This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The always-great Kaiser Bauch has a new article, this time on the (dis-)similarities between climate change and the fertility crisis. It's good and there's a lot to agree with, in particular the general gist: None of us will probably be able to do anything about either of those, and all we can do is adapt. Both are global issues that arise from the peculiarities of current-tech, current-culture modern societies, and may vanish or switch in another direction altogether with further increased tech levels or changed culture. Neither is likely to be an extinction-level problem. Both are politically polarized, with one side leaning towards doomerism and/or instrumentalisation, and the other towards denial and/or indifference.
Nevertheless, the article somewhat overstates its thesis, and furthermore I find it interesting to think about how and why the differences exist & are the way they are, as well as some related recent developments & discussions.
So, let's start with some of the most obvious differences. Climate change is a truly global problem in the sense that it's literally impossible to fix locally. This is the reason why the EU/german-style Energiewende is so insanely myopic and short-sighted; Even if it worked relatively fine on its own merits (i.e. reducing emissions to near-zero with minimal damage to the economy) AND if everyone on the entire globe did the same, it still requires adaptions to the already-changed climate. Instead it not only is sold as an alternative to adaption, the rest of the world isn't doing the same anyway, and of course it isn't working well on its own merits, either.
See the AC discourse: I actually think myself that the weather is still tolerable enough that ACs make sense mostly for clinics and for the elderly, we don't even need general adoption. But no, instead EU media is putting out very general anti-AC messaging that we can't have nice things since it costs energy, and energy causes climate change. There was a notable incident where the EU Commission HQ shut down its AC - but only for the lower, peasant floors. Imo it could easily go into a Parks & Rec parody episode, if P&R was capable of looking in that particular direction. All a microcosm of the dysfunctions of the contemporary EU.
Likewise, the instrumentalisation of climate change usually takes a very specific form: Due to its very nature requiring communal solutions, it's easy to combine with general-purpose communitarian ideologies like communism, social justice or "mere" socialism. The "watermelon" (green on the outside, red on the inside) accusation strikes one as very adapt if you just skim through, for example, the Green New Deal wiki page, despite its very pro-slant. Take a look at the "Environmental justice" subsection. But honestly, it's already enough to talk with the average green voter to notice the commonalities. This also directly explains rightwing dismissal: If the most prominent green initiatives blatantly risk torpedoing the entire enterprise by tying it together with completely unrelated, highly contentious far-left pet projects, what does it tell you about how serious its proponents are on the original topic? Nothing good.
So in short, I'd characterize the climate change movement: We pour significant resources into fighting climate change, but in a way and direction that does not and can not fix it. Powerful groups can and do profit from this free money, however.
Let's now look at the fertility crisis. First, I want to to note that it is a fundamentally local problem, in the sense that any given society with a healthy TFR can just simply ignore global fertility dysfunctions (insert Tyler the creator cyberbullying meme, except it's about the fertility crisis and just having kids). It's global only in the sense that it seems to happen everywhere, merely on different timelines. That means that, irrespective of the details of any possible solution it is at least in principle solvable by any given nation state.
Let's now look at the nature of the problem. There's a few candidates: The rise of solitary entertainment (related to the "It's the phones, stupid") thesis, the opportunity cost thesis, or the loss of religion thesis, and a whole bunch of others. I won't go into detail on which I find the most likely, strongest factor, but it's hard not to notice that they are all fundamentally cultural and, in fact, down to personal choices. You actually can simply choose to forego solitary entertainment and spend more time with family & friends. You can just stay religious. You can just avoid education and choose a job that is easy to combine with a family. As the kids say (well, if you have them), you can just DO things.
This now makes the shape of the instrumentalisation obvious: Conservatives and rightwingers more generally have always looked at cultural change through the lens of moral decline, and in the case of the fertility crisis, this lens is actually matching pretty well. It fits even better if you search for contrafactuals: As Lyman Stone points out, conservatives have very broadly more kids than moderates, which have more than liberals. This becomes even more striking if you look at the highest fertility groups, which is basically identical with a list of known religious ultraconservative groups.
So the right tries to instrumentalize the fertility crisis to push for whatever part of these conservative cultures is their personal hobbyhorse, be it female disempowerment, increased marriage rates, or clamping down on modern sex & dating norms, without bothering to look too closely on whether the shoe really fits that well. Which also readily explains leftwing dismissals: It's easy to find stats for any of those issues, showing that each, at least in isolation, does not really fix anything. And if that is the case, and the guy arguing in favor is blatantly doing the same for just about any issue, what does it tell you about them? Again, nothing good.
