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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25668 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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I was following the latest flame war regarding the human mating marketplace on this board (see here and here, for those that are unaware) with mild interest and was considering posting some dudebro take on the matter by using as an educative example the story of the now largely defunct Christian men’s identitarian group in the US who called themselves ‘Promise Keepers’, of whom I learned a long time ago completely by accident. Then I realized this may not be the best idea, as I imagine only relatively few people are even aware of their (past) existence. So before I decide to proceed I’ll ask this very question: how many of you have ever heard of this particular sad bunch?

A number of men at the church I grew up in attended Promise Keepers meetings/events

I heard of them from when I was Evangelical, but not in great depth, since my father is a cultured introvert, and not into that kind of thing. He would go read TS Eliot poems in a corner with his family instead. This is not unrelated to me being here, now.

All the fuss lately about "Oath Keepers" served to remind me that the Promise Keepers used to be in the news a lot but I hadn't seen bugger-all about them in years.

I heard of them back in the day, and have no memory of how they ended up. Definately interested in the effortpost.

I went to a Rally with my father. No clue what year. Only thing I really remember was the sound of four thousand men singing was a very different experience than what I've encountered before and quite profound.

I went to two in Colorado and one in Albuquerque. That last one impressed upon me how much at risk I was of losing my salvation were I to continue doing nothing related to my faith. Thereupon I began studying the Bible in earnest, and thinking theological and philosophical thoughts. I can draw a direct line from Promise Keepers to Triessentialism.

Flame war?

I engage in no such inelegant and crass activities.

"Torch Duel" if anything.

Also, I've heard of them, from growing up in a church.

Vaguely heard of them, no idea why you are calling them a "sad bunch". Tell us more about what they did or didn't do, or who they are, to be called sad?

Judging by how their org ended up, how they were treated and what happened to their aims and values since then, I think calling them a sad bunch is warranted.

As I said, I know little about them beyond the name, so a fuller account of "the rise and fall" would be better to read than a mere "this sad bunch". Let me add my voice to the chorus asking OP for a longer post!

Noted.

How old are you?

I sort of object to your framing honestly, if you think you have an effort post in you about this, have at it.

As a child of the 90s, who grew up in a house where we attended church weekly, this isn't a thing I would have heard about by accident, it's a thing I would have needed to be pretty oblivious to have not heard about. (I'm trying to think if my dad ever attended an event, I'm not sure if he did or not, I'll put it at about 30% probability that he did).

For those that haven't heard of it, it was an evangelical men's movement in the 90s that was started by University of Colorado's football coach.

There was a stretch there where they drew large audiences at football stadiums.

If you're familiar with Tim Tebow's place in our culture, I perceive it being a pre-Tebow Tebowesque phenomenon (I'd actually be sort of surprised if Tebow's father had no interaction with Promise Keepers).

I find it sort of an interesting window into our culture's soul why people would seem to prefer it if Tebow didn't live up to his values.

I find it sort of an interesting window into our culture's soul why people would seem to prefer it if Tebow didn't live up to his values.

That isn't my point. Either way, I'll probably do the effortpost.

I find it sort of an interesting window into our culture's soul why people would seem to prefer it if Tebow didn't live up to his values.

Deemed to be the wrong sort of values, though. Isn't that the problem? If they can catch him out saying one thing and doing another, then he's a hypocrite and can be safely scorned. If he turns around and says "I am leaving all that, it's Problematic and I have converted to being a good liberal Democrat", then he's a brand snatched from the burning and can be held up as an example that you, too, can leave toxic masculinity behind. If he remains as is and keeps living out his values, that's very uncomfortable for the rest of us and since that makes us feel judged, we can only mumble about how he is bad and that is bad and it's all bad and he should stop trying to impose the white supremacist theocracy on us.

Speaking of former sports controversial figures, whatever happened to Colin Kaepernick?

The Tebow hate had very little to do with politics. While he was vocally anti-abortion and his politics were assumed based on his religious affiliation, he never made any direct statements about Obama or anything like that, or even claimed to be a Republican. The religion thing is a bigger part of it, but still not as big as people make it out to be. He won two National Championships and a Heisman Trophy while at Florida, and was about as prominent a celebrity as exists in college football, which isn't quite the NFL but is still pretty big. Even when he was inspiring rule changes after putting Bible verses in his eye black, he still didn't seem to inspire too much hate.

When it came to the NFL, though, Tebow was an athlete, which in the pros is damning with faint praise. He had no special ability to play quarterback, but was able to be successful in college by relying on his natural athleticism. There's a YouTube clip of Ray Lewis and Ed Reed talking to rookies about the importance of watching film, and one of them says that in college they may have been able to run and jump their way to success, but in The League that wasn't going to work. Tebow was successful in college because he was a big guy who could plow his way forward on QB runs or out of a scramble, and played in a system where he wasn't expected to win games with his arm. He was regularly among the leaders in rushing yards among QBs in the top college ranks (and not too far from one of the top rusher's, period), and he led the SEC in all kinds of passing statistics, but pretty much everyone who saw him play could tell that his ability was limited. His footwork was terrible, and his throwing motion was so long it would make Byron Leftwich blush, resulting in high, looping passes that could work if the receiver was "NCAA open" but didn't have a chance at hitting the tighter windows in the NFL. He had no concept on how to read pro defenses. His decision-making was terrible. Even his rushing ability, his strong suit, was built less on speed and more on sheer power.

the NFL at that time was at one of its various low-ebbs when it came to dual-threat quarterbacks. The last one drafted of any consequence had been Michael Vick in 2002. The last one drafted period had been Pat White, the year prior. And though his time at West Virginia was successful enough that fans wore white in honor of him at their last home game, he only lasted one year in the pros, never completing a single pass. The tide would start to turn the following year with Cam Newton, and reach its crescendo after the success of Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson led every head coach to salivate over what could be done with a raw mass of pure athleticism. But that tide is turning now after the failures of guys like Trey Lance, Malik Willis, and Anthony Richardson. And Tebow had less obvious ability than any of them. After he graduated, there was talk that he'd have a future in the NFL as a tight end or maybe a fullback, but Tebow was having none of it. This had been suggested before, but he insisted on playing quarterback. Coaches had been trying to fix his mechanics since high school, but he could always fall back on his athleticism so he had no incentive to change. By the time he got to the NFL, these problems had become so ingrained that they were beyond coaching; even if he made improvement, if under pressure he could only be expected to revert to what he knew from muscle memory.

All that being said, quarterbacks are at a premium in the NFL, and in a draft class thin on QBs, Tebow was taken by the Broncos in the first round. He didn't see the field much in 2010, but the following year, with Kyle Orton being terrible, he was given a shot, and he made the most of it. That isn't to say he was good, exactly, but he won games. He'd pass for like 16 yards in the first half but the defense would keep the game close and Willis McGahee would get yards on the ground and in the fourth quarter he'd get a few good completions, march down the field, and win the game in the final minutes. He even won a playoff game, and though the Broncos promptly lost the following week, he now has more playoff wins than Justin Herbert, Andy Dalton, and hall-of-famer Y.A. Tittle.

In other contexts, this wouldn't have been a problem, but Tebow's existing public profile and relationship with the media did him in. If the same results were had by a nobody like and Easton Stick or Sam Ehrlinger type, the story would be about the defense and the running game and how they're winning despite expectedly poor QB play. If it was a guy like Duck Hodges who was working on a sod farm or something before getting the call to the big leagues, it would be a story about determination and never giving up. If Tim Tebow is the same person, except his personality is such that he's arrested for firing an unlicensed handgun during an altercation outside a nightclub, it wouldn't have made him more likeable, but the story would be about how he's a gritty guy who can take a sack and run for a first down on third and three.

