this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2021
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Anarchism
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I know of many systems. Systems are inhuman things, created by engineers to manipulate things.
Humans are not things, and belong in no systems. Saying "but this other system is better" just misses the point.
No, they have just succeeded in convincing their populations that these are good. That's not the same thing. I don't need my children in a "better public school" where better just means "they do the same things, but more successfully". I need them far away from such things, distances measured in astronomical terms.
Europe is dead. It does not know it yet, it will keep limping along for another century at most. What's the fertility rate again? Everything about its culture is killing it, and it can't escape that fate.
The opinions of dying people don't do much to sway me. My descendants will tell spooky stories about the place that whined itself to death.
Lets not call each other insane, please.
I think the view expressed here is incredibly cynical and with such a cynical view the negative outcome for a society is a forgone conclusion, but I don't think it is worth imposing my more optimistic view on other people (and it would not convince them anyways).
Sure, if you want to stretch the definition to meaningless. I named my house "society" therefor I live in one too!
I don't. There are things I have to work around even in the US, if I moved, there would be different thins to work around. The US has fewer of these than some places, but not substantially more than other places.
I don't hate anyone. Hatred is a peculiar emotion that I have felt in the past, directed towards specific individuals (low count). I hold no hatred towards any group of people, whatever the manner of grouping.
I mostly have indifference for humans in general. I make exceptions for people I like. As for public school teachers, even the ones who were cruel or didn't give a shit to me personally... how can I blame them? My mother didn't do anything about it, kept sending me back. If someone should have done something, surely it was her don't you think? But public school teachers continue to behave stupidly, continue to make poor life choices (their career, in case that's obvious), and will even scuttle around on the ground picking up dollar bills like an over-aged stripper at the nudie bar.
If they are humiliated, how is it anything other than they doing this to themselves?
Anything below replacement is eventual extinction. And it's so far below that that it's absurd. Children growing up seeing everyone around them have one child, or none at all... they internalize it, think it's normal. Then they grow up to have one or none themselves. Which math says means it goes even lower since the ceiling was set but not the floor. Sure, you can pretend that some day 80 years from now one of those little girls will wake up and say "I want to grow up and have 2.1 children!"... but it really has to be all little girls who say that. If it's just one in 10, then those girls have to say "I want to grow up and have 21 children!". Neither of those is plausible.
Dead. The US might be too. Certainly heading that way. Wouldn't that be a hoot?
I don't identify as my country though, unlike yourself. You see yourself as a citizen of X, one of many, collectively acting like some gigantic robot made out of people. One that can die even if some of the individuals survive. Me? I'm just me. My existence in this country is an accident of geography.
Your argument has one glaring logical error: The overall population of Europe is growing and not shrinking. Yes, this is due to immigration, but with a well managed immigration that ensures the new-comers are integrated into society this is no problem at all and in fact a positive outcome for all involved. Now arguably immigration isn't that well managed in Europe, but at least it is mostly managed better then in the US (lately... they used to be better at it).
Yes. One of us has a glaring logical error. It is not me. Populations can (temporarily) grow, even as the fertility rate goes below replacement. Just as a car that runs out of gas can coast along for awhile on momentum. Sitting in the passenger seat, you taunt me with "I've invented perpetual motion". I just smile and nod.
Those countries the people come from... what's happening to their fertility rates? Aren't those declining? Are the rates of decline decreasing or increasing? Do you see any evidence of it bottoming out at all? Will it bottom out at 2.1, or go lower?
They have the same problem you do. You just have a head start.
This is laughable. I am not a racist. Assume each immigrant magically integrates instantly and perfectly... you'll just run out of them is the problem. Or, more accurately, the problem is that you'll run out of them and that you're somehow deluded enough to never notice that you'll run out of them. The fertility rates are declining even in the countries where the immigrants come from, with no signs of slowing down at all. They'll hit 2.1 and keep plummeting further. What will you do then?
Or, if we want to dig deeper, you don't even know why it's falling. You bandy around sophistry like "when women are educated they have fewer children" and just leave it at that. You can't explore the ideas, for some instinctive fear that you might discover double secret misogyny or something.
Children internalize the norms they grow up with. Every immigrant child in Europe is internalizing your childlessness norms. You're converting them to be like you in that regard, not just the other stuff, the positive "integration" stuff. And you're converting them far faster than their great numbers can hope to overcome.