Nevertheless though, it seems obvious to me that we are failing on fertility for the simple reason that we are hardly even trying. A single look into the lifestyle of the ultrafertile makes it clear that all the personal reasons seculars usually give are basically bullshit as well. The ultrafertile earn less, give more to charity and on top have more kids anyway. And their kids aren't, objectively, doing badly, either. Nor am I compelled by the pronatalists to do anything in any way, at least so far. The instrumentalisation, as it exists, is mostly secluded to online anon accounts or conservative sermons in church. Unlike climate change laws, I can easily ignore them.
All of this is so silly to me. The answer is women's education reduces women's fertility, and there's no real way around this problem. Women, when given the choice, do not choose children, and so by allowing them to support themselves and choose whether to have kids, they choose not to.
Everywhere education of women has increased has seen a precipitous drop in fertility. Women's education is genocide:
Meh, its not that, most data shows people not even pairing, despite evidence for the desire to do so.
More options
Context Copy link
This is loading the question. I was thinking about it a lot and to me one of the major factor is that the whole society is built around women. Women are huge net negatives when it comes to direct welfare costs, they draw more than they pay in taxes. Moreover, women employment is largely in state or semi-state professions like teachers or bureocrats or bullshit jobs. Thirdly, women are using the whole state apparatus in their favor, I would not be the first one to note that in a sense women married state. Just name a government policy and it disproportionally benefits women: progressive taxation, public healthcare, welfare, public employment or even other things like military draft etc.
So in my eyes it is not a simple natural "choice", the whole environment is built so that women do not have any duties and do not shoulder any burden of society - they do not even reproduce. The choice of "hey, here is free stuff and no responsibility" is an artificially created one. They get stuff for themselves and then renege on any responsibility or duty. Just slash government spending to let's say 5% GDP and watch how women fall in line and start to actually plan and work for their security. Suddenly having family and social ties suddenly becomes more important.
I don't disagree with the problems you've listed, and I do think they are serious problems. However, I also am not sure that they would fix the problem. China has one of the worst birth rates in the world, but as far as I know, it has almost none of the same social welfare policies that we do; most Chinese citizens are on their own in regards to providing for their own welfare or paying for their own healthcare.
Of course, they're pretty different styles of country, liberal democratic republics versus authoritarian state capitalist "republics". Maybe the variables are different.
More options
Context Copy link
So you're saying the problem isn't women's education, it's women voting, and that the two have never been thoroughly separated enough to notice?
Because the women are voting for those policies which benefit themselves. Women voted to marry the state.
It makes sense to build the entire environment around women, when they are having babies, no different than birds nesting. That's the wrench in the gears. Women have all this advantage because they are the ones who have to have children and that's a lot of work. But they take the advantage and don't fulfill their end of the bargain. They have abandoned their duty, so much that they don't even believe it is a duty any longer.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Incorrect. Israel is interesting opposite case. They have large urban population, educated women and everything. And even secular population has TFR above 2. Education is important, but there are other things as well. Also there are logical things, for instance education may work indirectly - not indoctrination or that it educates women not to have children. In fact fertility has famous U shape as low income uneducated women have more children than middle class women, but upper class women rebound in around $100k and cross toward 2.1 TFR at income of around $200k. So there may be a different issue and indirect effects. As women spend the most fertile years at school and then they work to wipe out debt, they are not reproducing until after late 20ies early 30ies. Then they usually have smaller families as they spent 10 fertile years on school and work. Who knows, maybe there can be a system where women have children first and they will have something like GI bill when they will get free education if they have two or three children or some such. Like KaiserBauch mentioned, it is a complex problem.
The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
The Byzantine Catholic belt in Europe has mostly replacement-ish fertility with generally educated women and high female LFPR- and some of the lowest fertility rates in the world on their borders. Conservative social norms and high importance of religion work, even when it isn't Jews.
More options
Context Copy link
I really wish this stupid, vapid phrase would die. At the very least, I would have hoped no one would use it here, let alone as a standalone, low-effort response.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
In theory I agree, but I think one needs to ask how Israel got around the problem. Because I'm not so sure it's that easy for other groups to copy, at least right away.
Here's my hypothesis: Lots of factors cause TFR to drop, but the main factors are modernity and urbanization. Certainly it's easy to see why these would be expected to be significant factors. Before the industrial revolution, most people worked in agriculture and lived in rural areas. In such areas, arguably there was a direct financial incentive to reproduce: More children meant more free help on the farm. So arguably cultures developed which put a high value on fertility.
When industrialization comes in and people start moving to cities, there is significantly less incentive to reproduce and thus with modernity fertility predictably falls.
Arguably, modernity and urbanization are analogous to putting antibiotics in the Petri dish. Yes, it will have an effect for a while but eventually the effect wears off as you select for resistance to the antibiotic.
