Funny how they love to portray people with no children or few children as freaks when the reality of modern life in developed and developing countries is the other way around.  It used to be that Amish-sized families were the norm ... now people like the ClownCarTribe are treated like circus freaks!

Oh, and how many kids does Papa Ratzi have?  Really?

Even my Catholicest, kid-lovingest uncle and aunt realized after their fourth that they had reached their maximum.

*but they can’t afford the college tuition, nor can they afford to have children that don’t go to college, since your earnings without a degree are so damn low on average.  *

This is your problem right here.  Who do you think you are, to think that you and your children deserve a reasonable quality of life?  Those sort of privileges are reserved for the elite deserving few. YOUR job is to pump out children while your husband works in a coal mine or something for slave wages.  Then you both die at 35, and your children take your place in the grand cycle of peasantry.

I think a really good case can be made that among the people who “don’t care about the future” are the people who insist on things like forced pregnancy and forced marriage, with little or no care for the actual people that are born and raised under those circumstances.

Care about the future? Work to create a world where nobody has a baby they didn’t want and couldn’t raise, and where all existing people are supported and encouraged.

Sure, a lot of the people who trashed the economy were childless young yuppie types, but that’s more because they were young, not because they were dedicated to a life of childless decadence. Plenty of irresponsible CEO’s (and the last President and Vice President) have kids. Didn’t make them any more responsible toward the economy.

For that matter, while we’re bashing the Pope, let’s not only look at his (presumed) childlessness, but also his decadent lifestyle.

Oh, and while we’re caring about the future, could we please reemphasize things like science and education? Yes, resources are limited, but creative, intelligent, responsible science will stretch those resources a whole lot more.

Then again, if the Vatican and the right wing Christianists have their way, Africa should be uninhabited in a couple of generations, and we can start a whole new batch of strip-mining and stuff there.

My favorite part is the argument that because of Roe v. Wade, there are 50 million tax-paying zygote-Americans that were murdered before their economic time.

It’s also that the resource wall has been hit—-a lot of families with one or two children might want more, but they can’t afford the college tuition, nor can they afford to have children that don’t go to college, since your earnings without a degree are so damn low on average.

Never mind college, how about day care, warm coats, and new shoes?

It makes my head explode.  If you’re poor, it’s “OMG, my tax dollars are paying for all your children [even if it’s 1], why don’t you get a job, you lazy slut, and who cares if you can’t find day care” and if you have money, it’s “OMG, you’re a terrible mother if you work, why aren’t you staying home with your children, and why don’t you have more?”  Lose-lose, which is exactly how the patriarchy likes it.

I know when I’m driving on the interstate past suburban sprawl the first thought that crosses my mind is “this place could really use MORE people!” /snark

Let’s not be naive and assume of women turn around and do exactly what these windbags say they want then we’ll be doing something right for a change. According to the BBC, too many women are having babies. Or it’s that they’re having unauthorised babies. Or maybe the problem is that they’re just too stupid to not believe the doctors who scaremonger about declining fertility in any over-30 dried up hag? I’m really not sure at this stage.

I guess that other theory they had, that the “masters of the universe” tanked the economy because they wanted to score chicks, wasn’t working out for them.

And the sad thing is these people are too dumb to realize that the fertility rate in the USA is just about perfect. Our population is growing but growing slowly, so we’re managing to avoid either the demographic disaster of overpopulation or the demographic disaster of a rapidly shrinking population like Russia or Japan.

No, no Mnemo, that theory was more like “the economy tanked because the Masters of the Universe were too distracted and busy trying to please thankless, picky bitches”.

“But in other ways, the resources to handle the new people we’re already making are strained as it is.  And if you don’t think so, ask a new parent to tell you how easy it is to find day care.”

“The good news is that most people are going to look at 10% unemployment and laugh at the idea that the problem is not enough people competing for jobs.”

Well, they see limiting women’s choices as the solution to both of those problems.  See, just as Dr. “Not Really A Doctor” Laura and many others have been saying for years, the Original Sin of the modern world was letting middle-class women work instead of staying home like god intended.  Never mind that they were forced to work because shitty and declining modern wages.

Make the women stay home, barefoot and pregnant, and then only men will need to compete for jobs, and daycare takes care of itself. 

See?  Problem solved!...

No, no Mnemo, that theory was more like “the economy tanked because the Masters of the Universe were too distracted and busy trying to please thankless, picky bitches”.

Or it was all because Barney Frank (who is TEH GAY, remember!) was passing out loans to the undeserving (i.e., black people and hispanics) to buy homes. So minority home ownership is the problem. Seriously, I’ve heard this argument all over wingnuttia. This is how they explain the recession.

Y’know, in biology one learns about r-strategy species, which produce lots of offspring, each of which is unlikely to make it to reproductive age, and K-strategy species, which produce fewer offspring, each of which is much more likely to make it to reproductive age. r-strategy parents pump out as many kids as they can but don’t invest a lot in helping them survive; K-strategy parents invest a lot of effort in making sure that their few offspring make it to maturity.

Why a bunch of celibate guys who have their basic biology backwards is arguing that human beings should behave less like big mammals in general and apes in particular, and more like salmon or cockroaches, I’m sure I don’t know.

Paul, because Conservatives are cockroaches in disguise?

