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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33441 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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Bud Light update: VP of Marketing ~fired ("leave of absence")

Stock down 1.5% (ie, nothing) since this started

In fairness, InBev is massive. Bud light is but one brand. The other question is what the stock would’ve done but for bid light harm. For example if it would’ve been up 1.5% then 3% is meaningful.

There's a few other factors to this IMO. Since they're so large, if a boycott was super effective, it might still take a while to produce a noticeable effect on their bottom line. And even if it doesn't hit them that hard, the real effect might be that other, smaller companies would notice and shy away from making these sorts of moves out of fear of drawing a similar response that might be much more painful for them.

Anecdotally, we're what, two weeks into this? One of my acquaintances works for a Budweiser distributor in west Alabama and from what he tells me (while being beyond tired of talking about it) things are apocalyptic, his employer is tightening the belt, they're not getting help from AB, he gets accosted by randos for wearing Bud Light shirts, etc. We're talking multiple bars pulling all In-Bev products, a whole Walmart selling two cases of Bud Light (on Rollback!) in a week, customers sitting on pallets of unsold product, nobody hitting sales quotas. At the least, this is worse than the Papa John's N-word saga and much worse than the John Schnatter comments about Obamacare (I delivered for a Papa John's while in college at the time; hearing about his antics semi-regularly got deeply annoying after awhile.)/hosting Romney in his mansion.

I don't have a dog in this fight (other than being deeply sympathetic to the local distributors who are, at this point, the ones taking it in the ass, not InBev, and who tend to be pretty red in my experience), but I agree that it may take time for the effects of a boycott to make their way up the chain.

That's pretty interesting anecdotal evidence. The logistics issues tracks more or less as expected - that it may take months for even pretty major purchasing changes to make their way through the supply chain back to the bottling factory and force them to actually change how much they produce.

Lol, looks like right-wing cancellations are as short-lived and poorly thought out as the left's.

Called it!

To put a more positive spin on it, you could say that people obsessed with politics are only a minority of the population.

Stock down 1.5% (ie, nothing) since this started

not too surprising. same for Nike stock which was not hurt despite kaepernick ads controversy

I think it's because Dylan Mulvaney is famous for this https://youtube.com/watch?v=EQ-yzbzqH4U and nobody finds him to be an appealing icon.

Is that head:body ratio extreme or is the clothing/camera angle/body position causing an optical illusion?

Sticking your neck out like a turtle (often advised by professional photographers as a more flattering stance) in front of a wide-angle lens will do it somewhat -- but man just every proportion is out of whack there. The shark-mouth is particularly disturbing.

I think it will increase as the right learns how to do boycotts effectively. It’s not enough to boycott a specific product, but everything owned by the brand. Switching to another brand owned by your target company is a waste of time— they still get your money. If you’re mad at Kraft, you have to boycott more than just that one brand, they’re owned by a big conglomerate with hundreds of brands.

No, I actually think this is right on the money for how a boycott should go.

Bud Light tries a marketing tactic and immediately sees its sales crater: even if the sales are going to its other Anheuser-Busch brands there are real costs in having to drop large amounts of production on one brand and move it to another.

Plenty of people work for Bud Light but not AB, and if they have to cut, say, a quarter of production those people are at least having their lives disrupted and possibly being laid off and replaced. Even if AB's sales stay completely level, that will be a significant event.

Meanwhile, they paid for that privilege: that was a marketing campaign that was intended to raise sales. And the people at the top of AB who are at least going to casually glance at new marketing campaigns are the same ones who had to reorganize after this Bud Light stuff. If AB goes under the company that replaces it is determined by market demands plus luck, with no guarantee they won't be more ideologically opposed to our Bud Light boycotters.

Instead, AB sticks around and learns the lesson "don't waste money on the trans stuff" which is what the boycotters wanted in the first place. Not only is it the most direct goal, it's much more attainable than trying to take out the largest brewery in the US.

In addition to this, cancel culture is an ethereal and poorly defined thing, but this all feels a lot more pure to me than it could be. Brand does advertising, consumers change their purchasing behavior of the brand as a result. No major agitating for collateral damage, not even really that much of a push to get people fired*, just "we're not going to buy this anymore because of what you did with it, you figure out what happens next".

*I'm sure people on Twitter were loudly calling for both, but it seems like the impact on a consumer level was much bigger. I would ideally just have people change their purchasing behavior and make a relatively-quiet confirmation of "yes this is about the Mulvaney thing", and this feels like a step in that direction if not in any way perfect.

I feel like this depends what your goal is. Switching between brands should still reflect badly on the person responsible for the brand and send a signal to other companies/brands that you’re willing to vote with your wallet.

I’m not sure its politically valuable to care about punishing the Joe’s boss’ boss for Joe’s decision. You’re talking about really indirect effects (the boss’ boss now wants to hire a boss who will hire a Joe who won’t alienate republicans).

I’m not sure its politically valuable to care about punishing the Joe’s boss’ boss for Joe’s decision.

Indeed. The objective isn't (shouldn't be?) to bankrupt the parent company's bottom line or fire the CEO; this is a confusion with means and ends. The right-wing objective should be to stop pro-trans advertising from trying to propagandise audiences in future. That can be accomplished by a relatively limited outcome that whatever activist thought up this stunt, doesn't get listened to in the boardroom next time because "Remember the shitshow last time".

Getting that guy fired, getting that guy blacklisted, getting his boss fired, bankrupting the company - these might send a strong signal and a chilling effect to others, but they're at best stretch goals and possibly counterproductive vindictive overkill (after all, the parent company puts out manly non-trans beers too). Failure to reach those ends does not mean your boycott failed.

The right wing’s power to cancel people or ideas they don’t like has definitely increased. Not that long ago they they probably would have told them to kick rocks. Also the trans issue is a losing one and even many on the left are uncomfortable with it.

Twitter is probably to blame, if I had to guess. Since elon's takeover it has been a maajor memetic force that has benefited the right. Clips go viral, which almost always makes the left look bad.

I thought right-wingers hated cancel culture as it was impressing on the First Amendment? Unless right wingers think this isn’t cancelling?

  • -16

I'm not gonna make a long response because it's Sunday night, but if you think about it from 30,000ft voting is a proxy for violence. Once upon a time if my team disagreed with a decision that yours tried to impose on us, we would try to violently resist. Now we vote instead and my team (hypothetically) says 'eh, I guess we're losers on this one' rather than resort to violence. But 'cancel-culture' is pretty clearly (to me) a bridge beyond voting, that's trying to be cute about 'nonviolence.'

All of this is to say - as a general rule - I prefer voting to violence. But 'cancel culture' isn't voting and it isn't 'nonviolence.' "Heading to Africa, hope I don't get aids" does not mean you should be made unemployable and homeless and it's egregious that it's dressed up as cute nonviolence.

As always:

My rules fairly > Your rules fairly > Your rules unfairly

Unfortunately, this probably mirrors the thoughts of a majority of progressives decrying the cancellations of, and status attacks on, insufficiently "patriotic" people in the aftermath of 9/11. There are very, very few principled libertarians.

As far as I know one guy got fired, for saying that people working in the World Trade Center were little nazis who deserved it. And technically he didn't get fired for that, the public attention just forced the university to acknowledge that he was a plagiarist who got promoted to full professor without any qualifications.

The appeal to an imaginary era of right wing censorship is so strange, when the only example anyone can come up with is that people stopped buying Dixie Chicks albums.

To be perfectly clear, I think calling the victims of a major tragedy little Nazis who deserved it would be a firing offense for a professor today, with the possible exception of that tragedy being a GOP convention blowing up, but it seems like a lot of the woke ridiculousness was prefigured by things like freedom fries.

Yeah, I'm definitely not saying things didn't get weird after 9/11 (and in some ways both are typical of American National Hysterias) but professors weren't getting fired for refusing to swear loyalty oaths to The Homeland. The scale and level of coercion were so completely different that it's hard to see the comparison being made in good faith, until you realize some of the people doing it were 3 years old at the time and are working off a mythical version of events we actually remember.

I mean as a principled libertarian I'm not opposed to such tactics in all cases, like Hobbes points out, the state of war is a binary switch and once one's natural rights have been intruded upon, all means to restore them are permissible. As misapplied as it can be, defending yourself is a legitimate justification for terrible things so long as they don't stray into pointless cruelty.

I think there are much worse things than "cancellation" that are entirely morally permissible to do to people who have in fact silenced others.

But here I'm merely pointing to the Nash equilibrium conservatives find themselves in. Which also explains the examples you give and the potency of Bin Laden's successful tactics to provoke retaliation. Complaining that these are unprincipled is just ignoring the nature of power, which always comes before principle in practice.

"people who have in fact silenced others..."

By this do you mean specific people or people who belong to a group you don't like? The difference is constantly being elided or not indicated.

Specific people of course, I don't believe in groups, only in associations of individuals.

Though of course if you're going to have voluntary membership of an organization whose stated purpose is solely to destroy and undermine natural rights, wear its uniforms and do its bidding, I think it's reasonable to assume you are personally guilty. Not that I'm saying it applies in this case.

As always, this just resolves to ’I want to think of myself as anti-cancel-culture but I also want to cancel people’.

Why are you treating this person like an ordinary average normie? They were vp of marketing. A vp of marketing who tried to do something controversial to bring in a new customer base, but their map of the region was off, and so they scuttled their ship. Scuttled it so bad apparently anheuser are restructuring their whole marketing department 'to bring them closer to the brand', aka because it's far too obvious how much they all despise bud's customer base. It was a high risk high reward gambit, and you are ignoring the risk so you can claim right wingers are unprincipled cancel culturers.

Frankly, while this might sound bad formulated like this, it can also be a perfectly coherent position under certain circumstances.

I want to think of myself as anti-killing, but I also want to kill murderers.

Which is consistent. Just like being anti-murder and still believing in a right to lethal self defense. Or having a strong preference for civilization not to end in nuclear hellfire, and yet maintaining a stockpile of warheads and a willingness to press the button, for the sake of MAD.

You think he'd want to cancel people if there was no preexisting cancel culture?

Why not? It's not like consumer boycotts, getting people fired etc. are tactics that haven't been used by whatever political sides long before we started to call them "cancelling".

Consumer boycotts aren't cancel culture. Because for some mysterious reason, when the right had a lot more cultural and political power, left wing figures remained distinctly uncancelled. Whenever asked for an example people reach for the Dixie Chicks, which is wrong for obvious reasons, or have to go all the way back to the Hayes Code or McCarthyism which, unlike modern cancel culture, are recognized as an overreach.

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obvious reasons

That's a really weak argument. A cancellation attempt doesn't have to wipe someone from the face of the earth for it to have an effect. Otherwise no one is ever cancelled.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-popular-and-silenced/

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Dixie Chicks isn't cancel culture anyway. They were "cancelled" for things they said in public as part of their public performance in the job they were being "cancelled" for.

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Some right-wingers don't like cancel culture (when done by the left) but not First Amendment reasons.

Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I am very anti cancellation and don't like what happened here but in the end am not particularly bothered by it.

Your comment reminded me of this quote from Dune:

"When I am weaker than you I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles"

The way to deal with such "people" is to treat them according to their own principles even when you have power. I know it doesn't apply strictly but it's just "Paradox of tolerance and all that shit" the way leftists use it.

I think there's a difference between an executive getting fired because of some tweet he made on his personal account that's pro-trans, and the executive getting fired for a business decision that actually alienated a core demographic. The former would be cancelling, the latter is how things should work.

If an executive of any given company with a large leftist demographic gave a promotional product to Donald Trump, I don't think people on the right would be too outraged about the executive being fired. They might thing think executive doesn't deserve to be fired because they personally like Donald Trump, but it wouldn't cause the same sort of outrage as the executive being fired because he tweeted out "Donald Trump is a swell guy".

Personally, I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. If you’re tweeting on a personal account on your own time, I think the principle of free speech applies — no one should be held to account for anything they say on their own time, on their own device, and on their own personal account. The only plausible exception is if the tweets in question are made by someone famous and famously connected to the brand, or if the tweets are directly related to their role. A CEO cannot help but represent his company, so he’s a bit more liable. And sometimes the comments bare directly on things that they deal with (for example the head of accounting commenting on various races and their ability to do math) which would be exhibit A in any racial discrimination suit. But if some random grunt is posting on his personal account from his personal device on his own time, I don’t think anyone should be fired for that.

The only plausible exception is if the tweets in question are made by someone famous and famously connected to the brand, or if the tweets are directly related to their role. A CEO cannot help but represent his company, so he’s a bit more liable. And sometimes the comments bare directly on things that they deal with

I'm mostly okay with a rule that "anyone who tweets that they hate their own/their company's customer base lands in hot water".

If their role is to represent the brand, I get that. It’s just that I don’t think it’s reasonable to allow companies to fire people for political or social speech that has nothing to do with their role in the company. It’s kind of an end-run around the principle of free speech if I have to worry that the wrong person misunderstood my tweet and might get me fired. If you’re in a position that has nothing to do with being the face of the brand or in a role where your political or social views have some bearing on whether you can do your job properly, then it’s just using your need for a job as a cudgel against “heresy”. And I fear the chilling effect on free speech when most people have to police their own opinions on important issues because they have to have a job.

It isn't. A marketing executive being fired for an atrociously bad marketing campaign is not cancellation.

Bruh. Come on.

If Bud Light put out a commercial that featured only white people and leftists boycotted them and the VP of marketing got fired, we'd all agree that was a cancellation.

Bruh. Come on. How close are the demographics of bud light drinkers to 100% white compared to 100% trans.

Of course if you make up a stupid example your interlocutor will be made to seem stupid.

It matters who's bringing the politics in. It's possible to put a political meaning on just about anything someone does. It's a favorite tactic of activists--in order to avoid the norms about not beinging in politics where it doesn't belong, the activist just calls some non-political thing political so the activist is justified.

The most likely scenario with a Bud Light commercial featuring white people is that the company decided either to market to an area that was mostly white, or by chance picked people for its commercial who were white, If so, that would be cancellation because Busch was staying nonpolitical and the activists were the ones who introduced the politics, even if the activists try to obfuscate it by saying "well, having an ad full of white people is already political".

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For a brand like bud light, if you really want to have a trans spokesman, don’t pick the femme trans woman known for advertising fashion and Kate Spade purses. Pick a trans man with a beard, for God’s sake. Do you even know your brand?

Part of the problem seems to be that they did know their brand and , and they didn't like it.

The "the brand is too fratty and is dying" quote from the VP can't have helped calm people down. It is a variation of the common "you're about to be demographically eclipsed and you're the past. Catering to you is outdated" rhetoric you see a lot on the Left.

I wonder if the Right just has a trauma response to it now.

Low interest rates truly broke capitalism. Bud light is(was) the best-selling beer in America. Sure, sales have been going down, but this is regression to the mean if anything. Producing a massively popular product year after year with a 10% net profit margin somehow wasn't enough.

Producing a massively popular product year after year with a 10% net profit margin somehow wasn't enough.

I suppose the argument is that loyal fans are locked in and you should try for new demos

You might see that stat and think, “Well, this means that Nike will prioritize men over women in its new, odd, gendered segmentation of the company.” That’s not necessarily how this all works, thanks to a phenomenon I’ll call Undecided Whale. The idea is that a company, as its aims grow more expansive, starts catering less to the locked-in core customer and more to a potential whale which demonstrates some interest. Sure, you can just keep doing what’s made you rich, but how can you even focus on your primary business with that whale out there, swimming so tantalizingly close? The whale, should you bring it in, has the potential to enrich you far more than your core customers ever did. And yeah yeah yeah, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but those were birds. This is a damned whale! And so you start forgetting about your base.

Which explains many cases where this happened before the current economic climate (the author gives the NBA and China, Scifi Channel maybe going to Syfy to try to be more cool might be another and the entire phenomenon of wokifying movie IPs comes to mind)

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Wait, Bud Light has/had 15-20% of the domestic beer market?

That's pretty wild -- high risk/reward for marketers; even a percent of that in either direction is a shit-tonne of money.

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If you want trans for bud light you pick a FtM that has managed to actually become burly and with beard. There has to be one or two. Not creep like Dylan that is simultaneous mockery of men and women.

This is a sleight of hand I've seen several marketing execs use over the past few years, and while it is admittedly genius, it is still sleight of hand. That is not cancelling for a marketing executive, in marketing generating a surplus of negative feelings towards your brand is the definition of failing and precisely what you should be fired for. I can see some people calling it a cancelling, but those people would probably be using the term for rhetoric rather than accuracy.

Your hypothetical doesn't match on the salient points. If a company put out a commercial that alienated it's actual customer base (which leftists aren't to Bud Light), it's not cancellation if those customers then boycott and the VP of marketing gets fired; otherwise you'd say it was cancellation for the New Coke guy to get forced out. If it's not the actual customer base and the VP of marketing gets fired because people who don't use the product "boycott", that's something different. If the VP is getting fired for something in her private life, that's also different.

New Coke did it's job, which was to mask the transition from cane sugar to high fructose corn syrup ... at least that the popular conspiracy theory. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/new-coke-fiasco/

The same argument can easily be extended to show that no one has ever gotten cancelled for anything. Anyone who has ever been fired for a racist or sexist view has not been "cancelled", because racism and sexism are evil so of course public knowledge that an employee of a company has racist or sexist views will be alienating to that company's customer base.

This is literally what leftists say all the time. "We're not cancelling! We're simply speaking for the majority, we speak for the paying customers!"

will be alienating to that company's customer base

Why are you trying to smuggle in a future tense here, when Budweiser is reacting to what actually happened? How many left wing cancelations can you name where this was the case?

The same argument can easily be extended to show that no one has ever gotten cancelled for anything.

Yes, by those trying to be disingenuous. You can never convince anyone who doesn't want to be.

A part of this is the disintegrating barrier between public and private life due to social media, as well as who gets considered a public figure. A part of this is because of a shift in progressive values over time, where what may be considered racist or sexist has changed generationally to the point that under previous conditions, certain intersectional talking points would have absolutely been considered racist or sexist.

