Recently, a loose group of conservatives has emerged with a solution: that the family can be defended by boldly reasserting the importance of old-school gender roles. The movement tells men to be strong and women to have babies without overtly insisting that women must submit to their husbands or stay at home. It’s an effort to revive an older model of gender relations without the explicitly sexist baggage (though it often resurfaces in a more subtle form).
I call this loose movement “neopatriarchy,” and have come to believe that it is at the root of both some of the modern right’s biggest ideas and its most interesting internal conflicts.
Beauchamp recalls similar concerns back in the 1970s, when the fear was of communism.
Modern neopatriarchy begins from the opposite fear; the concern is not communist collectivism, but liberal individualism.
This is a case study of the distinctions I’ve discovered in the past year or so about base human nature and morality, and the way those have, or need to, adapt to a modern world in which we are not all living among tribes on the Savannah anymore. Conservatives cling to tribal morality. My take: don’t worry about. Lots of people will have lots of children, and the population will keep expanding. (This is also why not to worry about the homosexuals, the transgenders, and so on, unless you as parents are obsessed about passing along your personal genes.) Ironically, conservatives values now seem to prize collective values or individual values. What happened to freedom and liberty?
You get a tax cut! And you get a tax cut! And you get a tax cut!
Both major-party presidential nominees sound pretty Oprah-esque these days. They’re pledging lower taxes to bribe important voting blocs, including all the tipped service workers in Nevada.
Perhaps “bribe” sounds harsh. To some extent, politics is always transactional. Politicians often try to win votes by promising to improve people’s material interests. Maybe they pledge to deliver lower gas prices or a higher minimum wage. But usually those politicians at least offer the fig leaf of improving the greater social welfare or promoting equity or efficiency. Or something else similarly public-spirited-sounding.
GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has no such concern (real or feigned) for such lofty goals. He has dangled military aid, lifesaving medical equipment and corporate tax cuts in exchange for various political favors or donations. These are crass quids and quos that Democrats have, correctly, condemned.
But now Trump is taking these tax cut kickbacks on a national tour. And, unfortunately, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has joined him.
I agree. Especially since there’s been no rationale about why tips should be exempt from taxes any more than any other kind of income. (What neither political party ever does, of course, is act like a business: estimate necessary expenses and balance them against sources of income, and adjust tax rates up or down to meet specific expense goals. That’s why the government is not, and never will be nor should be, run like a business.)
\\\
I think I noted this, but here’s another link about it:
No, the two political parties are not equally bad, as intelligent folks have been pointing out for decades. And here’s a new study.
[R]esearchers report finding that a handful of “conflict entrepreneurs” in Congress are essentially polluting our national political discourse and worsening the vibes of democracy. They spend more of their time arguing and tossing out personal attacks than they do being productive in elected office. Along the way, they don’t just polarize the country, but also hamper the effectiveness of our government.
…
They tend to be Republicans, more ideologically extreme, and more likely to hold seats in the House of Representatives (as opposed to the Senate). And you can probably guess who some of these folks are: Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, is the second-largest producer of personal attacks, according to the tool. Colorado Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert is the seventh.
Of course the writer feels obliged to point out that some these conflict entrepreneurs are Democrats. Example, please? California Rep. Robert Garcia, who replied to Vox:
“as the only Democrat to sit on the same three committees as Marjorie Taylor Greene, part of my job is calling out her bullshit. Democrats need to bring the fire and push back on their lies.”
And which politicians instead focus on issues?
Democratic Sens. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Jon Ossoff of Georgia, as well as Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, all talk about policy in more than 70 percent of remarks.
\\\
Humans have no sense of long-term trends, and live only for the present, with concern for the future only to the extent of their children, if that. Anything beyond that is someone else’s problem. Except for the minority who do understand long-term trends, and worry about ameliorating them, even in the face of tribalist drives to expand the population for fear of dooming the human race. So ironically, perhaps it’s the nonreligious folks who will save the race.
Fifty-four years ago, in 1968, American biologist Paul Ehrlich warned that a human “population bomb” threatened global catastrophe. The world’s population at the time was 3.54 billion.
This “population bomb” is only partly to blame for climate change and other unfolding catastrophes. We might be able to sustain a population of eight billion if each of us consumed and polluted less, especially the affluent hyper-consumers of the developed world. But it would also help if there were fewer of us consuming and polluting.
But where did all of these people come from—and how might we slow that growth?
There is a strong argument to be made that religious belief and practice are a major part of the problem, and that increasing secularism could be part of the solution.
I’m old enough to remember Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb from 1968; I read it, and still have a copy. Like Malthus, Ehrlich has been dismissed as warning of a problem that somehow more-or-less solved itself. An alarmist. Still, the long-term trend will not go away. Humans can’t keep filling up the planet forever. The longer we wait, the worse it will get. So, given the question mark in the title, does this article this its premise is true?
Key point: religious people have more babies. Muslims even more than Christians. And Mormons more than both of them. The problems here are restrictions against contraception, and religious priorities to endlessly reproduce.
In a world of eight billion people (and counting), it is simply reckless to listen to the command to go forth and multiply. The Biblical basis for this idea ought to be critiqued. There was no flood, and humanity did not develop from Noah’s seed. Rather, we evolved as one species among many. Our big brains and upright posture allowed us to develop technologies, social systems, and ideologies that led us to conquer the earth.
The time has come to apply new technologies, social systems, and ideologies to help us avoid ecological collapse.
We already have the main technological tool we need: contraception. Now it’s time for social systems and ideologies to catch up, and for human beings to choose to have fewer children.
And concluding:
Children are great, but so too is life in a family with fewer kids or none. And in the long run, fewer children means a better life for each of them.
Quality vs. quantity. In the primitive environment, life expectancy was short, and most babies died before adulthood. It made sense to churn out as many babies as possible, so that one or two of them might live to adulthood. That is no longer the case. Things change.
