“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”
This statement is—wrong-ish.
For decades various people have been predicting what is happening now: the end of the American empire, the late Imperial wars, the despair and poverty of late-imperial rentier capitalism, and the rise of China.
Indeed a lot of people (your host included) were screaming about this 30 years ago. I read my first book on the way that America was turning to Gilded Age plus inequality in 1986. Everyone who wasn’t stupid, bought or ideologically captured could see what neoliberalism would lead to. From the late 90s we yelled about sending the West’s industry to the West, but hey, it was the “End of History” and capitalism and democracy had won and it didn’t matter where industry was because “comparative advantage” was, and still is, completely misunderstood, as were the constituents of state power.
So—it’s all happening now, along with massive wildfires from climate change and it seems like for decades nothing happened, but really, it was all happening: without deliberate policy choices, these weeks wouldn’t be possible.
The key to making accurate predictions is simply asking “what must happen if the current course continues, and will the course continue.” In 2009, when Obama decided he’d rather have a couple mansions and Hollywood friends than be the next FDR, and massively increase fracking to top it off, it became clear that the course would continue and all this became inevitable. Realistically, the rise of China was locked in when they were allowed to join the WTO and climate change was locked in when Reagan tore down the solar panels on the White House roof.
So it’s been a very easy time to make accurate long term predictions, much as Keynes, upon seeing the post-WWI peace deal was able to predict WWII and the end of the British Empire. It still had to play out, but everyone with sense knew it was inevitable.
Most of the time I’m sanguine about all this, but every once in a while despair and anger at all the harm which was so easily predicted and which could have been avoided wells up. Other times it’s glee: the fall of the American Empire will occasion a lot of horrid events, but unless you’re American or perhaps European, it’s hard to be sad, especially as we witness genocide in both Gaza and Syria, and witness huge homeless camps.
I was sent this video to watch, and it’s so typical of America these days:
American citizen breaks down in tears because she is now living in her car “for the foreseeable future”
She has a job but rent prices are so out of control in America and you need 2.5x the rent to qualify for an apartment, she has to live in her car
Rent is out of control pic.twitter.com/zpJ68fEvF5
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) March 13, 2025
Kind of hard to feel sorrow at the end of an Empire which treats even its own citizens this way. Meanwhile China deliberately crashed its own over-inflated housing market when the CCP noticed that too many people couldn’t afford their own homes any more, and is moving to mostly state-built housing. Tell me more about how awful “Communism” is. Nor are they shipping Israel arms and supporting genocide. (No, the Ughuirs are not being genocided, though they are discriminated against.)
If you’re feeling similar emotions, well, that’s understandable and no big deal. Just remember, the world is always and has always been shit for a lot of people, all that’s changing is who, and in a couple decades, how many. But there’s still delicious food, beautiful scenery, and love is just as sweet. All the good still exists, and your sorrow and pain does not help other people, and hurts you.
Live, enjoy, and perhaps allow yourself some happiness at the good amidst all the evil.
Jefferson Hamilton
>But there’s still delicious food, beautiful scenery, and love is just as sweet.
Both difficult to take solace from when you’re living out of your car. I, too, have been predicting America’s failed state status for a long time, although in my case only about twenty years or a bit more, but it’s hard to take any real joy in being right when the reality is so sordid.
someofparts
Brian Berletic has a good podcast episode out there breaking down the real back story on the Ughuirs. I will try to find it later today and come back with the link. The jist of it is that they have been destabilized US proxies but China has rehabilitated them.
One of my least favorite things about being poor is not being able to help people. I don’t think there has ever been a time when there wasn’t someone I wanted to help but couldn’t, be it an elderly relation, a broke friend, or even the occasional cat.
Even after Germany lost the war, the propaganda had been so encompassing that ordinary (as in not rich or powerful) citizens did not snap out of it’s thrall until they held local trials for war crimes and people could see for themselves what had happened to their own neighbors. Newsmax looks set to be just as successful as their German predecessors. It is also a good example of your point that none of the things we suffer happened overnight, because it has taken decades of sustained lies to create the baseline of gullibility that the outlet exploits today.
