hydroacetylene
No bio...
User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
29d ago
Men have more successful suicide attempts, but this can be explained by higher levels of aggression.
I thought the consensus was that it was because men used different methods, and women actually had higher numbers of suicide attempts.
hydroacetylene
29d ago
and a lot of cash is being made
By whom? My impression is that therapists are broadly pretty middle class and their bosses aren’t exceptionally well off either.
hydroacetylene
29d ago
Genuine question, because I don’t know- in countries where it’s illegal, is corporal punishment an ‘everyone does it, just don’t brag about it on social media’ thing, or is there some kind of alternate discipline method in common use, or what? I don’t get the impression of all those kids acting like they never got spanked.
hydroacetylene
28d ago
Alright, to start with I think the cathedral knows trump is going to win this round, doesn’t actually have a backup plan, and are mostly trying to insulate themselves, personally, from worst case scenario consequences.
But, there is a potential political earthquake coming up- the trials over SB 4. SB 4, if you don’t know, is a Texas state law which would allow Texas(the state) to deport illegals without the cooperation of the federal government- there’s other things there but that’s the main provision. It’s currently stayed pending a full hearing with the 5th circuit, but Mexico has already said it won’t accept any deportations under the law.
Now, Texas’ chances of getting the law to go into effect aren’t very good. Almost the exact same law got struck down in Arizona a while back. But the 5th circuit is in other matters frequently Texas’ bitch and the case thus far has gone better for Texas than I would have expected. It’s dimly possible that the 5th circuit allows it to temporarily go into effect and the Supreme Court eventually strikes it down.
It’s anybody’s guess what happens then if the law’s been in effect for a month or two. Probably there’s a foreign policy crisis and then a mega-version of the state-federal standoff we saw earlier this year. And keep in mind, Texas is the natural hegemon for the south central US by virtue of size and location and also by being phenomenally wealthier than the neighbors. A much weaker federal government benefits Texas more than it hurts and Abbott has no incentive to worry about the federal government’s legitimacy- his incentive is not to call bluffs if and only if he has strong reason to believe they aren’t bluffs. And he knows that.
A major rearrangement of federalism’s arrangement with particularly large and wealthy states is certainly in the cards even if it isn’t the most likely scenario.
hydroacetylene
28d ago
If you’re posting Good Friday music, why not the reproaches? https://youtube.com/watch?v=-i1VMXEMPzM&pp=ygUfR29vZCBmcmlkYXkgcmVwcm9hY2hlcyB2aWN0b3JpYQ%3D%3D
hydroacetylene
28d ago
Victorian era America and Britain were just as big on the whole ‘kids belong in a coal mine, not in front a screen’ thing as Austria-Hungary, the Russian empire, and China. They also notably didn’t produce brutal dictators who killed millions.
hydroacetylene
28d ago
On 1), don’t multiple other countries subsidize medical school, and all of those countries have in common medical school working very differently from the US? Specifically, things like a shorter overall path, strictly meritocratic admissions with no fudge factors at all, etc, etc.
Obviously if the US declared medschool free for anyone who could get in, there’d be all sorts of problems. For one, medical schools would admit thousands of people who spend immense amounts of money to never graduate(or graduate into incompetence). No doubt right wing Twitter would find someone literally named Shaniqua who’s getting paid to take organic chemistry again after failing it three times, but the problem is actually deeper than that- students who never graduate are now a money printer for medical schools. Currently there’s some incentive but actually doing this pretty much requires the federal government to pay for every medical student’s books and classes and also give them all living stipends. That changes things.
hydroacetylene
28d ago
New France fined men whose daughters remained unmarried after 16. Early 20th century Argentina fined bachelors.
Both societies(French Canadians and argentines) maintained high tfr long after declines had started everywhere else. This is because in most societies, the tfr issue is not due to DINK’s. It’s due to a high percentage of unmarried people. Even Japan and South Korea have stable married TFRs.
I’m not sure that fining unmarried people is the solution, but I am sure that fixing the lack of partnering is the solution- fines may not be the best answer, here. This is a deeper issue and I have an effortpost bouncing around in my head about gender polarization, but it’s likely to be a next month thing if I get around to it- as it has been for the last several months.
hydroacetylene
28d ago
When people describe all these expectations, all these extracurriculars, all this stress about test scores and good schools and networking and "don't you dare make a mistake"... it sounds so unbelievably suffocating that it's yet another non-miracle to me that so many preppy professional people have concluded our society is deeply oppressive. Because for them, it is.
This is a drum I occasionally beat- the upper class kids aren’t alright. Mental health, transgenderism, it’s not just screens. Upper class kids from culturally liberal backgrounds are under an immense amount of pressure to do things that are extremely difficult in arbitrary ways. Understandably many of them don’t make it. Some become failsons, who have a laissez-faire attitude to community college and smoke lots of weed while living with their parents into adulthood. Some milk themselves and others try to change their gender first.
There’s no forgiveness for error, either. You wonder why cancel culture has no ramp back? That’s why.
hydroacetylene
28d ago
That’s a pretty big assumption, and you haven’t provided any evidence.
hydroacetylene
28d ago
I don't mean famous people, but the owner of a HVAC company in suburban Michigan whose kind of annoyed by Trump, dislikes immigration, but also dislikes that he tired to repeal Obamacare, but hated that the country was shut down, and like the PPP loan he got. Without the latter, maybe he doesn't vote for Biden, but does he turn out for Trump?
