Crowstep
5hr ago
I truly am hard-pressed to think of policies that are explicitly aimed at making relationships and children look like a better choice for men.
The obvious one to me would be joint tax filing. In practice, that acts as a big tax break for married men. And child benefits in general incentivise both men and women to have children. Surely those would count?
And rules against abortion are a big obvious restriction on female behaviour.
I think Faceh's comment is a great example of the problem with gender discourse online. There are certainly problems that need solving (low coupling leading to low birth rates being the one I care about the most). But since the cause is a technological shock affecting everyone, it doesn't fire up the blood in the same way. Much more fun to feel the righteous fury of blaming the opposite sex.
Crowstep
12hr ago
do we really want a lot more Africans who can't feed themselves when the global fertilizer crisis really hits
Malaria nets reduce infant mortality, and reduced infant mortality causes birth rates to drop. The only way out of the African population explosion is through it.
Crowstep
12hr ago
Me and my wife were in a similar situation, with a flat in the city and planning to have our first child. The financially responsible thing would have been to have baby #1 in the city, and then moved out to the suburbs when #2 came along.
In the end, we moved out to the suburbs first. It wasn't the most economical decision, but I'm glad we made it. It's very comforting to be able to say 'this is our house, we own it, and we're probably going to live here forever'. Moving was stressful enough with my wife being pregnant at the time, it would have been harder if we'd had a baby or toddler I think.
But it really depends on how much you like the condo. If you weren't living there and were just viewing it as a potential buyer, is it the one you would go for?
Crowstep
12hr ago
Disappointed that Faceh's comment got so many nominations and upvotes, given that his comment was a trivially dispprovable claim (discussions of birth rates focus mostly on men) and his 'evidence' was three articles he didn't like combined with a nonsequitous call to action (find me a pronatal policy that tries to limit women's behaviour, when there are literally no pronatal policies that limit men's behaviour). For an apparently 'quality contribution', there's no actual contribution there, no argument beyond the impulse to blame women.
comes out of thin air
Are you forgetting the part where the Spanish government granted a mass amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants a few weeks ago?
Or perhaps the decision by the Spanish supreme court that forbade the authorities in Ceuta from turning away illegal immigrants?
But no, it must somehow be the fault of the Jews.
Crowstep
5d ago
I wouldn't call out someone, maybe they're autistic, but would (subconsciously) pay more attention to other signs they think like that.
Funnily enough, both my wife and my mother have used female in this context. I had to explain to both of them that it sounded weird. Bless their hearts for not being up to date on what they're supposed to be offended by.
Crowstep
8d ago
Am I missing something. Like 90% of the comments seem to be straightforwardly answering the question. There is one top level comment about the sleeve, and I don't know enough about drums to know whether or not that's a big deal. But it seems disproportionate to condemn Reddit as a platform with this as an example.
Crowstep
8d ago
Is it because modern oligarchs are not valuing art for its own sake, and not interested to pour cash to enterprises that will never pay for themselves, or just lack of imagination?
I suspect it's a personality difference between landed gentry and ultra-PMCs. There are definitely passion project films, but they are usually funded by filmmakers, rather than billionaires who have hired filmmakers.
Crowstep
8d ago
the controversy was the whole point.
Maybe you're right, or maybe the point was making the film eligible for Best Picture.
A real baller move would have been to make the biggest film of the year and then watch everyone's confusion when they realise it isn't eligible.
Crowstep
8d ago
Strictly looking at human sexual preferences, this kind of relationship isn't even that unusual except for the fact that it's probibited by society (for good reason).
I half of Europe, 14 or 15 is the age of consent. In the rest it's 16. You'd think from the headline he's been grooming an 11 year old.
Crowstep
9d ago
There is a very simple solution - decrease the extra care elderly people receive.
I'm not sure it would work like that. We've seen with the pension age debates that young people are perfectly willing to defend more goodies for the old, because young people will be old one day too.