Arguably, Jewish people were one of the first, and perhaps the first, population to get hit with the antibiotic effects of urbanization. Even in pre-industrial Europe and the Middle East, Jews were heavily concentrated in cities. So it's reasonable to think that Jews have a head start on developing cultural and/or genetic resistance to the fertility-depressing effects of urbanization compared to other groups.
Which is why it may not be so easy for other groups to just copy Israel. Possibly those other groups are 100 years behind.
I think the example of Jews here is complicated because of events last century: "there are fewer Jews than there should be" is a sentiment that I've heard expressed multiple times even as an outsider, and seems broadly believed in the community (willing to hear closer accounts, if anyone wants to offer). That's a hugely pronatalist meme that probably outweighs things like urbanism and education.
It's unclear that there would be such a consensus on the issue without that shared generational trauma.
Both you and @omw_68 are wrong, for the simple reason that non-Israeli Jews have very low fertility. On the other hand, the nonzionism hypothesis- that Israeli society is set up so that everyone is trying to imitate a higher fertility group, even if indirectly- passes the immediate smell test.
I would have to disagree with this: The Jewish population in the United States is exploding. Certainly among the ultra-religious, but even among the somewhat religious there is steady growth.
I don't think this is inconsistent with my hypothesis.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The best data I could find is a decade and a half out of date, so I'd be happy to be corrected by something newer, but the data there is not showing any opposite effect, just weaker and more restricted effects. TFR of older (40-44) Israeli women who have graduated college is about the same as those who only graduated high school, but both are significantly less than that of those who didn't finish high school.
More options
Context Copy link
Your one counterexample is not going to disprove all the overwhelming other evidence of the trend. It's one outlier amid a sea of data points all pointing the same direction.
I suppose you could combine education with indoctrination so that you don't lose the fertility drop of educating women, but I doubt it, and certainly no one is trying.
Yes, I know, that's the problem in itself: education reduces fertility. There's never going to be enough rich women to make up the decreases at the lower ends, so the phantom right side of the U is just that: a ghost. If you scaled the graph by people, and not fertility per capita, then the U would disappear.
More options
Context Copy link
Isn't that a distinctly Anglo problem? I suppose continental Europe also has private schools, but that's not what everyone is aiming for, and I've never heard of public-university-educated women being more fertile.
Not necessarily. There is often implicit understanding that after school you have to develop your carrier. Why study law or medicine when you then go straight toward part-time work and childcare? You will have gap in your CV and your opportunity may be lost forever as your social network moves on. It is a trap of school, carrier, maybe some real estate and material security. It is not only after 30 where some women feel secure to search for relationships, while others select to be childless to pursue their career more - it is not as if the treadmill stops after 5 or 10 years.
This is inherently male behavior, with huge caveat that men historically did that in families. Men could work 12 hours a day while their wife was at home with kids even when husband was 20. For women it is possible only if childless or with immense pressure and/or external help. The reverse situation where high powered attorney returns to work at 26 with her toddlers at home with her husband is exceptionally rare. It is not how things work, men and women are not interchangeable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What's the evidence that this is the true root cause, over or relative to any other number of competing explanations?
More options
Context Copy link
Have we tried every possible way around it?
I can't recall precisely where I read it (I think it might have been on the Artist Formerly Known As Twitter?), but someone suggested that, if the educational environment were more accommodating of studentesses with babies, women would be less likely to postpone or forego reproduction for the sake of their education, and other women, upon seeing a classmate or three carrying a baby in her arms, might activate the wiring inside her that makes her want a baby of her own. (Cf. the attempts to deter teenage pregnancies by issuing realistic infant dolls to girls in secondary school, which had the exact opposite effect.)
(Also, even if one ignores the cost to women, increasing fertility by steering women away from education would still not be an un-alloyed victory, as the children thus produced would be growing up with less knowledgeable mothers.)
One, the education of women was not intended to prevent births; two, the people promoting women's education typically promote it for women of all ethnic backgrounds; three, the usual examples of genocide-by-preventing-births involve stopping women of the targeted group who wish to reproduce from doing so.
No, I don't think we have tried all the possible ways around it, but having identified the main problem, perhaps we could simply address the problem instead of trying out one farfetched kludge after another.
OK, but what about the men who are denied admission to those programs, and therefore are less able to provide for a wife and child? What, in other words, about the male doctors who never were, who were denied so females could go to medical school and quit working by 35?
The stated goal of many of these programs, and the way they measure success, is by reducing fertility. This is a holdover of the overpopulation, population bomb, thinking that was coincident with the push to promote women's equality worldwide.
