lofl @ the idea of a country that doesn't even believe in public transportation playing host to one fucking billion people
It's like a whiny narcissist rich kid (USA) who sees a poor kid (China) doing something "cool" that was necessitated by their poverty (large population), gets jealous of it and has no understanding of it and says "hey this is mine now"
Also having 1 billion people isn't cool, but you get the idea
They're going to use it as an argument that abortion should be banned. Or at least softening people on the idea that things that increase population are a net-good overall.
hesitantly pulls out papers titled "Dechudification Plan" from my jacket pocket
Not for population control I just really dislike east coasters
As an ardent stan of Well There's Your Problem I demand the East Coast stay alive.
it has nothing to do with the environment, they're just loathsome and irredeemable
lol. you fuckers are gonna need way more affordable housing, healthcare, and infrastructure for your white supremacist wet dreams
like i know plenty of mid 30s people who refuse to have kids because they cant get financially stable, and youre asking them to pop out 5-7 kids?
I've read the insane delusions of Matt Yglesias and he's actually talking about mass immigration from the global south rather than native births.
The neoliberal sub loves this idea because their understanding of how economics works is fundamentally flawed. They read statistics that say immigration increases economic output at a greater per capita rate than without it, so they think you can just move as many people in as possible and the economy will stay the same but scale up. The problem is in order to logistically accept that many immigrants you'd have to remove all barriers to entry and actually actively recruit people to move there. What that means is you will get mostly poor, low skilled and uneducated people. That means a shortage of high skilled professionals like doctors and engineers on top of massive housing shortages and skyrocketing food prices.
The funniest thing is that judging from the people on the neoliberal sub, they don't really even think about the sociopolitical problems that would come out of that. Like an insane rise in far right terrorism and a rise in left wing politics as the poor living in overcrowded slums become a political force. They think neoliberals would still get elected lmao.
The funniest thing is that judging from the people on the neoliberal sub, they don’t really even think
I don't think people who unironically call themselves neoliberals really understand anything
They think they know best though because there is a billion dollar industry pumping them full of cherry picked statistics and false analysis.
yeah they're either grifters or complete idiots. bail outs prove the math is flawed. even if the idea of dog eat dog capitalism wasn't a heinous, morality devoid construct, the fucking math doesn't even add up.
it must be so much easier not having to think for yourself and just believing that 'red team bad guys. america good. i like money.'
tbh mass immigration from the global south could be a good thing in a sustainable, green, socialist system, but holy shit this is insane under neoliberalism. at least in a green socialist system, youd be putting less strain on the global environment by moving most of humanity to specific highly developed areas of specific continents. this means the productive forces can be pushed into communism and skip over capitalist stages for developing regions.
Why would there even continue to be a global south under Green Socialism? There would be a massive redistribution of plundered wealth out of the colonial core back to the places from which said weath was plundered.
it can be very expensive, carbon wise, to develop certain areas extensively. most of south america, south east asia, and the congo should just be left alone, for example, except for maybe some choice coastal cities.
china, north america along the mississippi, the indus and ganges, and the rhineland are probably the best places for human development. generally any area with big rivers and lots of plains in order to avoid cutting down forests.
and i fail to see how getting people to immigrate to the former imperial core wouldnt also be considered a redistribution of wealth, assuming all services are rendered equally
skyrocketing food prices.
lol no. Just no. Is this a bit? Find me just one single reputable source that says that.
If you double the population, food gets more expensive
source: food prices literally anywhere in the world that isn't a settler state that genocided a native population within the last 400 years
also, climate change
and the food quality is already going down to begin with, it's just not noticeable/drastic enough for people in the US to hate their lives yet. Virtually all your seafood is filled with plastic. Fuji apples started going downhill in 2011. I even found an article about it several years later to vindicate my suspicion https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/climate-change-is-altering-the-taste-and-texture-of-fuji-apples-44558/
They were specifically talking about "skyrocketing food prices" due to "mass immigration from the global south rather than native births".
Climate change is irrelevant here.The USA exports more food than any other country.
These two maps from ourworldindata.org show poorer countries spend a higher percentage of income on food, but they also spend less on food.
The groceries index also shows that food prices for equivalent items tends to be lower in poorer countries.If anything it is gentrification that drives up food prices locally. (although the global effect is much more complicated)
These systems are not simply driven by supply/demand, it is more like they are driven by the supply of money in consumers wallets. If people are willing to pay more the prices go up.
What else could one expect in a world that can easily feed its entire population, but decides not to when there is no profit to be made.The rising global food prices are mostly a sign of globalization, with rich countries driving up prices, such that poor countries are exporting food, often as high value density meat, instead of feeding their own people.
