Then there is the acceptance of what can only be described as unconventional lifestyles. Gay rainbow gender-bending madness is one thing. It seems progressive. Sodomites used to get ten years of hard labour. Look how advanced we have become.
But now they’ve moved on to the kids. It is easy to believe a listless, drug-addled elite might indulge in sexual degeneracy just for the hell of it. But how do we explain kindergarten teachers teaching their pupils about pronouns? Doctors emotionally blackmailing parents by insisting that the alternative to mutilating their children is their suicides? Or civil servants quietly putting gender-neutral bathrooms in public spaces?
How do we explain any of this? How do we even explain the emergence of transgenderism at all? There have been transexuals and gender dysphorics throughout history. They were typically understood as an offshoot of homosexuality, the extreme end of the effeminacy spectrum, and a vanishingly small fraction of the population.
But the current contagion is unusual and is clearly artificial. Its scale can only be a result of active promotion. Much of that is accomplished via the media and fellow travellers who champion these activities. But it is helped along by a collection of other professionals, and any attempt to question it is met with energetic pushback.
It is apparent that much of this comes from on-high, a literal top-down initiative. In less than twenty years we have witnessed a journey that began with gay rights and now includes active promotion of sexual deviancy to children, none of it natural or wanted by the majority. There is lots of speculation as to why this may be, including the part it may play in a comprehensive depopulation agenda.
What is apparent is that the professional class who endorse and promote this perceive it as an exercise in tolerance.
The notion of tolerance has typically been invoked for the distasteful, a last line of defence when direct measures fail, not a behavioural response indicating sophistication.
We rely on tolerance for things we dislike but cannot avoid. We learn to tolerate a persistent whine from an air conditioning unit, a noisy neighbour, or a noxious smell. But our goal is always to remove the source of the problem. Tolerance is a stopgap only when more permanent solutions are absent.
Their belief that tolerance is a virtue is one of the greatest shortcomings of today’s chattering classes. It is exactly the kind of signal error that exemplifies the disconnect between globalist elites and their obedient cheerleaders. The mechanism here seems to be a kind of learned override to natural disgust or discomfort. When others then object to whatever letter they have just added to the LGBTQWERTY+ community on the basis that it can’t be healthy or normal to endorse this stuff, that learned response includes the flare of superiority at your obvious backwardness.
How satisfying it must feel to have your natural inclination toward superiority endorsed in this way. Like whole food vegans at a Medieval banquet, it must provide an irresistible sense of smugness to know that you are the one-eyed man in the rainbow-decked land of the blind, with the uneducated hopelessly lost in their backward understanding of the benefits of sexual liberation.
While elites and their public relations machine happily endorse this misplaced emphasis on tolerance, all evidence suggests the elites themselves are not tolerating anything, despite what their obedient minions may think. They really are indulging in the cocaine-fuelled all-star human sacrifice orgies for real because they are cosmically bored and rich.
They aren’t rising above intrinsic disgust responses, they have sexualized them. They seem to have fetishized everything we consider unacceptable. Trafficked kids, femboys, chicks with dicks, gangbangs, farmyard orgies, human sacrifice, the lot.
They may even experience a thrill in seeing just how far they can push public morality as many have suggested, and especially how far they can get otherwise normal middle-class people to champion deviancy and hedonism most cultures find distasteful enough to ban.
The excessive promotion of tolerance is a defence against unnatural practices bored elites are rumoured to engage in. The professional class, for all their faults, probably aren’t into human sacrifice or animal orgies. So their response is to elevate the importance of visible acceptance of alternative lifestyles, hence gay kids, castrated boys, invented genders and other absurdities they cannot possibly believe themselves, and all of it instantly conveyed to one’s peers with nothing more than a multicoloured flag.
To top it all when they see how normals react, those unmoved by inept calls to be more understanding about sexual abuse, when they see parents reach for the shotgun at the very idea of sexually mutilating children, they get to invoke the conjoined twin of their cultivated tolerance, namely artificial superiority. The deep belief that they see further than the yokels with their primitive instinct to actually protect the vulnerable and embrace some basic sense of public morality.
These absurd beliefs can be observed in our educated classes because they ostentatiously demonstrate tolerance and its newfound position as the supreme virtue of the post-Christian age, one of the most successful public relations campaigns ever run by elites.
Spaceman Spiff (guest-post) “Praying to Absent Gods”, Postcards from Barsoom, 2024-07-16.
December 15, 2024
QotD: Elite luxury beliefs – cultivated non-disgust
December 12, 2024
The dispiriting rise of the “kidult”
Freya India explains the need for modern parents to re-embrace some of the more traditional duties of parents in raising children:
It’s pretty much accepted as fact that parents today are overprotective. We worry about helicopter parenting, and the coddling of Gen Z. But I don’t think that’s the full story. Parents aren’t protective enough.
Or at least, what parents are protective about has changed. They are overprotective about physical safety, terrified of accidents and injuries. But are they protective by giving guidance? Involved in their children’s character development? Protective by raising boys to be respectful, by guiding girls away from bad influences? Protective by showing children how to behave, by being an example?
As far as I can see many parents today are overprotective but also strangely permissive. They hesitate to give advice or get involved, afraid of seeming controlling or outdated. They obsess over protecting their children physically, but have little interest in guiding them morally. They care more about their children’s safety than their character. Protective parenting once meant caring about who your daughter dated, the decisions she made, and guiding her in a good direction. Now it just means preventing injury. And so children today are deprived of the most fundamental protection: the passing down of morals, principles, and a framework for life.
