RenOS
something is wrong
No bio...
User ID: 2051
RenOS
something is wrong
9d ago
I agree with you insofar as, conditional on your story being true, you have little to directly feel bad about except the equivalent of gawking at a trainwreck.
However, I ultimately still come down on HereAndGone's side on practical terms. The secret to a good life is 90% avoiding bad people. A hot, unstable model with a (rightfully!) jealous fiance is someone that should get all your spidy senses tingling, screaming get out now.
There is so much potential here for things to go wrong, some of them even entirely out of your hand, and so little upside. It's not hard to imagine the fiance catching you two, coming to the wrong conclusion, and going after you. Maybe you have just one bad day, fall for the temptation, and get sucked in. Really, just keep your distance & find excuses not to meet until she gets the hint.
RenOS
something is wrong
10d ago
One extra variable buy-in, and then tournament with 3 winners.
Thanks for the help, that sounds reasonable. I don't need to go pro, just not like to feel like I threw the money away.
RenOS
something is wrong
10d ago
Yeah, that sounds like the games we had in the past. Though it's been a few years, so some could have levelled up in the meantime.
RenOS
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10d ago
Some old school friends invited me to a poker table around christmas. It's a bit too much for me to just happily play the money away as I usually did, but not so much to say no just for that reason (losing it wouldn't make a noticeable dent in my finances at all, I'd just feel bad). Does anyone here happen to know a decent, short basic poker intro guide/video series or anything that I can watch over a few days?
RenOS
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12d ago
Plus again, you have a very self-defeating definition of Pickup Artist. It seems to exclude any man who either starts or during his life gains status, wealth, social trickery or any other resource. What is your stance then? That "true" pickup artists are only losers who never start or end with money and status and who never get laid?
I guess that one large difference between us is that I actually had some contact with the people in the PUA scene, as it actually existed, though not enough to call myself a pickup artist (I was at a particular low point of my social university life and tagged along for a short while with some of them, but found their behaviour too unpleasant to really get into it). The great majority of them were literal nobodies, low or middling social status at best, no notable wealth, certainly no possibility of using physical power to get their way. Nothing. Just like me, that was in fact precisely what attracted them to the movement in the first place. They weren't even especially charismatic in a general sense, nor unusually intelligent. They employed a relatively rigid playbook of behaviour that works well on lone, ideally half- or fully drunken girls who already were receptive to liaisons. But that's the important part, it worked. And this is what PUAs were selling, an approach for getting women to sleep with you available to anyone, even the losers, in the span of a single night, or maybe just a few dates. That's the whole point. You don't have to be a loser to use it, but it works even if you're a loser.
And now take a look at Casanova again. He's in an entirely different ballpark. The average loser can't get people to finance their university degree, can't get a wealthy patron to enable them, can't trick people into believing they are medical experts, and especially not for months at a time. It just doesn't work. Casanova used a wide array of social trickery far beyond the small, formalized PUA playbook, and expertly switched it around to whatever was needed for whatever he wanted to do at the moment. This included seducing women, but was not limited to it, and even on this particular topic he generally was more versatile. He's a con artist.
So, in extra clear words on what is PUA, and who is a pickup artist: PUA is a limited playbook of behaviour aimed primarily at seducing receptive lone women over short spans of time that flat-out wouldn't have worked in the past due to social/male guarding. A pickup artist is someone who employs this kind of playbook to sexual success. Someone can also develop such a playbook, or teach other people how to use it, and become rich & famous as a result. This would enable them to seduce women in a different way, using their status & wealth, which was available to people in the past since it's a way to get past social guarding. They can also simply be con artists in addition to pickup artists. But most of them would still regularly employ PUA tactics instead anyway, because they were already used to it and it already worked for them. And in this way, they did stay pickup artists.
RenOS
something is wrong
12d ago
Anyways, the point is that PUA is nothing new. You discarded pirates, conquistatdors, minor nobles and other players as somehow unfairly using status and violence to bang hundreds of women in order to be "true" PUA artists. Now you discard Casanova and his ilk for applying social trickery and beguiling his victims from being the same. So what is PUA artist? Only those who fail in life or in seduction of women using their perceived status, money, power, social wit and any other trick? It does not make any sense.
