WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
If she is getting married, becoming pregnant, and having kids — things that are necessary for both the health of society and the self-actualization of the woman —
You have here smuggled in a massive, unjustified assumption on which your overall construct needn't rest. Certainly a number of women find it fulfilling to have children - as, indeed, do many men - but it's hardly all of them. There is at the very least no reason, by your logic, why confirmed lesbians and asexuals couldn't be allowed to serve. And even among the majority who would find motherhood fulfilling, I would guess that there are significant numbers who could also find happiness in many other ways, i.e. motherhood is for them a possible path to self-actualization but not "necessary", as you claimed. I don't doubt that if a society tried to conscript all its young women to war, it would do a great disservice to a majority of them by depriving them of the chance to bear children. But you cannot flip this and conclude that anything which directs any woman away from child-rearing is doing her personal self-actualization a disservice.
This leaves "necessary for the health of society", of course; and I think that's what you actually have strong views about. Perfectly fair. But if the argument is "society needs a majority of women to tough it out and pop out babies, never mind what else they'd like to do; we need baby-makers just as we need farmers and beat cops and trash collectors, we can't wish it away, and unfortunately this is one hard manual job that only those citizens who were born with wombs can do", then let's not pretend that women's self-actualization enters into it; that's just lipstick on a pig, a just-so story to help the medicine go down.
If that's where you stand, better to bite the bullet that yes, motherhood might be a suboptimal way for many women to spend their lives, but society must nevertheless ask it of them as a sacrifice for the greater good of all. This needn't mean a dystopian portrayal of parenthood as some emotionless carnal duty - you can and should still talk about the ways it can be fulfilling and joyful - it just means cutting the bullshit about genders' supposed deep pseudo-spiritual purposes in life, and talking simple good sense about the practicalities of life.
To be sure, no society could survive if it told its citizens that they need only grow crops or collect trash bins if they feel it would add to their happiness, in the way that we tell women that they should only have kids if they really really want to. But contrariwise no society has ever tried to seriously gaslight its farmers and bin men into believing that their very bodies cry out for back-breaking work from dawn to dusk and they'll never be truly happy unless they work those specific jobs. They're just recognized as… hard jobs that need doing, and we pay people to incentivize them to perform those jobs, and while we're at it, sure, we tell the people to find what happiness they can in performing them capably and dutifully. But maybe at the end of the day you'd still rather write poetry all day or go on globe-trotting adventures, and society still has to shrug and say "well, ya can't. hopefully one day when we have better robots." I say the same applies to pregnancy.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Those who say life is worth living at any price have already written for themselves an epitaph of infamy, for there is no cause and no person they will not betray to stay alive. (…) But that is not the general thought of the Western world today. Safety uber alles, and the state to make sure it is "unsafe" in a large way to violate that in a big way.
I would dispute that state-mandated safetyism should be construed as a craven commitment to self-preservation. Not for nothing is it called the nanny-state - it is an essentially altruistic impulse, or to pick a more negative word, it's patronizing in the truest sense. The bureaucrats who make the rules and the lobbyists who campaign for them are not thinking of their own lives - they're getting high on the belief that they are saving other people's lives, the lives of the poor, stupid, reckless children called human beings, who cannot be trusted to seek what's good for them.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Well, now, I wouldn't go so far as to say that I saw no "aw, making sure to put your helmet first, are we? what are you, a baby?" grandstanding from wannabe-toughies. "It's dorky to wear a helmet" is not an alien sentiment to me. What I objected to was the idea that it is a truth universally acknowledged that bicycle helmets, as a piece of gear, look dorky. An oversized one painted in bright primary colors, such as a worrywart mother might give to a nine-year-old - sure, that looks a bit dorky. But a sleek pro-type one, I just don't see it.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Contrarianism is the whole point of unbuckled driving; I don't think it's the whole point of unsanctioned playground maintenance. Therefore I object to them being listed as examples of the same phenomenon. I'm not even knocking the joys of contrarianism! But it's more of a niche pleasure, and many people can and should see the appeal of the playground thing even though they have no interest in contrarianism-for-contrarianism's-sake.
