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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38752 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Agree 100%. In older mass media, "think of the children" was an archetypal motivator in community and political action. But today, living with children in a big American city, it does seem like making the world nice for children is a lower priority than dog parks, dogs relieving themselves on public property, automobiles, allowing crazy vagrants to roam the streets, library worker unions, teacher's unions, squeezing every bit of life expectancy from the gerontocracy, etc. The mandatory masking for children in schools and daycare -- while adults were free to go to work and bars maskless -- was a major black-pill on how society is treating children.

I'm reminded of this old quote from Plutarch:

On seeing certain wealthy foreigners in Rome carrying puppies and young monkeys about in their bosoms and fondling them, Caesar asked, we are told, if the women in their country did not bear children, thus in right princely fashion rebuking those who squander on animals that proneness to love and loving affection which is ours by nature, and which is due only to our fellow-men.
  • Plutarch, Pericles. 1st century A.D.

According to William Durant, who I believe, a major underlying cause of the Fall of the Roman Empire was a gradual decline in population, in turn due to people deciding to have fewer children. This started with the elites, but eventually reached the provinces. From his Caesar and Christ:

A serious decline of population appears in the West after Hadrian. It has been questioned, but the mass importation of barbarians into the Empire by Aurelius, Valentinian, Aurelian, Probus, and Constantine leaves little room for doubt.3 Aurelius, to replenish his army, enrolled slaves, gladiators, policemen, criminals; either the crisis was greater, or the free population less, than before; and the slave population had certainly fallen. So many farms had been abandoned, above all in Italy, that Pertinax offered them gratis to anyone who would till them. A law of Septimius Severus speaks of a penuria hominum—a shortage of men.4 In Greece the depopulation had been going on for centuries. In Alexandria, which had boasted of its numbers, Bishop Dionysius calculated that the population had in his time (250) been halved. He mourned to “see the human race diminishing and constantly wasting away.”5 Only the barbarians and the Orientals were increasing, outside the Empire and within.

What had caused this fall in population? Above all, family limitation. Practiced first by the educated classes, it had now seeped down to a proletariat named for its fertility;6 by A.D. 100 it had reached the agricultural classes, as shown by the use of imperial alimenta to encourage rural parentage; by the third century it had overrun the western provinces, and was lowering man power in Gaul.7 Though branded as a crime, infanticide flourished as poverty grew.8 Sexual excesses may have reduced human fertility; the avoidance or deferment of marriage had a like effect, and the making of eunuchs increased as Oriental customs flowed into the West. Plantianus, Praetorian Prefect, had one hundred boys emasculated, and then gave them to his daughter as a wedding gift.

According to William Durant, who I believe, a major underlying cause of the Fall of the Roman Empire was a gradual decline in population, in turn due to people deciding to have fewer children.

https://web.archive.org/web/20151018140823/https://www.utexas.edu/courses/rome/210reasons.html

\126. Loss of population

\158. Population pressure

Supposedly the same fate befell Sparta a couple of centuries before, because Spartan women were expected to perform various economic / quasi-managerial tasks at home, while at the same time also completing combat training, which altogether depressed the fertility rate.

Also, there were supposedly many eligible single men in the Late Western Roman Empire who joined monasteries or became hermits as Christianity gained a larger following, which also eroded the fertility rate.

The mandatory masking for children in schools and daycare -- while adults were free to go to work and bars maskless -- was a major black-pill on how society is treating children.

That's nothing compared to Hong Kong, which is looking at introducing vaccine passes for 5-11 year olds and requires mask wearing almost everywhere outside of your own home (including e.g. sitting on your own outside at a public civic park, where you are also banned from congregating in groups of more than 4) to protect the 30% + of the old who don't want to be vaccinated.

I mean, the rules didn't differ so much in places where the elderly did get vaccinated. Once you agree to the premises of corona containment, nothing other than a perfect vaccine with universal uptake can stop the madness.