I added my position in an edit since I didn't expect you to answer so fast, so sorry for that. But I think my position is pretty clear:
Edit: And to make my own position very clear: Solely beguiling women without also having access to some genuine advantages such as high social standing, wealth or power was near-impossible before the sexual revolution due to guarding behaviour by males in her social circles. You had to successfully trick those men as well to even just get access to the women. Casanova does not disprove this position in any way whatsoever; He had a genuinely high social standing, genuine wealth, genuine education, and then also tricked entire social circles.
After the sexual revolution, women would start to regularly go unattended to parties & festivities, which made (a percentage of) them easy prey for the first generations of tricksters in the hippy movement. Since women aren't stupid, this caused a backlash quite fast and they became more wary again, which necessitated the more elaborate trickery employed by PUA. However since it's a formalized movement it's easy to recognize once you know what you have to look for, so it died in the span of just a few years again. But more generally, there still just aren't as many safeguards nowadays; Obviously, tricking an entire social group, including both men and women, over long spans of time is much, much harder than tricking a (necessarily single-sex) lone individual over short spans of time. So the general style of social trickery as employed by PUA artists is still mostly viable, but was not in the past.
Now you're talking about someone entirely different than you did before, though. I was talking about the people you yourself mentioned: Aristocrats, soldiers, pirates etc.
Secondly, Casanova is someone with a high enough social standing & wealth that his family could afford to send him to study law at a university, at a time when such education was extremely rare. That tells you a lot more about his background than just saying his parents were "two actors". He also is a classic general-purpose con artist, as evidenced by the wikipedia entry you cite yourself. He not only regularly, successfully impersonated aristocracry, he also directly tricked aristocrats themselves. And he evidently was genuinely rich, even if it was ill-gotten & regularly frivolled away. Obviously, such a person can take advantage of a similar playbook as the actual aristocrats.
He didn't walk into a bar at night negging unaccompanied women until they sleep with him. He publicly displayed his wealth and status to the entire greater circle of people around the women, would woo the men around her as well, often played a long game over months that included ripping off entire social groups for money by claiming access to secret, useful knowledge. It's certainly more similar to PUA than the classic, far more common aristocrat, in that it includes social trickery aimed at women, but yet again structurally very different and far more complicated.
And also I have to mention again we're talking about the personal memoirs of a self-admitted con artist. That's really not something I'd take at face value.
Edit: And to make my own position very clear: Solely beguiling women without also having access to some genuine advantages such as high social standing, wealth or power was near-impossible before the sexual revolution due to guarding behaviour by males in her social circles. You had to successfully trick those men as well to even just get access to the women. Casanova does not disprove this position in any way whatsoever; He had a genuinely high social standing, genuine wealth, genuine education, and then also tricked entire social circles.
After the sexual revolution, women would start to regularly go unattended to parties & festivities, which made (a percentage of) them easy prey for the first generations of tricksters in the hippy movement. Since women aren't stupid, this caused a backlash quite fast and they became more wary again, which necessitated the more elaborate trickery employed by PUA. However since it's a formalized movement it's easy to recognize once you know what you have to look for, so it died in the span of just a few years again. But more generally, there still just aren't as many safeguards nowadays; Obviously, tricking an entire social group, including both men and women, over long spans of time is much, much harder than tricking a (necessarily single-sex) lone individual over short spans of time. So the general style of social trickery as employed by PUA artists is still mostly viable.
RenOS
something is wrong
12d ago
It still is structurally quite different. PUA is based on the idea of a stranger seducting women entirely with social trickery. This wouldn't have worked historically; Men in a social group generally guarded the women against strangers, and the women themselves were often even more wary of strangers. Inside a social group where everyone knows everyone else already, PUA falls apart as well.
