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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.

Low birth rates are caused by urbanization, this has been well understood for at least a century.

Ok, what else, I have to close the contest soon:

  • education

  • female education

  • female workplace participation

  • feminism

  • urbanization

  • modernity

  • excessive parental investment

  • immigration

  • irreligiosity

  • birth control

  • high house prices/ cost of living generally

  • quality of available entertainment

  • socialized pensions

A few things that I think contribute but aren't the main causes:

  • People lose their social circles a lot more, first when going to high school, then going to college, then moving for jobs. I think that makes it harder to find a spouse.

  • A trend of long term dating without getting married. I see a lot of couples move in together and live like that for 5 years or more without ever getting engaged. IME one of them thinks (or copes) that they're basically married but one day they just get dumped because, after all, neither of them made any sort of commitment. If a woman does this twice starting in her early twenties then her child bearing years are pretty much gone.

  • The delusion that if you wait around long enough the perfect spouse will drop into your lap. In reality, finding a good husband or wife is like finding a good job or getting into a good college. You should work at it and put yourself out there and make it a priority from a young age. I think people in the past had a more business like view of marriage that was healthier and more realistic than our modern ideas.

The delusion that if you wait around long enough the perfect spouse will drop into your lap. In reality, finding a good husband or wife is like finding a good job or getting into a good college. You should work at it and put yourself out there and make it a priority from a young age.

Yeah. A lot of that is about things like being attractive (Princeton sociologist Catherine Hakim's erotic capital theory) and actually having social capital - not being isolated as all hell.