One obvious example of this is that adults act like children now. They talk like teenagers. They use the same social media platforms, play the same video games, listen to the same music. Our world moves too rapidly to retain any wisdom, denying parents the chance to pass anything down or be taken seriously, so they try to keep up with kids, who know more about the world than they do. Fathers are “girl dads” who get told what to think. Mothers are best friends to gossip with. The difference between childhood and adulthood is disappearing, and with it, parental protection.
Beyond that, too, there’s this broader cultural message that adults should focus on their own autonomy and self-actualisation. This very modern belief that a good life means maximum freedom, with as little discomfort and constraint as possible, the way children think. Now nothing should hold adults back. They have a right to feel good, at all times. They stopped being role models of responsibility and became vessels of the only culture left, a therapeutic culture, where it’s only acceptable to be protective of one thing, your own mental health and happiness. Listen to the way adults judge decisions now, how they justify themselves. Parents are celebrated for leaving their families because they were vaguely unhappy or felt they needed to find themselves, even at the expense of their children’s security. Adults talk about finding themselves as much as teenagers do. Parents complain online about the “emotional labour” of caring for family, or express regret for even having children because they got in the way of their goals. Once growing up meant sacrificing for family, giving up some of yourself, that was an honour, that was a privilege, and in that sacrifice you found actual fulfilment, broke free from yourself, moved on from adolescent anxieties, and there, then, you became an adult.
But slowly, without thinking, we became suspicious of adulthood. We debunked every marker and milestone, from marriage to children all the way to adulthood itself. Now we aren’t just refusing to grow up but rejecting the very concept of it. Adulthood does not exist, apparently. It’s a scam, a lie, a myth. Adulthood is a marketing ploy, we say, while wearing Harry Potter merch and going to Disneyland. Adulthood is a performance, apparently, that’s going out of style. “There is nothing, there is nobody which/who would really justify the claim ‘you have to grow up’,” seems to be the sentiment. “For whom? for what?”
November 27, 2024
Scolianormativity
At FEE, Michael Strong defines the neologism and provides evidence that it has been a long-term harm to children forced into the Prussian-originated school regimentation regime:
Scolianormative (adj.): The assumption that behaviors defined by institutionalized schooling are “normal”. An assumption that became pervasive in industrialized societies in which institutionalized schooling became the norm that resulted in marginalizing and harming millions of children. Once society began to question scolianormativity, gradually people began to realize that the norms set by institutionalized schooling were perfectly arbitrary. It turned out that it was not necessary to harm children. The institutions that led to such widespread harms were dismantled, and humanity transcended the terrible century of institutionalized schooling.
The conventional educational model, government-enforced and subsidized, is based on 13 years of schooling consisting of state-defined curriculum standards and exams leading to a high school diploma.
Young human beings are judged as either “normal” or not based on the extent to which they are “on track” with respect to grade level exams and test scores. Students who are not making the expected progress may be diagnosed with learning differences (formerly known as disabilities). Students who can’t sit still adequately may be diagnosed with ADD/ADHD. Students who find the experience soul-killing may be diagnosed with depression or anxiety. Students who can’t stand to be told what to do all day may be diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD). Students who score higher on certain tests are labeled “gifted”.
Massive amounts of research and institutional authority have been invested in these and other diagnoses. When a child is not progressing appropriately in the system, the child is often sent to specialists who then perform the diagnosis. When appropriate, then the child is given some combination of medication, accommodations, and/or sent to a special program for children with “special needs”.
Many well-intentioned people regard this system as life-saving for the children who might otherwise have “not had their needs met” in the absence of such a diagnosis and intervention. And this is no doubt often true, but our fixation on scolianormativity blinds us to the fact that an entirely different perspective might actually result in better lives for more children.
How could one possibly deny mountains of evidence on behalf of such a life-saving system?
Scolianormativity
The Prussian school model, a state-led model devoted to nationalism, is only about two hundred years old. For much of its first century it was limited to a few hours per day, for a few months per year, for a few years of schooling. It has only gradually grown to encompass most of a child’s waking hours for nine months a year from ages 5 to 18. Indeed, in the U.S., it was only in the 1950s that a majority of children graduated from high school (though laws requiring compulsory attendance through age 16 had been passed in the late 19th and early 20th century). In addition, for most of its first century, it was far more flexible than it has become in its second. The increasing standardization and bureaucratization of childhood is a remarkably recent phenomenon in historical terms.
In his book Seeing Like a State, the political scientist James C. Scott documents how governments work to create societies that are “legible”, that can be perceived and managed by the state to suit the needs of the state’s bureaucrats and political leaders. Public schools are one of the most pervasive of all state institutions. The structure of public schooling has grown to suit the needs of the state bureaucrats who monitor it.
November 19, 2024
“Sometimes, a bouncy castle is just a bouncy castle”
From Donna Laframboise at Thank You, Truckers!, part of the story of the bouncy castles during the Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa in 2022:
A t-shirt shows some of Bianca’s post-Convoy branding.
More than two years after the trucker protest ended, Bianca says the COVID era was clarifying. “It opened my mind to what we need to do — and what we don’t need to do.” In her view, childhoods are precious and fleeting. Society should have gone to greater lengths, she feels, to insulate children from pandemic panic and fear. “The kids don’t need that. They just need to be kids.”
[…]
Other than a brief conversation with TVA — a Quebec French-language television station — Bianca says no one from the media spoke to her.
How do we explain this profound lack of curiosity? A young mother inflated bouncy castles that were wholly impossible to miss. Mere steps from the National Press Building. Two weekends in a row. (Smaller inflatables sometimes put in an appearance mid-week.)
