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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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I fundamentally disagree that parents have some inherent incentive structure to care for their children that is superior to the incentives of social institutions.

Then the rest of this debate is moot. But you're proven so utterly and violently wrong by history that I have a hard time believing you've ever seriously considered the question if you think the State is a good guardian.

Have you met many children raised by the State? Or checked the

In a different worldly circumstance with different institutions, it could easily be the case that the State is more aligned with child interests than parents are.

It was fine to believe Rousseau before the XXth century. I don't think it's fine anymore.

We have tried that world and discovered that the worst thing an individual can do to does not raise to the horrors that States can visit upon you in both scale and intensity.

Sure some weirdo can kidnap, rape, torture and eat you, and this stuff has been done at scale by institutions too. But is he really going to give you horrible diseases on purpose and keep you alive to study how you die?

Granted the far edge of evil is not necessarily instructive of your median expected treatment. But there is something to how different the incentives are when you're a relative versus a number on a spreadsheet. It's far easier to argue the human experience of the number doesn't matter, in the grand scheme of things.

Do you think doctors (especially in America) were making these medical decisions with the full knowledge that the medical literature did not support these decisions?

Yes. I think they intellectually knew the risks but let their interest, curiosity and politics get in the way of their better judgement.

It is my belief that:

  1. the American medical system is uniquely corrupt and ill conceived in that it demands large amounts of scrutiny for new drugs but waives much of this scrutiny for off label use

  2. the psychiatric community at large has handled GD very poorly since constructivist arguments made is a political issue and overcorrected its terrible historical handling of homosexuality as LGB and T got put together in a political coalition

A hypothetical

I don't think there is much to learn from this situation since it is a very clear cut case of abuse, which is of course one of the edge cases of parental authority we can all agree on, alongside drug use, wanton violence and the like.

Now let's alter it to make it actually interesting. Say there is no physical evidence of this abuse and you are getting all this from the minor, but you also know for a fact that the minor is mentally ill.

It's not so clear cut then is it?

I've been in the unfortunate position of having to care for people who are paranoid schizophrenics, and the amount of hallucinated lies I've been told is staggering. But then again some people do abuse their kids.

The issue isn't so much how that particular hypothetical could be resolved, but what a good general rule is for dealing with such problems at scale. And I find that despite its pitfalls, leaning on parental authority does provide the best results.