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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33012 thread views

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.

I find concerns about sub-replacement fertility rates to be largely pointless:

  1. It's an inherently self-correcting problem. Fertility below the carrying capacity results in massive selection pressure for more fertility, this weird transition period where memes and genes haven't caught up to our seemingly endless abundance is just that, transitory. Sooner rather than later, particular groups or individuals who persist in higher fertility will fill in the blanks, even if I personally find most such groups rather distasteful.

After all, the future belongs to those who show up.

  1. Even the above is entirely moot, because if you look outside, the Singularity is imminent, once ASI is a reality, manufacturing endless new humans would be a trivial endeavor, assuming you want to do something weird like that. Not that it matters, because economic output and standards of living will end up entirely decoupled from population size, or at least the population of biological humans.

In pretty much no plausible future will population crashes meaningfully impact standards of living, outside perhaps the most sclerotic nations such as Japan and China in the next decade or so. You simply won't notice before it becomes as quaint a problem as worrying about excess horseshit on city streets as the people switch to flying cars..

That's assuming population decline in a vacuum. The 'transitory' nature of selecting for high fertility in, for example, the US would leave it with, proportionally, a lot of Amish and traditionalist types. The transitory nature of selecting for high fertility alongside mass immigration, however, means those who inherit the earth are not the fertile native but rather the excess population of whatever foreign country.

In real world terms that means that the country that is backwards for the longest and in turn manages to maintain its high pre-modernity birthrates the longest will be the one that wins out. There's no reason to hold to any optimism for any modern native population. Profit motivated immigration + low native birthrates + high foreign birthrates = ethnic replacement.

Given that my timelines are less than 10 years for a fully fledged technological singularity to be upon us, I see absolutely no way that we continue struggling with demographic collapse for the 20+ years it would take to be truly debilitating, short of something like a nuclear war, in which case we have bigger problems to worry about.

There's no reason to hold to any optimism for any modern native population. Profit motivated immigration + low native birthrates + high foreign birthrates = ethnic replacement.

You're implicitly speaking about Western "native" populations (as if the US even has a native population, they're almost all immigrants!).

As an Indian, I can only chuckle and pour myself a drink, who exactly is going to be demographically replacing us?

Not that I particularly care about the West becoming a slightly more brown shade of brown, I'm only concerned with economic or social collapse, and those are not on the cards.

I don't understand what technology you are going to be relying on for childrearing. From the way I understand the dangers of technology, they primarily come from very effectively distracting people from propagating themselves. I don't see why anyone would care otherwise.

You're implicitly speaking about Western "native" populations

I am talking about modern native populations. In that sense it might be unclear. I'm not talking modern as in 'exists today', but modern as in, 'has abundance food, electricity, clean running water and functional toilets and the ability to maintain those things'. That mostly encompasses East-Asia and the western world.

(as if the US even has a native population, they're almost all immigrants!)

There is no United States of America without the white people that built it. In that sense most white Americans are native to the US. Other than that I find the 'native' song and dance very tiresome and low brow. I don't think how long someone has occupied an area has much relation to the value of their existence. I'm much more interested in what they actually did whilst they were there. In that sense the short existence of America, measured in centuries, eclipses large swaths the brown world and all the millennia they had to make something out of themselves. But sure, those browns are 'native' to the travesty they call home whilst the Americans are merely 'immigrants' to the place most brown people wish they could live in.

Not that I particularly care about the West becoming a slightly more brown shade of brown, I'm only concerned with economic or social collapse, and those are not on the cards.

We are too reliant on the word 'slightly' here, for my taste. From what I can understand, the demographic change in the US is much more than slight, with a white minority already being a thing for 15 year olds. I'd call it a safe prediction to say that the current paradigm won't last for long. If you only care for the next 10 years then I can see why you wouldn't care. But for a longer term outlook, again, I'd predict rather drastic changes. The most notable one being a lack of a credible 'world police'.

I don't understand what technology you are going to be relying on for childrearing.

Artificial wombs and robo-nannies?

In 10 years? Maybe I'm just a fuddy duddy but that seems optimistic to the point of delusion.

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