Thursday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, February 6, 2025
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85 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
As I watch Trump and his cronies dismantle decades of progress, a couple of thoughts come to mind:
* I wonder if Biden has any regrets about treating Trump with decency and respect on his way out the door. Trump is causing a massive amount of misery for people around the world and it all started with a smile and a handshake as Biden welcomed him back to the White House.
* I think back to 2016 when the voters had the sense to keep Trump out of the White House. Unfortunately, the founding fathers thought the knew better so that because Trump’s supporters were more geographically dispersed their votes counted more. Thanks, founding fathers, for sticking us with this disaster.
* I wonder if any democrats are having second thoughts about their commitment to norms and institutions. Clearly, the voters don’t care. And given the ease of which Trump is tearing these institutions apart they were never all that robust to begin with. The Dems limit their exercise of power (see Garland, Merrick) for the sake of these principles while the Republicans obliterate anything that stands in their way. Doesn’t seem like a fair fight. I would have loved to see this sort of muscular use of power back when January 6 was fresh in our memory.
* Every time a democrat says Trump can’t do something because it’s illegal or violates such and such to no effect it only demonstrates their own impotence. He can do whatever he wants until he is stopped.
Anyway… it’s 3am here and instead of sleeping I’m thinking about Donald effing Trump, which is exactly the situation I wanted to avoid. I hate this timeline.
@Paine:
I disagree with most of this. Democrats do need to stand on law and institutional integrity while the GOP is descending into lawless madness. Citizens need to see a clear distinction. Having the two parties act like brawling gangsters doesn’t do the Democrats any good or the country either. And the time will come when the country will need to look around at a lawful, traditional political party to rescue us from this orange moron. I think the Democrats can do a lot more to resist and they seem to be getting their act together on that front. Like everyone else, I think they were taken completely by surprise and are recovering now.
If you’re awake at 3 am, it’s best to read a book until you get tired enough to fall back asleep.
Know who I’d like to hear from right now?
Mitt Romney – Mr. Jellyfish who supposedly stands for a more moderate, better GOP
George W. Bush – the last living Republican president
Now would be a real good time to make some critical comments about what’s happening. Bush in particular has been allowed to coast since he left office. Maybe he’s just grateful that thanks to Trump he’s no longer the worst president in the past fifty years.
@Not the IT Dept.: No, no, no! Mitt Romney can’t possibly speak up as Trump has handed over the entire government to an unelected billionaire and his teenage minions, because he has to protect his ability to speak in a future Republican party. Didn’t he make that clear to you? Can’t you see why that’s vastly more important than stopping a fascist coup? He might want to say something someday!
@wr: Doesn’t he understand that the far right Christian Nationalists hate Mormons and consider them heretics?
Has it occurred to anyone that this is exactly what Trump wants? A fall guy to take the heat off him? Let’s not fall into that trap and pin everything on Trump.
Democratic polling finds Elon Musk is unpopular
If Mitt does speak up, I’d like to know if he ever amended the tax return that he made public in 2012–the one that didn’t claim some major deductions because it would’ve looked bad to have a single-digit effective tax rate on millions in income.
@Scott: Has it occurred to anyone that this is exactly what Trump wants? A fall guy to take the heat off him?
Yes, I think he does, in as much as he still has intelligent thoughts about. But there are a couple of problems. It’s one thing to have a fall guy like Giuliani who can be jerked around at will and then kicked to the curb, but Musk has his own power base and is friends with other billionaires. That makes things a bit dicier for Trump. Another problem is even if Trump regrets appointing EM to the position of The Real President, EM might have enough on Trump to make it necessary to move very carefully. Trump might be riding a tiger he can’t safely climb off.
The person who can really benefit – and who’s lying mighty low these days – is JD Vance. EM goes too far, pisses off too many MAGAs, Trump doesn’t move fast enough to rein him in and it’s hello Amendment 25, remove Trump, fire EM and his evil minions and be a big hero to GOP congresscritters and MAGA.
And I don’t believe for a nano-second that Vance is loyal to Trump or any other person on the face of the planet. He’d knife Trump in a heartbeat.