*Why a bunch of celibate guys who have their basic biology backwards is arguing that human beings should behave less like big mammals in general and apes in particular,*

Are you implying that we are, in some way, related to mammals and especially apes?  That evolution is true?  Burn in Hell, heathen!

Our population is growing but growing slowly, so we’re managing to avoid either the demographic disaster of overpopulation or the demographic disaster of a rapidly shrinking population like Russia or Japan.

It’s only a disaster if you’re too restrictive about immigrants and too uncreative to imagine economic models that don’t require endless and unsustainable population growth.  It’s remarkable to me that, when faced with the prospect of overpopulation, people are able to envision technological advances coming to the rescue and colonies on Mars.  But in the reverse scenario it’s “OMGZ WHAT WILL WE DO???!? WHO WILL TAKE CARE OF TEH OLD PEOPLE IF WE DON’T HAVE ENOUGH BAYBEEZ NOW!!!1!”  Really?  The human ingenuity that is certain to figure out how to accommodate eleventy billion more people will fail in the face of the population declining a bit?

holy Murphy, why would you subject yourself to reading “The Anchoress”?

Well, OK, if it’s a case of keeping your eyes on the enemy…..

The thing about Japan is why shouldn’t their population shrink?  Yeah their GDP might go down and they’ll be some transition costs but how is cramming millions more on an island already close to bursting a good idea?  Would Japan really be so bad with a population of 115m instead of 130m?

Robert—

They’re worried about paying for retirees and the social safety net, would be my guess.

Russia is probably concerned with having enough people to put in their military, quite frankly.

So really it’s not about population loss per se, but a rapidly aging population and rapidly shrinking work force.

But in the reverse scenario it’s “OMGZ WHAT WILL WE DO???!? WHO WILL TAKE CARE OF TEH OLD PEOPLE IF WE DON’T HAVE ENOUGH BAYBEEZ NOW!!!1!” Really?  The human ingenuity that is certain to figure out how to accommodate eleventy billion more people will fail in the face of the population declining a bit?

Well, a few dudes started making robots that were supposed to be interactive caretakers for the elderly, but both of their inventions are sexbots now instead. So, it’s maybe more a problem of priorities than ingenuity… :p

r-strategy species, which produce lots of offspring, each of which is unlikely to make it to reproductive age, and K-strategy species, which produce fewer offspring, each of which is much more likely to make it to reproductive age.

Until modern medicine with vaccines and advances in trauma care really started to take shape in the beginning of the 20th Century, we were more a r-strategy species, as it wasn’t that unusual to have 8 or 9 kids and end up with only 5 or even less survive to adulthood.  If you read the biographies of people from before that time, it isn’t unusual to hear of cases like that, a specific one is Gustave Mahler, whose music is thought by many to be haunted by the death of his siblings during his childhood.

Yeah, actually having a low population seems fine and wonderful, but getting there (assuming killing old people is off the table) is gonna be a bit painful…

Japan wouldn’t be terrible with 115m, they’d just be somewhat poorer. Obviously, not every new citizen automatically represents an improvement in wealth, or Haiti would be one of the richer places on earth. Carrying capacity and the real size of an economy are real constraints. In a place like Japan (or here), a new citizen generally does represent an increment of productivity.

“Paying for the social safety net” is an extremely apt comment, because that is where the demographic math becomes tangled (and important). If I may be permitted to oversimplify, a society’s population growth curve in the modern era depends overwhelmingly on one factor: number of living, surviving-to-adulthood children born per woman on average. If the number is 0.2, the society is quickly extinct; if it is 4.0, the society is growing quite quickly. The USA is somewhere like 2.05 last time I looked.

The realistic prospect of a social safety net we want to have, and its extent, is in large part dependent on the number. A society with a number of 0.9 simply cannot have a retirement system based, for example, on the idea that in generation N+1 we will have more workers than retirees, because we won’t. A society with a (durable) number of 4.0 certainly can base its retirement system on that idea, because it certainly will have plenty of workers.

We often cast the question of what level of safety net our country should have as a question of moral will, and of course that’s very often valid. Some people don’t want a safety net even if we can easily afford one. But setting that dispute aside, what we can actually pay for is going to be a real constraint on our actions.

And with THAT in mind, we should reflect that a society with a modest growth rate is in a much better position to fund its social programs than a society that is shrinking, simply because those social programs are so often going to focus on the elderly. At least for me, it’s not hating on women, it’s just noting that 2.25 child-per-woman gives a better outcome for Social Security than 1.95 does.

might look at the financial crisis and blame it on banksters who have made it a habit to create bubble economies to continue to generate wealth on paper without having to do tedious things like actually build wealth, on the grounds that actual wealth-building takes too long and requires hard work—-the sort of thing that belongs to the era of higher marginal tax rates and hefty labor movements. “

Or you could blame it on the hundreds of thousands of sovereign individuals who made their own choice to get in on the Ponzi scheme action.  Nah, can’t do that.  Only the bankers are to blame.  It can’t be that women spend most of the discretionary income in partnerships.  It can’t be that women’s greed for Malibu Barbie Dream Houses helped create the bubble.  Nah, they’re not human beings who can make bad, stupid decisions, like taking on half-million dollar loans in hopes of selling the houses later at an inflated price.  They shouldn’t subsequently should be held responsible.  They’re Martyrs and Angels and Victims.  They were bamboozled!  By their husbands and the bankers!

