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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   32795 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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The incoming administration has promised to punt the issue of abortion to the States and I hope they go one step further and enshrine this punt with a Constitutional amendment that would keep the federal government out of the business altogether, including encouraging or discouraging States or individuals via funding, services, etc. And probably also prohibiting States from punishing abortion tourists in any way.

There are so many important issues of geopolitics and energy and trade and I'm so fucking tired of this issue being at the top of mind every single national election (for literally my entire life and I'm over 40!!!), and half the electorate being one-issue voters about it so you can't even have a real conversation with them about anything else.

It might also help heal relations between the sexes but I won't bet on that, let's not get too greedy now.

Such an amendment would discredit the government for obvious reasons. The abortion issue is a reductio ad absurdum of democracy. Apparently the electorate cannot even agree to prohibit the industrialized slaughter of infants.

Such an amendment would discredit the government for obvious reasons.

Not obvious to me, can you elaborate? I personally think that there doesn't need to be an amendment because the federal government doesn't have authority to restrict abortion anyways, but I don't see how it would be bad to include an amendment to explicitly prohibit it.

The political environment isn’t at all conducive to it, but even under a narrow reading of federal powers the feds could prohibit interstate traffic in abortifacients or crossing state lines to obtain an abortion.

Interstate traffic in abortifacients yes, prohibiting "crossing state lines to obtain an abortion" is already a stretch, though nothing like the utter goatse of Wickard v. Fillburn.

It is obviously the duty of the government to prevent its own people, and particularly children, from being murdered.

But it's not obvious that a fetus a couple of weeks old is a child.

Murder is not a federal crime (with some special-case exceptions)

I think Trump already started shanking the pro-life right with his comment about how great IVF is. That was a preemptive move.

It remains to be seen how his administration handles the inevitable push for a federal abortion ban.

Looking at the abortion ballot results at a state level, proposing abortion legislation at the federal level seems like obvious suicide for the Republican party.

And yet there is a large part of the base that has been reliably turning out and will feel jilted if the GOP abandons them.

No they won't. There is a sizeable grifting industry which are jilted because Trump shut off a big spigot which they had been worthlessly living off of for decades. They have been attempting to mobilize others to also feel like they were "jilted" by Trump giving them their biggest win ever, but it has so far failed spectacularly.

This "large part" of the base can't stop modest abortion protections from being added to state constitutions in deep red states, so claiming after they were handed the biggest win they've ever had they're suddenly owed something like a nationwide abortion ban even if it cost Trump his entire mandate is pretty incredible to be honest.

The pro-lifers should be upset they got nothing after giving hundreds of millions to the useless GOP and a pro-life grifter class for decades. Focusing their ire on Trump after he got Roe v. Wade overturned is misplaced.

The pro-life right is also split on the question of a federal ban. Some want to push for one, some would push for one if they thought it were politically feasible (but they recognize it’s not), and some think the issue should belong to the states, period. When even the pro-lifers are split like this, the odds that a federal ban even makes it through one house of Congress is basically nil.

Agreed, and in the mean time there are a lot of pro lifers, including myself, who (as @Bleep points out) dont feel "jilted" as much as they are happy to take the overturning of Roe v Wade as a win

I think just as a matter of principle, we need to prevent commerce clause abuse and the abuse of federal funding which both end up being used as a back door way to force states to do whatever the federal government wants them to. As it stands the government can dictate through federal funding that roads be marked for bike lanes, that schools must teach LGBTQ narratives, that the state can regulate environmental protections on products that have never and will never leave their state of origin. It’s ridiculous.

As it stands the government can dictate through federal funding that roads be marked for bike lanes

What's the alternative here? That the federal government be banned from attaching any conditions to any funding given to states? How would that even work?

The alternative would be to not hold funds hostage. You want bike lanes, pass a law making bike lanes and fund them. As a completely separate thing. What happens often is that the money for I.e highways is contingent on X miles of bike lanes. Or school funding rests on the enactment of policies like trans rights and trans students in women’s restrooms.

Here's how it would work

The above is a link to Saving Congress from Itself which is a wonderful book by William F. Buckely's brother. In many ways, he was far more accomplished than his more famous brother.

Anyway, the TLDR is that Congress has to start doing top level only block grants to the state. State's bundle together all of the federal funding requests they have and send it to Washington. Congress votes on a straight YES or NO to providing that funding. If they want to adjust the number, they only adjust the top line number (say from $10bn to $9.5 bn or what have you). There's no ability to say "This $5m slice has to go towards the LGBTQ bike lane in downtown San Antoino." Nope, it's just one, big number.

The result is that states get A LOT more leeway in what and how they spend their money. Also, there would be less bureaucracy as the endless "reports" on the use of funds would vanish. The result of this result is you'd start to see states that are fundamentally run better probably attract citizens from other states. The results of that result (result depth level: 3) is that we'd probably end up seeing even more stark disparities in outcomes. For instance, most of the states with the worst obesity, illiteracy, and high school graduation rates are in the Deep South or are those with sparse populations generally (WV and one of the Dakotas, IIRC). I'd expect this to continue and accelerate with a "Block Grants Only" approach.

But the result of that result (!), I think, would be that some states effectively become giant national parks with almost zero population. West Virginia, for instance, is now a net mortality state, meaning that more people die and leave the state than are born / move into it. Eastern West Virginia, south of the panhandle that includes Martinsburg and Charles Town, is one of the least densely populated places in the country - it's literally up there with Montana and Wyoming in the lower 48.

Would this be a good or bad thing? That's up to you to decide.

If you really want federalism, the federal government should be made to raise less taxes. Ideally the federal government shouldn't be able to tax citizens directly and should tax only the states. States would raise their own money to e.g. build roads.

