BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
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User ID: 3614
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
6hr ago
But imagine a world where national policy isn't concerned with immigration at all. Yes, that would mean a reduction in government-sponsored pull factors like welfare and resettlement initiatives for immigrants/refugees, but also a complete lack of enforcement of any sort of border controls. What do you think migration looks like, in this world?
We used to have those and they looked like the Migration Era. And to be honest, if the Central Americans can pull off a Migration Era conquest of the rich land to their north, they deserve their winnings.
What were you envisioning? A world of huge masses of people just move around freely and frictionlessly? Because that’s what requires massive state intervention to accomplish.
Why not let these "natural civilizational cycles" play out here?
That would be better than the current situation, so if they were actually allowed to play out with all the violence accompanying it(and not the weird Libertarian vision of people just freely going wherever while the current residents just bend over and take it), I would be fine with that. If that means all of India and Africa builds a navy and comes over here, conquering and pillaging as they go, well, the West had a good run. But at least they actually had to build their navy, instead of just being escorted straight into our airports.
Similarly you propose, "a bunch of other childless couples want to organize a mutual support community to help look out for each other in your old age" as an alternative to government, but... that seems essentially like a government to me.
I’m pretty sure I used the word State as my hate object, which is a kind of government but not synonymous with government in general, a point it seems like you understand in the very next paragraph, so I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make here.
There's no point devolving power to local governments if they're going to be just as stupid
Of course there is. It’s because you don’t actually know what’s stupid. Or rather, we have no idea what the fifth order consequences of our actions are going to be. Nobody who was working on the internal combustion engine in the 19th century had the foggiest idea that it was going to produce Greta Thunberg. The American post-war consensus was a huge boost to the worldwide economy, but it appears to me that a slow decay of the population’s dynamism and a societal Balkanization might have very negative effects later on.
You might think it’s stupid for people to have a purposely all white community, or to have a community that’s all Catholic by law. You could be right, even. I might think a society that transes kids is stupid. I could be right. But we’re not going to know in the long run if my ideas are stupid, or if yours are, when the State shuts down every community it doesn’t like.
And that of course is the crux of the original discussion here. The State has decided that the allegedly best thing for the original population is to let in more than 76 million immigrants, in the belief that this is what’s best for the population it was empowered by.
Because of that, cities and states are allowed to be sanctuaries for these immigrants, but nowhere is allowed to be an anti-sanctuary, actively stopping immigrants at the edge of town. There’s no way to really know which choice is stupider, if such a concept could ever even really be agreed upon.
This is just an example, of course. One could even argue that the State would be betraying its original clients by stopping massive transfers to old people. That’s certainly looking out for their interests, after all, and they were around before the young, so first come first served. That’s a fair argument. Totally destructive for the society as a whole, of course, but a fair argument.
But we’ll never have the opportunity to actually know if stopping transfers of wealth from the young to the old would make a thousand fetuses bloom, because no one is allowed to try it.
We’re just stuck here, asking ourselves “Who will take care of me, if not the State?”
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
8hr ago
You might have indirectly inspired me. That post of yours was kicking around in my head for a while and probably sunk deep into the substrate.
But we’re definitely less the same person and more like blood enemies, because I’m not a huge fan of WaWa. I’m a Buc-ee’s guy.
I will preface this by saying my voting pattern went Obama, Obama, Biden, Trump. It’s been a real philosophical adventure.
DEI has been in the military from Day 1 of my career. There was a female servicemember who won the “Female Servicemember of the Quarter” award the same quarter she won the “Servicemember of the Quarter” award at my first duty station. Obviously, that’s one more award than I could have won each quarter, and awards matter in the military. I’m not saying I would have won, I didn’t know that gal and she might have been Queen of the Amazons. She just had more opportunity than I did.
In boot camp, women received the same degree of PT God recognition as the men did, despite the female standards being 20 fewer pushups and a minute slower run than I was already accomplishing, and I was just at the low end of the good male PTers, something like 10 pushups and 30 seconds off the top guys. But the women got praised and rewarded for being objectively worse, and I just carried on with life. It was the water in which I swam and I saw nothing wrong with it.
Obama just made it clear to the upper echelons in the military that they were going to stop saying things like “Women aren’t as strong as men,” and “Young women in a platoon of young men are going to cause order and discipline problems, and their chance to girlboss around is not worth the sacrifice.”
That was the point at which Skynet began learning at a geometric rate. He shuffled out the old guard and replaced them with people more aligned with him. From then on, the Pentagon just kept sending up more and more prog general promotion recommendations. At the time, this was of course a right-wing conspiracy theory, as I smugly told many people.
Since then, I would say that the military stopped being an inherently conservative (slow progressive) organization, and has switched to being progressive at the top echelons. It’s also much more prog at the lower echelons than it was when I came in. But we’ll see how Hegseth’s purges shake out and if people are willing to stay if a culture shift actually happens. Hegseth needs to get his own Pentagon Skynet learning at a hyperbolic rate if he wants to succeed.
Are you under the impression that I think what I described applies to Bulgaria? It may or may not. I have no idea and don’t care, because I’m not Bulgarian. I’m sure this will shock you, but the USA is different from Bulgaria. I don’t care about Bulgaria and didn’t mention it.
I’m concerned about White people in America, and our fertility is 1.75, and we keep being given the chance to welcome new immigrants with a 2.19 TFR into what is rapidly becoming not our country anymore.
You can think that that’s a good or a bad thing, but your argument is not arguing about what I’m actually saying.
What I am saying is that, in 1965, the United States government, staring down the barrel of the already massive drop in TFR from the pill, should not have passed the Hart-Cellar Act in an attempt to goose the numbers, because opening the floodgates to immigration made the problem worse for the native population in America.
That’s why your references to “Well, Bulgaria has a low TFR” hold no power here. Because at least that’s the TFR the native Bulgarian population is settling on. You can’t tell me what the TFR of the native German population is, because the national stats are full of Turks and Arabs now. These stats are meaningless and say nothing about the effects of immigration.
“Other states implemented different centralizing solutions to perceived problems and have experienced a similar crisis of modernity” is no different than what I’m saying.
Also, when coming at what was revealed to the reactionary in a dream, the facts presented must at least be factually correct.
Ukraine has the lowest TFR in Europe at 0.99, and that rate does in fact have a lot to do with immigrants.
Romania has a 1.71 fertility rate, making it #6 in Europe.
As for South Korea and Japan, they have their own problems of organic processes being interfered with. The Japanese people have always had a small and not particularly giving batch of islands to work with. The spiritual human carrying capacity on those islands might be as low 50 million people, maybe as high as 90 million. It is almost certainly not 129 million, where the population peaked. The solution to this is for the government to just not touch it. The Japanese government doesn’t actually have to pay old people. It doesn’t have to bring in waves of immigrants, either elite or lowly. It can just let the Japanese people find their own carrying capacity and then work with what is given it in terms of human capital.
Korea’s situation is even worse, and TBH they may be so far gone as a result of culture and government that they’re going to get rolled by North Korea one day, despite North Korea also having a declining population.. That would be a key marker of what the world’s future is going to look like, it it were to happen this century.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
10hr ago
Sorry to have misinterpreted you, glad that I managed to answer your question anyway.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
10hr ago
I hope you’ll understand that providing specific service locations in conjunction with my retirement timeline is heading in the direction of self-doxxing.
In my career, I’ve been both CONUS and OCONUS and I’ve deployed multiple times.
what do you do when the people like my mother and sister have kids? What do you do to make sure those kids even have a chance? Are they simply meant to fall through the cracks so long as the overall metrics look good? Do you try to disincentivize that from happening in the first place?
On the other side of the coin, what do you do with people like me? I've lived below my means my entire life (no vacations, extensive savings, retirement) so as to not be a burden on others. I've tried to do what good I can in raising my brother, but I have no biological children of my own. Should I be left to rot in my old age, like some of the replies suggest?
What do you do?
You (the State in its formulation as society, which is clearly the you being referenced here) don’t do anything. That’s the hardest answer of them all. You just don’t touch it, the good and the bad. Your mother and sister will have kids, and it isn’t the responsibility of the State or any other formulation of the general “you” to do anything about that. You have to stop interfering and be willing to let things play out organically. We see this perhaps most pressingly with immigration questions these days. High modernist planners at the highest levels of government realized that there was going to be natural decrease in the fertility rate after the baby boomers, and that this would create an eventual national crisis, so their solution was to import foreigners, based on their belief that all humans are fundamentally similar enough to be economically interchangeable.
