This is going to be a bit of a ramble, and pull together some disparate ideas. I don't do these regularly.
One of the first things I heard was anguish that this means they're going to loose their sacred right to abortion. First off, I'm of the opinion that this would be a good thing, but I think saying this is just trying to provoke outrage among the leftist base - I hear they're already fund raising based on this. Aided by a lack of understanding of how the court works. The justices don't just sit down and say, "which old rulings do we overturn today?" They rule on cases brought to them through the multiple levels of the federal court system, and they generally abide by old supreme court decisions; the legal doctrine of stare decisis (let the decision stand). They wouldn't just throw out an old ruling unless a case was brought to them that addressed the same issues, and of course they do overturn old rulings, as in the union dues case. This will probably take a year or two.
Back in 2015, I did a post that posited there really was no post WWII baby boom. If you look at the post war birth rate from the right - back in time from after the 1960 introduction of "the pill" and then after Roe vs. Wade in 1973 - the post war birth rate does indeed stand out as higher. If you look at that birth rate from the left, the post war birth rate is hardly noticeable, and never reaches the birth rate from 1900 to 1919. People living in 1900 would think that at the peak of it, the birth rate never returned to normal levels. I'll reproduce the graph here - it's from the Wikipedia article on the subject.
An inconvenient conclusion I could make here is that while I can't make an estimate of how different the demographic picture would be without legal abortion, I'm sure we would be a very different nation. And I don't mean to focus on just this one aspect: in the time period the birth rate tanked, environmentalists were pushing "zero population growth" and trying to convince people to have smaller families. There was a broad cultural push from the usual sources to slow population growth that continues to this day.
Viewed from another angle, the main reason we have a bubble of baby boomers heading toward retirement that everyone is alarmed about (or "the Boomer pig in the demographic python is well and truly hitting the cloaca of retirement," as Tam unforgettably said) is that the children who could have been in succeeding generations were either prevented or aborted. Like Europe, we're attempting to get around that demographic shortfall by immigration. Like Europe, I think we're going to have lots more trouble coming because of that.
While I agree with the conclusions, a lot of children aren't being had because the marriages became as disposable as the byproducts, at roughly the same time, and by the same considered design.
ReplyDeleteMGTOW now is simply a recognization that the marriage roulette wheel offers men nothing, gives them the risk of losing everything, and when you can't win, and you can't break even, you simply elect not to play.
The result is more zero- and single-child families, which also contributes to that demographic death sentence.
The only demographics growing are among those of religious fervency that attitudes about marriage and children have remained, if not unscathed, less damaged by the corrosiveness of what became known as the Playboy Culture: women as toys, marriage as an inconvenience that trapped women (and now traps men), and that institution and babies themselves as disposable items, much like the used paper after a visit to the smallest room.
Wipe out marriage, the nuclear family, and offspring, and you've pretty much destroyed the dynamic that gave us the world in the first place.
It's the iron triangle of demographic suicide.
Throw in the clowncarnucopia of social pathologies that inevitably arise with the resultant single-child families and then single-parent childhoods, and you have a toxic stew as corrosive to civilization as flouroantimonic acid is to solid objects.
As you say, the destruction of the family isn't a byproduct, it was the intent of various "progressive" organizations for most of the 20th century. The prevalence of abortion clinics in black communities has been protested for as long as I remember. Even without that destruction of millions of black babies, the destruction caused by the Fed.gov and its welfare policies might be the worst thing that has happened to the black American family. In 1960, black and white families had the same rate of out-of-wedlock births, about 20%. Today, black families have flipped and in-wedlock births are about 20%. Fathers are ridiculed everywhere. In 30 years we went from "Father Knows Best" to Home Simpson. Fathers and men in general are a running joke everywhere in society.
DeleteMeanwhile, study after study shows married couples; the traditional husband and wife, both in the home, both involved, produce more successful, better adults.
Is the largest driver for the present-day majority voting for socialism self-loathing? Or what I'll call political agoraphobia, freaking out at the thought of being completely responsible for themselves, for which the protective response is religious faith in government? Is the hazard level from socialism high enough now that we need to pull back from focusing on exactly how the compartmentalization of irrationality is arranged inside voters' brains?