Several journalists commented on the bouncy castles. But no one reported Bianca’s story. No one tried to understand.
[…]
Many people instantly grasped the outsized, symbolic significance of the inflatables. “I will never get tired of seeing videos with the bouncy castles in them,” one person tweeted. “It just crumbles the false narrative …”
But “the mainstream media told us the trucker rally was all hate and violence,” someone else pointed out facetiously, while another chimed in: “Those fringe extremists ruining Canada with their happiness and joy.”
If the flag of Canada is ever changed, still another added, the maple leaf should be replaced with a red bouncy castle.
“I absolutely love the tactic” (italics here and below by me), someone else tweeted. “It’s peaceful, family oriented, and gives the Politicians the finger at the same time. Mayor Watson was near tears on CTV today.”
Many people — both sympathetic and hostile to the protest — talked about the bouncy castles as if they were part of a pre-determined plan, dreamt up by a mastermind. According to one individual, the “bouncy castle is probably one of the greatest strategic moves against any government lusting for violence in the history of war strategies“.
Another described the inflatables as “one of the finest information warfare tactics I’ve seen to date”. In the opinion of someone else, “The bouncy castles are the unsung heroes of the protest. The government doesn’t dare send in the tanks or snipers while children are playing in bouncy castles. The optics would be horrific.”
Thomas Juneau, a University of Ottawa professor who specializes in Middle Eastern politics, confidently told the world: “Just to be clear, the bouncy castle was an info op, and more than a few gullible commentators fell for it”. In the universe inhabited by our pompous professor, no evidence is actually required. According to someone else, the presence of bouncy castles pointed to “a sophistication of terrorists”.
On the Monday following the first bouncy castle weekend, someone said the inflatables had disappeared because the “bouncy castle guy” had to report to work. Ten days later, someone else claimed the bouncy castle (singular) had exited the stage because those responsible “are hoping to get their deposit back on it so they can afford the bus fare back to Alberta”.
But the facts in this matter are straightforward. The Freedom Convoy story is about ordinary people who did extraordinary things. Bianca of the Bouncy Castles was one of those people. A mom who cared about the kids. A resident of Quebec who lived three hours distant. An event planner who knows how to make things happen.
There’s nothing covert or complicated here. Sometimes, a bouncy castle is just a bouncy castle.
October 31, 2024
Nine Types of Trick-or-Treat Houses
It’s a Southern Thing
Published Oct 23, 2018Halloween is coming. Which one will you be?
#SoTrueYall #itsasouthernthing
October 24, 2024
The colonization of academia
Lorenzo Warby decries what he calls “the systematic attack on sense-making”, especially the galloping credentialization of everything in sight partly through the long-running takeover of the universities:
University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.
The disastrous dysfunction of our universities is nowhere more obvious than in the Education Faculties and Departments, which have been invaded by systems of toxic nonsense that not only have no pedagogical value, they are actively pedagogically destructive. Ideas that manifest in pedagogical “theories” and “techniques” that not only lack evidence, but actively go against the evidence, yet allow adherents to flatter themselves as noble Social Justice activists.
In 2004, psychologist Richard E. Mayer published in American Psychologist the paper “Should There Be a Three-Strikes Rule Against Pure Discovery Learning?: The Case for Guided Methods of Instruction”. In it, he decried the way Education academics kept re-packaging ideas that have been shown, again and again, not to work.
Fast forward to 2023 and the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) results show that about a third of Australian school children have inadequate literacy. The Australian Education Minister announces a A$12bn package to, among other things, essentially bribe the public school systems to bring in explicit instruction — an effective approach to pedagogy in line with what psychologists have shown across decades to work. This would replace the — yet again repackaged — notions pushed by Education academics that do not work and which appear to be on their fourth or fifth iteration. So, no, three strikes were not enough.1
Sympathetic reviews of Isaac Gottesman’s The Critical Turn in Education applaud the sets of ideas he discusses as flowing through Education academe. Yet they are all sets of ideas not only without pedagogical value, but that are actively pedagogically toxic.
All of this colonising of Education Faculties — and then of school systems — of pedagogically disastrous ideas has been done on the basis of massive bad faith. This process of colonisation pushed ideas that did not remotely reflect the view of the citizens that were paying for all this and who entrusted their children to ideologically-colonised school systems.
Ideas that have no evidentiary basis worth mentioning to support them: indeed, went systematically against the available evidence. Ideas, moreover, that actively seek to increase social dysfunction so that the oppressive “dross” of contemporary societies can be burnt away and the transformational future can emerge like gold from the ashes: i.e., social alchemy theory.
Hence the systematic attack on the mechanisms for adjudicating facts, and on mechanisms of accountability.
Much of the anti “disinformation” push — also coming out of the universities — is about protecting preferred ways of looking at the world from inconvenient criticism and inconvenient concerns. Fake news, even on a broad definition, is a tiny proportion (0.15 per cent) of US daily media consumption, and is dwarfed by consumption of mainstream news. It is a prop of convenience.
The convenient-moral-panic campaigns to block “disinformation” also go against both historical and scholarly evidence that censorship tends to promote conspiracism and entrench views among the censored. The hate speech laws of Weimar Germany enabled prosecuted Nazis to play the martyr game.
Cargo cult grant structures
There is a lot one could say about the institutional problems that gave rise to all this academic dysfunction. For instance, the innovation cargo cult that has led to spurious academic “innovation” funded by grants. Grant structures that have had many invidious effects — including, via daft citation metrics2 and straightforward financial interest, the replication crisis — and massive waste of public funds on toxic nonsense.