This person is a deep-red Republican who might have qualms about their abortion policies but definitely agrees with trump’s economic and border agendas.
hydroacetylene
28d ago
While Catholicism probably suppresses promiscuity rates at lower levels of religiosity than Protestantism does, only particularly religious Catholicism has any effect on fertility rates, same as Protestantism. AFAIK the only example within Europe of this happening at scale is the Byzantine-Catholic belt in eastern Poland and Slovakia and western Ukraine having higher TFR’s than the rest of the country(and at least for Ukraine this was demographically visible pre-war, the Catholic percentage was rising due to high fertility rates). The tfr in rural Galicia was still pretty similar to that in the Dutch Bible Belt and the faroes, though, so we can assume that aside from the IRL tradcaths religious Catholicism and Protestantism have similar effects on fertility. And while American tradcaths have a claimed tfr of 3.6 with the possibility of it being an underestimate, it’s worth noting we’re a small, selected minority group everywhere in the country except for two towns, the larger of which is less than 10,000 people, and that we recruit partly by being attractive to pre-existing large families.
hydroacetylene
28d ago
Varies by sect, Catholicism requires that you ‘contribute to the support of the church’ in keeping with ability. Mormonism makes a strict tithe. Protestant denominations vary.
hydroacetylene
27d ago
Rwanda and Botswana have massively improved with black Africans in a dominant position. So has Namibia.
hydroacetylene
27d ago
Ok, I’ll try to get around to it.
hydroacetylene
27d ago
I think you’re leaving out that everyone wants services from a ‘big state’- stable currency, long range security, access to markets on favorable terms, etc. And America has, quite helpfully, lots of medium sized governments with major economies attached which can fill the void- bigger state level governments.
The median outcome for the federal government’s decline into irrelevance is federal assets defecting to Texas, California, etc which then become regional hegemons and solidify into major countries on their own right by cannibalizing nearby smaller communities. The ‘civil war’ then looks like conflicts defining the edge of each SOI. In the long run this is probably likely enough that it would be foolish for bigger state governments not to have specific plans to capitalize on it. But it being particularly likely in the next decade or so as opposed to the US being in for a rough couple decades? Maybe. I think we probably have enough assabiyah to pull together through another major crisis or two, and if rural areas have increasing control by non-state actors the system can deal with it in practice. I wouldn’t count out balkanization when the social security bill comes due either, but I still think you’re looking at regionally hegemonic empires which happen to be smaller than the current expanse of the USA.
hydroacetylene
27d ago
St Mary’s, Kansas is roughly 2/3 SSPX parishioners.
hydroacetylene
27d ago
Texas has substantial leverage over the governments of Mexican border states. Abbott’s first recourse is to use it to get the Noreste to side with him in ignoring the Mexican federal government. This can spiral into a foreign policy crisis.
hydroacetylene
27d ago
My state offers heavily subsidized childcare
Free childcare is not actually an inducement to have children. It’s a subsidy for moms to work.
Moms have a strong revealed preference to work less and spend more time being a mom. There’s nothing wrong with that, but in a capitalist economy that results in some unfair-on-the-surface outcomes, and you can’t paper over them. It’s much easier to make mothers miserable so you can claim their career outcomes are where you want them.
hydroacetylene
27d ago
I straight up don’t believe that 30% of 19-26 year olds own homes. That’s a ridiculously improbable number. I bought a house at 22 and my real estate agent- who was probably a top 10%, and definitely in the top 20%, by volume of sales- said I was his youngest ever successful sale, and that he doesn’t get many clients within a few years of me either. If he’s representative- and DFW is one of the larger housing markets in the country so he should be reasonably so- then just based on ages, that’s not happening.
Instead what I suspect happened with this- I can’t find the specific survey methodology- is that this was a survey of heads of household, which actually tells us that gen z is likely to live with parents/as roommates if they can’t afford to buy. This tracks very well with everyone’s lived experience that I’ve heard and is also much more plausible than lots of early-20s homebuying.
hydroacetylene
27d ago
It’s actually pretty easy to solve low fertility with money; it’s expensive and politically incorrect, but it’s very doable. You just need a big increase in male purchasing power relative to female, targeted at the reproductive years. It probably helps if you discriminate in favor of married couples. That’s basically the story of the baby boom.
Helpfully, everything about doing that is illegal.
hydroacetylene
27d ago
You can probably create a large one time baby bump at comparatively modest cost if you’re willing to fuck up certain markets- eg, turning house rentals into rent to own agreements for newly weds, whether the landlord likes it or not.
hydroacetylene
27d ago
There’s a case to be made that the historical fertility advantage for new world French populations comes from coercive fertility raising efforts in the founding population, as well.
And of course, let’s not forget Argentina, which had above replacement fertility until Covid because they so mismanaged their welfare system that single mother benefits were higher than prevailing blue collar female wages. I doubt it was intentional, but it was a thing.
hydroacetylene
27d ago
Heck, federal regulatory tweaks to require car seats to take up less space(so you can fit more of them in a backseat) would have an effect.
There’s a lot of low hanging fruit that hasn’t been tried. Personally I think we should try it before dramatically restructuring the tax structure to punish childlessness.
‘Enshrine’ implies a change in status.
More options
Context Copy link