But what doesn't fit is a guy who has won two national championships and a Heisman, who was drafted in the first round, who had a big enough public profile to do endorsements, to play so poorly and be rewarded for it by winning. He was already enough of a national celebrity by that point that whatever he did in a game was going to be newsworthy, and the Christianity threw the whole thing into overdrive. The fact that he was openly Christian wasn't the issue; there are plenty of pro athletes who have made their religious beliefs known. Phillip Rivers is also an Evangelical, and no one seemed to ever give him shit for it. But, aside from being a far better athlete, Rivers was also never as in-your-face about it as Tebow was. He went out of his way to make his religion a story, thanking God in every interview and genuflecting in the end zone. It became cloying, and in the light of the Broncos continuing to win in spite of his poor play, one could be forgiven for getting the impression that he was specifically attributing his teams success to divine intervention. Furthermore, he became a lodestar for people who cared more about religion than sports. His jersey was among the best-selling in the NFL. The people who wished him the most success, though, apart maybe from people in Denver, were those who weren't so much impressed with his playing ability as they were his evangelism.

Tim Tebow was hated because he completely upended puplic perception of what a pro athlete was supposed to be. If he had played better the religion would have seemed less important, and his success would be deserved. If his poor play cost his team games, he'd be another bad quarterback on a bad team and nothing special. Maybe Orton gets his job back.If it turned out his personal life wasn't as squeaky clean as he made it out to be, then the ensuing scandal would overshadow anything about his play or his religion, and the holy rollers who were buying his jerseys would be disowining him, and even if the Broncos continued on their trajectory, fewer people would care. But the right combination of things happened to allow religion to overpower sports, and fans don't like that. I'd talk about Kaepernick more, but it's more or less the same story, except with politics—a player with an existing public profile from (college, making the Super Bowl) ignites a national discussion about (religion, politics) far out of proportion to the player's actual ability. People have limited tolerance for these things being allowed to creep in where they don't belong, and to the extent that it's inevitable, they prefer that it at least involve someone whose value as an athlete justifies cutting them some slack. When the catalyst is a mediocre to awful player, and those most invested in taking the player's side aren't those typically invested in the game itself, things can turn ugly.

Furthermore, he became a lodestar for people who cared more about religion than sports. His jersey was among the best-selling in the NFL. The people who wished him the most success, though, apart maybe from people in Denver, were those who weren't so much impressed with his playing ability as they were his evangelism.

I think this is an understated part of it: wildly popular backup quarterbacks are not a thing any team/coach wants to deal with.

To be clear, he wasn't a backup at that point. Denver had given up their 2nd, 3rd, and 4th round picks to be able to draft him (even though they probably could have drafted him later), and once Kyle Orton was benched there was no expectation that he was going to be anything but the starter. The team received a lot of criticism at the time for giving up essentially their entire draft to reach for a guy who nobody else was seriously interested in. The idea initially was that he could be in some kind of RB/QB/TE/WR combo role, but after he was drafted he made it clear that he was only interested in being quarterback. People who knew football could tell that he wasn't the answer, but Tebow fans only saw the Ws piling up. As soon as the Broncos signed Manning the following offseason Tebow was promptly traded to the Jets in a move that their then-GM admits was a mistake, especially since the circus he would bring was unneeded on a team that was probably going to lose anyway, especially in a media environment like New York. To be fair there were other reasons why they had to trade Tebow that are strictly football-related, but his career fizzle in New York, and even though he had been demoted to third string by the end of the season, he was still the subject of disproportionate media and fan interest.

Thank you for this, it makes sense. So good in college but not got the talent for the big leagues, which annoyed the fans (why the hell are we over-paying this loser who is dragging down the team?) and for those who didn't care a rap about football, the overt Christianity was the red rag to the bull.

If he just stuck to drinking, gambling, dog-fighting, and slapping his girlfriend around like the rest of the ordinary sports millionaires, it would all have been okay! 🤣

Funny the behavior we punish in our heroes.

Tangentially, I have come to see hatred of religion as the first and largest red flag that someone has converted to a new one.

I haven't but your comment was a very effective hook, and now I'd really like to read whatever thought you have bouncing around

You should tell the story!

I remain perpetually confused as to how a group of Tough Minded Rationalists™, who believe in the invisible hand of the free market and facts over feelings, can be so concerned about birth rates.

Organisms that can adapt to their environment will reproduce. Those that can't will die off. So it always has been, so it always will be.

Why so much ire over nature taking its course? Any attempt to engage in large scale social engineering that would cause civilization to deviate from its current course in order to force it to align with an abstract values framework starts to sound a bit... socialist-y.

Organisms that can adapt to their environment will reproduce. Those that can't will die off. So it always has been, so it always will be.

When the organism is a society the means of adaption is memetic. The ability to struggle about the birthrate and find a solution is fitness. Societal conversations and self correction isn't socialism, it's a much older thing that's at least as old as religion. I'm perplexed why you seem to want to bring socialism vs capitalism into the conversation, even by your loose definition of socialism here as when the government does things socialists do not have a better track record on birthrates and your remedy of evolution is not kind to their societies.

In nature, tough, fecund generalists invariably outcompete long established species in time of environmental chaos. Rationalists note that there is socioeconomic chaos on the horizon, they note that low birth rates are a contributing factor, and rationalists are not tough, fecund generalists.

This is an expression of anxiety about who the feral hogs of future society are. It’s quite reasonable to be particularly worried about that stratum’s biggest weakness.

Why so much ire over nature taking its course?

There's a decently convincing and certainly coherent argument that birth rates going too low, even if it doesn't extinct humans, renders us unable to maintain a technologically advanced civilization.

I like living in a technologically advanced civilization, and its our only hope for getting humans off this rock in the near future. Which I think is important. Any threat to this raises my ire.

Short argument: too many nonproductive elderly supported by too few young, healthy, intelligent, productive citizens means our most advanced technologies (i.e., those that utterly RELY on globalized trade and capitalist hyperspecialization) cannot be built at scale. Too much economic activity is devoted to keeping oldsters alive, there's not enough talent in the younger generation to go into the most advanced fields, or to even maintain the advanced capital we've built.

Any industrial and economic advances that depend on such techs shrinks and stagnates. Standards of living fall everywhere.

A microcosm of this is Russia, which 'cut off' from global trade and can only produce tech, including military tech, that it can design and build at home, with resources on hand. If they didn't have massive energy reserves, they'd be even more screwed than currently implied.

Germany is also experiencing this problem, from all appearances.

Maybe AI and robotics comes in clutch, or we make some other crazy saving-throw (artificial wombs, anti-aging tech, some unforeseen breakthrough in global peace and cooperation) but all else equal the predictable outcome of current trends is advanced civilization sputters and regresses, if not collapses entirely. No ignoring the numbers.

I talk about it at more length here.

Isn’t that fully generalizable?

Time and money spent on elder care isn’t spent on roads, farms, or a warm campfire. How far down should our current course take us?

I find it far more likely that there’s a control loop. Negative feedback. At the extreme end, it’s “I won’t starve to keep Grandpa alive,” but it doesn’t have to get that far.

Time and money spent on elder care isn’t spent on roads, farms, or a warm campfire. How far down should our current course take us?

I have no good answer to this particular question.

We can spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars squeaking out a few extra weeks/months of 'life' for a dying elderly person.

They will not enjoy this life, but they will be alive.

Or we can have some norms around end-of-life care that decide that its NOT appropriate to blow wealth that might benefit a younger generation on such diminishing returns.