The rules may not have differed much (though most countries were never as extreme as HK with masking) but the fact that severe pandemic measures are still in HK in autumn 2022 is unusual.

it does seem like making the world nice for children is a lower priority than dog parks, dogs relieving themselves on public property, automobiles, allowing crazy vagrants to roam the streets, library worker unions, teacher's unions, squeezing every bit of life expectancy from the gerontocracy, etc

It would seem as if pets, dogs in particular, have too many rights, and people have too few rights. Long sentences for non violent offenders, boys overly disciplined in school and by parents, yet dogs are allowed to be defecate in public . It does strike me as an inversion of a functioning society.

yet dogs are allowed to defecate in public

To be fair we seem to be heading towards giving you this right too

A dog can charge up to me, invade my personal space, menace me with its natural weapons... 'don't worry, he's friendly' say the owners, nary a leash in sight. Every fiber of my being wants to meet this violence with violence; a million years of ascending the food chain tells me to kill this predator to protect my small vulnerable offspring and wear its skin...

But I'm the bad guy if I want people to leash their dogs so they don't knock over and/or bite the kiddos.

yet dogs are allowed to be defecate in public . It does strike me as an inversion of a functioning society.

I guess that places san francisco at the vanguard of the struggle for human rights.

The mandatory masking for children in schools and daycare -- while adults were free to go to work and bars maskless -- was a major black-pill on how society is treating children.

Children, and especially teenagers, are the most discriminated-against group in society today; a utilitarian approach to anti-racism would start with them.

If we believe that parents want to give their children the same kinds of opportunities they grew up with, and literally every parent says this, the generation who needs to decide whether they're having kids right now (1980/1990s-born) grew up after the point where child rights were completely and utterly decimated. No wonder nobody wants to have them! If you have to have them on a leash, and they'll never mature under your watch beyond obeying simple commands... well, you're describing a dog, and dogs are cheaper. And better, because they're physically incapable of saying "no" and even more disposable than even kids in the 1930s were: can't afford them, drop them off at the shelter, and if they were still there you could pick them back up afterwards.

It's literally 2010s-era "I'm not having children because I'm saving the climate" except this time it's "I'm not having children because they'd have to suffer through 25 years of modern society". Same thing in Asian countries (it will eventually become a thing in India for the same reasons)- sure, you can have a kid, but if you do that you've signed your future human being up for 15 years of slavery your neighbors have cargo-culted their way into for no socioeconomic benefit whatsoever. It's honestly surprising to me that reproduction in Japan even exists; I don't think it's a coincidence that a culture with an absolute hellscape with respect to healthy family life also produces the highest-quality pornography in the world.

The only "freedom" these human beings have these days is to stay inside and play video games; forced to exist as 2 arms and a head is enough for a reasonable adult to seek death instead, and as such it's not a surprise that suicide is usually more deadly to the under-18 set than accidents. Which should be the first indication that that demographic really isn't "living" so much as "existing", but that's OK because they haven't lived long enough to know better.

Your right to enjoyment of your own property is non-existent; with CPS being abused by concern trolls to the point where they'll arrest you if you so much dare to play in the front yard. Freedom of movement doesn't exist either; god forbid you walk or bike to your friend's house or the corner store because the State can just show up and arrest you for no reason. Want to go home for lunch? Same deal.

[By contrast, elementary-aged children in the 1920s were more than capable of doing all of these things, in working conditions far worse than school, and far more dangerous than modern life in general, tends to impose. The claim that they're not capable of getting from Point A to Point B just doesn't wash.]

Your right to bear arms is limited so hard that if you exercise it and are caught you'll never be able to do so legally again. Kyle Rittenhouse was put on trial in part for, functionally, being subhuman (edit: temperature) while armed; the emphasis on "but 17, therefore he's not a human, and should be charged for daring to act as if he was" was everywhere.

[Contrast Boomers that grew up in rural areas, who have formative experiences hunting rabbits in the woods at 10 with a rifle, and teenagers with gun racks in their trucks to go hunting after school let out. Sure, you had to store your guns in the office, but you can at least argue that's reasonable to reduce theft.]

Taxation without representation; income tax applies to them but voting doesn't.

I could go on. The only justification for this shit is "it's fine, because they're subhuman" (who hold that pop-psych belief that you don't pass the paper-bag test until 25 specifically for that reason), and while we can certainly argue about to what we should take away from subhumans to the extent that we're right about their tendencies for violence, nonsense, and disorder, my argument against this is the Progressive one: offer these people reasons not to do these things and you'll see better results. It's so bad that even the teenagers themselves will accept the rest of society's behavior as justified for this reason, though humorously you might argue that's just a logical consequence of subhumanity.

And I'm still not entirely sure where it came from.

  • Was it really the Satanic Panic, where Karen lost her mind because "muh D&D and pedos around every corner"?

  • State agencies adopting extreme aversion to risk allowing themselves to become weapons of the bored housewife concern troll?

  • Was it the cratering of the laber pool in the 1980s that solidified the segregation of the youth from the general public?

  • Was it the dramatic increase in crime because the CIA was selling crack on the streets?

  • The 24-hour news cycle and the Amber Alert (where 99.99% of its uses are custody disputes)?

  • Teenagers running amok killing their classmates because they correctly assessed that their life didn't matter to anyone and had no social buy-in (which is itself likely an emergent phenomenon; spree shooters in 1998 would have been born in 1980 and thus grew up post-enclosure)?

  • All of the above?

Even better is that, because abolition and miscegenation are (at least popularly) linked for what should be obvious reasons, anyone who dares attempt improve the standards of the under-18 set in society is clearly doing it just because they secretly want to normalize sex with them or otherwise expose them to danger for selfish reasons rather than actually wanting this class of people to have a life worth living for once.

How do we meaningfully improve things for kids? Let them work at 10 yo again?

I don't think it needs to be quite that drastic (also, working youth not making enough to afford their own apartment tends to be a moral hazard, contributes to a 3.7-income trap, and as such needs barriers).

Anyway, there are ultimately 3 problems that stand in the way: infrastructure (transport required for even trivial tasks), safetyism (State abusable by concern trolls), and moral hazard (the people who create these problems are not the ones that will ultimately pay the price for them).

Some things (from "already done in some places" to "is politically very difficult") in the North American context:

  • Take steps like Utah has to limit the ability for concern trolls to use the State as a weapon against children walking down the street or playing in the yard. This should ease pressure on parents who do live in areas that have parks available but don't dispatch their children to them for fear of CPS. Dispatching your kid to run the odd errand now also becomes feasible, depending on location.

  • Fix the parks so that kids actually want to go to them and ensure technology is there to encourage meetups. Structures there don't have to actually be dangerous, but they do have to seem like it to be fun. Might require cleaning up tents.

  • Subsidize and improve medium-speed personal transport options (which should counter the suburb problem somewhat). The powered bikes that you can ditch at mass transit stops are a good start, but if you managed to issue every kid in a school district one (they're about as costly as a cheap laptop, and would cost about as much as a comparable technology deployment) you can dilute the inherent theft problem (not that technology doesn't already exist to just key students to their own bikes) and don't have to constantly re-buy them as they get taller. Traffic accidents will probably go up as a consequence of more bikes on the road, though, so it'll require a body politic that doesn't (for lack of a more polite term) instantly wuss out at the first couple of injuries with the new tech, and it's currently illegal in most polities.

  • Fix the education-social pipeline so people who've lost patience for school closer to when their biological need to belong to a society develops (about 16) can leave it and do something else that pays better than minimum wage, and harmonize training requirements for jobs with reality. If the best solution to crime reduction is "just give them a future; show them that participating will get them The Good Life(tm) in a reasonable timeframe", well, that would probably do it.

Re-creating the initial conditions for the "good life, back when kids were competent to do things we pretend they can't do now and didn't need to be hand-held through everything" isn't a panacea, but it's probably a good start. If the conditions are allowed to persist for long enough, and those conditions really were the cause of the former, then that emergent behavior should come back and we won't have to deal with so many nervous wrecks who "mysteriously" never developed the ability to do things on their own.

And I'm still not entirely sure where it came from.

Was it really the Satanic Panic, where Karen lost her mind because "muh D&D and pedos around every corner"?

State agencies adopting extreme aversion to risk allowing themselves to become weapons of the bored housewife concern troll?

Was it the cratering of the laber pool in the 1980s that solidified the segregation of the youth from the general public?

Was it the dramatic increase in crime because the CIA was selling crack on the streets?

The 24-hour news cycle and the Amber Alert (where 99.99% of its uses are custody disputes)?

Teenagers running amok killing their classmates because they correctly assessed that their life didn't matter to anyone and had no social buy-in (which is itself likely an emergent phenomenon; spree shooters in 1998 would have been born in 1980 and thus grew up post-enclosure)?

All of the above?

Suburbanization, I think, as accelerated by the violent crime epidemic. Car-based suburbs are basically human settlements bereft of any sense of community, unwalkable neighborhoods, and have harmful psychological effects on children.

Kyle Rittenhouse was put on trial in part for, functionally, being a nigger while armed

Come on man. Not only are you ruining an otherwise not-terrible post but it's not even an apt metaphor for the situation.

Also, if you're not hiding your power level, you could shill your Substack and book while you're at it.

I almost wrote this exact response. I was pleasantly surprised through much of the first half that the quality of the argument was much improved but it just kept digging.

I like this post, but I think it could do with some more explanation/details (for example, analyzing the Karen phenomenon you've hinted at, data for the "virtually all Amber Alerts are custody disputes" thing), and maybe a cooler temperature (for example, was the hard-r necessary?).

I remember that a history teacher in my college was wanting to put together a lecture about the rise of the teenager category, and I've heard that the idea of the teenager was in part invented/socially constructed by marketers (something he might have mentioned, along with changing conditions).

dog parks, dogs relieving themselves on public property, automobiles, allowing crazy vagrants to roam the streets, library worker unions, teacher's unions, squeezing every bit of life expectancy from the gerontocracy, etc.

masks for children and not adults

Roman Empire demographic screed

The Venn diagram overlap of “could better benefit kids” and “the fault of pet culture” contains almost none of these things. Maybe choosing to build a dog park over a playground. The points about unions don’t even fit either circle unless I’ve missed recent developments in the Library Cults.

Every DINK with a pet are two votes that should been a pro-child vote balancing out the other forces in politics, but instead they are absent from the fray. When you have so many adults in their prime ages of energy raising pets instead of children, it changes as a whole what the culture values.

The points about unions don’t even fit either circle unless I’ve missed recent developments in the Library Cults.

In my city, libraries have been basically non-functional since the pandemic. The official hours are ridiculously limited, but every time I actually go during those hours, it has been closed. They have rules requiring at least 4 staff members be on site all the time, so if one staff member calls in sick, and they are below the number, the entire thing closes. This is despite staffers admit they spend most of their time doing nothing. They are having trouble hiring, but despite shelving books being a task many people could do, only people with the official sheepskin are allowed to be hired, which is generally a union thing to create barriers of entry and higher pay. Of course, the library workers job can itself suck, because they are lower priority than the rule "always accommodate vagrants lest we get publicized doing something that creates bad optics."

Wow, that’s absolutely ridiculous about the libraries. I had no idea. Thank you for clarifying.

demographic screed

Do you have arguments against the parents thesis, or do you think labeling a text you disagree with a "screed" is sufficient disproof?

I don’t think the parent presented much of a thesis at all. If he wanted to say “demographics is destiny”, he could have ditched the first half of the post.

Nothing wrong with his quotes.

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