domain:alexberenson.substack.com
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1m ago
It's not that motherhood "sucks" as an activity, but being a stay at home mother does have significant opportunity costs in the form of lost income and other expenses. A million a kid is probably far too much. I suspect you would raise fertility pretty significantly if you paid women merely they wages they would have had if they had not stopped working in a kid-independent way.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
15m ago
I don't know. I think if some activity X is generally banned, but with an exception for Y, then you remove the exception for Y, your action is fairly characterized as "banning Y." You used to be able to do Y. Now you can't. Sounds like a ban to me!
sliders1234
17m ago
You said it was a simple solution to just pay women to have kids. Now it sounds like you are arguing being a mother sucks so we need to pay them a lot of money? How much like a million a kid? More? Obviously we do not have that much government money. So government paying women money to have kids instead of worker would not be viable. At the end of the day women being homemakers and taking care of children has to be funded by basically the earning capabilities of one man (whether direct or indirect thru taxation of men). It sounds like your saying one man can’t make enough money to fund a women staying home which means we should just accept low fertility.
If women prefer being boss babes and going to Bali instead of motherhood then just isn’t a solution. Personally I think the current viewpoint is the propaganda and most would prefer motherhood if society did not pressure them to oppose it. But if Bali is preferred to babies there really is not a solution. Motherhood is evolutionary programmed into females since well it’s necessary to survive so I think it’s the other side doing the propaganda.
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
19m ago
If you have a partner, is she "pure"?
Yes, I’m her one and only. And I’ll admit I’m lucky.
charles
19m ago
What's wrong with C-sections? Let me try to answer my own question. It looks complicated: https://islamqa.info/en/answers/92831/ruling-on-caesarean-births
There appears to be some sort of stigma attached to it, and a belief it makes future pregnancy less likely? I lack the background to know if any of this is true.
SomethingMusic
20m ago
You're right this is not clear, I'll admit to this thought being a little half baked but I want to get it out before I forgot or moved on to other things.
I would assume, based on this, that the increase in selfishness then, would be found in the, non-marginalized, non-favored, demographics, but my vague understanding of the spike in shoplifting is that this is not the case.
My argument is when governance stop enforcing laws unilaterally and starts responding to perverse incentives, that all parties start switching to self interest over mutual growth. In a game theory matrix, the best but 'unstable' outcome is both the government and constituents do wats best for each other, when one party defects for one reason or another, they both slide to following self interest, creating a more stable or predictable, but significantly less beneficial, environment.
I think government action, or often inaction, is probably contributing to the rise in the overtness of these behaviors, but I am not sure the mechanism is any more complicated than, some people will act up if you remove the consequences from their actions.
Why do you think governments are selectively enforcing laws? And what are the consequences of the government making these deliberate choices?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
23m ago
I am not sure where your quote is coming from, I didn't say anything about "more" economic value compared to some other state of affairs.
In any case if your argument is correct it suggests my proposal would be a Kaldor-Hicks improvement. We can simply tax away part of the social gains of raising children and remit it to the women doing the raising and we will all come out better off. Let's get it done!
NewCharlesInCharge
23m ago
With this context, I think I'm actually wrong, and some of the media were right, but perhaps on accident.
Interesting to note that this section of the law, passed in 1953, appears to be designed to attack the KKK. The section is titled "Prohibited Secret Societies and Activities": https://www.ncleg.net/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/HTML/ByChapter/Chapter_14.html
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
26m ago
Solution isn’t simple. Countries have tried economic incentives and mostly failed or slowed the decline.
This is because the economic incentives they offer are pitiful compared to the costs they are asking people to bear. Defraying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs and lost income with tiny payments.
It also introduces a huge deadweight loss of higher taxes. Since most of these ideal heavily bread females would be supported by heavily taxed men who are their husbands it’s wooing just further depress economic activity. The past would have expected the man to man up and work 80 hrs a week if he needed and transfer directly to his wife instead of using the government as a middleman.
I am skeptical that doubling the hours of work men do would totally compensate for the loss of all the extra workers in the form of women. Structuring the transfer this way also requires a women become almost totally dependent on a man, which has its own issues.
Probably far easier to propandize all the Instagram executives. Instead of filling young females with attractive girls traveling to Bali bombard them with pretty pregnant chicks with 5 children and a dutiful loving husband. You can change economic incentives sure but changing what people value changes how the evaluate incentives. If real life hot pussy is begging men to man up I am guessing there is no shortage of men willing to work 80 hours a week for that deal.
