This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I stopped worrying about potential dysgenic effects of boosting fertility among lower classes: if elite overproduction is a thing we should be worried about, low PMC fertility is a feature, not a bug.
One thing that's required is a massive propaganda campaign:
I say propaganda, but this doesn't have to be outright censorship, measures like the National Minimum Drinking Age Act can be used to goad companies into compliance.
The propaganda campaign must be supplemented with additional economic measures:
This is interesting because wealthy red tribe consumption(and let’s be real, there’s not a lot of liberals buying powerboats) is as much about showing off family formation as it is a replacement. The median lake house purchaser does so to convince his son-in-law to bring the grands around more often.
More options
Context Copy link
I have to wonder at the Venn diagram between 1) thinking TFR is a problem and 2) belief in the efficacy of diverse/inclusive/woke media. Not valence, efficacy. There can’t be many who think replacing the Black hobbits with pregnant ones would have made Rings of Power tolerable.
More generally, the policies you describe form a continuum. At the close end, we certainly could bully companies into producing some Very Special Episodes about resisting the urge to buy a boat. They’ll run directly into the cultural antibodies developed by every other time the government has tried something similar.
At the far end, Hollywood and friends could in theory adopt this wholesale, saturating the media environment. Make
vitalismbirtherismnatalism as universal as girl power. No, as ubiquitous as punching Nazis. Maybe that would have a chance of connecting with audiences. Except to reach that point, you already have to have won. Not just over the culture producers, but the consumers who pay for tickets and subscriptions. Such a media blitz isn’t the cause; it’s the effect.What is practical won’t be effective, and what might be effective is wildly impractical.
Efficacy for what? They were always justified with trying to increase tolerance / reduce ism, but they seem almost custom engineered to do the opposite, so how do we measure efficacy?
Then there's also the fact that bad propaganda also exists. Eastern commies were quite bad at it, for example, so they had to make up for the shortfall of hearts and minds with more conventional methods.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Oh really? Yet we must recognize that even though your policy is phrased in a gender-neutral fashion, the onus is of course going to end up on men (as the onus for everything always does) to organize that settling, even though the other gender is fighting them every step of the way. This type of tax is completely unfair unless you address that.
If you want to get Pigouvian, start charging women 50 bucks every time they want to for example post a picture of their ass online/send it to anyone who isn't their husband, among all of their other anti-familial and anti-civilizational behaviors, and then maybe you'll have at least the rudiments of moral license to tax men for not settling down under the notion that it is their lazy, selfish choice to be freewheeling libertines in a sea of good, wholesome women just waiting to adore them as loyal wives, as opposed to them understandably not wanting to pledge their lives and souls to voluntary pieces of the world's sexual leftovers, rampant social media exhibitionists, misandrist "feminists" who would need cult deprogramming-level interventions to have any chance of being even remotely good wives to men who aren't completely pushovers, unfeminine tattooed oddjobs, etc. (which means you're left in most cases with hundreds of men playing musical chairs with one winner, a situation in which it's hardly fair to tax all of the losers for failing to achieve the impossible of them all winning instead).
You'll still run into a big problem even if achieve success there though: generation vs generation. Perhaps with your new measures you restore a superior breed of valuable female who does not possess a morality (unfortunately so common in modern women) that only 5 decades or so prior would not have been considered superior to your average prostitute. A new generation of 18, 19, 20, and 21 year old girls arrives fresh on the marriage marketplace with a feminine value and virtue unthinkable a decade prior, ready to settle down and have kids as soon as as they are courted in a fashion their based fathers deem appropriate. No thotty Instagrams, tattoos, or excessive drinking here, just quality feminine human capital, good mothers waiting to happen.
Of course men their own age will want them, given that they stand to be taxed if they don't have one anyway. But also of course... so will the millions of men in their late 20s, early 30s, and even beyond who were left behind by the post-60s/70s (and especially post-90s) increasingly twisted feminine Tinder wasteland in which managing to find a good, reasonably marriageable woman, especially a Western woman, became more and more like finding a needle in a shitstack, a small spring in an endless desert. So again, musical chairs.