I’m glad you’re in Canada Ian. It has crossed my mind many times that if it had been your misfortune to have been born a US citizen, our savage parody of a health care system would have done you in a decade ago.
Oakchair
every once in a while despair and anger at all the harm… wells up.
—–
Even the obnoxious teens in media who have to agonize over their unwillingness to kill the big bad —to show how moral and good they are— exhibit large amounts of anger.
Frankly, someone who isn’t angry at the uncountable mass graves is psychopathic or a monk who would sit in silence while setting themselves aflame.
—-
Other times it’s glee:
—-
How could you not feel some sense of glee in the destruction of an empire that has spent the last 75 years destroying country after country, and mass murdering people after people?
We live in a marketing society that absconds at real emotion because like children scared of the dark it’s too caught up in appearances to care about substance. It’s too frightened of it’s own shadow to look in the mirror. A mass of people not only unable to think for themselves or stand but who get outraged at those who do because denial is their bliss. I wonder, are they happy yet?
Soredemos
That girl is going on about how she hopes this will just be a phase that will help her build ‘character’. This is just another form of delusion. Not every experience helps you build resilience; sometimes it just breaks you.
This seems to be a somewhat uniquely American delusion where we believe manifestly unjust arrangements are just trials that make us better, and the underlying problem is never addressed. Closely related is the obsession with some mysterious thing called ‘work ethic’, which I’ve never seen satisfactorily defined. In practice it just seems to be employer propaganda for ‘you show up and work more than I pay you for, and we pretend this is character building somehow and that you’re getting more out of it than actual wages’.
There was another recent viral video of a woman working her first job, and heaving a breakdown because she can’t afford rent close to the job, so her entire life now consists of either going to or from the job, or working the job, and she has no time left to actually live.
Liberals have nothing to offer in terms of solutions, because fundamentally they see no problem. This is how life should be; a series of ‘character building challenges’. At most they’ll offer up token reforms to slightly take the edge off certain things. As said word for word in an episode of The West Wing, in the context of a man struggling to send his kid to college, “life shouldn’t be easy…it just shouldn’t be quite so hard”.
That’s the extent of the American Liberal imagination. It stands in sharp contrast to European, or Canadian, or Japanese, etc, Liberalism, which have their own limitations, but even in heavily degraded neiliberal forms can still deliver elements that are downright utopian by American (American’t) standards.
The American right is of course now openly hostile to American institutions, and by extension the American people, and attempting to shred whatever was left of civil services, but it was able to get into power by simply voicing populist rhetoric. ‘Make America Great Again’ resonates because the country openly sucks, much worse than it did fifty years ago, and everyone knows it, except Liberals, who can only offer up that either ‘no it doesn’t, look at these fake numbers’, or ‘saying it does is just code for wanting to go back to racism’.
Jan Wiklund
A non-committed viewer would have been able to detect it in the late 60s, when the industrial corporations turned to the rentiers to get money, and had to sacrifice productive investments to fast profits.
But the marxisizing critics of the time thought that this was the normal capitalist behaviour, common since god knows when. They didn’t know the capitalism they were born in, when everything was about market shares, and dividends were modest because rentiers weren’t influential.
ven
As with others, I also can empathise with feelings of anger, sorrow and glee.
I was railing to my wife this morning how it is not just the politicians that are corrupt, but so are all the mainstream media that facilitates their lies. And also it’s the corporate heads. But then again, there are the legions of middle managers who keep their heads down and only care about their career progression and enjoying themselves (“play hard, work hard” crap). And whilst they sanctimoniously preach about DEI and supporting local charities, it’s all a respectable veneer, for you never hear genocide discussed over a lunch meeting or evening drinks.
I came across a quote from Primo Levi which seems to aptly describe the situation and the inevitability of the horrors to come:
“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions”
Eric F
Hi Ian,
Thanks for the essay. Especially the “Tango” in the title.
Which, if you’ll indulge me in a little diversion here, is the perfect metaphor.
Tango, as I know it, is filled with sadness and longing and tragedy. Usually about lost love or drunkenness or horse racing, but still the pathos comes through in the music even if you ignore the lyrics.
