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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32435 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Increasing the TFR is monumentally difficult and with your set of constraints just about impossible. A majority of the things anyone is going to suggest in this thread will be blocked by your hypothetical supreme court if that supreme court is the averaged-out federal judiciary of all current first-world countries.

Anyways, I think a lot of the policies I would have suggested (for them to be blocked anyways) are already covered. Mostly economic policies that make housing cheaper, remove subsidies towards women as a class, remove pressure from the middle class, etc. I think @wlxd's answer is excellently put.

Here's an alternative body of ideas to tackle the TFR problem. I'm just going to copypasta a reddit comment by u/jss78.

In Finland, my solution would be perhaps surprising: I'd try to help boys do better at school.

Finland has a peculiar problem where girls do a LOT better at school compared to boys. Most kids whose education stops after elementary school are boys. At high schools, 58% of students are girls, and the percentage remains similar at universities.

This leads to a multitude of social problems, not least because in a high-tech society the job options for the elementary-school-only educated boys are limited. Enter long-term unemployment, drugs, alcohol, depression, suicide.

But it's also suspected to contribute to Finland's remarkably low birth rate. Because girls pursue higher education more than boys, some problematic patterns emerge:

Small towns have an excess of poorly educated young men. Cities and university towns have an excess of highly educated young women.

So our young women and young men are, firstly, in different places, but also they live in very different social spheres. The urban, highly-educated women vote liberal and eat vegetarian, while the poorly-educated small-town men are the core base of right-wing populist parties. Obviously, these people are unlikely to even talk to one another, let alone procreate. (emphasis mine)

That's my #1. Apart from that, a better job market with better long-term employment prospects would help with financial confidence. The government support systems for families with children are already at a very high level compared to the rest of Europe.

I think this comment is directionally correct, if not to the mark. Of course, it had a lukewarm response in mainstream Reddit.

Intuitively, I think that one of the principal components between all first-world countries struggling with TFR issues is that females are given far too (IMO undeserved) much status (college being the end all be all is to blame). @wlxd's first paragraph somewhat brushes on this idea. Most female-dominated white-collar occupations are just glorified email jobs or secretary jobs with different names. And people can feel that, they won't say it but they will make memes about it.

In no sane world should a "human resources coordinator" with a Communications degree who sends out emails for a living, feel that the Electrician who wired up her house is beneath her. She is just as much of a 110 IQ boring, passionless midwit as she thinks the Electrician is, but at least one of them is useful to society.

My solution isn't to necessarily make boys better at school, it's to make girls worse. But anything that could knock some humility into the emailing class, let that be propaganda, defunding useless degrees (defunding education as a whole would be amazing, but that's reserved for the kingdom of God.), whatever.

Yes I do think increasing the "Fuck rate" will increase the birth rate. This will have all kinds of nth-order effects from increased "accidents" to those "accidents" making an email job not so appealing or unfeasible, just scratching the tip of the iceberg.

Wildcard: This entire enterprise might be outside the scope of politics to fix altogether. Population dynamics can be chaotic and that includes humans too, the premise that TFR could be increased at all is not written in stone.

In no sane world should a "human resources coordinator" with a Communications degree who sends out emails for a living, feel that the Electrician who wired up her house is beneath her.

Counter point - We lived for millennia without electricity, but communicating is a key factor in building community, consensus and indeed society. Creating and nurturing those bonds has been a female role for a long time (see who tends to organize church events et al even where the milieu is explicitly patriarchal). It is those artificial but carefully maintained social ties that are what have allowed us to scale tribes into cities, nations and overarching cultures. Those roles are high status because they are absolutely VITAL in a societal sense.

This is not to denigrate electricians, most of my uncles on one side of my family are electricians or plumbers (and most on the other side are teachers) but I think there is a tendency especially in the rationalish sphere to devalue just how important emotional and social cohesiveness is (possibly due to the fact that "normie" women are not exactly well represented either there or here). And from what I can tell in both my own and others marriages, and in every company and organization I have ever worked for it is nigh exclusively women in these "useless" communication roles that do that. There probably isn't much need for the Communications degree but building a corporate culture begins with communication that most men, again in my experience are not interested in. Women are heavily involved in the social shaming, rewarding and so on that is the foundation of our societies, top to bottom.

Which leads to the solution. If you want more babies, you have to convince enough socially influential women to shame and judge other women for not having enough kids. More easily said than done of course, but the only real answer. Social status, social shaming and judgement will outweigh any amount of financial incentives or law changes.

I'm baffled by the suggestion that voluntelling people to put their pronouns in their email signature, attend pointless diversity seminars and wear green ribbons on their lapels is somehow improving social cohesiveness within a company.

That isn't all or even most of what HR does however. But even so thatv is exactly what building social cohesion is like. Attending church, publicly espousing certain views, being judged for being outside those views, are all replicated inside organizations.

Social shame and social judgement is the building block of society. It's the reason we're so good at, it limits the differences accepted in a society, or in this case a company.

Of course all that "social cohesion" goes out the window when it turns out a plurality of your work force goes through the motions purely cynically.

Does it? People going to church still cheated on their wives and husbands. Some went to church and then secretly snuck out to a gay bar. Social cohesiveness is largely concerned that we publicly adhere to the shared values.

If you think a rule is nonsense but you follow it anyway, whether engaging in Church or at the DEI seminar you are still following the rules outwardly. You don't actually have to be a believer.

Does it? People hoingvto church still cheated on their wives and husbands. Some went to church and then secretly snuck out to a gay bar. Social cohesiveness is largely concerned that we publicly adhere to the shared values.

Yes, it does. We're not talking about believers going to church, but occasionally falling to the temptation of sin, we're talking about half of the congregation secretly following a completely different religion. Social cohesion is not people following the rules when they're afraid they might get caught, it's them following the rules even when they know they could get away with it.

Which is why God can see all and HR can read your emails and slack chats and anyone you talk to can inform on you.

Social cohesion is exactly people following the rules when they are afraid they might be caught. We're selfish individuals at heart, society has to fight against that and it has a lot of tools in its box to do it. The basic ones are fear and shame.

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