The relative weakness of the youth vote vs the grey vote in the UK is why the government is raising the retirement age but not removing the triple lock, which is mathematically unsustainable.
I suspect we'll see more countries go that route. Maintain generous pensions but with higher pension ages, which to be fair was the initial idea for pensions. 20th century politicians didn't imagine people living 30+ years in retirement.
Crowstep
9d ago
Immigration isn't going to be a viable solution for much longer
I saw on twitter someone describe immigration as a solution to declining birth rates as being like trying to turn a shredder into a printer by shoving in more paper.
Crowstep
9d ago
Global birth rates were declining in the 2000s, certainly (which is what your first chart shows). But if you narrow it down to the richest countries at the time, most were seeing mini-baby booms. The US, UK, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Scandinavian countries, China, Canada and Russia (plus a bunch more) all saw TFRs increase between 2000 and 2010.
These researchers estimate that the introduction of the iPhone specifically reduced TFR in the USA by 33-52%.
'Modernity' doesn't really fit as an explanation. After all, the 1950-70s were definitely more 'modern' than the 1930-40s, but that's when the Baby Boom happened. The Industrial Revolution (arguably the beginning of 'modernity') caused the global population to explode as it left behind the malthusian limits of agriculture.
Of course, perhaps framing it as 'narcissistic culture vs smartphones' is the wrong way to go about this. Lyman Stone makes a convincing case in the second half of this article that the kind of self-centred culture you criticise was created by the technology shock of digital entertainment (of which smartphones seem the most powerful part).
To that end, we should not see the “long decline” graph as a rebuttal to cell phones, nor should we see digital technology as a mere “accelerator of the trend.” The new selfishness is only a viable ideology because digital technologies made it viable. Sitting at home wouldn’t be appealing without the digital technologies! These norms would not have reached scale without the specific vehicles to propel them, and because socializing is a cooperation problem, even individuals who do not share emergent selfishness norms lose out on potential socializees. People don’t RSVP to the party because they are at home chatting to their AI girlfriend. Even people trying to live in the real world are impacted.
Crowstep
9d ago
The root problem is that the beliefs and values of modern (ie post-modern) liberalism are not conducive to, and in some respects actively incompatible with, forming healthy and stable relationships.
Before 2010, birth rates were going up across the developed world, and either reached or came close to reaching replacement level.
We'll never know, but it may well be the case that modernity minus the smartphones, social media and dating apps could have been fine. This paper suggests that it is specifically short form video and dating apps that are the problem, but not video or social media in general (Facebook and Youtube don't seem to have affected birth rates, while Tinder, Tiktok and Instagram did).
Crowstep
13d ago
I think it's worth pointing out that under your definition, Lebanon is an apartheid state; Syria is an apartheid state; Egypt is an apartheid state; heck, even Norway is an apartheid state.
I'm not VIM but what exactly do you mean by that? Because Norway etc has non-citizens in its territory?
Crowstep
15d ago
I'd like to see some feasible measure developed that can 'quantify' the benefits and harms of social media use and THEN we can craft policies that regulate the issue, just like we do with cigarettes, toxic waste, and like we USED to do with gambling. My general prescription is that we should add friction to the vices.
The funny thing is, I agree with you. But from reading your comment history, your misogyny (and trust me, I do not use that word lightly) makes me distrust anything you say.
Like, if the problem is the phones, you should be talking about the phones, not about how women are awful.
I do concede that maybe you're not like this in real life. I talk about HBD on here occasionally, but I spend approximately 0% of my time in real life talking about it for obvious reasons. Maybe you have deep, fulfiling relationships with women in real life. Maybe you're married with kids?
But to quote a recent article on Astralcodexten:
The pain facing both men and women is evidence of a wounded society, and you cannot heal an injury by only stitching half of it
If you want to fix the world, you're not gonna do it by attacking half of the population, even if the media is unfair when it writes about men.
Its the women.