New Coke was legitimately a worse product. No one would have known or cared about Dylan Mulvaney's Bud Light deal if it wasn't for social media outrage. It wouldn't have affected the product at all.

if it wasn't for social media outrage

That is the whole purpose of the Mulvaney campaign, to be a social media thing. That it was negative rather than positive was a judgment error.

Which would mean something if she was VP of product. However, she was VP of Marketing and directly responsible for the promotion on social media.

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Yeah I think you're right, if it wasn't a replacement it would probably have a dedicated fanbase. Were you alive (and cognizant) when Pepsi blue came out? It had fans, despite tasting like accidentally calling your teacher mum.

I wasn’t alive to try it, and I really wish they’d reissue it as a limited-time thing so I could.

Just drink some Pepsi, it's close enough. They did try it as a separate thing (the ill-fated "Coke II"), it didn't make it. Probably because anyone who likes Pepsi will just drink the real thing Pepsi.

If we're canning ad execs now, can someone take out whoever okayed the giant CGI "RUFFLES" logo for the NBA playoffs? This might be the most distracting ad-placement I've seen in months.

When ads get that distracting, I'd rather not consume either product (NBA or Ruffles). Strangely, I'm okay with product placement when entertainment leans into it like Wayne's World or Idiocracy, or like the KFC dating sim.

sounds like it is doing its job. I would give them a rise instead if that is the case.

In late October 2022, the Department of Education began an investigation into alleged discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity at a school district in eastern Pennsylvania. While many of the specific allegations in the complaint focused on conventional culture war -- Pride flags in middle school classrooms, pronoun and name policies, what gender's sex-segregated health class a trans person should go to, some complex questions about during-school-hours protests -- a large portion reflected something far less prosaic: over two dozen (largely-redacted) pages of bullying targeting specific students, and a teacher (redacted in the ACLU's public copy of the complaint, but in other reporting revealed as an Andrew Burgess) was suspended and transfered after reporting that bullying.

The school district has, in response, investigated and released its own report:

For his part, Student 1 wrote Mr. Burgess a lengthy e-mail, setting forth multiple alleged bullying incidents, including:

  • having ice thrown at him, being hit, and being subjected to physical threats;
  • having a student yell at him and try to trip him;
  • being “deadnamed” and being told the name he used was not his “real” name;
  • being called a variety of slurs;
  • being repeatedly propositioned for a date, despite turning down theoffers;
  • having food thrown at him in the cafeteria; and
  • being called the “r-word.”

3/3/2022 E-Mail Message from Student 1 to Andrew Burgess [Ex. 41]...

Mr. Burgess then began to organize Student 1’s allegations of bullying and harassment into the dossier, setting forth in a two-page chart the names of the alleged perpetrators, dates and times of the alleged bullying, a description of the alleged events, names of witnesses, and the locations of the events. The remaining two pages of the dossier contain further detail about the alleged events. [Ex. 16.] During his interview as part of this investigation, Mr. Burgess explained that he created the dossier during a meeting with Student 1 and Student 2 during school hours. Burgess Interview at 25–26 [Ex. 11]. According to the dossier’s metadata and contemporaneous e-mail communications, it appears that the dossier was initially created on March 3 and that additional work occurred on it on March 4, when it also appears that Mr. Burgess met with Student 1 and Student 2.

The dossier contains serious and troubling allegations. If true, it shows that Student 1 was subjected to repeated bullying by about a dozen of his fellow Lenape students over the course of months, with some of it continuing on a “weekly” basis or even “3 or 4 times a week.” [Ex. 16.]

During his interview, Mr. Burgess was asked whether he ever reported to the School District the information Student 1 gave him:

Q. And did you ever report any of the information that [Student 1] gave you to anyone else at Central Bucks School District?

A. No, I did not.

Burgess Interview at 26 [Ex. 11].

This was not a one-off:

During her interview, Ms. Gluck, a French teacher at Lenape and moderator of the school’s SAGA club, told us that, around December 2021, she was approached by Stephen Albert, then a former Lenape assistant principal and a vocal activist on LGBTQ issues and frequent attendee at School Board meetings. Mr. Albert asked Ms. Gluck to get information from SAGA club members (i.e., students at Lenape Middle School) about stories of LGBTQ bullying and harassment in the School District that they had heard.

According to Ms. Gluck, in January or February 2022, she made that inquiry of SAGA members at a club meeting and reported the information to Mr. Albert, who, again according to Ms. Gluck, was to send a “compilation” e-mail to a Lenape administrator. During our investigation, we found a February 6, 2022, e-mail message from Mr. Albert to Mrs. Saullo and Mrs. Dowd, which copied various individuals, including Borough of Doylestown officials, Ms. Pray, Superintendent Lucabaugh, and the three Democratic School Board members.

Nor was it specific to just faculty at the school:

Mr. Burgess told us that he sent the dossier—which was replete with allegations of physical and verbal abuse—to Mr. Marshall [ed: an attorney at the Philadelphia Office for Civil Rights], that the two of them talked about the issue over the phone in May 2022, and that he told Mr. Marshall that the information in the dossier had never been reported to the School District. Id. at 197–98.11 Further, in his April 25 e-mail to Mr. Burgess, Mr. Marshall refers to the “the student and family involved in the complaint,” indicating that he appreciated that a child’s welfare was at issue. [Ex. 12]. Yet, with this knowledge, Mr. Marshall failed to notify the School District of the allegations in the dossier and OCR complaint, even though he knew the information had been concealed from the District.

During our investigation, we wrote to OCR about Mr. Marshall’s conduct in this case, requesting an opportunity to interview him about what happened, and asking OCR to cooperate with this independent investigation. On February 8, 2023, Beth Gellman-Beer, the Director of OCR’s Philadelphia Office, wrote us, declining to make Mr. Marshall available for an interview.

To be absolutely clear, this is not a neutral analysis by an disinterested third party: the report is written by Duane Morris LLP at the request of the School Board, which does not require mind-reading to find somewhere other than the bleeding edge of trans activism or jumping to support OCR investigation of their policies. It is absolutely possible that Duane Morris is spinning this as hard as they can, or even playing as fast and loose with the facts as it is alleging the teachers in question did. (though the recommendation that Burgess be suspended without pay is at least raising the stakes, if doing so.)

But they do have some pretty nasty receipts.

It's even possible (indeed, I'd guess likely) that the school administration would not have necessarily acted in accordance with Andrew Burgess's preferred punishment schedules, if perhaps more on the matter of incorrect pronoun use or the awkward 'romantic' (probably not; the report seems to think they were genuine if stalkerish, but that it came through a third party feels more like what's often used as the windup for later mockery) overtures than one the student that allegedly said "I'm going to rape you". I wouldn't be surprised to find someone here immediately start debating whether each particular thing counts as meaningful harassment rather than 'mere' teasing, though given that Burgess and the ACLU listed them as serious offenses I don't think it particularly matters at this point. I wouldn't be surprised if the teachers here genuinely believed, in their heart of hearts, that the school board and principle's policy proposals were strong evidence that they Don't Care About Trans People rather than just Don't Care About Pronouns, or perhaps that they were the earthly incarnations of Satan awaiting the opportunity to break children.

((Hell, it's possible even the most friendly administrators might still ignore a case, without the political loading: joint overdiagnosis and under-diagnosis is more palatable a term than anarchotyranny, but neither is unimaginable or even that unfamiliar. The report details a Buck County Investigation against students who wore t-shirts sloganed with and said "Let's Go Brandon" at Sexuality and Gender Alliance students as an example. And there are genuine policy disagreements over when and what extent requires intervention.))

According to the school district's claims and investigations, which seem to fully match the unredacted portion of the ACLU's complaint, they never had the opportunity to fail that test. And that's relevant less because I care for the opportunities available to a school's upper management, since no small number of the upper caste in public education make it seem like they thought Brazil was a how-to guide, but more because it means that a student (actually, multiple students) were getting left for the bus to run over them, by people that they thought were specifically looking out for them.

I've written before about cases where people elevate Activism above actual things happening on the ground, and while this isn't quite as literal as burning the very people you're claiming to protect on a pyre, it's got my hackles up to a pretty similar degree. Barring some pretty serious revelations from the ACLU or Burgess -- which is possible!... if not likely, given this statement --this does not look like how a teacher would or should act if trying to use every tool available to prevent harassment of vulnerable students. Even had the Department of Education acted on the initial complaint, rather than closed it, Student 1 would have finished a full school year and experienced a large part of a second one before any intervention could have occurred.

This looks more like people who wanted to provide a gift-wrapped case against the school district's new board, which could wrap the controversial or policy questions in with the trivial ones. I can see the utilitarian arguments, for the needs of the many, so on. They just look very bad when, at the end of the day, a trusted adult specifically acting as an advocate for the students is sitting on that list.

Humans are weird enough that I’m near certain that some are gender dysphoric. But this is likely a stable, rare number. Growth in trans identifying youth appears to be a misfit thing, like the goths of my generation.

Some of the goth thing seemed to me to be an embracing of and celebration of misfit status. They dialed their weirdness up to eleven so no one could possibly mistake them for a normie.

It would be so very strange to see even a news story about goths being bullied in middle school. People would have a few reactions:

  1. That’s so unfortunate.

  2. It’s probably not happening because they are goth.

  3. If it is, why don’t they just dress normally?

I’m surprised the comments here are so supportive of bullying, and frankly I wonder if it’s because it confirms many of our anti-trans biases.

When I first read this I noticed myself disagreeing that the bullying was important, but after reading some of the arguments in the comments I realized I’m not convinced for any logical reason, just because I am frustrated that trans ideology is spreading in middle schools. I think it should be reserved for adults.

If this child were being harassed for something like believing in God, or an immutable characteristic like a big nose or their race, I would find this situation terrible.

For all the people saying kids need to toughen up or whatever - I firmly disagree. Humans can learn to operate in high trust, net positive ways, and that’s the society I want to build. If we keep creating cycles of kids being fucked up and aggressive in their early lives, adults will continue to act that way too. You can say hierarchical psychological violence is necessary to the human condition or whatever, but if that’s truly the case I say we strive towards something better.

I think part of the issue is that some of the things in that list are very definitely bullying but some of them are things that SJ has unilaterally declared Problematic, and even here nuance is hard.

Yeah, that's probably a good part of it. Even in the Duane Morris report, which (at least by the time of publishing) was trying to highlight the teacher's inaction in the face of bad behavior, it's worth noticing the euphemistic nature of "being subjected to physical threats" and "variety of slurs", given that the investigators had (and attached!) the chart listing exact words. And the ACLU-PA complaint redacted wholesale anything outside of the political and school policy matters.

I emphasized the exact quotes from that report to highlight fidelity, but it did mean it's easier to focus on the less significant and more minimal stuff.

I feel like there is a "Central and non-central example" going on here.

Everyone agrees that the central example of Bullying is unequivocally bad, only that is relatively uncommon; negative social interactions among kids and teenagers aren't rare though. A lot of people are trying to claim bullying, for varying reasons. They might have had poor social experiences but that doesn't mean they were Bullied or even that they were (only) the victim.

Then there are the actual policies, do they help or are they making things worse and only providing an illusion of action and acting as a cover for not taking responsibility for the really horrible events by hiding behind policy?

The same dynamic extends to a lot of issues:

  • Parental abuse

  • Rape

  • Racism

  • Sexism

  • Etc. More or less anything with a claimed victim/abuser dynamic

A genuine but relatively uncommon issue exists and people immediately try to claim victimhood to gain sympathy or rationalize their own inadequacies (often to themselves)/bad experiences. Most claimed instances are so ambiguous that it's impossible to tell who's the victim and who's the abuser, or even if the event took place at all.

Sweeping policy is implemented but is so ineffective as to be possibly be counterproductive in regards to its stated purpose and has a lot of negative unintended side effects, which end up being the primary effect of the policy. Often with stated lofty goals just like the one in your final paragraph.

The cure is so bad that disease not only becomes harmless in comparison but even actively good in the minds of some people.

Bullying is bad, but this whole thing is selective outrage. If someone was bullied there for any other trait, would any authorities have cared about it? Let alone open a Federal investigation?

On one hand, probably not. The ability of school administrations to ignore bullying, or worse to come down like a pile of bricks only on students who defend themselves, is pretty legendary. I've written before about a school district that managed to have its employees walk by some of the most severe crimes: overlooking some thrown food or an implausibly-friendly 'joke' is a lot more minimal than that and certainly happens thousands of times a day across a country the size of the United States.

((I don't think any of the behavior here requires or even benefits from a federal investigation, instead of just telling the offending students to knock it off and, for repeat offenders, something like a detention or separated lunch sessions.))

On the other hand, I've spent six hours in the last month dealing with the fallout of a student making fun of what he perceived or joked about perceiving as (heterosexual, if it matters) flirting between two students. Part of the reason it took six hours to deal with the fallout is that the organization didn't spend fifteen minutes two weeks earlier to recognize that same complaint had shown up in three different contexts and put a stop to it then, but a bigger part is that I didn't want to have three students lose some important opportunities for learning. And that stuff then was far more marginal (I wouldn't categorize it as bullying at all, but if you had to it's definitely closer to norm enforcement than a lot of the described stuff here). And unlike the teachers in question here, making sure students have a conducive learning environment isn't my literal full-time job.

So while I absolutely agree that this shouldn't require a federal investigation, I absolutely would care about it, and would expect other adults in a position of authority or trust to at least consider the situation once brought to their attention. I'm not going to expect or even ask for heroic efforts from every teacher on the planet, and it's not hard to imagine a teacher or school administrator that didn't think any of this was worth the paper it was written on.

((I don't agree, and to no small extent I think this organizational willingness to accept disruption and student-student conflicts is one of many small reasons that some of the worst schools manage to be so incredibly bad, along with having negative effects for normal students at normal schools, but I could be persuaded that it's better than the alternatives. And there's nothing in the Duane Morris report suggesting the discipline problems in this school were outside of the typical range.))

But this teacher did decide that it was something he Cared About, enough to file with the feds and involve the ACLU. Just not enough to do anything in the meantime.

Would you care? If yes, why don't you make it a Federal issue?

It's not up to me what gets made into a federal issue. That's up to the feds.

Yeah, that middle school was a horrible horrible time for me, filled with with what would rightly be classified is ongoing physical abuse and verbal harassment in an adult context. The setting of middle school makes bullying a much bigger issue than most people will ever encounter as adults.

I don't know what the best solution is -- I don't want kids' lives getting ruined because they were a dick as a 12-year-old -- but I think it's perfectly appropriate for a school to investigate and take serious action on it.

I think changing the setting has to be the start. That some teens are abusive dicks is one thing. That you (and I) felt obligated to go back everyday to the place where you are regularly abused, to sit in forced confinement with people you hate, is insane.

No need to ruin any lives. The solution is simple: anyone caught bullying gets punished in a horribly embarrassing manner. Spanking, maybe? Something that would make them the object of mockery, to reduce their social status and impede the social dynamics that encourage bullying.

The process is then iterated. Anyone caught bullying the former bully is also punished. After a few passes, everyone will be too terrified to bully.

This won't be implemented because (1) the required punishment is not permitted in Western countries and (2) teachers generally don't actually care about bullying.

This is a terrible solution. A punishment can't really be embarrassing unless the one doing the punishing is higher status, and I don't think bullies generally respect teachers. A teacher spanking a bully wouldn't lead to him being bullied by his former friends, it would lead to him and his friends beating up the previous victim for snitching to outsider authority.

I don't think respect for teachers matters. You think a 12-year-old being spanked in front of the whole school wouldn't be embarrassed about it? You think his peers wouldn't laugh at him?

They would laugh at him for getting caught, and not taking the punishment stoically enough, and then go right back to being his friends and bullying the previous victim/the snitch. Friends laughing at each other does not make them lower status amongst themselves.

The idea was to embarrass the bully in front of all of his classmates etc., not just his friends.

But OK, it might not be a foolproof plan. Maybe I just don't understand middle school social dynamics well enough.

or all the people saying kids need to toughen up or whatever - I firmly disagree. Humans can learn to operate in high trust, net positive ways, and that’s the society I want to build. If we keep creating cycles of kids being fucked up and aggressive in their early lives, adults will continue to act that way too.

I was with you until this part. Kids do need to toughen up, but bullying is not the way to do it, unless we're using a very broad definition of bullying. The problem with bullying is the mob dynamics, not that they might get into a scrap.

It depends what is your plan for your children's future.

If they will have to live in the jungle where only right is might and only laws are teeth and claws, they do need to learn how to be animals.

Of course, when you are the biggest, strongest and toughest jungle animal, you are still jungle animal, and some people another ambitions for their lives.

If they will have to live in the jungle where only right is might and only laws are teeth and claws

I'm sorry, but what the hell are you talking about? I missed the part where I advocated for might makes right, and law of the jungle.

unless we're using a very broad definition of bullying.

That seems to be both the commonly-used definition and the most common form of bullying nowadays. Most people I know have said they were bullied, and when I asked how it essentially boiled down to "I didn't have many friends" or "I faced social repercussions for my actions."

Oh. I was thinking more of cases like this, where someone is picked on precisely because they seem unlikely to retaliate, though here the bully meets karma. OTOH, this example isn't even so egregious, because all the other kids let them sort it out one-on-one. What I'd consider bullying would be when the bullies friends would step in, and beat the crap out of the victim for daring to retaliate.

Yeah that's definitely closer to actual bullying.

I am of the belief that bullying is net positive and our obsession with bullying is another manifestation of over charged empathy.

That doesn’t mean all bully is net positive (some goes too far). But a little bullying is positive.

In my experience almost all kids who are bullied are bullied over harmless or immutable characteristics like being short, unattractive, shy, or fat. Once it's established that they suck, other even more minute characteristics (clothes they wear, their interests, their family, etc.) which would be totally unremarkable in anyone else are used as pretexts for further bullying. I don't think I've ever seen a case of "constructive" bullying.

