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Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline
11–20 of 172 posts
Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline
#12[deleted]
Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline
#13seems like an odd choice to so emphatically phrase this as a quality of "the left" when there are so clearly many plausible confounding factors (education, wealth, employment status, do you live in a small city apartment, etc.)
Agreed, although one thing I'll grant is that these days it seems like extremely large families in the US are almost always evangelicals, who obviously skew conservative, and there's not really a counterpart to that on the left. So even if families are getting smaller in general across the political spectrum, could it be that the outliers are imbalanced?
Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline
#14[deleted]
Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline
#15Captain Planet literally told children who cared about environmentalism to "keep families small" to save our planet. https://youtu.be/tZCg9HsDntY It's not difficult to take that to the next logical conclusion, no children means less resources used.
Okay but if other groups aren’t doing it, the planet is still doomed and now your group is worse off. Congratulations, you have accomplished nothing!
Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline
#16[flagged]
>Oedipalizing them into the world as linguistic subject
I don’t think this means what you think it means
Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline
#17seems like an odd choice to so emphatically phrase this as a quality of "the left" when there are so clearly many plausible confounding factors (education, wealth, employment status, do you live in a small city apartment, etc.)
I feel like the obvious answer this topic is circling is that the left expresses more empathy to those outside their immediate circles (caring for the planet), while the right focuses their empathy inwardly (family values.)
I think this is bait because it's the sort of thinking that 'feels right' without thinking too hard about it.
Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline
#18[flagged]
It remains to be seen if the indirect strategy of converting people originating from different backgrounds holds or fails in the 21st century. All that we can say is that it used to work against some traditional Christian churches and more liberal Jewish groups. That does not mean that it will work against all of them. Some high-fertility groups of today don't seem to be particularly prone to losing their members to…
I think the way the left's exterior reproduction's been successful is by leveraging the market more effectively. By that, I mean that global capital has already done a great job of mapping and stratifying our desires. If you like, say, passive media consumption combined with power fantasies (e.g., the superhero movie), the market will figure that out pretty quick. The left then only has figure out how to inject their social reproduction program into this pre-existing channel, then reap the rewards.
Your counterexamples are indeed the succesful defenders, the ones the right could learn from. The Amish (the only successful resisters of brood parasitism I'm directly familiar with), don't have to worry about capital mapping their offspring's desire because they have created an effective cultural barrier from it. No doubt many young Amish would find superhero media alluring, but movies, TV, and phones need electricity, which they have forbidden from their personal lives. More generally, the hierarchy of God, family, work, then finally self is fundamental and encoded into the child's being. To electrify your bedroom is to no longer be Amish, which has a lot more friction than drifting from your parents' mainstream conservatism.
Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline
#19Every time this sort of news pops up, I think "why aren't they incentivising and subsidizing fertility treatment"?
You want to raise the fertility rate, yes?
You could convince an entire population to have more babies the hard way (social or economic pressure).
Or literally just let the people who are already trying, but can't for some physiological reason, have one. They already want children, if they're pursuing fertility treatment, they're already decently well off, too.
To me it seems like a very obvious, targeted solution!
Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline
#20[flagged]
>Oedipalizing them into the world as linguistic subject I don’t think this means what you think it means
I mean that in the Lacanian sense. This is the symbolic Oedipal, not the Freudian familial romance. Reductively, transistion through the Lacanian Oedpial creates the linguistic subject, structuring the unconscious as a language with a relation to the master signifier. Entry into the symbolic register provides the semiotic pathway for linguistic media to be effectuating.