Keeping women from being educated, even if it solves the problem of declining fertility, introduces two new problems:
I. A mother whose husband becomes abusive to her or her children will, if she has been denied education, be less able to provide for herself and her children without her husband's coöperation; this makes it much harder to stop domestic abuse.
II. A mother without a solid understanding of the world will be much more vulnerable to claims of "Your children are in grave danger from everything I don't like!" or "My magic beans will guarantee that your children enjoy perfect health!"
(At two he knew/the Bible through,/An infant prodigy;/His parents cried,/'Our joy and pride/we've raised on Q. R. V.' --Edward Gorey, The Universal Solvent)
Thus, if we are concerned about falling fertility rates, it would behoove us to figure out how to make women's education not reduce women's fertility.
What might help is if the more extreme of you guys could at least sound like you don't hate women.
I'm an outlier here, but were I a normal woman of around 25-30 considering marriage and kids, I wouldn't touch one of you with a ten foot barge pole, given the comments on here reeking of "we hate women". I'm going too far?
What do you call the laundry list of "women shouldn't get educated, women shouldn't be allowed vote, women shouldn't have a career (but at the same time women should not live off men), women shouldn't get a choice about who they marry, women shouldn't get a choice about having children, women should not be permitted to divorce (but if the man wants to divorce for a younger, more fertile woman to have more kids then that's fine)" and the other string of "what's wrong with the world? women!"
None of which sounds like "If we marry, I would respect and cherish you and work on a happy home and family" but rather "Your only function is to be my fuck-toy who gets knocked up on my schedule, and otherwise do everything to keep me happy, but don't bother me with your emotions or anything to do with raising the six kids I insist you have, as The Man and Head of the House I get to decide on everything including on whether you have any money of your own or not, and if I want to leave you penniless this is how it should be".
I'm always down for pushback against our resident misogynists not wanting to uphold the male end of the historic social contract. But I haven't actually heard one of them say that.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think there is any single person here that believes all those things. You're conflating the traditionalists with the black pillers so a lot of those conflict, and both stances combined are probably a minority opinion on here.
More options
Context Copy link
What is a woman? There are plenty of likable women out there, but there are also tons of not-so-likable women. Creating new laws and regulation that favor women has led us to cratering birthrates, maybe we should try something else for once.
Where is that laundry list? Is that an unwarranted demand for rigor on my part here, or is such hyperbolic woman-hate really so prevalent on this website and the woman-skeptic web in general?
I am not going to trawl through past comment threads for the exact quotes because that's too damn disheartening, but yeah - previous discussions of "why isn't anyone having babies?" has devolved into "it's because women! the uppity bitches!" and solutions suggested include:
knowing their placebeing ready to be wives and mothers as soon as they hit twenty at the oldest)And then there are the guys who really don't like women and want to put them in their proper place.
*If you think I'm joking, no indeed past discussions have also gone "women should use their natural advantages to get ahead in the workplace so if Boss offers promotion in exchange for sleeping with him, go for it". No guy has said he'd let his boss fuck him for a promotion, but then again they are all Straight Manly Men of Talent who got ahead on pure merit, unlike women who only have their fleeting sexual attractiveness to offer, right?
Well I think we are all on a spectrum on all of these different assertions. Some of these are a little contradictory, depending on whether this is coming from a more traditional or non-traditional perspective.
I imagine that even the hardest of communists see an issue with running out of comrades if nobody in the world has any kids, even these evil conservatives whose kids we will all convert.
I hope we can both agree on some basic facts such as :
There are some other assertions that are more debatable, like
That one is more of a correlation/causation problem, maybe the inevitable fertility cliff was to happen no matter what with modernity, but [single] women do vote for policies that seem to decrease fertility.
I disagree with that one, but there is obviously a huge problem in how feminists vow to handle these nuanced matters. #BelieveAllWomen #NotCarolynBryantTho
Rare, but it happens. Lee Boo Jin / Im Woo Jae
Why are you so upset about this anyway?
Would it be okay if women were 100% legally allowed to pursue a career, go to college, etc -what we have now or better- but society was relentlessly shaming women who refuse to get married and have 2+ kids?
Or would you also be upset about that?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, solving one problem often involves creating other problems which themselves need to be mitigated.
That is not an excuse to avoid the problem, nor does it require that the new problem be of equal worth as the one solved.
Fertility is so much more important than anything you said that your complaints are trivial. There is nothing more important in the world than who is around to live in it.
By the way, I don't have a solution for people being vulnerable to charlatans. I consider it an unsolvable problem inherent to human nature, and even if it isn't, it's not so bad as to threaten extinction.