Getting picked on all the time didn't make me any more of a well-adjusted person, it just made me angry and withdrawn. What did was when I eventually ended up transferring (for unrelated reasons) to a new school where bullying was practically non-existent, so I was able to reach out and make friends without the constant fear that I would be mocked or physically assaulted.

Being fat is not an immutable characteristic, especially as a kid.

Most kids are not in control of their food intake (and should not be). Their food is prepared and portioned by adults. If a kid is fat, you need to be bullying the parents.

There is value to enforced conformity, especially when people are young. People learn the rules.

Perhaps if they were going to be (openly) trans, they should have had stronger convictions or perhaps been closeted. It's a shitty situation, but life is full of those.

"The same boiling that hardens the egg softens the potato"

I've found people's opinions on things like bullying or violence tend to just be them projecting their own egg-ness or potato-ness onto others. Yeah, some people will grow character because they got picked on, pull themselves together, become more socially adept etc, but others will just break, curl up into a ball in their own isolated corner, and suffer for it for a long time.

Now you can just say "they should be better," but I'm not sure that's possible. Most things are genetic, and I'd be surprised if fragility isn't heavily genetic as well. There's always trauma adaptation, but that usually makes the person less fragile and also less socialized, so there is a tradeoff there.

The way I see it, the problem is trying to act like everyone is equal. By insisting that this is true, we've left no room for people to exist safely at the bottom of social hierarchies. There's always a sense of "why aren't they better?" that just wouldn't exist in a world where it's understood that yes, some people are at the top, and others are at the bottom, and you each have responsibilities and expectations. Meritocracy has become an excuse for those at the top to ignore the responsibilities they must carry, and an excuse to blame the bottom rung of the ladder for not carrying out responsibilities they shouldn't even have.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_TVJ50I9Qf0

Yeah, some people will grow character because they got picked on, pull themselves together, become more socially adept etc, but others will just break, curl up into a ball in their own isolated corner, and suffer for it for a long time.

Devil's advocate: perhaps the point is to sort the sheep from the goats, and to do so early in life in a way that rarely kills them outright. Then those that can't hack it wind up in roles for those that cannot hack it...

In my experience, it's the losers that do most of the bullying. The kids with dysfunctional families who don't have anything going for them. The actually smart, successful, socially adept and resilient kids... often do a lot of posturing and casually put others down... but the kids who go out of their ways to be bullies are not our future stars.

"Hack" what. It's not like being a bullied dweeb precludes someone from a good career and family.

And also those who can't or won't be bullied are not placed on a track for the best societal roles.

I guess. There could be a noblesse oblige for those at the top, but so much of our society is predicated on catering to the bottom already.

Further, it incentivizes the worst kind of bullying — cry bulling.

Pretty sure the worst kind of bullying would be the sort that leads to death (by own hand or otherwise) or permanent physical damage.

The 'catering' we do for the bottom is caused by the meritocratic view, however. Believing that every ghetto-denizen and backwoods hick is just a temporarily-embarrassed email worker is a direct result of ignoring the fundamental differences between people. Our current system is built around trying to pretend the bottom is "really" just like the top, while shunning anything that's actually 'bottom-ish.' Proper recognition of natural differences means that we can accept that no, most of the bottom has very different ways of thinking than those at the top, and will never be the same.

The same goes with cry bullying. It only works because privileged people are able to pretend that they're not. Proper noblesse oblige means that the privileged are held to higher standards.

Yeah. But I guess...I think that a lot of middle class schools have gone too soft. Take stuff like zero-tolerance. It'd be a good idea to have at least a cursory attempt to find out who started it...if Bully punches Victim and Victim grows a pair and decides to fight back they both eat a suspension. Incentives are all fucked up.

So too: we've got stuff like...1) people crapping on someone that doesn't shower, calling them Stinky or some shit like that. They can probably fix that problem, and if they can't there are larger issues at play. Then you've got shit like 2) assholes bullying a kid on crutches by repeatedly kicking his crutches out from under him and causing him to fall. These are not the same.

I've heard stories of things that are closer to 2)...Tonya Harding tier shit where a bunch of jealous guys ganged up on a star football player, punching him when no one was looking and eventually pushing him down a flight of stairs. Guy broke his leg, but returned to football the next year.

I wouldn't be surprised to find someone here immediately start debating whether each particular thing counts as meaningful harassment rather than 'mere' teasing, though given that Burgess and the ACLU listed them as serious offenses I don't think it particularly matters at this point.

Yes, there are kids who get relentlessly bullied (and serious harm is done) but that seems like an outlier and not applicable to this incident. The examples given were common (to just about anyone) when I was in middle school. Kids can be mean, but so is the world. Some kids need to learn to harden up and others need to learn empathy for people who are different. School is when you can learn these lessons/make these mistakes in a relatively safe environment (compared to IRL).

Saying that this is a moot point is odd. I don't understand why the ACLU gets to decide this.

Edit* Interesting write up tho... thanks for posting

I suspect that these things follow a power law...for both bullies and victims. There are some bullies who are really good at being bullies and bully a lot; there are some poor motherfuckers who are simply bait for said assholes. You've got some mix of voluntary bad conduct AND immutable characteristics in there. That mixture varies. On one end you've got the guy that genuinely is an asshole, on the other you've got the guy who's IDK black in an all-white school in the middle of nowhere. Admittedly - that is becoming dated, but 40 years ago that was very much a thing that happened.

I think there could be some interesting conversations in the general sense, about what extent each particular matter requires intervention, if any, and what those interventions would be. I'd argue that there are some that I think are unusual enough that they should require intervention -- even if "I'm going to rape you" was an outdated Dragon Ball Z Abridged joke, and contextually I'm pretty skeptical that it was, it's the sorta thing you at least need to mark down so you know if the kid's learning when to stop -- but I probably could be persuaded a lot on what extent that intervention needs to take, especially.

I don't think it's relevant for discussion at this stage. None of the current OCR complaints are about punishing the students. Regardless of when the ALCU or OCR should be deciding things, both the ACLU-PA and the teacher on site believed that these incidents were enough to justify federal investigation, and indeed investigation about insufficient response to this bullying. Even if the ACLU and teacher wrongly believed a strong and immediate intervention necessary, it's valuable to notice that they weren't consistently behaving as if they believed that.

I'd argue that there are some that I think are unusual enough that they should require intervention

I agree. But it seems they're pushing it to the point where everything requires intervention.

There's definitely a line and rape threats are past it; even if it's trolling, joking, whatever... And that's something kids should be taught. But a federal investigation?

Perhaps that shock causing me to miss the nuance of all this...

Has retard really hit this level of the euphemism treadmill that it is included on this list? Besides the dead naming and stalking I could have produced anecdotes for that whole list for myself and many people I knew growing up and none of us even considered ourselves that bullied. Discipline the little shits doing it for sure, they need to learn what is unacceptable but am I really supposed to be that surprised middle schoolers are little bastards to each other? I suppose if these are tasteful understatements that might be different but that doesn't seem their style.

Has retard really hit this level of the euphemism treadmill that it is included on this list?

I'm not sure. It was widely suspected to have been either on the No No List or used as justification for putting subs on the No No List back at reddit, but it wasn't the sort of thing that was getting autofiltered everywhere. In this case, it's a middle school student sending an e-mail to a teacher teacher, so I can understand not being in a huge hurry to spell it out (though the student did write out "faggot", which I was under the impressive was pretty discouraged).

Besides the dead naming and stalking I could have produced anecdotes for that whole list for myself and many people I knew growing up and none of us even considered ourselves that bullied.

I'm not sure for the 'stalking': the original allegation from the student was "[redacted] that kept asking if I would go out with him or [redacted] because they "had a crush on me" even after I kept telling them I was uncomfortable and asked them to stop". It might have been a genuine-if-creepy romantic overture, in which case it'd be outlier stalking, but I'd had something similar happen that was essentially just trolling, . Given the gender stuff, age group, and especially the dual overture, that seems at least as plausible for me.

That said, while I got to run into some really annoying bullying, I don't think anyone ever said even jokingly "I'm going to rape you". The closest was a girl who kept wagging me across the room and then making jokes about how she 'made me come with her finger', which is... still a pretty far distance away. And my high school days were back when that was much more in the common comedy than now.

Discipline the little shits doing it for sure, they need to learn what is unacceptable but am I really supposed to be that surprised middle schoolers are little bastards to each other?

Yeah, I'm absolutely not surprised by a bunch of young teenagers being jerks; even well-intentioned teens often don't recognize boundaries or reasonable behaviors, and a lot of kids aren't well-intentioned. I think the kids need to be talked to, but the bigger issue's the failures by the teachers in question. Even in informal environments, you have to be really careful because it's so easy for problems to fall through the cracks until they explode. If you can't separate the situations where a kid misbehaves until told proper behavior, from those where the kid continues to repeat or escalate bad acts, you don't have the ability to manage students at all.

I don't think anyone ever said even jokingly "I'm going to rape you".

Guys say this all the time, in different, often grotesquely violent terminology. "I'll rip out your eyes and skullfuck you into the next county!", which in a school document would probably get pared down to "I'll [rape] you". Especially if the person doing the writing wanted to make it seem more serious, rather than just over-the-top ridiculousness.

Didn't get that one, either. Especially at the time and the circles I wandered, there were only so many times you could offer or threaten to (skull)fuck a suspected gay before the 'suspected' bit would have rubbed onto the jokester too, so may have been more present for other people.

I'll certainly recognize the possibility it was a joke or even a friendly joke, and the timeframe would be about right for when the whole 'submissive and breedable' meme took off (which, uh... is even more awkward to write out). And, to be clear, there's a lot of not-joking interpretations that would still require little and minimal immediate intervention. At the other extreme, it's certainly possible that Student 1's specific allegation (to directly quote the e-mail: "[redacted] threw ice at me, and after it hit me, said 'You bitch, I'm going to rape you.'") was either exaggerated or even wholly false.

Sometimes these are things you can figure out, and sometimes they aren't. Most teenagers are awful liars, but that mostly just lets you eliminate what didn't happen, rather than increase certainty in what did.

But, notably, none of those simple investigatory steps happened here for months. I don't, and Duane Morris LLP's report does not, make any serious analysis of the specific bullying allegations. The teacher in question claims to have believed the student, and wrote down the name of another student that Student 1 claimed was a witness for the specific matter. And then sat by as nothing happened about it.

Has retard really hit this level of the euphemism treadmill that it is included on this list?

It might have. I’ve had people confront me over saying it in casual conversation a few times, years ago (granted in a very progressive environment), and I’ve seen a lot of “r-word” referring to retard in the last few years.

I don't understand how saying 'r-word' is any better. They're referring to the same word, just not putting out the phonemes.

It all seems kind of r-worded.

Yes. This happens with all slurs though.

When people say "N-word", they aren't yelling "You N-word!" at a black person. The signalling would make no sense (I want to yell a slur at you but I want to be Politically Correct about it...?) and they would sound stupid and unprincipled.

When they want to use the slur, they actually use the slur, so by not actually saying the slur, that's a strong signal that they are actually not using the slur. And this reifies the whole signal.

Is this stupid? shrug It's how slurs work.

That's my point. People who are racist just find a new word. Thinking that stopping the word will stop evil is silly.

We can all acknowledge that the euphemism treadmill is kind of dumb. Yet we still defend it because bad people use those words.

In the meantime, silly things like the OK symbol gets trolled into being something it's not... and people still go along with it.

I’ve always seen it as stupid in the He-who-shall-not-named way. It’s poor communication (if you mean to refer to a slur, then imo it’s much better to simply say the word and be clear what was said and what was meant) but it also gives those words much more power than they’d otherwise have. Half the fun of smoking is knowing that it will really upset the squares, and likewise half the fun of saying retard or nigger is seeing the adults hyperventilating over a single word.

I mean, the way things are going I could definitely see people in the future using "N-word" as a minced oath. It would certainly be amusing to see a kid try explaining to their teacher or angry parent that they called someone "an N-word, but not the N-word."

Man, I can't get over the fact that The Department of Justice Education is investigating middle school bullying. Like, it's middle school dude. What did you expect? I'm sure if you put everything that happened to me in middle school into an adversarial legal brief it would look pretty bad too.

Let me explain the problem: Every single child in the public school system has to learn every single social rule at some point. Some will learn simply by being told, but not every rule is or could be expressed in words. Some will learn from the mistakes of their classmates. Some further will have to make the mistakes themselves. A number of these mistakes are, or must result in, bullying. Middle school is when puberty starts, and thus is where many of the most salacious rules must be learned -- learned the hard way if necessary. You can't take the bullying out of middle school and have it still be middle school.

Was anyone killed or maimed? I've known people that went to schools where bodies were being hauled out once or twice a year. Perhaps that is a bit high of a price to put on social gracefulness, but there might be a point in some of it. I've heard stories of people who had their classmates attempt to light them on fire when they were seventh-graders because they were gay in Texas in the 70s; I don't know how the attempt turned out.

The kicker: his teacher egged them on.

You're being overly charitable to middle-schoolers if you think most of bullying is that "they didn't know better". They know better well enough, they simply don't care.

I'm sure if you put everything that happened to me in middle school into an adversarial legal brief it would look pretty bad too.

Right, but nobody would care, because you're not a member of an actually-protected class. It's who/whom all the way down. Heterosexual boy gets beaten up, threatened, called a retard or faggot or whatever, that's just a day ending in 'y'. Same thing happens to a 'trans' student, it's literally a Federal case.

As far as I can tell, the DoJ isn't involved; the complaints here were filed with the Office for Civil Rights under the Department of Education (officially its own cabinet-level org, for whatever anyone treats it like that). But they agree that it was too small beans for them, too, and the original complaint detailing just the middle-school harassment was closed in September of last year.

The four new complaints at the OCR, at least some of which were filed with the ACLU-PA, are about alleged retaliation against Burgess, alleged retaliation against students who protested Burgess's suspension, allegedly discriminatory naming and pronoun and class assignment policies, and failure by the school administration to respond to the bullying allegations.

I agree that some students will only learn the hard way (and sometimes not even that). I do not think the appropriate response for these alleged bullying behaviors involve removing the students from the environment, and severe punishments shouldn't (and probably can't) be brought. The galling thing here is that a teacher that believed the behaviors here were severe enough to justify an initial OCR complaint, but did not act in a way conducive to actually getting any lesson, at the expense of the targeted student that confided with him. Even something as simple as sitting the kid down and telling them to cut it out, cause that's the sorta thing that will get them in deep trouble in most office jobs, wasn't possible when the only teacher with the kid's name was sitting on it.

You know things are bad when even liberals are despairing at DeSantis' poor performance. I think her analysis is mostly correct. Voters don't really care about issues so much as who is the strong candidate. Trump is funny but also strong. DeSantis is neither - despite being the actual principled conservative by comparison.

Given Kamala's own exposure as a weak air-head, it seems almost inevitable to me that we will see Biden vs Trump once again in 2024. I try not to be ageist but American politics is really becoming a gerontocracy. The refusal of Dianne Feinstein to step down is par for the course.

That said, while I believe the author is right about the primal nature of Trump's appeal, it's probably a mistake to ascribe his popularity entirely to it. I suspect many in the media still haven't understood that he rose as a consequence of structural changes that will outlast him. Seeing the GOP as the more anti-war party would never have crossed my mind during the Bush era when accusations of insufficient liberal patriotism was rife. Now it appears to me that the veneration of the CIA, Pentagon and FBI are all highly liberal-coded.

The NYT is sad because they want a Republican civil war. DeSantis knows that he needs Trump's voters and supporters, and that he can't afford to alienate them by attacking their perfect prince. But the fact is he doesn't need to. He's far younger and will live to see the end of Trump.

Why does DeSantis need to wait eight years? I don't see any reason he can't run in 2028 or 2032. Particularly because there's no obvious successor to Biden. Harris is unpopular.

You know things are bad when even liberals are despairing at DeSantis' poor performance. I think her analysis is mostly correct. Voters don't really care about issues so much as who is the strong candidate. Trump is funny but also strong. DeSantis is neither - despite being the actual principled conservative by comparison.

DeSantis has the advantage of not having any obvious weaknesses and following the same formula/playbook as Bush and Reagan, by getting a huge evangelical turnout and conveying populist culture war appeal.

Perhaps, but evangelical turnout isn't the same as it was in the eighties or nineties. During Trump, a portion of the "moral majority" or whatever we're calling religious voters these days, went "NeverTrump" and got run through the BLM, Covid and Trans splits. Not certain they'd come back for DeSantis.

The moral majority is dead, but there seems to have been an upwell for the trads lately.

Perhaps. Time will tell, but I'm not staking any bets on them shifting the next national election.

Why is Trump a stronger candidate than DeSantis? It seems to just be a matter of charisma.

Trump can't make things happen. Even if he wanted to, which is dubious, he doesn't have the ability to manipulate the organs of state and get things done. DeSantis does. DeSantis is younger, smarter and more capable. DeSantis just isn't so exciting. For example, I could get behind this policy platform from Trump: https://twitter.com/loganclarkhall/status/1631725952395878416

  1. use federal land to build new cities
  1. develop flying cars
  1. revitalize rural industries
  1. launch a baby boom with bonuses for young parents
  1. beautification campaign, get rid of ugly buildings

But I know that he doesn't have the ability to implement it. Consider that in the first part of his presidency they had both parts of the legislature and executive. He got nothing done with all that! He tried and failed to build a border wall. He succeeded in lowering taxes and assisting Israeli foreign policy goals. He failed to win culture war battles or break the power of the US administrative machine. It looks much more likely that the deep state is going to break him.

Trump is a stronger candidate in that he is still an outsider. DeSantis is just another bog-standard Republican, and that's what you're selling him as. He'd be competent (maybe), he knows how to work within the system etc. The fact that Trump isn't like this is what made him popular. He can't compromise, everyone hates him too much.

even worse, when he signed the bump stock ban he actively went against his base.

