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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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?
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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.
That's why you do it step-by-step and keep the pressure on and accelerate the pace as it goes deeper. You don't want to give them time to think, you want them disoriented, panicking, and accustomed to doing what you say.
Even smart people get taken in by scams, and afterwards they go "Why did I do that? Why didn't I see how stupid it all was?" but good scammers know how to push buttons.
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Indeed, most women would never fall for that scam.
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