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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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People choose to take on too much frivolous debt and destroy their lives. Is the whole lending project dead? Should the media no longer write op-eds about payday loans with a 400% ARP? The average person no longer seems to be convinced that this is just a cultural problem which will go away.

Uhhh this is unironically also a big societal issue. Lots of people have been agitating to nationalize the credit card industry for this exact reason.

That Pavlovich bird does not a summer make. There are global differences in median male and female traits, but I see no reason to treat them differently under the laws of a free society

Ok but the issue is that we do treat men and women differently under the laws of our society...

Most of my critique revolves around extending a single instance of an unreliable narrator into viewing women as children, and questioning their right to vote. This is an insane extrapolation of the data, and wouldn't be accepted as a fundamental policy or philosophical argument.

Lots of people have been agitating to nationalize the credit card industry for this exact reason.

I know, and the govt heavily regulates lending anyhow, but less now than ever in terms of max ARP.

My point being that even the most egregious instances of usuary (ie pay day loans) do not portend the end of lending. Nationalizing the credit industry seems less fringe and hairbrained than not treating women as adults. However, neither are practiced anywhere worth living.

I'm sure there is bias in the law as practiced, and men and women suffer unfounded disparate impact, but AFAIK the laws theoretically apply equally wherever possible. Given men's propensity to fall for romance, finance, and gabling scams, its odd that I've never seen it argued that we should view all men as hapless children, and restrict their rights. A maximally insane take would be restricting unrelated rights like driving or, I dunno, voting.

I'm sure there is bias in the law as practiced, and men and women suffer unfounded disparate impact, but AFAIK the laws theoretically apply equally wherever possible.

Theoretically is doing a lot of work here. There are all sorts of issues with women's vs men's shelters, funding for female programs in schools, affirmative action type things for women in corporate, etc etc etc.

I think that we are disagreeing on the fact that I absolutely do not think that women and men are treated equally right now, even though the laws say they do. In fact I think there's a big difference. Do you agree with that or not?

EDIT: FWIW I'm not actively arguing we take away rights from women, which you seem to be implying. I'm just saying that culturally, there seems to be an issue with having women occupy both the role of equal to men and also getting much more benefit than men socially.

Yeah I agree with your assessment quite a lot. My point is that extrapolating these outlying male deficits in self-control/agency all the way to questioning if society can treat men as adults is absurd.

I don't think that society should treat alcoholics or degenerate gamblers as adults... and in fact we don't in many cases, in similar ways.

I can grant that, and the original hypothesis still doesn't follow. We're talking about an entire category of people, only some of whom demonstrate lower agency in at least one area. Men are less able to control their drinking and gambling, but we wouldn't consider all men to be children. Its the same in the Pavlovich et.al cases. Some women claim they can't meaningfully consent to sex even when they do. They're insane and a moral hazard. I'm not gonna play in that framework. Whether they like it or not, they're adults.

Again I'm not saying that women should be denied rights or anything. I edited my earlier post to clarify. No need to play in a framework that doesn't exist.

I'm really just asking the question of like - what do we do with this? How can we make it more fair, perhaps by changing the culture, or at least make things make more sense?