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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Childbirth being painful is a universally known fact. The fact that women do it anyway is one of the many miracles of our biological condition. Such is the power of hormones and the genetic compulsion to reproduce.

What I suspect is happening here is that she doesn't want children, began that as her conclusion, and intellectualized herself into her preferences. And that's fine. Many people perform the backwards scientific method all the time when it comes to core beliefs. But if her reasons become mainstream - well, our species would soon cease to be.

We are all descended from either careless women, who had babies by accident, or feckless ones, who were brave enough to do it anyway despite the danger. I remind everyone to thank your mothers the next time you see them.

We are all descended from either careless women, who had babies by accident, or feckless ones, who were brave enough to do it anyway despite the danger. I remind everyone to thank your mothers the next time you see them.

Instructions unclear; just thanked my mother for being careless and feckless.

I also thanked her for the same.

Well it's not so much a miracle as the natural process that those that refuse to do it and their genetic patrimony cease to exist over time.

It may very well be that having children is an irrational decision that is not in the interest of any individual woman. But unless you want to commit the civilizational equivalent of suicide, you have to impose this duty on them.

This isn't the only thing we do that is configurated like so. Men's duty to fight in war is exactly the same, desertion is unquestionably in your individual interest but it's also destroying the commons so we have to have strong norms against it.

We've destroyed the strong norms around the duty to bear children in a mistaken belief that people would do it for the sole enjoyment that children bring into their lives, but that was wrong, at least in the short term.

In general, we've abandoned notions of duty, so solving problems that require people taking a hit for the sake of greater things has become impossible. Time will fix this, either by slowly erasing our civilization one death at a time or by selecting those few people that do not think in the ways this essay does, whether or not that means abandoning reason.