Trump derangement syndrome is real – politicalbetting.com
Even after ICE arrested his wife, this Trump supporter refuses to take down his MAGA flags and says he doesn’t regret voting for Trump:“Trump is not trying to do anything bad. He wants the best for the country.”pic.twitter.com/42I2tbAN8x
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
We covered this yesterday where we pointed out its got to be the cheapest possible divorce solution - 1 call to ICE and all you problems are 3,000 miles away..
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
Apart from the bollocks about other planets, I agree with Leon!
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
Apart from the bollocks about other planets, I agree with Leon!
So do I. Worrying isn't it when you read the bollocks he posted at the end of the last thread.
Trump is a depraved freak show of a president, however I note with pleasure that my US investments are now doing rather nicely, after an initial slump when he went all tariff-y
Morning all. England to win today? Quick burst of wickets then Crawley knocks em off one handed?? And i spotted two proposed names for the dried fruit party yesterday - Collective and Arise. Oh dear. A dreadful 'charity single group' or Breakfast telly?
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
Out of my three closest friends and me, none of us have children. One has a step son. We haven’t become friends by default as not being part of the whole parenting world, we’ve been friends since a mix prep school and early twenties.
Out of my wider circle of friends (rather than acquaintances) of six chaps there are another two who have no children.
None of us didn’t have children for financial reasons as everyone has great careers and/or family wealth.
Two of us just never settle in relationships and other reasons are that their partners don’t want children or met current partners when partners are past wanting more children.
I think we are a relatively unusual group in the lack of children for men in their forties but not sure.
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
Apart from the bollocks about other planets, I agree with Leon!
So do I. Worrying isn't it when you read the bollocks he posted at the end of the last thread.
My esteemed editor at the Gazette sent me some fascinating data the other day. Might become an article
It’s from a scientist who studied the effects of overpopulation on rats. He made rats live at varying levels of overpopulation - from moderate to severe. Each scenario was termed a “universe”
In “universe 25” - extreme overpopulation - the rats suddenly reacted very strangely. Female rats refused to have sex and became more aggressive and masculinised. Male rats became more feminised and sperm counts plummeted. Anxiety and self harm proliferated and the rats got more and more atomised - interacting less, isolating more
Eventually all the rats in Universe 25 died out. The rodent baby bust could not be fixed
Most of their victims never want to admit (to themselves, let alone anyone else) that they did something stupid/greedy/dishonest.
The thing that's a bit different here is that the conman isn't doing a runner, because he doesn't need to.
Could it simply be that Trump voters continue to fear the alternative more? The Dems aren't exactly going out of their way to court the middle ground of American opinion.
» show previous quotes That's a good point; but 'feeling' and 'being' safer are two different things.
Anecdotally, the 60s, 70s and 80s were not exactly safe times for women on Britain's streets.
Thanks for mansplaining to me what it was like to be a female in the 80s, as a student nurse and then a staff nurse back then on nights out in Aberdeen and Edinburgh, we were always even back then making sure we all got home safely from nights out as that was really important to us and we had to have great safe guards in place even then. I could dine out on the amount of times that groups of drunk men would spot and single out a lone female thinking they were being helpful when they were being anything but and causing them real distress when they were traveling on public transport or standing in taxi line!
Can someone explain to me why we don’t want asylum seekers to have jobs? In a country where it’s very easy to find menial work (so it’s not like they’re taking jobs off others) what we ought to have is asylum seekers allowed to work - and if we still want to be a bit nasty, maybe tax them at 50% from £0 or something to pay for their room and board.
There must be something I’m missing (I doubt it’s incentives, cause the major prize is being allowed to stay, and the minor prize of working illegally for a couple of years then being deported isn’t really different to working legally and contributing tax).
Because it would be too much of a loophole in the visa system. Asylum claims take a very long time to process and if you let people work formally then it will be exploited, plus it will make it harder to turn claims down because people will use all the human rights arguments we're familiar with to argue that they are already settled here.
Basically the government causes a problem with its own laziness and incompetence, then undertakes disastrous measures meant to manage it, but which fail and cause lots of other problems in the process, then bills taxpayers bills of pounds for the cost of those measures.
Just like in the housing market, where it causes disastrous housing shortages through the planning system, then makes a fortune off the stamp duty and capital gains tax revenues for which its own catastrophic cowardice and incompetence is responsible, incidentally destroying the life chance of a generation in the process.
Unfortunately, because seeing these things needs people to think things through for more than a few seconds, neither the press nor the public will ever catch on.
Pah!
The disastrous shortage of housing is due to people not being rich enough to keep developers in the manner to which they have been accustomed.
There’s 1.5 milllion plots with planning permission sitting there waiting to be built. Developers need people to be desperate. And they ain’t desperate enough. Yet.
Planning is not the problem.
Not necessarily so. Round here a plot for a nice 3-4 bed house with planning will change hands for £100 - 200k. Good agricultural land with no prospect of getting planning is £10-20k an acre.
All those 1.5 millions plots that the developers are "sitting on" cost someone real money - probably the developer spent £50-£100k per plot buying the land off a lucky farmer once it was in a local plan, and then spent another £20k a plot getting detailed planning. Then in addition to building the house, there's probably another £25k of section 106 commitments, and they will make you sell a third of the site under market rate as "affordable housing". All those costs end up in the final price.
Housing is really expensive because we have made it really expensive to build houses.
Don't get me wrong, most developers are scumbags, but they are generally only following the market incentives successive governments have set.