And what to do with the old, wretched breed of women that is used up and no good? This is millions of people we're talking about here. You cannot justifiably in any sort of good faith punish men for not wanting to "settle down" with a former college party favor any more than you could justifiably punish them for not agreeing to permanently staple a bag of dog feces to their forehead. The limit of public policy is where people would rather accept any punishment you can reasonably enforce than comply, and trying to force men to LARP a happy tradlife with former campus bicycles is definitely past that limit for a not insignificant number of men.
That is, there simply aren't enough women worth settling down with for all the men who want to settle down (as there haven't been for a long time), there can't be even if you fix the women because of older men, and therefore only decades of eugenics favoring female births to dramatically affect gender ratios would change this. (And without a basically totalitarian-level of masculine control over society (that is excruciatingly violent against any wannabe suffragettes or whatever, basically the Taliban and White Sharia), this would inevitably backfire as these women would then use their greater numbers to bring about an even more feminine triflefeels-pandering anti-society.)
I just don't get why you people never address this with your pontificating about singles taxes. The gender ratio of births is basically the same as it ever was, and yet modern culture has rendered anywhere from 70%-95% of Western women as totally unacceptable marriage partners. What do you expect men to do? Sure, the non-Western world offers somewhat of a relief valve here (as this policy's most prominent supporter yet JD Vance shows with his own exotic import wife), but we're rapidly exporting Western whore culture to them to the point that that well is soon to dry up too. How can you justifiably tax 100 men for not being able to snag one of five available slices of cake? Why not just have states issue limited edition golden licenses/IDs, enough for 1% of the population, and then tax people for not owning those too? Same principle.
Here's some modifications to these kinds of proposals that are absolutely necessary (without which they would be wholly immoral and invalid and should only deservedly lead to responses like this from aging men who had already been born into one of the worst time periods ever in human history to be a man seeking the traditional birthrights of all men and then had even more injustice from a sneering society blaming them for its own failure heaped upon them):
Men born during a reasonably defined wasteland period for finding a good, stable, marriage-material wife must be exempt from any singles tax forever. (This is the least society could do for them. Realistically they deserve straight-up reparations, but one step at a time.) The only exceptions will be men who have engaged in above a certain threshold of sexual promiscuity (perhaps we'll say more than five sex partners in 20 years, which is fairly generous), who will be deemed to have contributed to the problem and taxed considerably.
Age gap relationships will be monitored, and so long as younger women are going for the again many older guys left behind by the wasteland, the singles tax on young men will be pushed back to around 26 or so. (Or rather, to make it more general: no man will be singles-taxed in a situation where there are too few marriage material women marrying men in their demographic to go around. Men will be singles-taxed for their choice to remain single, not merely being the unfortunate victim of a mathematical reality.)
The promiscuous men mentioned above will be banned from courting, marrying, etc. the newer breed of superior, chaste female as an additional punishment for their behavior. Instead, they will be expected to take their wives from the older breed of damaged goods women that they created. They will be expected to take multiple wives too. Their breeding however will be restricted to avoid promulgating genes that induce promiscuity and immorality. (Many of these men are already married with children, and of course you're not going to break up their marriages and kill their kids, so this won't be a punishment for those.)
These are just a few small modifications I thought of off the top of my head though. Realistically, if you're going this far you might as well just institute a straight up anti-"feminist" reactionary reign of terror. Anything below that is probably a half-measure that won't actually accomplish much anyway.
Point is, you can't just demand people couple and reproduce by presuming to tax them for not doing so, any more than you can just demand a square peg fit into a round hole and think it'll have to fit eventually if you tax it enough. You have to address the tens if not hundreds of millions of women who have destroyed any reasonable marriage/reproductive value they might have once had and the millions of men who have thus been left without reasonable prospects. (After all, what's the point of having kids just to have kids if it's with a whore? To raise whore kids and make society's problems even worse? Part of the problem here is that birthrate fanatics don't seem to understand that a higher birthrate is not always better and therefore a declining birthrate is not always a problem, but often rather just a naturally homeostatic process regressing to a more reasonable mean, returning to the baseline its current surrounding conditions can comfortably support.) That would require nothing less than a complete transformation of society, and even then you'll still be undoing the damage of the previous regime for longer than the likely lifespans (assuming no longevity takeoff or whatever) of most of those men affected (unless maybe if you find a way to buy nice virgin 18 year olds from Asia by the millions).