At this point with Covid-19 it works somewhat differently; prices have gone up because suddenly less people are eating in restaurants.
More people with plenty of money are instead buying their food online, effectively gentrifying those prices.
But also there is a supply problem, since much of the food produced for industry cannot simply be sold in stores because packaging plants do not have adequate capacity.Food markets are globalized, increasing the total world population could increase food prices.
But immigration into a food exporting country like the USA simply does not.
I'm 34, financially stable and living with my girlfriend, and I have zero plans to have children. We have a dog and two cats and it's going to stay that way, most that will happen is we add another dog in a year or two.
Boomers created a world where it costs $500k to raise a child to adulthood and are also gutting social security and pushing the retirement age up. If I have to choose between maybe retiring someday or having a child, retirement is going to win 100% of the time. Not to mention it's morally questionable IMO to bring a child into a world with ever worsening income inequality and a looming climate disaster.
the idea that its “wrong” to bring a child into the world because.... is unnecessarily binary towards a complex decision.
If you prefer not to have children or don’t think you could provide stability for your child then that’s your call, but if you did have a child and the wrath of Climate change burned your whole city to the ground. It’s not your fault for having a child bc you knew about Climate change. In the same way it wouldn’t be your responsibility if a tsunami destroyed your city and you lived near a fault line.
For as much pressure as we put on people to have kids. Wanting a life without children needs more encouragement. Let’s not frame the decision in such good vs bad terms.
same but for me those that did had them accidently or unexpectedly. only one person i know (my sis) had planned and she has as very stable decent paying job
I'm not sure why the idea of the Overton window came to be mocked on the subreddit (don't know if it's any different now, I've only recently migrated over and the culture here feels similar yet not the same), but it's totally real, and leads to shit like this happening: a fascist interviewing a conservative in denial, both agreeing about something ridiculously stupid, and passing it off as bipartisan consensus.
It's mocked because the OW is shifting rightward, and has been for decades. The slight leftward bumps aren't as exciting as liberal Twitters thinks they are.
That makes sense. The idea of "shifting the Overton Window" by getting overly excited over a platform that's, frankly, not even very great, is like the whole "political harm reduction" bs. The window still shifts rightward, yet somehow it's counted as a win.
What seemed to happen on the sub, intentionally or otherwise, is after the phrase itself got a mocking automod response, likely for the reason you mentioned, people started mocking the concept itself, as if believing in its existence was laughable.
Also heard some people talk about how the left shouldn't embrace it because it's a right wing idea. Which never made any fucking sense to me, and just felt like sports team mentality.
Like, yeah, the reactionaries figured out how to game public opinion by going hard right with their talking points and putting out insane ideas so often that they began to be seen as reasonable, moving the political reference frame to the right.
But we can't learn from them and counter it with hard left talking points just because the baddies figured it out first?!after the phrase itself got a mocking automod response, likely for the reason you mentioned, people started mocking the concept itself,
I'll admit I've done this like an unthinking dumbass, but I think in general I still uphold the AutoModerator party line. The Overton Window as a concept is okay I suppose, but only when used to analyze historical trends. The second you start biting your tongue because, "oh gosh, my position might fall outside the Overton Window and alienate some folks," you are being a lib. When you start arguing in favor of immigration because "immigrant labor makes line go up" instead of because "immigrants are just as human as you and me" you are being a lib. Immigration status is an artificial caste system which should be abolished, and there's no point of beating around the bush. When you say "the police need to be reformed" instead of "the police need to be abolished," you're being a lib. The police are our class enemies, are irredeemably racist on a systemic level, and there is no place for them in a civilized world.
We should always be in the habit of making maximalist demands, and a fixation on the Overton Window confuses what should be crystal clear to us from a rhetorical standpoint. That said, there's nothing wrong with analyzing how the boundaries of "reasonable discourse" have shifted over time, and this is exactly what the Overton Window describes. There are material reasons behind this, and it is important to understand them if we want to do anything about it.
Marxists traditionally lean more on the "Base and Superstructure" metaphor than the Overton Window, but both are capable of making the point. Personally, I find the Base and Superstructure metaphor more complete because it makes the relationship between material conditions and cultural interpretations explicit, while the Overton Window focuses solely on the realm of culture. In other words, the Overton Window accurately identifies a phenomenon, but it doesn't offer us as much in terms of understanding the mechanisms behind this phenomenon. Meanwhile...
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely [the] relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead, sooner or later, to the transformation of the whole, immense, superstructure. In studying such transformations, it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.
