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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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White middle class people having one kid is morally irresponsible in the age of climate change and economic precarity, brown people having kids in a warzone is proof that we need to open our borders and wallets to alleviate human suffering. Liberals get squeamish at any suggestion that abortion be extended specifically to populations with current, let alone future, suboptimal life outcomes. Any suggestion that abortions be subsidized for poor (brown) people or for mentally ill is met with cries of racism, and that instead their choice to carry a crack baby to term should be supported now and forever with more social welfare.

Ultimately it is pretty easy to drill down the opposition to (current thing) purely on the grounds of 'the people I hate love it'. To be fair, the right is super guilty of this too. White supremacists (larpers or not) get tied in knots when informed that abortion rights means you get less black or brown criminals ala Piketty, and there are exceedingly few white babies being aborted these days. White girls use contraceptives and aren't afraid to request condoms, black girls use their (shitty) math skills.

It's perfectly consistent to think that people should have fewer children but that they should be looked after once they're born.

Actual population control efforts in the real world are mostly targeted at third worlders.

There was plenty of drunken campfire agonizing about the morality of neocolonial imposition of western values on local populations back in the mid 2000s already, and the rhetoric has gotten worse since. Between theological opposition to population control and liberal white guilt, population control is very much not in vogue any more. My own thoughts are that externally encouraged population control schemes have never succeeded but that goes too deep into anecdata.

My only nitpick is that you seem to be assuming that there's an overlap between racists and social conservatives. I doubt that is, or even was the case.

Yes there is. Old not-terribly online people.

I assume you mean Boomers? Because I doubt there was ever significant racism present among them.