Consequently, our present society (or even one that makes any sort of effort to return to sanity) is (or would be still) already walking a tightrope of hoping that porn and video games sedates so many men so much that they don't effectuate a collective realization (which so many of them have already come to, even if they aren't moving to implement it in its most literal form yet) that realistically the better option for most of them is to burn it all down and see what treasures might be found in the ashes (dignity, for one). (I mean I say they're not implementing it yet, but again that's only not literally, as they actually are, albeit indirectly: They're for the most part not openly literally burning down anything yet, but they are quiet quitting, lying flat, whatever you wanna call it, overindulging in the porn and video games (as it turns out, when you use drugs to pacify people, you get addicts) and leaving the working, leading, and innovating parts of life that strong societies have always needed men to take the lead on to the "strong powerful womyn" who they've been told are better than them anyway, which predictably has led to the "competence crisis", a heretofore unknown malady in the West's post-industrialization history. This may not burn anything down ever, but it is quite likely to leave it to rot.) Punishing them with an unfair singles tax that charges them for society's failures is unlikely to help this goal.
The only real quick fix I see for this issue is wonderfully truly feminine AI/robot waifus (which realistically at this point will come from China unless you get US government funding for a counterinitiative, introducing its own national security risk that will need to be dealt with) with artificial wombs capable of baring biological children. Introduce this technology, and I think you will very quickly find that it was not ever your average man who was the one standing in the way of family formulation. (This would definitely introduce some new issues with a generation of children where a large percentage of them have artificial mothers, and yet this would still be superior to the potential "motherhood" offered by ruined wasteland women, if not just for the fact that it would satisfy the basic necessary criterion of actually inducing men to make mothers out of these women, artificial or not, in the first place. After all, if men won't play ball, it's not going to happen no matter what. Whatever deficit in open rebellion modern man has developed he's more than made up for with an expertise in slacking and shirking what authorities insist is his "duty". See: Chinese coronavirus lockdown/masking/etc. policy)
#1, #2 and #4 are in most cases no particular permanent issue if the social context is handwaved (as it is in your hypothetical). The only legacies of sleeping around that both can't be fixed and are serious (lol herpes/cytomegalovirus; lol hep B if you're vaccinated) are HIV and pre-existing stepkids; paternity tests and prenups basically eliminate the cuckold risk assuming a friendly legal environment, and the vast majority of STDs are curable. Tattoos can usually be removed, and unless the "unfeminine" comes from literally being an ex-transman, it's generally either changeable or is genetic i.e. would have been there in the 50s.
I'm not really seeing the "ruined forever" here for the rest of those categories.
(With regard to #3, I will add that if they bear sons there's a clusterfuck waiting to happen.)
More options
Context Copy link
Okay, my answer to the problem you've outlined is: I don't care. The tax might be unfair towards incels, but both they and the veterans of cock carousel will both have to pay up, social security doesn't grow on trees. Some of them might even enjoy the findom aspect of this.
More options
Context Copy link
San Diego is right next to Mexico and might feel exotic to someone from Ohio, but is still an American city. I need more time to address the rest of your reply.
Ah, yes, San Diego, the traditional land of the Telugu Chilukuri clan.
Well, the traditional land of the hillbillies lies on the Anglo-Scottish border in this case.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Whew, this is a lot...There is also a precedent for it multiple times recent western history, from Jamestown to Australia, with my favorite being Parisian prisoners being offered freedom if they agreed to marry prostitutes and move to Louisiana. So yes we have punished men for not "stapling dogshit to their heads."
I also don't know if you went to college, but if you did you should know that most women aren't "bicycles", sure there were some, but that has always been the case.
The medieval church literally offered an indulgence for marrying a prostitute, as well.
Getting promiscuous women married even if that isn’t the preference of men has been a TPTB goal for forever.
