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You're not going to get very far with that. As anti-woke as this place is, a good chunk, possibly the majority, of the people here are progressive, and the only way they'll accept a criticism of progress is if you 50 Stalins it:
Other than that no one who doesn't fundamentally agree with you already will suddenly start, no matter the amount of evidence.
Why bend over backwards to dunk on the forum, instead of proposing solutions yourself? There is an obvious 50-Stalins solution to the "romance recession", which is waifu/husbando tech/ever-improving AI partners. The obvious endpoint for a society of individuals whose standards have them demand ever more while providing ever less is to put everyone in their personal lotus-eater simulation hugbox, anyway.
That being said, if we make it past all the impending Great Filters at all, I'm not too concerned about these lesser problems in the long run. In my entire social bubble, tracking from early graduate school if not earlier, there are few signs of "romance recession" - most everyone has organically paired up, whether it is from in-person matching or online dating or circulating date-me docs, and I guess we'll see in the next 5-10 years what will happen with birth rates although some are already starting to have ~2 kids, maximum observed 4. There clearly are subclusters of more sustainable norms in the waiting; given that feedback length is on the order of one lifetime, I would expect natural selection to spread them fast, and the (particular) problems we are observing to only be this one wretched generation's cross to bear.
Sorry about that, but I'm a bit jaded about the pretense of rationality in these discussions. They never have been, and I doubt they even can be.
Ban porn sites, dating sites, smartphones, and civilian wireless internet.
I might be missing something, but it sounds like the opposite of a solution.
Like I said, not a rational conversation. This argument would be immediately dismissed if it was used to argue for something you disagree with, and you know it.
What are examples of irrationality in these discussions to you?
Usual objection: coordination problem. Assuming you can even create a strong enough dictatorship in one country or several to implement all of these, how do you stop people from defecting to a country that doesn't participate in the bans, and that country subsequently curbstomping yours?
Uh, it depends on what exactly you define the problem to be. Do you want people to report happiness/satisfaction of a cluster of needs that could be summarised as "companionship", or do you want people to pair up? It's obviously a solution for deficiences in the former but not in the latter, but if you consider the latter to be the only problem you want to solve, you run the risk of winding up in a world where nobody even agrees with you that there is a problem.
To a skeptic, this exchange may be isomorphic to something like:
Tribal elder: It is a problem that nobody sacrifices to the grain gods anymore, but you progressives will never acknowledge that there might be a problem there because there is no progressive solution to it.
Progressive(?): Well, there's a perfectly progressive solution. We just have to build up a fertiliser industry and develop industrial farming, so there will never be a shortage of grain again.
Tribal elder: This sounds like the opposite of a solution.
Who is right? On the surface, the progressive really did propose something close to the opposite of a solution to the Elder's problem as stated, but on the other hand it seems quite reasonable to treat the prospect of a grain shortage as the problem the Elder was actually talking about. Certainly, the Elder's authority would have suffered if he had been forced to make explicit from the outset that he doesn't care whether there is grain or not, but just wants people to sacrifice to the Gods regardless. His position depends upon being able to lean on an implicit assumption that sacrificing to the Gods is good (whether for the stated purpose of improving grain yield, or some other unnamed good), without having to explain or defend this.
Instead of talking about a hypothetical dismissal, please actually explain the grounds on which you want to dismiss it yourself. I don't see anything obviously wrong with it - variants like "$country will be majority-Muslim in a few years even if we stop immigration now" are structurally exactly the same thing deployed to right-wing ends. Do you think that one can be dismissed too, or are Muslims uniquely capable of receiving the boons of natural selection?
I'll be happy to, but I must also note that the dismissal would absolutely take place (and that you know it would), because the non-rationality of the discourse is part of our conversation. If you want a non-hypothetical example, just look at the conversation in this thread, and note the amount of people that don't even bother questioning OP's evidence, putting forward arguments that are later refuted with evidence, but not changing their mind, etc. This sort of stuff happens all the time, has always happened, and will continue to happen. At some point we should just come clean and admit that the conversation we're having is not based on reason.
We ban shit all the time, and you don't need a dictatorship for it. The EU basically forced retarded cookie banners on the world, so they can force porn sites back into the underground as well.
I'm not convinced this is even a realistic threat. Who is going to leave behind their house, job, and family, because they're not allowed to goon and/or doomscroll on a mobile device?
The latter. If I wanted to maximize reports of happiness/satisfaction, I'd be hooking people on heroin, and ensuring they answer the survey while high.
Aren't you the tribal elder and me the progressive in this scenario? I'm the one insisting the goal is reflective of material reality, while you're the one pushing for a simulacrum with no connection to it.
Anyway, this only proves my thesis. Either your example is reflective of our case - two people talking about two different issues, and the progressive is more than happy to chime in, because he has a progressive solution to a progressive issue - after it's been reframed to be about something else (grain production, rather than the originally raised decline of religion). Or - let's assume the Elder was actually worried about a potential famine - he's happy to talk about it because there is a progressive solution on offer.