Exactly. If we assume, for the sake of argument, that your hypothesis is correct, then solving the 'women financially dependant on abusive husbands' problem has created the problem of 'the way we do education is destructive to fertility', which needs to be mitigated by rearranging the education system!
I hardly think 'this risks turning half the population into appliances for the other half' is a trivial complaint.
There may not be a perfect solution, that dispenses with the issue once and for all, but it is possible for the problem to be made lesser.
This maps very neatly onto what I suspect to be the motivations of many in the European governments who are backsliding on freedom of speech. The last time a European nation was run on the explicit ideology that 'those of our bloodline matter, other people don't' cost nearly forty million lives.
Both arguments posit a grave threat to humanity (fertility decline/mass warfare and genocide); both see solving them as easier without the constraint of having to respect the rights of individuals (women's equality/free speech); both claim that the issue with which they are concerned is so important that the trampling of Liberty is trivial in comparison.
Understand why you do not accept that argument from the Eurocrats, and you will comprehend why I do not accept it from you.
In absolute terms, no. By comparison to the extinction of the human race? Definitely.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The state already pays for this or it gets the ex-husband to pay?
Does education even help here? Are women, or men for that matter, taught about what supplements might or might not have any benefit? Does the teaching sink in? Are the teachings actually correct? Everyone was taught a lot of nonsense about the food pyramid, saturated fat vs sugar vs whatever...
Some people are just stupid/unwise that can't be changed. Send a stupid, unwise person to school and they'll come out just as they went in.
Basic financial competence is not taught, nor is it required even for teaching or providing information to others. I know it's just an anecdote but apparently nobody thought that this woman is unsuitable for giving financial advice even after coming to worldwide prominence for spectacular financial incompetence. It's systemic, like how educators decide to teach their students badly (re phonics) because it's a fashionable fun fad in the education world.
Education can teach skills like engineering or mathematics but it doesn't seem to teach anything like these general life heuristics you're gesturing at. You'd think people would learn about compound interest and credit cards, the concept is pretty simple... But they don't!
And how many of those advocating for an end to women's education wholeheartedly support this?
I was thinking more along the lines of:
Less 'these are the precise steps to protect your baby' and more 'how the physical components of the world function, so that when someone makes a claim that doesn't line up with that knowledge, you can be on the look-out for what part of their anatomy they are speaking from'.
I think that most such people believe that there should be some payout/divorce mechanics for abuse, they just think that the standards for proving abuse are too low. No fault divorce means that there is scarcely any need to prove abuse. Also, there's a welfare state so that even if there were no such payments it's not forced destitution.
I think it'd be great if the education system taught this but they don't teach it, at least not effectively. Women are consistently more anti-nuclear than men, I guess it's innately male-coded. Women, on average, are more likely to support anti-nuclear Green parties.
Or consider astrology. Nobody taught astrology in schools but women are a lot more into it than men! It's not to say that men are more rational than women in a global sense, men do plenty of stupid things and die young. But there's a certain kind of rationality that men have and women, in general, lack and I don't see how education can fix this. Can young men be taught not to take risks? I doubt it.
More options
Context Copy link
Just to be clear, for the argument to be valid, the majority of a given side has to support it, yes? And I can count on you to maintain this standard the next time we get into a conversation on trans issues, right?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Her errors were not financial. Oddly, they were social. She trusted a random cold caller who had some of her easiest-stolen personal information and was running a con.
Handing over money to strangers by deception is a financial error primarily and only secondarily social. A social error would be a faux pas.
More options
Context Copy link
This social vulnerability of Mrs. Cowles actually points to the real problem though.
Returning to our original concern:
The people pushing these kinds of approaches are generally not backing it with nearly-ironclad scientific literature that can be picked apart only with an advanced degree. At most there might be something that kind of looks like a study if you don't squint too hard at it. Usually it's a headline with zero backing: for an example, an anti-vaccine friend recently gave me a picture of a man in a doctor coat, with a label stating that six children died in the clinical trial for a particular vaccine. Attempts to find out what the study was, how big the sample size was, what the death count in the control was, etc. have been so far unsuccessful.
Mrs. Cowles' knowledge of the financial system didn't matter because she wasn't engaging on that level at all: there were undoubtedly financially-related red flags, but she wasn't applying that knowledge. And if our goal is to create mothers resistant to incorrect health decisions pushed by someone with an agenda, their degree won't matter because it's far easier to take an approach that bypasses the topical discussion in favor of social weaknesses, which don't seem to be remedied as part of a higher education.
Teaching bullshit detection in schools is probably fraught with culture war concerns (undoubtedly everyone will be attempting to teach only how to detect the outgroup's bullshit). But if we're not going to do that, I'm not sure a master's degree is going to change vulnerability to these kinds of arguments. It's the equivalent of an intimidating twelve-foot-high barbed wire fence, but the gate is secured with a cheap rusted combination lock set to 1234.
