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You could also ban contraception and abortion. Romania managed to grow its population this way, albeit with orphanages.

You probably have to row back a fair way on women's rights and heavily reward it socially and in the tax system to boost population.

Women themselves, on average, want to have more children. You don't have to fight them to force them to do so. You just need to make it easier for them.

One option is to make it socially acceptable for women to have children without a long-term partner. Waiting for Mr Right to come along (who themself is ready to be a parent) seems to be one of the bigger impediments. And then, of course, you need to have the support to ensure that those children grown up to be well-adjusted without a Dad.

Or women, especially graduate career women, could be less fussy in the men they are willing to date and marry

…

You could also ban contraception and abortion. Romania managed to grow its population this way, albeit with orphanages.

You probably have to row back a fair way on women's rights and heavily reward it socially and in the tax system to boost population.

Women themselves, on average, want to have more children. You don't have to fight them to force them to do so. You just need to make it easier for them.

One option is to make it socially acceptable for women to have children without a long-term partner. Waiting for Mr Right to come along (who themself is ready to be a parent) seems to be one of the bigger impediments. And then, of course, you need to have the support to ensure that those children grown up to be well-adjusted without a Dad.

Or women, especially graduate career women, could be less fussy in the men they are willing to date and marry

Just the women should? Did you just marry any old girl or did you wait to find someone you fancied and felt you could make a life partnership with? I think a lot of men should be very glad that a lot of women are less fussy about who they are willing to date and marry.

Men need to up their game for starters - have you noticed how terribly British men dress, especially in the summer? Like overgrown children.

Maybe the guys need to stop fetishising the Love Island look and go for brains and then they might talk to the graduate career women who don’t look the part and both find a match.

Graduate career women know that having children will, in most cases, kibosh their career. Sure there are laws and regulations to stop it but frankly they have a choice of banging out a family earlier then going back to their career and building from there or stopping when they have career momentum and having the children.

I know some who have become board level at banks and law firms but they are the exceptions.

Many will understandably choose their career - would you give up your career to raise your children instead of your wife?

Being a good father has sod all to do with how well you dress.

Throughout history most women never had a career at all, their primary role was being home makers and raising children.

They can work part time in the early years when their children are young and then shift back to full time as they start school.

If they are rich enough to be at board level at banks and law firms they are rich enough to get nannies too

This ignorance is why these women have rejected you. They can work when and how the fuck they like without your approval and funnily enough, a lot of women, far more successful than you, would like not to hand over the upbringing of their children to a nanny, and have to make that decision not out of pure choice but because biology means they are the only party in the relationship who can gestate children.

I am married as I said, not to a liberal self absorbed career above all else woman however.

I don't give a shit how successful women are career wise at the end of the day if they want children they should find a man and stick to them and yes that may well mean giving up working full time when their children are young and if they don't want a nanny.

Why do you think many young men are surging to the far right and populist right across the western world in elections while young women vote still mainly for 'progressive' parties?

It is because in part many young men are fed up of traditional gender roles being discarded and some women putting their careers first so much they refuse to even consider a role for most men in their lives and as husbands and fathers

Your last paragraph is weird

Why should women be subservient to men ?

Well the Bible says it so if you are a traditional Christian

'Ephesians 5:22-24:
"Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior."

Or for Muslims Surah An-Nisa (4:34) "Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more [strength] than the other, and because they support them from their means."

So that is Paul's opinion not God/Jesus. Also the Islamic quote doesn't say anything about women being subservient to men. You can protect and support your wife without suborning her

An appalling case that is right at the intersection of a lot of issues that have been discussed on here recently:

https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/glasgow-news/glasgow-sex-attack-delivery-driver-31305185

Glasgow sex attack delivery driver was using someone else’s Deliveroo account when he assaulted woman

Muhammad Faizan Khan subjected JJ - who asked to remain anonymous - to a sickening sexual attack which left her bleeding, and which she believes was a factor in a pregnancy loss several days later. He was found guilty in December 2024 at Glasgow Sheriff Court, sentenced to 12 months in prison and placed on the sex offenders register in February this year.

12 months??

I met my girlfriend on Hinge and I am certainly not a Love Island adonis.

Yep, both my boys too met their partners on Hinge, together 8 and 2 years now.

Though dating Apps have a conflict of interest. 1 successful match loses 2 customers!

