And that doesn’t seem at all cold-blooded to you?
I recently made a post about how the tyranny of resource scarcity significantly limits our ability to provide medical care, so in fact, I can be cold-blooded.
I can even be cold-blooded and petty - I agree with Singapore’s decision to ban chewing gum because vandals were using it to disrupt the transit system.
When you get right down to it, I kind of suck at this “Utilitarianism” thing that I’ve built my life around.
You don’t need Utilitarianism to object to this: what have the “extra” “surplus” men done to deserve their situation?
But the reality is that after it turned out we don’t actually need to take children away from gay couples so they’ll be raised properly, and it turned out we don’t actually need to take children away from Native Americans so they’ll be raised properly, I’m inherently skeptical that children raised by folks who’re polyamorous will all turn out broken.
Ah, yes, we had all of those gay countries to compare to as an example. So many of them. And someone like me, who routinely suggests forming city-states to run political experiments, would never have suggested actually testing it on a smaller scale, which would have established just how (relatively) harmless it really was…
Look, we know what polygamy looks like in our countries (cruddy polygynous cults/backwards communities with “extra” “surplus” men). We know what polygamy looks like when it’s the norm in a country (the Middle East).
We know single parenthood isn’t great, either.
Hypergamy isn’t perfectly established, but it’s probably true enough to matter. And once a social change has taken place, it’s difficult to put it back without great cruelty.
Also, polygamy is more dangerous than polyamory, but I don’t recommend polyamory to anyone. You’ve got increased risk for STIs (much broader network of sexual contact), you’ve got the risk that they’ll fall in love with someone else and leave you, but without the increased transaction cost/friction of monoamory, you’re not their number one priority and if it comes down to a choice between you and someone else, they may pick someone else, you might just not even be poly, you could end up a single parent begging for money in online groups (okay okay, I wasn’t close to that particular drama, but it happens), etc.
(”But those are all risks in monogamy, too!” Sure, but not ones that are part of the very structure of it.)
It’s not some kind of virtuous, enlightened thing we should all aspire to. It’s just a preference that some people have. It’s not even an orientation.
Also, someone tell @pervocracy he’s a “weird autistic lovable internet nerd.” You’re speaking about people like they’re overgrown children who aren’t capable of making their own decisions.
Oh, you think that’s what I meant by it?
And not the more obvious “actually, because neurodivergents are different from neurotypicals, the outcome of neurodivergents doing something may be different than neurotypicals doing the same thing, particularly if there are fewer of them”?