And is a mother with no education more likely, or less likely, to know that she should ask these questions, or understand the terminology?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah. Everyone says, when they hear about scams, "how stupid must that person be to fall for such an obvious trick! I would never be that dumb!"
But unless you're as cold-hearted and unsocial as I am, it's the entire script of con artists and scammers to lead people along and convince them bit by bit to do what, if they weren't being pressured and stressed deliberately and thought about it rationally, they would never ever do.
Most people never would be that dumb. With this kind of scam, as soon as the mark shows too much awareness, the con moves on to the next mark.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What is "the group" here? I am going to presume you would say "white people," to which I would say that nobody is "imposing" college attendance on white women, to which you will likely bring up DEI, to which I will bring up that DEI is used to juice black university attendance as well. Is "the group" simply "humanity"?
The group is the gens, of course.
It works on everyone regardless of their race, but I will say that the stated goal of many of these programs, and one of the ways they measure success, is by reducing fertility and getting those women who have 5-10 kids to have 3-5, the 2-5 to stop at 2, and the 2 to only have 1.
Women's education is just as much genocide in Africa and India as it is everywhere else in the world, by the definition above.
Which gens?
Whichever one is having their girls educated, of course. The method works the same regardless of race or gens.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's not a hard and fast rule though. I have a BS, MBA, and have four kids. There are others like me. Do we have a gene or cultural meme that helps us choose to reproduce when given other options? If so, and it's inheritable, the world will eventually be filled with highly educated, fecund women.
You have four kids, but why not nine? I assert that you would always have been among the higher-fertility in your population, but the difference is that you think 4 is a lot and not the median.
Well, if it's the societal norm to have that many, you run out of space for all those people quite quickly. That's not a problem if a lot of them die in infancy and/or you're conquering a continent or two in the meantime, but the former condition is quite unpleasant and the latter is frowned upon nowadays (unless...?) Nevertheless, at some point the median* woman needs to be content with having just about 2.1 children, and neither rad trads nor radfems seem to be able to achieve that.
*Technically it'd be the modal woman, but if that's too far off from the median then you get a constant churn of intra-group population replacement, which doesn't seem like a basis for a particularly stable society.
More options
Context Copy link
The number is set largely because I married 9 years ago, had a kid close to every other year, and now we're getting older. If we had more time, maybe we could wait a couple more years until the oldest two can go without car seats, then have room in a minivan/suv for a 5th-6th. Don't really want to go full-minibus but there are a few families at my parish who have them.
The point is, 4 is over replacement, and I did 4 even with education, starting late (by historical comparisons), and modernity. If 3/4 of my kids marry and reproduce 2-5 kids each (with other children of large families), over time my great-grand children will inherit the Earth.
My Maternal Grandma had 12, but that was a modern miracle of formula and sudden access to antibiotics and vaccines. My Paternal Grandma had 5. My mom had 3 (but 2 miscarriages). My aunts and uncles save a couple all have 2-6 kids. (and the couple who don't seem to have health issues)
My husband is one of five. His siblings have all had 2-4 kids. While dating, one thing that drew us to each other was the idealization of having grown up in a family with "the right amount" of kids. Which to us was at least 3 or more.
If there is a "have kids despite modernity" gene, I have a high likelihood of it and have a good chance of passing it along. If this gene also encourages such people to be drawn to each other, all the better.
I have listened to many such claims from men and women. In the end, majority of those cases were just excuses. The thing is, that these people are not having problem with dating or finding a partner. They have problems with any relationships, period. A normal social life works with Dunbar number where you have 1-2 intimate friends, 5 very good and reliable friends that help you, 15 friends that invite you for birthdays etc, 50 or so members of your tribe - people with whom you can create groups when necessary, who vouch for you in a new job or who will group with you if you meet them on vacation. The rest are at least good colleagues or contacts that will let's say write you a linkedin review if asked. However the way you develop this network is the other way around, you meet people and then move them closer to more intimate circles. You do not hookup and spread your legs to randos from internet every other day like a lottery. Life partner will not fall on your head from the sky, you don't order him from dating app according to your excel checklist - it requires constant work cultivating social network and relationships.
Most often people who whine about how hard dating is have problem with any relationships. I know literal loners who do not know anybody with whom to go out for a beer or who would invite them for birthday party. Heck, they often do not even think to call their own mothers for months. They are socially inept, they have anxieties even thinking about calling a call center. No wonder that these hermits cannot find any dates. Who would want to go to such an empty and parched social circle - and more importantly where would they meet them? Ordering doordash for her permanent homeoffice? Just look at reddit and nonstop threads of thing like "how to meet people"? What the heck? You are 30 years old and do not know how to meet people and make acquaintances or friends? This is something that 5 years old do naturally on playground, what is next - asking how to wipe your ass and wash you hands? It is depressing.
