pull down to refresh
220 sats \ 13 replies \ @SimpleStacker 19h \ parent \ on: A bunch of alarming shit BooksAndArticles
Statistics (which i'm too lazy to look up and link to right now) show that young men are actually trending more conservative in terms of desiring a more trad lifestyle: getting married, having kids, etc. But I think the stats also show that there's a growing despair that they'll ever be able to achieve that. At the same time, women are trending less trad than ever. The gap between young mens and womens' outlook on life has never been wider, afaict. It's very concerning to see. Every generation worries about the next, but the statistics seem to look worse than ever before.
reply
I'm sympathetic to both of your points:
- every generation thinks the next is utterly ruined
- right now feels (to me) acutely bad
... but then I think that maybe, wrt #2, I am exquisitely sensitive to certain flavors of ruin, and see it clearly, and see that it's worse than ever. But then I think that every generation may have had their own particularly fine-tuned feature detectors.
For instance, there are people alive now for whom the prospect of men marrying each other and paying money to impregnate someone for a sperm cocktail baby surely predicted the end-times; that worry seems absurd to me, but I have an entirely different mental ecology as a function of my path and era.
It's a foreignness that's hard to simulate, I think.
reply
the prospect of men marrying each other and paying money to impregnate someone for a sperm cocktail baby surely predicted the end-times
Renting people's reproductive capacity is abhorrent in the same sense as cannibalism. It's not like renting their labour. So yeah, end-times is on point.
reply
Bryan Caplan occasionally does posts where he makes a big list of things that seemed abhorrent and hideously unnatural over the years, that now we don't think twice about. This seems like that, to me.
The bigger class of concerning things, imo, are things we don't think twice about now that our successors will one day look as monstrous in the same way we're stunned that our ancestors thought slavery was fine.
reply
things we don't think twice about now that our successors will one day look as monstrous
Hm. Wrt slavers, I think we can either excuse them because of moral relativism, or not, and say they should have known better.
Do you think we ought not to be excused for our follies on this principle?
Or maybe we should know better about certain things, making our behaviors inexcusable. Then I would wonder what these are as well.
reply
Or maybe we should know better about certain things, making our behaviors inexcusable. Then I would wonder what these are as well.
The only possible audience for such an audit is yourself; and therefore you're the only one who can say what's on that list.
I do wonder if most people go around, as I do, knowing they're doing terrible things, and do them anyway, because they can, because it's normal and nobody's stopping them, and they get by through a willful act of looking-away.
Or whether the wrongness doesn't even occur to them, and so there's nothing to look away from.
And I don't know which I think is worse.
reply
With respect to your contrarianism, a few more questions:
The only possible audience for such an audit is yourself; and therefore you're the only one who can say what's on that list.
If we agree to leave it up to the individual to judge the rightness/wrongness (or wrongness/more wrongness, as you seem to suggest) of their actions, then shouldn't we also establish what measuring stick they need to use?
If it's the same one, or at least similar, in the past and future, then haven't we contradicted ourselves?
If it is different, then isn’t that quite the quandary, since then the number of lashing owed to, say, the persecutors of Jean d'Arc, depended on how much we are willing to admit that our ruler looks the same as theirs?
As for what I think, if I compared my own wongness/more wrongness with theirs, I'd say I am still in good shape, because, at least to me, there does seem to be something definitely wrong about persecuting a teenager for her heresy in claiming to have had visions of Saint Michael.
reply
reply
First try to understand why cannibalism is abhorrent, malum in se, and rather than just abnormal.
If you find yourself justifying cannibalism you'll be able to justify buying babies like IKEA furniture.
But the truth is that children from surrogacy tend to feel that their surrogate parent exploited their real mothers. These feelings are gaslit, and in extreme circumstances the surrogate parents cut off the children the way they would never have been cut off by real parents.
Bottom line is that people literally cannot be owned or bought, and if you try to buy a child you're only renting the experience of parenthood, not the real thing, hence those relationships are emotionally easier to sever from both sides.
Renting or buying a person's labour is not exploitation if the person is getting better at something, increasing their own capacity rather than draining it.
reply
I still don't understand why you compare something that’s—in my opinion—pretty close to adopting children to people eating each other.
If parents don’t want their child and I adopt it, you think this is as abhorrent as me eating other people?
This is what I'm hearing, and tbh, it sounds quite ridiculous.
reply
Surrogacy is nothing like adoption if the parent isn't buying the child.
If you bought it isn't a possession. You own it. But that person you bought has free will, they literally cannot be bought, it's technically impossible. The relationship you have with the purchased child is nothing like the adoptive process for a child whose parents haven't had the capacity to raise them. The purchased child will silently or publicly reject the relationship in favour of the parent they lost, but the taboo against speaking out is enormous because the surrogate parents can and do withhold resources.
Purchasing the experience of parenthood is a scummy way to exploit people in poverty.
Notice that in adoption the adoptive parents are told to tell them that they have been adopted from an early age, and to explain the situation, and to enable bridges to their real parents if feasible. It wasn't like that in the past, but we learned. That's not the case with surrogates.
Listen to the video by Olivia Maurel.
Cannibalism is using a person as an object, consuming them. Modern surrogacy is a consumptive act, like buying furniture from IKEA.
reply
I don't want to be that guy, but I think someone has to be that guy, so I'm going to be that guy who mentions that, yes, he thinks his generation is mostly fucked (ha!) when it comes to dating.
I’ve more or less accepted that it's very likely I’m not going to marry, I'm not going to have children, but I might own a house thanks to bitcoin, but I’m not even sure if I want that, also thanks to bitcoin.
But I'll be rich enough to fly planes for fun, so I guess I shouldn't complain? 🤔