site banner
PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   33883 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

If the movement takes hold, it could potentially lead to some of the same outcomes as have been seen in Korea, where women are reconsidering dates with men out of suspicion and lack or trust, young people are marrying and having children at lower rates, and both men and women are expressing deep loneliness

This is just thrown out there in the article, but this is massively important, the most significant consequence of what's being discussed.

"Women have decided to swear off men, which will lead to expressions of deep loneliness for both men and women" is a terrible outcome. It's people choosing to take actions that steer them and others into profound unhappiness.

In Korea, you can understand why people might make that choice: better unhappy alone than unhappy being a servant of the mother-in-law. But in the US, I hold that this is people choosing to avoid something that would be profoundly meaningful to them out of intense, neurotic fear that their partner might not be an angel. This is making the perfect the enemy of the good, and thus destroying all the good.

Amadan said this:

[Korean women] all look at fairy tale romances as an ideal, but it seems like very few of them actually expect this to be the reality.

This is the key difference between Korea and the US: in Korea women wish they could have fairy-tale romances but expect marriage to be hellish. In the US, however, women wish they could have fairy-tale romances and damn well expect this is what they're going to get. Korean women know what they're in for. American women, like American men, have swallowed all sorts of messaging about fairy-tales and then subsequently find their dating life to be disappointing, because it's not perfect. American perfectionism and hedonistic optimizationalism destroys everything it touches, like a metastatic cancer or a radiation burn.

But I disagree with him on this: something like the 4B movement is already going on among young women in the US already, albeit not explicitly politically. A huge chunk of women are simply uninterested in sex, dating, relationships, marriage, the whole sheboodle (or rather she-not-boodle). I've dated women like this. Didn't go well. I've certainly met many more; rates of explicit asexual identification have skyrocketed among US women. I don't know about political lesbianism, but practical asexualism seems predominant.

I'm agnostic on the cause, I don't know if men just aren't striking them as interesting any more, or if mass-media is just too satiating with its parasocial relationships (see Tumblr shipping and fandom), or if there's some kind of endocrine dysfunction (I genuinely worry there might be one affecting both men and women -- we're turning the frogs gay), or if incentives towards focusing on careers are just so great... but it's alarming. We have a whole generation of lonely men who can't get a date, and lonely women who don't seem to have any inclination towards resolving their loneliness.

There was one of the tiktoks about 4B going around, that featured a young women who said something like "I haven't dated for 4 years, I'm happy, and I'm fine swearing off men for the future." I don't know why this woman who was already off the market seems to think a permanent pledge is worthy of a video, but ok, sure! But really, this is just women politicizing something they were already doing. If it weren't Trump, it would be something else.

Women are asexual unless Chad is around. The upturn in their identification rates is just an upturn in hypergamy. I'm not sure if Korea's situation is the same.

Also, 50 Shades isn't porn for women; Tinder is porn for women. That's probably part of the situation, too.

I'm agnostic on the cause

What do you make of the idea that the government now fulfills most of the roles that a husband and the extended family used to fill, though in an inferior capacity? It seems similar to the way free streaming porn and thirst-trap simp-magnets have supplanted chasing girls in the lives of many young men, though also in an inferior capacity. In both cases, the choice used to be between a risky venture (dating/marriage) and simply having nothing at all (no sex/economic security/companionship). Now, there's a inferior choice on offer that requires way less risk/effort, so a lot of people "choose" that out of inertia.

Radical feminism/inceldom seem downstream from these massive changes in the sexual and romantic landscape. I can't imagine them arising in a state that did not have a massive welfare machine and lax sexual mores.

I think it might just be depression, housing unavailability and financial insecurity. When you’re clinging by the fingernails to the bottom rung of Maslow’s hierarchy, you aren’t going to be too concerned about self-actualization and fulfillment.

I kinda doubt that. People have lived in much worse conditions than the Gen Z PMC people deciding not to have kids. Go look at video of any third world slum — people have kids when things like electricity and running water aren’t available. They have babies in war zones. I can’t see that and then look at Gen Z refusing to have kids and see financial issues being the real reason.

I have a few hypotheses.

First, I think American children are much slower to mature emotionally and mentally. 25 year olds in the USA still act like teenagers and are still into drunken partying, staying out late to go clubbing. They aren’t really ready to settle into parenthood even if they had the means because they aren’t ready for the responsibility of a baby.

