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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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I don't think this was your intention, but that statement's logical extreme is authoritarianism. "We can't rely on people to make good decisions, therefore, we have to take aware their ability to make those decisions."

Again, I don't think this was your intention, so I'm not going to hammer that point.

I appreciate that. What I was trying to get at was that if you have a society which assumes most people will act in a way contrary to their nature, that society is not going to work well. Eg the communists and how they expected people to contribute “according to their abilities” without responding to incentives. I don’t know if there’s a better way to word it, but to me you're expecting something similar, of the average person to practice rational discipline instead of succumbing to baser biological drives.

I believe that for much of human history, chastity was a valued thing

Chastity was more reasonable when people were regularly getting married off during their horny teenage years. Not so much these days when many are putting off marriage until their thirties, if ever.

Even back then, with all the pious Christian emphasis on family values, there was plenty of infidelity. So if we could magically make chastity a thing again, there’d probably be less sex, but I’d doubt the effect would be that major.

But let’s assume that we could greatly reduce the amount of sex in society by shaming those who have too many partners. How does less sex make society better?