China: One child policy
Capitalist West: Zero child policy
Gotta laugh how fash think people aren't having babies because of Jewish mind control when in reality the people are fucking broke and childcare in the USA is a luxury lmao
if it was feasible during the Black Death it's feasible now. you just have to adjust your expectations of your child's material conditions from infancy through adulthood. If you go through with it you should also accept the likelihood that their life will be short and bad.
Great, so if I can stomach bringing life into this world with the intention of it suffering horribly then we're good to go.
Still debating if that was a good decision on their part.
Also, they had me in the 90s when they still thought there was a future and were told that the economy would only get better and better.
Also, they were terrible people that made my life hell so they're maybe not the best example
Not exactly. My parents were both born in the 60s and lived in an entirely different world when they had me
I’m personally probably never going to have kids because 1) I haven’t had a partner in awhile and 2) I don’t like the argument that “things were bad in the past and people still had kids” because you’re really just rolling the dice at that point. I also don’t buy the alpha bro argument that humans are meant to reproduce as if humans aren’t creatures with the capacity to make decisions about what is best. Plus, kids are becoming a luxury with the way everything continues to get more expensive with no signs of the bourgeois being kept in check. So naturally, things will only continue to get worse.
I don’t understand why people are obsessed with their genes and can’t at least consider adopting but I also realize capitalism has fucked that alternative too.
owls just need to adapt to eating human carcasses and they'll do fine
I wouldn’t call the Black Death feasible, but more “miserable” and 2/3 of crackerland died, so many people with kids end up with no kids, and many kids ended up raising themselves. So comparing crackerland’s Black Plague to modern conditions is like comparing apples and oranges.
I think the whole "americana is when you move out of the home when you're 18/graduate" is probably the most devious social engineering done by capitalism.
Families are support networks, even if you don't have a kid yourself someone else would have and you can focus on supporting them.
From a south asian islamic perspective, I don't know why crackers have a culture of hating their parents and fucking them over later in life with retirement homes (it's probably just capitalism tho).
From a south asian islamic perspective, I don't know why crackers have a culture of hating their parents and fucking them over later in life with retirement homes
Speaking as a cracker that came from neglectful parenting; It's because their parents hated them and fucked them over early in life. Many of us had to be parents to our own parents while they took everything from us.
with retirement homes
The thing is that most people have no other option. If you work full time, live far away from your parents, and have other responsibilities, how can you take care of them? Getting good home health workers is very hard and expensive. Letting the parents move in may be impractical due to housing costs, and may also ruin your marriage if you have one. It's put them in a nursing home or let them die alone and not be found for days, usually.
From a south asian islamic perspective, I don't know why crackers have a culture of hating their parents and fucking them over later in life with retirement homes (it's probably just capitalism tho).
I think the whole "americana is when you move out of the home when you're 18/graduate" is probably the most devious social engineering done by capitalism.
You answered your own question. Their parents boot them out of the house when they're 18, so there's a degree of resentment that carries over as the parents grow old. There's also a reverse dynamic where the parents treat their kids like complete shit since "well, they're going to be out of the house at 18 anyways." Here's my impression dealing with cultures that haven't had their family dynamic get ruined by Anglo culture: there's a mutual understanding by the parents and the kids that the parents need to rely on their kids later in life, so the parents can't burn bridges lest the kids decide to just fuck off and abandon the parents. The kids also can't burn bridges since the parents are their main gateway to their extended family. The lack of generational housing also means the kids are unable to help their parents too. What happens to parents who are old enough that they get completely tired from buying groceries? Obviously, their kids aren't going to fly half-way across the country to buy groceries from Walmart and fly half-way back to their homes.
Anglo culture is perversely anti-family. You have dictatorial parents who raise ingrate kids and ingrate kids who grow up to become dictatorial parents.
my dad went hindutva and wants me dead for being trans so it's kind of hard not to meet like with like
I mean yeah a lot of people are out there doing it lol
Definitely not ideal, and my partner and I aren't going to for a variety of reasons, but given adequate money and a strong family support system you can avoid most of the problems poorer people will face
I think the problem is that “adequate money” gets harder and harder to get.
May I ask which are some of the reasons why you decided against?
climate
the US is a shithole that I wouldn't want to bring anyone into
the feeling that you should only have kids if it's the #1 thing you want in life and that isn't true for either of us
Really these points are all kinda the same thing lmao
I have similar answers to the question. For me it's a combination of knowing that in the West, no matter how hard you try, another person just living life here will disproportionately contribute to climate change and waste purely because of how society is set up. Sure a revolution would fix that eventually, but having kids is not an important enough desire for me to roll the dice there.
And second, knowing how bad things are likely to get in the near term seems like having a kid is really setting them up for a ton of difficulty and dread unless you're very wealthy.
For me personally, I think communism will come from outside the west and anyone here who can organize is doing it primarily as harm reduction for their community and attempting to slow down how much the west can fuck up for the rest of the world. Having a kid might add another to that group, but it's also part of the two points on climate and doesn't seem fair to the kid or the world to me.
I'm sure others are more optimistic or have a stronger desire that make it worth it to them, and I'm glad for it. Otherwise things would be pretty grim for the left here
We've got a kid and he's probably gonna die in a nuclear war, but hey, he was probably gonna die someday anyway.
I would love to have a kid someday, it's just sad that it's primarily a fiscal decision
Releasing my hit DSBM/raw black metal/dungeon synth single "Maternity: The Prime Mover Of Suffering" soon.
It’s just comically expensive nowadays and I’m not a proponent of kids growing up without resources that will ensure their growth
There’s also the climate change angle because who the fuck knows what the world will look like in 30 years (guessing not great)
It's certainly doable but much more difficult, both parents must work now - nevermind single parents. Community is shot in general and families are spread out partially due to economic effects, people leave because they go where work is, the churn means roots are harder to put down and neoliberal individualism has kind of rotted out a lot of communities as well. It's hard to raise kids when you're on your own and there just aren't as many options for assistance. Wages have also been suppressed for quite some time so the money coming in just isn't meeting how much kids can cost.
So, is it feasible? Yeah, I see kids and families all the time. Is it more difficult in ways previous generations did not in general experience? Yeah, some of these struggles have been shared by many oppressed people historically but the widening of who struggles with raising children is new.
Due to an oddity of health insurance and drug manufacturer coupons we have our maximum out of pocket hit without spending any money.
If not for that, our baby would have cost us $40,000 out of pocket, out of about a $300,000 bill, in 1 year. That's pregnancy, screenings, birth, and a single cold from the first day of day care. The cold was $200,000 for a week in the hospital.
Just name your child after one of many, many businesses and you'll get some free shit
My child, Best Buy T.J. Maxx Subway is doing pretty good so far
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/21/kids-named-after-google-windows-vista-why-parents-did-it.html
Unfortunately
https://web.archive.org/web/20230804085054/https://www.subwaynamechange.com/
So far the only way it has been working out for me is a number of privileges I've not earned such as paying far far below market rent.
It's hard to imagine a situation where it's not feasible to have children, short of an apocalyptic one
yes, hardships never stop people from have kids
In the time of famines and wars in China, people (my grandparents and great grandparents) tend to have more kids. In less hard time, people stop having kids. There are a lot of factors at play, poor time requires people to not put all their chip in one place, a lot of family labour division needs a bigger household, there are a lot of community involvement (it requires a whole village to raise a child).
Are you sure that people just don’t end up having more sex in hard times to at least have something nice going on? 🤣
