DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
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User ID: 180
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
Low birth rates are caused by urbanization, this has been well understood for at least a century.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
I find it hard to believe that there won't be a population equilibrium somewhere beyond the decline. The jury is still out on what exactly the fifth stage of the demographic transition looks like.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
The US blowing up Nordstream has always struck me as an extraordinarily risky gambit. There may be an economic motive, but if it were uncovered that the US is directly responsible for acts of terrorism on critical infrastructure in the heart of Europe, the diplomatic fallout would certainly outweigh whatever the US would make from the added natural gas exports.
Granted, I don't know how risk-tolerant the US covert-operations apparatus is. I also didn't think Putin would invade Ukraine.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
higher birthrate of immigrants it is practically a given that the Replacement is going to happen come hell or high water.
Immigrant birth rates always normalize to the local level within a generation or two.
Can someone explain to me why this has turned into such a legal issue?
The state issued these loans that Biden is attempting to forgive, did it not? I would've thought it would go without saying that the state would then also have the power to forgive them. It's not like debt forgiveness isn't something countries don't routinely engage in, so this whole thing has left me perplexed.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
will have to cope with millions of African/South Asian/Middle Eastern immigrants
Ukraine will? What on Earth are you talking about?
Look up the demographics of any former Iron-Curtain country in the EU and see if you can find even one whose current population born in those region breaches a single percentage point.
This is entirely a choice of national governments, not the EU.
No it’s the migrants’ choice.
No it's not. Migrants choose to go to countries (through the asylum route) where they're unlikely to be deported (government policy) and where they're allowed to get into a benefits program and/or the job market (also government policy). It is entirely a government's choice to receive them, and a choice that EU countries are in fact free to not make, i.e. Denmark ever since their Social Democrats took power.
The US has limited resources so needs to use them wisely.
Any true threat to US interests in the current geopolitical environment is always going to involve Russia, either directly or indirectly through supporting China. Taking an easy opportunity to weaken the Russian military is not just wise, it's a no-brainer on a silver platter.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
So what gives?
I don't think it's all that complicated. If they lift all restrictions right now, they're looking at a death toll potentially in the millions because their vaccine doesn't work (embarrassing in and of itself), and they're worried that the population will blame the party for this whole predicament (which they should).
The CCP is kicking the can down the road, or digging a hole for themselves. Whichever analogy you prefer.
she is a traditional third wave feminist
This might be nitpicking, but I've always understood TERFs as being perceived as a second-wave holdout that survived the post-90s intersectionalization of the movement (that being the third wave).
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
Ukraine as a country isn't particularly important
There is no way a European country of 40 million people can ever be considered "not particularly important" by the Europeans at the very least. It's also of great importance to the countries outside of Europe that used to import Ukraine's food, nevermind the untapped gas reserves that could go a long way towards replacing Europe's imports from Russia. All the fuzz around Ukraine is very much justified.
It reminds me of the flawed 'domino theory'
This invasion is the third domino after Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014. What is there to doubt?
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
If you give children the right to vote, the majority of them are just going to vote for whoever their parents tell them to.
What justification do you have for believing this? An 18-year old's vote is going to be heavily left-leaning pretty much no matter where you go in the democratic world, but you think the 16-year old vote would instead track the 45-year old demographic? Why?
The issue here is that in Europe this is impossible to do on the national level anymore.
Not true. Denmark's Social Democrats, of all people, pulled it off.
Talk about channeling Nixon going to China.
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.
It's absurd on the face of it to argue that being the top dog is somehow "not beneficial" to you.
Yes, being powerful is good. Being weak is bad.
To get into some specifics, even if the US were entirely self-sufficient (it isn't), the amount of inflation the US exports to the rest of the world through the dollar's status as the global reserve currency is hard to overstate. That's one of many things.
I posit that aiding Ukraine is in fact the anti-war position, just as handing a weapon to a man who's being mugged is "anti-mugging".
But atheism on The Motte is usually not met with accusations that it is as absurd
The simplest explanation is that this forum is full of atheists.
I always got the impression that the arguments the New Atheist made were never successfully refuted and the whole thing ended with godless heathenry effectively being adopted into the Overton Window of acceptable opinions by the early-2010s, in exchange for them shutting the fuck up about it. But I'm an agnostic atheist myself, so hardly a neutral observer.
Regardless, if you or anyone else wants to take off the kid-gloves and rehash the existential arguments people were mired in 15 years ago, I'll probably be there to respond. I'm one of the few people left who still has some leftover interest in the topic.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
there does appear to be a wide scale attempt to infiltrate and subvert Christianity
They said this about the Arians, and the Waldensians, and the Lutherans, and the Fourth Congregation Southern Baptist Communion Restorationists.
Surely this time, though.
I see them as perhaps the most ideologically confused people on the spectrum today. They wear the cloak of socialism while extolling authoritarian dictatorships, their words are like those I'd expect from Soviet career-bureaucrats with the KGB breathing down their necks. Because what else could possibly keep all these self-contradictions together?
It's not just that I disagree with them, I don't get them. I get why a dedicated right-wing culture warrior in the US today might support Russia's invasion, their reasoning is at least coherent. The only way I can make sense of tankies doing the same is if their fundamental moral axiom is just "USA bad", but that seems excessively uncharitable.
I've spent some time now looking for the data, and it's quite a lot harder to parse than I expected. There's undeniably been a huge drop in the asylum flow, but the effects of the 2019 socdem crackdown are obscured by the natural drop from the absurd mid-2010s highs, Covid, and now Ukraine. Although it's striking to me that even with Ukraine, the acceptance rates dropped from 85% in 2015 to 59% in 2022.
As for the secret sauce... my pet theory is that when the socdem's focus shifted leading up to 2019, they were uniquely positioned as having neither the ideology nor the monetary incentives (socdems are generally not liked in the circles that benefit from cheap labor) propping up the migration-friendly stance of their government.
Ah, cruelty carried out on the innocent. My favorite topic.
Go further back in time to Anglo-Saxon England and you'll find my favorite (read: most disturbing) example.
One Anglo-Saxon custom suggests the level of thought about children in earliest times. Thrupp says: “It was customary when it was wished to retain legal testimony of any ceremony, to have it witnessed by children, who then and there were flogged with unusual severity; which it was sup-posed would give additional weight to any evidence of the proceedings.
And this was in a literate society. I get that parchment wasn't cheap back then, but Christ...
The "extreme" way to read this slogan is that the extremely rich should be killed, in which case your indignation would be justified.
The reading that extremely rich people should have their wealth "forcefully expropriated" (AKA taxed) is a position I would consider moderate, and perfectly reasonable in societies with a high enough level of economic inequality.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
I would argue (North) Macedonia. In opposition to Bulgaria rather than Greece.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
Someone once wrote a post about sales being a bullshit job that spawned a lot of interesting economic discussion, which would be my pick. I'd appreciate if someone has a link to that, actually. It might have been KulakRevolt, although I'm not sure.
While I appreciate your honesty, I don't recognize your right to dictate what other people build on plots of land that aren't actually in your backyard.
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