The thing about Japan is why shouldn’t their population shrink?  Yeah their GDP might go down and they’ll be some transition costs but how is cramming millions more on an island already close to bursting a good idea?  Would Japan really be so bad with a population of 115m instead of 130m?

Yep, and if it reaches 115 M and hits a steady state where people again have the replacement 2.1 children per couple, that’s fine.  It’s the ride down on the way to a stable population that’s bumpy.

And with THAT in mind, we should reflect that a society with a modest growth rate is in a much better position to fund its social programs than a society that is shrinking, simply because those social programs are so often going to focus on the elderly. At least for me, it’s not hating on women, it’s just noting that 2.25 child-per-woman gives a better outcome for Social Security than 1.95 does.

Of course, especially if you’re a “New World” country like the United States, it can be done through immigration not forced-birthing.

The caring-for-the-elderly thing is mostly a crock, though. Krugman has written about this; he points out that if productivity continue to increase at even modest rates, and workers actually capture a reasonable proportion of productivity increases as wages, the burden of paying social security goes down even if you don’t assume an ever-growing population. (And if productivity increases without workers capturing any of it in wages, then caring for the elderly is the least of your economic problems.)

It can’t be that women spend most of the discretionary income in partnerships.  It can’t be that women’s greed for Malibu Barbie Dream Houses helped create the bubble.  Nah, they’re not human beings who can make bad, stupid decisions, like taking on half-million dollar loans in hopes of selling the houses later at an inflated price.  They shouldn’t subsequently should be held responsible.  They’re Martyrs and Angels and Victims.  They were bamboozled!  By their husbands and the bankers!

There may be some people who look at Amanda’s title and think she’s using hyperbole. You prove that she’s speaking the simple truth. /troll feeding

Until modern medicine with vaccines and advances in trauma care really started to take shape in the beginning of the 20th Century, we were more a r-strategy species, as it wasn’t that unusual to have 8 or 9 kids and end up with only 5 or even less survive to adulthood.

I wouldn’t call us an r-strategy species, though many parts of the world developed r-strategy societies to cope with agriculture.  IIRC, most hunter-gatherer type groups have more of a k-strategy with women only having two or three kids, and those are the kind of groups that we evolved from.

I read a really interesting book about childbirth in England during a transitional period (from Georgian to Victorian, if anyone cares) and there was a reference to French women looking down on English women for having so damn many kids when the French women were perfectly happy to use modern innovations like the diaphragm and have only three or so.  This was a period when English women were having something like an average of 8 children apiece.  No wonder they had to develop an empire to have someplace to put them all.

Mnemosyne, it also has something to do with Napoleonic land reforms where. Not only during the revolution was land split up and given to former serfs who became small peasant farmers, but inheritance laws were changed: instead of all the land going to the oldest son, the law said land should be split up equally among sons. So there was a very good incentive to have fewer children.

”blaming women—-as they’ve done going back to Eve”

going all the way back to Lilith

IIRC, most hunter-gatherer type groups have more of a k-strategy with women only having two or three kids, and those are the kind of groups that we evolved from.

Or, like the Kikiyu of Africa, there are measures like breast-feeding children to the age of two, which tends to that kind of spacing you’re describing.

This was a period when English women were having something like an average of 8 children apiece.

Malthus is remembered for his description of the problem of over-population, not so much for his solution to it:

In the second and subsequent editions, with his name on the title page, Malthus put more emphasis on moral restraint. By that he meant the postponement of marriage until people could support a family, coupled with strict celibacy (sexual abstinence) until that time. “He went so far as to claim that moral restraint on a wide scale was the best means—indeed, the only means—of easing the poverty of the lower classes.”[28] This plan appeared consistent with virtue, economic gain and social improvement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthus

You, being a generous, logical human being who doesn’t hate women, might look at the financial crisis and blame it on banksters who have made it a habit to create bubble economies to continue to generate wealth on paper without having to do tedious things like actually build wealth, on the grounds that actual wealth-building takes too long and requires hard work—-the sort of thing that belongs to the era of higher marginal tax rates and hefty labor movements.

You’re forgetting brains. Building real wealth also requires enough brains to come up with something people actually want.

Plenty of banksters work hard. Getting around laws and bribing members of Congress takes a lot of man-hours.

”(And if productivity increases without workers capturing any of it in wages, then caring for the elderly is the least of your economic problems.) “

...which is where we’ve been at since the dawning of the Age Of Modern Republicans that began with the election of Richard Milhous Nixon.

We would not have any problem caring for any American citizen of any age if we didn’t allow some Americans to think they are worthy of being paid millions, tens-of-millions, or hundreds-of-millions, while other Americans are deemed unworthy of being paid Minimum Wage…

Hey now, I’m pretty sure the Catholic Church believes in evolution.  They’re the pro-science church, even if they’re anti-humanity. 

As for Japan, once all these hordes of old people die there’ll be no problem.  The main problem seems to me to be that they live for fucking EVER and all the younger people commit suicide and often take their families with them.  We don’t need more people here.  We need the younger people to stop viewing suicide and murder-suicide as a good option.  And more immigration and less xenophobia couldn’t hurt.

The New York Times magazine ran a piece last year on Europe’s demographics last year. One of the key points of the article was that fertility rates vary dramatically from country to country in Europe - France is at replacement level, Germany and Italy a lot lower. There’s a correlation between fertility rates and female labor force participation but the correlation is positive - i.e., the higher the percentage of women in the labor force, the higher the fertility rate. The costs of having kids rise pretty dramatically when you move from an agricultural to a modern society. If women pay most of the costs, they stop having kids.  Basically, if you want to keep birth rates up after modernization, you need to reduce the costs of having kids for women.  Do that and you get French fertility rates. Don’t and you get Singapore and Japan. Of course this kind of suggests that fertility rates in Muslim countries will crash as modernization proceeds. Note that Iran now has a lower fertility rate than France. Don’t bother with any mystic explanations - it’s all simple economics.

The moral of all this is that bribery works and the French are quietly planning world domination.

I’m remembering that joke about the Jewish dude reading a regular newspaper and the Jewish dude reading a Nazi propaganda paper.

Woo! I’m POWERFUL! Just by not spurting out babies, I can collapse ENTIRE FINANCIAL SYSTEMS! Muahahahahahahaaaaa!

*wreaks HAVOC and DESTRUCTION on a MASSIVE SCALE and GIGGLES MANIACALLY*

I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds…

Generally speaking though, generally speedy population declines are usually the result of social events/activities that one, as a progressive and/or liberal, should stop.  You want to slow pop growth, usually.  Declines are almost always an occurance that is unpleasant to the people that live there over the long term—and environmentally worse than mild increases.

It’s the game of the psychological bubble economy!

Plenty of banksters work hard.

I guess they won’t mind being sent to forced labor camps then.

It can’t be that women’s greed for Malibu Barbie Dream Houses helped create the bubble.  Nah, they’re not human beings who can make bad, stupid decisions, like taking on half-million dollar loans in hopes of selling the houses later at an inflated price.  They shouldn’t subsequently should be held responsible.  They’re Martyrs and Angels and Victims.  They were bamboozled!  By their husbands and the bankers!

Really?  You’re going to have to do better than that.  So I’ll see you a “stupid greedy cunts” and raise you a “why didn’t the big smart bankers and manly men husbands protect the ladies from themselves?”  There’s only so much damage to an economy that greedy women with half-decent credit can do - it wasn’t Malibu Barbie that was trading debt around like it was an asset. Greed and stupidity are gender neutral, but unfortunately for guys, your gender makes up most of the people in charge of making the rules by which these games are played.

Plus, that wasn’t even Amanda’s point, seeing as the original article wasn’t blaming greedy men as much as it was blaming small families, which even in your opinion has to be the dumbest damn thing anyone could say about the financial crises.

The United States is pretty sparsely populated when compared to just about everywhere else but Western Australia and the barren parts of Canada.  I have to say that this is a good thing, and all those who disagree should try Calcutta for a while.  After all, if it’s good enough for Mother Teresa, why isn’t it good enough for those people?  It’s a veritable cornucopia of population growth, and it has limited governmental regulation.  I’m not sure about capital gains tax rates, but I doubt they reach the level that the Indokenyanesian Muslim Prophet B&Hussein;&O;Railroader wants to implement.

It can’t be that women spend most of the discretionary income in partnerships.  It can’t be that women’s greed for Malibu Barbie Dream Houses helped create the bubble.

Notice that in these two sentences PeterZeroOne avoids making any definitive statements.  Notice that he avoids making any of the kind of claims that might invite refutation.  Here’s what PeterZeroOne does not say: “Women spend most of the discretionary income in partnerships.  What’s more, the hunger of women for Malibu Barbie Dream Homes helped feed the housing bubble.”  PeterZeroOne doesn’t take that tack because statements that bald can be discredited once they’ve been proven untrue.  PZO can’t state flat-out that women spend more than half of their husbands’ money and that they herd hapless men into tract housing by means of choke chains.  Too many people might laugh.  So what he has to do is, he has to say something like that, or get his audience to accept that he’s said it, without actually saying it at all. 

Consequently PeterZeroOne throws most of the responsibility for the construction of his argument onto his audience, which is a rhetorical technique of hoary antiquity.  PeterZeroOne’s audience (us, in this case) is supposed to understand him to have said that women spend most of the discretionary income in partnerships and that women underwrote the housing bubble because they wanted their kids to grow up in McMansions, but in fact, he as said nothing of the kind; instead, he has specifically disclaimed both of these assertions.  PeterZeroOne’s tone is ironical and so we attribute irony to him, because that’s what his phraseology asks us to do.  But what happens when we deny that request and refuse to play along? 

We realize that, far from stating forthrightly that women spend most of the discretionary income in partnerships, etc., PeterZeroOne has in fact said something more like this:

“It could be that women spend more than half the discretionary income in partnerships—but even if they do I’m not going to flatly accuse them of it because I’m dealing with Mythic Truth here and I don’t want anybody to be able to pin me down.  It could be that women get some basic idea about what a house ought to be like from playing with their Barbies in childhood and it could be that they’re moved by that experience in later life—but even if that’s so I’m fundamentally uninterested in proving it because, if it’s really true, then however true it is now it might change later.  For the purposes of my argument women have to be enthralled by ridiculous houses in the same way clams are encased by shells.  They can’t just be the inheritors of a strain of correctable bad taste.  It might be (‘it can’t be’) that women spend most of their husbands’ play-money…but then, again, it might not.  It might be (‘it can’t be’) that women want to live in huge rackety laminated barns (in neighborhoods with no gathering-places and no sidewalks)...but then again, it might not.  As for me, I’m not too concerned with whether or not these things are so.  What I need is, not for them to be true, but for them to seem true, and lastingly true, in a way which is not negotiable and which can’t be modified.”

Regular language, of course, can rarely come up to that high mark, which is why PeterZeroOne has recourse to the linguistic tactics he employs.  He could just say that men make money and that women spend it, but he doesn’t; he could just say that males are the victims of perennial female bad taste, but he doesn’t.  Why not?  I think it’s because he fears that both these claims are disprovable, which is why he refrains from making them.

Wait, you’re saying that PeterZeroOne is a smart troll?

Au Contraire!  I posit that he learned the speak this rhetoric, but NOT understand the tactical benefits of what he said.  It just sounds cool and sly to his unrefined ears, while his betters reserve the ability to shift the lay of debate.

Allan says that there were more men than women at the house-flipping seminar he went to. So, no, P01, you can’t blame it on teh wommenz.

First of all, it’s super-obvious that they’re solution to pesky things like day care, economy, and employment is that women need to get out of the workforce and dedicate their time to birthing and raising the children. When you yank out the college-educated women from the workforce, all of those put-upon white men can regain their rightful place as masters of the universe.

As for having way too many kids to be able to give them a good life, this is not something they worry about: it’s not that they aren’t students of history. They want a large, desperate pool of impoverished workers, preferably un- or under-educated, because they’re cheap labor. How are we going to go back to the Manor Houses/Plantation lifestyle if you can’t have live-in maids that you pay pennies and can throw out on the street on the flimsiest excuse if you don’t have a swarm of desperately poor people looking to make even the most infinitesimal improvement to their life?

And of course, they know that in the past, having hordes of desperately poor people has led to certain uglinesses… like the Bastille, say, or Communism. But they are pretty sure (and I’m inclined to agree with them) that they’ve perfected their opiates. The Catholic Church probably knows that it’s not going to keep the masses in check while they’re being crushed under the boot of the wealthy, but they know they don’t have to do it all alone now… not with Fantasy Football and Idol helping out. We have a whole slew of people who are famous for being famous (seriously, I have no idea who the Kardashians are, I honestly thought someone was mispronouncing the species of Gul Dukat when I first heard their name). This last financial meltdown was the test. We didn’t have people rioting in the streets, we didn’t have people storming the offices of Bank of America, we didn’t have the sort of groundswell of populist outrage that would have been appropriate.

Instead, in a masterful move, Fox News took the reigns, and organized fucking tea parties. They convinced a bunch of people who had just as much to lose from the financial meltdown that they could blame their problems on not enough corporate control. Instead of having marches in the street to demand the dismantling of the “Too Big To Fail” corporations, we had a bunch of losers standing around calling Obama a Socialist. And I am fully self-aware when I say that the people who should have been out raising hell and demanding the government actually act in the interest of the people took all that rage and instead went and bitched on blogs instead of going out and taking action people would have noticed.

We lost. That was the test, and we lost it. We (the middle- and lower-class) have shown the corporations our bellies and made it clear we will not stand up to them. And until that changes, there is no hope, and we might as well just start dropping litters of kids to make our social betters happy.

I haven’t had time to read all the comments above, but just in case no one else has pointed this out, the position of Mr. Tedeschi’s group is fundamentally racist (with mysogyny thrown in, yes).  The problem can’t be that not enough children are being born.  The world population continues to rise explosively.  What must it be then?  Not enough of the “right” kind of children are being born.  And I wonder what color and ethnicity those children might be.

TheLady, did you read the link?  Because the link I read said that women over 35 are at risk for unplanned pregnancy, because they believe the hype about how you’re dried up at 35, and the government is saying, “You can still get pregnant, and if you don’t want to be, you need to use contraception.”  What, pray tell, is wrong with helping those who don’t want to be pregnant not be pregnant?

I think Catholic bishops look at the poverty and misery caused by 6-12 children you can’t feed and see it as a feature, not a bug. Remember Mother Theresa, “the suffering of the poor is beautiful.”

On that note, I tried to watch the 1st episode of 19 Kids and Counting. Little Duggar was born by emergency C section at the ripe old age of 25 weeks, and as a result was the size of a kitten. I literally started sobbing and turned the channel. This is what happens with unlimited fertility, sooner or later the body will wear out and the mother’s health will decline, as will that of any offspring. Any dog breeder could tell you that.  Any time some smarmy Catholic fuck tells you the beauty of being “open to life”, point to Little Duggar. Is that what they want? A NICU teeming with micropreemies fighting for survival? (SPOILER ALERT: The answer will be yes.)

Demographics is destiny! That is why a country like Bangladesh is a rising world power, in contrast to declining China. If only more countries could follow the lead of Bangladesh!

bekabot @24: that. And, of course, because he wants attention. It’s the socially-crippled adult’s version of pulling the girls’ pigtails; find a feminist blog and make dumbass, misogynistic comments. (Though, come to think of it, the pigtail analogy might be a bit off. Little boys who do this just want girls’ attention, whereas big boys who troll are pretty goddamn angry that they don’t get the attention from girls in real life that they feel is their due. There’s a vein of hostility and entitlement in trolling that isn’t present in pigtail-pulling.)