Second, Americans are pretty hedonistic. A baby isn’t about you, and worse requires sacrificing your lifestyle in major ways. You need to get serious about a career and making money because the baby needs food and diapers. You might hate what you are doing, but you don’t have the same choices that you have as a child-free couple. Likewise every other choice you make now has to include planning for the baby. You want to go out to dinner, you either find a sitter or the baby comes along. And I think the lifestyle most young adults like living just doesn’t have the room for a baby.

Pairing up is a SOLUTION to housing unavailability and financial insecurity.

Yes, that's absolutely correct.

But the association persists in people's minds. There was a youtube comment (bottom of the barrel, I know) that I saw which absolutely flabbergasted me. Who knows who the person who said it was, whether male or female, whether Western not, or whether they just weren't another 13 year old let loose on the internet posting silly takes. But they said:

Getting married is so expensive, there's no way young people can do it!

And then a thousand comments in response going, "what the hell are you talking about, marriage reduces your costs because you're sharing expenses!"

In subsequent comments, the person made it clear they weren't talking about wedding costs or honeymoons or anything dumb like that, they honestly believed it was more expensive for two people to live together than to live separately.

From "Marriage Makes You Rich and Stupid" by Megan "Jane Galt" McArdle:

Marriage allows you to pool nonrival goods, such as Netflix accounts, but also what economist Bryan Caplan calls “semi-rival goods,” such as kitchens and cars:

Two childless singles, each earning $50,000 a year, marry. Both keep working, living by the old-school principle of "share and share alike." What happens to their material standard of living? If all depends on how rivalrous their consumption bundle is.

If all their goods are rival (like food), the answer is "Their standard of living stays the same." $50,000 times two divided by two equals $50,000.

If all their goods are non-rival (like Internet access), the answer is "Their standard of living doubles." They pool their money and buy a $100,000 lifestyle for both of them.

In the real world, of course, couples are rarely at either pole. Most goods are in fact semi-rival. Consider housing. If you share your home with a spouse, you don't have as much space for yourself as a solitary occupant of the same property. But both of you probably enjoy the benefits of more than half a house. If a couple owns one car, similarly, both have more than half a car. Even food is semi-rival, as the classic "You gonna eat that?" question proves.

But this is not the only benefit of marriage. Marriage also enables specialization. Which can be illustrated by a piece of wisdom I have developed in my brief three and a half years of marital bliss and now pass onto my friends who are getting married: “Marriage makes you stupid.”

I mean, I used to know where I kept my batteries and old documents. But when we got married, my husband, who is much tidier than I am, took over organizing the house. Now, unless it’s a piece of my clothing or kitchen equipment, I have no idea where we keep anything. And while I’m pretty sure I used to be able to put up shelves, now all I know how to do is ask my husband to do it.

On the other hand, he has no idea how much money we have, or in what accounts. And he can’t do the grocery shopping, because he doesn’t know what we consume. Individually, we are less competent to survive on our own. But collectively, we eat better, and we have a tidier house and better-managed finances. And our shelves don’t fall down so often.

Obviously, child-rearing is a major area of specialization. One interesting thing I’ve heard from gay parents is that they find themselves falling into roles that you might describe as “Mom” and “Dad,” even though this is obviously not some pre-programmed gender destiny. It just doesn’t make sense to try to jointly manage a kid 50-50; one parent keeps the social calendar and decides what kids Junior can play with, because two parents trying to do it actually makes the task take a lot more time, as both people have to learn about all the friends and the birthdays and the parents, and then negotiate what Junior does with her time. I’m not saying this happens with every gay parent. I’m just saying that gay parents I know report considerable benefits to specialization.

Specialization also allows for external income gains -- perhaps one reason that married men make a lot more than single ones do and married households are richer than single ones. Some of that is selection effect, of course -- stable, responsible men are probably more likely to get married, especially in this day and age.

So while pooling nonrival and semi-rival goods is an excellent benefit of marriage, it is far from the only one. And it doesn’t stop with economics: There’s also better health, less depression, and happier and healthier children to consider. At the end of his piece, Caplan calls being single a “luxury” good. But it’s not exactly an aspirational one.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats