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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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And I think the fully-generalized-counterargument to tearing down any Chesterton's fence that's starting to emerge is that if you allow even one fence to be torn down even with good reason, its tearing down will be used as a fully-generalized-argument to tear down every fence.

The example I can think of being gay acceptance/rights/marriage. There are good reasons I think to believe the fence that were holding them back was obsolete: wealth and technology is such a force multiplier that our societies are no longer in a demographic race against their neighbors, so we can afford to let off the natalism and hostility to pairings that don't lead to births. But that opening was then used to argue that ANY social objection to any orientation, sexual identity, etc... is Wrong and Bigoted.

Honestly I'm at a loss as for what to do. I guess the solution is to personally calmly keep evaluating fences and not let myself be influenced by the whims of the era, but I admit I do understand why conservatism-minded people are worried about cedeing any ground at all anymore; each time they do the bulldozers go on a rampage.

The demographic race against one's neighbours has never (except, maybe, for very brief periods of time when both populations were decimated by some calamity) been contained by reproduction, but constrained by carrying capacity of territory (as evidenced by the fact that starvation were common in all parts of the world until the 1800s).

If Adam and Bob had zero children together, when they would previously have had X in expectation, it just meant that Charlie and Delilah had X more children survive to adulthood.

The flip side to that by focusing on holding up a generic fence, you undermine the strength of the stronger taboos where there are arguments better than holding back bulldozers. There were a lot of other problems in the early 1970s-era gay rights movement that allowed NAMLBA-types to get a foothold, but one of them was that California law brought a number of extremely sympathetic cases of seventeen-year-olds boinking each other.

@Meriadoc has a post here that's very interesting, but it's also quite plausible to read it as using the same principles to prohibit daikamura (pillows) and sex robots by its text, and there are other people using the same principles to argue against porn or sex toys. I think there's a way to square the circle, here, and actually find that bad things are bad without finding good or at least boring things bad too, but if you don't do so quite a large portion of the voting populace with reasonably expect you to be coming after them, eventually.

daikamura (pillows)

Are you sure you've got that right? I don't know Japanese, but everything I've seen from anime fandom suggests you mean "dakimakura".

Yeah, that's the right spelling, sorry.

Just be careful not to get ahegao and ahoge confused. They'll lead you towards very different things.