More options
Context Copy link
An offer of freedom isn't a punishment. If you're going to offer men bounties for marrying flawed modern women, then yes that's a whole different story. If instead of taxing singles you want to offer more for married couples and see how low men are willing to go for the rewards, then that's their choice and I have no problem with it.
Obviously it depends on the college and the time period, but it's a fact that female promiscuity is a more prominent issue than ever before. Tinder isn't a wildly popular enterprise for no reason. The increasing amounts of (sometimes, increasingly less) softcore pornographization of themselves that women engage in on social media (and real life with their basic wardrobes) isn't without consequence. It's pretty obvious if you don't live in a willfully ignorant bubble.
I mean, forget any quibbling we could do over what constitutes a "bicycle": Any amount of past casual sex is too much for wife material, unless you are a cuckold, which I personally am not. Of course you might say, "This is the most fucked up time period for male-female relations perhaps in human history, and I will accept a bit of cuckoldry in exchange for not being alone forever.", and I won't judge you too harshly for that, but that's still the bargain if your wife has any sort of a casual sex history. You're trading cuckoldry for companionship.
Taxing and incentives are exactly the same. If you don't marry a prostitute and people who do are getting extra cash every month. This is just a tax with extra steps. The people that don't marry prostitutes have to stay in jail, now not for their original crime but for refusing to marry a prostitute. This is punishment for refusing the offer.
Big Red Pill/Black Pill energy you've got going here as well, the user name alone is worth a chuckle. If you look at a lot of stats "modern" women are actually having less sex and fewer hookups than their parents generation, and fewer still than the generation before that. Why get pressured into sex at 16 at makeout point in a 68' chevelle when it is much easier to sit at home and snapchat with your friends and watch netflix after soccer practice. This trend has only accelerated over the last 10 years to the point where even major news outlets are picking up on it. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-08-03/young-adults-less-sex-gen-z-millennials-generations-parents-grandparents
Before AIDS it was a sexfest for 2 decades. Society is much less promiscuous than it was 50 years ago.
Surveys during the 1970s reported that by age nineteen, four-fifths of all males and two-thirds of all females had had sex
People all caught up in this stuff never seem to have a very accurate view of the past. The rose tint of history tends to distort into whatever you imagine you would like it to be.
Also the definition of cuckold is raising another man's child. If you're not doing that you're not a cuckold. Maybe according to you you're dating or marrying damaged goods, but you're not a cuckold.
If you limit your dating pool to only confirmed virgins checked and confirmed intact by the royal court's physician. You're going to have a bad time.
Particularly because the men ranting about this issue never seem interested in upholding their side of the bargain. The old social contract was a two way street.
I think there are a modest but meaningful number of men online, whether they were successful cads or not, who are coming to realize that rejecting Christian sexual ethics has been bad for people of both sexes. I wonder if they'll be the one group of irreligious moderns who will find the natural law persuasive.
More options
Context Copy link
Oh they are holding it up alright, just not on purpose.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
In all your writing, this is the closest you give for a rationalization as to why marrying a woman with (if you'll forgive my paraphrasing, feel free to replace with terms of your choice) a 'high body count' is bad. And yet, your meaning of the word cuckold doesn't comport with any definition I've seen used before - you're suggesting that in a monogamous marriage where neither partner has slept with anyone else since the wedding, the man is nevertheless a cuckold if his wife had casual sex in college? You're just trying to use the shock/meme value of the word cuckold to smear a perfectly healthy marriage.
Seriously - what is your concern with the situation outlined above? STIs? The woman may have a child prior to the marriage? Okay, set those aside for the moment and let's explore cases where neither of those apply. Explain to me what is so wrong with a woman who has casual sex in college, settles down in her late 20s and has a family in her 30s without resorting to broader arguments about society and fertility.
He will not be able to explain this - he was banned right before you said this (I missed this too when I replied to his earlier post).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I actually think this is the correct answer. Idk if 'status' is the right frame, but the subtle propaganda of media showing the fun partying lifestyle as ideal, even for middle aged people, is incredibly harmful.
Not sure about the tax on single people, but tax on DINKs I guess... but then ppl would pretend to not be together to try and dodge the tax. Either way, probably a good idea.
It wouldn't help to pretend not to be together, since single people are also faced with additional tax.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link