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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   36939 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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Yes, but whoever Trump picks next will be attacked just as harshly as Vance. Remember what happened to Kavanaugh. All the media needs is one person claiming personal knowledge that the nominee did or said something bad.

The fact that the main attack on Vance is a blatant and total fabrication probably suggests that it's difficult to make a genuine attack land. You don't go around making up stories about the guy having sex with a couch if there's a reality-based smear available that will stick.

Is couch fucking really the main attack? The main attacks I've seen are:

  1. He dislikes the childless

  2. He wants to ban abortion in (nearly) all cases

  3. He is against gay marriage

None of which are fabrications. Obviously on Twitter people are going to talk about couch fucking because it's funny, but that's not the angle the media is (mostly) going to take.

Is it true he disliked the childless? He noted in the speech where this came out of that many people have unique situations or medical issues etc.

Instead, he seemed to be reacting to a spirit of anti natalism that seems real and bad.

He has proposed the idea of allowing parents to vote their children's votes until age 18 in order to enhance the voice of parents at the expense of the childless. He has also proposed increasing taxes on the childless, though functionally this is no different from the popular Democratic childcare tax credits. Which, inasmuch as the childless represent a cohesive class interest, amounts to dislike.

That’s one way of framing it. Another way is that a family of four with two adults gets the exact same voice as a family of two with two adults. Maybe the default is wrong as it shrinks the voice of larger families. Maybe the family of four should have a larger voice relative to the family of two.

That could be seen as righting a wrong instead of harming the childless. Perspective matters.

Also if you think kids are on net a good maybe you want to try to raise the status of families. Giving them more of a vote would make politicians cater more to families raising the status of families.

These are all arguments for why this would be a good policy choice. They are irrelevant to the question: would these policies weaken the power and reduce the resources of the childless considered as a class?

Just as "We should have more black people here" is quite obviously a statement of at least relative reduction of the white people that are here already, "we should give more power to the child-rearing" involves taking power away from the childless. This is the closest we get to a true political statement of dislike.

I don't think the policy is bad, or necessarily very partisan-impactful, provided that the various details are resolved in a way that isn't an obvious power grab. How are the votes of the children of divorce assigned? Can a non-citizen vote for their citizen child in cases of immigrants with birthright-citizen children? What about a widowed non-citizen voting the interests of her citizen children with an American father? Can parents who are incompetent to vote by reason of felony convictions or other disqualification still vote for their children? What do we do with parents who are domiciled in a different location from their minor children? The devil is in the details, and the resulting decades of lawfare over the details, but it isn't inherently a bad policy.

My point is that it is framing. Just like a child tax credit is functionally the same as saying childless pay more taxes. No difference.

Close enough to count, imo, and I say that despite being sympathetic to his point of view.

I saw the full context somewhere but now I am totally unable to find it.

The antinatalism stuff is, as far as I can tell, how he's trying to spin those comments now. The original sentiment was clearly "these people without children don't have a stake in our future" or something like that. Maybe you could even argue that just because he thinks they don't have a stake doesn't mean he dislikes them, but that also seems weak.

I think you can read it akin to in democrat culture there is an anti natalist streak. These people are an example of that (ie it isn’t a coincidence that a lot of their leaders don’t have kids). That streak is bad and we don’t really want those kind of leaders as they raise the status of being child free / won’t be as child motivated. That seems…right to me. It isn’t good to have so child free leaders. Babies are great—we should be having more kids. My wife and I are doing our part!

As an aside, it is gross how hard it is to find transcripts to give full context. All you can find are media reports that quote X but don’t provide links for the transcript. Just another example of bad journalism and Google being awful.

It's not the full interview but you can see a longer clip here.

I think your interpretation is pretty much correct. He's saying "people like Kamala Harris are miserable because they don't have kids and want to inflict their misery on the rest of us."

Here's an article someone posted elsewhere: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c147yn4xxx4o

On Friday, Mr Vance said: “I wish her step-children and Kamala Harris and her whole family the very best. The point is not that she’s lesser. The point is that her party has pursued a set of policies that are profoundly anti-child.” Mr Vance made similar remarks against Democrats in a 2021 speech at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, in which he also said his criticism was not directed at those who could not have children for biological or medical reasons.

I don't have a strong opinion.

On the one hand, it is in the national interest to be more positive about children, and influence more people to have more children, since we're below replacement levels of fertility throughout the wealthy industrialized world. I would be interested to hear Vance's thoughts on ways the government can encourage more children, especially children in stable, working households.

On the other hand, calling female senators who didn't have children a "bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives" doesn't sound good. It sounds like something to say on an anonymous message board, or to your good guy friend in private, but maybe dress it up or change the subject in public spaces?

I would be interested to hear Vance's thoughts on ways the government can encourage more children, especially children in stable, working households.

He wants to give net taxpayers huge tax credits/refunds(there's very little difference between the two) for fertility.

Seems hard to fund.

Probably, but he's not a deficit hawk.

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On the other hand, calling female senators who didn't have children a "bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives" doesn't sound good.

He included Pete Buttigieg in that list also.

The internet says he's gay married with adopted kids? That's its own problem from a conservative perspective (and I'm personally in favor of prioritizing married man and wife couples for adoption, since there's a shortage of adoptable children, and "well off, but your dads are in the public eye all the time" isn't a clear win for a child), but doesn't seem like the same problem.

This was mentioned earlier (I think in this megathread), but the Vance interview clip was from a couple of months before Pete Buttigieg finalized the first adoption.

So what they say about any generic Republican?

I mean this time they are actually probably true, but the people it would be aimed at have the nerve burned out already.

The "childless" thing is not really a generic Republican attack point.

the people it would be aimed at have the nerve burned out already.

I can't say that Vance is particularly well received by anyone, so I'm not so sure. Democrats don't like him for the above reasons. Trumpists don't like him because he compared Trump to Hitler/Nixon or is a vc stooge. And so on. I'm sure that you can find rationalizations by the right for why he's actually /ourguy/ but I can't say I've seen anyone really like him.

I kinda-sorta like him. He's clearly a guy with a brain who isn't all style over substance, so that's a pretty good start. I don't think his values exactly match mine, but he's probably closer than most.

The Ross Douthat crowd likes him.

What do you think is the base rate of dudes in Vance's demographic having ever fucked a couch? I suspect it is a lot higher than you would expect.

I'd put the base rate of men with a weird masturbation story at 100%. Some will admit it, some won't. It's a fundamentally silly attack.

Well now I'm just wondering what you would expect me to expect and what sort of experiences have led you to think that expected number is wrong.

My guess is that pretty large subset of men have done something weird with their dicks at some point (depending on what counts as weird I guess), but any specific guy is unlikely to have done a specific weird thing.

pretty large subset of men have done something weird with their dicks at some point

I made a graph to illustrate this subset as a percentage.

It is a function that asymptotically approaches 100.

Wait what is the x axis here?

Percentage horniness felt by a young man. Or age across childhood starting just before puberty to adulthood.

I really made this up, so it is open for interpretation.

Time I would expect.

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