It occurs to me that the founding fathers (and subsequent legislators) failed to realize that an elected might be capable to disassemble the democracy. IMO, many of the laws that say “thou shalt not do thus and so…” fail to provide any penalty, or the ability to enforce those penalty.
In other words, founders really believed that our leaders would always act in good faith and take their oath of office seriously.
Welp, we got our daily dose of “ACT NOW LAST CHANCE THIS OFFER WILL NEVER COME AGAIN!!!” from the OPM. Interesting to see if they send multiple instances of it today.
Now back to actual work.
@Not the IT Dept.:
Agree.
A Delta and a Japan Airlines plane collided while taxiing yesterday afternoon.
Deregulation is going great! Firing all the Air Traffic Controllers is fine!
Announcer voice: Zero airplane collisions under Biden.
@Not the IT Dept.:
IMO the only way that ever happens is if vice president weathervane owns a gun he calls Amendment 25.
@Gavin:
There were probably a handful of on-ground collisions during Biden’s term. While rare, they’re not that rare.
Usually, though, it’s the very tip of a wing hitting the tip or edge of a tail or another wing. Form the photos it looks like the JAL plane had nowhere near enough room to maneuver past the Delta jet.
@Scott:
Well, duh. A wise man said some time back that Elon was the opening, the exposed jugular. At risk of repeating myself, White vs. Not is a 60/40 split. Male vs. Female, is 50/50. But billionaires vs. not billionaires, is 99/1. This is the reach-across issue. We need to expose the billionaire class as damaged, sick men, as parasites. And we have to include our own billionaires to make the issue work.
@Scott:
Data? How did they need data to determine that Elon Musk and his minions are unpopular? How much time and money was wasted on this shocking analysis?
@Kathy: IMO the only way that ever happens is if vice president weathervane owns a gun he calls Amendment 25.
Vance isn’t a weathervane. He’s very ambitious in the new way that no one is prepared for, and I’m sure he’s very aware of how Amendment 25 works. If you want to use that analogy, I’m sure the time will come when he pulls the trigger.
@Not the IT Dept.:
It’s a literal statement, not an analogy.
@Bobert:
They believed the opposite. Hence the Electoral College, separation of powers, impeachment, and above all states’ rights.
@Fortune: the Founding Fathers also built for protection against dangers they knew about. They knew the danger that came from a government being able to accuse anyone of treason, hence why the circumstances under which one can be accused of it is written in the Constitution.
@Grumpy Realist: You’re right. I wasn’t trying to present a full list.
On better things, I’m slow bingeing* Hazbin Hotel. I’m not quite sure I get the theme or the setting, but some of the characters are intriguing.
This weekend I plan to cook burgers and potatoes on the cast iron pan, and see if there’s really any difference with cooking them on my other pans. I made cornbread in it last weekend, and it did give the bottom a nice browned crust.
One issue I just realized is that I don’t have a big enough lid for that pan… This limits some uses.
What I really want to try is deep dish pizza. I’m looking for pre-made dough, and for recipes for a decent sauce. The sauces sold in jars, be they for pasta or pizza, are way too sweet for my tastes, and have unhealthy amounts of sugar. More like tomato icing than sauce, IMO.
*Meaning one ep each day.
A history lesson about the Red Scare and the 50s and well worth reading. Long but good.
What Happened the Last Time a President Purged the Bureaucracy
I love common sense. I can see the value of it every day. There are times I wish certain people had a dose of it.
AND, my entire life, people have used the phrase “I have common sense” to justify their own laziness and incuriosity about the world.
They say, “I have common sense” to avoid learning anything about this big, beautiful, complicated world.
They say “I have common sense” to brush away any statement that might challenge their beliefs, and require them to do the uncomfortable work of engaging with realities they weren’t aware of previously.
They say “I have common sense” to brush away any objection to their agenda on those occasions where their course of action is being challenged.
I love common sense, AND the phrase “I have common sense” is the tool of scoundrels and hucksters.
@Fortune: You need to re-read the Federalist Papers.
@Kathy: FWIW… my wife uses her cast iron skillet to make a very good skillet chicken pot pie.
@Scott:
Every gamer knows: you must dispatch the smaller bosses before you get a crack at the Big Boss.
First Musk, then Trump, then Putin.
@Fortune:
Above all? Is that a joke?
The Founders were not a monolith.
The Constitution is the result of a compromise; neither side got everything they wanted.
Pop quiz. No Googling. Who wrote the following passage?
I have no idea what books or commentators you read. Nor what podcasts or radio shows you listen to. But I do know there is a lot of deliberate dishonesty on Early American History bookshelves, in op-eds, and the various types of audio shows.
Look, I do my best to be cordial. I fail more often than I would like. But right now, at this particular juncture in history, honesty must trump coddling.
I am sick and tired of seeing people assert assert assert and then act like they said something original, meaningful, or insightful. When all they do is spout barely heard bullshit spoken by people who can justify their views only if they tell part of the story.
Lies of omission are still lies.
Did you figure out the source of the quote? It’s James Madison, Federalist No. 45.
Or are you going to tell me that any of the Framers who did not place states rights ‘above all’ do not really count? Ya know, not real Americans?
I recently wrote something similar to the following, my guess is in reference to one of your posts. But I will state it a little more directly this time:
I’m also sick and tired of conspicuous Christians and conspicuous Constitutionalists. If you all took 1% of the effort you expend trying to signal your fealty to The Bible and the Constitution and put that effort into actually reading that literature and the historical context of them, you may actually learn something.
You and your party claim to be defending American History and you regularly demonstrate you either do not know fuck-all about it, or you only want to talk about the parts that make you feel proud.
“Act-as-if” is bad enough, but it seems more and more that it is “look-as-if.” When will you realize that fake it till you make it only works in the long-term when one is forever surrounded by fakes? It sort of makes sense that Trump is so appealing. But guess what? Trump and Musk and Vance will eventually decide they don’t like the cut of your jib either.
I get it, you’re tired of smug, arrogant leftists and liberals talking down to you.
Well, kiddo. If you do not want to be spoken to like a child, demonstrate you can read and think like an adult.
@Motopilot:
That’s something I should try soon.
@Fortune:
I can’t believe that I’m taking you as being serious.
The Electoral College does not prevent or punish a president for violation of their oath
The concept of separation of powers does not prevent or punish a president for breaking down the designed separation of powers.
Impeachment – functionally all that does is remove the president and tarnish his reputation. But (I hear you say) he could be indicted and convicted later (as a private citizen) …. except that SCOTUS just issued a free pass for criminal activity of a president conducting a “official” duty. That action (an official act) need not be lawful, just official.
Virginia Halas McCaskey, longtime Bears owner, dies at 102, team announces
RIP
@Kurtz:
@Bobert:
I was just listing some of the barriers the Founders put into place because they didn’t trust leaders to behave honorably. Just pretend Cupanoodles23 made the comment instead of Fortune, say “I sort of get what he meant”, and move on.
It would be good if Trump learned to spell “stolen,” especially since he’s so fond of the word:
http://www.rawstory.com/trump-rant-stollen-truth-social/
The Founders believed that people in Congress would act in the best interests of the people they represented. Washington warned, correctly, that if instead Congress acted in the best interests of their political parties that our system would not work well.So they designed a system that did not recognize political parties as important and they also assumed that POTUS would work within norms. They really didnt address what would happen if POTUS did not behave within norms and Congress would not provide any checks. Other nations have noted that we now have what is in effect a “strongman” form of govt. When Iraq wrote its now constitution it deliberately avoided ours as a model as they were trying to avoid too much power in the hands of the executive branch.
That said, the National Science Foundation now has a list of words that if included anywhere in your grant application will lead to automatic denial. It includes controversial words like “female, women, socioeconomic, black…”. The country doesnt have that many women, at least not important ones, so I guess that is OK but it’s just awful that poor Hawking would have never been published. Maybe he could have called them white holes? (Via LGM)
https://bsky.app/profile/darbysaxbe.bsky.social/post/3lhcvn4hxwk2o
So you do your own research?
We were not wrong. The science evolved and changed.
@Fortune:
Then why the added descriptor?