We currently do not have any real traditions that allow the elderly to end their lives with 'dignity,' And the current instantiation of MAID is clearly not being limited to true "end of natural lifespan" cases.

We had a discussion about this quite recently, and as then I want to argue that we have not figured out a way to maintain technologically advanced civilization while forcing high birthrates either. "We are going to die, better preemptively kill ourselves now" does not sound like an appealing policy platform.

I mean, are we saying "high" birthrates, or replacement-level, with maybe a small buffer.

Me I'm not going to say we need to politically mandate a 2.1 birth rate per woman, or require that every woman put out at least 2 kids or face expulsion.

But I think maintaining the 'nuclear family' as the primary economic unit of the country is so self-evidently good for such a country's stability and development, and for the happiness of its citizens, that any policies that might be linked to weakening that unit and reducing family formation should be viewed extremely harshly.

Problem we seem to run into repeatedly is that sans some kind of biblical mandate for family formation and buy-in from some large % of the population, there's just no compelling reason to individually prefer family formation over individualized hedonism in a world where raising kids is no longer critical to individual survival. Otherwise, you have to be high-conscientiousness enough to notice that the society you're living in needs children to continue functioning, so its ultimately in your best interest to keep birth rates above replacement.

Then there's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma issue: can you convince other people to have enough kids to keep the show running, whilst you instead defect and enjoy childfree life with all the joys an advanced civilization can provide you.

Cue the research showing fertility is higher across the board among the religious.

I get to see this happening up close. I have two younger brothers. The youngest has a wife and a 1-year-old kid now. The middle one is continuing with an extended adolescence, chasing every whim and indulging in various vices without much regard for anyone else. He can get a girlfriend with relative ease (currently has one) but is allergic to true commitment.

No prize for guessing which one has a more stable, fulfilling, happy outlook on the world. Then there's me, who really does want kids, and wants to continue to live in an advanced civilization, and considers the propagation of the human species to be a good thing in and of itself. And yet everywhere I turn I see the pillars upholding it all being chipped away, and very few seem to be willing to give up their own immediate comfort to try and address that fact, even assuming they realize there's an issue.

Otherwise, you have to be high-conscientiousness enough to notice that the society you're living in needs children to continue functioning, so its ultimately in your best interest to keep birth rates above replacement.

Is it? Most projections of the future that aren't AI doom or transhumanist utopia seem to make it clear that you will be dead quite a bit before society collapses to untenable levels. So unless you have kids in the first place, and thus create someone who will be dead a few decades later, how is it in one's best interest?

That, and the fact that a state that's strong enough to reverse course towards replacement fertility has no actual reason to stop at "just a bit of strengthening the nuclear family to keep us at 2.1", makes it look like it's all or nothing. And I'd rather bet on the side that's given us the advanced civilization I like.

That, and the fact that a state that's strong enough to reverse course towards replacement fertility has no actual reason to stop at "just a bit of strengthening the nuclear family to keep us at 2.1", makes it look like it's all or nothing.

Well, once again. No religious guidelines in place means no real guardrails on the conduct of the kings, either.

Most projections of the future that aren't AI doom or transhumanist utopia seem to make it clear that you will be dead quite a bit before society collapses to untenable levels.

The Peter Zeihan prediction is that the effects will manifest sooner rather than later, as globalization breaks down, which will very quickly make production of advanced technology/products far more difficult. The order that allows large container ships to travel the seas unmolested is tenuous, and if countries get more desperate as their own economies slip, this order likely fractures.

This will probably lead to a reversion in living standards on its own.

We got the tiniest taste of how quickly this can happen with COVID restrictions shutting down ports.

I'm also going to make a concerted effort to not die any time soon.

And I'd rather bet on the side that's given us the advanced civilization I like.

Realize that this 'side' was a largely Christianized, largely Western European-derived stock, and what we're heading towards/currently have is VERY DIFFERENT from that along most dimensions.

We should be concerned about what conditions for building advanced civilization are also necessary and sufficient for its maintenance.

No religious guidelines in place means no real guardrails on the conduct of the kings, either.

Did they ever? And even if they did, will they stop the kind of deep states upon deep states we have going on now?

The Peter Zeihan prediction is that the effects will manifest sooner rather than later, as globalization breaks down, which will very quickly make production of advanced technology/products far more difficult. The order that allows large container ships to travel the seas unmolested is tenuous, and if countries get more desperate as their own economies slip, this order likely fractures.

This is, perhaps, the strongest argument in favor of fixing demographics now. Even then, the actual effect a currently childless person can have on reversing that is going to manifest 20-30 years later, when the children they've had ASAP grow up and become productive. So people have to believe in the sweet spot of "close enough that I'm gonna feel it, but not so soon that my potential children aren't going to be stuck in Mad Max regardless".

I'm going to make a concerted effort to not die any time soon.

For a 50% increase from 80 to 120, at best. Anything further will probably have to rely on society-wide life extension methods.

We should be concerned about what conditions for building advanced civilization are also necessary and sufficient for its maintenance.

We should. But if it turns out that the world I like is unsustainable in the state of it that I like, such as for example not relying on literal slavery and/or being race-segregated and sex-segregated and everything you're darkly hinting at, then I'd rather milk it for what it's worth.

But if it turns out that the world I like is unsustainable in the state of it that I like, such as for example not relying on literal slavery and/or being race-segregated and sex-segregated and everything you're darkly hinting at, then I'd rather milk it for what it's worth.

See, people seem to read that into any ambiguity I leave in my writings.

But that's quite far from what I'd actually want or even suggest for society. I do not, in fact, think that we need to make blacks into second-class citizens, or strip voting rights from women, or created mandates for childbirths.

I'm mostly in favor of radical individualism, I may be the most nonracist person on this entire board, insofar as I consciously, deliberately choose to judge every single person I meet on their own merits, by their own behavior, and accept their words as truthful in good faith until proven otherwise.

But that runs smack into the reality that a lot of people are not well-suited to run their own lives and this is very detectable in the larger aggregate outcomes.

So when I look at broader statistics, I feel very comfortable discussing them as concrete facts about the world, and proposing the hopefully least intrusive intervention that might improve on the current equilibrium.

Western women are getting less content with life.

Young western men are getting lonely, discouraged, and angry.

A LOT of immigrants in the U.S. are a net economic drain.

Boomers are clinging to wealth and power well into old age, to the detriment of later generations.

Religious groups have higher TFR.

Non-White groups tend to vote for Democrats, Whites are the biggest racial bloc for the GOP.

Ashkenazi Jews have a significantly higher average IQ than the global average. All signs point to this being very genetic, partially cultural.

Kenyans are better at long-distance running than virtually any other group. All signs point to this being very genetic, partially cultural.

I find none of this distressing to discuss, there are many ways to divide up society to try and model the effects of various policies.

I literally just want to have a social order that grants people maximum autonomy, but also a culture that provides basic life scripts that young people can follow to produce generally good outcomes in their life if they're not particularly intelligent and agentic. Complete High School, Get Married, have kids is a pretty decent one.

And, OF COURSE, I want elites/politicians to have skin in the game.

The one thing that genuinely peeves me off is when I see people in positions of power/authority making absolutely DUNDERHEADED policy decisions, causing untold amounts of suffering or economic loss, and then skating off unscathed because they had no direct stake in the outcome/were poised to benefit either way.

So as you can imagine, I maintain an ongoing level of simmering disdain for a lot of our current political class.

This is, perhaps, the strongest argument in favor of fixing demographics now. Even then, the actual effect a currently childless person can have on reversing that is going to manifest 20-30 years later, when the children they've had ASAP grow up and become productive. So people have to believe in the sweet spot of "close enough that I'm gonna feel it, but not so soon that my potential children aren't going to be stuck in Mad Max regardless".