If your daughter had healthy social circle, then for sure some of her friends would either be male, or her female friends would have their own brothers or their boyfriend's friends she could naturally meet during social occasions such as birthday parties or any other activity. This social circle serves for vetting via gossip as well as matchmakers of potential mates in similar social and cultural milieu. If she was competent in social situations, it would be no trouble to find somebody interesting to have relationship with. But most likely she is incompetent, just guessing from her stance that dating is "waste of time". What a stupid thing to say - every social interaction has potential to develop into friendship or even dating and romantic relationship. It is opposite of wasting time.
More options
Context Copy link
I've found complaints along these lines always questionable; Women aren't better at all, they just waste their time in different ways, such as social media. These time wastes are also itself a function of loneliness and go down once in a relationship, and go down even further once you have kids. I can understand being worried about loser gamer guys in, say, low-end service industries, but if you're in STEM already there really is no reason at all to consider gaming of all things a dealbreaker.
In general, as a dad now looking at young adults, both women and men seem inappropriately immature for their age to me, stuck in a prolonged state of juvenility, mostly due to ultra-long & easy education, and a general lack of obligations and challenges. But the young women nevertheless feel themselves superior to the men no matter how similar they are and, worst of all, are supported and coddled by society in this view.
More options
Context Copy link
Is it gaming as a hobby that is the problem, or is it gaming to the point where it consumes your life and responsibilities? The latter she can definitely get around just by meeting enough men. Even in STEM, far from everyone has that problem. The former is a lot more difficult given just how popular gaming is these days. While she can go to bars or clubs (lower odds of gamers as they tend to stay home), those are less than ideal for the purpose of looking for an actual relationship. Looking for them at part time jobs and active hobbies is the main other way I can imagine you would filter them out.
That said, if her problem is with gaming as a hobby, maybe she should reconsider her standards. If a man is responsible and takes care of the things he needs to do, then why is it so bad that he spends his downtime gaming? If you need a man who not only has his life well put together, but are also only interested in those whose hobbies are high status, then your dating pool quickly becomes very small.
More options
Context Copy link
And you don't tell your son with money problems to get a job, because he just doesn't believe in working?
I'm not sure if I understand your point but, yes, it is very common for American fathers to tell their sons they're sure there are jobs out there that will hire them, but not have any actually useful information about looking for them.
His point is that @fribble should tell his daughter to go to church; whether she believes in God or not is irrelevant.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I lucked out by meeting my husband at work. I also am more naturally prone to end up in male-dominiated spaces, so I basically was the only women in a department of 20+ men. I had multiple options and picked the best of the bunch. Not sure how I'd have done it if I was more attractive than autistic.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Nine kids is historically almost unheard of outside of high infant mortality areas.
The Quebecois were pretty close for a while, and they were 'normal for the nineteenth century' religious rather than the literal Amish.
We were more religious than most of the northern US and western europe. Something like southern europe would be a good analogy, until the 60s, where we caught up all in one shot. Having as many children as possible was heavily encouraged by the church, and was even regularly discussed as an act of resistance against the anglos, it was called "la guerre des berceaux" or "the crib war". And ultimately, it is probably why we managed to avoid what we refer to as "louisianisation".
More options
Context Copy link
I don't know what the infant mortality was in 19th century Quebec, but it basically doesn't matter. Even if it was low, such cultures are the exception rather than the norm over 200,000 years of human history.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My father was one of ten, he had seven, my siblings have from three to eight kids. Neighbor in high school had 23, seventeen with the first wife, who subsequently expired as one does. Nearly everyone in their social circle has 6-12 kids. It's not nearly unheard of, you just gotta live in the sticks with the plain folk.
It is indeed practically unheard of at the country level.
Sure, but "unheard of" and "practically unheard of at the country level" are two vastly different statements.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My grandmother had seven; my grandfather had eight (the seven he had with my grandma and one illegitimate daughter that was raised alongside her half-siblings). I'm a millennial. These sorts of numbers were common a few generations ago.
From "Dégénération" by Mes Aïeux:
Or, as the English version puts it:
I wasn't an accident, but my sister was.
Seven, much less fourteen children, surviving to adulthood on a regular basis has never been the case. Here is a time series for "effective" fertility rate. For the UK and the US it only goes back to the early 20th century, but for Sweden it goes back to 1751. This has never exceeded 3.5 children in any of these countries.