A list is a list. If you want to annotate it, fine. But you don’t get to then claim you were not trying to slip a ranking in a mere list.
Dishonesty out of a religious zealot, what a surprise.
@Paul L.:
Who exactly are you addressing?
As cynical as I am, as much as I hold the Republican Party in contempt, they continue to surprise me. I expected a lot of immigration theatre, minor raids presented as major actions, a handful of criminals portrayed as typical, routine deportation flights presented as an innovation. It never occurred to me ICE would just change the dates on press releases to make old raids new again.
@Paul L.:
Who exactly are you addressing?
@Paul L.:
“Do your own research” is a mantra of the MAGAs at lucianne.com. What it means is “get your information from The Gateway Pundit and other crackpot semi-literate blogs.”
@Kurtz:
Addressing the BlueAnon boosted mask cult.
R.I.P. Lightning the Kitty, yesterday at age 18.
Lightning was a one woman cat and hated me with the heat of a thousand suns. Lightning would come in from a different room just to stare at me and hiss. I was flattered by the attention. One of the early signs that Lightning might not be doing so well was that she ceased hating me. She allowed me to feed her, even occasionally suffered my touch.
She had a good life. She got to the see the world – North Carolina, Italy, California and Nevada. She ate premium kitty food and slept, basically, on my wife’s head despite numerous cat beds. She bullied many dogs, including our current two, Astrid and Boss. Now we have a one-man dog, Astrid, my emo dog, who is fixated on me and barely tolerates my wife. Boss, however, is generous and favors anyone who will scratch her Pug jowls.
Death has been on my mind of late, that’ll happen when you hit 70 and are creating the ‘What To Do,’ document for the kids that includes such exciting subheads as, ‘What to do if Mom and Dad die overseas.’ Will’s been updated, everything is in trusts and I appear to be in good health with bloodwork numbers I’ve done nothing to deserve. But it’s good to be ready so that when the time comes I can go out with the same quiet dignity as Lightning the Kitty. Off to cat heaven with you, my old foe.
ETA: I know it was you, Lightning, who sneak-peed on the bathroom rug.
@Michael Reynolds: I’m sorry for your, or more specifically, Katherine’s, loss.
I truly appreciate people who give animals a good life, it speaks to high character.
A federal judge has delayed the deadline for the “buyout” (aka forced coercion resignation) offer.
ETA: And, the US Labor Department has been temporarily blocked (by court order) from sharing info w/Musk and his staff.
@Kurtz:
The agitated voices in his head, probably.
Virginia community health centers close over federal funding access (Virginia Public Media)
@Jen: That the judge extended the deadline on Musk’s buyout strikes me as akin to regulating the length of unicorn horns.
“The Onion”
@Paine:
It’s worse than that. He can’t do anything without collusion from his victims. Trump and Musk are not filling out the paperwork to put thousands of civil servants on administrative leave; neither are their flunkies. It can only happen when frightened mid-level managers and secretaries follow instructions that they know are illegal, and that were handed down by people who do not have the authority to give those orders. We need to get the message out that “just following orders” is not acceptable, and not going to save your job anyway if your agency is one of the targets. It’s not even civil disobedience when the law is actually on your side…
@gVOR10: injunctions are the quickest way to freeze a situation. What will be interesting is whatever gets said on Monday.
@Not the IT Dept.:
Any politico or civil servant who was surprised at all, much less completely, was apparently in a coma for all of 2024.
@gVOR10: You don’t think the buyouts will ever occur?
@DrDaveT:
Yet again we learn just how cowardly most people are, and how little integrity they possess.
@gVOR10: IMHO, anything that says “no” to Musk is a point in the column. His “this offer will not be extended” is now “this offer has been extended.”
@charontwo: The date on that Onion piece…had we only known how much worse things could get.
Oh, FFS. These clowns and their obsession with Americans having more babies:
Trump Administration Prioritizes High-Birthrate Areas for Transportation Funds
[…] Some conservatives, including Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance, have fixated on America’s declining birthrate, viewing it as catastrophic for the national economy as retired people start to outnumber younger workers, and reflective of eroding family values. But it remains unclear how directing more transportation funding to areas with higher birth and marriage rates would reverse the trend.
“It’s hard to know what sort of transportation policy would promote fertility or marriage,” said Scott Winship, the director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “You could imagine that someone might think if we had more bike lanes people might have more kids, but there’s just not good evidence that any of that is going to be effective.”
Prioritizing areas with higher birthrates would, however, send more federal funding to Republican states. South Dakota, Alaska, Nebraska, North Dakota and Texas are among the states with the highest fertility rates, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. States that have the lowest fertility rates include Vermont, Oregon, Rhode Island and New Hampshire, none of which voted for Mr. Trump in the 2024 election.
“Clearly this is helping red states,” said Phillip Levine, an economics professor at Wellesley College who has studied the topic of falling U.S. birthrates. […]
I was answering some questions from my team on what we are doing about the tariffs, and unfortunately my answer was that aside from trying to find some backup sources, there’s not a lot we can do at this moment. You see, a normal tariff is part of a law, which must be negotiated, debated, voted on and signed into law by the President. It includes a time period in which the appropriate forms are created and those affected are educated in their use. In this instance, Trump just announced we had a new tariff on three countries. Is that in addition to the tariffs that already exist from those countries on specific products? Or instead of? But never mind, he suddenly announced a few days later that two of them are “suspended”. What happened in those days it was supposedly in force? As far as I know, absolutely nothing.
There is still a Trump Tariff on China. Our sister company gets castings from China and I believe those are already subject to a tariff. Further, I believe it is more than 10%. Did we just get a windfall, lowering our import duties? Or do we get an additional 10% tacked on. Who knows? This isn’t a law, it’s just an idiot on the end of a bar who suddenly has authority (maybe?) to enact all of his loud mouth stupid ideas, which will result in exactly what you would expect.
On a completely different subject, I’ve come to the conclusion that the current state of the AI game when it comes to being a virtual assistant in Microsoft Office, Apple Mail, Apple Messages etc is essentially like having a clueless person who keeps trying to organize and prioritize your various inboxes, message streams, alerts etc. They are 100% confident they know what is best for you and pretty much have everything that is actually important wrong, and can’t be sent away. It’s a constant battle to try to keep them out of things because every time there is an update, They’re Back!!!, like Jack Nicholson. Oh yes, and they insist on giving you a garbled summary of all your correspondence.
@Jen:
What would help is raising wages and lowering costs, so one adult with a job can provide for a larger family.
But that would be opposed by the oligarchs who own the government.
@MarkedMan:
It may have been a mistake to model AI on human intelligence.
Who’ve thunk?
https://www.wsj.com/tech/doge-staffer-resigns-over-racist-posts-d9f11a93?mod=hp_lead_pos3
Eugenics for thee but not for me… hehe!
@Kathy: Seriously though, so many things have been tried to raise the birthrate in country after country around the world, things that had serious money involved. None of it worked. In a few cases it slowed the rate of decline for a while but that was about it.
The one thing we know lowers birth rate is educating girls, regardless of anything else. Other things that seem likely:
– Providing easy access to birth control
– Providing practical sex education
– Increasing opportunities and mobility for everyone. This makes people want to do more stuff before settling down
– Raising the standard of living. This allows people to actually do more stuff
A family member worked for years at the CCP, an international woman’s and child’s health NGO, whose is most famous (amongst sociologists and demographers) for the Pop(ulation) Report, and annual deep dive into birth and maternal and child health statistics for virtually every country in the world. It must be close to it’s 50th year, if not more. When it started the birthrate was climbing and Malthus was looming. Since the 70’s the birthrate in virtually every country has plummeted.
We will have to adjust our economy to this reality, but we can do it and having an actually smaller global footprint will make managing all kinds of things a hell of a lot easier. Perhaps in a century or two or three we will have to think about staving off extinction, if nothing changes. Though I sure wouldn’t put any money on trends lasting centuries without change.
Of course if you wet your pants over the thought of people who are different from you making up a larger share of the population, then by all means panic.
Shocker. But let me posit this: This staffer was granted a security clearance but without having to go through a vetting process that the rest of us peons had to go through.
DOGE Staffer Resigns Over Racist Posts
There are no innocent bystanders.
