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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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So anyway, I was discussing the great replacement theory with a far-righter earlier, and I said that immigration had little to no effect on native birthrates, citing Japan and Korea as examples.

That pointed to a far more likely culprit, education as a whole (not just women’s). South Korea and Japan can’t seem to stop "investing in the future" by making their and their kids’ lives hell. Naturally, to escape the vicious cycle, they end up abolishing the future.

Isn’t it weird that a prominent justification for making money in our society is ‘sending my kids to college’? Anyone who refuses to do so is shamed with accusations of selfishness and not wanting their kids to succeed. They then choose the alternative path where kids aren’t even in the picture, so they’re free to be selfish in peace. We’re copenhagen ethics-ing humanity into slow painless extinction.

Trads like to assign the blame to female education, but most of the arguments apply to men as well. People are wasting 5-15 years of their lives on a very expensive vacation, at best, when they could be having kids. We want them to make that important decision early, and nothing sobers a young man quicker than staring decades of drudgery in the face.

It’s time to abandon our rosy view of Education as just an intolerable burden on the living. The unborn are its primary victims. Your children cry out: “Mum! Dad! Why do you let my Evil Professor keep me here? Why can’t I liiive? “

Say No To School. Choose Life.

IMO female education gets more blame because, historically, women performed all child-raising activity in early years while also performing all homemaking activity. Men could pursue law, pursue a degree, pursue whatever and their only labor obligation toward their wife would be inseminating her. There is a reason for this delineation of labor. A pregnant woman should not be stressed (as happens in white collar professions), a child forms a bond with the mother in early years (we see this in apes), a child should be breastfed directly for a multitude of benefits, and women are better at handling multitasking. Failing to perform motherhood correctly, which should really be conceived as an art and not just a task, results in many extreme invisible costs like increased diabetes, autism, and BPD. There’s a tyranny of the visible here: calculating the cost of feminist-career practices is opaque (like calculating the cost of crime), but calculating the benefits is easy: one more worker drone. So for the sum total efficient good of society, it’s beneficial to not have women pursue intensive high-stress professional careers.

I would still press (as the far righter in question) that in a society where the rich are holding an immense amount of wealth, anything that reduces wage negotiation among the lower and middle class is net bad for median income. So NYC is replacing domestic nurses with foreign nurses to cut costs, while domestic nurses are striking for better conditions and wages. Hyper-inflated competition in an income unequal nation is surely a recipe for a terrible quality of life among median citizens. Instead of NYC hospitals taking a look at themselves (perhaps they need to make gov spending more efficient to pay nurses more; perhaps cut investor compensation at private hospitals), they will just reduce nurse QoL. Which reduces nurse-adjacent professional QoL: now anyone who had the ability to change position and become a nurse no longer sees that as an option, so they further have reduced wage negotiation.

I think it’s probably down to institutionalization of kids. Most of the generations after the boomers were more or less raised by daycares and schools with parents playing a supporting role. So if you take a highly social animal, a wolf or a chimp or something, and raise it in an artificial environment where it doesn’t form the normal social bonds that would form in the wild, it doesn’t seem surprising that such a situation might well depress reproduction in that group of animals (alongside other similar instinctual behaviors like hunting). They don’t know how, to form the bonds necessary to make that happen so they don’t.

I suspect that this has lead to a lot of mental health problems as well. Social animals who can’t form bonds get depressed and sometimes lash out at other animals.

Are children in daycares and schools prevented from socializing with their peers?

Not to the same level as one might form with his natal family. It’s not secure attachment where a child knows he is safe and that his family will always be around and accept him unconditionally. Daycares and schools have staff that changes every year, and possibly more often at a daycare. Kids shuffle in and out as families move or change schools.

If you consider a state of nature, kids would have been raised by close kin. Parents, aunts and uncles, cousins and brothers and sisters. They form strong bonds because they’re always there, and if the child needs help, they care enough to help.