But that sadness, or sense of loss isn’t left to fester. It is picked up and expressed with a partner in an intimate embrace. An embrace fueled by music and celebrating the physical connection between two living human beings. This. This is a perfect microcosm of what makes living as a human tolerable – enjoyable even.
And fortunately, there is Tango available to teh public in every major city in the world. Many minor cities too. A little social media search will find it.
Purple Library Guy
That poor kid. There definitely is something very American about her reaction–I mean, she’s trying to keep her spirits up, of course she is, but still I kept flashing on that quote about “socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
different clue
@Purple Library Guy,
Actually , socialism took quite a bit of root in parts of America starting in the 1880s or so. Especially in high-percent ethnically German areas. America had a number of medium-city Socialist Mayors.
The first major up-rootment of that socialism happened during WWI, when President Wilson unleashed a wave of antiGermanitic persecution all over America and also a wave of anti-socialist repression. We had a Socialist Presidential Candidate Eugene V. Debs who was fake-convicted on fake-charges by the Wilson regime.
Of course John Steinbeck’s quote was also true for many non-socialist Americans. But not for large parts of the big city Industrial proletariat, who were only repressed by force.
Separately, here is a funny picture of the red carpet which Canadian greeters rolled out for Secretary of State little marco’s arrival in Canada. It’s as small as he is.
” The tiny red carpet Canada rolled out for Marco Rubio ”
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1jay8s8/the_tiny_red_carpet_canada_rolled_out_for_marco/
Mark Level
Great post by Sorodemos, yes, ‘Muricans well-trained to revert to psychobabble to explain all the shit being poured on their heads by TPTB, rather than simply “look up”. That post trended a couple of weeks, maybe a month ago, & Due Dissidence shared it. She does (off topic) speak for 1,000s of others, tens of thousands, plus she is a white woman and someone who tried to “obey all the rules, work hard” which under Obama they were telling us was all you needed for protection. Not!! I’ll be charitable and assume that at some point she may realize it’s NOT her fault, there are Agents and a System that sacrificed her quality of life, eventually perhaps her life itself.
Until recently, I thought I’d insulated myself pretty well, at least economically. I have recently admitted to myself that while I did great during Covid– kept my friends network, the nature of my job was such that I was working less and getting paid while many colleagues got hit with more work, also I got the first jab and booster, never got Covid, then or since. I’m “a Unicorn” a friend told me.
However, I am now a pretty big “Medical Debt” victim. In 2018 when I was still covered by my Employer’s health care, I got an inguinal hernia, Kaiser Permanente was my HC provider (better than most!) I paid $2,200 out of pocket, presumably 60% to my employer’s 40%, no biggie. Last summer I had another one on the other side, did not want to wait 3 months to get it fixed under Medicare when I was eligible, so the shitty Corporate Monster that took over my local provider, “Aspirus”, billed me– over $9,000!! My Blue Cross paid $3,000, so that means (oversimplifying only a bit), the cost inflation for the same (ok, some new high tech “machines that go ping!”, to quote Monty Python’s the meaning of life from 42 years ago) equaled 410% inflation.
This kind of shit is unsustainable to the average person. I worked out a “plan”, I can pay $148 monthly for 8 years, no punitive additional fees added . . . I’m in a better than average place, this will not make me homeless. (Even if I succeed in emigrating.) But I think the estimate is something like over 70% of Americans can’t afford a sudden $500 out of pocket cost? (This is my recollection, likely mistaken; please feel free to correct me.) One more reason to get out of Dodge!!
So back to my main point– I handled Covid well, but the overt Biden-Harris-Trump genocide has really challenged my mental health a bit. And now we have the joint HTS-Izzy genocide of Alawites (called by the NYT and the other “responsible adults” “Assad loyalists”, oh that’s okay then, murder their children, film yourself dragging people behind cars, they deserved it!!) Not just them, but Shi’a generally (the only nations Shia are now safe in are Iran, Yemen, I know of no others), Christians, Assyrians, Chaldeans (lots of overlap I believe between the last 3 groups) & the formerly sacred (to the US NatSec state and the ShitLibs) Kurds . . .