And that’s about all the energy I’d like to waste on our latest troll. I saw my quota of the “how dare those females refuse to fuck me, haven’t they seen Revenge of the Nerds and understand their duty?! I’ll show THEM!” attitude living in Silicon Valley.

Re the article, how astounding that the CEO of a bank would want to find someone, anyone to blame other than the financial crisis. It’s the misogynist godbag version of insisting that the housing market collapsed because US banks were forced to make loans to undeserving dark people.

this is what happens with unlimited fertility, sooner or later the body will wear out and the mother’s health will decline, as will that of any offspring.

Not exactly ... the problem here is that out of any 20 births, something bad will likely happen.  Most people get sick at some point, pregnant or not.  If you are constantly pregnant and get sick, well, something bad will happen.  I’m surprised that it took this long, and I don’t think this particular case was age related. 

Just like using contraception faithfully for 20 years may still result in an unintended pregnancy because the odds play out over the long-term.  The chance of one unintended pregnancy in 20 years is still good odds, compared to the alternatives ...

women over 35 are at risk for unplanned pregnancy, because they believe the hype about how you’re dried up at 35

Maybe I’m lucky to be in touch with my body or have a body that produces clear signs of ovulation, but I know damn well at age 42 that I’m cranking out the eggs on pretty much the same schedule as I have for three decades now.

The science, however, is increasingly supporting the contention that not spacing your pregnancies means that the fetus doesn’t develop in a rich enough womb environment.  So you’re more likely to have lower IQs, birth weights, etc.  if you pop one kid out after another.

Even given the idea that more kids is an objective good for society, someone explain to me how “shut up, go home, and get pregnant” is supposed to be more attractive than “Hey, let’s help provide child care, health care, and education options so raising your kids isn’t so hard on you (optional: you both)?”

The United States is pretty sparsely populated when compared to just about everywhere else but Western Australia and the barren parts of Canada. 

That might be a good metric of “sparse population” IF we were a land-based society.

It is a piss-poor metric when you consider the consumption levels of our population versus the magnitude of our resource base.  Factor that in, and one could argue that we have too many people for our level of consumption and resources.  Pure ass-movement space isn’t a good measure of capacity.

I’m reminded of the Catholic church’s expectation that large families will tithe some of their children over to the church so the Institution can be Perpetuated (because it must!), ostensibly in exchange for an education for the child and some respect for the family. It was still happening in the 50s in Québec, if I remember my family history correctly, but right around then the kids started taking the education and running, as the church’s social stock was plummeting. Refus Global ftw!

No, we can’t blame wimmenz for global warming, because global warming doesn’t even exist.  Real True Christians (TM) know that global warming is a conspiracy, because God would never ever let something bad happen to entire Earth…

(Sadly, I’ve actually heard similar arguments to that one.)

The good news is that most people are going to look at 10% unemployment and laugh at the idea that the problem is not enough people competing for jobs.

I think the idea is that once a couple has a certain amount of kids, one of the parents will have to quit their job just take care of them, because childcare will eventually cost more than one parent’s salary, and this will free up some jobs.  In Cathofantasyland, the spouse that quits will always be the woman, and in reality, it often will be the person who makes less, which is more often the wife.

Of course this plans doesn’t factor in the reality that if most women left their jobs, we’d have lots of open positions that are so “pink-collar” that many men wouldn’t even want them.  So then we’d have a shortage of nurses and early childhood teachers and maybe even restaurant servers.  Even if a large number of men were willing to take these jobs, they don’t usually pay well, and if they have a bunch more kids and lose their wife’s income, then many will be worse off than when they were unemployed.  And even if this plan managed to work out perfectly somehow, it would still only work for one generation until each family’s 10 sons needed to get jobs to support their many children.  On top of that, our economy is based largely on consumerism, so if each family is cutting their income in half, they won’t be spending nearly as much money on most things, which will cause many industries to suffer and more jobs to be lost.  Also, this plan doesn’t take into account single parents, even “legitimate” ones who are single because they’re widowed.

No, we can’t blame wimmenz for global warming, because global warming doesn’t even exist.  Real True Christians (TM) know that global warming is a conspiracy, because God would never ever let something bad happen to entire Earth…

I think the Catholic Church actually believes in Global Warming, along with evolution (albeit theistic evolution).

Again, they’re pro-science, anti-humanity, while fundie protestants are anti-humanity AND anti-science.

Religion is the only domain where someone would take the advice of the inexperienced (ie priests with sex and family).

“Plus, that wasn’t even Amanda’s point, seeing as the original article wasn’t blaming greedy men as much as it was blaming small families, which even in your opinion has to be the dumbest damn thing anyone could say about the financial crises. “

I was responding to Amanda’s assertion in her article that “the vast majority of people who fucked this up were male. ”  Women are responsible for half of consumer spending, and the crisis was driven by greed and overloading on debt - like credit card debt financed by the growing equity of an inflated home price. 

The statement is horribly, horribly sexist.  It’s as if I said that the rise in hospital acquired bacterial infections is women’s fault.  Or a common MRA line that the drop in school performance for boys is women’s fault, just because nurses and teachers happen to be mostly female.