DeleteThe books _Snow Crash_ and _Diamond Age_ speculated gated communities containing people with a single ideology, encircled by border walls defended by robots. I'll accept that as likely for the next few years until the singularity gets rocking. _Diamond Age_ suppressed and subverted its predictions in order to have a plot, speculating government controlled nanotech without widespread open source nanotech. I don't believe that.
DeleteThe biggest win of libertarian gated communities will be compounding liberty, after the ending of socialism banning every productive activity. I predict great and painful breakups of families along the lines of 'are other people our property?' and 'have humans met other life forms in the universe?' Libertarian men will have to invent sex robots, because libertarian women are so rare we know them all by their first names.
The marriage roulette wheel isn't a thing because feminist women teamed up with the space aliens in round silver spacecraft to produce a militarily unbeatable Feminist War of the Worlds. The marriage roulette wheel is a thing because the men it injures obey its family court prescriptions. As a group, men have voluntarily climbed into the family court boxcar. How come nobody ever blames the majority of voters who are actually in charge?
ReplyDeleteCute, but nonsensical.
DeleteLaws are seldom if ever made by a majority of the voters.
Political power isn't produced by a small minority making laws; political power is produced by a large majority obeying laws. If the majority of men wanted the family courts system gone, they could stop paying child support tomorrow. Men are as guilty of obeying feminism as women are of inventing it.
DeleteRight.
DeleteAnd if prisoners just walked out, there'd be no prisons.
That's a right special argument you've logicked yourself into, right there.
If men stopped paying child support tomorrow, court judgments would be rendered, their wages would be automatically garnished, and then warrants for their arrest would be issued.
Anyone with any professional license, from doctors to barbers and mechanics, would lose it.
So other than never being able to work for a salary, or ever see their kids again, or show their faces in public for the rest of their natural lives, your clever plan would totally work, you betcha.
Or, did you perhaps see those results - each with the certainty of gravity - as features, rather than bugs, in your unified theory of You Can Do Anything?
Good luck walking on water, and have fun storming the castle!
And if prisoners just walked out, there'd be no prisons.
DeleteA company I knew sold phone service to state and federal prisoners. The company was terrified about the phone system breaking, because there could be a riot, and in a riot where the prisoners are serious, the corrections officers lose. American prison is not a POW camp where the prisoners are starved and tortured and killed into submission; American prisons have weight rooms where prisoners get stronger. American prisons are not run as a series of sterile transfers between cage airlocks guarded by overwhelming force. There is social hierarchy which the prisoners accept, and the threat of eventual recapture outside.
If men stopped paying child support tomorrow, court judgments would be rendered, their wages would be automatically garnished, and then warrants for their arrest would be issued. Anyone with any professional license, from doctors to barbers and mechanics, would lose it.
I get it, this is a game of Simon Says. No matter how successfully rebellious these men were, they will instantly surrender if somebody in government says the right words. It breaks a law of physics or something if these men said no to child support, no to wage garnishment, no to licensing, and no to being arrested, all at once, and enforced that no with guns. Why did the game of Simon Says feel natural to you as a child? I'm going to say magic words, and you're going to compete at being obedient to arbitrary commands? What instinctual brain firmware is that riding on?
Approximately 60M abortions since Roe v Wade in '73. No need for those various "immigrants" since '65, that's for sure. I forget the numbers, but a huge percentage of brides typically were pregnant at the alter.
ReplyDeleteOne of the major drivers for decreasing amounts of children is the heavy taxes to support socialism. When both parents have to work to make ends meet, kids become an afterthought. Look at all the Western Civ nations, which uniformly employ some form of socialism now, and they all have very low birth rates, which generally track back to the ramping up of those socialist policies/taxes. It's not the only reason, but it's a biggie.
The idiocy of feminism is another factor.
Weren't the 20's a selfish and hedonistic time? That might explain it.
ReplyDeleteWeetabix
That's an angle I hadn't thought of, but yeah, sounds like it could be.
DeleteA quick search says that modern condoms were first made legal for sale in the US in 1918. That's a possibility, too.
No liquor either, which cuts down the gradient of pliability. ;)
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