When I first retired I’d spend at least a couple hours a day reading in a variety of fields that interest me, history, philosophy, anthropology, spirituality, the arts, fiction, etc. Hard to do now. I have become a news junkie (none from the MSM except to note HOW it’s lying to me). The Black Iron Prison that P.K. Dick warned about (which Wm. S. Burroughs simply called “Control”) seems to be here, trying to keep my own body out of its grasp, work with the few allies smart enough to see what’s right before their eyes.
The place I currently live in is environmentally sustainable, for the most part (& relative to other areas) but culturally, not so much.
The War the US has waged unremittingly since allying with the defeated Nazis (& mass-importing them to Canada, US, Latin America, etc.) is reaching a culmination. Yes, I feel anger, despair, and at times glee. I have a low (sustainable) level of shock, combined with free-floating anxiety. I feel no “awe” whatsoever, except in private moments of self-transcendence or reverie.
Biden-Harris were the greatest Evil I have seen in my lifetime (while at the same time just being a repeat/ hangover of the Bush Jr. Great War of Terror years, complete with the Cheneys), however Trump seems quite likely to surpass them. Biden-Harris were entirely predictable evil, however, no surprises, no discontinuity. The shit you saw was the shit they delivered. Trump’s chaos mixes it up. I tried to find what flora or fauna I could relate him to, settled on a Cephalopod. Not due to any innate intelligence, obviously (they are incredibly smart; there is a famous deceased one who called the results of the Football World Cup successfully.)
The joke back in the day for the Obama Cult was his playing “5-D chess”. Not hardly. Just selling the suckers to go onto the menu. (Which many like that poor woman in the video are.) Trump can’t play 2-D chess, he likely couldn’t even play checkers. He recently bragged that we are smarter than the Chinese and Russians because “we” think in Quarters, they think long-term! No he is in the octopoid class for just squirting ink everywhere, particularly in the Normies’ and CHUDs’ eyes.
When I had a strong spiritual practice, we were reminded to always act “without attachment.” As I watch all this shit come down, I have to internalize that lesson and just feel the glee that it is falling apart. Some of the Anti-Civilization folks used to promise, “Some day we will dance in the ruins of this garbage!” I am nowhere near that sanguine, it could happen, it likely won’t. Obama was a great teacher in one respect– Hope is a Lie, a Dodge, a Poisoned Chalice. Whether I go down to death quickly with most of it, or can extend my existence depends on my ingenuity in the coming months. It’s immaterial whether I do or not in the larger picture, however.
mago
Yeah, I agree that Soredemos nailed it.
Adversity builds character, yeah right. I remember as a teenager hearing how this or that or the other thing builds character, and I was like, no, it sucks.
Then the work ethic thing. It took me a long time to figure out what a steaming pile of cow pucky that is. I used to be a proud possessor of the work ethic. Sucker.
I’ve long been grateful that I escaped so much of mainstream cultural conditioning, but there’s some inevitable residue that clings like the faint odor of ripe trash.
But hey, I agree that there’s much to celebrate and be thankful for in a world on fire. Kind words, a loving smile, the sun and the moon, the stars overhead, and hey, you know not to get all Pollyanna and rainbows and unicorns about it—no one who knows me would ever make that accusation—but I have a simple appreciation for artistic and spiritual expression. I try to accomplish that with cooking among other activities.
Wasn’t it Sly and the Family Stone who sang I just want to celebrate another day of living? I just want to celebrate another day of giving. . .
mago
Off topic, just sweeting the pot by saying if you’re lost, stay where you are.
Más allá
bruce wilder
determining where a path is headed is relatively easy; timing the path can be very hard
hence, “the market can remain wrong longer than you can remain solvent”
neoliberalism as birthed by Milton Friedman and Mt Pelerin was just a good gig for a corruptible academic intellectual until New Deal liberalism collapsed into virtue-signaling and theatre criticism. (“If you kill Hitler at birth, knowing what you know from history, should you?” “Yes, but what are we signaling about American Will if we admit we were wrong and reverse course?”)
We give way too much credit to the Right for doing what they always do and too little to the collapse of “the liberal classes” for embracing the short-term profit they could realize from corrupt stupidity. Neoliberal “markets in everything” is obviously the corruption of the whole economy, every day all day. That is long before we get to lying George W Bush into office so he could lie us into war in Iraq. Suckering Trump into running and then buying a “scandal” to impeach him, twice. All to run a completely fake red v blue opera “war” on cable news kayafabe 24 hour channels.
are you being ironic or literal?
two mints in one!