Taking back agency in a practical, goal-oriented sense is, IMO, not the same conversation as letting yourself be contrary for the hell of it now and again - and while both are valid causes, the former is more societally important (while fortunately also being an easier sell).
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
The idea that bike helmets look "dorky" is very alien to my lifelong sensibility on this point. They look sporty. Professional competitive bikers on television have them - they're part of the same aesthetic as football helmets or hockey masks, they have a kind of paramilitary-looking toughness about them. I will grant @4bpp the point that they are cumbersome, though.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Midnight playground maintenance has an actual purpose. It's agency for something. Unbuckled driving or helmetless biking achieves nothing (unless you're in the autism-adjacent minority who find the sensation of having to wear seatbelts and helmets actively torturous, I guess). It's just contrarianism.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
My null hypothesis was that the people in charge of making that decision didn't really think Kamala would win, and decided holding one last ace up their sleeve in reserve was better than blowing everything they had on a losing battle, and being totally powerless once Trump inevitably took office.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
Broadening the scope, it's uncontroversial to believe that some medications work, some medications don't really work, and some work but have unacceptable side-effects. I don't see why vaccines have to be any different.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
Bringing women who want tit jobs or whatever along for the ride is just a sop you're willing to throw in.
It isn't. I am a genuine transhumanist and I do in fact support transgender people as a special case of my broader principle of supporting people's desire to alter themselves however they damn well want.
and since those can't possibly exist
Sure they can. But if we decide that they do and we should just have very small government, then there's not much point in talking about the politics of gender transition on its own merits. I have strong opinions on "if there are charitable government subsidies for various things, should gender transition be one of those things" but I have neither expertise on, nor particular desire to discuss, the viability of that "if". It is, quite literally, a different question.
I take the point re: the general swampy Moloch-spiral of any new government scheme - but that's a fully general argument against introducing new forms of government spending, orthogonal to the innate value of the proposal. A conversation on government bloat qua government bloat is not really the conversation I was looking to have; the policy was meant as more of a "here's how I think a sensibly run state would do it" deal than an electoral suggestion.
I'm not sure how in practice your pitch appeals to those who are net taxpayers and think that transness is an unfortunate delusion.
Well, that's where the one-size-fits-all nature of the policy comes in. As discussed in the tangent with FttG, I'd be happy expanding the scope of the policy such that it encompasses subsidies for forms of self-improvement that Red Tribers might be interested in just as well as pro-trans progressives, such as gym memberships. Besides, in the mid-to-long term, I expect genuinely attractive self-mod options not related to gender to become more and more available and popular; one (wo)man's sex surgery budget would be another man's cyborg-implant budget. Though again, I wasn't really thinking of it in terms of how to "sell" it to a partially hostile nation, just describing how I think a state populated by what I'd call reasonable people ought to do it.
I almost went on a tongue-in-cheek tangent about the fact that rationally, a random cisgender taxpayer can't be sure he or she won't have a gender epiphany in twenty years, and spending a few extra dollars in taxes on supporting the policy would therefore be insurance of sorts. I suppose that actually does raise the serious alternative option of introducing straight-up private-sector "trans insurance" separate from health insurance. Plausibly, enough affluent Blues would buy it as a virtue signal to meet demand, without touching the wallets of anyone who objects.
I don't love that option, because it bakes in gender exceptionalism, whereas an important part of my morpho-freedom-budget idea is that it would serve as a slow lead-in for broader societal acceptance of transhumanism (within which I hope and expect today's gender specific "trans movement" to ultimately dissolve). But it would probably work better than the healthcare kludge we have right now, and would presumably be more acceptable to gender-criticals, as they could keep on buying their health insurance without funding transitions.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
In what world does what I'm suggesting inconvenience non-trans people in any way? It's literally free money, distributed indiscriminately to all citizens.
(I guess you may be assuming that it would require a tax hike to implement, but I don't think so. I suspect it would pay for itself relative to the status quo by eliminating the need for a complicated diagnosis and insurance claim process; even if it doesn't, I would be very happy to reduce funding to some other over-bloated area of government to this end, while leaving overall budget the same. And in any event we aren't talking huge numbers. Counting $20k per person as a rough estimate, we're talking a maximum of what, seven billion dollars nationwide? That is a drop in the yearly Federal budget, and it would be a lifetime allocation, not yearly. Moreover a majority of people would never use their 20k, so a vast percentage of the money would be repossessed by the US gov at no loss.)
