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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   25739 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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There's no turning back on technologies that profound, immediate positive effects on people's lives,

If that were true, most electricity would be nuclear and I'd have plastic straws right now.

Cultural campaigns can have lasting effect.

In the long run, Luddism is fated to lose because your society stops to exist if it doesn't adopt better technology. But for the specific case of technology that causes your society to become unsustainable, it is fated to win.

Religious fundamentalists who anathemized contraception will be proven right and their children will inherit the Earth. I welcome our new Islamo-Mormon overlords and their actual concern for family life.

Both Mormon and Muslim TFR are in extreme, rapid decline worldwide.

A quick google suggests that the same is true for secular Jews in Israel, leaving Modern Orthodox Jews (in Israel and the west) as the only group capable of maintaining above-replacement fertility in a way compatible with modernity.

Everyone's is, worldwide. But there's spots where it isn't, and all the ones I know about are radically religious compared to the average.

Religious fundamentalists who anathemized contraception will be proven right and their children will inherit the Earth.

There's a reasonable chance this is right. I can't find the comment, but someone here recently summed up that position as "evolution works". Correct! But it just means that negative-fertility species will lose (on a geological timescale), not necessarily that the fundamentalists will win. Most of the fundamentalist groups have a problem keeping children onside, and even their fertility is in decline, with a few notable exceptions.

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