Red Mosquito

Rove is the devil, and he's no longer in power, but this quote goes hard.

Geez. I wonder what his yearbook quote looked like.

A busy bee

Those are just the lyrics to "Fitter, Happier"

Is it just me or is there a looming government shutdown on the news like every 3 months

You ever listen to this guy, trag? He is unfortunately Irish, but has risen above that degenerate waste of an island. He's more finance than international affairs like Zeihan. I also like his dry humor.

Where is Simple Schoolboy? I need someone to celebrate with. And make cryptic posts about Curtis Yarvin and the Unabomber with.

Is this true?

what is the point though?

It's probably had some effect on people and attitudes toward marriage and having kids.

BurtReynolds wrote:It's probably had some effect on people and attitudes toward marriage and having kids.

I guess I read that (the tweet, not your reply to me) as it being a bad thing. Is it? I don't think it is a bad thing unless you are very conservative in religious beliefs.

E.H. Ruddock wrote:

BurtReynolds wrote:It's probably had some effect on people and attitudes toward marriage and having kids.

I guess I read that (the tweet, not your reply to me) as it being a bad thing. Is it? I don't think it is a bad thing unless you are very conservative in religious beliefs.

Might be. I don't think you have to be a religious nut to recognize the societal problems that may be caused by cratering birthrates. Plus, having kids in your 20s seems completely natural to me, even though our society makes it very difficult. Not to mention the fact that female fertility drops off a cliff in the early thirties, making having kids even more difficult for those who want them.

tragabigzanda wrote:

BurtReynolds wrote:It's probably had some effect on people and attitudes toward marriage and having kids.

TV and the audience became mutually reinforcing elements of a society where women increasingly pursued FT jobs, upskilling, leadership roles at the expense of marital stability. Laverne and Shirley worked at a bottling plant; Elaine Benes was a successful media publisher. None of them were lucky in love.

And yet Penny Marshall had a kid when she was 23.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus had hers in her late 20s-early 30s, after some difficulty.
But Cindy Williams was in her mid to late 30s when she had hers.

Make of that what you will.

BurtReynolds wrote:I don't think you have to be a religious nut to recognize the societal problems that may be caused by cratering birthrates.

No, but you would certainly have to be a culture wars nut to ascribe more of this effect to television than to economic and other concerns.

even though our society makes it very difficult.

Don’t race past it like this. This is the actual problem, and it’s about to get bigger.

A large swath of the American public has been convinced by an ugly collage of billionaires that a return to Gilded Age inequities and working class conditions is how you win the culture wars. If you like those policies, then fine. But here’s the part you can’t talk your way around: that approach will never create a world in which young people are more inclined to have children than they are today. Whether you accept that statement or not, further decreases in birth rates are an obvious natural consequence of these decisions. You get what you get, and you don’t throw a fit.

I really don’t understand the premise. “We’ll get rid of OSHA, make healthcare and home ownership even less accessible, obliterate social supports, gut our spy agencies while triggering terrorist groups in the Middle East, insist that this just has to be a world in which large groups of kids are sometimes shot to death, and destroy the consumer protection watchdog best known for taking dangerous children’s products off the market….and then we’ll talk people into having more kids by propagandizing the nuclear family on television?” I’m reminded of Morgan Freeman in the Dark Knight: Good luck.

Young people all over the world are choosing not to have children, and they are very directly telling you why. They experience completely different cultures, and they come from completely different backgrounds, and they watch completely different programming…but they are all describing the same feeling of being crushed under economic, environmental, and societal pressures…pressures that actively deter them from the path you want them to seek.

I'm not discounting the material or other reasons it's become so difficult to have kids (though I definitely disagree with some of your reasons, especially disempowering our spy agencies!). And I agree with you that attempts to turn back the clock are doomed to failure, but I do think attitudes are at least somewhat influenced by the media we consume. It's interesting that it's practically unheard of in modern media to see that portrayed positively, or portrayed at all. I know it's been ingrained in many people's heads (including my own) that it's wrong to have kids in their early to mid 20s - to say nothing of the near-taboo of having them in your teens - but is that really something people should be instilled with?

It's all too little too late to me anyway, if there was ever a solution in the first place. We are just going to have to deal with it. I don't think making the government our new nannies is much of an answer.

Geoffrey Miller is a pro-polyamory psychologist with an open marriage, for the record. So I don't think he fits into the traditionalist mold.