Obviously there are families that buck the trend, but that doesn't take away from what's normal and what isn't.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
One might posit that it is not education in general that makes women not want children, but rather what specific lessons they are taught at institutions for higher learning. If I were a social scientist not worried about career suicide, I would look into whether there is a causative relationship between exposure to feminist ideology and not wanting a family. It would certainly make sense that an ideology whose prime thinkers take pride in criticizing motherhood, degrading men, and advising women to sleep around and postpone marriage would result in fewer marriages and children.
True! I went in for Mechanical Engineering, ended up in Information Science because I couldn't handle fluid dynamics. Even Information Science had a bit of woo in it, but I mostly avoided the real mind-killing stuff.
More options
Context Copy link
I've gotten sucked into the mommy wars section of Substack lately, and my impression is that it does go a layer deeper than that. College educated women want status for their ability to do things like write, reference interesting authors, articulate cultural and educational opinions, and so on. In the past, women educated in that fashion had nursemaids. Now, they drive their baby to daycare at four weeks old, and work. Their work does not produce much status, and neither do their children. But with everything going online, it's increasingly difficult to gain status from the things they go to college for either, so the popular ones are happy because they're popular, and bully the less popular ones, for saying unpopular things. This is not a good state of affairs, middle class women should be able to do a bit of cultural generation while their children are in daycare or school, and generate positive feelings about their lives. Feminists did not help with that, merely chaining them to fake desk jobs and bloated school systems instead of their kitchens. And the ones at home don't sound happy either, because they never get a break at all.
I, again, don't have a solution, but giving up on women doing classic feminine things like writing essays to each other, and making everyone nursemaids again seems like the wrong direction to be pushing in.
This doesn't really sound like the problem is with education, but more that the mothers have zero time to do stuff outside their immediate duties. Given modern work hours and convenient household appliances, part of me wants to question that premise. But taken on its face, I would assume poorly educated mothers should face a similar problem where they want to their life to have meaning beyond kids and use whatever skillset they have to attain status, but just can't find the time and energy to do so. In other words, what you are pointing out is a problem with the overall structure of society, not women attaining skills and knowledge at higher education.
Otherwise, what is keeping the intellectual women from organizing book clubs, starting a podcast, or using their skillset to discuss the state of the world over a glass of wine?
The limiting factor is mostly sustained attention. I brought my kids over to my friends house the other day to play with her kids, and it was nice, I'd like to do it more often, but a child needed something about every 5 minutes. I'm sure this gets to be less frequent as the youngest children are older, but it has been about 7 years of this for us now, which is certainly not nothing. Her husband was looking forward to returning to his trades job after a month of parental leave, because it was less chaotic and allowed more sustained attention.
The parents arguing on Substack seem to consist of some parents who want to vent, often because they're playing on hard mode. Their husband is gone until evening, they have six children spaced very closely together, the youngest is a baby or toddler, and they're homeschooling the other ones. Then someone pipes up and says: you can just teach your children to not be like that. Arguing ensues.
Have you considered hanging out with families that have kids who are a bit older? Little kids love teenagers and tweens and will prefer to bother them instead. And girls don't really need to be coaxed to not complain about it.
Sure, if I manage to befriend anyone. We were friends before having kids. My mom started making new mom friends when my brother and I got into 4-H.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think you can. Theoretically it's possible. If we raised cattle the way parents are expected to raise kids, nobody would ever get to eat beef. Easing the regulations on parenting and education would help the supply issue.
If the birth rate issue was serious, we probably shouldn't have any child protective services at all, as it should be pretty trivial to demonstrate that the fear of legal repercussions for accidental child harm prevents the average non-abusive parents from adding another child. Exhibit 1 on travel-related regulations reducing birth rate:
When the bureaucrats run out of peasants to feed them they'll find out that you can't eat paper. It's odd how millenials who literally grew up with the libertarian revolution of the web, birthing such bureaucracy-killers as uber, youtube, amazon or onlyfans, still hold dear to letting dead people decide how their life should be lived.
Unironically.
Maybe. "You could do things that are now technically legal, but everyone in your social group will think you're a crappy mom" isn't much of a pitch to have more children.
But I'm currently having an annoying summer break because my youngest, not yet two, needs to be chased down and grabbed everywhere we go, I'm sure I'll feel better about him again in a month.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The women in my family were also teachers with university degrees and 3-4 children, at least three generations back. Which is what stability looks like in an era of low infant mortality; it's not like society even wants a bunch of 15 child underclass families anyway.
I don't have a theory for this. None of them moved to IQ shredder places like San Francisco or New York, and when two of my cousins did, they have in fact not had any children.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link