Universities and mainstream media want to maintain their authority, while evading responsibility for what they have done to destroy that authority.
1. Australia has had public schools since the 1850s. Apparently, they still have not yet learnt to reliably teach students adequate literacy. Let that sink in. (In reality, it is worse than that, their performance has regressed.)
2. Citation metrics that replace what is useful — good teaching — with what is public while also enabling idea laundering.
October 23, 2024
Canadian history through the propagandist lens
Fortissax casually tosses a few bricks into the glass house of Canadian history as it has been taught to schoolchildren over the last 30-40 years:
During our annual Not One Body Found season, I thought I’d discuss the truth about the brutal violence and savagery of North America’s most early, prominent and influential indigenous tribes, and popular narratives surrounding them.
If you’re an ethnic Canadian, born in the 1990s, you’re no doubt familiar with the education system’s attempts to subject you to a program of Maoist-style struggle sessions over the alleged genocide of the indigenous peoples in Canada. These struggle sessions in classrooms and collective humiliation rituals serve multiple purposes. One is to de-legitimize the history of, and perpetuate the ongoing deconstruction of Canada. The other is to de-legitimize the existence of the Canadian people as a nation (defined as a group sharing ethnic, cultural, and historical ties), in preparation for demographic replacement via mass migration.
The average Canadian’s school experience is filled with a turbo-charged version of liberal Noble Savage mythology, which is still propagated by leftists and indigenous activists. This has given the impression to many of the indigenous tribes as a singular race, continent-wide, uniformly peace-loving, non-binary, nature-appreciating matriarchal egalitarians until the evil, white, patriarchal Christian man arrived.
This resembles equally revisionist history about the Indo-European invasions into Europe around 4000 B.C. against the Pre-Indo-Europeans. You know that story: patriarchal brutes from the Eurasian steppes, with their advanced bronze weaponry and horse-powered chariots, wiped out the longhouse-dwelling, peace-loving, egalitarian agricultural Early European Farmers, who were feminist. This theory, conceived by Maria Gimbutas, a feminist intellectual, was debunked and discarded years ago. In reality, the Early-European-Farmers were extraordinarily warlike, violent, engaged in child murder or sacrifice and were apparently innovative as they built monuments like Stonehenge. This is much the same for indigenous in North America. All of this is framed in a Marxist oppressor-oppressed paradigm.
Tales of cruel treatment, deliberate biological warfare via smallpox blankets (of which there is only one known reference, with attempts to implement unknown), or extermination by colonial death squads haunts the minds of Canadians, planting the seeds of self-doubt and masochism. If you listen carefully to the rhetoric of leftists and indigenous activists, you’d be led to believe there was an industrial mass-slaughter of tribes, with conveyor belts funneling indigenous people into machines that spit out moccasins and dream catchers. The depopulation of indigenous tribes was not the result of deliberate action but rather Europeans being far more numerous and carrying diseases to which they had no immunity. The second cause was perpetual, brutal warfare by the survivors against each other. The mass depopulation from epidemic disease in North America occurred in the mid-1600s, after epidemic breakouts in the filthy, cramped conditions of Europe. Not almost a hundred years later in 1763, where smallpox blankets are merely discussed by General Jeffrey Amherst and Colonel Henry Bouquet.
Indigenous activists believe they were subject to a holocaust-style genocide. It is not a coincidence that the amplifying of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation occurs at the same time as the Managerial Regime in Canada has declared itself a “post-national state” (which the indigenous also live in and suffer consequences from). They believe Canada is a country without a people. Ironically this lines up with activists’ own definition of “cultural genocide”, because in 1867 during Confederation Year, according to census data, Canada was 92% Anglo-French, 7% miscellaneous Europeans, and the remaining 1% indigenous. Canada is unquestionably, unmistakably, a European construct of Anglo-French extraction.
In 2021, seemingly out of nowhere, the public was subjected to the establishment of this astroturfed federal holiday, which was made statutory—still only for employees of the federal government (what a coincidence!)—as of March 2023. Participation in this public humiliation ritual involves the coerced wearing of orange, and sometimes red, shirts. Canadians across the political spectrum knowingly or unknowingly participate in this ritual, with many rough, cowboy-hat-wearing, lifted-big-black-truck-driving conservatives, as well as tattooed, soy-eating, vegan ketamine enthusiast quartz-worshiping leftists also enthusiastically partaking.
It’s called being a decent human being, Chud! Schools, the monopolized legacy media, corporations, and brands all recognize and partake in the humiliation ritual, directed exclusively at ethnic Canadians. Football games have their players sing the national anthem, and every clinically obese, corn-syrup-slurping sportsball fan claps as the announcer humiliates and shames him or her with a land acknowledgement to prove to the crowd and community that they “don’t see race”. Medical professionals and university faculty across the country also include land acknowledgements in professional email signatures. Even law enforcement gleefully participate in the the ritual, dancing like circus monkeys to the tune of people who despise them.
October 18, 2024
Accidentally creating an epidemic of food allergies, from the best of intentions
Jon Miltimore discusses how the unintentional outcome of professional organizations making recommendations to the public without proper scientific understanding created so many of the allergies that now plague youngsters:
“Peanuts, LEAP study (Learning Early About Peanut allergy)” by jlcampbell104 is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0 
.
In 1992, with the help of a grant from the National Institutes of Health, The New England Journal of Medicine published a report on a rare phenomenon: fatal or near-fatal anaphylactic reactions in young people due to food allergies.