Yep. There's an element of faith required, and that seems to be in shorter supply. People don't know what to believe in, what purpose to work towards, or what the 'point' of it all is.

Did they ever? And even if they did, will they stop the kind of deep states upon deep states we have going on now?

If a king genuinely believed in an all-powerful creator who could and would punish them eternally after death, that would indeed incentivize 'better' behavior during their life.

That's all, just pointing out how the removal of a deity (and the threat of hell/promised reward of heaven) leaves us with very few tools for guiding human behavior.

For a 50% increase from 80 to 120, at best. Anything further will probably have to rely on society-wide life extension methods.

Unless you're arguing that there is a hard limit on how long humans can live, ingrained at a biological level, I don't see this as discouraging.

More comments

Aren't the transhumanist wing of the Tough Minded Rationalists the ones who wish to defy nature taking its course? So why be surprised they want to go against the tide of falling birth rates of the intelligent high human capital elite?

I believe that in your rush to throw shade, you have confused rationalists with Objectivists and/or Social Darwinists.

I've only ever encountered birth rate concerns in the predictable context of "p.s. they should get out of my workplace and onto my dick"-type sentiments, but I also remain confused as to why this whole weird part of the discourse cropped up, mushroom-like, seemingly overnight.

Tinfoil-hat read is that the whole fertility panic was deliberately astroturfed on Twitter as a way to lay the groundwork for "....so this is why we need to invest heavily in artificial wombs," with incels as useful water-carriers for the interim messaging. I can certainly think of entities who'd plausibly want to push that based on stated values, but speculating about end goals gets too bizarre to waste much time on.

but I also remain confused as to why this whole weird part of the discourse cropped up, mushroom-like, seemingly overnight.

Wasn't it 2021-22? A.k.a. when Substack and then MuskTwitter broke SJ's lock on the public square? Doesn't seem surprising that things would show up "out of nowhere" if they were being suppressed prior, and SJ generally considers birth rate worries a dogwhistle for racism.

artificial wombs

I think some people are under the mistaken impression that we are living much, much further in the future than we actually are. We barely understand how these systems even work, much less how to recreate them. It’s like Romantic era scientists thinking we’re a decade out from creating life because we got a dead frog’s leg to move by shocking it.

@faceh

Reject Bladerunner, RETVRN to Mad Max

Research seems to be further along than I would have thought, even if we're still talking "probably decades away".

Womb transplants are now functional, which surprised me as I expected this not to be feasible yet.

I'm not betting on Artificial wombs arriving in the next 10 years. Or 15. 20 seems a stretch.

Which makes the extant supply of organic ones that much more critical.

Aren't the massive immigration waves to the West being pushed as a result of the fertility crisis (Well, really the inability of the current population to support adequate pensions & pension-adjacent for the elderly)? It isn't exactly an unfathomable conclusion that the current rate of reproduction is too low and that a lot of the current incentive stack is essentially dysgenic. This isn't something that's just come out of Incel spaces, though the 'women's liberation is the core of the current issue' take

I don't find it so tinfoil-hatty because I do believe artificial wombs need to be invested in. It seems like things that are meaningfully different about the West and made it good inevitably lead to things that make people find something better to do than coerce half of the population into being the means of reproduction and little else.

I think it's instructive that the debate has already baked in "coerce" and "means of reproduction and little else," though, which feel like complete non sequiturs. If women increasingly delay childbearing through (imho entirely reasonable) economic anxiety and difficulties finding a suitable partner, it's weird that people jump to "so dumb 'em down and marry 'em off by force, or if you don't want to, guess we'll just have to replace all y'all hoes with robot uteruses," rather than, you know, making it easier for moms to return to the workforce after staying at home through toddler years, or figuring out why young men are under-socialized, undermotivated and underpaid, or whatever.

I know plenty of mid-20s women who would love to find a kind, conscientious guy to have three kids with, followed by a nice Boomer-style dual-career middle age. I know absolutely no real-life girlbosses wishing someone else would pop eggs into a slow cooker so they could get back to those late-running meetings with Marketing. Thus, the fact that the discourse keeps presuming the latter rather than the former feels like an artificial move to guide the conversation to a place it wouldn't normally go.

No offense, but you're roughly two decades behind the state of the discussion. The rough trajectory goes like this (I'll use germany as the example since I'm most familiar with it, but afaik it's quite similar for many different western countries, save maybe a decade or so earlier or later):

60s: Germany is on a high due to the baby boom with a birth rate of ca 2.3. It switches to an overtly pay-as-you-go pension system, which works very well due to the circumstances. Some already point out that it will only work if birth rates keep stable and say we need to have policies to ensure that it does (of course, this is actually true of almost any economic system, but pay-as-you-go makes it overtly obvious). Chancellor Adenauer dismisses them stringently with "children will always be had" and this is also the public sentiment, so nothing is done.

80s: Birth rates went done substantially to ca 1.5. However, it's generally chalked up to be more an issue of delayed children rather than not having them at all. (Also, as a note: Germany already had rather generous maternity leave during this time already)

00s: The first generation of women has become old enough with a low birth rate so that it's clear that delaying is not the reason - people really have significantly less children overall (only 1.3, even). This coincided with a great increase in women employment, which was an amazing economic boon. When asked, women directly say the reason is economic - not enough money, not enough protection from discrimination after maternity leave, not enough family accommodation, ... and so on. Obviously, people are reluctant to rock the boat too much when times are good. So the focus is on increasing the (economic) benefits over the years in the expectation that the birth rate will go up again. People aren't terribly worried and the discussion is not really big in the public. The only who are worried a lot are, more often than not, literal nazis, so they are still easy to dismiss. <--- you are here.

10s: The birth rate didn't change, at all. More people get worried, since at the current rate there will be a big crunch in the 30s when the baby boomers retire. But in 2015 a new possible saviour turns up: Immigration! The immigration of earlier years usually was too small to be demographically notable, the large waves now were so massive that they actually could plausibly make up for the crunch. While this wasn't the primary reason that we opened the borders, it was mentioned multiple times by the left wing and made it hard for the then-mostly economic right to argue against it (it went roughly like this: "We worry about having not enough workers in a few years, now we are gifted plenty of young people, what are you complaining about!"). So policy doesn't change much, especially since accommodating the immigrants is too expensive to plausible further increase child benefits.

20s: It becomes very clear that the immigrants are actually an additional drain, not a benefit, to the economy. Birth rates also pretty much didn't change, except a short-term anomaly around covid. Now there actually isn't enough time left to solve the problem until the 30s - kids born now would only be teenagers. In fact, the negative impacts already become noticeable since some boomers already scale back work or even retire early, and the general economy is bad enough that people get unhappy. As usual, this is the moment the wider public really groks that there is a problem at all. Behind the scenes for the last decade, lots of overwhelmingly progressive, optimistic scientist have been looking for any policy, anywhere in the world, that increase the birth rates. There are none. All known developed countries have low birth rates. The discourse gets pretty gloomy, and the only reliable relationship that anyone can find across most countries is a negative one between female employment and birth rate. This coincides with a general rise of the right-wing across the entire west.