Rationalists tend to worry about x-risk and the very long-term survival of the human race. Thus, HBD-believing fertility-rates-concerned rationalists' thinking goes that lower IQs might be selected for and boost short-term reproductive fitness in the short term, while preventing us from solving AI alignment or colonizing Mars or any of that good stuff, and thus drastically reducing Homo sapiens's chances of long-term survival.
(Of course, this is assuming one only values survival of the species and nothing else, which is true of very few rationalists.)
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
But my gym membership costs me less than €40 a month, which according to ChatGPT is pretty typical: I find it hard to imagine the monetary expense is a leading factor in why so many people are sedentary.
Not as a rational cost-benefit thing, but I think a government subsidy could plausibly manipulate significant numbers into taking advantage of the opportunity, due to the human tendency to not want to "miss out" on a free lunch. Think of all the people who stuff themselves at buffets on free snacks they'd never touch if they had to pay for them, even for cheap. If people were told "you have [X] thousand dollars in the bank, they're yours, but they'll revert to the government unless you spend them on one of gym, hair-dyes, plastic surgery, etc." I think that would in fact increase demand for each of those items as people rush to get what's 'theirs'.
And I don't think it's fair to call my proposed policy "nonsensical" even as you grant that it might be net-positive and that you might like to take advantage of it yourself if it was on the table! Unorthodox, yes; implausible in the short term; but hardly nonsensical.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
My pitch regarding subsidies for transition is that every citizen should be entitled from birth to a finite "morphological freedom budget", calculated to cover gender reassignment plus detransition. A trans person can cash it in to transition (with just enough left over to detransition if they change their mind); an ordinary person can use the money on whatever other elective plastic surgery they want. But once you're out you're out, and further expenses are on you.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
That's not what Coil meant - he meant that the "policy outcome" of the existence of "a new sub-class of horrifically incompetent 30 year olds" will be increased immigration from India to fill their slots in the economy.
WandererintheWilderness
11d ago
My dating life has been an unbroken succession of disappointments because none of the women I've dated were comfortable with waiting for marriage to have sex - they wanted to fool around, and I did not.
Honest question: have you considered giving in on this point? If you'd potentially want to start a family with any woman you're dating, you must be reconciled to the idea of having sex with her at some point even if you genuinely lack the drive/desire. If it's a religious objection then, well, I'd have to know your religion, and you'd do better to talk to a priest; but AFAIK consummating a future marriage early doesn't tend to be looked on very harshly by mainstream Christian denominations even if it's not the ideal.
Of course, if you suspect that the women wouldn't have stuck around all the way to the altar either way, that's a different question. But taking your words at faith value, if your reluctance to have sex with potential fiancées is all that's keeping them away, I think you might be self-sabotaging your marital prospects here.
(And by the way, I'd also question your self-perception as "repulsive to women" if you can't be "a provider". Surely all the women you've dated wanting to have casual sex with you, and getting turned off when you confess you'd rather tie the knot first, clashes with the idea that no women find you physically attractive and your only hope of attracting a mate would be one who's after your bank account?)
WandererintheWilderness
11d ago
when it comes to the law enforcement response to
Think your sentence got cut off there.
do you have any kind of evidence that men and women are both equally interested in being financially supported by the other sex?
I think the reason men don't want to be financially supported by women is that they don't want to be dependent on women. This is wholly separate from the question of whether men would want a life of effortless luxury if it were presented to them with literally no strings attached, or with strings they'd find more acceptable to their pride.
I would certainly like a life of effortless luxury. This isn't to say I want to laze around on a sofa all day, but I would love the security of an unlimited bank account to fall back on while I got on with the activities I'm actually interested in, which I'll enjoy more if I'm not doing them for profit. (I love writing, teaching, public speaking, even acting - and all of them become more of a slog if my next meal depends on them than if I'm doing them for the fun of it.)