The examples you cite have primarily two mechanisms they used: Actual status, and (the threat of) violence. As a peasant, you couldn't openly dismiss a noble unless he very blatantly broke with established rules, the way you would with a stranger. The social status itself also, of course, made the nobles more alluring for the women, and peasant men that would otherwise guard them also might try to curry favor with the noble instead. Not to mention that more critical literature of these individuals often strongly insinuates that their allegedly awesome powers of seduction was to a large part just plain prostitution. This is proven at least partially true by what frequently followed; A peasant women with an accepted noble bastard child would usually get an alimony that far outstrips any other stream of income usually available to her. But also for sex more generally, if a noble offers a women coin upfront, and the sexual encounter is revealed against their wish & expectation, both parties can save face by claiming that it actually just was a seduction. The women becomes a hapless victim, the men an awesome seductor. Much better than a whore & john.
For the soldiers/conquistadors/pirates etc. taking advantage of their physical power, almost everything above holds true as well, just that the arrangement is usually less voluntary in nature.
I agree on 70/80 rockstar/yuppie life. Male hippies, even if they have a different political connotation, behaved in practice quite similar as well. It's all imo quite evidently downstream of the sexual revolution. PUA simply couldn't exist without it.
RenOS
something is wrong
13d ago
Short version for the question is, in essence, no we generally do not need to treat actual people directly differently (especially for people where you don't know their ancestry beyond the visibly obvious, and even for those the variance per person is still usually larger than the population level genetic differences, though there are some notable excemptions), but we also simply shouldn't expect different groups to exhibit the same mean for many traits even given identical environments. The big problem here is especially affirmative action, which lifts people visibly beyond their competence levels into positions they're unsuited for.
There are multiple substacks that write a lot about topics in this space. One of my favorite HBDer is Razib Khan, who is writing almost exclusively about population genetics. There is also a community of heterodox scientists which frequently publish together on HBD and all run their own substacks: Emil Kirkegaard, Peter Frost, Seb Jensen, Meng Hu, Davide Piffer. Several also write in the hub Aporia, which also includes a good entry point.
RenOS
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21d ago
If you want a picture of the future, imagine being asked "Oi oi oi, you got a licence for that, chum?" - forever.
RenOS
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23d ago
Jesse Singal is pretty even-handed, even if he's vilified a lot by activists; His position is, as far as I understand it, that the evidence on the entire topic is far too unreliable to act on it the way the medical establishment is currently doing. Diagnostic standards are far to deferential and all the available treatments have muddy positive impacts; If anything, the negative impacts have far better evidence than the positive ones. Nevertheless, he still stresses that we should be tolerant, that most trans-people are perfectly fine, and that this is especially about protecting teens and children from haphazard decisions that will impact their entire life.
Andy Ngo really trashes crazy (violent) left extremism in general, which includes a trans-rate of seemingly >50%. Of course you can't call this representative of anything, but it still gives you a good view into a subgroup that nevertheless enjoys widespread support in media & academia.
Colin Wright (note that this substack also includes some other authors) lands somewhere in-between, generally also primarily highlighting the low evidentiary standards. But he also regularly makes a deliberate point about the primacy of biological sex, and is more openly dismissive of large parts of trans medical care.
RenOS
something is wrong
27d ago
At no point did I claim that women have no agency. Quite the opposite; My view is that women happily pushed the movement forwards for as long as they thought it was good for them, and then changed course once they realised the issues with it. If anything, a point could be made that the women were the primary agents, while some men were passively enjoying the perks (which isn't even entirely wrong). Of course, all the later feminist waves are also introducing as many new problems as they are fixing.
RenOS
something is wrong
28d ago
I think it was Deiseach who once pointed out that second-wave feminism was actually a really sweet deal for men and a poison pill for women, with all the "free love" turning out to be just fucking around without any responsibility, and all later feminism waves are just an attempt at fixing this giant screw-up without admitting to it. I'd nitpick that it only was a sweet deal for a particular kind of men, but otherwise agree.
RenOS
something is wrong
28d ago
It seems rather logical to me. My parents had little choice in the jobs they did, and just stuck with them due to a mix of necessity and convenience. But they aren't "dream jobs" in any way, and nobody feels the need to portray it as such.