It's not terribly surprising here that some are jumping to coercive measures, and it's definitely not coming out of nowhere. My personal opinion is most close to pronatalist Lyman Stone (and to a lesser degree the Collins), which is that the problem is cultural and can't reasonably be solved economically. As a father who shares family obligations equally, I can tell you that especially small ones are a lot of fucking work (and money), and they will not only reduce your immediate work time, they also reduce your career opportunities and your free time. It's almost impossible to redistribute so much that having kids becomes economically beneficial. If you tell women that careers are important to them, they will not have kids, bc you can't have both and everyone knows it. Men will generally not blow up their career, either, especially since women don't actually respect house-husbands. A culture that idealizes self-actualization also suppresses child-rearing, since they are in the way. Etc. That doesn't mean coercion, but pretty much everything you propose has been tried in one country or another and found wanting. Of course the old arrangement (male main breadwinner, women part-time worker + child care) still works, but there is an ever-increasing portion of the population who is not willing to do that anymore. And once you've changed to the new dual-income model, the margins become quite thin so making a family work on top of that will include quite a lot of sacrifices. Worse, you have to outright compete with the DINKs.

Not to nitpick but I guess Boomers started retiring as early as 2010 or so. I'd also argue that any massive immigration wave surely erodes the birth rate of the native population even further, as it drives societal angst, uncertainty and fear, while also driving up house prices on average.

10s: The birth rate didn't change, at all. [...] That doesn't mean coercion, but pretty much everything you propose has been tried in one country or another and found wanting.

Can I ask your source for "the birth rate didn't change, at all" based on policies to bridge family life and working life? Everything I'm seeing suggests that return-to-work protections and generous parental leave provisions did have discernibly positive effects on birth rates in Germany, e.g.: article, except in some circumstances where shortages of daycare spots made it effectively impossible for people to use the parental-leave benefits in the first place. In one instance, the government seems to have reduced the duration of parental support and observed a reduced birthrate in consequence. That seems to me like pretty direct evidence that the policy works.

Obviously, saying the policies worked (i.e., had a positive effect on fertility) isn't the same as saying that they returned TFR >2 or even that they were enough to balance any unrelated downward pressures on birthrate. But it does suggest that the women were telling the truth that their childbearing decisions were motivated at least partly by economic fears, particularly about the difficulty of making a living after having children. It also suggests that the coercive approach of increasing women's economic anxiety by forcing them out of the workforce/ limiting their education and ability to provide for a family in extremis is moving in exactly the wrong direction.

The article is from 2018 and talking about specifically post-2015 increases. That just-so-happens to be the timing of the largest migration waves ever to enter germany. It even itself admits that the only group which plausibly stayed structurally the same - mothers with a german passport - had only a change from 1.43 to 1.46, which they call "notable" but which most would call "pretty much nothing". Attributing these changes to policy is, to be frank, imo bordering on willful misinformation. In general including foreigners/immigrants in most modern stats leads to nonsensical results, since everything gets drowned in composition effects. It's the equivalent to comparing test scores between a rich kid prep school and a public school in a poor district and claiming that it's due to this or that teaching approach; No, it's 100% due to differences in the populations (which, btw, don't need to be genetic; I know quite well how much difference simply highly motivated & supportive parents make).

You can see the stark differences quite well here. Again, note that the foreign population, at different times, included substantially different percentages of a) turkish majority-muslim migrant workers, b) italian majority-catholic migrant workers, c) syrian majority-muslim asylum seekers, d) north african asylum seekers (often, but not always masquerading as syrians), e) Ukrainian majority-orthodox asylum seekers and a million other smaller groups. Concluding anything from those numbers except the composition is pure insanity.

So that leaves us with german mothers subgroup. Now, there is an argument that you can see a very slight increase from around 1.3 in the 90s to a top of almost 1.5 in the mid 10s (note that the timeframe of the DW article is actually flat), and that this is due to policies. That's prima facie plausible, but firstly as you point out generally considered not nearly enough, and secondly doesn't match very well with the timing of the actual policy changes usually considered major. The biggest was the 2007 Elterngeld, which was deliberately designed to benefit working mothers and families in general as well as increase male investment into children. Can you see it in the plot? I can't, not as a one-time, not as a rate-increase, nothing. The second was the Elterngeld Plus in 2013, which accomodated part-time work in early childhood specifically. There is a modest increase here between 2013->2014, but it's still small, also looks more like a continuation of a former trend and worse, the line flattens shortly afterwards anyway. Another problem is the covid bump and the post-covid downturn; Family policies in germany are still very generous and didn't really change during covid, but the overall change observed easily drowns out all the other changes. Neither does it fit with economic or general anxiety; those were, if anything, especially high, not low, during covid.

And finally, even the german mothers actually have a significant problem with composition effects, even if they're not quite as strong. See the large increase in foreign births vs a corresponding small decrease for german mothers in 2011? This isn't an immigration wave nor policy effects, it's entirely due to the Zensus 2011 re-counting of who belongs into which group. Most immigrants stay in western countries nor is getting a passport particularly hard, and germany is no exception to that rule. So culturally noticeably different foreign groups with non-western marriage/family patterns get increasingly counted as german. Btw, afaik France's high official birth rates are for example almost entirely due to this as well, thanks to comparatively early postcolonial immigration waves.

And this even applies to rather old immigrant groups, and even non-immigrants. The region where I'm from has a specific town with a large church of pentecostals who fled from Soviet Russia long ago. Back then, however, it was a very small group. When I grew up (90s to 00s), they were already a substantial percentage of a specific town. Nowadays they are literally half the population (I can send you a DM with a link if you do not believe it, but don't want to share it publicly for OPSEC). They have consistently high (6-10 children is not exceptional) birth rates, high cultural cohesion and high retention rates, similar to Hasidic Jews in Israel. They are large enough so that our entire region is among those with the highest birth rates in germany, and has at multiple times been number one. Though admittedly my heritage (conservative catholics) isn't doing badly there, either (I literally do not know how many cousins I have; it's around 30-40).

Which leads to the explanation that makes by far the most sense to me: Culture. The pentecostals do not earn well (in fact, substantially below average). They do not have better family benefits. But what they have is social structures that consistently, consciously and openly advocate for and support marriage and family formation, while suppressing all influences that plausibly reduce it, such as casual dating, the focus on self-actualization, abortion and birth control, non-standard sexualities, education, female careers .... the list is long. It's a matter of priorities; Having children is hard and expensive, and no entry on the list is in itself mutually exclusive with high birth rates, but our culture just has a low status and low priority for #children, so almost any competing topic or enabling technology plays a part in the reduction..

If somebody put a pistol to my head and said I have to do something that reliably gets us back to >2.1 TFR, fast, I'd absolutely go with the right-wingers. Ultraconservative religious groups exist all across the western world and still have extremely high birth rates; If we become more like them, we will, too, have a higher TFR again, QED. Family benefits policy nerds are almost exclusively using bullshit composite stats and are thus ignorant about very basic realities. That doesn't mean, however, that I WANT us to do this; As it happens, I'm best described as a technoutopian transhumanist, and I do think we would have to pay a large price in technological progress if we were to attempt this, let alone my libertarian distaste for coercive measures. Me and my wife are trying our best to find a modern synthesis, where we consciously sacrifice what is necessary to have the number of children we desire while still keeping the parts we value about the modern system. But that doesn't make the right-wingers wrong on the facts.

it's weird that people jump to "so dumb 'em down and marry 'em off by force"

You believed an innovative solution would come from what passed for progressive thought 50 years ago traditionalist thought, especially when parroted completely uncritically? This is just mostly just men being butthurt.

Thus, the fact that the discourse keeps presuming the latter rather than the former feels like an artificial move to guide the conversation to a place it wouldn't normally go.

You believed an innovative solution would come from what will be traditionalist thought in 50 years progressive thought, especially when parroted completely uncritically? This is mostly just women being butthurt anyway.

or figuring out why young men are under-socialized, undermotivated and underpaid, or whatever.

