lobstersalad
1d ago
You’re right that the numbers who actually change their voting behavior off of this may seem unimpressive but “roughly half the country” means a very different thing in the modern American two party system than it does in typical day to day human life. 2008 was the most recent politically relevant election that was considered to be a true landslide and the popular vote result was 53% to 46%.
If I’m taking a poll of 20 coworkers to see where we want to go to lunch and 11 of them want pizza and 9 of them want tacos I would consider that a very close decision. But in modern American politics a vote that close is a blowout. A small percent of Trump voters switching sides next time or just not voting changes things dramatically. And this type of insane and economically destructive brain rot if it isn’t stopped immediately is the exact type of thing that will make that happen.
I absolutely despise the ethos of the modern left and have from the very moment I became aware of it when I was literally a middle schooler. But I’m not supporting a cult of personality whose leader is hellbent on crashing the global economy just because. If this keeps up and whoever gets the GOP nod in 2028 isn’t clearly intent on changing course I don’t think I can stomach it any longer. I don’t know how many people like me are out there but if even s small percentage of the vote defecting can make a big difference.
lobstersalad
4mo ago
I think about this whenever I see “protestors” shut down highways. If there was a 100% guarantee of no police involvement whatsoever the commuters would physically move them out of the way within a few minutes. But if you did that you’d be arrested and lose your job. Functionally the police are there to protect those obstructing traffic and falsely imprisoning people.
lobstersalad
8mo ago
The lack of preparedness seems more like a myth than fact. It looks like they already had ads ready to go and are outspending her 25 to 1.
lobstersalad
1yr ago
I agree that a mandatory retirement age for elected officials could happen in the near future based on what’s happening with the 2024 election. Similar to how limiting the president to two terms wasn’t put into the constitution until FDR broke tradition by running for four terms, Biden’s age (and Trump’s to a lesser extent) represents a serious risk to the country.
While neither of these men are as feeble/sick other side likes to portray, four years in an extremely high stress job for men who would be in their mid/early eighties respectively could end catastrophically. There’s a serious chance that whoever wins in 2024 is removed from office by their cabinet sometime in the next term due to age related cognitive decline. And the damage that’s done before that happens in a bad scenario could be significant.
lobstersalad
1yr ago
It’s true, and I don’t see any good reason why this would change but the future is always uncertain. I couldn’t have predicted 2024 ten or fifteen years ago
That said I think the role of religion in fertility might even be underestimated. I know I know anecdotal evidence but I see so many families with 4+ kids at church and knowing what birth rates are like these days thats very unusual in the general population. According to this women who attend religious services weekly or more are right at replacement with 2.1 kids per woman, while women who never attend are 1.3. Women who sometimes attend are in the middle. And this pattern has persisted for at least 40 years in the US so it’s a reasonably good bet that it’ll continue.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secular-fertility-divide
lobstersalad
1yr ago
This is the most plausible explanation I’ve seen. It was perhaps really a marriage boom driven by upward mobility from men and increasing divergence between male and female wages in favor of men. Sadly it’s also probably the bleakest explanation in terms of future demographics given that people are getting married less and less and women are pulling away from men in college enrollment
lobstersalad
1yr ago
My great grandparents and my wife’s great grandparents were born in the same decade. My great grandparents had one son, who had two children, two grandchildren, and only one great grandchild (working on fixing that!) Her great grandparents had five children, all of whom had huge numbers of kids, the lowest was 5 and the highest was 11.
Same ethnic group and religion too although her side actually practiced. Couples of the same era but one side has almost no living descendants and one has hundreds. Crazy. How do people ensure they’re on the side that actually reproduces if you can’t afford or don’t want to have 5+ kids?
lobstersalad
1yr ago
One thing I genuinely wonder about re: current and future birthrates is if the selection pressures stay relatively consistent. People always talk about the current bottleneck selecting for people who still choose to reproduce under modernity but do those selection pressures change too quickly to effectively select for anything? Things have changed so radically culturally and technologically just in my short lifetime. Are current births selecting for the same type of personalities as in the 2000s? What about now vs the 2030s and 40s? Maybe the type of personality that become DINKs in the 2020s would’ve had four kids in 1990 or will in 2040. For example right now (in the US at least) actually practicing a religion makes one much more likely to reproduce but could that reverse?
I genuinely don’t know. It makes it even harder to make any serious predictions
lobstersalad
1yr ago
As a long time lurker (but posted back on Reddit) I like the thread but have the same complaint with it that I have with Reddit, I would like to more easily be able to surf original posts. It’s kind of a drag to have to scroll past comment chain after comment chain to get to a new post. In that sense it would be better to not have most content in one thread, it would be easier to find new content .
It’s entirely possible there’s a way to do this and I just don’t know how since I don’t use Reddit basically at all and this site is kind of a clone
“The dream held by parents around the world is not 'I have done backbreaking labor roofing the houses, tilling the fields and manning the production lines - I hope that my child will live the same life,' it is 'I have done backbreaking labor roofing the houses, tilling the fields and manning the production lines so that my child doesn't have to.”
This is true but I would also strongly prefer my son to be a roofer or an assembly line worker than a 400 lb NEET. While the idea that we’ll automatically get back to the idealized somewhat fantastical version of the 1950s of good values and high employment in a productive industrial economy if we just mass deport and tariff is also a fantasy…. I do think we’ve gone astray as a society when able bodied men are permitted to be jobless parasites while we’re also importing a helot class to do the types of jobs we need able bodied men to do. I don’t have all the answers on how to fix this but I think it’s at least worth commenting on
More options
Context Copy link