Examining a period of 14 months, researchers identified thirteen cases, twelve of which involved asthmatic youths. Six of the thirteen anaphylactic reactions resulted in death, and each case had involved a young person with a known food allergy who had unknowingly ingested the food.
“The reactions were to peanuts (four patients), nuts (six patients), eggs (one patient), and milk (two patients), all of which were contained in foods such as candy, cookies, and pastry,” researchers wrote.
The paper said nothing about banning these foods, but concluded that “failure to recognize the severity of these reactions and to administer epinephrine promptly increases the risk of a fatal outcome”.
Nevertheless, food bans followed, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began to encourage educators to “consider possible food allergies” during food preparation.
By 1998, the New York Times was reporting on the rise of peanut allergies and the measures school districts were taking to stop them.
“Prodded by parents warning of lethal allergies, by the contentions of some researchers that peanut allergies are on the rise and, not least, by a fear of litigation, growing numbers of public and private schools across the country, including many of New York City’s most selective independent schools, have banned peanut butter from their cafeterias,” wrote Anemona Maria Hartocollis.
“The Biggest Misconception”
When the Times published its article in 1998, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) was not yet issuing recommendations about peanuts or food allergies in infants. But as public concern grew, they decided they had to offer guidelines of some kind.
“There was just one problem,” Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins University surgeon, noted in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. “Doctors didn’t actually know what precautions, if any, parents should take.”
Instead of remaining mum, the AAP followed the lead of the United Kingdom’s Committee on Toxicology and recommended that mothers avoid peanuts during pregnancy and lactation, and that children avoid peanuts until the age of 3.
The decision to make such a sweeping decision in the absence of compelling scientific evidence was a mistake, allergists say, and runs counter to basic immunology.
Dr. Gideon Lack, an allergist at King’s College London, says the collective effort to cocoon children from peanuts and other foods is responsible for what has been described as a “food allergy epidemic”.
The data suggest Lack is right.
In the 25 years since the AAP issued its recommendation, the US (like the UK, which also advised peanut avoidance) has experienced an explosion of food allergies, especially peanut allergies. Data from Mount Sinai Hospital System in New York show that peanut allergies more than tripled in the decade and a half following the AAP’s guidance. In 1997, peanut allergies affected 1 in 250 children in the United States. By 2002, this rate had risen to 1 in 125, and by 2008, it reached 1 in 70 children.
Anecdotally, I only remember one kid in my middle school who had food allergies … and poor Rusty had ’em all. He was known as the “Kid with a thousand allergies” and had to be so careful of what he ate and even what he touched. but this was the mid-1970s and there weren’t formal school guidelines on what we could bring in our school lunch bags or use scented things like deodorant. (It was the 1970s, and a lot of us were just hitting puberty and many of my classmates were new Canadians from poorer countries … we needed the deodorant!)
October 7, 2024
The demographic impact of modern cities
Lorenzo Warby touches on some of the social and demographic issues that David Friedman discussed the other day:
US Birth Rates from 1909-2008. The number of births per thousand people in the United States. The red segment is known as the Baby Boomer period. The drop in 1970 is due to excluding births to non-residents.
Graph by Saiarcot895 via Wikimedia Commons
Cities are demographic sinks. That is, cities have higher death rates than fertility rates.
For much of human history, cities have been unhealthy places to live. This is no longer true: cities have higher average life expectancies than rural areas. But they are still demographic sinks, for cities collapse fertility rates.
The problem is not that more women have no children, or only one child, making it to adulthood. Such women have always existed, though their share of the population has gone up across recent decades.
The key problem is the collapse in the demographic “tail” of large families. Cities are profoundly antipathetic to large families, and have always been so. This is particularly true of apartment cities — suburbs are somewhat more amenable to large families, though not enough to make up for the urbanisation effect.
While modern cities do not have slaves and household servants who were blocked from reproducing as ancient cities did, various aspects of modern technology have fertility-suppressing effects. Cars that presume a maximum of three children, for instance. An effect that is worsened by compulsory baby car-seats. Or ticketing and accommodation that presumes two children or less. There is also the deep problems of modern online dating. Plus the effects that endocrine disrupters and falling testosterone may be having.
These effects also extend to rural populations: falling fertility in rural populations is far more of a mystery than falling fertility in urban populations. How much declining metabolic health plays in all this is unclear. Indeed, futurist Samo Burja is correct, we do not really understand the “social technology” of human breeding.
Be that as it may, cities as demographic sinks is a continuation of patterns that go back to the first cities.
Matters at the margin
There are factors at the margin known to make a difference. Religious folk breed more than secular folk, though that is in part because rural people are more religious and city folk more secular.
Educating women reduces fertility. This is, in part, an urbanisation effect, as more education is available in cities. It is also an opportunity cost effect — there is more to do in cities, both paid and unpaid.
Education increases the general opportunity cost of motherhood, by expanding women’s opportunities. This also makes moving to cities more attractive. Women having more career opportunities reduces the relative attractiveness of men as marriage partners, reducing the marriage rate.
Strong cultural barriers against children outside marriage can reduce the fertility rate, by largely restricting motherhood to married women. This makes the fertility rate more dependant on the marriage rate.
Educating women makes children more expensive, as educated mothers have educated children. Part of the patterns that economist Gary Becker analysed.
September 30, 2024
British and Australian schools are teaching boys to hate themselves
Janice Fiamengo discusses the sort of things British and Australian boys are being taught about themselves and their role in society:
For years, feminists in the English-speaking school systems have done everything they can to psychologically destroy a generation of boys, calling their masculinity “problematic”, “hegemonic” and “toxic”.
