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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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I think the biggest problem with this proposal is that I don't think there are easy levers to just control culture.

If we're entering this politically impossible situation where @ArjinFerman gets these powers, it's fairly easy. Does he want to reverse the sexual revolution, as a random example? Illegalize over-the-counter contraceptives and abortion clinics. Mandate >90% male:female ratio in colleges and technical schools. Remove mandatory maternity leave and allow discrimination against female hires. End no fault divorce. Lower welfare benefits for single people (Edit: Perhaps this falls under 'economy', so nix this.) Done and dusted.

The CRA is a fairly modest law that radically reshaped American culture over time. With a literal culture czar, you could steer the country at least that effectively.

But will the people accept that? When I say there's no easy levers, I'm thinking about how hard it would be to enforce some of these things in practice.

The US struggles to stop illegal drugs from coming over the border from Mexico. How would we stop oral arbortifacients and condoms from coming over the Southern border? How would we stop women from making intellectual salons for teaching college and technical topics - and stop employers from letting these qualified women work for them? How would we stop women from poisoning husbands they can't divorce?

I'm not saying it's absolutely impossible to be brutal and efficient here, but I'm not actually sure the state capacity to do all of this actually exists.

How would we stop women from making intellectual salons for teaching college and technical topics

LOL. With the full power of the culture (and a not-insubstantial portion of law) pushing women into technical subjects, engineering and computer science remains skewed 4:1 male. Take that away, and you will be able to maintain 9:1 ratios with no problem at all.

I'm not talking about STEM. I'm talking about all of college and technical/trade schools.

If the people want to resist your lawful efforts to change the culture, how do you stop women and sympathetic men from creating university alternatives where women are trained in a field and then hired even without a degree? Like, how do you actually put the genie back in the bottle here?

How do you stop people from creating samizdat, and passing down trades within their familes and a dozen other things that people who remember the old regime will want to do?

Umm, how many of the women in non-STEM college majors are there to study and how many of them are taking a vacation for four years? It certainly seems like very high percentages of the latter.

Of course the real problem is that for non-underclass women, there is no alternative to a college degree. You don’t see female plumbers and cops and infantrymen and the most reliable route to being a housewife is… through college.

how do you stop women and sympathetic men from creating university alternatives where women are trained in a field and then hired even without a degree?

The idea of society organizing bottom-up in such a manner, on a scale that is any kind of threat, is kind of dubious to start with. The way universities work and what they teach has lots of detractors too nowadays, they even have dedicated alternatives, but none of it adds up to anything.

How do you stop people from creating samizdat

STEM education is difficult and people who are doing it are too busy to teach it; this also applies to trades, and they have other requirements anyway.

As the jobs become less technical, the advantage yielded by those who could train their children is correspondingly diminished.

how do you stop women and sympathetic men from creating university alternatives where women are trained in a field and then hired even without a degree?

Market forces. Because the credential spiral is mostly fake, and there's nothing of significance that separates a worker with an Arts degree from one that only graduated high school, this will impose a ceiling on the price of labor for those with a fake degree.

As far as "training in a field and then hired without a degree", this is another way to state that they're receiving the level of education that much more closely matches the demands of the job; this is better for the students, and it's better for the part of society that isn't employed in academia. It's a good thing that academia did not spend 50 years agitating for a destruction of wages for those without degrees or anything like that, or they could be in real trouble.

technical/trade schools

Trades are already captured by licensing boards and apprenticeship requirements. Some of what they teach is fake, but not to anywhere near the same degree as academia in general, and you get paid which offsets some of the cost.