There are no table stakes. We're not interested in investing in youth outside of how much interest that student loan is going to generate, we banned all development that would make their current salary appropriate, and we're too invested in "teach men to not rape" to make sure that those who weren't going to do that anyway aren't getting treated as pre-emptively guilty (we have taxed their virtue to redistribute it to rapist men and stupid women, and now wise men don't want to exercise that virtue or see doing so as too risky? And now they have anxiety and won't come out of their room(s)? couldn't have seen that coming).

(we have taxed their virtue to redistribute it to rapist men and stupid women, and now wise men don't want to exercise that virtue or see doing so as too risky? And now they have anxiety and won't come out of their room(s)? couldn't have seen that coming).

Sure, there seems to have been a cohort of hyper-conscientious Millennial men of ~Scott Alexander age that got traumatized by Title IX culture and now complain about it. But those men are now aging out of family-starting age, anyway. And Title IX was never actually about gender relations, just about a parasite class of university administrators finding an excuse to justify swelling their retinues.

I don't see grounds for presuming that "teaching men not to rape" has created any more recent crop of hikikomori-style dropouts, if that's what you're arguing. I haven't heard a Zoomer say they didn't want to date because rape accusations, just that dating feels awkward, is a PITA and they worry the girl would be judging them. I can spin about ten different just-so stories for why they might increasingly express those feelings, but "because they were taught not to rape" is pretty low in the plausibility ranking. Certainly it's far below "too little free play as kids, now permanently anti-social"; porn fucking up sexual desire and behavior; Netflix, weed and videogames fucking up attention and motivation; collapsing economy fucking up developmental pathways; anti-family culture fucking up availability of role models; and youth mental-health memetics destigmatizing "I can't, I have anxiety" as a life narrative.

On the other hand, assuming that Anti-Rape-Culture Did It means you can blame the whole thing on girls being so darn sensitive, so there's that.

I haven't heard a Zoomer say they didn't want to date because rape accusations, just that dating feels awkward, is a PITA and they worry the girl would be judging them.

The "awkwardness" comes from the heavy cloud of social and legal consequences men face for making just one wrong move on a date. The longhouse taught us that we need explicit verbal consent at every step of foreplay.

Men overwhelmingly make the first sexual move (and then make 3-5 moves for every 1 his female partner makes). This roughly 4:1 sexual dance is preferred by the overwhelming majority of men and women. Add to this the lingering social stigma for women to be viewed as sluts for making the first move or evening out the 4:1 ratio, and many possible romances fizzle out on the first date. Modern dating markets are so flooded with men on the supply side of the equation, that women rarely invest their time in a second date for "no chemistry" suitors.

Men have a perfectly rational fear here: the bar for what counts as felony sex assault has been lowered to "he made me uncomfortable when escalating (but I didn't say no)" from "he overpowered me after I said no." The legacy definition is extremely clear, but this new grey zone of flirting/foreplay is unmapped by normies. Pickup artists have been studying this for decades, but there's no universally agreed upon set of rules. On the other hand, insing women ignorant of the territory have come up with a reasonably self-consistent set of rules around dating (chad is exempt). Insings have also taken over the disciplinary boards in universities and some district attorneys offices' with these new rules.

The existential threats to young men who actually absorbed some of the "don't rape" lessons in grade school include:

  • Getting arrested
  • Losing essentially all your friends post-allegation
  • $30,000-60,000 on a defense lawyer for trial
  • 3-5 years in prison
  • Possibility of getting murdered in prison
  • Permanently losing your career and social life as a REGISTERED SEX OFFENDER

All of these life-altering consequences may be applied over something relatively inconsequential as fingerbanging a drunk girl who verbally asks her date to "fuck me" over the course of about 5 minutes

Or two drunk teenagers flirting through text, mutually kissing, moving to a private location and then [disputed testimony]

I may update this post with more examples, but the first link took a massive federal lawsuit to reverse Ben Feibleman's expulsion from Columbia. I doubt his legal win has done much to repair his social life.

I'm not advocating for a retvrn to the 50s-70s dating rules (which were much clearer), but something must change on a cultural and legal level here. This is a primary variable in demographic collapse, although relatively unstudied. Men and women simply can't agree on the rules of flirting. Women have a near total legal control over sex, whereas men have near total physical control. A non-trivial number of men and women will refuse to compromise on this issue, at the cost of marriages and future children.

foreplay claim source: lots of dates

Men overwhelmingly make the first sexual move (and then make 3-5 moves for every 1 his female partner makes). This roughly 4:1 sexual dance is preferred by the overwhelming majority of men and women.

I think it's moreso a compromise rather than a mutual preference. I feel like most men would ideally want something like a 1:1-2:1 ratio (and with bigger tits) and most women would ideally want something more, ah, romance novel-esque (though only with the most desirable men, of course).

I mean, it seems like you could wait to have sex until you're married or in a long-term relationship? A super-majority of those scary situations you mention are driven by casual hookups or first through third dates. I know of no girls who, even if they came on to a guy in those circumstances, would object to his saying "Hey, could we wait a little? I really like you and I want to spend more time getting to know you before we get physical."

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The existential threats to young men who actually absorbed some of the "don't rape" lessons in grade school include:

You go to Room 101. 1984 is literally a book about this exact thing happening. The English released a modernized version of that (from the Party's perspective, of course) where [a younger] Winston just straight up kills Julia, as was his fantasy [and per his justifications] of doing in the beginning of the book.

Men and women simply can't agree on the rules of flirting.

Men and women will not be allowed to agree on the rules of flirting. That's what the Junior Anti-Sex League does (the attempts to make all intimate images [implied: of women] legally equivalent to child porn are a pretty good example of this). If they figure out a way to get along the older femcels (and the Chads who find that idiocy useful, since it keeps men from things like "having standards") will lose their power.

Now, if society somehow evolved past the notion that women are more inherently valuable than men- and in modern times they are less valuable due to the way they actively damage society for shits and giggles- then that might change. But that's going to take some doing, and it's not going to fix the damage that's already been done.

Women have a near total legal control physical control by proxy over sex, whereas men have near total physical control in the moment

It's also going to have to be women that disarm first (and fight other women on that point, and train their sons out of the "don't rape" propaganda), and stand firm against the hedonic treadmill of risk mitigation (or just insist on having more daughters, I guess), though it's possible that this continues forever since a birth rate of 0 still won't imbalance the genders. We can't retvrn to the 1950s-1970s; we aren't as rich as we were back then, and to be more precise women are [at the same point in their lives] comparatively richer now as compared to men, and therefore [feel, and are] in a better position to make demands like this.

If men are in socioeconomic oversupply, and as we can see clearly from the dating stats that they are, then there's still going to be sufficient men willing to enforce the physical-control-by-proxy (as no law survives an intentional lack of enforcement). Men can't enforce a fix for moral hazard from a position of relative weakness.

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I think it's instructive that the debate has already baked in "coerce" and "means of reproduction and little else," though, which feel like complete non sequiturs. If women increasingly delay childbearing through (imho entirely reasonable) economic anxiety and difficulties finding a suitable partner, it's weird that people jump to "so dumb 'em down and marry 'em off by force, or if you don't want to, guess we'll just have to replace all y'all hoes with robot uteruses," rather than, you know, making it easier for moms to return to the workforce after staying at home through toddler years, or figuring out why young men are under-socialized, undermotivated and underpaid, or whatever.

Is it not possible that the fact that you think these are the bounds of the debate is the result of negative polarization in a world where practically everyone who has heard of the problem has spitballed their own cause and solution? People retweet the most ghoulish posts by their outgroup back to their ingroup, not the reasonable proposals.