So they wanted something else for me. They supported me, they told me to do something I love. This has also been one of the core messages I grew up with in media: Explore your interests! Find the real you! Self-actualize! etc.
The thing is, work is generally work because it needs to be done, but nobody wants to do it. That's the reason you get paid. Otherwise it would be a hobby. Meanwhile, the few fields that at least sound appealing in theory all turn into such a fierce competition that they debase themselves into working for the absolute minimum survivable amount (see journalism). Sometimes below that, if there are enough nepo-babys who can coast on their trust fund anyway.
But wasn't this your dream job? You sacrificed so much just to get here! Your parents supported you so much! You told everyone that this is what you want to do! So there's two options: a) drop out (and often just rinse-repeat in a different field) or b) accept that yes, this is your dream, but you just have to FIGHT HARD and BE PASSIONATE until you prevail. Even if it wasn't your dream job specifically, people generally get much more choice in what they do, so if you end up hating it, it's your own fault for choosing stupid. That's much tougher to swallow than it was in the past; You didn't get a choice, so it wasn't your fault.
RenOS
something is wrong
28d ago
I thought the same, but to be fair, it makes sense in the framing of the post it's a reply to. People who were tribal when the Europeans showed up were colonized by them, period. It's also true that tribals generally tend to get conquered/enslaved by anyone who shows up with a sufficiently high tech level compared to them, so this has little to do with Europeans in particular, though.
RenOS
something is wrong
30d ago
Ha, I remember very well when I pirated DMC3 as a teenager and couldn't afford a controller. The difficulty and the over-the-top edgelord-ness meshed well with my mind-state at the time, so I pushed through despite the, as you put it, masochism of the endeavour.
It's appropriate to be cynical, and I 100% agree about the heat pump arrangement being effectively a mandatory ripp-off, but fortunately the Erbbaurecht is legally very restrictive and they have already made some unusual choices that they can't take back. First, setting the price of the plot so low now means that possible later price explosions are mostly irrelevant for the yearly payment, since that is instead entirely bound to the VPI, i.e. the general inflation index. The same goes for rate of 2%: Typical is between 3-5%, so this is not just at the lower end, it's even below. The rate is entirely fixed, by contract, for 99 years. This part is genuinely beneficial to us and they have little leeway to screw us over. There are even several clauses protecting us should we struggle to pay otherwise.
It makes sense however once you know more about the structures behind the scenes: The plots of lands themselves originally belonged to the church and they now want to use them to generate some alternative income stream. As I've talked about before, modern church employees tend to be very progressive and not very religious. So they were easily talked into extremely generous conditions under the excuse of social housing. The "public" utility company, on the other hand, is a private company that is merely owned by the city. So they are relatively free to re-distribute significant income to (usually high-ranking) employees, and any further profit goes to the state (I've just checked, they indeed have gotten a decent profit the last few years). And I don't think anybody will be surprised to hear that they, too, are very ideologically progressive.
So it's in practice a re-distribution scheme from old church assets towards one (large) part ideological progressive pet projects, one part towards well-off Bildungsbürgertum, and one part to the state.
RenOS
something is wrong
1mo ago
Yes, it's depressing. We consider building a house soon-ish, since there is a very attractive Erbbaurecht project currently. In short, they treat the value of the plot outrageously low (ca 200/sqm, comparable plots here can easily go to 600 and more!) and then on top you even only have to pay 2% of the cost per year, so you pay an absolute pittance. Connection costs etc. are also very low. After 15 years you also get the right to buy it up properly (still for a low price, though it can increase somewhat), so it has basically all the upsides of either buying OR renting the plot. For this reason, the project is considered "social" and it's also "family-friendly", meaning you can only apply if you're a family AND don't earn too much together.
But then they throw all of this under the bus for the "green" part. You have to use a green flat roof with water retention, which is basically worse in function in all ways that matter to you (notably excludes an attic) and also costs an extra 50k. We have to build significantly more solar than we normally would. You can't build a cellar, either, nor a garage or carport, because ... fuck you, I guess? Most importantly, you're forced to take the local cold district heating for 10 years, which includes renting the heat pump for >100€ per month (in addition to paying 25k connection costs in the first place) and then you still have to pay for the electricity to run the heat pump. The kicker? You can't use the solar energy for the heat pump, "for technical reasons" and since the energy provider owns the pump (not us), we can't do anything about it. And a million other overly-specific, stupid limitations.