At their least malign, feminist teachers have made it clear to boys that their perspectives and experiences aren’t as important as those of girls. Many businesses and organizations support programs aimed at girls’ academic success; there are no equivalent programs for boys. When study after study shows boys lagging behind girls in school, many feminists don’t even pretend to care, blaming the boys, as did Australian feminist Jane Caro, for their alleged privilege. Such ideologues continue to call for more feminist teaching, and moreover take direct aim at schoolboys’ maleness in what scholar Paul Nathanson has identified as a form of identity harassment, a pervasive psychological assault that creates doubt, shame, and alienation.
Under the feminist model, boys learn from a young age that their sex is responsible for violence and other serious harms, and that they must take personal responsibility for it. A few years ago, it came to light that the female principal of an Australian school thought it a good idea to hold an assembly in which the boys were to apologize for male misbehavior to the girl next to them. Naturally, no girls are ever expected to apologize to boys for the misdeeds of the female sex.
Calls regularly circulate, as in the West Australian‘s “How We Stop This Kid Becoming a Monster“, for teaching to address the problem of predatory masculinity. Unless the feminist deprogrammers can get to work in the early years, we’re told, the boys will succumb to their inner monster. Boys learn that they can hurt girls and women even without meaning to, just by looking at them or holding traditional views. As we’ll see, any boy who objects to his own vilification will learn that objecting itself is a technique of domination.
Teaching Toxic Masculinity
A recent report on UK schools provided a glimpse into what feminist instruction looks like, revealing that terms such as “hegemonic masculinity” and “toxic masculinity”, until a decade ago part of the radical feminist fringe, are now in the mainstream of pedagogy even in the lower grades.
The Family Education Trust surveyed materials used by UK schools in their sex education classes. Out of 197 schools that responded to a request for information (more than 100 did not respond), 62 schools confirmed that they were teaching about toxic masculinity. 10 schools even admitted to teaching that “men and boys possess traits that are inherently toxic and negative for society“. (One would be relieved to hear that the principals of such schools and all participating teachers were immediately sanctioned, or at least told to stop such claptrap — but of course such has not occurred.)
One slide from a lesson on toxic masculinity stated that while “masculinity in and of itself is not necessarily a harmful thing […] the way that masculinity is traditionally defined in society can be problematic”. Some of the materials don’t even make sense, as for example the statement that traditional masculine traits “can be limiting for women, girls and other people who don’t identify as men, who are not expected to display these traits”.
September 23, 2024
Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel wants to help you keep your kids from the perils of right-wing ideology
eugyppius on the help Berlin’s leading daily newspaper is offering to their readers whose kids are hearing the siren call of non-progressive politics:
This obviously charming, cheerful and not at all withered or overwrought woman is named Eva Prausner. She is a social worker, and she directs something called the “Project for Strengthening Parents“, which provides “Training, networking, and counselling in the area of family and right-wing extremism”. This means that she runs around telling parents what to do when they suspect their children are succumbing to political wrong-think. And this in turn makes Frau Prausner the woman of the hour, for never before in the history of the Federal Republic have so many undemocratic children bloomed under the noses of so many upstanding democratic parents.
It is very hard to understand how this happened. The leftists and the Greens, after all, have been doing the Lord’s work teaching leftism and Greenism in schools for decades now, but despite their valiant efforts we are rapidly losing our youth to malign antidemocratic forces. It can’t be that elevating leftoid lunacy into an establishment ideology has backfired, transforming the once cool, counter-cultural left into a political movement for middle-aged scolds and schoolmarms – the kind of thing from which teenagers flee in terror. No, nothing could be less plausible. The real reason for the pandemic of right-wing children must simply be that we haven’t indoctrinated them enough. If parents will not do their part and bring indoctrination also to the home, our democracy will collapse and it will be 1933 all over again, just like it was 1933 all over again two weeks ago after the elections in Thüringen and Saxony.
For these reasons, Der Tagesspiegel, Berlin’s largest daily newspaper, interviewed Prausner on her advice for parents who find themselves forced to deal with their evil, right-leaning spawn. The product is a prescient write-up for the ages bearing the headline “Help, my child is turning right-wing! Eight tips for democratic parents with undemocratic children“.
The rightward shift in East Germany is a shift above all among the youngest, as the elections in Saxony and Thüringen have shown. One in three young people there voted for the far right. In Thüringen, as many as 38% of 18- to 34-year-olds cast their ballot for the AfD – more than in any other age group. Many a parent who values living in a democracy will have wondered: “What have we done wrong?”
In Brandenburg, too, it is becoming clear that even the youngest are now leaning towards the right. In the under-16 vote a week before the state election, the AfD came out on top with around 30% … In the state elections on 22 September, the AfD could become the strongest force, thanks in part to young first-time voters.
Do parents still have any influence over their AfD-voting children?
Alas, Prausner is not very certain that they do, but she believes that democratic parents “should at least try” to rescue their children from the grave heresy of voting for the wrong political parties. Children in Brandenburg are particularly endangered, because Brandenburg is largely rural, and Prausner has discovered that the countryside is absolutely dripping with “condensed prejudicial attitudes”. There is so much racial prejudice in the Brandenburg air that it is collecting on cool surfaces, like windows and beer glasses, that is how bad things are there. Also all children everywhere are in danger because the internet is a powerful right-wing force that helps bad organisations like the AfD pump their fascist mind virus directly into millions of young yet-forming cerebral cortices.