And I assert that small families (in Europe) did have an impact on the crisis - the banks in Europe had a shortage of young people to lend to, so they lend to Americans.  That’s why European banks suffered so much as a result of an American housing bubble.

Because the link I read said that women over 35 are at risk for unplanned pregnancy, because they believe the hype about how you’re dried up at 35, and the government is saying, “You can still get pregnant, and if you don’t want to be, you need to use contraception.”

I’ve heard OB-GYNs talk about this, how a significant part of their practice is dealing with fallout from these myths.  Apparently it’s a pretty common sight in delivery rooms to see fortysomething women who thought they couldn’t get pregnant anymore giving birth.  Ethical & honest physicians just can’t compete with 24-7 media hysteria about how loudly your biological clock is ticking.

What, pray tell, is wrong with helping those who don’t want to be pregnant not be pregnant?

What, and prevent all those Happy Accidents?

“The statement is horribly, horribly sexist.”

...well!  After that terse statement of concern, how could anyone question P01’s deeply held commitment to sexual equality?

Then add his deluded self-talk dismissing the actions of the Wall Street Masters of the Universe in the giant casino of crooked international financial transactions in favor of the party line blaming the screwed for our own screwing.

You’ve got quite an act going there PeterMan!  Hoo rah!

You’re a great representative of the kind of thinking and attitudes that have made America what it is today — a politically, intellectually, socially, and (duh!) economically bankrupt nation that is vigorously seeking the best path to transform ourselves into a continent-wide corrupt 3rd-world banana republic…

Going back to Alkaloid @26

What they said worries me. If the structure of modern capitalism, even socialized cannot sustain declining populations on any real level, then we have a problem, because there will be a cap on resources. Now, we may be close, we may be far, we may be able to stretch things out if we ever get our heads out of our asses about science and renewability and lowering waste, but there will be at some point a singular point by which the number of people on the planet or in any one country is physically unable to sustain any more growth.

I think Japan is almost a strong warning on that level. They are pretty close to out of room on that island and have maximized a lot of technology just to keep things running as a first world nation.

And if the economic models cannot support controlled slow decline of populations, then the other option we face is essentially large decline by tragedies. Plagues, mass poverty and starvation, full running out of various resources, etc… Now, we might have already passed the point on the planet where this is avoidable. We’re running out of gas, we’re fucking up a lot of things the green cycles depend on to provide us with oxygen, food, and shelter material.

At some point, perhaps soon, maybe even in the past, maybe in the distant future, but at some point, we will need to find a model that will support and aid controlled declining of a population back to sustainable levels. It’s a natural curve of pop caps for species.

And there is something ponzi scheme about our economy literally requiring more participants each generation just to function. That’s not sustainable outside the boom years urbanization might allow. Not forever, not on a global scale.

On the troll? Meh, I’ve got no respect for libertarians. Their philosophy fails spectacularly before their eyes and they didn’t even blink. Kept repeating the same old crap, same old philosophies. When they could be bothered, they just deflected the blame to random others and defended their philosophic premises. Now, call me silly, but I’ve often thought that when your philosophy has so spectacularly and publicly failed, that basic humanity would lead one to be humbled, perhaps to rethink “overreaches” or even attempt basic level defenses arguing bad implementation. The “crisis, what crisis” response though and “hey, what we need are more tax cuts” responses are the signs of diseased brains on the level of rapturist Christians. They don’t even believe their crap, it’s a tool for keeping blacks and women down and for praising oneself as smart when you’re a dumb pile of shit the real smart people laugh at. Fuck them and the horse they rode in on.

But yeah, he’ll be here, because the default defines itself by opposition to the different. In our misogynist world, this is toxic masculinity. The type of masculinity that defines itself by how non-feminine they are. For a libertarian whose idea of intelligence is related to masculinity. How smart he is is how manly he is, how much smarter than women he is is how manly he is and how much more awesome men are than women is critical to his world view.

So stumbling through a bunch of attempted thoughts that sounded cleverer to his diseased brain and showing up those women will make him manly and even if they reveal him to be an idiot, well, at least they’re angry and having their little tea party crashed up and that means men still rule and shut up, I’m proving how manly I am. Basically, Peter I wish I was actually good with computers so I could get out of this dead end corporate job and stop feeling like such a tool, is the embodiment of those otherworldly super bowl commercials. He is the type of person they are designed to please and the pathetic trolling of the man in the book commercial is Peter’s reason for being writ large.

He will come into the book club and take it over, because it existing threatens him and he’s got to prove himself to the threat or else someone will take away his man card. And it doesn’t matter if he’s hated, if he looks like an ass, he disrupted the bitches attempt to have something of their own and that’s enough.

was responding to Amanda’s assertion in her article that “the vast majority of people who fucked this up were male. “ Women are responsible for half of consumer spending, and the crisis was driven by greed and overloading on debt - like credit card debt financed by the growing equity of an inflated home price.

I don’t actually think consumers had a goddamn thing to do with this.

When my husband and I set out to buy a house in 2005, we were limited to houses in the city, near the public transportation, because of my husband’s eyesight issues. We needed a house with at least three bedrooms, one of which had to be large enough to contain two children. We wanted a yard, because we have kids, and we needed to be in the area of a decent school. And for family reasons we stayed in Baltimore.

