chapotraphouse

Charlie Kirk: We have millions of young women that are miserable. You know, the most miserable and depressed people in America are career-driven, early-30-something women. It’s not my numbers. It’s the Pew Research numbers. They’re most likely to say that they’re upset, they’re depressed, they’re on antidepressants. Do you know who the happiest women in America are? Married women with lots of children, by far.

Is there possibly a third variable in this? Perhaps something to do with the acquisition of resources? Correlation doesn't equal causation, after all (they don't really address it in the immediate aftermath).

Rosin: But if you move the discussion outside politics and into just sheer demographics—how many humans, ideally, do we want on Earth?—a whole different conversation is beginning about a potential crisis coming that we are not paying attention to, at least by some people’s accounts.

Insufferable. Same rhetorical device used to cry about white genocide.

The birth rates are not declining because people are "making the ultimate personal sacrifice to reduce your carbon footprint" you fucking nitwit. People are not having children because they live in a soul-crushing hellscape and can barely afford to keep themselves alive, let alone a child.

Better for population to plummet due to declining birthrates than for it to plummet due to famines induced by global warming crop failures, warfare, and nuclear winter (it's going to plummet due to famines).

Also making cuts to programs like SNAP and other social safety net programs aimed at helping families, and in particular children, goes a long way towards making having children less affordable. Again, something political. These fucks want people to have more kids while cutting down any sort of help they could have to raise them and then turn around and whine about how kids aren't being raised right these days and blame the parents.

One of the many contradictions of capitalism: it needs an ever-increasing population to maintain its growth, but it strongly disincentivizes having children for the vast majority of people.

Referring to the intentional decision to not reproduce as "the ultimate personal sacrifice" is so aggressively heterosexual and patriarchal. So like, does that mean that I am damned to live a pitiful, empty life because of my infertility? What about gay couples? Orphaned children and the adoption thereof are never mentioned once in the entire article and the challenges of parenting are only briefly touched on, so its not about the experience of raising children, its about producing more humans. The interview sucked and the author's point was that declining birth rates are bad because of a bunch of nonsense reasons like the potential extinction of humanity. They offer no concrete solutions. Its white supremacist anxieties mixed with a breeding fetish dressed up as erudite concerns about economies and quality of life.

This segment about 2/3rds in is pretty illustrative of how utterly detached these people are:

[Spears makes an argument that population growth is a primary driver behind scientific progress and improved quality of life]

Rosin (the interviewer): This is actually a quite beautiful notion of humanity or vision of humanity, just this idea that collective knowledge is a good; more of it is better. I think I’ve come to associate, particularly at this moment in time, you know, collective action as oppressive or—at least, I have a lot of examples of it now in my world, where masses of people getting together can also cause disinformation and push us backwards. And maybe that is just very present in our minds right now.

Spears (the interviewee): Yeah, I mean, it’s not the whole story. It’s not just about innovation. I think that there are other ways that strangers’ lives are not only good for them, but good for you. So, you know, here’s another way of looking at it: We’re used to thinking of other people as, potentially, rivals that consume the resources that we want, and part of what I’m trying to say is that we should think of other people as win-win.

My theoretical children deserve a better future than the hogshit this society will provide them with

~~should you be having more babies~~

People should have the rights and means to have babies if they choose to

: “I’m laying off everyone! I just don’t need workers anymore, and why invest all but the bare minimum in my business? Don’t give me that look poors, I just don’t need you anymore! Now hurry up and die! No one owes you anything, it’s called freedom!”

: “Why aren’t you having kids?! What do you mean I turned that into a status for just rich people too? You OWE me kids!”

Yeah have more souls to torture under the clusterfuck your policies are helping create.

More individualizing the "solutions" to systemic problems.