07mk
5d ago
I thought usually vets are people who've served in the military and then moved on to civilian life, and, as civilians, they get casual nepotism from fellow vets and non-vets who have high regard for military service, but otherwise are hired based on their merits. Akin to, say, a company that's run by a mother or a non-mother who has high regards for mothers who might give casual nepotism towards a mother in terms of hiring, but otherwise judges potential employees on their merits.
But where I'm not sure how the comparison works is where vets generally aren't expected to take time off to go back to their military service, possibly multiple times and unexpectedly (well, with around 9 months of lead time, anyway). I think that, once they return to civilian life, vets are generally expected to keep working like a regular civilian. This can't be said for any given woman in a certain age range with respect to motherhood. A vet's ability to perform the job can be assessed before hiring and then, if they get hired, the employer can generally rely on them to behave like any other employee; in the case of potential mothers, that's not the case. Mothers who have aged out of birthing more children and have already spent their time raising them before they apply to the job, perhaps, is a better analogue. But those aren't the mothers that are under discussion.
There's also the issue that, as best as I can tell, there's very little empirical reason to believe that extra maternity leave would have any meaningfully positive impact on fertility. It certainly could, and we could try it out, but if the predictable happens and it has no positive impact, then it becomes an arbitrary handout that's basically impossible to revert, leading to high costs for no gain. Of course, there's the gain of mothers having more time with their babies as they grow up, which is a positive in its own right, but it's also a different issue than fertility and one that needs to be argued on its own merits separately.
07mk
5d ago
I think you're right. Back then, I stupidly believed that the left, as the side that represents actually getting things correct rather than getting things according to our preferences, would properly moderate the ideology of the Democratic party, in order to actually get things correct (which necessarily means giving more leeway and charity to one's ideological opponents than to one's allies) and thus keep holding onto power. What I stupidly didn't notice was that the left half of the left half were actually at least as religiously and arbitrary-preference-motivated as the right half of the right half, and they had spent decades from well before my birth laying down the groundwork to manipulate people like me to believing that there was any there there. When you're naive and looking from the top, turtles all the way down can be confused for a really tall tower of turtles.
07mk
5d ago
The fact that it's continuing means at the very least some of the people were under 16 when the relevant events happened.
I don't think that follows. I think the fact that it's continuing means that, at the very least, the people who are continuing this believe that they can create a public impression that some of the people were under 16 when the relevant events happened. Hard to say if the people who are continuing this also believe that some of the people were under 16 when the relevant events happened, but their belief regarding this doesn't matter, it's the belief of the voting populace that matters.
07mk
5d ago
I don't know that this is a great analogue, but I'm reminded of around 2008-2012 when all the people with basic human decency - like me, at the time - were excited about the prospect of a permanent Democratic majority in the USA due to demographics and such. It's hard to parse out the causal factors, but one possible effect was that the most extreme factions saw this as an opportunity to push their ideology to the top, and one of the more extreme factions - what is generally known as CRT/identity politics/social justice/woke-ism/postmodern neo-Marxism/the ideology that shall refuse to be named/basic human decency - had positioned itself over the course of half a century to be in that sweet spot of being extreme enough to make partisans feel like they're righteous freedom fighters but not so extreme or personally costly as to turn them off.
I'm not alone as a Democrat who thinks this has been disastrous for the world, for America, for American society, and also for Democrats specifically. But there's potentially some good that did come out of it, such as catching predators like Cosby & Weinstein during the #METOO fervor of the late 2010s, or bodycams becoming far more common in police. Arguably, these would have happened anyway, but also arguably, this ideology helped make these happen more quickly, which matters. Which makes me think of what good could come out if, say, the Groypers were to prove to be the successful right-wing analog to the successful left-wing "woke-ism?" The first thought that comes to mind is widespread knowledge and acceptance of HBD could be a positive consequence, for helping us to build better policies, because a more accurate model of the world should allow us to better design policies for accomplishing the goals they are ostensibly meant to accomplish.
07mk
5d ago
Maybe that doesn't matter; I don't know why it should be better to understand how to hunt a rabbit, skin, cook and eat it, or grow barley from scratch, than to know a bunch of 2000s-era Disney Channel theme songs and how to achieve a middling Fortnite score. One does feel viscerally more freeing than the other, though.
The only way out is through. Good case scenario, we invent Matrix-level VR tech sometime within the next 1000 years, allowing us all to viscerally experience these complex physical daily life tasks in entirely safe virtual environments, including the fear that one feels in true survival situations like our ancestors had to feel.
What's kinda scary to think about is that there are likely a lot of people looking at the state of Rapture at the start of BioShock and think, rationally and disturbingly likely correctly, that living there would be preferable to them than living here now. And that number seems likely to be growing for the foreseeable future.
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