All this together means especially that when searching for duplex partners, we had a lot of contact with low-earning people at first, but they all get weeded out by the requirements since they can't afford all this stuff. So the only people left are people like us, well-off Bildungsbürgertum who are not in private industry bc we'd be earning too much then. That's quite convenient to be clear, but also extremely self-serving since guess who are the people making these decisions?
And when I talk with other germans about this, they're just so goddamn defensive no matter how stupid and self-serving it is. Sure the limitations are annoying, but combatting climate change is alternativlos! Yes the cold district heating design is a ripp-off, but gas prices will go up (for mysterious reasons not spelled out) so you come out ahead! Green roofs will be mandatory soon anyways, so why complain! Sure the project is not actually social, but the real fault lies with capitalism not paying enough!
Germany feels so, so dead. The entire mentality revolves around what needs to be done to sate modern progressive moral conceptions, and everything else is an afterthought that can only be used if the former is threatened. German industry going down is good, actually, since CO2 is going down with it, and the only reason why we shouldn't overdo it is that we can't finance the Energiewende otherwise.
And mind you, this is with the allegedly conservative CDU allegedly in charge.
RenOS
something is wrong
1mo ago
Maybe it's petty, but that is too me possibly even worse than general wokery and makes me want to avoid the game. Good romance is already hard enough to do well in a video game when focussing on one or two fleshed-out options and still often feels very cringe even then. Strong feelings ought to be earned, which is incompatible with many genres. I often entirely avoid romantic subplots altogether if possible for the same reason, and there is little I dislike more than accidentally stumbling into it (and no, I can just watch porn if I want to see merely casual sex, I don't need it in games).
RenOS
something is wrong
1mo ago
It's a bit of a digression, but I found it funny (and admittedly unsurprising) for acoup to say that he thinks the story would be improved by making admiral purple hair uncontroversially competent and Poe incompetent UNTIL he realizes his error of not listening to his female superiors. That's an extremely sanctimonious and unfun storyline (sexist to boot, though who cares if it's this way around?) and I wouldn't be surprised in the least if that was the original intention, but was scrapped on contact with focus groups to make it more fun.
RenOS
something is wrong
1mo ago
The article is from 2018 and talking about specifically post-2015 increases. That just-so-happens to be the timing of the largest migration waves ever to enter germany. It even itself admits that the only group which plausibly stayed structurally the same - mothers with a german passport - had only a change from 1.43 to 1.46, which they call "notable" but which most would call "pretty much nothing". Attributing these changes to policy is, to be frank, imo bordering on willful misinformation. In general including foreigners/immigrants in most modern stats leads to nonsensical results, since everything gets drowned in composition effects. It's the equivalent to comparing test scores between a rich kid prep school and a public school in a poor district and claiming that it's due to this or that teaching approach; No, it's 100% due to differences in the populations (which, btw, don't need to be genetic; I know quite well how much difference simply highly motivated & supportive parents make).
You can see the stark differences quite well here. Again, note that the foreign population, at different times, included substantially different percentages of a) turkish majority-muslim migrant workers, b) italian majority-catholic migrant workers, c) syrian majority-muslim asylum seekers, d) north african asylum seekers (often, but not always masquerading as syrians), e) Ukrainian majority-orthodox asylum seekers and a million other smaller groups. Concluding anything from those numbers except the composition is pure insanity.