Countries with maternal laws/customs have even lower fertility than the US though. The modern/western society didn't find an answer aside from going back to past patriarchy vs sci-fi solutions.

making it easier for moms to return to the workforce after staying at home through toddler years

This is one of those things that sounds great when you say it but in practice requires some extremely unpleasant political compromises. Are you going to...

  1. Redirect the labor of childless women toward parents? That sounds a lot like coercion to me. (Also all taxes are coercion, but I'll only mention this here because this seems like the only type of coercion you care about.)
  2. Redirect the labor of childless men toward parents? To put it bluntly: taxing incels to subsidize chad and his baby momma is deeply unfair and liable to result in suicidality and violence.
  3. Redirect the labor of parents towards other parents? Congratulations, you have made parenting even less appealing.
  4. Force employers to disregard that the fact that having less experience and less availability to work makes someone worse at their jobs? In the best case, they'll route around you by just being more bigoted. In the worst case, every business collapses.

The only thing that could possibly raise birth-rates non-coercively is for society to stop forcefully redistributing the labor of working age adults to unrelated elders. Removing social security and medicare would give people a much stronger incentive to either invest productively during their working years or have children to support them in their old age. There would still be a need for welfare, but it could be distributed as a UBI: flat cash payments to every citizen.

I mean, to some extent, all 4 of 1-4 are already happening:

Most countries have at least some form of policy that incentivizes being coupled off with children; Canada, at least, directly pays parents via the Canada Child Benefit. I'm fairly confident that the US has options to file jointly or single for couples, enabling them to minimize the amount they owe in taxes. This means that people who are single are either paying more than their fair share, or couples are paying less than their fair share (depending on your viewpoint).

In an "almost certainly not what you meant" sort of way, parents (as in, working parents) are forced to spend their income on programs that are intended for the welfare of the elderly, or to support single mothers; most of these elderly have had children, so the labor of working parents is subsidizing the lifestyle of parents who are not working.

And it is currently illegal in Canada to discriminate against a pregnant woman; I ran into this as a kid when my teacher left for maternity leave, they hired a pregnant substitute, who also left for maternity leave.

I don't really have any point to this "well, acktually"-ing, just thought it was kind of funny.

Canada Child Benefit.

To the extend that child tax credits directly help parents, they're unfair... But I'm not heartless enough to deny support to the blameless children. On net I think we'd have a lot less need for them if we removed elder-support programs and therefore let working parents keep more money in their pockets.

enabling them to minimize the amount they owe in taxes

The american tax code is designed to help families in a "working parent/homemaker" situation but ironically punishes cases where you have two high-earning adults. I've got some DINK friends who had to pay more taxes after getting married. TBH, I also think that's unfair. They shouldn't get elder assistance in their old age, but also they should be able to save and invest more of their taxes now so that they don't need it. Basically, our society can let people decide of their own volition whether investing in children or career advancent is their best retirement bet. Anyone who chooses to be both unproductive and childless can suffer the consequences and resign themselves to either poverty or becoming such a pillar of their community even unrelated adults are willing to help thm.

In an "almost certainly not what you meant" sort of way,

That's kind of exactly what I meant, actually. By removing the need to pay for unrelated elders, adults can focus on supporting their own parents. Reciprocally, that also increases the incentive for elders to help their adult children with childcare. My grandmother helped my mom with me while my mom was doing her PHD; in return, my mom has helped her quite a bit through the years with remittances. That all winds up with a greater incentive for adults to have children, and in particular to raise them well so that the children will be happy to take care of them.

Force employers to disregard that the fact that having less experience and less availability to work makes someone worse at their jobs? In the best case, they'll route around you by just being more bigoted. In the worst case, every business collapses.

This seems like an unnecessarily fatalist take on an already very solved problem. We already have working structures to encourage people to enter the military while ensuring that their time in service won't work against their employment prospects when they return. Vets are also people who have not necessarily been gaining experience that's 100% relevant to the civilian workplace experience during their time away, but who have been building job-adjacent skills and demonstrating conscientiousness while away, as well as sacrificing pleasure to serve the greater good. I haven't noticed that mild preferential hiring standards for vets have caused every business to collapse, and employers aren't forced to give vets credit for more experience than they possess, just forced not to use their work gap to freeze them out versus other similarly-experienced candidates. It seems to me that most mid-20s professional women leaving the workplace to raise young children would be happy simply to reenter at the same step on the ladder, the way veterans get to; what I've seen in practice is that employers just arbitrarily won't even consider them, so they have a terrible time reentering at all.

If preferential hiring for returning moms seems like an unthinkable drain on productivity while you don't feel the same way for returning vets (notwithstanding high rates of PTSD, etc., etc. that make vets at least as empirically risky to hire), then I think that intuition merits some extra scrutiny. Is it possible that we don't really believe increasing the TFR is actually a contribution to the public good, the way bombing villages in Afghanistan was? In which case, it's a fair question why that same TFR would then require public investment in robot wombs.

Or is it possible that we don't actually believe that raising small children is a respect-worthy task for a talented person to spend time on, the sort of thing that should look good on a resume the way military service does? In which case, wouldn't the feminists be correct that people pushing momhood are mostly doing it as a way to demean women?

Not all work experience is universally applicable in every other domain. Experience in the military is highly transferable to jobs where you are expected to carry out orders while working as a team under time pressure-- a.k.a, most well-paying jobs. Experience as a mother is highly transferable to jobs where you are expected to determine your own schedule and manage small children. That admittedly does prove useful in stuff like hr/people manager/project management roles. (Basically all the managers I've ever had have been parents, and I think that makes perfect sense.) But the supply for those roles is much greater than the demand, so rationally self-interested companies filter for accumulated domain knowledge, which disadvantages mothers. Meanwhile the most numerically common jobs that benefit from experience as a mother are childcare and teaching related, but those jobs have a whole ton of structural problems that prevent them from accurately renumerating employees based on the quality of their work. The incentives of school district administrators are poorly aligned at best with actually maximizing learning, and any attempt to assess teacher skill and renumerate appropriately will piss off so many entrenched groups.

There are a few fields-- like nursing, for example-- that avoids the problems I've mentioned... but if you just compare the number of veterans versus the number of order-following jobs, and the number of mothers versus the number of caretaking jobs, and you see why things get to be the way they are.

Experience in the military is highly transferable to jobs where you are expected to carry out orders while working as a team under time pressure-- a.k.a, most well-paying jobs.

Really? Slavishly following orders and following repetitive protocols under conditions of extreme physical stress sounds more like McDonalds jobs to me. And one could argue that running a household with small children is far better preparation for C-suite roles that require big-picture strategy, critical thinking about efficient use of limited resources, thoughtful design of people-friendly processes and institutional structures, etc. But both sides are just special pleading, because of course there are many military tasks and many mom tasks that will cross-apply to any given job, and many others that won't. The point of preferential hiring is not that the person is inherently more qualified for every position; it's that their resume gap was undertaken in order to render something of value to the public, so they shouldn't be disadvantaged for it versus a similarly-qualified person who didn't serve.

But I'm getting from your comment that you pretty much agree that mothers should be disadvantaged in hiring? The claim about how women with children should be unhireable lest they eventually bear more children makes no sense unless you're rationalizing a general sense of "moms, eeeeeeew": men could similarly acquire health problems or decide to become stay-at-home dads at any time, and statistically a childless man is far likelier than a female hire to eventually create expensive workplace issues through drug and alcohol problems, running-off-with-a-floozy problems, white-collar or violent-crime problems. But better to hire Schroedinger's embezzling coke addict than... a lady who's at some point changed a diaper, I guess. On account of the mom ick.

