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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33971 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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If there are some means by which these people create fewer additional versions of themselves, I’m more than happy to have such means be common, and I mostly only care if such means are safe and legal to the extent it helps them be common.

How far does this extend? I bet plenty such people would at least occasionally, circumstantially be happy to off their two year olds.

Why would it need to extend? Abortion and infanticide are not necessarily a packaged deal.

Infanticide does strike me as more distasteful than abortion, but I imagine the fraction of such people willing to Gregor Clegane-away their already-born children (or leave them perishing due to neglect) are a fraction of those willing to abort a pregnancy, so the effect size is relatively paltry and the hypothetical is not particularly relevant. In any case, such people Cleganing-away their offspring or leaving them perishing to neglect is no skin off my back.

Not my circus; not my monkeys. Especially when such offspring would be deleterious to me and my own family, and families like us.

I imagine the fraction of such people willing to Gregor Clegane-away their already-born children (or leave them perishing due to neglect) are a fraction of those willing to abort a pregnancy, so the effect size is relatively paltry and the hypothetical is not particularly relevant.

Historically no. Infanticide was rampant in the ancient world and much of human history up until surprisingly recent times.

Historically no. Infanticide was rampant in the ancient world and much of human history up until surprisingly recent times.

Baby farming - i.e. infanticide for profit by plausibly deniable neglect as a service - was commonplace in the UK until we got rich enough to be concerned about it in the 1870s-1890s.

The idea that we should keep unwanted babies alive comes after the idea that we can keep wanted babies alive. And that requires industrial civilisation.

Having read the link, the baby farmers neglecting or killing the children they adopted was not societally acceptable. That wasn't the point, the actual point was a decentralized societal foster care system. It certainly seems to be the case that the vast majority of children fostered this way were not deliberately killed or died of neglect.

The idea that we should keep unwanted babies alive comes after the idea that we can keep wanted babies alive. And that requires industrial civilisation.

This strikes me as absurd, and thankfully @FlyingLionWithABook already came by to say why.

But I wanted to thank you for the link about baby farming. New to me.

I dunno, one of the main things that marked Christians out in the first and second centuries was that they took in babies left out to die. That's a long time before 1890.

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