So that leaves us with german mothers subgroup. Now, there is an argument that you can see a very slight increase from around 1.3 in the 90s to a top of almost 1.5 in the mid 10s (note that the timeframe of the DW article is actually flat), and that this is due to policies. That's prima facie plausible, but firstly as you point out generally considered not nearly enough, and secondly doesn't match very well with the timing of the actual policy changes usually considered major. The biggest was the 2007 Elterngeld, which was deliberately designed to benefit working mothers and families in general as well as increase male investment into children. Can you see it in the plot? I can't, not as a one-time, not as a rate-increase, nothing. The second was the Elterngeld Plus in 2013, which accomodated part-time work in early childhood specifically. There is a modest increase here between 2013->2014, but it's still small, also looks more like a continuation of a former trend and worse, the line flattens shortly afterwards anyway. Another problem is the covid bump and the post-covid downturn; Family policies in germany are still very generous and didn't really change during covid, but the overall change observed easily drowns out all the other changes. Neither does it fit with economic or general anxiety; those were, if anything, especially high, not low, during covid.
And finally, even the german mothers actually have a significant problem with composition effects, even if they're not quite as strong. See the large increase in foreign births vs a corresponding small decrease for german mothers in 2011? This isn't an immigration wave nor policy effects, it's entirely due to the Zensus 2011 re-counting of who belongs into which group. Most immigrants stay in western countries nor is getting a passport particularly hard, and germany is no exception to that rule. So culturally noticeably different foreign groups with non-western marriage/family patterns get increasingly counted as german. Btw, afaik France's high official birth rates are for example almost entirely due to this as well, thanks to comparatively early postcolonial immigration waves.
And this even applies to rather old immigrant groups, and even non-immigrants. The region where I'm from has a specific town with a large church of pentecostals who fled from Soviet Russia long ago. Back then, however, it was a very small group. When I grew up (90s to 00s), they were already a substantial percentage of a specific town. Nowadays they are literally half the population (I can send you a DM with a link if you do not believe it, but don't want to share it publicly for OPSEC). They have consistently high (6-10 children is not exceptional) birth rates, high cultural cohesion and high retention rates, similar to Hasidic Jews in Israel. They are large enough so that our entire region is among those with the highest birth rates in germany, and has at multiple times been number one. Though admittedly my heritage (conservative catholics) isn't doing badly there, either (I literally do not know how many cousins I have; it's around 30-40).
Which leads to the explanation that makes by far the most sense to me: Culture. The pentecostals do not earn well (in fact, substantially below average). They do not have better family benefits. But what they have is social structures that consistently, consciously and openly advocate for and support marriage and family formation, while suppressing all influences that plausibly reduce it, such as casual dating, the focus on self-actualization, abortion and birth control, non-standard sexualities, education, female careers .... the list is long. It's a matter of priorities; Having children is hard and expensive, and no entry on the list is in itself mutually exclusive with high birth rates, but our culture just has a low status and low priority for #children, so almost any competing topic or enabling technology plays a part in the reduction..
If somebody put a pistol to my head and said I have to do something that reliably gets us back to >2.1 TFR, fast, I'd absolutely go with the right-wingers. Ultraconservative religious groups exist all across the western world and still have extremely high birth rates; If we become more like them, we will, too, have a higher TFR again, QED. Family benefits policy nerds are almost exclusively using bullshit composite stats and are thus ignorant about very basic realities. That doesn't mean, however, that I WANT us to do this; As it happens, I'm best described as a technoutopian transhumanist, and I do think we would have to pay a large price in technological progress if we were to attempt this, let alone my libertarian distaste for coercive measures. Me and my wife are trying our best to find a modern synthesis, where we consciously sacrifice what is necessary to have the number of children we desire while still keeping the parts we value about the modern system. But that doesn't make the right-wingers wrong on the facts.
No offense, but you're roughly two decades behind the state of the discussion. The rough trajectory goes like this (I'll use germany as the example since I'm most familiar with it, but afaik it's quite similar for many different western countries, save maybe a decade or so earlier or later):
60s: Germany is on a high due to the baby boom with a birth rate of ca 2.3. It switches to an overtly pay-as-you-go pension system, which works very well due to the circumstances. Some already point out that it will only work if birth rates keep stable and say we need to have policies to ensure that it does (of course, this is actually true of almost any economic system, but pay-as-you-go makes it overtly obvious). Chancellor Adenauer dismisses them stringently with "children will always be had" and this is also the public sentiment, so nothing is done.
