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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26017 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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Social engineering is not some impossible task, societies have been regularly, consciously selected for all kinds of things for the entire history of human civilization.

If you want smart people to have more children, all you need to do is make life without or with few children less pleasurable, fun and exciting than life with many children. That is a question of incentives, most of them financial. Incentives and disincentives work, they’re why drink-driving rates have fallen by huge amounts for example, because of a feedback loop between high punishments, social stigma and shame. That same loop can be transferred to childlessness.

It is possible to make PMC life with kids more immediately attractive than PMC DINK life. But it requires hefty, substantial redistribution and engineering of tax burdens (neither of these are remotely new to Western countries).

It is possible to make PMC life with kids more immediately attractive than PMC DINK life. But it requires hefty, substantial redistribution and engineering of tax burdens

How do you make family life more appealing to degenerate hedonists than a DINK life of hedonism and degeneracy?

I'd focus on incentives to go from 2 to 4 or more. It's less of a lifestyle change. My fear would be that in current year instead of children conceived and born naturally from heterosexual marriage, incentives would be available to 'married' homosexual men using surrogates.

As long as they’re using first-world eggs, turning third world surrogates into baby factories for affluent Western gay men is of no significant population-level concern.

Depends on how heritable (exclusive) homosexuality is, I would think. If it's not very heritable it works fine, otherwise you're just pushing the problem to the next generation.

Because that's not creepy and corrupt? These sorts tend to be down with the globohomo ideology. Encouraging it's spread is a concern.

If your goal is to make more people, then why worry about gay people making them with sperm donations or surrogates? We're getting far into "feature, not a bug" territory if a policy makes gay people fertile.

I don't want people that badly.

My experience has been that the homosexuals that do this are all in on the globohomo (the other homo) ideology.

That they may do this on their own is bad. That they may be supported via some sort of policy intervention that was to increase hetronormative families is too far for me.

This line of argument reminds me of the "to get people to ride public transit, you don’t have to fix the issues with public transit, you just have to make the experience of traveling by car much much worse" argument I see sometimes.

They’re both true. A lot of US cities have a problem wherein public transport is seen as only for poor people and homeless, and once something becomes a negative class marker it has a stink that’s hard to shake off. Forcing middle class people to use public transport increases cleanliness and safety (because they lobby for it; in NYC the effort to clean up the subway has big support, whereas in LA and SF nobody gives a fuck since only the poorest of the poor use it) and in the long term makes for better transport systems. Countries like Germany and Finland where middle class people use the bus sometimes have a much higher standard of public transport than places like the US where it’s only for poor people without a car / license.

Obviously cleaning up the smelly / scary / dangerous / drug addicted scum is highest priority, as is general cleanliness, but some pressure is probably necessary to provide the initial impetus for a switch.

Taking wealthier people class hostage to improve public transit doesn't work. People just resign themselves to subways with smelly and occasionally aggressive bums in them. And Stockholm Syndrome makes them turn on anyone who does anything about it privately.

And Stockholm Syndrome makes them turn on anyone who does anything about it privately...

Stockholm has a clean, crime-free metro.. Since mass immigration altered Swedish demographics, this requires significant spend on graffiti cleanup and Metro-contracted security staff who are willing to use the necessary force to keep it that way. This continues to happen despite Swedish politics being what it is, because voters are neither morons nor masochists.

For the avoidance of doubt, so does every other sufficiently large Continental European or first-world Asian city. The fact that America can't police public spaces without a level of lethal violence that normies won't tolerate doesn't mean that it is impossible, just that America sucks at policing. The absence of research interest in "Why can't Americans convert taxpayer dollars spent on policing into an absence of crime the way other first-world countries can?" is exhibit A in why criminology as a discipline is a waste of space.

If you want smart people to have more children, all you need to do is make life without or with few children less pleasurable, fun and exciting than life with many children.

How do you do that? It's time is the important thing here, see the complaints about "now my friends are married and have kids they can't come on nights out/trips with us anymore as everything has to be planned around the kids". Raising kids is a second job, and if you dump it all onto the mother, while Dad is the breadwinner - well, we've spent sixty years nuking the traditional family, good luck with getting that back.

If the prospect is "I have five kids and have to look after them" versus "I have one or no kids and pay more tax", some people will prefer to pay more tax and have the ability to "hey if I decide I want to hit the club tonight, I can do that!"

Think of the Parable of the Daycare Charge for Late Pickups.

It's possible to go from DINK to traditional family but you have to be realistic about the lifestyle differences especially with 4 or more children. We may have had 5 or 6 if we'd started earlier. The first 7 years of marriage we were busy being DINK with nights out/trips.

See, I absolutely think the major problem is that we've turned having children from something that naturally happens, 'well of course now you're married and having regular sex, pregnancy is going to occur', into something that needs to be planned like the D-Day Normandy landings. From the scaremongering around abortion (every child a wanted child, as unwanted children are going to be victims of abuse, so if you don't plan it out perfectly then you will be an unwilling parent who will physically and emotionally abuse the child you resent), to the idea that you must be ready so you need the education, the career-building, the having fun while you're young, then settle down to having the perfect kid at the perfect moment with the perfect trajectory for making them successful in life.

I'm not saying you shouldn't consider finances and time and the rest of it when having children, but fuck it. The best way to have more children is just to have more children. No planning. No erecting astrological charts to decide the optimum moment for conception and then forecasting the future. Just do it (to swipe a phrase).

EDIT: That's also part of my dubiousness around this enthusiasm for polygenic selection. We've already made having children, for the people who should be having more kids, so stressful and expensive and high-stakes, now we're going to throw another gallon of accelerant on the bonfire: what, Justin and Pippa, you mean you didn't undergo IVF to create a bunch of embryos that could then be selected for the optimum traits for a Better Baby? You just got pregnant like some Stone Age cavepersons? Ahahaha, surely you must be joking! You're setting up your unfortunate child to be a failure and loser in life with deleterious traits being freely expressed in their genome!

Yeah, that's going to encourage people that having three kids at a minimum is a feasible thing.

I agree absolutely. There's less expectation that children would/should follow naturally from marriage.

The difficulty for me was a working top decile spouse.

The best and brightest of the PMC ladies are indoctrinated very early with plans and pathways. Achievements and career milestones. It's challenging to move past the sunk cost even if continued career progression is unlikely to make you happy.

There was much less planning for 3 and 4 than for 1 and 2. Partly due to experience and mostly that my wife was already full time homemaker after 2.

No erecting astrological charts to decide the optimum moment for conception and then forecasting the future.

It used to be that the astrological charts were used by couples who wanted children and they weren't coming along.

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