September 19, 2024
“This is the Law of Unintended Consequences in action”
Tom Knighton provides a wonderful example of “be careful what you wish for”, especially in the rich virtue-signal territory of the “green transformation”:
“Artisanal cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo” by The International Institute for Environment and Development is licensed under CC BY 2.5 
.
… it seems our glorious green future now comes with more child labor!
A new report from the Department of Labor raises tough questions about whether and to what extent forced labor and child labor are intertwined with climate-friendly technology.
The department released a report this month finding that several minerals that are key components of electric vehicles and solar panels may be produced through these unethical labor practices.
The findings point to major ethical quandaries surrounding the ongoing energy transition. Climate change, if not addressed, endangers many of the world’s most vulnerable people. At the same time, the report raises serious human rights concerns about the technology being used to address it.
[…]
Whoops.Here’s the thing, cobalt and nickel are kind of important for this sort of thing, so we have to get them from somewhere and the one attempt to mine cobalt here in the United States fell flat. Why? The price of cobalt dropped. It was no longer profitable to try to mine it in the United States.
But in poor countries, it was still plenty viable.
Yet while we view child labor as unethical, we have to remember that our society is rich enough that we can afford to hold that belief. Now, I share it and I’d rather kids be kids, and worry about things like school, video games, television, and that sort of thing, but the truth is that when you’re barely able to feed yourself, you need every penny you can get.
That means kids going out to work.
That means doing some grueling, back-breaking, nasty work like mining stuff like cobalt.
It means paying for dirty, nasty strip mining so you can convince yourself and your friends that you’re better than those of us who still prefer a gasoline- or diesel-powered car.
All around us, we tend to be oblivious to the reality of the rest of the world. We simply think something should be so and then just act like they are. We ignore what all might be required to make that something so.
This is the Law of Unintended Consequences in action.
August 29, 2024
How activists used lawfare to force the Boy Scouts to go woke (and then go broke)
A guest post from Cole Noble at Postcards From Barsoom discusses how progressive organizations and political activists have managed an immense take-over of the great outdoors, not least of which were the legal and political efforts to force the Boy Scouts of America to accept gay scouts and scout masters:
[…] This entertainment ecosystem, increasingly infested with culture warriors, also started chipping away at the longstanding prestige of organizations like the BSA [Boy Scouts of America]. Depicting someone as a scout became a kind of character development shorthand, signalling them as uncool.
The targeting wasn’t incidental; the existence of the pre-centennial BSA was a serious problem for the ruling class. Their organization’s commitment to values-based conservation served as living proof that going along with society’s adoption of critical theory was completely optional. If the BSA was free to refuse the push, others might start getting ideas.
Lawfare was inevitable.
In 2000, the United States Supreme Court heard Boy Scouts of America v. Dale. In one corner you had James Dale, an avowed gay rights activist, co-president of the Rutgers University Lesbian/Gay Alliance, and outspoken advocate for gay teens having gay role models. In the other, you had the BSA, who didn’t want someone like Dale around its young, impressionable members.
The BSA won, but there was blood in the water. Culture warriors circled back around, this time employing social pressure. They tried to make their demand sound as reasonable as possible: drop the policy against openly gay members. Just one teeny tiny rule. What’s the point anyway? It’s outdated. No real sense keeping it, right?
Smart members of the program clocked this Trojan Horse from miles away. Alas, the organization’s leadership did not. Possessing both the physique and fortitude of rice pudding, they caved, capitulated, and acquiesced some more — agreeing to an ever-escalating series of demands that hollowed out the once-proud group into an empty vessel for The Current Thing(TM).
The Boy Scouts of America is now all-inclusive! Not just to gay scouts and leaders, but girls too. In a show of solidarity with Black Lives Matter after the riots of 2020, a mandatory DEI merit badge has replaced camping as a requirement to attain the once coveted rank of Eagle Scout.
Let’s not forget the Scout Masters now left to deal with teens using the program’s overnight trips as cover for hookups.
Oh, and they went bankrupt.
The organization agreed to a 2.5 billion dollar settlement over tens of thousands of sex abuse cases perpetuated by adult men, against underage boys.
(data compiled from the BSA’s publicly available annual reports)
Rather than bolster ranks, adopting DEI cost the organization more than 1 million members.
The BSA – sorry, Scouting America1 – didn’t publish annual membership reports from 2020 to 2022, I imagine out of embarrassment. During this time, the Mormons, who used Scouting as a youth program for its boys, took their 400,000 members, and their money, and left.
[…]
Scouting was one of, if not the last bastion of quasi-unstructured outdoor activities. While the death of free-range childhood seems to be commonly understood, there is some debate about the precise cause.
Whatever your opinion on the matter, regime journalists shoulder enormous responsibility for eroding societal trust and inspiring mass paranoia through sensational reporting. Former latchkey kids became hysterical helicopter parents, petrified of letting their children out of sight.
Playing outside became a heavily supervised affair, usually relegated to fenced-in backyards with locking gates.
Kids have been robbed of the experiences that could lead them to develop an organic appreciation for outdoor recreation, and groomed into a hypersexualized version of early adulthood. All the while, the institutions which once taught conservation and virtue now serve as apparatuses of critical theory.
1. They changed their name in May of 2024, after 114 of being the Boy Scouts. Since they’re no long the Boy Scouts, this is at least honest.
Cole’s own Substack is Quandary Magazine, which you should check out if you’re generally interested in the great outdoors.