This of course was a wrong idea and contributed to further depressions of the birth rate, which necessitated more immigrants, and so on and so forth until either some sort of great violence breaks out or the original people the planners were in theory looking out for become an unimportant minority in their own land.
All of that could have been avoided by the planners packing up their notebooks, going home, and letting natural civilizational cycles of rising and falling fertility play out. Those might have been the original bullshit jobs, as it were, a job that would be better done by not doing it.
But all of the modern state is like this. Its tendrils are so thick into everything that people ask “Should I be left to rot?,” rather than “What have I done so that I won’t rot in my old age?”
The State shouldn’t even be perceived as “leaving you to rot” in your old age. Your choices are the ones that should define your old age. If you don’t have descendants, do you contribute enough to a community that they think it’s worth helping you out? Are you a beloved Grandfatherly figure or are you the local crotchety hermit? Etc etc through all of our choices all through life.
I don’t blame the average person for this kind of thinking, because the State, by shoving itself into everything actually closes down the possibilities for people. Maybe you and a bunch of other childless couples want to organize a mutual support community to help look out for each other in your old age. That would be laudable, if someone on the Motte right now were doing that I would have serious respect for them, whatever their reasoning behind not having kids. But the State will come and interfere. Are your houses big enough? Is the road sized appropriately for emergency vehicles? Is your private group a little too racially homogeneous about letting new people in? Etc etc.
And the squashing of that ability to just do things, to organically arrange things, for better or for worse at the lowest level and move up from there, that’s crushing to the soul of a civilization, to a people, to individual persons. I actually think this is a discussion where many lefties might find themselves agreeing with me, in that most complaints about crony capitalism stem from this kind of State over-regulation of everything.
But to answer your question, you should be the one to make the choices that define your old age, without expecting someone in far away location to contribute. You, and everyone else, should be freed to make decisions and suffer consequences, the good and the bad.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
14hr ago
Unlike what was the case in 1940 though, the relative quality of the population will be vastly inferior, and will in large past consist of 80+ seniors mostly incapable of doing serious productive work and in need not only of constant and large transfers from the working-age population via taxes, but also significant care efforts in homes for the elderly. The Committee estimates that every working citizen in the worst-case scenario will need to finance no less than 1.6 other people.
Hopefully, some nation somewhere will have the epiphany that, in fact, there is not a need to transfer large sums of money to the elderly.
Based on the demographic decline, it can be assumed that some significant amount of these elderly will have had no kids. Which means they had their fun spending on themselves in their youth. That is to say, they have had their cake, and there is no need to then let them eat it too.
Those who have had kids can be supported by their descendants, who will at least be freed up from having to pay for somebody else’s old person.
Presented with apologies to the expected level of discourse in this salon, which is higher than I may achieve.
Donald John Trump, peace be upon him, is blatantly attempting to buy my loyalty, and it’s working. Am I a cheap whore at the price of $1,776 and some badass rhetoric? That’s for the reader to decide, but it feels good to be wanted, y’know?
I’m a military serviceman, and have been for dickety-two years, since shortly before we started fighting the Kaiser in Iraq. I joined up right out of high school, in a peak Red Tribe era for the military. I mention these things because I think that I, personally, am at the confluence of a number of recent discussions, e.g., the warrior/soldier dichotomy, the importance/unimportance of normies, the Long March through the institutions, progressives using NGO networks to funnel government money to their clients, making it easier for their clients to be activists, etc. In many cases, I was the problem I hate to see in the world, as my journey from hicklib prog to ethnonationalist reactionary was, well, quite a journey.
But I digress.
Let’s talk about Bob Dylan. My personal favorite of his is Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts, but for my money, his song that will continue to describe the human condition for as long as there are humans is Gotta Serve Somebody. It’s not really a good song, like most of his gospel era, but it succinctly names and describes a phenomena that every human will experience, whether they want to admit it or not. Patron/client relations run from the top to the bottom of all human societies. He could have written a song called “Gotta Breathe Sometimes” and it would have been identifying the same kind of truth about the human condition, although granted, a much more palatable truth.