In other words, the ideological struggle that we engage in (which the Overton Window is derived from) is a component of the cultural superstructure, which is determined at a foundational level by the material conditions and economic relationships of its participants (the economic base), and as the material conditions shift, so too does the Overton Window (and superstructure as a whole). This shouldn't be boiled down to economic determinism though. While the base primarily influences the superstructure, the base isn't immune to being influenced by the superstructure in turn. They act in a sort of feedback loop.
The slight leftward bumps aren’t as exciting as liberal Twitters thinks they are.
I disagree. Street protests on the scale of what we saw a few months ago, with cross-race and cross-class participation, means far more than the chronically online give it credit for. There's a spectre haunting the United States...
Thanks.
I skipped the discord because I don't like using discord, so when news about the Lemmy instance reached me, registration was closed, then I kinda forgot for a bit.
there's one CTH episode where felix says how people can't afford to own homes and have kids anymore and that thought has been resonating in my head ever since. one of my friends who literally has a millionaire for a mom went on a rant about how it's totally possible for people to have kids and still be financially sound as if any financial related reservations people had towards having kids wasn't a valid reason to put off having kids. wanted to bitterly laugh at that. i want kids of my own someday but i can't even fathom how the hellscape will manifest itself in 5, 10, 20 years.
Currently navigating the Texas adoption system. I'm rich enough that I can afford to care for a child. I've got space in my home (literally half the reason I went out and got a house was to have space for a child). But holy fuck, the amount of bullshit bureaucracy necessary just to foster is insane. We've been licensed and waiting on someone in CPS to queue us up for months. There are a thousand little do-dads I need to constantly, independently, re-register every year to stay current. And because the Texas CPS system is chronically underfunded with a comically high turn over, I never actually talk to the same case-worker more than twice.
I explored other options. Besides just making babies the old fashioned way, there's "private adoption" which costs $50k and sounds suspiciously like some sort of puppy mill machine for people. There's foreign adoption, which is cheaper, but which is rife with straight up kidnapping. And there's sectarian adoption (our current preferred option) which amounts to lying to people that I believe in Jesus in order to get the social services necessary for a placement in my home.
Fucking insane.
There's a lot going on behind the scenes, and I've only got a partial picture of it. Massive turnover at CPS means the bureaucracy is incredibly slow. The political instinct to avoid scandal rather than reduce human misery means it's better to leave kids in legal limbo than place them in a "bad" home that shows up on the evening news. And there's some good-ish news, at least in my home of Harris County. The new wave of Black Lady Democrat Judges who came up through the 2018 wave are far more reluctant to throw people in jail and, as a consequence, throw their kids into the foster system.
The CPS system is bad for a whole bunch of reasons. And pumping people through it faster won't necessarily make it better. But the things that would make it better cost money. Texas State Legislature has been trying not to spend a penny more on CPS than absolutely necessary for decades.
One reason I'm engaging in shitlib electoralism is in the vain hope that flipping the state legislature might change that.
Idk if you know what that's called but check out r/antinatalism for a group of like-minded thinkers
Thanks, I try to fill the hole with showering my niece with affection, and I 'm honorary aunt to some friends' kids. I love them dearly, and it helps, but I really wanted kids of my own to love. I'd be a foster parent, but I'm not financially stable enough to even think that's a good idea.
Nah, they are probably both masturbating to the idea of a whites-only child tax credit program that rapidly increases white birth rates.
Matty is talking about mass immigration but you're probably right about Glenn
america's population growth is actually dropping off because of the decline in births and immigration and rise in coronavirus deaths so maybe they're gonna need to address that first...
one billion people that will only live into their 60s, that's winning
There's literally no difference between these two, they're both on that cato institute sponsored grift.
Looking at the current state of the US and world as a whole and deciding that we need to more than triple our population is such a staggeringly stupid idea that it's actually impressive.
Omg imagine there being 3 times the amount of Americans than there currently is 🤮
MattY: "We need 1B Americans to compete with China."
Any sane person: "Did MattY just advocate for open borders with Latin America and the Middle East."
MattY: "No. That's not what I mean at all. We still need strict border controls and strong standards for permanent residency and citizenship."
Any sane person: "So... what are you proposing."
MattY: boards Epstein plane "The age of consent is too damned high."
"What do you mean there's a climate crisis that will make food scarce and STD's are rife!? FUCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK MORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRREEEEEEEE!"
I hate Glenn Beck so much like he personally made my life hell by brainwashing my stupid father. All the time the guy would just rant on TV and the radio about how his views are what god wants and that everyone needs to band together to defeat the evil Marxists which includes everyone even as far right as Obama..... He makes ignorant people afraid so that he can sell them dehydrated food, subscriptions to his content, tell them what investments to make, etc.
The right just wallows in constant anger and fear and these tv/radio personalities know it and use it for monetary gain. If I never have to hear him speak about anything again it wouldn't be soon enough.