In your collective psychology, there is something that makes you all feel as if you're bad. So bad that you shouldn't exist. And your wish will eventually come true. Personally I'm not surprised, it is the continent that gave us a century of world wars, pogroms, holocausts, and other villainous acts of barbarism. Maybe you guys have the right idea.
Listen to the stuff being said to me in this thread. That I'm privileged and hateful. You want me to feel miserable with you. To be ashamed, embarrassed, and to change. Why would I want to become what you are?
You're already all dead. You just haven't noticed yet.
No argument there. We should let in anyone who wants to be here... whether they want to stay and be citizens, or just stay awhile and go back home. Anyone smart enough to want to come here is an asset, and it's sort of crazy that their home countries would let them leave. No strings, no gotchas... if they haven't been convicted of a felony or have untreated tuberculosis, let them in. Bricklayer or PhD.
Uhmm, you realize the world population is nearly 8 billion people and still growing fast? We will not run out of "them" anytime soon, and even if we do at some point (far in the future) that is probably a good thing as the world is way over-populated as it is right now already.
Sorry, but your logic really doesn't hold up there at all.
Let's imagine a simpler scenario, for those who might read our comments but are bad at math. We won't use humans (too much baggage), but little aliens we'll call zoops.
Zoops have two biological sexes that procreate together. There are two specimens, a Y and a Z. They have two offspring, also Y and Z. The population has doubled, but the fertility rate is at exact replacement level. When the two older zoops die, there will be only two. Zoops have no incest taboos, and so the second generation procreates twice.
In this way, the population has reached a steady state. But what if, instead, they only procreated once? This population is dead. Period. Sure, it will hang on a little longer, and sure, you'll scream "but their population increased by 50% in just minutes" as some sort of lame argument that overpopulation is a concern. No, that was never a concern, instead extinction is the real risk.
We are in the period where humans are just having the one offspring per two parents, and since the parents don't immediately die, it looks to you as if the population is "still growing fast".
You will indeed run out of them within 25 years. Within your lifetime. This will be about the time that you personally are relying on them to be the nurse's aids in your nursing homes and to wipe your geriatric ass.
No one growing up in this world you imagine will think "ok, the population has fallen enough now it's time to start having 2.1 children again".
You belong to a death cult. Suicidal at the species level.
I don't know where you get your figures from, but the global fertility rate is still above replacement level, and that in sub-saharan Africa is easily twice that.
Also even at a slightly below replacement rate (where the global fertility rate is heading indeed) it will take centuries or even millennia before the global population will have shrunk significantly.
It is moot speculation what society will look like in a thousand years or so, and yes maybe people will decide to get more children again then.
Only when including several regions where fertility remains high (mostly Africa). If those are excluded, it's extinction-level. But hey, you say "that's how averages work".
So let's look at Africa. Their fertility rate is above replacement, but is dropping rapidly. We can measure how fast it is dropping. We know approximately when it will fall below replacement levels. And we don't see any reason why it should remain above them, when it didn't remain above replacement (or even just at) anywhere else in the world. It's natural, and even smart, to assume that the same sociological forces that made it drop elsewhere are those making it drop in Africa, and that they will work the same as elsewhere (since Africans are human like everyone else). It'd actually be sort of racist to assume that it would work differently there wouldn't it?
Once we have considered the places it's below replacement, and the places that it's above replacement but dropping, where else is left at all? Nowhere.
You don't even understand the phenomenon. You don't want to understand it. And you're claiming that somehow it's not even happening. It's bizarre.
No. The effect actually picks up speed the longer it occurs. Children internalize norms. If the 5 children who see everyone around them childless (excepting their own parents who have one), then don't grow up to have one child also, they'll have on average 0.2 children or something like that. Each generation shrinks faster than the last.
And if that somehow still translates into "it will be centuries before the last centenarian dies!"... how is that a counter-argument at all?
It's bizarre that you are so stuck to your pet theory of human extinction that you try to ignore the facts that global fertility rate is above replacement rate, and will stay so for quite some years still. And even if you extrapolate the current trend it will not drop significantly below replacement rate anytime soon. There is literally zero data suggesting otherwise.
Oh and there is no evidence that people (on average) have decided to go totally childless. They usually only get one or two children, which does indeed drop the average fertility rate below replacement, but only slightly so. This means in turn that the population will at most shrink very slowly.