I am skeptical about the number of men who would sign up for this, or the extent to which women could be propagandized into it. We had this kind of arrangement once. We ceased having it for a reason.
hydroacetylene
28m ago
They’re sometimes bound to do so by treaty, but they frequently don’t IIRC. Nobody actually wants criminals hanging around their country, after all. I think there’s been cases of the US paying big bucks to convince various foreignstans to accept their own citizens back.
SomethingMusic
30m ago
Selfishness doesn't always come at significant cost to someone else, but I'd argue the choice to pick former over the ladder does imply some amount of selfishness in the term of short term gain over long term benefit.
hydroacetylene
31m ago
I think it’s because they don’t trust men to do what they say they’ll do. The feminist attack on Harrison butker- aimed at their own audience- wasn’t ‘you deserve a career’. It was an evidence free assertion that he beats his wife. A lot of the ‘why do women give up X to not be dependent on a man’ has an answer, and that answer is ‘they think a man will abuse them if they’re dependent, or otherwise not fulfill his side of the bargain because he thinks he can get away with it’. This belief may be neurotic and unfounded, but it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t exist and inform the behavior of a lot of very risk averse people.
I encourage you to go talk to the socially conservative housewives in whichever sect that practices female domesticity is easiest to access; they will tell you that their particular sect has figured out how to make men behave, but women out in the world have to go into the corporate world, poor things, because they can’t depend on their men.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
32m ago
Sure, selective enforcement is a concerning aspect of any potential criminal law, but this is also a fully general complaint. I don't want to protect right-wing rioters or left-wing rioters as a matter of principle though - it's the rioting I object to, not the political positioning of the rioters.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
32m ago
Wasn't something like that the canonical origin of Night City, of Cyberpunk fame?
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
34m ago
Also, the 'irony' is that a woman can genuinely have all it all if they locate a reliable husband and lock him down early in life, since he can support her ambitions in ALL THREE of those roles. He can give her kids, support her raising them, take her on trips and parties and generally have fun, and support her career ambitions where needed.
This is my lived experience, but it took my wife entering a well-compensated corporate position in her mid '30s where her superiors were mothers of young children for her to entertain the idea of kids. Before that (and I mean, from her late-teens when I first met her), she had a laser-focus on her career.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
37m ago
As I neurotically must bring up in every topic on fertility, the “Abraham Orthodox” (Amish, Haredi) have retained very high birth rates despite the latter living in the densest and most expensive part of the country and having very little money. What they do differently, and what others don’t do, is (1) make motherhood the only real female social value, and (2) train women at a young age to be mothers adept at homemaking tasks. My hobby horse comes out of this battle unscathed.
hydroacetylene
40m ago
Obesity isn't a trust issue, it's a selfish issue, where people would rather eat themselves into oblivion instead of finding a healthy balance and self restraint.
This isn’t true.
I can buy a large pizza and a 12 pack and settle into videogaming while pigging out. I can make an organic healthy meal for after returning from the gym. These imply the exact same level of concern for my fellow man- it’s simply a differentiation between long term consequences(for myself) vs short term pleasure(also for myself). Like sure, one indicates better character than the other. But it’s not about selfishness. It’s about- I think mostly time preference and discipline.
ResoluteRaven
41m ago
A few miscellaneous stories to start us off:
Peru
The president of Peru has signed a decree classifying gender identity disorders as a mental illness and offering coverage for them under the national health insurance plan.
Thailand
The Thai government is considering building a planned city to relocate the business districts of Bangkok due to rising sea levels, perhaps inspired by the similar Indonesian project to relocate their capital.
Ireland
Ireland is moving to recognize Palestinian statehood, making them the first nation in western Europe to do so, as far as I know. The historical relationship between the Irish and Palestinian nationalist movements means this was perhaps to be expected.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
41m ago
Would you still find the fourth point bad if the resulting mask-off mandate were primarily used against your tribe - say, retroactive dragnet identification of the Jan 6th protesters from photos, or police demanding that any future garden-variety right-wing protester unmask while being fully aware that the leftists are already standing by with cameras to feed a well-oiled machine of crowdsourced doxxers ready to send form letters to his bank and employer?