Eric Anderson
All so easy to say when you don’t have a child.
That said, this commenter will continue to fight his ass off for a future that is, at worst, sustainable.
I’ve polled this before among all you ready to turn belly up and surrender to “fate.”
But how many of you have children under the age of majority? Huh? Don’t be shy … speak up.
Societies throughout history that focus on bare material prosperity stop having children, grow decadent, and decay because their populations would rather invest in their present ease, than in the children’s future ease.
Think on that …
miss jennings
That girl is going on about how she hopes this will just be a phase that will help her build ‘character’. This is just another form of delusion. Not every experience helps you build resilience; sometimes it just breaks you.
I couldn’t even really watch it. She’s ‘insane’ in a way because this ‘society’ is insane and ‘it’s no sign of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society’ but she doesn’t know that so she’s still trying to ‘fit in’ to something that is certifiable.
It makes one mad. Believe me I know.
Here is yet another story and yet another video of a woman who’s been living in her car for a few years now. I didn’t really watch this video either because it’s so bizarre I couldn’t take it. But the story intrigued me because this woman – Dawn Jones – was a member of the 90’s diva girl group En Vogue. She was nominated for a grammy and the group’s last song and music vid with Dawn as a member of the group in 1997 – ‘Don’t Let Go (Love)’ – was also their biggest single, a top ten in many countries.
In the ten years spanning 1990-1999 ‘Don’t Let Go (Love)’ was ranked the 83rd ‘most successful’ single of the decade by Billboard.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/dawn-robinson-living-car-net-worth-en-vogue-b2714289.html
The zeitgeist has stifled the ability for many to empathize to any serious degree with their own condition. Likewise, empathy from others, however meaningful and well-intentioned, is more often than not ‘superficial’ and short-lived because the go-go-go winner-take-all uber-competitive nature of ‘society’ as a whole simply doesn’t allow for much else.
At the same time more and more of us are unable to in any way reconcile our own interiority with what’s going on around us.
‘True compassion is more than flipping a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring.’
So, I read a little more about Dawn Jones. The final paragraphs of an April 2024 article about her in ‘First for Women’ magazine state that:
‘Robinson reunited with her fellow En Vogue members in 2005 and left in 2006, only to come back in 2008 and then leave permanently in 2011.
After quitting the group, Robinson joined the cast of the reality show R&B Divas: Los Angeles in 2013. She’s also appeared in shows like A Different World and SeaQuest 2032 and movies like Life (1999), The Last Request (2006) and Life in LA (2021).
Now 57, Robinson still sings with former En Vogue member Maxine Jones as part of the Funky Divas.’
https://www.firstforwomen.com/entertainment/music/en-vogue-members
This is also what her Wikipedia page said until being updated with the most recent news.
But recall that Dawn said in the just-released video that she’s been living in her car for three years.
The zeitgeist forces her to live a lie.
And ‘First for Women’ magazine/website isn’t in the business of telling truths:
https://www.firstforwomen.com/
Shiny happy people!
Now, here comes more. Dawn’s ex-husband Andre ‘Dre’ Allen got word of her predicament and has offered her a job in the hospitality business he now works in. Allen still considers himself a ‘songwriter/recording artist’ though he says he got out of the official biz to save his ‘life and finances.’
Allen himself sold more than half a million albums with his pop and R&B group, IV Xample, in the 1990s. He said that Dawn’s ‘charisma and personality’ would serve her well in the company’s sales department.
She may want to stay in her car.
Other former friends and acquaintances offered the obligatory sympathies and offers of assistance.
No one dared wonder aloud why things of this nature are so prevalent in this allegedly very wealthy country. No one wondered because this is everyone’s normal. There is not an inkling of MLK’s words in anyone’s consciousness.
https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/en-vogues-dawn-robinson-offered-job-by-ex-husband-amid-homelessness/
People’s spirits are crushed in this soul-destroying existence.