Note to Our Readers
And so on…
@MarkedMan: what it all boils down to is that having kids is expensive and takes a heck of a lot of attention. Especially when the load falls mainly (usually) on the distaff side of the family, whether said individual is holding down a job as well or not.
Bluntly, women are voting with their feet. And with the present ridiculous prices for education and housing, a lot of Gen-Xers of both genders are saying, no, we can’t take the financial risk.
Re: the highway funds for birthrates nonsense, I hope the next Dem president ties such funding to high school graduation rates, or (low) teen pregnancy rates, etc. These idiots need to remember that setting bad precedent comes with consequences.
Onion:
@MarkedMan:
Malthus is a fascinating case study for why (as Yogi put it) prediction is hard, especially about the future.
Malthus had the math exactly right — when harvests are good, the population grows exponentially. When harvests are bad, the larger population starves. Because the availability of productive land can’t grow exponentially, England was doomed to cycles of boom and starvation.
So why didn’t it happen?
1. Improved food storage and improved transportation meant that people no longer had to be dependent on local crops. Crops needed to fail over a much larger area for there to be no food to be had.*
2. New technology and improved seed greatly increased the productivity of any given acre of land, on a continuing basis.
3. The education and standard of living of the poor improved steadily, leading to a lower birthrate. (See discussion above.)
Malthus, living at the end of the middle ages, could not foresee either the explosion in technology or the social revolutions that would change the nature of poverty from what had been pretty constant for hundreds (thousands?) of years.
*The Irish potato famine was artificial — only the potato crop failed, but the peasants were forbidden to eat the (cash) crops that were being grown. By them. As they starved.
@MarkedMan:
This, of course, is the real story. Simultaneously fighting like hell to prevent immigration and clutching your pearls over declining birthrates is equivalent to an “I’m a racist” forehead tattoo.
@MarkedMan:
Yep, no government effort in any country has succeeded in raising birth rates.
Education and the basic economic incentives all work against procreating. Kids used to have an economic value – unpaid farm hands, babysitters for younger siblings, carers for parents in old age. Kids now have negative economic value. They make absolutely no economic sense, it costs about a quarter mil, just to age 18, and if you think the costs end there, I have some depressing news for you.
They’re expensive, they don’t milk cows, they don’t have younger sibs to care for, and they are not going to take care of you in old age, and would you want them to? Indeed sometimes they kill you even as you’re giving birth, and they always represent the threat of unsupportable grief. Also, stretch marks.
I mean, mine are great. Let me just, ahem, make that clear.
@Scott: This sudden resignation sounds an awful lot like his skeleton closet has a much deeper crevasse.
There hasn’t been any shame around DOGE, so I wouldn’t expect it to appear just because one of them was like “white makes right!” – they would just say that’s locker room talk where they’re from and the magaverse would flood the zone with prominent pols claiming it’s racist DEI to call actual racism racist.
If Republicans actually wanted an increase in the birthrate, they’d vote for things like the Child Tax Credit, breakfasts and lunches at school, transportation for all children throughout the day, free money for new textbooks every 3yrs or so, support staff and massively higher wages for teachers and everyone else in the country, medicare for all.. and the list goes on.
But none of it happens… because Republicans don’t actually want kids.
Republicans just want exploitable labor, they don’t want kids to have a rewarding life.
And they’re terrified that people of any income level continue to make the objectively correct decision not to have kids in this environment.
As the kids say, oopsie. FAFO.
@DrDaveT:
I’m curious. Do white people not know how to make babies? I mean, there are how-to videos all over the internet. They can click on BornHub. Because that would solve all their problems. Just make some babies with the spouse you’ll eventually divorce.
Back up, fellow White people, first, go find someone willing to procreate with you. I’ll bet there’s an app for wanna-be parents. Incels, you can’t get a date now, and you think that situation will improve if you signal you want to start making babies?
The place you live? You’ll need something much bigger. Your neighborhood, how are the schools there? Not great, huh? Sleep: no. Time with friends: no. Time with spouse for the first decade: no. And since you may have a Trad Wife situation, think about a second job.
