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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024

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In some ways, I kind of want to reject the idea that all of our social policies should be aimed at minimizing female deaths like an autistic actuary.

As a simple example from another domain, I kind of don't care if the facts on the ground are maximally unfavorable to me in, say, the gun control debate because I am pro-liberty and am willing to bite the bullet on this. Even if an angel came down and gave me divinely inspired tablets that showed with 100% certainty that we could reliably remove, say, all ~40,000 gun deaths per year in the United States by repealling the 2nd Amendment (and the vast majority won't convert to knife deaths or whatever), I would still say we should prefer 40,000 annual deaths to the infringement of liberty that would involve.

I don't want to empower the government to enforce any kind of bathroom policy, and so I'm willing to put up with a few women falling victim to men and ex-men in the name of liberty. My opinion wouldn't change if an angel came down and gave me divinely inspired tablets showing that such a policy reliably leads to X female victims of violence each year.

I feel the same way about casual sex with strangers, and a number of other issues. I'm willing to bite the bullet on the idea that freedom often comes with negative consequences for part of the population. I still think the government should enforce contracts that turned out to have been bad bets (which is why I was angry when Scarlett Johansson was succesfully able to cow Disney during the pandemic when they shifted movies to streaming where she got a worse deal - she made a bet, and it turned out to be a bad bet. If Disney wants to smooth things over with her, they can do that outside of the context of a contract dispute as a show of good will, but in an ideal world Scarlett Johansson should have been forced to live with the original bad deal, because that's what contracts are for.)

I agree with this, with the quibble that I thought the point of contracts was that either party is free to break a contract if they feel like they aren't getting what they want, they just have to deal with the consequences of breaking said contracts. Real-life contracts tend to have escape clauses and ways of dealing with breaches.

(Failing that, you can always just go the Westinghouse-Tesla route and just burn it.)

I feel the same way about casual sex with strangers

As in, you're opposed?

No, for. My position is that freedom sometimes makes people worse off, but in the vast majority of such cases we should still let people be free and have the bad outcome.

To tie it back to the trans issue. I would be okay with the government banning kids from transitioning, but against the government preventing adults from transitioning - even if reliable information emerged that medical transition lead to worse outcomes than the alternative. People should be allowed to sterilize themselves, allowed to cut off their breasts, and be prepared to face all consequences of it.

This is also why I favor tattoos and piercing being legal, even if I personally dislike them and suspect they have long term effects on employability and life outcomes.

Gotcha.