80s: Birth rates went done substantially to ca 1.5. However, it's generally chalked up to be more an issue of delayed children rather than not having them at all. (Also, as a note: Germany already had rather generous maternity leave during this time already)
00s: The first generation of women has become old enough with a low birth rate so that it's clear that delaying is not the reason - people really have significantly less children overall (only 1.3, even). This coincided with a great increase in women employment, which was an amazing economic boon. When asked, women directly say the reason is economic - not enough money, not enough protection from discrimination after maternity leave, not enough family accommodation, ... and so on. Obviously, people are reluctant to rock the boat too much when times are good. So the focus is on increasing the (economic) benefits over the years in the expectation that the birth rate will go up again. People aren't terribly worried and the discussion is not really big in the public. The only who are worried a lot are, more often than not, literal nazis, so they are still easy to dismiss. <--- you are here.
10s: The birth rate didn't change, at all. More people get worried, since at the current rate there will be a big crunch in the 30s when the baby boomers retire. But in 2015 a new possible saviour turns up: Immigration! The immigration of earlier years usually was too small to be demographically notable, the large waves now were so massive that they actually could plausibly make up for the crunch. While this wasn't the primary reason that we opened the borders, it was mentioned multiple times by the left wing and made it hard for the then-mostly economic right to argue against it (it went roughly like this: "We worry about having not enough workers in a few years, now we are gifted plenty of young people, what are you complaining about!"). So policy doesn't change much, especially since accommodating the immigrants is too expensive to plausible further increase child benefits.
20s: It becomes very clear that the immigrants are actually an additional drain, not a benefit, to the economy. Birth rates also pretty much didn't change, except a short-term anomaly around covid. Now there actually isn't enough time left to solve the problem until the 30s - kids born now would only be teenagers. In fact, the negative impacts already become noticeable since some boomers already scale back work or even retire early, and the general economy is bad enough that people get unhappy. As usual, this is the moment the wider public really groks that there is a problem at all. Behind the scenes for the last decade, lots of overwhelmingly progressive, optimistic scientist have been looking for any policy, anywhere in the world, that increase the birth rates. There are none. All known developed countries have low birth rates. The discourse gets pretty gloomy, and the only reliable relationship that anyone can find across most countries is a negative one between female employment and birth rate. This coincides with a general rise of the right-wing across the entire west.
It's not terribly surprising here that some are jumping to coercive measures, and it's definitely not coming out of nowhere. My personal opinion is most close to pronatalist Lyman Stone (and to a lesser degree the Collins), which is that the problem is cultural and can't reasonably be solved economically. As a father who shares family obligations equally, I can tell you that especially small ones are a lot of fucking work (and money), and they will not only reduce your immediate work time, they also reduce your career opportunities and your free time. It's almost impossible to redistribute so much that having kids becomes economically beneficial. If you tell women that careers are important to them, they will not have kids, bc you can't have both and everyone knows it. Men will generally not blow up their career, either, especially since women don't actually respect house-husbands. A culture that idealizes self-actualization also suppresses child-rearing, since they are in the way. Etc. That doesn't mean coercion, but pretty much everything you propose has been tried in one country or another and found wanting. Of course the old arrangement (male main breadwinner, women part-time worker + child care) still works, but there is an ever-increasing portion of the population who is not willing to do that anymore. And once you've changed to the new dual-income model, the margins become quite thin so making a family work on top of that will include quite a lot of sacrifices. Worse, you have to outright compete with the DINKs.
RenOS
something is wrong
1mo ago
Sorry for talking a while. It seems I slightly misremembered it. The kids-bleeding-out part is something he allegedly said, not wrote, but it is referenced in the text you quoted ("you were talking about hoping jennifer gilbert's kids would die" -> "Yes I've told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy").
RenOS
something is wrong
1mo ago
Yeah, I agree with this. An owner kicking a drunkard out of his restaurant is, strictly speaking, a form of discrimination. Just one most people would approve of. But it's easy and convenient to just jump to "well it's not REAL discrimination when we do it".
Sounds like "amnesty for current immigrants, but then we will totally enforce the border, this time for real" to me, so forgetting it seems appropriate.
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