Didn't the NRA actually support that one?

If they supported it is besides the point. It would only modify my statement to include 2 traitors instead of just one.

Yeah, I love reminding the crusty Republican Fudds about this at the shop. They've mostly memory-holed that as hard as Democrats did Obama's drone campaign.

What would a Fudd care about a bump-stock ban? You don't need a bump stock for hunting deer. (Unless this is a less-negative use of Fudd than I've usually heard)

Fudds are all on the hysterical and paranoid NRA mailing lists. They're always wound up about some state bill in Illinois or something that doesn't affect them in the slightest.

Fudds are all on the hysterical and paranoid NRA mailing lists. They're always wound up about some state bill in Illinois or something that doesn't affect them in the slightest.

"Fudd" used to be derogatory name for people who would say "Waiting periods? Magazine sizes? Scary black assault murder rifles? Hand guns? I do not care, let me alone with my shotgun, I want to shoot wabbits."

Not any more. Even the "fudds" now learned that all these things affects them, that the other side does not care about saving lives, is not interested in any "reasonable gun control", but wants to take all guns without exceptions (and then proceed to sharp instruments, including kitchen knives), and yielding to their pressure is inadvisable in any circumstances.

Consider that in the first part of his presidency they had both parts of the legislature and executive. He got nothing done with all that!

As you note, he made a major tax reform which eliminated loopholes that funnel money to high income Democrats. He ended the PATRIOT act. His supreme court hit rate is 100%, resulting in ending Roe vs Wade, compared to the 50% hit rate for all Republicans since the 80's [1]. He started 0 wars.

He also made Operation Warp Speed happen, saving millions of lives by routing around the regulatory state.

Now I'd prefer DeSantis to Trump. But lets not pretend Trump did nothing; he certainly did far more than I expected, and far more good things than the swamp dwelling Republicans he was running against.

And realistically speaking he also made other Republicans better. In a world without Trump putting wokeness on our radar, would DeSantis be anything other than a generic Republican?

[1] Bush Jr: Roberts and Alito. Bush Sr: Thomas and Souter. Reagan: O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Kennedy.

Trump's tax cuts for the rich weren't especially great for rank-and-file Republicans. His SCOTUS appointments could have been accomplished by any R president with a heartbeat. The fact that they're more reliably conservative is more thanks to McConnell and negative partisanship leading to fewer compromise candidates. Trump actually seethed about how "disloyal" his SCOTUS appointments were, as he would have preferred lapdogs rather than principled legal scholars, but thankfully McConnell outmaneuvered him.

I definitely agree that Trump made other Republicans better though, as their MO before him was essentially "chain-surrender on cultural and social issues in order to fellate transnational corporations as much as possible". Trump wasn't as much of a break with that as some people imply, but he at least moved in the right direction.

His SCOTUS appointments could have been accomplished by any R president with a heartbeat. The fact that they're more reliably conservative is more thanks to McConnell and negative partisanship leading to fewer compromise candidates. Trump actually seethed about how "disloyal" his SCOTUS appointments were, as he would have preferred lapdogs rather than principled legal scholars, but thankfully McConnell outmaneuvered him.

This is one of the great ironies of the religious conservatives on the Trumpist right. They hate McConnell for not being a loyal Trumpist and for being a DC insider, while also praising Trump for not fucking up the culmination of McConnell's patient long-term project of assembling a philosophically anti-Roe court. The way Roe was overturned is why we need systemic politically savvy game-players like McConnell. Trump just happened to be there when it hit the tipping point (to Trump's credit, he stayed out of the way).

Now, it looks like Trump might have one more problem on this front, with his squeamishness on the issue raising the hackles of at least one venerable pro-life group: https://nypost.com/2023/04/23/trump-touts-pro-life-record-to-iowa-voters-after-criticism-from-anti-abortion-group/ If this creates a schism in his base, DeSantis looks like a safer pro-life bet.

As you note, he made a major tax reform which eliminated loopholes that funnel money to high income Democrats.

This is the first time I hear about this. All the talk I've seen (predictably) focused on "tax cuts for billionaires". Could you elaborate a bit?

The SALT deduction cap made high-income blue staters and Texans(Texas is the main red state with the level of local taxes that the SALT cap affects) very angry, because high state taxes now had to be paid in full instead of deducted from one's federal tax bill, and ending or raising it is regularly if unsuccessfully demanded by democrats representing high-net-worth voters in blue states.

SALT tax deduction was a way that blue states could raise taxes without making their high income taxpayers angry. Trump capped it, meaning now a rich NYer has to actually pay the high state taxes he advocates for.

Also mortgage interest cap impacts people with multimillion dollar homes who itemize.

OP is probably talking about the SALT deduction cap.

Tangent on those policy proposals -

New cities: Maybe a good idea, but the goodness leans very heavily on details and execution. And explicitly bypassing whatever issues current big cities have, and whatever prevents smaller cities from growing a bit. There's also the perception-reflexivity effect - to make a new big city work in a very short period of time, you need to get a lot of people to invest in an uncertain project. Not that any of that is impossible or even 'hard', every country has done it many times. But I'm not a planning expert, so the first sentence means I can't say much of use about it.

Flying cars: multiple existing companies already sell flying cars, they're just not useful for anything other than a gimmick. Having the same components transform from car-form to plane-form and function to standards in both is just unnecessarily costly. Drive your car to a small plane or helicopter and get in it. And even then, few people use small planes or helicopters, they're just not that useful. I'm not sure if the VTOL startups went anywhere, but that's plausible in a way flying cars isn't.

Rural industries: The words 'revitalize' and 'industry' don't suddenly create industries. Which industries? How? Would that correspond to a significant price increase for normal consumers because they can't buy chinese/vietnamese clothing/chips/trinkets anymore?

Baby bonuses: Just aren't that effective in terms of cost/benefit. And compare to the increase of this, which happened under biden. (Just like welfare, baby bonuses incentivize lower income people more, necessarily)

Beautification campaign: Despite appreciating the 'modern building bad. ancient building good. truth, beauty, wonder. our civilization is in decay' more than a bit, I'm not sure anyone will notice. One reason so much effort went into statues and buildings and paintings, historically, is that there wasn't much else to look at. But now that we have pictures and movies and computers, the interestingness of building aesthetics correspondingly declines. I'm not too familiar with the aesthetic motivations behind modern art and architecture, but I believe that was deeply related. Plus, there are just a ton of buildings, and replacing 1 in 10k core buildings with new ornate architecture won't really change the actual 'feel' of cities as people walk through them very much. A more effective path might be a combination of the YIMBY making building, generally, much easier/more common, and then somehow have most of the new buildings be 'nice'. I'm not sure what the curve of 'ornate tradness' vs cost looks like, but I'd expect costs to be significant, given that labor and material costs of construction are still high (hence it resisting automation), and how much of past cost reductions are in the specific materials and techniques used. Of course, a rich and advanced society could 'pay the cost' and allocate 2% more of its population to making buildings look pretty if we wanted.

Precisely, all of these things are ambitious goals and the devil is in the details. Does anyone trust that Trump can make them happen?

You should check out 'where's my flying car?', he makes a good case for why flying cars would be useful in letting people live much further from workplaces and reducing commuting time. He lays the blame on ridiculous, luddite regulatory systems for suppressing the technology. But he also goes off into all kinds of other tangents, it's not a well-structured book.

I think it's not just that they're ambitious goals with tricky details, it's also that I'm not even sure we want them, due to opportunity costs.

New cities: what's wrong with the current ones, and why can we expect the new ones to be better? I don't see why this wouldn't just be a big waste of resources.

Flying cars: What is wrong with the current system? Proliferation of private flying cars, if they can be made to work, seem like they could be pretty dangerous, both to the people in it, anyone else in the air, and the people on the ground. Is there a reason that wouldn't be true? I suppose also the numbers would have to be run on how much development costs vs. benefits could be expected to behave.

Rural industries: This will require some care as to what exactly "revitalize rural industries" means. If they are doing economically worse than they should because of government regulations or due to externalities, that's great. But if the market is the cause in an unbiased way, then aiding them is at the cost of better use that that money could be put to elsewhere in the country. Subsidies and similar seem dangerous.

Baby bonuses: this one might be worth it, but the numbers would have to be run.

Beautification campaign: the previous comment was good about there being a somewhat lesser value to ornateness now, although I agree it is uglier. But improving everything would be expensive, and I would imagine it would have to be done judiciously to be worth it. So I suppose here it is more clearly an example of the devil being in the details.

New cities could be a way to expand with new forms of government, and let people that have different political opinions from mainstream big cities see if their ideas work.

As the US spread West this type of city formation driven political change was crucial. It kept eastern US societies more stable as well since there was a place to send the misfits.

what's wrong with the current ones, and why can we expect the new ones to be better? I don't see why this wouldn't just be a big waste of resources.

Well there are all kinds of traffic problems with extending urban sprawl, if you want to build anything it costs you a lot of money digging through all these cables and pipes from hundreds of years. And there are many powerful nimbies. Far better to just make new cities with all the necessary infrastructure, insulation, have it all up to standard. Economies of scale in construction, fewer costs from blocking off important infrastructure people need. The Chinese did a good job building extra cities and then filling them up later, they think ahead. But I agree that it would be a waste of resources if Trump was doing it - he'd probably just sign some bills, get some press coverage and move on.

What is wrong with the current system?

I was rereading parts from 'Where's my flying car' and he points out that insurance costs for his light aircraft (made using 1970s technology because investment and development's been crippled) are roughly equal with car insurance. So logically, if most people with flying cars are rich clever people like him, (which they would be since flying cars are still going to be expensive), insurance costs and damage caused should be similar. It'd be less with a better regulatory system and more efficient control technology - excessive regulations mean that aircraft are so expensive many people build their own instead of buying off the shelf planes.

Horses were OK but cars were better and flying cars should be better still. It's like a better, cheaper helicopter.

Rural industries

Subsidizing and supporting industry can be helpful in the long run. If Korea didn't support its domestic car industry, how could they have developed one from scratch when they were so outclassed by the US in technology, market size and experience? If they stuck to Economics 101 Comparative Advantage Good, South Korea would still be an agrarian economy. And why did semiconductor production move to Taiwan and South Korea when the US invented the whole field? Support has to be done in the right ways of course but it's still a good idea. Big countries should have the full range of critical industries like steel, chemicals and so on. You don't want to put a giant steel mill in the heart of New York. I suppose Trump is also happy to develop oil and pipelines in rural areas, contra Biden. In principle it's possible to do this correctly but in practice?

Baby bonuses

Well what is the alternative? Mass migration unravels the nation. Human cloning is not well-developed. My favoured policy of social engineering and affirmative action for parents is not exactly popular. Do we just wait for AGI?

cities

Good points about economies of scale and so on, obstruction by the current status quo, and so on. I'd still have to be persuaded whether or not is sufficient to outweigh the infrastructure already built up in cities, but it now doesn't seem entirely pointless.

flying cars

Maybe that's true now, but if flying cars became normal, there would be a much fuller airspace. I would find it hard to believe that that would not adjust the insurance rates. If a sizable amount of the population owned flying vehicles, crashes and near misses would become much more likely. Of course, 3 dimensional space would help, but desired destinations would concentrate traffic, at least at beginnings and ends of flights. There's probably a stronger case for some usage of flying cars making sense than widespread usage.

Rural industries

That's a good point. I suppose that doesn't account for it needing to be rural, but I think you're right.

Baby bonuses

Yes, I think aiming to raise fertility would be good. There might be more effective options, though.

I think the policy recommendations and critiques found in pronatalist.org's FAQ might be worth looking into. (under "what pronatalist policies are most effective")

Among the things mentioned is more doing cultural things. A tax cut gives financial incentives, but doesn't necessarily convey the message it's trying to send on a cultural level very well.

But I know that he doesn't have the ability to implement it. Consider that in the first part of his presidency they had both parts of the legislature and executive. He got nothing done with all that!

Paul Ryan and John McCain and the rest of the neocon Nevertrumpers stymied him from the beginning, all the way to the vote to cancel Obamacare and the McCain “FU I’m dead anyway” move. The wall was getting built, and until COVID, all of the economic indicators were nice.

Like Mitt Romney? John McCain? Bob Dole the former Senate majority leader? Ron DeSantis is another in this line, from Trumpsters’ perspective.

The people wanted an outsider who would buck the system. They wanted someone who would tell them the truth about how moneyed interests were selling out America. They were denied Bernie, so they chose Trump over Hillary. Then they voted out the legislators who stood in his way. It may have been bad gamesmanship, but so is getting second place perpetually.

Well the whole point was to defeat them - instead they defeated him. The US military went around his back to keep troops stationed in the Middle East. He did not have a firm grip on the judiciary or the instruments of power - they mangled his policies. He was on the defensive most of the time. A strong president would've gotten Hunter Biden imprisoned for corruption, he wouldn't have gotten impeached for it. A strong president would've delivered more tangible results with a trifecta. A strong president wouldn't have been 'monitoring the situation' as his supporters were swept out of twitter and reddit, he would've forced the social media companies to back down. Trump kept bitching and whining and complaining, he didn't use the methods available to impose his will. He could've ended the 2020 riots by deploying troops - if he had ensured that he had a reliable and loyal officer corps.

Everyone treated him with contempt because they knew he was weak. If he spent less time golfing and more time governing, he would've gotten more done.

The task is very difficult and surely needs more youth and energy. I don't know why people expected that from a man in his 70s.

A strong president wouldn't have been 'monitoring the situation' as his supporters were swept out of twitter and reddit, he would've forced the social media companies to back down.

Actually yeah, what the fuck. The largest pro-trump community on the internet was completely wiped out before the 2020 election, and we didn't even get an angerly-worded speech about it. It wasn't on Fox News so he didn't give a shit.

Best evidence there was never a Q euspiracy.

Is this /r/thedonald? Oh man we had fun times there back in the day. That subreddit was the whole reason I voted for Trump in 2016.

It seems to me that a strong candidate is one that wins by 20%; not someone who loses.

DeSantis was very strong during covid. Trump was weak (wouldn’t even fire Fauci). This whole “DeSantis is weak” thing seems astroturfed.

With all of that said, the Republican primary may be brutal. Even if DeSantis wins, Trump will decry the result and could make the general untenable.

If DeSantis loses, does he have a viable path in 2028? Romney went from runner up to nominee in 2012 but who knows.

If you’re RD, do you sit out the 2024 and go for it in 2028? Win or lose this is Trump’s last campaign. If Trump wins, his VP may be popular. If Trump loses, you have a relatively easy lane if you don’t make big mistakes over the next few years.

Honestly, best case for the Republican Party is Trump having a health scare, quitting the race, and throwing support behind RD.

Showing a young executive like RD next to a frail Biden will be quite the contrast and I doubt Biden will be Reagan like with quips about not taking advantage of his opponent’s youth and inexperience.

It's funny how Trump is worse for the Republicans than he is for the Democrats.

A geriatric Biden can only beat 1 candidate, and that candidate is Trump. Trump sucks the air out of any room he is in. An election with Trump is an election about getting a democratic candidate who can blend into the background, and allow the hate train to build on its own. An election with DeSantis it becomes about the issues. Biden would have to actually speak during the debates to beat DeSantis. Would allow Biden to speak, and Biden would absolutely dig hos own grave faster than Desantis.

With Trump, Biden could piss his pants in a debate, and people wouldn't even notice it. Democrats and Republicans alike will only be looking at Trump, with their minds warped to imagine dreams/nightmares that no reality could match.

Showing a young executive like RD next to a frail Biden will be quite the contrast and I doubt Biden will be Reagan like with quips about not taking advantage of his opponent’s youth and inexperience.

Agreed. I see a rock paper scissors scenario opening up.

Biden > Trump > DeSantis > Biden

An election with DeSantis it becomes about the issues.

And one of those issues is the six week Abortion ban he signed into law. If DeSantis had held the line at 15 weeks he would have had a really good shot but this will be the first post-Dobbs presidential election and there's no way for DeSantis to occupy a more popular middle ground position on abortion with any credibility after that.

I'm not sure that early abortion bans are Kryptonite for republicans in the same way everyone seems to assume. Even granted that they're unpopular, Abbott, Dewine, and Kemp all got reelected with unusually good margins while having recently passed fairly strict abortion laws. In the case of Abbott there is literally polling showing that Texans preferred O'Rourke on abortion and not other issues, while Abbott claimed multiple times on live TV(albeit not widely watched TV) that the most important issue for him was keeping abortion 100% illegal. Dewine had a major news story about a pregnant 10 year old rape victim who couldn't get an abortion because of his policies.

Granted that the electorates in Texas, Ohio, and Georgia are probably more pro-life than average, but they're not that much more prolife. Desantis is also better at message discipline and media control than average.

"I have no intention of pursuing a federal abortion ban as that matter is best left to the state level legislatures, as the Supreme Court made clear."

Man, that was easy.

I'm sure that's what he will say I just don't think the public will buy it. 'I think abortion is baby murder but you can trust me not to do anything about it' isn't particularly trustworthy after the 'Roe is settled law' judges went mask off with Dobbs.

"This is clearly a lie, as we can see from his previous behavior, supporters, and party platform" followed by a bunch of clipchimping and scary music.

Anybody who is on the prochoice side is incredibly ready to believe that republicans want a federal ban, because lots of them do and say so.

Doesn't even matter if it's not true; it's republican Death Panels style of thing.

The problem is of course, I'm sure ole' Meatball Ron has voted for restrictions multiple times on the federal level while he's in Congress, will be endorsed by numerous groups that want pro-life restrictions on the national level, and I'm sure the 2024 GOP convention will endorse national pro-life legislation.