If a trend affects women by 40% and men by 30% (or whatever percentages you prefer), then no, it's not.
Also, how would you go 'targetting the most susceptible gender' with, for example, social media? Ban social media but only for women? If social media is bad for everyone but worse for women, why ignore the harm to men?
You also conveniently omit the social trends that are affecting men more, like video game, porn and gambling addictions.
Your approach is like the mirror of those 'tell men rape is wrong' campaigns, where the point is clearly to scold men because the activist enjoys it, not because it'll work.
Crowstep
15d ago
The Women's Institute has about 170,000 members, although these are really hundreds of individual chapters (a la Freemasons) so not sure if it counts.
Crowstep
17d ago
They should be given free passage to the West Bank until Gaza is rebuilt.
I'm pretty sure an Israeli government with an empty Gaza would fill it with Jewish settlements, just like they are with the West Bank.
Crowstep
17d ago
I strongly suspect that most people with "FREE PALESTINE" in their Instagram bios don't want to let Palestinian refugees into Europe (or anywhere outside of Gaza), because that would constitute "ethnic cleansing".
My guess would be that most westerners on the Free Palestine side would be pretty cool with Gazans coming to Europe, given their broad support of third world immigration generally.
Now Israel's Arab neighbours, they are the ones who don't want the Palestinians.
Crowstep
17d ago
Why are you hung up on this, I wonder.
What can I say? I don't have much patience for the water carriers of genocidal dicatatorships, which there are unfortunately quite a few of around here.
So far all of Putin's negotiations have been obviously in bad faith, so the diplomatic options for the Ukrainian state are either:
- Fight until Putin's calculus changes, perhaps by destroying the Russian oil industry as they are currently doing
- Surrender so he can 'Denazify' the country with a lot of bullets to the back of the head
Given those two options, when someone flippantly argues that the Ukrainian state defending itself is illegitimate, it merits pushback in my view.
Crowstep
17d ago
How do you figure that? I do not think the brutal extent of conscription in Ukraine is currently deniable. If the people wish it, how come volunteers are so insufficient?
Conscription in existential wars is a normal thing for states to do, hell, lots of states conscripts young men (and in some cases young women) even in peacetime. Obviously any individual will have an incentive to freeride on his comrades and let them fight the war, but the existence of conscription does not, a priori, make a country defending itself illegitimate. If you believe that, then you'd have to believe that Britain and America fighting against Hitler was illegitimate, since they both used conscription.
(Also I find it curious that you responded to just one half-sentence.)
I quoted that part because it's the fundamental crux of our disagreement. You believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that the Ukrainian state should just surrender because fighting is, in your words, futile. I don't think it should, unless the people wish it (which they don't).
It's also worth pointing out that IGI-111 was claiming that Ukrainian soldiers were being blown up by the Ukrainian government.
The international aid-NGO complex has been funding African birth control for decades, with the explicit aim of reducing African population growth. Saying 'Africans should have fewer children' isn't some edgy right-wing take, it's the mainstream left-wing position. The only movements against international aid-funded birth control have been from the second Bush administration (due to its pro-life sympathies) and from Musk's gutting of USAID.
And we should expect there to be a lag between reduced infant mortality and reduced fertility. That's what happened during the industrial revolution, and it caused Britain's population to increase. But without reducing African mortality to literal malthusian levels (which would of course lead to mass emigration to the rest of the world) the only option at this stage is to reduce infant mortality further. And there really isn't a tension between reducing infant mortality and encouraging birth control. The same maternity hospitals that keep babies alive are the ones that implant long-lasting contraceptives in women who don't want any more kids.
As to whether it's 'working', well, according to the MICS survey Nigeria's TFR dropped from 5.8 to 4.6 in a mere five years. That's more than a whole child. If that trend continues, Nigeria is set to fall below replacement in about 12 years. It probably won't happen that fast, but I'm certain we will see the country drop below replacement in 20 years at most.
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