‘Fake it till you make it’ never worked for me in sobriety circles. It’s even worse in ‘real’ life, whatever that is. ‘Fake it till you make it’ often leads to suicide.
So, we have a celebrity ‘temporarily down on her luck’ who evidently nevertheless has found freedom through living in a car – at age 58. And we have a younger ‘unknown’ woman just striking out on her own in this big rough and tumble world who is also ‘temporarily down on her luck’ and living in her car.
Resiliance builds character.
America has a lot of characters. It’s one hell of a show.
—-
En Vogue’s ‘Don’t Let Go:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXafuSnq4BA
Perhaps a more soulful ‘Dont Let Go’ is necessary. Perhaps we all just need a really really big hug.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8TZRzZjlMU
And don’t let go.
——-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CJHbfkROow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA1LJ3blITU
——-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmzp4uPbOYo
miss jennings
Sorry, I referred to Dawn Robinson as Dawn Jones. I confused her with En Vogue’s Maxine Jones who she also partnered with in ‘The Funky Divas.’
I thought the video was included in the Indpendent article. Here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7MU-2VBN2w
Also, I wrote:
‘He said that Dawn’s ‘charisma and personality’ would serve her well in the company’s sales department.’
Followed by:
‘She may want to stay in her car.’
This wasn’t a dig at her personality and charisma! I am trying to say, probably rather poorly, that she wants to be valued for more than personality and charisma. And no one is going to discover themselves doing sales and marketing, particularly for a mass hotel chain.
But, if it pays the bills…
I hope she fares well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzRboWH1E6Y
Ian Welsh
Eric,
prosperity often leads to declines in birth rates, yes, but trust me, you can have a high birthrate and a shit nation. Lived in plenty of them. So many of the worst evils are committed by people thinking “I’m doing it for my children.”
But ever since I started writing people have mistaken accurate analysis for some sort of emotion. I have emotions, but to the extent they influence my analysis they have made me over-optimistic. My errors are almost all to the up-side.
As for “fighting”, keep it up. But the truth is that what you do makes very little difference to the arc of history. This is why America and Canada were founded by people who, living in shit countries, had the guts to move, so their children could have a better life.
And don’t think that you need children to fight. I was fighting hard, for decades and sacrificed significantly. Didn’t make almost any difference, mind you, but the fight was real.
Some of us look beyond family and the constant refrain from parents implying they are the only moral people is inaccurate.
someofparts
Speaking of ways to find joy as the maelstrom approaches, I decided to listen to Joe’s Garage while I motored around doing errands yesterday. It’s uncanny how timely it is, not to mention matching the mad energy of the current zeitgeist. Kind of a guilty pleasure to enjoy something so pornographic, but its funny and the music is incredible.
Astrid
Eric,
You got the causality reversed. People look at their decadent and failing societies and decided that it’s a bad idea to bring kids into it. The Roman proletariat suffered through centuries of elite instigated wars (where they often lost their land to debt) and economic competition from enslaved populations, and were largely subsisting on the state bread dole even during the “peak” of Rome. They didn’t have kids because it was already a dysfunctional system where family formation was getting to be impossible for the average person.
I did semi-seriously consider whether to have kids in my late 30s as there was a lot of family pressure, I could easily afford them, and there is a lot of pleasure and meaning in bringing up sentient beings who are like you but also their own person, a transmission chain into the future. But my conscience couldn’t possibly let me bring any other sentient beings into this mess. With the rise of China and possibly the global South, I feel a little better about it but there was a decade where I privately mourned the birth of every child in my circles.
At least for my friends and family, the more socially and politically progressive people are far more likely to be childless whereas people with kids are just completely wrapped up in themselves and their atomic family. I don’t fully blame them because raising kids in America today is exhausting and financially precarious, but they’re far more likely to do immoral and unethical acts because their financial situation compelled them to do so and “they got kids to feed”.
Eric Anderson
“Some of us look beyond family and the constant refrain from parents implying they are the only moral people is inaccurate.”
Come on, Ian. Don’t straw man me. Those are your words not mine.
History has never faced the situation we’re in right now — we are literally destroying the capacity of the planet to support our children’s future.
And I give no slander to those individuals w/o children who are morally and ethically astute enough to work for their future. Standing ovation.