I'm not looking to marry some wealthy heiress to support me, but this is because I think such an option, even if it were especially available to me, would have a variety of hidden downsides, from ethical objections to deceiving someone into believing I love her for personal gain, to discomfort with the idea of dependency. The chief appeal of effortless financial independence would be the personal freedom it brings, and being on a wealthy wife's leash would cancel it out entirely.
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
I rather think that was the joke.
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
I don't know about that. A lot of the boats already sink just because they're floating pieces of trash. "There's a chance we'll sink and drown" is something immigrants are already pricing in when they take that leap of faith. Obviously there's some number of deliberate sinkings that would move the needle, but I don't think it's "a couple".
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
Because all else being equal they want to maximize the number of requested marriages implemented (both because that's what the citizens want, and because it will make administration easier later down the line). Therefore any one couple failing to get legal recognition of their union is lost value, even if it is sometimes an acceptable loss in the interest of preventing inbreeding.
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
I think this comes naturally out of the very sentence you quoted. Say Alice and Bob ask to get married: the legal clerk will look into their application and say "but hang on, it says here you're cousins. if you fuck each other, it could create inbred babies, which is bad. you're more likely to fuck if I accept your request than if I reject it. therefore, I should refuse", and then Bob will say "hold your horses, Padre, my balls got cut off years ago in a tragic fencing accident", and this eliminates the problem, causing the clerk to revert to the default policy of "they asked for a marriage therefore they should get one".
treating it as a "debate" to be "won"
I'll note that I'm not treating it as a debate to be won but as a debate whose shared purpose is to arrive at the truth.
But alright - humoring you: I don't, in fact, believe that marriage laws historically existed as social-engineering policies intended to encourage the creation of heterosexual families. As a broad simplification, I think that a critical mass of a given human population will be inclined to pair up into heterosexual households anyway, and the law eventually started keeping track of who's shacked up with who for a variety of administrative purposes (like settling inheritance disputes between a bereaved partner and the blood family of the deceased).
Only at a secondary stage did social engineers and moralizing busybodies realize that, once legal marriage became the norm, they could gatekeep it as a way to police who fucked whom and on what terms, whether based on their subjective ick-factors, or on their clever notions about the greater good of the nation. "By default any man/woman pair who ask for it can be legally married, but we will deny it to couples that could produce inbred children with defects in the hope that that'll make them give up on fucking one another at all" is a policy you get if you start from "everyone who's liable to shack up together in practice should get a rubber-stamped piece of paper regularizing that status", and only secondarily try to prevent unions that will be actively deleterious to society. I don't think it's a policy you get if you start from "we need to encourage fertile heterosexuals to shack up and make babies and raise them to adulthood" and come up with marriage licenses as an incentive, because if "number of fertile families" is your success metric rather than "number of people who'd have fucked anyway whose status is now regularized", it would be much cleaner to simply ban all potentially-inbreeding cousins from marrying than to carve out exceptions for infertile cousins.
(To be clear, I am making a kind of Rousseau or Thomas Hobbes "deriving the current state of affairs from a frictionless spherical state of nature" argument, not historical claims about a real sequence of events. This is only a model. But I think it's a model with greater explanatory power than "marriage was invented to boost demographics".)
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
Eh, I don't know. It depends on the religion and how they think of God, but if I believe that God exists and serving Him is important then it doesn't seem especially surprising for there to be more-or-less-meaningless rules which I am encouraged to follow as a demonstration of loyalty. Compare patriotism - it doesn't inherently matter what I do with a square bit of stripy cloth, but if I want to be a Good Citizen then I still shouldn't disrespect the Flag.
The unserious gotcha is that I am skeptical of this kind of "strong revealed preference" argument, because you might say the same about doing heroin.
More seriously, my assumption here is that there's a kind of… not sunk cost fallacy, exactly, but "at this point"-ism to it. Once you've had one child, that's it, you are A Parent, you're going to have that dangling responsibility for the rest of your life come hell or high water. So you may as well make the most of it and keep on in that direction; trying to suddenly about-face to a high-flying career in rocket science would bring only the disappointment of never making it as big as if you'd jumped straight in without having a kid first, while with one kid under your belt, you're well on your way to becoming a very successful homemaker.
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