So, I’m not a patron, which leaves the question, of whom am I a client? Well, for the last fifteen years of my mumbldy years-long career, I’ve been the client of progressives. For the first mumbldy years, I was the client of slow progressives. The military has only become gayer and faker over my entire career. The paperwork has become worse, the training has become stupider and ever more blatantly hateful of whites and men who “do things.” It has become softer, gentler, more risk-averse in every way. It is a profoundly progressive organization, run by people who are either fast or slow progressives. I regularly see capable men passed over in awards and promotions for blatantly less capable women. There was a long stretch where the military’s number one goal was to have fewer white people. I personally experienced multiple mandatory struggle sessions doing Floydmas, and was expected by commanders and senior personnel to talk at some length about my own personal racism and how it had held back the blacks and browns of the world. At this stage, one begins to ask oneself, “Why should I care about Communist China making me do struggle sessions, if I get to do homegrown ones right here, y’know?”
And of course, with vanishingly few exceptions, all of us military folk went right along with this. The normies were not yet radicalized, but the seeds were sown in some of us. Slowly, we began to notice. Transgender servicemembers that I met were mostly a bunch of disgruntled problem-makers who appeared to actually hate their jobs, but every story coming out of the military about them was a hagiography. Women genuinely struggle to lead men, and are more indecisive, more prone to command by committee, crack more easily under stress, and blatantly favor their sisters in every situation. Standards were dropping across the department. Whites, my people, and especially white males, were staying away from the military. I personally think this is a bad thing, as I think one of the core functions of a reactionary movement is to fight to the knife for every institution, rolling things back as fast and hard as you can the instant you have power. In the military, that would of course entail being mean and destroying careers or closing recruitment to certain demographics, but after all the destroyed careers and discussions about discouraging certain demographics I have personally experienced, I can’t say that I care. Better to act and be prepared to act again as necessary, forever.
Ecce! Upon the horizon, a Fox News host. He rides a white horse and in his hands are a tape measure and a sword. Lifting his tape measure he says “You don’t look like a military, fat people think fat thoughts, and a military should think lean, hungry thoughts. Let there be no more fat generals or admirals in my sight.” Lifting his sword he says “War crimes are fake and gay. In all cases it is better to win than it is to lose with dignity. Why does the larger nation not simply missile strike the smaller drug boats?”
And all of a sudden, people like me started to feel wanted again. I like being in a military that doesn’t feel the need to run every operation through four levels of lawyers. Civilization spent centuries working to get warriors to become soldiers by making them follow orders unquestioningly, only to then turn around and decide some orders should be disobeyed and that the responsibility for making that determination in the moment lies at the…private/airman/seaman level.
So yeah, give me money Donnie. I’m happy to be your client, and in exchange for supporting you, I’ll take more money anytime you feel like handing it out. Your patronage is genuinely better for me, and the best patronage I’ll ever have, because I won’t be around in the military for King James the First. I find it very unlikely that this will happen, as in less than 0.001% chance, but if Donnie ordered the troops to move on Congress and the Supreme Court, I wouldn’t care. Those organizations have been against me since before I was born. They have proven that they have nothing to give me as a client, and in fact take from me and from my children. Better by far that a new patron/client relationship begins to develop, so that change can be made.
P.S. For those who are perturbed or disgusted by this insight into the mind of someone who gave the best years of his life to his country, first, I don’t tell you how to be an accountant, and second, you may rest assured that I will be retiring soon. I even plan to share the travails of the retirement process, which is shaping up to be exciting in the bad way. You can derive your schadenfreude from my frustrations at that point.
P.P.S. I forgot to mention that while this change of leadership in the Pentagon is leading to potentially exciting changes, I am also very confident that the military will prevent any real change from happening. It is a thoroughly progressive organization in the leadership echelons, and they can weather a storm for 4 or possibly even 8 years.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
4d ago
Is this a reference to the tomb of Jesus in northern Japan?
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
7d ago
True dadmaxxing is living somewhere with seasons that let you do both.
No AC in summer, no heat in winter. Any children that make it out alive will be wolves among men.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
7d ago
And to make matters worse, his decision to focus on the Catholic Nick’s virginity has backfired horribly
This makes me an out of touch old person, but I was under the impression that Nick Fuentes is gay.
If that is not the case, I wonder how I absorbed it out of the noosphere.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
8d ago
Fascinating. The closest city to me is entirely suburban, by that definition.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
13d ago
People have generally been pretty nice in real life.
This is not mutually exclusive with the same people disliking or even hating Indians.
