TRIGGERnometry - August 16, 2024


Was JD Vance Right About Childless Cat Ladies？ - Konstantin Kisin


Episode Stats

Length

5 minutes

Words per Minute

188.03116

Word Count

1,062

Sentence Count

62

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

4


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

J.D. Vance claimed that if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the entire future of the Democratic Party is controlled by people without children. Was he right about childless cat ladies?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Was J.D. Vance right about childless cat ladies?
00:00:07.100 Over the last couple of weeks, Donald Trump's running mate and potential vice president, J.D. Vance,
00:00:12.880 has come under heavy criticism for remarks he made in 2021.
00:00:17.280 Speaking on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Vance claimed that we are effectively run in this country
00:00:22.020 by a bunch of childless cat ladies, before adding,
00:00:25.080 if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is
00:00:30.260 controlled by people without children. Understandably, the resurfacing of these
00:00:34.280 comments has led to uproar in the media and fierce debate online. I say understandably because his
00:00:40.160 comments were crude and lacked the nuance required to properly discuss such contentious and, in my
00:00:45.240 view, important issues. Why they are contentious is obvious, but why are they important? For a start,
00:00:50.880 the Western world is going through a population crisis. We are not having enough children. And
00:00:55.920 crucially, it's not that mothers are having fewer children, it's that fewer women are becoming
00:01:01.080 mothers in the first place. If current trends continue, the childless population will keep
00:01:05.920 growing. What is more, the rapid polarization of Anglosphere politics in the last decade
00:01:10.980 has brought into sharp relief the significant differences in the voting preferences of various
00:01:16.240 ethnic, marital, and sex-based groups. In the course of the usual back and forth about this online,
00:01:21.360 I replied to a tweet by my friend and former trigonometry guest Sydney Watson in which she
00:01:26.520 wondered why people focus on childless women so much, but nobody seems to care about childless men.
00:01:31.840 I attempted to explain that the focus on childless women specifically, while appearing unfair,
00:01:36.800 has an understandable origin. The main thrust of my argument was that we would not pretend that
00:01:41.500 becoming a parent has no impact on your worldview, and therefore by definition, not becoming a parent
00:01:47.300 also affects how you think about the world. Especially if you're a childless woman past
00:01:52.560 childbearing age, for whom that childlessness is both permanent and irreversible. I don't want to
00:01:57.860 rehash that conversation here. Rather, it was a sarcastic reply to that exchange that caught my
00:02:02.920 attention and sparked the thought process that led to this video. As if parents are enlightened when it
00:02:08.400 comes to politics, said the reply. This really got me thinking. Enlightened is a poor character of the
00:02:13.800 parental worldview. Parenthood does not raise your IQ. But what it does do is put you into full
00:02:19.360 connection with the entire lineage of humanity. It makes you understand that you're merely the
00:02:24.040 intermediary step between the people who came before you and the people who are coming after you.
00:02:28.820 It makes you realize that you're not even remotely the center of the universe. It forces you to try so much
00:02:34.500 harder to be the very best possible version of yourself every single day, because you cannot bear
00:02:39.520 to see the price you will pay for failing. And the fact that despite doing your very best every single
00:02:44.780 day, you fail regularly anyway, humbles you. Any illusion you may have had about your own perfection
00:02:49.720 vanishes rapidly. It also makes you more empathetic in a very particular kind of way. When you see the face of
00:02:55.740 your newborn child for the first time, it imprints in your consciousness the fact that everyone you have
00:03:00.860 ever met, and everyone you will ever meet, whether they're the worst scumbag in the world or the purest
00:03:05.880 angel, was once an innocent little bundle too. It makes you more risk conscious. I don't necessarily
00:03:11.500 mean risk averse. You may be one of those parents who really wants to let their kids make their own
00:03:15.920 mistakes. But you are more aware of risk and more aware of vulnerability. Of your child's, of your own,
00:03:22.240 yes, but also of all other things too. Does this make you a better person? After all, this is the
00:03:28.000 implication, right? If you claim there's a difference between people with children and people without, that
00:03:33.420 means automatically that you're saying people with children are morally better. I don't know if it makes you
00:03:38.540 morally better, but does it make you better at some things? It would be absurd to claim it doesn't. We evolved
00:03:45.180 for millions of years in various life forms to ensure that parents were pretty damn good at getting their
00:03:50.560 children to adulthood. Those who weren't died out. So when it comes to politics, I don't know that calling single
00:03:56.920 women childless cat ladies is a winning strategy, but we ought not pretend that becoming a parent is an
00:04:02.700 entirely neutral event when it comes to how you see the world. The characteristics of childless people
00:04:07.640 are optimized for the first few decades of life. Having fun, meeting new people, work hard, play hard,
00:04:13.560 finding your way in life, exploring new experiences, traveling, personal achievement, ambition, experimentation,
00:04:19.260 etc. Your planning horizon is short because almost inevitably it is limited to the duration of your own
00:04:24.740 life. These are all great qualities and incredibly adaptive for the evolutionary objective of young
00:04:29.700 adulthood, finding a mate to produce offspring. But once someone becomes a parent, other things come
00:04:34.940 center stage. Responsibility, duty, pragmatism, stability. Your job is no longer to find a mate and
00:04:41.540 produce offspring. You're now trying to give your offspring the best possible chance of reaching
00:04:45.960 adulthood and reproducing themselves. These are different postures towards the world. Is one better than the
00:04:51.980 other for some things? Yes. And is the other better than the former for some other things? Yes. Given
00:04:58.880 the choice and all other things being equal, which of those two value sets would I personally want in
00:05:04.300 the leader of the most powerful country in the world? Undoubtedly a parent. I urge you to rewind and
00:05:09.640 listen to what I just said. I didn't say a parent is better than non-parent. I said all other things
00:05:15.680 being equal. You don't get my vote because you're a parent. In the same way, you don't get my vote for any
00:05:21.060 other single reason. But is being a parent a plus in my book? Absolutely. And it shouldn't be
00:05:26.960 controversial to say so. If you enjoyed these videos, please remember they're available on my
00:05:32.240 sub stack days, weeks, or sometimes even months ahead of time. So click the link in the description,
00:05:37.540 head over there now and subscribe.