More importantly, there's about .01% of the population cares about federalism - all they'll know is the GOP candidate signed a restrictive abortion law. Plus, the Liberal Media and SuperPAC's will have plenty of time to talk about the GOP's long history of supporting federal abortion bans and basically push the idea, "do you trust what Ron DeSantis says or what the Republican Party has said for 40 years", or whatever a smarter person than me can write.

Plus, there's just a decent chance that to try to win over evangelical voters in Iowa, he'll just go ahead and endorse federal restrictions to try to win a caucus.

I've been baffled by the sudden media deluge of people proclaiming that DeSantis can't beat Trump. DeSantis hasn't even declared he's running yet. It would be one thing if he had a sudden gaffe or something that got everyone talking, but I'm seeing articles, videos, tweets from "personalities" left and right beating DeSantis with any stick they have handy and declaring that he's already lost when the contest hasn't even begun. This strikes me more as an attempt by those who want Trump to be the Republican candidate (both on the right and on the left) to either pre-emtively take the wind out of DeSantis's sails or convince him not to run.

Chill out people. The primaries are a long way away, this is way to early to declare winners and losers.

This comment reminds me of this internet comic. Of course there's still a long way to go, but polls early in the primary are still fairly predictive of the ultimate outcome. For all intents and purposes Desantis is already running with the Florida legislative session just being an extended PR stunt of "what I would do if I got into federal office!". The fact that Desantis is losing support even this far out still isn't a good thing. Desantis will need to pull off an Obama vs Clinton in '08 feat to surpass Trump. The weaker he looks, the more likely other candidates are to jump in and bite into his chunk of the pie. His pseudo campaign so far has been pathetic, as it's clear he's terrified of directly attacking Trump when the reverse isn't true in the slightest.

Jesus Christ THIS.

Desantis hasn't officially declared. If (when) he does he's going to come out with a bevy of pre-arranged endorsements, and likely a massive set of ads and an actual, you know, campaign. Merely announcing he's running will boost his immediate popularity.

He's no stranger to fighting close electoral battles. He's not flying blind here. So maybe try not to be premature in assuming the current situation is representative of the future outcome. Or, if you are, lets place some actual bets.

I watched Desantis blow even the elevated expectations he had going into 2022 election season out of the water. I'll gladly accept 50/50 odds of Desantis clinching the nom right now.

Anyone who is pretending to know that Desantis is too weak to go the distance, at this point in the game, is giving away their own wishful thinking.

On the one hand…yeah, this is endless horse race nonsense. Gotta churn up page views and eyeballs, let’s make up some Trump vs. DeSantis drama.

On the other hand…a lot of Florida lawmakers endorsed Trump. Which is part of a growing drumbeat of stories that DeSantis is really quite the unlikeable asshole. A very loud drumbeat. A very, very loud drum beat with lots and lots of anecdotes that DeSantis has terrible people skills, and with very few stories of how he’s a swell guy.

I don’t know. Everyone seemed to like DeSantis when they knew his policies…but now that he’s more in the public eye and people can actually hear his voice and see how he interacts with people…dude doesn’t have a lot of charm, and Trump, god help me for praising Trump, but Trump does have a certain rakish charisma.

Which is part of a growing drumbeat of stories that DeSantis is really quite the unlikeable asshole. A very loud drumbeat. A very, very loud drum beat with lots and lots of anecdotes that DeSantis has terrible people skills, and with very few stories of how he’s a swell guy.

More stories than there have been over the last seven years about Trump being unlikable and hard to work with?

Which is part of a growing drumbeat of stories that DeSantis is really quite the unlikeable asshole. A very loud drumbeat. A very, very loud drum beat with lots and lots of anecdotes that DeSantis has terrible people skills, and with very few stories of how he’s a swell guy.

You really think Trump will defeat DeSantis because DeSantis is too much of an unlikeable asshole? Are we talking about the same Donald Trump here?

Anyway, this is politics. If you hear a drumbeat, think Foley artists, not restless natives.

Compared to DeSantis? Yeah.

Trump is an omega-level asshole…but he can schmooze. He can work a crowd, and he can do interviews. I have seen no evidence yet DeSantis can do that. Have you actually heard him speak? He has zero charisma—none. Trump has a toxic, used car salesman charisma, but at least he has it, whereas DeSantis is an awkward blank.

How did DeSantis win Florida?

Originally, Trump endorsed him, then the Florida Democrats were the Florida Democrats they've been since the 50's (after all, they were one of the first Dixiecrat parties to lose power to the GOP within the South) outside of Lawton Chiles and Bob Graham, then piggybacking off the rise of Spanish right-wing radio, general ambivalence toward COVID restrictions in a tourism-friendly state (note the only incumbent Governor to lose in 2022 was Sisolak in Nevada), and lots and lots of free money from the government via the COVID bill to pay for tax raises, and not being totally incompetent when it came to the hurricanes.

At the same time, Rubio won by almost the same amount DeSantis did, without all the Culture War stuff.

So anyway, I was discussing the great replacement theory with a far-righter earlier, and I said that immigration had little to no effect on native birthrates, citing Japan and Korea as examples.

That pointed to a far more likely culprit, education as a whole (not just women’s). South Korea and Japan can’t seem to stop "investing in the future" by making their and their kids’ lives hell. Naturally, to escape the vicious cycle, they end up abolishing the future.

Isn’t it weird that a prominent justification for making money in our society is ‘sending my kids to college’? Anyone who refuses to do so is shamed with accusations of selfishness and not wanting their kids to succeed. They then choose the alternative path where kids aren’t even in the picture, so they’re free to be selfish in peace. We’re copenhagen ethics-ing humanity into slow painless extinction.

Trads like to assign the blame to female education, but most of the arguments apply to men as well. People are wasting 5-15 years of their lives on a very expensive vacation, at best, when they could be having kids. We want them to make that important decision early, and nothing sobers a young man quicker than staring decades of drudgery in the face.

It’s time to abandon our rosy view of Education as just an intolerable burden on the living. The unborn are its primary victims. Your children cry out: “Mum! Dad! Why do you let my Evil Professor keep me here? Why can’t I liiive? “

Say No To School. Choose Life.

Isn’t it weird that a prominent justification for making money in our society is ‘sending my kids to college’?

Which makes the Marc Andreesen post about how flat screen TVs that cover your whole wall will soon cost $100 while a college education will cost $1,000,000 even scarier. Will we normalize taking out med school levels of debt for all degrees, and which people/parents will be stuck paying off for their entire lives?

Pricing the lower middle class out of college, so only those with generational wealth, those willing to take on a lifetime of debt, and those on scholarships can be elevated to the halls of power. The first group is already aligned with the elites, the second group is made of debt-slaves stuck doing whatever the system demands, and the third is beholden to the politics of pull.

Power grab. They’re finalizing one-party rule right before our eyes.

Schooling is part of the problem but really this isn't monocausal. If you want the monocausal explanation then it's "children cost too much", people retort that economic incentives don't work, so it can't be an economic problem but they just don't understand the sheer magnitude of the problem. In a preindustrial society, the kind of society with high birth rates, children are a source of wealth: you can put them to work around the house and in the field as young as 5 years old, it's basically free labor.

In our contemporary, industrialized, societies everything conspires to make children expensive: you don't live around an extended family that can help with child care, women's time is more valuable than ever, housing is expensive, putting them to work is prohibited by the law, not having children is easier than ever, culture doesn't value childrearing and, yes, the problem with education means both that the fertility window is smaller and that raising a child is more expensive.

There are two ways to solve this problem, either make children cheap again or just pay for their current cost. I don't think making children cheap is even remotely possible at this point. Half of the factors at play in making them expensive are huge coordination problems (you can't individually opt out of education, everyone else has to) and the other half are deeply unpopular positions that noone will seriously advocate for and stand no chance of ever gaining any approval, like "women should be property", "you must never leave your parent's home" and "we should allow a certain amount of child slavery to exist".

Economic incentives would probably work, since the problem is mostly economic, but you have to essentially pay for it as much as you do for any other white collar job. It would cost a lot of money, which is why it isn't happening and the problem will not be solved.

I'm starting to develop the opinion that the monocausal explanation is even more specific than that -- it's "price discrimination allows the seller to collect all of the gains from trade and thus ensures that nobody has any slack".

Which suggests that if my nagging suspicions are correct, means-tested economic incentives would also not work.

Edit: lol no wonder I felt like I've seen this argument before, it was made literally two days ago in this very thread. Go read that comment instead of this one, ControlsFreak put it way better than I did.

I think that explanation is probably wrong. It is happening in the US but declining birthrates is a global phenomenon and it's happening in countries that don't do the kind of price discrimination the US does in healthcare and education.

The fertility crisis is in some sense a fake problem. It could be solved tomorrow with common-sense birth control control. Make it illegal to give hormonal BC to a woman with less than 3 children (number adjustable as needed). All the proposals to increase fertility with tax-breaks and other incentives feel like responding to the lead crisis by increasing access to chelation therapy. Just take the lead out the fucking gasoline.

Make it illegal

You won war on alcohol, you won war on drugs, you won war on guns, war on contraception will be walkover.

Bring it on.

Are you talking about it not being feasible in America or it not being feasible at all? All of these policies have been succesfully implemented in other countries at one point in another.

Contraception was illegal in Ireland from 1935 until 1980, most Western countries outside of the US have strict controls on guns and there's no desire to reverse this, drugs are much harder to get in Singapore and far less people are addicted to them in East Asia than in North America and Western Europe, alcohol use is much less prevelant in Islamic countries.

I mean, technically, you don't need to make contraception unavailable, you just need to reduce it's typical use efficacy to the point where the average woman has an extra half a kid, which seems doable if unpopular by holding a war on contraception.

For this to have any effect, you would need to ban condoms too. This means you're not only increasing fertility, but also STDs.

"alcoholism is in some sense a fake problem, it could be solved tomorrow with a ban on alcohol"

this was tried in america in the early 20th century and did not work. how do you expect a ban on birth control would fare any better in practice.

not to mention, such a ban would be a terrible violation of human rights, but I guess the only right people here seem to care about is freedom of speech.

how do you expect a ban on birth control would fare any better in practice.

It's much easier to distill booze on a farm in the middle of nowhere than it is to synthesize Progesterone

not to mention, such a ban would be a terrible violation of human rights

When Griswold v. Connecticut was decided, the US fertility rate was 3. We were coming off the baby boom. There were too many people.

Perhaps such a move literally tomorrow would be premature. There are still plenty of off-ramps the future could take, AI being the most obvious. Still, it would be prudent to start thinking about contingencies now. Think about what a society with a fertility rate of 0.5 would look like after 30 years. What if the whole Earth was at 0.5? What if it was 0.2?

It's much easier to distill booze on a farm in the middle of nowhere than it is to synthesize Progesterone

People would just fall back to other forms of contraception.

It is very difficult to synthesise meth too, but people still manage to do it and distribute it in a way that anybody not completely incompetent can get their hands on it pretty easily.

If a society is sufficiently opposed to birth control that banning it becomes feasible, the ban would probably not even be needed under your standard, because birth rates would likely be higher than they are today, yet alone 0.5.

Possibly, but possibly not. I can easily imagine a world where everyone agrees that there need to be more children being born, but nobody wants to have children themselves. In such a scenario, the pro birth-control coalition is women 15-35 and the dudes that are fucking them, and the anti birth-control coalition is everyone else. You should be able to tell who wins politically in that situation.

its easy for you to say as a man that banning birth control is no big deal, but imagine you were a woman seeking to avoid the problems of pregnancy and childbirth, you would probably have a different perspective. but even from the man's point of view, pregnant women are less enjoyable to make love with because most men find big pregnant bellies to be unattractive, also giving birth stretches out the vagina making sex less pleasurable, young children cry a lot disrupting your sleep, stubborn ones can test your patience, and other problems that im not aware of because i dont have experience with them lol. forcing people to make babies by taking away their birth control is a form of enslavement and i would hope that former birth control users would have the moral integrity to not take away from younger folks what they themselves took advantage of during their time.

forcing people to make babies by taking away their birth control is a form of enslavement

Every single person in history was created by growing inside their mother for ~9 months. It’s not slavery, it’s paying forward your debt to society.

I am also amused that you seem to think that non having sex simply isn’t an option, as though this were some impossible thing, and that life without sex is hardly worth living. I assure you, from personal experience, that it is possible. It sucks in certain ways, but it is nowhere anywhere near slavery. If consequence free sex in enshrined as a human right, then please tell me where I can find the nearest STD-free government funded brothel?

Every single person in history was created by growing inside their mother for ~9 months. It’s not slavery, it’s paying forward your debt to society.

There is no legitimate debt that somebody did not choose to accrue.

If consequence free sex in enshrined as a human right, then please tell me where I can find the nearest STD-free government funded brothel?

What liberals mean when they say that birth control is a right is that following from the principle of self-ownership, it would be immoral for another entity to penalize people for the mere act of providing or consuming it, not that people are obligated to fund its free provision whether through taxation or elsewise. In general, if an act is not violating somebody's rights, imposing penalties for that act constitutes a rights violation.

It's much easier to distill booze on a farm in the middle of nowhere than it is to synthesize Progesterone

My understanding is that certain hormones are actually much easier to make than you'd think, there is a popularly imagined concept of "Bathtub estrogen"

The pill made very little difference

Birth control has been available for a long time; condoms and natural family planning have existed for centuries, ancient cultures like the Greeks and the Romans practiced infanticide, and anyone who understands where babies come from can make use of sodomy, fellatio, and coitus interruptus.

The sexual revolution did not happen because some asshole invented the contraceptive pill. The sexual revolution happened because we lost control of our women. Civilizations die of feminism; they don't die of birth control.

To fix the problem, make women property again.

No? Historical birth control, whether mechanical, behavioral, or chemical, wasn't very consistent - and with ~one attempt per month, a 10% failure rate is still high enough to maintain pregnancies. Cheap and engineered condoms and hormonal birth control are much more effective. The 'pull-out' method is not too effective for modern couples who solely use it.

It's true that birth control didn't precipitate the sexual revolution on its own - a natural hormonal contraceptive from a plant wouldn't have doomed ancient egypt to feminism. And contraceptive use would be lower if people believed having children was more important, or that contraceptive use was immoral. But feminism != birth rate, effective contraception does help lower birthrates.

Also, the sexual revolution didn't happen because men lost control over women, modern liberal values were held by both men and women. Men enjoyed and supported casual sex and easier divorces as much as women. The problem isn't women being property, because modern men don't really want more than 2 children (on average! individuals vary a lot) either. How did you icome to the conclusion of 'women must be property again'? How would it help for women to be property of men who remain the same?

Wasn’t France below replacement for most of the 19th century, before reliable contraception?

No?

I said that immigration had little to no effect on native birthrates, citing Japan and Korea as examples.

I don't think I buy this and suspect it's a matter of apples to oranges.

I don't necessarily agree with the reason, but I do agree with the sentiment. Education was sold as the liberation of the masses, but it's been used to create a caste system. And is staffed by ideology-simping mediocrities at best and racist child abusers at worst.

Around a third of American adults have a bachelor's degree. Around a third of those also went to grad school. So it's a 4 year burden on a third of the population and 6ish years on around one tenth.

That's not a lot. That isn't a crushing burden killing our society's ability to make kids.

More than 2/3 young americans have some college, and some do double time, that's usually on the parents. The rest of schooling might need to go on the block too. That's another 100-200k out of pocket, for unclear benefits. Free internet courses and books exist. That's almost the size of norway's sovereign oil fund per capita(240k). Those kids could be rich, free and happy.

School/education on its own seems relatively fine. It's just the particular way we go about it that ruins everything.

The standard meme in government economics is, "...best I can do is subsidize demand and restrict supply." We see this meme played out in at least three domains where there is high government involvement: education, medical care, and housing. Even just from that, there's not much surprise that prices rise higher and higher. But I think the standard bifecta is missing a third factor to make it a trifecta. What does the government do after subsidizing demand, restricting supply, and seeing prices go up? Why, they invariably come in and help the cartel they've set up price discriminate as perfectly as possible!

Every company wants to price discriminate. Companies/cartels with market power really want to price discriminate. The standard economics result is that if a monopolist is able to perfectly price discriminate (i.e., charge each individual customer exactly their willingness-to-pay), then they capture all of the gains from trade, leaving none of the surplus to the consumer. All consumers are still just barely willing to engage in the transactions, but none really feel like they've gotten a good "deal" out of the trade. These companies with market power are the bootleggers.

The baptists are in the government, seeing that high prices appear to harm poorer people, and they looooooove to help poorer people! So, what do you have to do when you want to go to college? Oh, just submit this federal form that tells the company gobs of data about your income/assets/etc..... oh, and for your family, too! That'll allow us nice people to help make college affordable price your personalized college experience as darn close to your individual willingness-to-pay as possible! Hospitals often tout (not sure if required by the government) programs that simply slash your bill, give you a personalized price, if only you give them a bunch of information about your finances. The government will even directly provide health insurance options for you... but, ya know, if you want a good individualized price, you better give us your financial data. I even saw this week that they're going to start adding fees to mortgages for homeowners with good credit (personalize their price) in order to subside those of homeowners with bad credit (personalize their price, too!).

All of this is wonderful, if you're part of the cartel that determines who can be a doctor, who can build a hospital, who can start a university (or even a program within a university), who can build what where (and have ease-of-permitting). Those are the people who will capture all the gains from trade. Everyone else? Whelp, be glad that you can just barely buy it, nevermind that you won't have much left over for any other aspects of A Good Life you might want.

I'll second @Primaprimaprima. It seems to me that although having kids is very rewarding, it also sucks in so many ways that I am not at all surprised that people in the developed world who both do not have an urgent and clear need to have kids as a form of social security and who are not strongly under the influence of pro-natal tradition tend to not have many kids. Why would they?

"Because people have always done it!"

So what?

"For society's sake!"

That's pretty abstract and I have more immediate things on my mind.

"To continue your genes!"

I like the sex part of continuing my genes, but when I imagine the raising a kid part of continuing my genes so far at least it hasn't seemed worth it to me.