July 28, 2024
J.D. Vance is an ideological extremist who has pushed an idea also supported by … Canadian deputy PM Chrystia Freeland
There’s much viewing-with-alarm and pearl-clutching going on over some of J.D. Vance’s more outré notions floated before he became Trump’s running mate:
U.S. Senator J.D. Vance speaking with attendees at The People’s Convention at Huntington Place in Detroit, Michigan, 16 June, 2024.
Detail of a photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
One of the amusing features of this week’s U.S. election turbulence has been sudden media scrutiny of Ohio Republican Senator J.D. Vance, a former author and pundit newly named as Donald Trump’s running mate. Readers will know I’m a sadistic student of electoral reform crusades, and in 2021 Vance advocated for one of the myriad of utopian ideas that has never quite reached prime time: parents should be given extra votes that they can exercise on behalf of their minor children.
[…]
Critics of Vance are screaming about the sacred principle of “one person, one vote” — but of course the centrists and liberals who have toyed with the same idea support it precisely because children are persons who deserve political representation. (They would be represented second-hand by their parents until the age of majority, but us adults are all represented that way in democratic decision-making now, right?) Earlier this week Reason magazine published a short excerpt from a pro-Demeny paper by two American law professors with strong conservative, originalist credentials: there isn’t all that much daylight between their arguments and Corak’s.
Are the arguments actually any good? Some of them seem circumstantial or even aesthetic. We’re in a transitory era of gerontocracy because of a baby boom that happened eighty years ago, and nobody under 70, whatever their ideology, likes this universal predicament much. But on the grounds of revealed preference, the lack of actual real-world Demeny experiments is a big problem.
If we want the proxy votes to go to custodial parents who are involved with a real child and conscious of its particular interests, you’re suddenly talking about integrating election systems with family law. I.e., an unfathomable technical nightmare. But assigning control of the extra child votes automatically to biological parents, including deadbeats and those who have surrendered children to adoptees or foster families, seems like a non-starter. (And would also be an unfathomable technical nightmare.)
You can say that the democratic principle is more important than the mere design details of a child-voting system, and this is the kind of thing election reformers say all the time — but would you book a seat on an airplane that was built on aerodynamic principles with no attention to detail?
June 30, 2024
California’s politics are so weird that Justin Trudeau is frantically taking notes
Chris Bray pays attention to California politics … and we should all pray for his long term mental health: that place is insane!
What’s happening in California isn’t politics in any conventional sense. No debate is underway, and no policy choices are being hashed out. We’re in the land beyond. In Our Democracy™, declarations are made, and then they are to be received in a spirit of quiet submission. Your failure to submit is disallowed, and the reason it’s been disallowed is that it’s been disallowed. Were it allowed, it would not be disallowed, but it is, in fact, disallowed, so therefore it is not allowed, you see? All “political” discussion is a circle, eating its own tail. I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain this, but the Sacramento Bee just did it for me. (Paywall-evading version here.)
The Bee is explaining — or “explaining” — what happened on the floor of the state Assembly yesterday, when a Republican was not permitted to argue against a bill, and a Democrat stood up to threaten him for trying. I encourage you to read the whole self-refuting thing. What happened, it turns out, is that the Republican was preventing debate by engaging in debate, which meant that he had to be silenced and threatened so debate could continue, which required that no one express opposing views, which is an act of anti-debate aggression. Debate is agreement, and not agreeing is preventing debate.
The “forced outing” debate was a discussion about AB 1955, which proposes to forbid schools to inform parents of discussions between children and school officials about sexual orientation and sexual behavior. It’s important that parents not be told about sexually themed discussions happening between children and the adults in their schools, because not telling mommy and daddy about sexual discussions is being safe and warm. But watch the casual turn of logic in the last paragraph of this screenshot:
- Evan Low said the bill is important because it’s good that parents not be told, and the bill makes sure parents aren’t told.
- Sabrina Cervantes said she didn’t have this bill when she was young, which would have forbidden telling, so someone told.
- Democrats explained that the bill is not meant to keep secrets from parents.
See, AB 1955 isn’t about keeping secrets from parents — it’s about not allowing schools to tell parents. Not being allowed to tell parents is different than keeping secrets from parents. The story doesn’t go on to explain the distinction between keeping secrets and not telling, but under Jacobin cultural rules, the distinction is that shut up. The distinction is presumptive, and so doesn’t require explanation.
Now, here’s the way the Bee characterizes Assemblyman Bill Essayli’s arguments during the debate that he derailed by not agreeing:
Essayli has exhibited a consistent pattern of publicly disparaging advocacy groups and fellow lawmakers in an attempt to garner attention for conservative causes. On Thursday, he interrupted colleagues’ testimony and expressed frustration over Wood cutting his microphone and shutting down his comments when they veered away from AB 1955 and toward the issue of forced outing, in general.
His comments about the forced outing bill weren’t about the bill — they were about forced outing. What a bastard! Mister Speaker, he’s not debating the highway funding bill, he’s debating highway funding. Again, why does this distinction make sense? Because shut up. It makes sense declaratively: X is true because they said X.
And Essayli has a “consistent pattern” of saying disparaging things, which the Bee knows through mindreading is a maneuver to “garner attention” rather than an attempt to express his views. He disagreed, which is a very cynical and manipulative thing to do during a debate. He has a pattern of it!
And also Essayli is so rude that he interrupted colleagues when they spoke, and then had the nerve to object when his microphone was turned off. It’s rude to stop someone from speaking, and it’s rude to object to being stopped from speaking. You should never interrupt people, and you should always allow other people to interrupt you. They’re playing partisan Calvinball under the dome, and all moves lose.