But, I won’t stand for the defeatism. Lead, follow, or get the [family blog] out of the way.
Astrid:
See above. I think you really strain the causality issue w/the Rome analogy.
We are destroying the bio-capability of our planet to support future generations. That’s new — and not having children is what the knee jerk shitlibs are doing to salve their consciences against their continued consumer profligacy.
Nobody is saying go full Mormon. I have one child and will have no more — because I’m old.
Eric Anderson
And, I will acknowledge that I am probably an outlier. Many do not share my predisposition for the fight. I’m a lawyer. It’s what I do. The fight is just an objective baseline state of being for me.
Mark Level
Replying to Eric Anderson, like others. I could put a bumper sticker on my car that others have, realized about age 45, “Oops! I forgot to have kids!” I had several relationships from my early 20s to my mid-40s, fewer in my mid- to late- 50s (the final one when I was 58, with a 39-year old), certainly after age 45 I realized it was not something I would ever do.
In my late 30s and her mid-30s, the love of my life had a brief pregnancy scare. But after a few days, the worry cleared up. Had it not, I certainly would have supported her, to the extent I could. Actually one factor in our breakup was that I didn’t start “earning big” or even get healthcare until just before I turned 40, realized I had to, didn’t want to live or die out on the streets.
We were unsuited to live together, anyhow, even the 4 years we were together it was always sleepovers. I’m a Libra “glass half-full” guy and she was a classic Virgo “glass half-empty” person, always dissatisfied, bummed out, nothing was ever good enough for her. A good sex-life (for both of us) and similar sense of humor, friends’ group kept things going as long as circumstances allowed.
I can’t see detailed family-planning or aspirations as something I ever would’ve been bourgeois or conventional enough to get into a harness for. We all have different destinies. Some people just bumble into parenthood. One of my much younger friends’ stupid younger brother had a kid when he was a year out of high school, as was the girl. (And yes, I’d use boy/girl for kids who are 18, especially for the boy since women mature more quickly, in general.) Never married the mom. My family was somewhat dysfunctional though comfortable at least materially. I can’t imagine that the child conceived by parents in their late teens who didn’t stay together will have a very bright future (though it’s marginally possible.)
Some things are planned, some are just a reflection of character or “fate” if we choose to believe in that. And yes, I concur with Astrid. I mentioned a recent medical debt earlier in this thread. It costs probably 5 or even 6 figures (if complications) to have a child in a US hospital currently, even more to raise them for 18 years or so. Wall Street and the Economic Overlords do not care if ‘Muricans cannot replace themselves, it’s a non-issue.
I’m just glad I grew up in the 70s when I did and was independent at age 19 and never became an Incel like so many male youth forced to live at home now do. These people are so miserable that they follow “Influencers” like Andrew Tate into toxic masculinity & misogyny. The Economy dictates fewer and poorer children and parents. Thus the birth-rate decline is a factor of Macro-economics as well as individual choice. (Btw, I’m not assuming you’re ignorant of this, but it still should be stated.)
miss jennings
I never met anyone whose company I enjoyed more than my own.
Of course, I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for certain ‘urges’ my parents felt towards each other!
Nature has its way. It feels really good and a little while later a kid pops out. And that’s how ‘we’ perpetuate ‘the species.’
It can even get better with time and experimentation, despite what some might say:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npfBhwwljZ4
It should be obvious that people who have children are a wee bit taken aback when people activley root for the wholesale destruction of the society their children will inhabit.
These people are sick. But then misery loves company.
We didn’t start the fire.
I don’t have kids, by the way. And, despite the handle, I’m a MAN.
Every day I stand up tall and pretend I’m strong. In the hope that I may be.
—-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVoX_Oh21ug
——
I’m looking forward to mago’s story.
Astrid
Eric,
The decline and fall were seeing is tied to the end of the US empire, that’s why I cited the best known instance of imperial decline and fall.
As for your projections about anti-natalists, I’ve heard of plenty of such aspersions and abuse. I’m also pretty sure that my childless family’s carbon footprint is lower than yours, on a per capita basis. I prefer to focus what energy and money I have on caring due people who are already here, not the ones I chose not to bring into the world.