This sort of thing has been a long-standing concern of lefties dating back to when they had a more credible claim that institutional power is aligned against them. The way I see it, the right wing, in its knee-jerk opposition to masks and affinity towards police powers, is interrupting the left in the midst of making a rare mistake borne of their denial that they are in charge. The train of a sympathetic police getting to use this to unmask and prosecute someone like BLM rioters has long left.
Tenaz
42m ago
the state already has a law on the books that prohibits concealing your identity when committing a crime
It's really just when concealing your identity in general.
12.7:
No person or persons at least 16 years of age shall, while wearing any mask, hood or device whereby the person, face or voice is disguised so as to conceal the identity of the wearer, enter, be or appear upon any lane, walkway, alley, street, road, highway or other public way in this State.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
43m ago
generates more economic value
Actually we can’t say this. At least not what it really denotes. Stressed working women raise less healthy, less intelligent children who are more likely to have behavioral problems. Stressed and older women and women who do not breastfeed correctly or nurture correctly are more likely to have children with autism. Intelligent working women give up on producing more offspring who are also intelligent, and the productivity gains from the very intelligent are outsized. Although there is not a study on this next one, it’s likely that stressed working women lead to unhappier, less healthy husbands, which cuts the productivity of all men, while also sapping their political participation due to household multitasking.
It would be far more economically valuable in toto and longterm if women focused on their biological role of mothers, wives, and homemakers. For the best of both worlds, restrict the lowest stress occupations to young women. And then if we really cared about wealth (what economic productivity ought to denote) we can ban makeup and so on. It’s truly dystopian to think that there are double doctor households where the male doctor is more stressed because he doesn’t have a homemaker to rely on, the female doctor (an intelligent woman who you want having lots of children) is delaying childbirth and then having only 1-2 less healthy and less intelligent children with a high rate of autism, and at the end of the day they are both unhappy despite being “economically productive”, and the naive economists think this is somehow a net gain for the country because their profession is narrow minded.
I was wrong about Japan, it appears, but Italy, Greece and Romania all have anomalously low female LFPR for the developed world with still southern-European TFR.
And as for Israel, secular Jews have a TFR that’s still higher than any majority population in the developed world, unless you count the American red tribe which is roughly at parity. Modern Orthodox Jews(who still work) have a TFR like America in the height of the baby boom. The ultraorthodox are the only ones who don’t work.
Stellula
48m ago
Heat death is high information density though as a description of the state.
Maybe from an information theory perspective, non-information bits are thought of as cold or empty.
faceh
48m ago
My model of modern western women™ is basically this:
They have a set of three roles they want to be 'seen' fulfilling:
- High-powered career woman (Girlboss).
- Freespirited, cultured, 'independent' woman. That is, one who travels everywhere, has a fun and carefree life, and flits from party to party.
- Devoted and effective mother.
They may re-order the priority and emphasis they put on it (or if its a triangular graph, they may land on some different space on it), but its the rare woman who doesn't have one of these three as their primary concern when it comes to status-seeking. You watch Tiktok, these are effectively the three 'genres' of women you'll find, if you ignore the e-prostitutes (which are technically a subset of 2). They want to project the image that they have an important, powerful job, or that they're constantly traveling, partying, and 'living life,' or that they're supermom, handling everything in life with grace and wisdom.
Modern Western Culture heavily emphasizes 1) and 2) as desirable options, heavily de-emphasizes 3). So women naturally start clumping more towards those two points on the graph. Once they've moved too far along towards that side of the graph (i.e. they've spent their twenties girlbossing, partying, travelling, etc.) it becomes VERY HARD to move out of that section of the graph to the one where they can become a devoted mother... and so they declare 1) and 2) are high status, and 3) is low status, and claim high status for themselves, accordingly.
If we limit ourselves to strictly social explanations, I think this one sounds pretty good. As you say, cultures that emphasize 3) will confer more status on motherhood, so it'll draw more women towards that point on the graph, and thus you'll have more attraction towards that section.
Also, the 'irony' is that a woman can genuinely have all it all if they locate a reliable husband and lock him down early in life, since he can support her ambitions in ALL THREE of those roles. He can give her kids, support her raising them, take her on trips and parties and generally have fun, and support her career ambitions where needed. But the subtext of the current culture is that women should be able to do all three WITHOUT male support, somehow.
This is all sensible, except:
3 is wildly low. If I had to make up a number I'd go for at least as long as it would take for them to qualify for citizenship. I'd start around 15 years.
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