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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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South Korea's fertility rate has been declining since at least the 1960s, but abortion only became legal there in 2020. Before then, people just got illegal abortions. The same would happen in the US if the pro-life package was enforced only by law, while people still wanted to have abortions.

US pro-lifers have developed no effective mechanism of changing whether women en masse get abortions or not. Trying to use law would fail just like in South Korea. Religion is no longer a serious influence on culture in the US outside of some politically marginal parts of the country - and for that matter, South Korean religiousness has not done much for their fertility rate. Long-term arguments about needing to support the future of society have little appeal outside some niche online forums like this.

Hanania is or at least pretends to be an extreme pro-free-market, pro-freedom-of-association kind of guy. So I am guessing that his answer to how to address the problems of immigration without arguing about HBD all the time might be something like "let whoever wants to come to the US come, but citizens and companies should be free not to do business with them and the government should not give them welfare". Which I'm not sure would work in practice, but it at least is a somewhat more defensible idea than "open the borders while changing nothing else about US law as it currently exists".

I'm not sure I agree with Hanania about the idea that appealing to pro-liberty arguments is more likely to get rid of anti-discrimination laws than appealing to "HBD" is. Most Americans just don't seem to be that libertarian. On the other hand, I somewhat agree with Hanania insofar I think that HBD's prospects as a force in US politics are very questionable and even if HBD became widely accepted, it would not necessarily do much to discredit dogmatic calls for equality. After all, what we now refer to using the euphemism "HBD" was by far the most popular attitude that white Americans had towards race differences just 80 years ago, but within the span of just a few decades that attitude completely shifted. So even if HBD "won" again, how would it retain its "winning" position against new futuristic versions of the call for equality?