Five years previously, in 2000, when we had shopped for houses but in the end couldn’t buy one, the houses were running $80K. A really nice, huge, four-story house was $115K. When it came time to actually buy a house in 2005, we could not find a three-bedroom house larger than the one we were renting (which, it had been our understanding, was worth $100K) for any less than $200K. We had to increase our search range from $150K to $200K and finally bought a house at $220K. Similar houses on the same block sold four years previously for $75K.

Banks relaxed the conditions for qualifying for large amounts of money, and sellers responded by increasing the amounts of money they were asking for a house. I’m *rich* and I can barely afford our house—I cannot imagine how people who don’t make over $100K a year could possibly be affording houses. Those suburban houses that the average middle-class American lusts after, with more yard space than any city home can have? At the same square footage as my house, they run $300K or over in a good school neighborhood.

This was not driven by women wanting Malibu Barbie dream homes. Malibu Barbie dream homes are priced out of the range of *everyone* but the richest of the rich. This was driven by people, both women and men, wanting *a* home, and being willing to sacrifice to get it, and being told by banks that they could afford it when they really couldn’t. Adam Corolla did a reality show about flipping houses where he bought his old family home from his dad, fixed it up and resold it. He bought it for $800K and sold it for over a million. It was SMALLER THAN MY PLACE. I have 1900 sq ft, hardly a mansion. But the house was in Southern California, where a 1600 sq ft house sells for over a million. Trust me, Malibu Barbie has more than 1600 sq ft in her place.

Men caused this crisis because men run the banking industry and men run the country. There were a few women involved, sure, but when 15% of Congress is female and the ratio of banking CEOs is even lower, you can pretty much say yes, this is a problem caused by men. That’s not sexism; the sexism was in the fact that so few women were in a position to cause the problem. Would women have contributed to the problem had there been more of them? Maybe; women are as greedy as men. But the fact is, we weren’t *there*. This crisis was not caused by ordinary Americans wanting more than they should have; this crisis was caused by ordinary Americans wanting what they’d been promised, what they’d grown up believing they could have—a house slightly nicer than their parents’ house—and the cost of said house skyrocketing out of control within ten years, because banks were giving away much more money than was safe. Which was because the banks weren’t suffering the consequences of the defaulted loans, because of financial deregulation, which were promoted by upper bank management, lobbyists, and signed into reality by Congresspeople, all professions that are dominated by men. (Though lobbyists are closer to equal than upper bank managers or Congresspeople are.)

Yeah, okay, it’s possible to rack up large credit card debt if you’re supported by home equity, but who was making the call that it was okay to mortgage your house for twice as much as it was worth two years ago? It’s not the job of the individual consumer to know how much is safe for them to borrow—that is what bankers go get MBAs to train to do. That level of mathematics is beyond the average citizen (and even people who know the math can be swayed by emotion—bankers were supposed to be emotionally invested in *protecting* the investment as well as in making money off it, to balance the consumer’s enthusiasm. That’s what deregulation eliminated.)

Consumers didn’t get greedier in ten years. Human nature does not change. Stuff didn’t get significantly more expensive until close to the end of that period. The only significant change was banking deregulation. And the people who did that were 85% male or more. Own it.

<i>We lost. That was the test, and we lost it. We (the middle- and lower-class) have shown the corporations our bellies and made it clear we will not stand up to them. And until that changes, there is no hope, and we might as well just start dropping litters of kids to make our social betters happy.<?i>

“If everybody had an owner
Across the U.S.A.
Then everybody’d be serfin’
Like californ-I-A
You’d see ‘em wearin’ their neckties
Corporate logos, too
Beaten into submission,
Serfing U.S.A. “

because God would never ever let something bad happen to entire Earth…

Further proof that Christians never read their bible.

Some days you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
One things for damn sure - the only person doing the crying in my house will be me.
And maybe my ex if he forgets the safe word.

I think the Catholic Church actually believes in Global Warming, along with evolution (albeit theistic evolution).

Yeah, I know that the Catholic church accepts evolution, although I don’t know their stance on global warming.  I was referring to global-warming deniers in general, and not specifically Catholics.  I only personally know one global warming-denier, and he is also Catholic, but I know better than to generalize from that one case.  It’s a large and diverse group and you’re right that we shouldn’t make the mistake of lumping them with fundagelicals.

FWIW, I was raised Methodist, and that church also officially accepts evolution, but there were plenty of creationists of all stripes in the very same church.  One time someone yelled at me harshly for even mentioning the E-word, and a different time someone insisted that I use the word “adapt” instead of “evolve” when talking about a species of fish that was newly discovered.

The only significant change was banking deregulation. And the people who did that were 85% male or more.

Phil Gramm (R)
Jim Leach (R)
Thomas Bliley (R)

All Republicans, all men.  And at least one of them, Gramm, a textbook-definition fuck-you-I’ve-got-mine asshole.

Wait, you’re saying that PeterZeroOne is a smart troll?

Au Contraire!  I posit that he learned the speak this rhetoric, but NOT understand the tactical benefits of what he said.  It just sounds cool and sly to his unrefined ears, while his betters reserve the ability to shift the lay of debate.

I know I ought to let this alone and after this I swear I will, but

(for the record)

shah8, it’s not so much that I think PeterZeroOne is smart, it’s just that I doubt that the people who are running him are dumb.

Aside from that, I agree (this time) with everything you say.  Cheers!