The thing about dating Apps is that actually, they are like the village that HYuFD harks back too - people don’t set their search to global if they actually want to meet someone, they set it to within a sensible radius of where it’s easy, if they like each other, to meet in person, go on dates, make a life together.

All it really does is speed up the searching process.

FPT on the baby bust (and it’s not so irrelevant - Trump is in some ways a reaction to it)

The irony is that the world needs far fewer people. Unless and until we can go to other planets we need to put less pressure on Planet Earth, we need to get our present 9 billion down to 1-2 billion

The problem is how do you get there without societal collapse. Gaia may, in her own way, be doing it for us

Africa needs fewer people, the western world needs a few more babies

African birth rates are declining from a very high base and will continue to do so based on forecast.

Fertility rate has fallen from 6.1 to 4.8 in just over a decade

So Africa is sorting itself out, especially as it is exporting plenty of young men to Europe.

https://www.mercatornet.com/to_the_surprise_of_demographers_african_fertility_is_falling

So Africa more than double replacement fertility rate still, thanks for the confirmation.

Meanwhile most western nations well below replacement fertility rate meaning ever higher taxes on the working population to fund an ever ageing population.

While most western voters want their navies to send back the migrant boats where they came from

Africa, with its declining birth rate and exporting its young men, is going the same way as the west, just more slowly. The more it exports fertile young men to the west the more their birth rates will fall. Now forecast to peak in 2060.

‘The UN now projects that Nigeria will have 342 million people by 2060, 200 million less than they forecasted ten years ago. Will even these estimates hold up?’

What voters want is irrelevant. It’s what the political class wants and they want more. Hell, your party happily hoovered up tens of thousands, with their economically inactive fiscal liability relatives, to wipe old peoples arses.

Africa’s birth rate will likely be down to replacement level, within a generation.

I highly doubt it, Africa has fewer women graduates in the workplace than most of the world and is much more religious

Twenty years ago, that was true of the Middle East.

Most of the Middle East still has above replacement level fertility.

West Bank and Gaza being two of the highest.

They're both trying to outbreed each other.

Russia: despite traditional values and massive incentives has a birth rate comfortably below UK levels.

On top of a high death rate, made worse by the Ukraine war.

Until recently, a lot of people thought of Putin as a 3-D chess player (and the MAGA's and tankies still admire him), but what could be more stupid than launching a war of choice that leaves you weaker than when you started?

Russia's vast oil revenues could have been used to transform the lives of its population, *and* to build up its armed forces.

Demographic pressures were one of the reasons for the SMO. About a million Ukrainian (mostly younger people who are more mobile) moved to Russia as soon as it kicked off. There's about 3 million people living in the fascistly occupied/heroically denazified territory who will be eventually added to the population of the Russian Federation. A big motivation for staying put under Russian occupation is that you can just stop paying your mortgage/car payment to Ukrainian banks with no adverse consequences.

OTOH, plenty of young Russians have got out of Dodge.

And up to a million young Russian men have been killed or injured, if we are to believe the more alarming statistics

This was all cleverly analysed in the Spectator

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-global-populations-need-to-fall/

This year, Russia has conquered about 150 square miles of territory, at a cost of about 200,000 casualties. That's an insane ratio of reward to cost.

The Soviets lost more than 25 million people in The Great Patriotic War. The odd 200,000 in the SMO is a rounding error.

Um, @Leon, @Malmesbury et al, the "Universe 25"/"Mouse Utopia"/"Calhoun Experiments", whilst not that well known, were known enough for me to discuss it in one of the works Xmas dinners last Christmas, where I fascinated/repelled various luminaries with the story[1], especially when I threw in the phrase "mouse incel" . The alt-right and frankly insane commentator "WhatIfAltHist" - you'd like him - did a YouTube on them

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-old-experiment-with-mice-led-to-bleak-predictions-for-humanitys-future-180954423/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTDTVbourzU

[1] I spend a lot of time in trains and taxis, and two of my jobs mean I have a fund of grotesque stories to entertain them. They can be repurposed for a more genteel audience.

I am not sure that I buy it though. Population Fertility rates for humans are dropping everywhere (albeit from a higher base in Africa etc) whether the country is densely or thinly populated.

Zambia has 20 million people in a country twice the size of France for example, yet the fertility rate is dropping there too. (Incidentally there is some belief amongst demographers that many estimates of current populations are overestimated in Africa).