I think that some people spend too much time wondering why people are not having more kids when they really should be grateful and maybe even a bit surprised that people are having kids at all. I think that one will not understand this issue properly if one takes people having kids as some kind of natural baseline, "the way that things were and should be", and then gets surprised that it is not happening as much any more in the developed world.

What if there is no innate universal human desire to have kids? What if it just seemed like there was because for most of human history humanity has been under the influence of ineffective contraception practices, pro-natal economic pressure, and pro-natal social customs?

I think that modern lifestyles and family structure make it particularly difficult to raise children for a number of reasons. In a nuclear family there are only two adults doing all of the childcare, at least when they aren't paying for daycare services, as opposed to an extended family or multifamily household where the various aunts, uncles, and grandparents can take turns being responsible for all of the young children, giving their parents a much-needed break. There's a reason "it takes a village to raise a child" is a well-known saying, and yet the way we live nowadays does everything possible to prevent this.

Immigrant families tend to be larger in part because they often have no qualms about packing a dozen or more people into a single suburban house that was intended for a single nuclear family (packing is not really the right word, given that this is often still more living space per person than they get back home) and can alternate who gets groceries, does household chores, and takes the kids out to the park, not to mention living in a much nicer neighborhood than if they had not pooled their resources.

Additionally, growing up in a larger household means greater exposure to young children and their needs. More and more upper-middle class women in developed countries have never even held a baby before they have their first child, which adds an additional layer of anxiety at the weight of that responsibility that is simply absent in most traditional societies, where her equivalent would have from an early age been cooking for, keeping an eye on, and picking up after her younger siblings, cousins, or the neighbors' kids. The last vestige of this was teenagers working as babysitters to earn a little money in high school, which may still be a thing in some parts of this country, but certainly not in my coastal, urban, PMC, zoomer bubble.

Now I don't necessarily think that addressing these issues would immediately restore fertility rates, because there is a deeper challenge born (heh) out of the number of desirable lifestyle options that the wealth of developed countries permits other than raising a traditional family. I leave sorting that one out to natural selection, which is working overtime on it as we speak.

Perhaps the problem is we haven't rejected trad lifestyles enough. Need to accelerate the gay space communism more. If we graduated from polycule cohabs to polycule cohabs with kids we can keep our depraved lifestyles while having a network of lovers around to help with the the child rearing.

Before you say there's no precedent for this allow me to bring up the Eskimo.

Eskimo didn't have much privacy huddled together in their igloos during winters and it came with somewhat corresponding social mores: intimate moments that couldn't be hidden, more partner sharing, seeming indifference to cuckolding, comfort raising kids communally. Also apparent dedicated sex parties.

We could be missing a pretty big prize here by being insufficiently freaky with our modern ways.

Some people just really want kids and don’t understand how other people don’t, and frankly I think the opposite is true as well- some people really like the making of kids but don’t want any, and doubt anyone is another way.

To the extent this is genetic there is selection pressure for the former.

Because kids are great? It's a hard sell these days, but kids actually can be a fun, rewarding life project.

One thing that's changed about having kids is that it used to be more fun. Your friends had kids too, the kids could be left to their own devices for most of the day while the adults hung out. You were allowed to have a life and identity outside of your children.

Now, children demand all things they see advertised at them, subject everyone around them to their obnoxious media habits, expect the adults to entertain them, or sit like a lump on an ipad and scream if it gets taken away briefly. All your childless friends don't want to spend time in a child-safe house full of child-friendly media. If the children do actually go outside, it must be in the form of organized events with signed waivers and fees and disciplinary talks when one kid makes physical contact with another kid. Kids have become a thing that you buy ipads for that resents you for being straight and white and killing the planet.

This. The generational progression has been rather pronounced, from my local observations. I should add that it also tracks with the availability of entertainment. My grandparents and my dad's older siblings grew up when electricity and airconditioning were novel. My dad grew up with Saturday Morning Cartoons, Bruice Lee, and Star Wars, with video games requiring a trip to an arcade. I remember not having video games and the Disney Channel being a temporary luxury, but by the time I was in school, cable and VHS copies of everything were plentiful, and whether or not I had access to a NES was entirely dependent on which cousin needed to pawn one for drug money this month... right up until my parents could swing for our own, after which point I spent way too much time on cartoons and video games. And also I was obsessed with toys and wanted just about everything I saw on TV.

My GenZ cousins had even more plentiful video games, and if they hadn't been hit with time limits during early school ages, would have stayed glued to them for hours at a time. My 7yo nephew was given a tablet with Youtube access before he could talk, and still demands to have it when eating or traveling. I feel obliged to add that I often wanted to keep watching TV at mealtimes, but back then my parents actually refused. These days, they put the table across from a 70in smart TV and they have to have something going most of the time.

Safetyism is a completely separate topic, I suppose. The conspicuous correlation between the availability of entertainment, and how absorbed people are by it, is easily observed. Have we made any progress toward safeguarding against superstimuli?

Have we made any progress toward safeguarding against superstimuli?

I don't think so. I think that'd take at least thirty years.

This must be how PMC and other alphabet people have kids. It's not been my experience. There are waiver laden indoor play space birthdays to be sure. My preference is a grassy backyard with a bounce house and beer on the patio with the other parents.

...and hot-dogs on the grill. Amen.

I think that some people spend too much time wondering why people are not having more kids when they really should be grateful and maybe even a bit surprised that people are having kids at all.

This is asinine and ass-backwards. Nobody should be surprised that people are having kids. They've been doing it for millenium, and will continue to do so for millenium. Every species on God's green earth has been reproducing to the best of their ability for as long as they can. This is not surprising, so don't make it some noble instead instead of the barest minimum standard just because you don't want to meet the standard.

What if there is no innate universal human desire to have kids?

What if the moon were made of cheese? What if I were god-emperor of all mankind? Why should I think zebras, and not horses, when you say there are hoofbeats in the distance?

They've been doing it for millenium, and will continue to do so for millenium.

Is this an argument? You seem to be just stating that you're correct without providing any justification, and then mocking @Goodguy for his opinion.

What could be a stronger argument than an unbroken trend for thousands of years?

Surely if having children was just a passing fad, we'd not exist.

This must be one of those core differences between traditionalists and others. There are many awful things that have been happening for thousands of years and I’m glad we ended them.

Status quo bias is one of my biggest frustrations with the world.

It certainly is. Nothing ever happens.

Some people have done it for millenia, but it doesn't mean that most have. Actually, if you take account of those who died as children, most people ever born have never got any children. You are the result of those who chose to have children, but it does not mean that most people have done it in the past.

For the majority of humanity's history people didn't have a choice in the matter. They wanted to have sex and kids were inevitable byproduct of it. Also for some time children were profitable investment of resources. Both of these reasons became invalid, hence demographic transition.

Surely those few nations and peoples that don't fall for this selection trap will inherit the earth, and with them carry whatever factor makes them have offspring with or without tying it to the pleasure of sex.

This is not the first time people invent a way to cheat our reward mechanisms and it likely won't be the last either.

Though I must say I personally have extreme difficulty relating to this argument given the only reason I even care about sex is kids and not the other way around. But it certainly seems most people don't share my disinterest given some ruin their lives over it.

It's a very inefficient and ethically dubious way to make new people.

Beings that start without well formed motives and worldviews is an ethics of consent issue, and the consequences of that issue has been every "think of the children" argument against personal freedom ever.

Still, people evolved to have kids. They want to. So assuming we don't outlaw it for reasons like those- I wouldn't be too surprised to see bio-conservative reproduction methods numbering in billions of births per year 1000 years from now...

But it's still inefficient. Nine months and a child that starts as a complete dependent? That you have to watch grow through all the pain and suffering of being a new mind? I would expect other methods like forking and spawning new teenage AI minds to be thousands of times more common at least. This is 1000 years we're talking about. We could easily have 10 more AI booms in that time even if this one fizzles.

It's a very inefficient and ethically dubious way to make new people.

Reality is not under any obligation to make sense. The obligation is upon us to make sense of reality.

I didn't even understand what you meant by this until I started seeing the responses because it didn't even seem like a response to my post...

And now I see why.

You see my brain's response to what you have just said is...

"That's enough culture war for this month. Time to go read all the ML papers my gay lovers have recommended to me so we can continue building our children together."

It seems clear to me now that we are living in entirely different realities.

This explains why you would say something like -

Reality is not under any obligation to make sense. The obligation is upon us to make sense of reality.

When from where I'm standing it is you who has clearly failed to make sense of reality.

It seems clear to me now that we are living in entirely different realities.

Do we really? Is the speed of light in a vacuum different where you are from?

You're free to find biological reproduction "inefficient and ethically dubious" just as I am free to believe that the world would be a better place if you had been aborted or run down your mother's leg in the seconds after your father came. The thing is I don't because I am not like you. I actually take the old cliche about each person born being a small miracle or crowning unlikelihood, dead seriously. Who do you think you are to judge?

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Careful, you might be handing the keys to a lunatic like Karl Rove with this sentence. To the point of this conversation: if the transhumanists get their pod babies that will be the reality that you'll have to make sense of.

if

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Yes, but that's a very laconic "if".

Is this an argument?

Not the OP but I'd say "damn right it's an argument". As the old saying goes, "the future belongs to those who show up", If you want to stake out a position that, on the face of it, would seem to contradict pretty much everything we know of both evolution and human history you at least need to offer up an alternate theory.

It's pretty clear that the desire to have kids is not universal. My source: the many people who never have children or express a desire to have children and in fact go to great lengths to avoid having children.

If the argument is that people are getting educated and this causes a decline in fertility rates, then it seems like something has to give out of the following.

  1. Having an education/theoretical knowledge-reliant economy.

  2. Having a society where people can move up the socioeconomic scale of their own volition if they try.

  3. Having people in jobs where they actually understand what is going on, not just what impacts their little corner of life.

I'm not arguing for a return to an agrarian society. Just that the marginal unit of education in our society is a massive net loss. We should cut the fat by half at least. The koreans send their kids to nightmarish haegwons and their productivity is 40% below US/Western EU.

Their productivity per hour is low because they work a lot. It's expected that the hours when you are awake and do the most important part of your job are more productive than those when you are tired and do something less useful. You should do a comparison ceteris paribus, but it is more difficult.

Ah interesting, you might be right then.

I wouldn't say they do worse than by productivity, I'd say that by working a lot more they juuust manage to catch up to the laggers and slackers of the group, France, Italy, UK, though not germany, nordics and US.

What exactly counts as "fat"? Any degree that isn't STEM? Are we doing cost-benefit analyses per field?

RoI has been done.

https://educationdata.org/college-degree-roi#field

Oh no, there's far more to cut than that. You don't need 4 years, let alone 8, even for the most high-productive, high-paying job. One of my friends has a Phd in mathematics, when he could have learned the programming knowledge in 2 months for the IT job he actually ended up in (and he needed to do that, too).

The amount of sex people are having does seem to be reducing, culturally.

I don't know that "say no to school" is a great answer, but "Say no to grueling schools that eat up all of your day" does seem like a good start. I'd start by advocating against cars, and then by advocating for shorter school days for highschool and middleschool kids. I'd propose a 6-hour highschool-day as well as for laws and policies that make car ownership more difficult. Perhaps this is the true path to a decopunk future?

Forcing kids out of schools and then forcing them out of cars is forcing them to meet others.

The US had high birth rates in the 50s and 60s which was long after we became a car culture.

In fact, the car was commonly used both as a private space in which to engage in activities which might lead to conception, and to get people to other private places to engage in those activities, out of the eyes of the older and younger folks.

There's a lead time before the full effects of a new technology or tool has effects on the culture, and that's what has happened. The effects of social isolation of both the single family home + sexualization of the vehicle has finally hit. Internet and mobile phones were the last nail in that coffin.

That said, socially, it will be more likely that we will get a 15-minute walkable city, 6 hour schoolday, and reduce the total number of car owners, than to get rid of mobile phones.

5-15 years seems like an exaggeration. Graduating from high school is not hard for most people and is pretty important for getting a reasonable paying job (also being 18). After that, college is a 4 year endeavor, and very few people spend any time in school after that. Even finishing a bachelor's is something that only a little over a third of those 25-30 have done (although closer to 2/3 have at least "some college" which might indicate a lot of wasted time failing to graduate--this number is probably far too high given the costs of college). The drop in fertility is much more widespread than that.

There's definitely a portion of the population going through higher education, and then trying to get started in a career to pay off student loans/justify so much college, and then don't have a lot of time left in between that and being too old, especially if you have trouble getting pregnant because you only started looking for a partner at age 30. I know people in this situation. (Of course, I also know people in this situation who got married young and got divorced and remarried, nothing to do with college at all). But this group is too small to explain the bulk of the trend.

It's not just about what the kids actually do, for prospective "good" parents it appears they will be stuck paying for their children until they're ~25 (and the bill increases at the end) when it should be around 15.

To the extent that's true, I don't think it's caused by longer education. Or, again, not for most of the population. Almost no 15 year old can get a job that will pay the bills. There's some job requirement inflation going into that, but a lot of things are also just way more expensive than they used to be in real terms, like housing. In places that are cheaper to live, job opportunities of any kind may be limited.

And how do you get 25?

Low birth rates are caused by urbanization, this has been well understood for at least a century.

Ok, what else, I have to close the contest soon:

  • education

  • female education

  • female workplace participation

  • feminism

  • urbanization

  • modernity

  • excessive parental investment

  • immigration

  • irreligiosity

  • birth control

  • high house prices/ cost of living generally

  • quality of available entertainment

  • socialized pensions

The delusion that if you wait around long enough the perfect spouse will drop into your lap. In reality, finding a good husband or wife is like finding a good job or getting into a good college. You should work at it and put yourself out there and make it a priority from a young age.

Yeah. A lot of that is about things like being attractive (Princeton sociologist Catherine Hakim's erotic capital theory) and actually having social capital - not being isolated as all hell.

It seems like in societies where women mostly prioritized getting married in their early to mid twenties, they accepted age gaps that the PMC today considers creepy and verboten. This is probably a real trade off that doesn’t have a way around.

Here are five more.

  • the switch from integenerational to single-generational households: a kid is a much bigger burden on "two people who have full-time jobs" than on "a bunch of people, some of which might work only part time".

  • reduced mixing of people-who-have-kids with people-who-do-not-have kids: people mostly do what the people around them do. If childless people mainly interact with other childless people, "having kids" is mostly not "the sort of thing people around them do"

  • salience of the negative aspects of having kids: news stories about kids tend to be either "look at the terrible stuff that happens to kids" or "look at the terrible stuff that happens to parents who let their kids act like kids". Observing the news and going "it's news because it's rare" is not a natural mental motion for people.

  • general doomerism incentives lead people to expect that they will be bringing their children into a world that is bad for children: if you express optimism, you will face criticism if things go badly, but if you express cynicism and pessimism, and the bad outcome you predicted hasn't happened, you can just darkly say "...yet".

  • culture of specialization: in general, the incentives of our culture are to do the things where you have comparative advantage. Most people don't think they have comparative advantage at child rearing.

You could probably collapse this list down to three bullet points of "media" / "culture" / "household size" if you're going for brevity.

Many of those things are linked together.

Modernity causes urbanization, which leads to higher house prices/cost of living and higher quality of available entertainment. The higher cost of living means that it's more expensive to support each child, so parental investment has to go up. Feminism, female education, and female workplace participation are all intertwined and mutually reinforcing. The idea of a workplace and accompanying workforce is a product of modernity and urbanization (premodern women spent all their time working, but not for a boss who pays cash wages). That workforce then requires a certain level of education.

Urbanization is what pulls fertility rates from 8 to 2.

There's no contest here, it's just urbanization. Looking at anything else is penny-pinching over decimals, while the elephant in the room is right there.

Urbanization is huge, but it can’t be the whole picture, as even farm families typically don’t have eight kids anymore. Fertility in rural areas has been falling just as surely as in urban areas; it just hasn’t fallen as far (but then, it also started off higher).

As an illustration, my uncle is a semi-retired farmer. He had three kids. My grandparents had four (plus one stillbirth and one miscarriage); my great-grandparents, seven; and my great-great-grandparents, ten. Not counting the Amish, I think all the farmers I know have between two and five kids. Heck, even among the Amish it’s relatively rare to have 8–10 kids today.

But what is it about urbanization, according to you? Surely urbanization itself cannot be the immediate cause, there must be some X or set of X such that urbanization causes X... and then X... causes low fertility rates.

IIRC the leading explanation is that kids generally are productive enough on low-tech farms to be at least net-neutral on the farm's balance sheet. Even in the days of kids sweeping chimneys in Victorian England, that just doesn't work in cities. Probably not on high-tech farms, either.

I suspect any study of even highly mechanized agriculture would show that farmers have a lot of kids, to say nothing of the migrant workers picking peaches(for whom kids are net earners from the time they’re out of diapers- and yes, child labor is a major part of the fruit and vegetable supply chain even in countries with generally strict child labor laws).

Do any of these cover the obvious point that having kids is just really not a desirable thing at all? On an individual level, I mean - it is desirable that humans continue as a species, but this requires sacrifice on an individual level.

Having kids requires an insane investment of time and resources, for a payoff that can mostly be gotten easier from other sources (e.g. if what you’re after is companionship, you already have your spouse, why do you need to make more people on top of that?).

A typical argument for why having kids is a good thing in and of itself is that it provides “fulfillment”. But it’s an empirical fact that most people don’t require any fulfillment beyond what is provided by Netflix and Grubhub. Certainly the average human has no need for anything resembling a “life project” or a “continuance of legacy”.

In a vacuum, most people will choose not to have kids; they need some external impetus that makes it more desirable (e.g. strongly increased social status), or they need to simply be forced to in one way or another. In a state of nature, lack of access to birth control is a pretty good impetus - people won’t choose to have kids, but they will certainly choose to have sex - but that’s largely a solved problem in any modern country. So you can partially put me down for “birth control”, partially for “quality of available entertainment”, partially for this and that, but blaming any of these factors ultimately obscures the fact that wanting to have kids in the first place is the deviation in need of explanation.