Of course that's not really feasible either, not even if everybody really wanted it, because the federal government can print money or get loans from abroad, whereas the states cannot.

Inasmuch as there's a breakdown in relations between sexes, I don't think you repair that without making abortion (at least during the first trimester) widely available.

I think the next 20 years is going to give us hard evidence on:

  1. Is civil marriage necessary for society to function / is long term civil marriage actually a huge benefit to spouses and children?
  2. Is sexual discipline far more valuable (maybe even necessary) than the whole of society has assumed since the late 1960s.

My prediction (which is heavily biased due to my value system): Couples that get married and stay married will become something like a new aristocracy. Generational wealth will literally be as easy as not cheating on your wife. Children with stable two parent households will not only outcompete their peers, but will have a compounding advantage by their age of majority.

Unwed single mothers, especially those who give birth before about 25, will become wards of the state to an even more extreme degree. Sadly, I think that state provided support will become so egregious that a single mother looking to get married would be committing economic suicide outside of finding a literal prince charming who already has the financial resources to subsume paying for everything.

Another way of summing this up; Some part of society will self-select to sexual and mating habits that look like the 1950s, while another, probably larger part will accelerate to poly-orgy levels of libertinism. My assumption is that the former will control an incredibly disproportionate level of wealth and political control. This is all very Matrix-y; The lowerclass in 2045 in America will be face tattooed Zi/Zirs wired into machines 24/7 with a host of pharmacological cocktails coursing through their veins. Sexual gratification options will be nonstop both in advertisement and usage. The upperclass will simply be everyone who can say "No" for a while and unplug.

Generational wealth will literally be as easy as not cheating on your wife.

I think they call this "a financial path to home ownership" these days.

the next 20 years is going to give us hard evidence

Hard evidence has already been provided.

For 1, we already know that being in a single-parent household is detrimental to average outcomes. Now, to what degree this is because the children are obviously going to possess the genes of someone who becomes a single mother (or single father) is another story- apples don't necessarily fall far from trees, and not being able to stick with a marriage is an indictment either of one's time preference or one's general ability to select a partner long-term over short-term concerns. Relative lack of resources for childhood development is another thing that can cause this, since single-family homes are required for self-development not limited to what doesn't make a lot of noise or take up that much space to practice (you aren't maintaining a vehicle, practicing an instrument, etc. in a two-bedroom apartment, so what you can get up to -> the ways these types of children develop their minds are more limited) and it's not 1980 where you could afford one of those on a single income.

For 2... well, there's a massive two-movies-one-screen effect that's been going on for the last 60 years about sexual ethics. The short version is that the people who don't need sexual ethics for the sake of sexual ethics (and their "sexual ethics" comes more from practical constraints than anything handed down from on high) came to power and re-made marriage laws in their own image. These are people who choose a life partner based on an utterly childish conception of love an intent and ability to align their wills to each other rather than just because he's rich/she's hot. And it's very difficult to determine who's saying what, and who's pushing which politics, and why- I don't think there's been a concerted effort to obfuscate this information (though certain traditionalist and progressive types try their best, especially if there's a religion/woke involved), but the results aren't meaningfully distinct from that.

Problem is, they shouldn't ever have insisted on that being marriage (even though the room temperature of the '60s and '70s made that kind of unavoidable), and considered that (before deciding to explode everything) this a-sexual mode of love might be technically ideal but is not, in fact, normal. And they decided to ban certain kinds of behaviors based on the fact that men and women operating in this mode are equal- so obviously, she should get half of the assets in the no-fault divorce, because people who don't/can't get along outside of their normal gender roles don't get married. Obviously. [Just ignore that 50% total divorce rate; it's not like that combined with the sex the resources/custody in the divorce tend to more often be awarded to trivially repudiate that thesis.]

Therefore, men and women who don't actually like each other but want to get married for other reasons probably need to be staring down the barrel of society's shotgun a little more than they already do for better societal outcomes (though at the same time, be provided carrots- men and women need to be marrying much earlier than they already do for family formation reasons and fixing that is both inextricably linked to this problem and is the harder of the two). Men and women who don't need marriage, by contrast, shouldn't get married, nor should the State treat them as if they were (as they do in some countries).

Men and women aren't equal except for the ones that are. A default plus an opt out for the people sufficiently informed/capable is what can work- but that requires a populace disciplined enough (or distracted enough) to keep that balance.

I think I agree with you? I find your prose to be a little serpentine and hard to follow at times.

The short version is that the people who don't need sexual ethics for the sake of sexual ethics (and their "sexual ethics" comes more from practical constraints than anything handed down from on high) came to power and re-made marriage laws in their own image.

Could I request you try rephrasing this so that I can better understand. Again, I'm pretty sure we're on the same page.

Sure.

I think the "new" post-Sexual Revolution sexual ethics were made by people who didn't, or couldn't, recognize that most relationships are at least a little dysfunctional (we were very rich at the time, which can cover up a great deal of bad in a relationship- no fights about cooking if you can just afford takeout, after all- and sex was the least risky it's ever been in history due to reliable hormonal birth control and no incurable STD of consequence). When the pro-SR people are talking about "liberation" [but only pre-1980; post-1980 the actors change as the below takes effect], this is what they're talking about.

But if you give that group power, they enshrine their autistic/childish/unrealistic views of how sex and relationships (and by extension, men and women) operate into law. And the problem with that is the same one as it was with legal equality- it just tilts the playing field in favor of the sex whose advantages were most illegible to the system (and so abuse of those advantages stopped being controllable, creating the problems we have now).

The trick, then, is in implementing that inequality/equity- making sure the people who do need those rules obey them (and are protected by them in return), and making sure the people who don't need those rules do not have to (but are not).

Thank you!

I think this change would make its availability feel less precarious than it does now.

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