they're wrong, the opposite.
Tree
1mo ago
You’re a pretty knowledgeable guy, Dean. But the problem is, the more one knows, the more spurious relationships one’s brain can come up with. There’s really nothing linking german elites’ mistaken evaluation of islamic third-worlders’ productivity, to the debt ceiling, to german unification. They could easily have rejected any one of those, and keep the others. Those are all independent events.
Tree
1mo ago
It's a simple question for me because bringing more life into the world is an unalloyed good, and I fail to see the negative in this situation (aside from vague religious and personal feelings). But overall it’s a complex issue. Not the place for blind moralism.
Tree
1mo ago
I'm not saying those are core claims, just what garden-variety conservatives frequently say at the dinner table. I don't consider anecdotes like justawoman's to be refutations of serious conservative thought. But they are not "trolling".
It is astonishing how people who truly, deeply live the principles of their faith come across as intensely normal, pleasant, and happy people.
I'm trying to avoid debating the entirety of conservatism, but that's obviously a No True Christian fallacy.
Other ideologies have their own idealizations of an imagined past or an imagined future, of course. And simplistic stuff they say at the dinner table.
Tree
1mo ago
It’s a legit point. The conservative project relies on an idyllic view of the past and of conservative families, which can be hard to maintain when you’ve seen it from the inside. My grandparents ‘s generation were all very religious, and so it was common for spouses to hate each other all their life.
Plus, a lot of straightforward claims conservatives make like ‘all mothers love their children’, ‘all men feel the need to protect women and children’, ‘all people have a god-shaped hole’, etc, can be refuted through a single anecdote.
Tree
1mo ago
I do agree that the end can justify the means in certain cases. But here, the argument that these means, based on voluntary exchanges, are morally wrong, has not been sufficiently defended. I'm not arguing for rape-and-kidnapping-based natalism.
Tree
1mo ago
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You must have a low threshold for what you consider ‘deep, deep evil’. Most people probably don’t realise all the ways in which they’re ‘profaning’ your preferred norms on “Sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and the relationship between a mother and her child ”. Is almost everyone deeply deeply evil then?
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Wrong comparison. I don’t consider surrogacy as an alternative to normal child-bearing, but to normal non-child-bearing. A surrogate child is not pulled from the set of normal comfortable children and thrown into an orphanage, he's pulled from the aether. He's thankful he even has a mouth to eat old bread with.
Do you have scientific evidence for your position? And if the available evidence was against you, what about the ‘ancient and holy ways’? It would be a waste to debate this if it was never your true objection.
Tree
1mo ago
is it moral to buy children, or is it not?
Of course it is. It's immoral and selfish to deny them life. Do you accept this consequence of your stance?
What is your actual justification? A vague appeal to sacredness("not a business practice.")? Personal feelings of disgust ("I cannot adequately express how vile I find this practice.")? "Objectification"? Forced acceptance that life sucks ("That’s just the way it is.")?
Tree
1mo ago
The question is simple: do you want people to exist, or not to exist? The bond between mother and child is a sacred thing yada yada, the problem is, modern mothers, left to their own devices, don’t have any. No bond, no child, and no mother. And that’s a sadder outcome than some blemish on your idealized view of motherhood.
Kids are resilient. You can just pump them out, hand them over to some strangers or an institution, and they’ll turn out fine. Well, they’ll complain in adolescence, but they’d do that anyway. Even life under suboptimal starting conditions is still well worth living.
Tree
1mo ago
The former. Of course there's always a status element in the background, but in the spirit of collaborative discussion, it should be ignored. Pretend I'm not a person, just a collection of positions, and I will do the same for you.
Tree
1mo ago
I didn’t say that. Also don’t simultaneously doubt my word on what studies say and preemptively dismiss them. You have insulated your position from evidence. You are hostile even though our object-level positions aren't far apart. Your comments are terrible and you should feel bad.
Tree
1mo ago
I just presented the statistics, I even said I am sympathetic to the 'henpecked husband' trope. I need more than your naked assertion of governmental lying to dismiss studies, even and especially those I would like to dismiss.
Tree
1mo ago
It's negative. The happiest group is married with children, the unhappiest unmarried with children. Also known as "the people who have their shit together" and "the people who don't have their shit together".
Anyway, because of this, the correlation between marriage and happiness is way stronger than between children and happiness. So if I'm conflating two things, it's not to the advantage of your 'shrieking harpy' argument.
Tree
1mo ago
What do you say to all the studies which find correlation between marriage/children and reported happiness?
Full disclosure: I sometimes argue against them, eg by pointing out that happy people are more likely to get married. But from an opposite perspective to yours: I think men in traditional marriage are, not oppressed, exactly, but too often treated like beasts of burden, expected to do unpleasant work and provide money to women and children, without a right to expect anything in return.
Tree
1mo ago
What is surprising about that chart? What did you expect? Obviously the transfers benefitting the poor come from the rich. People have been voting for this for the last century, and will keep voting for it. The state's share of the economy will keep growing, first to european levels, then beyond. And it doesn't matter to people how rich in absolute terms "the poor" are, or how much wealth gets destroyed in the process. I find the impulse difficult to understand, perhaps an extreme rawlsian risk aversion (like an insurance against relative poverty) coupled with the egalitarian ideal of equal social status leading to a demand of equal income.
Tree
1mo ago
Not to mention it’s extremely stressful and labor-intensive on the parents. And given that the evidence on the kid’s future well-being is inconclusive, that is the main thing.
They’re doing liberalism wrong. Liberalism is rooted in a profound lazyness. ‘laissez faire’, let [things] do, let it be. It’s like old hippies ‘free range’ education, not this micromanaging shit.
Tree
1mo ago
Am I more likely to make sexual misconduct accusations at any given level of sexual pestiness?
Of course. Unlike other women, you are aware of the patriarchy and rape culture and the myriad ways in which they threaten and coerce and pressure and nudge an entire sex into sex. Is it surprising that a strong perceptive woman unafraid to stand up for herself would run afoul of the meek sexual object role the patriarchy assigned to her?
Tree
1mo ago
The last big decriminalization push was in the 80’s, so I presume you’re old. You’ve monitored your male friendships for intimacy and noticed a statistically significant change, based on a cutoff point like this, bearing in mind that friendships in later life are often less intense?
Excuse my skepticism. It’s just that until a few years ago, no one had heard of this theory, and now it’s seemingly so obvious it has seeped into people’s bones.
To me this argument looks like a recent product of cross-pollination between anti-woke strands, in this case manosphere + trad. Until the 2010s, imo it would have been shameful and somewhat ‘gay’ to even care about male intimacy. By that I don’t mean to say that the argument is wrong, just that it was not and still is not obvious .
I don't want to lead them on any more than I would want to lead on a female friend.
The true analogy would be leading on, a gay friend. There is no ‘leading on’ a straight man.
Tree
1mo ago
Also no. I'm sorry, what are you guys feeling in your bones? That pride parades have fundamentally changed how you relate to other heterosexual men?
Tree
1mo ago
Not to be all atheist, but one of the things I find most discrediting to the Church’s claim of providing moral guidance was its shameful compromising with hitler. Even though it was clear to church leaders that nazism was both generally evil, and opposed to the power of the church as such. Unlike the german people, who were more bribed than threatened into compliance with the regime (so can be said to be morally corrupted, and complicit), the church’s behaviour reflects pure moral cowardice.
Don’t brag about blocking people, it’s a shameful thing. Then you can spare us the excruciating story on how you had to remove your own barriers.
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