Deal with all that you panicky racist twats, step up, shoulder the burden, pop out some babies or STFU and be glad someone else is doing the job for you.
@Grumpy realist:
This is a legitimate social justice point but it doesn’t seem to affect birth rate. Some countries with very low birth rates have exemplar child care, parental leave, health care, etc. Example: Sweden at a 1.7 fertility rate (replacement rate is 2.1 in developed countries), has some of the most generous child support policies in the world. Its rate is identical to the US rate, with almost the worst social safety net for children in parents in the developed world. In this case what seems to be common sense simply doesn’t play out in reality.
In 2024 only 79 countries out of 204 recorded are above replacement rate. And the racists will note that not a single one of those is from Europe, and the only one that might be considered non-brown is Israel, but of course that is due solely to the high birth rate of the Hasids. They see this and say “The brown and yellow people will replace us”, but don’t realize that a) that happened long ago (actually, white people almost certainly were never a majority), and b) the fastest drops in birth rate are among the people they fear the most.
@MarkedMan:
So, so often this is the case.
@DK: Here in deep-blue Northern Virginia, we will not notice the absence of these clinics. We have a wealth of health care options. There’s an emergency room 10 minutes from my house that never has a wait.
No, it’s the Trump voting parts of the state that will suffer, as people who only had to drive an hour for treatment will now have to drive three, and wait three times as long once they finally get there.
And in the least surprising news of the day…
Trump administration disbands task force targeting Russian oligarchs
The administration claims this is part of a shift in focus to drug trafficking and international gangs.
@Mikey:
I often say to those who say “once those trumpers see what happens they’ll realize how wrong they were!” That it simply won’t happen. This is a perfect case in point. The Republicans have both gutted anti-trust legislation and done everything in their power to block healthcare reform. The combination of these two things has let to hospital after hospital closing down in rural areas and those that remain eliminating unprofitable things like birthing wards. The one healthcare advance in rural area in the past two decades came under Obama, yet they blame everything on Democrats and zealously vote Republican to own the libs.
And you ain’t going to reach these people by focusing on “the issues they care about.” Healthcare bankruptcies are worst in the rural areas and championing these issues and doing something about them got Democrats exactly nothing.
@Bobert: Our founders believed that they were creating a system where no one outside their cohort was going to be eligible either to run for office or to vote. Sadly, future generations bought into that “all men are created equal” jazz in the other founding document. And despite all the clues that they really believed “but some men are more equal than others.”
@just nutha:
Sorry, I just disagree with that. They vastly expanded who had say in the government compared to what came before, and deliberately included dirt poor farmers who couldn’t rub two nickels together. In comparison to modern times they were wildly exclusionary, but they didn’t live in our times.
@Kurtz:
Anyone operating under the assumption that people like Fortune are operating under “fealty to the Bible,” understands the Bible even less than the people they’re criticizing. I will grant that people like Fortune may well say or believe that they are being true to the word, but that’s why English has words like “dishonest” and “delusional.”
Work got in the way in a most obnoxious manner, preventing me from replying. So, short version:
Overpopulation aggravates a lot of other problems, in particular climate and resource problems. I think we should work to lower the birth rate even more, and not go back to even replacement levels until the world’s population goes way down, say under 6 billion people (please, no Thanos jokes).
There are many reasons that drive migration. but one is that there is demand in higher income countries for the labor immigrants provide. The world would do better to regulate it than restrict it, but try to talk sense into a nativist…
@just nutha:
Right, it’s a virtue signal.
@Fortune: I don’t actually see how most of your examples aid in the protections you are claiming either, tbh, but I already know that you and I don’t “live” in the same world, so I’m mostly avoiding participation in these conversations.
@MarkedMan:
I saw some recent polling that the USAID ending, staff reduction letters etc. are just making Trump more popular with Republican voters.
Which explains why GOP congresscritters are just rubber stamping everything this administration is doing.
@just nusuffice.
@Kurtz
Their “fealty” is to a social power structure that benefits them personally at the expense of humanity; a power structure supported by a long rationalized interpretation of the Bible and at great odds with the core, authentic, congruent ideals of their “espoused”Godhead.
They know not what they do.