So yeah, this is kind of an illustration of the problem: if raising children well is not respectable professional labor, just base "caretaking," and if moreover being a mom at any point condemns you to be fit for nothing but caretaking scutwork jobs ever after, regardless of your pre-childbearing education and professional skills, then it's no wonder young women get nervous about the tradeoffs involved. Seems like a little open-mindness would fix the whole thing, but I guess there must be a lot of people who don't respect their moms.

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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.

Reservists have to leave their jobs to fight

Unfortunately, it seems like replacing the shoggoth of Capitalism with a simpler, cruder social system or inventing artificial wombs is easier for people than things like

making it easier for moms to return to the workforce after staying at home through toddler years, or figuring out why young men are under-socialized, undermotivated and underpaid, or whatever.

, even if I would prefer that too. Also, it seems a waste to not root for glorious transhumanist destiny in the age when it seems most possible yet.

In general, I think the debate has baked in coercion because many people in the debate have concluded that the reason for unmotivated young men is no steady gf, and no steady gf is because divorces and tinder. Which are large-scale enough factors that some coercion would be required to attack them.

In general, I think the debate has baked in coercion because many people in the debate have concluded that the reason for unmotivated young men is no steady gf

Serious question, how would one gather evidence on which way the causal arrow runs between "no motivation, poor social skills" and "no gf"? "I would do it if they changed" is just the default narrative for people with external-locus-of-control, same as the /r/antiwork people who would totally work hard if someone made them a tenured professor of philosophy.

Legions of awkward, self-indulgent, self-absorbed Gen Z men complain that girls are too picky about sex, sure; and legions of plump, vain Gen Z women complain that boys are too withholding about relationships. When both sides in a stalemate plaintively assert that it's the other side's fault, and when both have what the other side claims are unrealistic expectations of what's owed to them, what's a good method for adjudicating where the actual ZOPA should lie?

no steady gf is because divorces and tinder

But is that true? How much of the female withdrawal from the dating market is driven by the incredible level of fearmongering about male bad behavior? I mean, there's the family guy clip about campus sexual assault training, but tiktok is just way way worse at playing up female neuroticism than liability-minimizing bureaucrats.

How much of it is simply that a far higher percentage of young women are unattractive as GF's, mostly due to higher obesity rates?

Sure, you can throw tiktok in, too. Tinder does take up some of the "fearmongering about male bad behavior" space with all the low effort dick pic guys, or so I'm told.

I don't think obesity is a factor for most guys in question. The sentiment I observe is usually "no one is interested in me", not "only the fatties are interested in me".

This is like framing America's obesity epidemic as "liberation". Technically correct, I suppose.

No doubt some liberated slaves were worse off for having the responsibility to earn their own keep they weren't used to.

I choose to give the western society credit where it's due: there is no such thing as famine anymore. That you have to put in a bit of effort to not grow fat is small potatoes compared to that. Also, it's a choice to let your food industry dump tons of sugar into everything or whatever it is that is wrong with American food industry.

I'm not comparing you to someone who claims that western society is good, because it provides abundance, even if that means you have to put in effort to not grow fat, or regulate the food industry.

I'm comparing you to the HAES / Lizzo's beuty enjoyers / fitness is fascism people. People who see fatness itself as liberation from oppressive forces like beuty standards, healthy diets and exercise.

Is your view that "fitness is fascism" people are to being in shape like the "I don't want to have to marry a man to make a living/have to marry a woman to obtain companionship and sex" people to obligate marriage?

Rest assured I don't think that being a 1000 body count fuckboy/slut should be the highest aspiration and the goal of all freedom-loving people.

like the "I don't want to have to marry a man to make a living/have to marry a woman to obtain companionship and sex" people to obligate marriage?

Like the "there is no such thing as famine anymore" / "motherhood is merely the means of reproduction and little else" people are to it. People who didn't want to marry always existed and weren't a problem.

Rest assured I don't think that being a 1000 body count fuckboy/slut should be the highest aspiration and the goal of all freedom-loving people.

I'd say that this what your views lead to, whether you think they should or not, but the next step is likely going to be sexless rat utopia, so we won't even get the 1000 "body" orgies.

Rationalists tend to worry about x-risk and the very long-term survival of the human race. Thus, HBD-believing fertility-rates-concerned rationalists' thinking goes that lower IQs might be selected for and boost short-term reproductive fitness in the short term, while preventing us from solving AI alignment or colonizing Mars or any of that good stuff, and thus drastically reducing Homo sapiens's chances of long-term survival.

(Of course, this is assuming one only values survival of the species and nothing else, which is true of very few rationalists.)

Rationalists are basically a doomsday cult dedicated to surviving the chaos of the singularity through human power; it's reasonable to assume they're very concerned with having sufficient human capital to harness that power.

Thus, HBD-believing fertility-rates-concerned rationalists' thinking goes that lower IQs might be selected for and boost short-term reproductive fitness in the short term, while preventing us from solving AI alignment or colonizing Mars or any of that good stuff, and thus drastically reducing Homo sapiens's chances of long-term survival.

Look, I still remember how popular the opening bit of Idiocracy was with a lot of left-wingers all those decades back, well before "HBD-believing fertility-rates-concerned rationalists" were a thing. For that matter, I remember classmates from Caltech talking about how we needed "parenting licenses" out of mid-20th century sci-fi to keep the dumb, Bible-thumping rednecks from breeding too many future Republican voters, before we end up another moron like Bush the younger in the White House. (They also had either one of two explanations as to why this wasn't eugenics.)

Why so much ire over nature taking its course?

because they don't like that course? The invisible hand of the free market leads to plentiful goods and prosperity. Low birth rates lead to extinction. What's next "Why do you wear a jacket in the winter? Heat flowing from hot to cold is natural, and therefore you should freeze."? Liking one default outcome doesn't imply liking every default outcome.

Any attempt to engage in large scale social engineering...starts to sound a bit... socialist-y.

Yup, that's a problem. Sucks that there aren't any nice solutions, but nature doesn't have to play according to our desires.

It's about as confusing as a person wanting to get in shape, instead of being content to fill themselves up with junk food and whatching their health deteriorate. It would be nature taking it's course too, wouldn't it?

As for it sounding socialisty, there aren't that many devoted libertarians out there.

how many of you have ever heard of this particular sad bunch?

Can't say I have. I vaguely recall something about a group calling themselves Oath Keepers (or Oathkeepers?), which may or may not be a right-wing militia organization?

These are completely different things- promise keepers was an evangelical men’s group which did standard evangelical things. Oath keepers is a veterans right-wing militia organization.

Yes, they are a completely different group.

My dad took me to a PK conference in the Silverdome back in the day. Mid-90s PK was booming. Not sure what you mean by "identitarian", but it was a paint-by-numbers evangelical men's movement. I was a very lost cause by then, but PK was as unobjectionable as a religious group that size is capable.

Identitarian in the sense that the group was founded on the members' shared identity as Christian men, not simply as Christians.

My recollection is that it was very liberal-coded and "complementarian" grading on the curve of evangelical christianity. Very much a normie American christian thing, which my more strict upbringing recognized as "not real christianity".

Are you comfortable saying which denomination you were raised in? That makes me curious.

No real denomination, independent evangelicals. Faith healing cult out of Indiana, google Hobart Freeman.

Thanks. That's not at all what I expected. Sad to read about.

As with many marginal religious groups, it was very successful under the original charismatic preacher, and fell to infighting starting immediately after his death (from a perfectly treatable medical issue).

At the least he had the conviction of his beliefs.

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