Anti-Indian sentiment online could just be where some percentage of those people go to express their true sentiments.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
14d ago
It wouldn't surprise me if we end up observing a similar trend here. No genuinely smart student actually needs "accommodations" to get into an elite college, so the only ones who try to game the disability system to do so will be mediocre students. Like the black students in the paragraph above, they will find themselves near the bottom of the classroom hierarchy, constantly struggling to grasp material their classmates master with ease. Consequently, they will be far more likely to drop out with receiving a degree.
I think the overall point here is good, but that it only misses the magic “civilization is fucked” sauce.
In the 1970s, the U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges Ranking didn’t exist. Even elite colleges were at least somewhat more likely to cut loose the lowest performers. But now, thanks to the wonders of journamalism, graduation rate is the single most gameable factor in maintaining school prestige.
Graduation and retention rates (21%): the proportion of each entering class earning a degree in six years or less (16%), and the proportion of first-year entering students who returned the following fall (5%)
Graduation rate performance (10%): actual six-year graduation rates compared with predictions for the fall 2014 entering class
Social mobility (11%): how well schools graduated students who received federal Pell Grants (6%), and graduation rates and performance of first generation students (5%)
42% of the score is strictly about graduation rates.
Harvard has a 98% graduation rate and the most common grade is an A. These kids are not going to drop out like a merely above-average black engineer might have in 1975. They don’t even know to be ashamed, and the college will do everything it can to prevent them from feeling shame.
We are not prepared for the stunningly brave world’s first Down Syndrome judge.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
27d ago
I assume you meant lasting poverty rather than spending a few years relatively poor compared to the more established couples around you when starting out.
There’s no way that getting married early (20, per @Crowstep’s original age statement) and having children leads to poverty more than 20% of the time, at best.
This paper, which only tracks women who were married at or before age 15, during the mid-century economic boom, comes up with a 31% increase in experiencing any poverty at all, though out life. There’s absolutely no reason to think that gets worse as women age up to 18, 20, or 22.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
30d ago
That's not the way I heard it. He did it because his father suggested it. (I will look this up when I can). He was also not very good with people compared to his more popular siblings, and definitely not a 'natural leader' at that age or really for some time.
Wikipedia obviously not the greatest source, but this is what it has to say.
Hiking with his family in the Alps in 1869, Roosevelt discovered the benefits of physical exertion to minimize his asthma and bolster his spirits.[7] Roosevelt began a heavy regimen of exercise. After being manhandled by older boys on the way to a camping trip, he found a boxing coach to train him.[8][9]
Incidentally, the strenuous life pays off. Look at this future President mean-mugging the camera at 19.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
1mo ago
The average age at first marriage in the US is 30.5 for men, and 28.6 for women, which is close enough to 30-30, IMO.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/371933/median-age-of-us-americans-at-their-first-wedding/
South Korea is further down the same road, at 33.8 and 31.5.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1112935/south-korea-median-age-at-first-marriage-by-gender/
This is a significant increase from mid-century stats, which were around 22.5 for men and 20 for women in 1950.
When the good professor was writing, the American average was 26 and 22.
Age gap marriages of 10 years or more constitute 9.3% of marriages, almost all of them an older man and younger woman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_disparity_in_sexual_relationships
If you go 30 man, 24 woman, which is a big gap, that constitutes 20.5 percent of marriages. If you also include the vice versa relationship of older woman, younger man, that gets you 23.3 of all marriages.
It turns out when women have control over who they marry, rather than being coerced by threat of economic destitution, they tend to prefer men around their own age.
There is a huge confounder to this statement, which is that even in the Canadian doctor’s era, forced or arranged marriages were exceedingly rare, indicating that women did in fact have choices about who they married.
Additionally, the propaganda and societal pressure that women receive advocates much more strongly for 22+ years of education for women, for having a long-term stable career before getting married, and against motherhood.
In a hypothetical world where women were just as free as they are now, but with the propaganda and societal pressure of 1905, we can, I believe, properly assume a very different age ratio and time to first marriage.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
1mo ago
Dude. I would enjoy living a luxurious life with minimal effort if that option were provided to me.
I believe you and thanks for the counter input, but this is such a vastly different way of thinking than any other man I’ve ever talked to. I have never encountered any situation that would lead me to believe that this goal is equally shared among men as it is among women. I hate to be a Redditor, but do you have any kind of evidence that men and women are both equally interested in being financially supported by the other sex? I think that might be the closest likely study question, but if you have something that is pretty specific about just lives of indolence, that would be interesting also. You could potentially shift my opinion of WEIRD men even lower than it already is!