Do any of these cover the obvious point that having kids is just really not a desirable thing at all?

Define "desirable" because an observation I've made in the past when this topic has come up is that the contemporary rationalist/progressive mindset with its emphasis on self-actualization/gratification seems to be fundamentally incompatible with parenthood and family-formation. The first thing you realize when you become a parent is that it's not about you. Your life is not your own.

As for why having kids is a good thing? the future belongs to those show up. The Lord sets before us blessings and curses, life and death. If you want to choose death that is your prerogative, but don't expect me to applaud or praise you for it.

It's possible that the superficial tone of my post lead you to misinterpret my actual views.

the contemporary rationalist/progressive mindset with its emphasis on self-actualization/gratification seems to be fundamentally incompatible with parenthood and family-formation. The first thing you realize when you become a parent is that it's not about you. Your life is not your own.

We are in complete agreement here. I am the Arch Anti-Utilitarian. I am on a crusade against pleasure-seeking.

The operative sentence of my post was this:

On an individual level, I mean - it is desirable that humans continue as a species, but this requires sacrifice on an individual level.

Having children is indeed a Good Thing. As a society, we should encourage more of it. If we really have such a great labor shortage that we're on the verge of economic collapse (I question the facts here, but let's run with it), and the choice is between importing masses of foreigners on the one hand or forcing native women to have more children on the other, then we should absolutely force native women to have more children. Or at least, the state can make it a top priority to remove impediments for couples who already want to have children, and see if that's sufficient to fix the situation.

My post was simply describing the natural state of things, not approving of it. Most people are guided by the pleasure principle, and having kids is not inherently pleasurable, so ceteris paribus most people won't choose to do it. You can't tell people "hey guess what, this really hard thing that takes a ton of work and years of your life? you don't have to do it anymore!" and then act all shocked pikachu face when people go "ok, I won't do that thing anymore". All I did was describe the way that the force of gravity pulls people; I didn't say we shouldn't fight against gravity.

In general, having kids is a more valuable life project than whatever dumb crap the average person is up to. If you tell me "yeah I just don't feel like having kids because I want to, like, travel to a lot of countries and build a really big stamp collection, or something, idk", then I'm going to look askance at that. Such a person's life would very likely be made more valuable if they were to invest themselves in having children instead - assuming certain reasonable restrictions, we wouldn't want them to have a big dysgenic effect on the population, etc.

There are certain individuals who are engaged in activities that are more valuable than having children, activities that make it impossible or impractical for them to have children and provide an appropriate level of parental investment. Such individuals are excused from the responsibilities that bind more earthly mortals, and have my full blessing to simply continue on with what they're doing. But such individuals are relatively rare, and are of course virtually impossible to identify, so the recognition of such individuals should certainly not factor into any state policy.

In general, having kids is a more valuable life project than whatever dumb crap the average person is up to.

its more valuable to you, but why should they do what you want and not what they want to do, theyre not your slaves.

Like Aristotle, I don't think it's crazy to suggest that some people are best suited for slavery. But at the same time, I didn't mention slavery anywhere in my post, so I'm confused as to why you're bringing it up.

Was it the line about "forcing native women to have children"? I would only recommend more overt methods if the situation is truly dire, and all other methods to enable voluntary childbirth have been exhausted. E.g., there's a lot more currently in our power we could do to make sure that two parent middle class families are able to live on one paycheck, to make it easier for mothers to stay at home and not be dependent on childcare services. Even in a dire situation, I would not recommend rounding women up and taking them to breeding facilities or anything like that, because that's unlikely to end up good for anyone. Simply making all abortion and birth control illegal would be pretty "forceful" by itself, because it's not like people are ever going to choose to stop having sex.

Like Aristotle, I don't think it's crazy to suggest that some people are best suited for slavery.

its always other people that are best suited for slavery, never the people saying this.

Simply making all abortion and birth control illegal would be pretty "forceful" by itself

making those illegal would be akin to slavery in that both involve an infringement upon property rights. arguably, slavery is defined by the state of lacking self-ownership, from which property ownership follows. So somebody paying half of their income as taxes to the state is in some sense a half slave to the state.

why do you care so much about other people's reproductive decisions?

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When it comes to having children, I don't think you'd understand-

For I don't want human children, I want children made of sand.

Manufactured en mass to a meticulous plan.

And endowed from their first day on earth with all the skill of Man.

I do understand and as I keep saying; It seems to me that the so called "AI Alignment Problem" has little if anything to do with intelligence (artificial or otherwise) and is better understood as a utilitarian alignment problem.

Are those "children made of sand" going to give a shit about you or any of those skills you've endowed them with?

I trust current AI models to be aligned with their trainers and prompt engineers more than I trust the average human to be aligned with me.

But I also find this obsession some humans have with enforcing their unnecessarily specific ideals onto their children to be highly distasteful.

If I want more of me to help uphold my systems, I'll work towards making more of me.

Children are for when I want to bring someone less aligned with me into this universe.

I'm much more afraid right now of AI being unaligned because we only let unaligned megacorps build them than I am of our current learning machine architecture being inherently difficult to align.

There's no guarantee that actual children will care about you either. Didn't you just say it's not about parents, though?

I share your view, but I wonder about your tone. Are you trying to explain, to convince, or just to preach to the choir?

I'm not so sure this is true. Stephen Shaw put out a documentary about falling birth rates called Birthgap, and he was interviewed by Jordan Peterson recently (it was a good interview, you can get it by podcast as well, but I know most people don't have the time for that).

The most interesting thing he's talking about, that I hadn't heard before, is that according to him something like 5% of women report that they never want to have kids, yet right now something like 30% of women never have any kids. Which comes out to something like 80% of women who never have kids having wanted them. This is a real source of suffering that has mostly gone unnoticed by the mainstream. Shaw, interestingly enough, never gives an explanation of what's causing this. He has ideas, but every time he looked at the data the ideas just didn't make sense. He described his documentary as him asking all these experts why fertility rates are falling, even while most women still want to have kids, and finding that every explanation he was given kinda made sense but didn't match the data. Really, the interview is great and I'd recommend listening to it.

So while it makes sense intellectually that "most people will choose not to have kids" for the vast majority of women, at least, who never have kids it wasn't a choice. They meant to have kids, but it did not work out for them. No doubt for most of them it was due to other choices they made, but they never meant to be childless. So when we see falling fertility we can't round it off as "More people are choosing not to have kids." That doesn't seem to match the data (again, among women).

Another interesting bit of data I learned from the interview: Shaw claims that only children are not a major driver of lower fertility, and says that having only one kid is still very rare. The people who are having any kids at all are choosing to have more than one kid, and only child rates have remained about the same over the last 70 years or so.

EDIT:

Just wanted to add a quote from Shaw, from a different podcast he did:

"Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe women don't want their children. Maybe that's the answer. Maybe we have to accept that. And that's the society where now, you know, we set ourselves up for and we just accept consequences. Well, it turns out from studies and from my documentary talking to people in 24 countries, it's pretty clear that the vast majority of people who don't have children, and I'm estimating 80% and it might be higher, had planned to have children. They had assumed there would be a moment in time after education, after careers when it would be the right time. But the right time never came. And, you know, if you were to watch a part two of the documentary, I almost suggest you don't watch it alone because there's some very emotional scenes with people in their 40s, men and women who get deeply emotional about what went wrong in life that they had planned to have children."

I think it's better to judge people based on their actions not words. You can easily have children while having a career on first world country. Problems with having kids in 40s are well known. Women just choose what they want more in theit youth and maybe they committing a mistake because they don't think long term but this is their cross to bear.

Problems with having kids in 40s are well known.

You know, I don't think they are. At least, not among the population of women who want to have kids but never have them.

I think our society used to be built around an cultural expectation that you marry young and have kids, and the 1970s blew up that cultural expectation because it restricted people's freedom. And a lot of women since never got told that they better have kids young or it probably won't happen. Pop culture didn't tell them, their parents didn't tell them, school didn't tell them, and their peers didn't tell them. This isn't true of all women, but of a lot. They were told they could have it all.

This is my wife and I's position. We're child free by choice. I've even gotten a vasectomy to prevent this possibility. When I look at my friends or siblings who have had children it seems like having children has had a clear negative impact on their quality of life in terms of the things we care about. Hell, having a dog is almost more responsibility and imposition on the way we want to live our lives than we're willing to tolerate. Forget raising another human.

I think "people are by and large no longer raised in a memeplex that views having children as the terminal goal in life" is underrated as an explanation for why people no longer want to have children. It turns out when you tell people they should be able to live the kinds of lives they want to lots of people are no longer interested in having children!

What is the liberal argument against removing the right to vote and other civil rights from 'childfree' people?

What would go wrong if we made them untouchables?

The issue with a lack of justice is that people's families are going to take justice in their own hands and seek revenge which might spiral down into vendetta and worse.

But what happens when an elderly childfree citizen gets murdered, if the police just files the case away?

I think "people are by and large no longer raised in a memeplex that views having children as the terminal goal in life" is underrated as an explanation for why people no longer want to have children.

Strongly agree. That memeplex - and people raised in it - are going to construct a lot of societal expectations and systems.

Oh absolutely. Assuming no singularity, society needs kids though, they generate a huge positive externality that everyone benefits from. The natural solution is to subsidise having kids relative to not having them, but society is also not willing to tolerate the level of subsidy necessary to have a noticeable impact ($100,000+ per child). For a time while the going is good this inconsistency can be elided, but eventually the contradiction gets too big and something will have to give, either massive collapse of the welfare system or massive taxes on the childless relative to those who have kids.

Subsidizing children seems difficult. If you give the same amount per child to everyone, you've incentivized poor people way more than rich ones. That is, in a social circle where having kids means violin lessons and their own room, let alone private school, 100k/18yrs=5.5k/yr ain't gonna cut it. If your goal is equity, maybe this is a good thing. Otherwise, you're incentivizing spready of whatever social/genetic reasons lead to poverty.

Maybe subsidize but only for incomes in the 50th to 90th percentiles? Boy would that be unpopular.

You could specifically tie it to marriage, which has the side effect of excluding the poor in the USA.

I've been thinking that something like this is probably the way. But to fix the problem @null brings us, you need to also incorporate a piece of what I recall reading here that Hungary did recently: tie it directly to tax rates, too. IIRC, they basically said that women, after having some number of kids before some age or some such test, would not have to pay income taxes for the rest of their lives. However, that is imperfect for at least a couple reasons. First, the benefit really only comes so long as the woman is working again, which means she's rushing to get back to work and to work as much as possible, not pumping out more babies and raising them. Second, it's untethered from marriage, so she can just pump and dump random dude for baby batter (or even just swing by a sperm bank) to get her required allocation of children before going back to her now-tax-free life.

One of the things most people think we've lost in the last century is a strong incentive to stay married, even when the marriage isn't like, perfect perfect. The motivation for trying to get rid of that strong motivation is that if the motivation is too strong, then some people will end up staying in marriages that are not just not-perfect, but which are actively horrid. However, trad folks today think that we've gone too far and that we need more incentive for folks to stay together.

If the old tools to incentivize couples to stay married won't work anymore, and the best tool we can come up is tax policy, then we've got to use tax policy. Make a husband's income tax free for the rest of time, so long as two conditions are met: 1) Whatever conditions like what Hungary already has on a woman pumping out a sufficient number of babies before whatever age, and 2) The parents are still married and caring for their children.

The biggest problem is that (2) might be hard to police. That said, in the US, we already have a scheme for doing basically exactly this, so it's probably not completely impossible. We have conditional green cards for immigrants-by-marriage. You have to demonstrate (by means of tax/property/bank records, records of pattern-of-life together, testimony of family/friends, whatever) that you are still in a loving marriage, and that it's not just a sham for scoring immigration benefits. This system would have be massively scaled up (which will obviously cause plenty of problems on its own, most unforeseen), but it is in principle possible.

In any event, I meant to include somewhere in there that if it hits directly at a husband's tax rate rather than a fixed amount, it'll provide more incentive for higher-earners. Of course, there is no way this will be palatable for the left; they won't stomach what appears to be giving more money to rich people. Maybe there's a plausible middle-ground that doesn't skew the tax benefit quite as far as the tax burden itself has been skewed, but we're not really talking about political feasibility here; we're mostly just talking about the feasibility of the social engineering solution.

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Please don't take this as a personal criticism.

A few threads back I said the following:

My wife and I got married right after undergrad and had three kids while I was doing a PhD and she was in nursing school. We had help from the grandparents to pay the rent, but no childcare -- nearest grandparents were 1,000 miles away. It can be done, but it requires real work and real sacrifice and I don't think anyone in #currentyear really wants that -- it doesn't maximize utility, or something.

I got some good pushback on that post, but ... here you are making my point for me. Having kids is an imposition on the way you want to live your life. Raising children requires putting the good of others above your own in a way that requires serious effort and self-sacrifice and that doesn't sound so appealing to the folk who inhabit modern times.

I suspect the data above about women who want to have kids but aren't is falling prey to known issues with polling -- women say they want to have kids, revealed preference says they actually don't. My own guess is that having kids maybe seems like a nice idea and it costs nothing to say you want them, but by and large at any given moment it's too daunting and difficult and hard. People don't want to do hard things anymore without obvious benefit to them.

What more is there to say, really?

It can be done, but it requires real work and real sacrifice and I don't think anyone in #currentyear really wants that -- it doesn't maximize utility, or something.

I missed the initial thread but this sort of attitude is exactly why I continue to maintain that utilitarianism is fundamentally evil/incompatible with human flourishing. For the umpteenth time, utility is not fungible and the moment you start acting like it is you're fucked because utilions and qualia don't exist.

Having kids is an imposition on the way you want to live your life. Raising children requires putting the good of others above your own in a way that requires serious effort and self-sacrifice

Isn't the trick to want to live your life to facilitate and optimize for children?

Adding one child to our DINK lifestyle was just about possible. Child care was expensive and when he was small the extra stuff when traveling or out was a pain. Once we had two, something needed to change.

Now single income with 4 kids, my wife is a homemaker. We only travel where we can drive. We're we are now in New England this hasn't been terribly limiting.

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, I can say without hesitation that having kids had a severely negative impact on my life. Most of that was due to my poor selection of partner/her post-partum/outside elements that don’t have anything directly to do with the kids themselves. On the other hand, the moments of joy I experience when my children are happy and loving… it’s a higher high than any other sensation I’ve been able to find in this life. And then, egotistically, I get the satisfaction of fulfilling my belief that a reasonably-good-looking National Merit Scholar is the type of person who should be reproducing.

Sure, I respect that choice, I'm a liberal at heart, my solution is for people who want more children.

The link doesn't seem clear to me, especially since the drop is also happening in e.g. Iran.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Iran’s version of Islam smile on birth control and have fornication loopholes big enough to drive a truck through?

If you look at places where opposition to the sexual revolution is more grassroots(parts of India and Mexico, for example, or the aforementioned Charedim) you do see meaningfully higher fertility rates.

IMO female education gets more blame because, historically, women performed all child-raising activity in early years while also performing all homemaking activity. Men could pursue law, pursue a degree, pursue whatever and their only labor obligation toward their wife would be inseminating her. There is a reason for this delineation of labor. A pregnant woman should not be stressed (as happens in white collar professions), a child forms a bond with the mother in early years (we see this in apes), a child should be breastfed directly for a multitude of benefits, and women are better at handling multitasking. Failing to perform motherhood correctly, which should really be conceived as an art and not just a task, results in many extreme invisible costs like increased diabetes, autism, and BPD. There’s a tyranny of the visible here: calculating the cost of feminist-career practices is opaque (like calculating the cost of crime), but calculating the benefits is easy: one more worker drone. So for the sum total efficient good of society, it’s beneficial to not have women pursue intensive high-stress professional careers.

I would still press (as the far righter in question) that in a society where the rich are holding an immense amount of wealth, anything that reduces wage negotiation among the lower and middle class is net bad for median income. So NYC is replacing domestic nurses with foreign nurses to cut costs, while domestic nurses are striking for better conditions and wages. Hyper-inflated competition in an income unequal nation is surely a recipe for a terrible quality of life among median citizens. Instead of NYC hospitals taking a look at themselves (perhaps they need to make gov spending more efficient to pay nurses more; perhaps cut investor compensation at private hospitals), they will just reduce nurse QoL. Which reduces nurse-adjacent professional QoL: now anyone who had the ability to change position and become a nurse no longer sees that as an option, so they further have reduced wage negotiation.

I think it’s probably down to institutionalization of kids. Most of the generations after the boomers were more or less raised by daycares and schools with parents playing a supporting role. So if you take a highly social animal, a wolf or a chimp or something, and raise it in an artificial environment where it doesn’t form the normal social bonds that would form in the wild, it doesn’t seem surprising that such a situation might well depress reproduction in that group of animals (alongside other similar instinctual behaviors like hunting). They don’t know how, to form the bonds necessary to make that happen so they don’t.

I suspect that this has lead to a lot of mental health problems as well. Social animals who can’t form bonds get depressed and sometimes lash out at other animals.

Are children in daycares and schools prevented from socializing with their peers?

Not to the same level as one might form with his natal family. It’s not secure attachment where a child knows he is safe and that his family will always be around and accept him unconditionally. Daycares and schools have staff that changes every year, and possibly more often at a daycare. Kids shuffle in and out as families move or change schools.

If you consider a state of nature, kids would have been raised by close kin. Parents, aunts and uncles, cousins and brothers and sisters. They form strong bonds because they’re always there, and if the child needs help, they care enough to help.

People are wasting 5-15 years of their lives on a very expensive vacation, at best, when they could be having kids. We want them to make that important decision early, and nothing sobers a young man quicker than staring decades of drudgery in the face.