You really don't see an issue with the bit I quoted? You'd accept an argument like "in my geographical bubble there's few signs of 'global warming'"?
Not exactly. Sure, it's possible that resistence to anti-natalism will be passed down, but then again it's also possible that it won't, so you're basically saying "we might recover or not" and bring no new definition to the table. And even if recovery does occur, your argument offers no insight into what such a world will look like, and whether we should embrace or avoid it.
I actually think Muslims in Europe are just as susceptible to progressive anti-natalism as Europeans, they might still end up the majority because of different starting points for the trends, but I'm not in favor of naive extrapolation of the present state.
I mean, even in the Good Old Days, there were lifelong bachelors and spinsters who never got married, or the chance to marry, due to different reasons: lack of financial support (men who couldn't earn enough to support a wife and family, women whose families couldn't provide dowries - and for example, in the wake of the Great Famine in Ireland having that kind of financial inducement for marriage, be it the eldest son inheriting the land or the eldest daughter having a dowry going with her made a huge difference in marriage prospects, and could lead to younger siblings having no such prospects), not enough potential spouses (too many women, or too many men, depending), oddities of character (being ugly, being weird, being otherwise not considered suitable), women being stuck at home in the caretaker role for elderly parents and missing out on the chance to marry until too old, etc.
There are modern reasons why people don't marry, or can't marry even if they want to, but it's always been true that at least some element of the population was never going to marry either.
Ok, but when we see a sudden massive increase in that element, surely it's worth looking into why it's happening, and taking steps against it?
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Many emigrate from places such as Russia because they were merely afraid that at some point the nuts will get screwed tight enough that they won't be allowed to doomscroll what they want and goon to what they want to on their mobile devices. Or ban being gay, or ban talking about being gay, or do a number of other things the young view as backwards and retarded.
It is not very pronounced in Russia because emigrating to the first world from the second world is hard. The other way around seems like a much easier choice.
No one, and I mean absolutely no one, emigrates out of Russia for that reason. They do it for the money. Also it's not a "at some point" thing over there, these things are already banned.
It does not appear that your knowledge on Russian emigration is enough to justify your absolute confidence in such a claim as "absolutely no one". Or to put it more bluntly, you really should know better than to say something like that which is pretty much 100% guaranteed to be wrong.
As for "those things are already banned", they were not banned a few years ago, and yet more things weren't a few more years ago, and yet more aren't banned yet but there's talk of it. There was ideologically-tinted emigration for all those years.
I'll venture I wild guess I have better knowledge of emigration out of Eastern Europe that exceeds yours, given that I am an Eastern European emigrant.
I was being bombastic, but ideological emigration is not a thing on any statistically significant scale. I suppose you can make the argument that a country might get it's ass kicked if the ideological emigrants are von Neumans and von Brauns, but even that rests on many assumptions of dubious quality.
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This is not a solution. Tokophobia is a minor part of the birthrate decline; the median woman who won’t have kids won’t do so because she doesn’t want to be a mom, not because she’s afraid of getting pregnant.
You don't have to tell this to me, but I've already heard arguments like "look at those silly conservatives crying about falling birthrates but opposing IVF / surrogacy / artificial wombs".
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It's not just tokophobia but how pregnancy can permanently change your life in many ways.
Sure, and a huge number of these changes boil down to ‘you have a kid now’.
Yes, but even outside of that pregnancy can have changes that affect your life permanently. Many women have permanent body changes and problems that they have to live with. Apart from health issues, there is still the fact that many women are unable to do much during pregnancy and it affects your career.
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Fifty seven years on, and Humanae vitae looks better and better. Everyone was expecting, especially in the wake of Vatican II, that finally, finally, the Catholics would get with modern times and accept birth control (after all, the Anglicans had given in on this as far back as 1930).
Instead, Paul VI went "nuh-uh", everyone was horribly disappointed, and the teaching of the Church remained unbroken. And now, all these decades past the Sexual Revolution, we're looking at the problem "but why is nobody dating? having sex? having babies? getting married? staying married? how did this happen after all the liberty and joy we were promised?"
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Respectfully, this seems slightly off the mark. There's plenty of RETVRN-posting on the Motte, sometimes quite overtly. Just look at all the people who indeed advocate for Christianity as the only path to running a functioning civiilization.
Sure, I didn't mean that everyone at the motte is progressive, just a decent amount. Possibly a majority, but I'm less sure of that.
And I think RETVRNpoasters (of which I am one) will tend agree with him. Perhaps not on the specifics of the causes and the solutions, but on there being an issue, and the uselessness of boomer-tier "muh bootsraps" advice.
Ah fair enough; on a strict reading you did say as much.
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