Most men don’t want to be fuckboys, let alone a fuckboy forever.
Well, except the many examples of all the guys who do end up living lives of vast indolence and luxury, and acquire equally vast harems of women.
We’re in something of a harem lull so maybe it seems like this is not a great strategy that the average man would enjoy, but give it some time and I think our billionaires will get back around to it. Elon is blazing the trail for them.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
1mo ago
I understand what you’re saying, and I obviously feel similarly about Buddhism. Such is life.
But what I’m saying is that you are intellectually wrong about the dogma. You can’t have committed this sin or meet any definition for it because you’re not dead yet.
If you come from a Christian tradition that was super literal about this, okay, just know they are in the minority here and I would be very interested in what their actual dogma said, as opposed to just a rando (such as myself), opining.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
1mo ago
No argument there, the ancients always impress me.
notice patterns
I don’t think I’ve ever really brought it up here, but one of the things about past humans up until maybe the 1930s or so, is that they had nothing but time with which to notice patterns.
Most entertainment activities and almost all of the work ones involved interacting with other humans on a constant basis. Most of them required you to go outside to do them, and mingle amongst other humans. Even if they don’t require it, like spinning, spinning by yourself is extremely boring and it’s more fun to go outside and talk to other people. They had a lot of time to notice patterns and behavioral trends in their fellow humans.
And once we got around to the Greeks, they started writing down their notes for us.
The fact that they had so much time just spent hanging around each other inclines me to trust their observations of human nature very highly.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
1mo ago
Have you considered the health benefits of being leeched? I can assure you that Breaker’s House of Leeches sells only the finest leeches to temper your humours.
Buy one, get one, no returns.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
1mo ago
But kindly also note the double standard: women must be virgins upon marriage, and married off at eighteen (the maximum limit at which nature intends them to be single) else men will be having sex outside of marriage. That men should not be having sex outside of marriage? Well, uh, that's different.
But those who know anything about virtue in the male know that the marriage of our young men under twenty-five, to a woman with a sound body about eighteen years of age, is almost, if not the only, means of preserving the virtue of the rising generation of men.
I assume there is more to this speech than just what you provided, but he clearly expects men to be virgins at 24, at a minimum. They wouldn’t be having their virtue preserved if they were out knocking boots with girlfriends and/or hookers, and he sets the line at “under twenty-five.”
“Remain a virgin at 24,” vs “remain a virgin at 18” seems to me to actually be the higher expectation.
Everybody knows that the one child of the wealthy and highly educated couple is generally a spoiled child and has as a rule, poor health; while the six or eight children of the poor and moderately educated woman are exceedingly strong and lusty.
Exceedingly strong and lusty is hilarious, I wish we still talked like this.
But also…seems plausibly true. I’ve lived near a seven kid family before, and while I have no opinion on their strength or lustiness, they certainly seemed vibrant and not prone to sitting indoors all day. That may also have been a Mom trick to get some peace and quiet, but they were clearly not hothouse flowers.
On the other hand, we have a lot of single children these days and I have heard accusations that a lot of those kids are hothouse flowers. And there do seem to be more fragile kids around, which I believe is even born out statistically.
The 19th century might have been on to something.
I’m not even a huge libertarian. I think that theft is a perfectly valid way of acquiring wealth, society to society. That’s what conquest is, after all, and I think conquest is a perfectly valid way for nations to go about dealing with each other. Internally in a society, theft will destroy it, but that’s just ingroup/outgroup dynamics at the vast scale of peoples and nations. Externally, it can improve it dramatically, ergo all the IP theft that China does, and which young America did a fair amount of from the British. The non-aggression principle is incoherent.
This is more like where I am. Technology probably lets us have sleek, attentive and relatively homogeneous polities bigger than Ancient Athens, but the reality is that I know jack shit about New York and so, in a perfect world, my opinion about what they get up to over there should be completely impotent to change anything there. And of course, vice versa. Patchy, inefficient ways are better.
Also, Big Government doesn’t need to be strange or sinister. Plenty of bad decisions are made by the smartest people with the best intentions. They just need to be wrong and do their damndest to prevent any possible alternative from ever arising. All of which can be done out of the purest hearts.
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