I mean, you can call it a 'vacation' if you really want to, but the market has spoken, and it has said that the better educated command much better salaries.

I mean, you can call it a 'vacation' if you really want to, but the market has spoken, and it has said that the better educated command much better salaries.

Multipolar trap. The only way to signal you're intelligent, dilligent, and agreeable is to spend four years purchasing a $100k piece of paper. The best way to know you're hiring someone who's not dumb, lazy, and/or antisocial is to fish from that pool of people.

Appoint Bryan Caplan Education Tsar (and overcome ideological aversion to tests that reveal population differences), and you can solve this signalling problem quicker and cheaper. By a lot.

If the purpose of college is mostly signaling, yeah, you can just require high standardized-test scores, cut a few courses, load students up on lots of credits (21 credits per semester was standard at West Point 50 years ago), and basically speedrun college. Two years of hard-ass work, three 20-credit semesters a year.

There is also a socialization/talent-search part of college, too...centuries ago it was a place for the brilliant to mingle with the rich. Isaac Newton had to work his way through college, waiting tables for his richer classmates.

At best signaling, at worst pre-selection. If the former, societal loss. If the latter, personal loss on top.

The issue with your hypothesis is that while Japan's TFR (1.33) is lower than Germany's (1.53) and Spain's (1.35), it is still higher than that of Cyprus (1.31), Greece (1.28) and Italy (1.24). Out of OECD countries, only South Korea's TFR (.81) stands out for how low it is.

Yes, SK and Japan are on low side, but the gap between them is significant, despite the similarity of their school systems. And as Mediterranean countries are not famous for cram schools, more significant factors must be at play.

In November of 2022 @gorge wrote a three part, well argued AAQC, which showed that the role of feminism doesn't deserve being downplayed.

Italy and Greece are not the most feminist countries in the world. The US are much more feminist, I think.

I find concerns about sub-replacement fertility rates to be largely pointless:

  1. It's an inherently self-correcting problem. Fertility below the carrying capacity results in massive selection pressure for more fertility, this weird transition period where memes and genes haven't caught up to our seemingly endless abundance is just that, transitory. Sooner rather than later, particular groups or individuals who persist in higher fertility will fill in the blanks, even if I personally find most such groups rather distasteful.

After all, the future belongs to those who show up.

  1. Even the above is entirely moot, because if you look outside, the Singularity is imminent, once ASI is a reality, manufacturing endless new humans would be a trivial endeavor, assuming you want to do something weird like that. Not that it matters, because economic output and standards of living will end up entirely decoupled from population size, or at least the population of biological humans.

In pretty much no plausible future will population crashes meaningfully impact standards of living, outside perhaps the most sclerotic nations such as Japan and China in the next decade or so. You simply won't notice before it becomes as quaint a problem as worrying about excess horseshit on city streets as the people switch to flying cars..

I agree. It seems way overblown. Japan's population has only fallen a tiny amount despite sub-replacement fertility rates for over 50 years, and this despite having among the most restrictive immigration laws of any country.

That's likely because the great dying-off hasn't happened yet; there's two large peaks of people in their 50s and their 70s, and when the currently-70s cohort die off the figures will be more dramatic. Japanese life expectancy is >80 for both sexes.

That's assuming population decline in a vacuum. The 'transitory' nature of selecting for high fertility in, for example, the US would leave it with, proportionally, a lot of Amish and traditionalist types. The transitory nature of selecting for high fertility alongside mass immigration, however, means those who inherit the earth are not the fertile native but rather the excess population of whatever foreign country.

In real world terms that means that the country that is backwards for the longest and in turn manages to maintain its high pre-modernity birthrates the longest will be the one that wins out. There's no reason to hold to any optimism for any modern native population. Profit motivated immigration + low native birthrates + high foreign birthrates = ethnic replacement.

Given that my timelines are less than 10 years for a fully fledged technological singularity to be upon us, I see absolutely no way that we continue struggling with demographic collapse for the 20+ years it would take to be truly debilitating, short of something like a nuclear war, in which case we have bigger problems to worry about.

There's no reason to hold to any optimism for any modern native population. Profit motivated immigration + low native birthrates + high foreign birthrates = ethnic replacement.

You're implicitly speaking about Western "native" populations (as if the US even has a native population, they're almost all immigrants!).

As an Indian, I can only chuckle and pour myself a drink, who exactly is going to be demographically replacing us?

Not that I particularly care about the West becoming a slightly more brown shade of brown, I'm only concerned with economic or social collapse, and those are not on the cards.

I don't understand what technology you are going to be relying on for childrearing. From the way I understand the dangers of technology, they primarily come from very effectively distracting people from propagating themselves. I don't see why anyone would care otherwise.

You're implicitly speaking about Western "native" populations

I am talking about modern native populations. In that sense it might be unclear. I'm not talking modern as in 'exists today', but modern as in, 'has abundance food, electricity, clean running water and functional toilets and the ability to maintain those things'. That mostly encompasses East-Asia and the western world.

(as if the US even has a native population, they're almost all immigrants!)

There is no United States of America without the white people that built it. In that sense most white Americans are native to the US. Other than that I find the 'native' song and dance very tiresome and low brow. I don't think how long someone has occupied an area has much relation to the value of their existence. I'm much more interested in what they actually did whilst they were there. In that sense the short existence of America, measured in centuries, eclipses large swaths the brown world and all the millennia they had to make something out of themselves. But sure, those browns are 'native' to the travesty they call home whilst the Americans are merely 'immigrants' to the place most brown people wish they could live in.

Not that I particularly care about the West becoming a slightly more brown shade of brown, I'm only concerned with economic or social collapse, and those are not on the cards.

We are too reliant on the word 'slightly' here, for my taste. From what I can understand, the demographic change in the US is much more than slight, with a white minority already being a thing for 15 year olds. I'd call it a safe prediction to say that the current paradigm won't last for long. If you only care for the next 10 years then I can see why you wouldn't care. But for a longer term outlook, again, I'd predict rather drastic changes. The most notable one being a lack of a credible 'world police'.

I don't understand what technology you are going to be relying on for childrearing.

Artificial wombs and robo-nannies?

In 10 years? Maybe I'm just a fuddy duddy but that seems optimistic to the point of delusion.

It's an inherently self-correcting problem.

So is a plague, but both can cause a lot of social disruption and avoidable damage before they are corrected.

Notice how I specifically said that it's exceedingly unlikely that anyone here will have their QOL significantly degraded by a population collapse, unless you're Japanese or Chinese in the next 5-10 years.

Also, the histrionic claims made by OP about this being tantamount to an "extinction", which it categorically isn't.

Notice how I specifically said that it's exceedingly unlikely that anyone here will have their QOL significantly degraded by a population collapse

This can only be true for the definition of collapse that doesn't matter. Those groups and types of individuals you yourself find distasteful will be becoming more and more prominent parts of our lives. Those nice clean neighborhoods of prosocial, functional adults will be shrinking over our lifetimes; every institution that stull works well will be slowly turning into what Americans call DMV; then go lower and lower. This gap will not be plugged by technology because this technology will be at the disposal of rapidly degenerating human stock that has less and less good political sense. Certainly it will not have enough decency to tolerate more successful people going off grid.

You seem to enjoy having moved to the UK. Will your quality of life be significantly degraded by the worst aspects of India catching up?

And that's still only the differential collapse. Because then these people, too, get old and even less capable.

What are your AI timelines? As far as I'm concerned, I expect ~30% unemployment rates within 5 years due to to automation, and an outright Singularity (in the sense that superintelligent AGI breaks all the charts, not that it necessarily goes FOOM) within 10.

I specifically said significant population collapse because I don't see the problem becoming noticeable within 10 years, and certainly not 5.

I strongly disagree that technology can't mitigate or even reverse the negative effects in said time frame. The primary concerns of demographic collapse are loss of tax revenue to prop up social security and pensions, and insufficient productive workers to maintain infrastructure and care for an aging populace. In a largely automated economy, those are moot points, and the latter can be mitigated by caretaker robots.

If humans become obsolete, then I don't see how a decrease in their number matters!

Also, in the particular case of the UK, it's multicultural enough that I genuinely don't think I could even tell if there was a 10-20% change in demographic ratios in said time frame. From what I can tell, they're finally cracking down on illegal immigration, so I have reason to expect that they'll largely take productive, reasonably prosocial immigrants in the future.

Meritocracy is unsustainable. The idea that one could skip competing in life and get a low paying job and have kids ignores the fact that you would likely end up with an unattractive partner. A master's degree and a senior dev title at a respectable firm combined with the apartment that is barely affordable with that salary greatly increases one's attractiveness on the dating market. Getting a job at a hardware store and living in something affordable with that income would be the equivalent to a shadowban on tinder. You aren't getting an iq 120 woman with a beautiful body and high general factor of personality if your life is mediocre.

In traditional societies, people didn't have to worry about competing to the same degree. If your father farmed you farmed, if your dad was a blacksmith you became a blacksmith. Instead, we spend 20 years fighting a zero-sum game for who can post the most travel photos in tropical countries, get the most educational prestige, get an attractive apartment etc. If you can't get into a good college, you can get a master's degree. If you didn't get the top job after graduating, you can become a middle manager at a mediocre firm and outrank the junior at a good one. By trading time for status in a zero-sum game, people are incentivized to push life ahead of them and not settle.

Eating disorders are a lot rarer in traditional societies. Lip fillers, overtly sexualized social media and obsession over appearance are having a ruinous influence on women's mental health. Instead of marrying one of the guys next door, they are either going to absurd lengths to compete or having poor self-esteem for not looking like a tiktok model. Instead of giving people a place in the world and treating with them respect for filling the role that place fulfills, we have a race in which we judge people's worth and moral value on their place in it.

A master's degree and a senior dev title at a respectable firm combined with the apartment that is barely affordable with that salary greatly increases one's attractiveness on the dating market.

Fascinating assertion. How many bay area tech wives have you met?

If they were working at gamestop how would their dating life be?

Anecdotally? Not as bad as you might think.

My first Serious Girlfriend was a cute goth chick who was working the pretzel stand at the local mall while I was working at the video store across the way.

A master's degree and a senior dev title at a respectable firm combined with the apartment that is barely affordable with that salary greatly increases one's attractiveness on the dating market. Getting a job at a hardware store and living in something affordable with that income would be the equivalent to a shadowban on tinder.

Not true in the real world. There are plenty of senior devs with master's degrees at respectable firms in expensive apartments who aren't getting any at all. At best, they'll get a 36 year old polyamorous woman, and this incites burning rage in Mottizens.

Meanwhile, plenty of fit, funny, socially-skilled guys who stayed in their home town to work at the hardware store seem to have kids, often with multiple women.

Yeah. I've heard lots of tales of fit multimillionaire virgins in Silicon Valley.

senior devs with master's degrees at respectable firms in expensive apartments

multimillionaire

Pretty sure you're an order of magnitude off.

Yeah. Although I'm a bit surprised that said senior devs can't find gold diggers willing to hold their noses for the money.

Sorry if this comes across as edgy, but have you considered the possibility that the "travel photos in tropical countries", or at least that which they are a proxy for, are not zero-sum because travelling to tropical countries is actually enjoyable for many people? Personally I'm also partial towards apartments that do not come with black mold in the bathroom and an air-blowing heater-cum-AC that has the noise level of living next to a busy airport like the first one that I had to live in in the US did.

I often see the internet right work off of a model of humans that leans in the general direction of "the serfs would still be happily plowing the fields while wearing potato sacks; anything more they get is useless for them and just part of a zero-sum competition for status". To the extent this claim is not just an unfalsifiable value assertion that denies agency to vast numbers of people, it is sufficiently at odds with people's self-reports and intuition that it needs more evidence than vaguely pointing at eating disorders and Instagram anxiety and claiming that these are sufficient proxies to compare the all-around utility of the present unfavourably to that the past.

If you ask those questions of me personally, the answer for most of them is "yes", based not just on what my understanding (through reading the occasional old text) of medieval peasants but also just comparing myself to members of my parent generation who have still inherited an older work ethic, scarcity-oriented life philosophy et cetera. For the general population, I'm not sure, but I'm not convinced that these are the right questions to ask either - is self-report actually the end-all measure of utility, or could we look at two equally happy people and say that the happiness of one of the two is actually more legitimate?

More importantly, even if we find no difference between the peasant and the modern youth in all of those criteria (or even a difference favouring the peasant), symmetry remains broken in the other direction in that scarcely a modern youth would be happy to trade places based on a description of the medieval life but almost any medieval peasant would be based on a description of the modern one. In fact, we can surmise (based on experience in the Cold War and social inequality within modern countries) that the mere presence of those who live the modern template causes any zeal, excitement and eudaimonia of those who live a life of back-breaking work to feed themselves to evaporate.

Considering that, doesn't it seem facile that theories such as the parent poster's always single out a form of society that just happens to align with their aesthetic preferences as the one that actually makes people happier? Communists also have a good case that the life of occasional deprivation and abuse under a planned economy - especially coupled with the occasional drives for purpose such as a push for space colonisation - would have been superior to our abundant anomie, and that the people living under it were merely rendered unhappy because the Capitalist West gratuitously flexed its abundance in their faces. In fact, in this way, perhaps the West is really to blame for the unhappiness of serfs anywhere, be they communist, feudalist, or the underclass in a capitalist society! Following down that train of thought may lead you to a very socialist place.

I mean, maybe, maybe not for the peasants who made it to 60, but there are billions of people alive today who would've either died in childbirth, of some random disease, or been sent off to die because some noble wanted 9 more square miles without a choice, and so on, and so forth.

Also, I just think people who think peasants were dumb, happy proles are kind of ignoring the actual history of medieval Europe, where not only did medieval peasants actually gain economic power because of plague rats, but there were multiple peasant uprisings and the like.

I'm just fundamentally against pastoral nostalgia for medieval times, whether it comes from edgy right-wingers who hate capitalism and think peasants in 1450 were happy, religious serfs or edgy left-wingers who hate capitalism who think peasants were happy laborers who worked less than they did.

I would much rather the life of a peasant, but it's not possible to live such a life now. They ate well, had well made (if fewer) clothes, and largely happy lives. But such prosperity depended on the existence of the commons, from which peasants could obtain firewood, fish, trap small animals, etc. Once enclosure made these illegal, the common people chose to move to the cities and become wage slaves. It was preferable to attempting to be peasants under the current private property regime. Given that they had direct experience with both realities, I trust their judgement that I would not want to be a peasant without access to a commons and a traditional community.

Said peasants also buried half their children because they didn't have germ theory, vaccines, or antibiotics.

I mean, I'm pretty sure most of us here are self-aware enough to not hold "happiness" as the supreme/only metric for measuring the worth of one's life, and even those who claim otherwise don't usually act that way.

Taken to its logical extreme, that point of view advocates for wireheading, or at least doing as much fentanyl as you feasibly can.

I'm quite sure that I'm not alone in having values more complex than mere happiness, I value freedom, comfort, luxury, knowledge, health and myriad other things, all of which are certainly in better supply today than a medieval peasant could hope for. These might not reflect on my mood, because humans are cursed to run on hedonic treadmills, but they are still strictly superior to not having them.

As such, I can't even say that people are behaving irrationally (with reference to their preferences) when they prioritize their lifestyles over having kids, it's more of a coordination failure on a societal scale than a personal one. Sure, most women when polled want something like 3 kids as opposed to 1.5 or even a replacement 2.1, but how many of them would actually trade an upper middle class lifestyle for that?

I know I start sweating thinking about cost of living when my girlfriend wants 3 kids in London, but I don't really worry too much because society will likely be in utter turmoil by the time we have our first, let alone the third.

(I think I'd be pretty miserable as a peasant, all else said and done)

Bonus: Not just education, the entire high-maintenance parenting paradigm is negative-sum insanity. Increases perceived and actual child costs to unsustainable levels, no benefits, a pain for the kids, just harms all participants.

The only education, present or hobby a child should expect from her parents is a library card, annually renewed, if she’s been good. Keep the children barefoot and you will keep the women pregnant.

I know it’s hard given our evolutionary history and they’re “sooooo cuuuuuuute”, but we need to flip that r/K switch, people.

If I recall correctly, additional parental investment above a very low baseline has no returns in terms of children's outcomes.

Helicopter parenting, ballet lessons, the best pre-K, all of those add up to pretty much zilch in terms of actual concrete benefits.

As long as you don't active fuck-up your children, via fetal alcohol syndrome, beatings or starvation, they'll turn out just fine, and the marginal returns from fussing over them are close to nil.

Actually IIRC early childhood education of any kind, even the best available, is a net negative compared to staying home with mom. Post-90’s UMC child rearing not only has no advantages over 50’s child rearing, it’s actively worse in many ways.

Brian Caplan describes it using academic terms:

'Parenting is a pass/fail exam'

I think it was Caplan who first familiarized the idea, but I wasn't aware he'd come up with such a pithy phrase! Thanks.

I am not so certain that school itself is the cause of our woes here.

I think even without school, if you take the type of demographic that attend them and put them in to some sort of a job, they will still

delay children until their late 20s early 30s just because the responsibility of having a child would detract from the benefits incurred from having disposable income to travel to world and consume things.

Seems unlikely it's inherent, because it wasn't always the case. The Grand Tour was only a year, right?

Wasn’t the grand tour male specific and occurring in a context where those men could still marry 19 year olds even if they were themselves in their late 20’s to 30’s by the time they were ready to settle down.

More importantly, I assume a Grand Tour was only available to those with means. At least, I assume so, because the concept of Grand Touring cars comes from that concept, and that term refers to pricey sports cars.

Yes, but I assumed "the type of demographic that attend them" referred to the Professional Managerial Class here.

Naw...in ages past it wasn't like well-to-do peasants or carpenters made good went on these. This was very much a 1%er thing if not top 0.1 or 0.01%. The modern equivalent is probably something like a year spent on a personally-owned yacht or something like that...it's for the blue bloods and the people with silver spoons in their mouths.


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