The drop in fertility rates is pretty universal, in both rich and poor countries, the densely and thinly populated, in ones with welfare states and without, in countries with expensive and those with cheap housing, religious and irreligious alike, from different starting points

I think we have to look at other societal changes, and these would have to be worldwide, and particularly taken up by young women. Smartphones and Internet access spring to mind.

Education, opportunities, birth control and reduced child mortality rates have all played a part in reduced fertility rates.

Hardly surprising as most women don't want to be a baby factory and want to do other things with their lives..

Sure, but these have been around for decades, but with Smartphones that information is much more widely available, including on the life opportunities as alternatives to serial maternity.

If you were born in an African village - I suspect opportunities beyond the village only arrived in the past 10-15 years as mobiles arrived..

FPT on the baby bust (and it’s not so irrelevant - Trump is in some ways a reaction to it)

The irony is that the world needs far fewer people. Unless and until we can go to other planets we need to put less pressure on Planet Earth, we need to get our present 9 billion down to 1-2 billion

The problem is how do you get there without societal collapse. Gaia may, in her own way, be doing it for us

Africa needs fewer people, the western world needs a few more babies

African birth rates are declining from a very high base and will continue to do so based on forecast.

Fertility rate has fallen from 6.1 to 4.8 in just over a decade

So Africa is sorting itself out, especially as it is exporting plenty of young men to Europe.

https://www.mercatornet.com/to_the_surprise_of_demographers_african_fertility_is_falling

So Africa more than double replacement fertility rate still, thanks for the confirmation.

Meanwhile most western nations well below replacement fertility rate meaning ever higher taxes on the working population to fund an ever ageing population.

While most western voters want their navies to send back the migrant boats where they came from

Africa, with its declining birth rate and exporting its young men, is going the same way as the west, just more slowly. The more it exports fertile young men to the west the more their birth rates will fall. Now forecast to peak in 2060.

‘The UN now projects that Nigeria will have 342 million people by 2060, 200 million less than they forecasted ten years ago. Will even these estimates hold up?’

What voters want is irrelevant. It’s what the political class wants and they want more. Hell, your party happily hoovered up tens of thousands, with their economically inactive fiscal liability relatives, to wipe old peoples arses.

Africa’s birth rate will likely be down to replacement level, within a generation.

I highly doubt it, Africa has fewer women graduates in the workplace than most of the world and is much more religious

Twenty years ago, that was true of the Middle East.

Most of the Middle East still has above replacement level fertility.

West Bank and Gaza being two of the highest.

They're both trying to outbreed each other.

Russia: despite traditional values and massive incentives has a birth rate comfortably below UK levels.

On top of a high death rate, made worse by the Ukraine war.

Until recently, a lot of people thought of Putin as a 3-D chess player (and the MAGA's and tankies still admire him), but what could be more stupid than launching a war of choice that leaves you weaker than when you started?

Russia's vast oil revenues could have been used to transform the lives of its population, *and* to build up its armed forces.

Demographic pressures were one of the reasons for the SMO. About a million Ukrainian (mostly younger people who are more mobile) moved to Russia as soon as it kicked off. There's about 3 million people living in the fascistly occupied/heroically denazified territory who will be eventually added to the population of the Russian Federation. A big motivation for staying put under Russian occupation is that you can just stop paying your mortgage/car payment to Ukrainian banks with no adverse consequences.

OTOH, plenty of young Russians have got out of Dodge.

And up to a million young Russian men have been killed or injured, if we are to believe the more alarming statistics

This was all cleverly analysed in the Spectator

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-global-populations-need-to-fall/

This year, Russia has conquered about 150 square miles of territory, at a cost of about 200,000 casualties. That's an insane ratio of reward to cost.

The Soviets lost more than 25 million people in The Great Patriotic War. The odd 200,000 in the SMO is a rounding error.

The differences are that:

(a) back in 1941, the typical Soviet woman had 6 children in her lifetime, rather than 1.4. Their leaders are still acting as if they can lose millions in war, and the population will rapidly bounce back.

(b) the Nazis wished to exterminate or enslave the population. They had no choice but to take whatever casualties were necessary in order to win. This war is a war of choice.

So what? My thesis explains the continuation of the SMO. Yours suggests any rational Kremlin would not have launched it. Mine more closely matches the facts on the ground.