With 8 billion people world wide (and still growing above replacement rate right now!) it is simply absolute non-sense to talk about human extinction due to birth-rates dropping below replacement rate. Even assuming the trend will last for thousands of years (nothing in human history has ever lasted that long!) we will not go anywhere near extinct.
It's bizarre that your theory is that we haven't run out of gas when the speedometer still says we're doing 100kph.
Soon for me is "anytime in the next 200 years". Soon for you is "next 2 minutes". We do not have the same "soon".
It wouldn't have to be average. All it has to do is nudge things below replacement.
And children who grow up in that world internalize it as a social norm. That becomes their ceiling for how many children to have someday. They then have the same number. Or fewer. The ones that go for "fewer" just nudged the rate down lower still. Iterate that through 30 generations, see what happens.
Depends on the "we". If by "we" you are excluding myself and my descendants, then you most certainly will.
If you are including me, then no. But the subset of humanity that is like yourself, you're goners. Along with most of your ideology.
I forgot. Only climate science is allowed to think long term. The one true science. Measured in human generations, any one of which lasts no longer than about 100 years, each generation staggered with the next, and with a growing sentiment that having children is wrong, dangerous, and unfashionable that we impress upon youth... you people have less than a couple hundred years. Someday, when it becomes impossible to ignore, those of you still alive will look back to times like now, when something might still have been done about it.
Apparently you are absolutely fact resistant. But try to do the math at least once: 8 billion people and a fertility rate of 1.8... how long will that take to human extinction? or 1.5 or even 1.1... just calculate it. In each case it will take thousands of years.
Sure you can claim it will go even lower then that, but there is literally zero evidence that people will stop having children all together. Z-E-R-O.
And claiming to know what will happen with the fertility rate in the next thousands of years is just bullshit. It might as well go up again in a few hundred years, who knows...
Which fact am I resistant to? I'm resistant to your conclusions, which aren't worthy of being called facts.
I'll wait 20 years until it's 1.3. Or 40 years until it's 0.3. The rate's not constant. You get that right? It's provably not constant. It's provably not going up, or fluctuating back or forth, but continues to go downward. That's not so hard to understand.
Maybe that's the fact I'm resistant to. Maybe the fact that it's currently 1.8, and that you imply there it will stay without anything to corroborate the idea. But also that you only imply it, because to assert such a thing sounds so absurd even you can't possibly say it with a straight face.
There's plenty of evidence that the downward trend continues to accelerate, as it has for a century. There's plenty of evidence that children internalize such things as social norms, and not alot to suggest that this isn't at least the cause, in part, for the downward trend.
They don't have to stop having children. It just has to fall below replacement. At that point you are, as a species, effectively dead. It never recovers.
I used to say the same thing about climate. But the difference there is that we're supposed to believe such things about holy climate science, and disbelieve those things which contradict the dogma of our ideologies.
Magically? Like, your ideology already makes some assumptions about why it went down in the first place. And I'm not saying you are wrong... what makes you think those assumptions won't continue to hold, when all the statistics say that they are doing just that?
Dead.
Your arguments are how soon-to-be dead people think. I'm not unhealthy, so what if I've put on a few pounds. Sure, it was a heart attack, but just a mild one and with medicine now days. And I'm too old to do the fitness thing anyway, the medications are a better bet. Maybe they'll invent whizbang medical technology to make me immortal and I'll vacation on Neptune! Just dead.
The current global fertility rate is 2.4. Well above replacement rate (fact).
There is no evidence that the rate will fall below 1 (fact). You just claim that this is a linear trend to the bottom, but it isn't. People still get plenty of children and the "norms" you talk about are about getting less (i.e. one or two) not no children (fact). Claiming that getting less children automatically leads to getting no children is factually incorrect. All sociological data shows that people still want to get children, just not as many as before (fact).
And if you actually did the math you should know by now that it means next to nothing if the global fertility rate falls to something like 1.8 in the fear future.
And your climate analogy also does not hold up at all. All the models only forecast until 2100, because the uncertainty on a longer time frame is so high that is would be ludicrous to extrapolate anything from it. Which is exactly what I am saying about forecast on fertility rate hundreds of years into the future.
You can claim as much as you want that your pet theory is right, but the facts are clearly on my side of the argument.