Most of their victims never want to admit (to themselves, let alone anyone else) that they did something stupid/greedy/dishonest.
The thing that's a bit different here is that the conman isn't doing a runner, because he doesn't need to.
If you've got intensely invested in somebody, as with these Magas, it's difficult to cut loose because it means admitting you've been a fool. But what I'd hope is that whilst in public they keep the faith there's a growing proportion who privately are starting to think, "hmm, not so sure about this guy." Emphasis on 'hope' there. I'm not particularly bullish on the point.
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
Out of my three closest friends and me, none of us have children. One has a step son. We haven’t become friends by default as not being part of the whole parenting world, we’ve been friends since a mix prep school and early twenties.
Out of my wider circle of friends (rather than acquaintances) of six chaps there are another two who have no children.
None of us didn’t have children for financial reasons as everyone has great careers and/or family wealth.
Two of us just never settle in relationships and other reasons are that their partners don’t want children or met current partners when partners are past wanting more children.
I think we are a relatively unusual group in the lack of children for men in their forties but not sure.
Personal question (you are not obliged to answer!) - do you ever regret this? You don’t strike me as full of wistful remorse so probably not
Many of my childless friends (and like you I have a lot) seem to cycle. At certain points they are struck with sadness - something missing. At other points they relish the freedom and the lack of financial pressure
Can someone explain to me why we don’t want asylum seekers to have jobs? In a country where it’s very easy to find menial work (so it’s not like they’re taking jobs off others) what we ought to have is asylum seekers allowed to work - and if we still want to be a bit nasty, maybe tax them at 50% from £0 or something to pay for their room and board.
There must be something I’m missing (I doubt it’s incentives, cause the major prize is being allowed to stay, and the minor prize of working illegally for a couple of years then being deported isn’t really different to working legally and contributing tax).
Because it would be too much of a loophole in the visa system. Asylum claims take a very long time to process and if you let people work formally then it will be exploited, plus it will make it harder to turn claims down because people will use all the human rights arguments we're familiar with to argue that they are already settled here.
Basically the government causes a problem with its own laziness and incompetence, then undertakes disastrous measures meant to manage it, but which fail and cause lots of other problems in the process, then bills taxpayers bills of pounds for the cost of those measures.
Just like in the housing market, where it causes disastrous housing shortages through the planning system, then makes a fortune off the stamp duty and capital gains tax revenues for which its own catastrophic cowardice and incompetence is responsible, incidentally destroying the life chance of a generation in the process.
Unfortunately, because seeing these things needs people to think things through for more than a few seconds, neither the press nor the public will ever catch on.
Pah!
The disastrous shortage of housing is due to people not being rich enough to keep developers in the manner to which they have been accustomed.
There’s 1.5 milllion plots with planning permission sitting there waiting to be built. Developers need people to be desperate. And they ain’t desperate enough. Yet.
Planning is not the problem.
Not necessarily so. Round here a plot for a nice 3-4 bed house with planning will change hands for £100 - 200k. Good agricultural land with no prospect of getting planning is £10-20k an acre.
All those 1.5 millions plots that the developers are "sitting on" cost someone real money - probably the developer spent £50-£100k per plot buying the land off a lucky farmer once it was in a local plan, and then spent another £20k a plot getting detailed planning. Then in addition to building the house, there's probably another £25k of section 106 commitments, and they will make you sell a third of the site under market rate as "affordable housing". All those costs end up in the final price.
Housing is really expensive because we have made it really expensive to build houses.
Don't get me wrong, most developers are scumbags, but they are generally only following the market incentives successive governments have set.
I think section 106/75 commitments should get binned, along with the affordable housing provisions. Councils should be provided with funding up front for the infrastructure and community amenities, and sell off the adjacent plots to developers.
In terms of affordable housing, if we agree that housing is stifling the economy and harming us all, then we should fund medium-high density council housing as we have in the past. At the very least it could reduce the billions and billions we are shovelling to private landlords via housing benefit.
Most of their victims never want to admit (to themselves, let alone anyone else) that they did something stupid/greedy/dishonest.
The thing that's a bit different here is that the conman isn't doing a runner, because he doesn't need to.
If you've got intensely invested in somebody, as with these Magas, it's difficult to cut loose because it means admitting you've been a fool. But what I'd hope is that whilst in public they keep the faith there's a growing proportion who privately are starting to think, "hmm, not so sure about this guy." Emphasis on 'hope' there. I'm not particularly bullish on the point.
The goodish news is that it doesn't need that many Trump voters quietly quitting to flip the national result.
The bad news is the nagging fear that, whilst there will probably be elections in 2026/8, they might matter less than they used to.
To continue the theme and bring it back to the thread
Strikes me there are TWO existential processes at work in the world, right now. As in: unprecedented challenges for humankind
One I cannot mention, so I won’t
The other is the collapse in fertility. This is having enormous second order effects all around the world, often going unnoticed
eg it can be argued that Trump is a consequence of the baby bust. American demographics are bad. Not as bad as east Asia, but bad. Below replacement and ageing fast
The answer then is immigration - but that means white people very quickly becoming a minority in the USA, and of all the white populations in the world it is Americans who are most likely to fight back against this (violently, if needs be). So we have Trump - a more-or-less openly white supremacist president
Different versions of this dynamic are playing out around the planet
On the British Nationality (Irish Citizens) Act 2024, that Leon was so ignorantly flapping about, bthe below link is to a Lords debate in Hansard which includes some background to the motive behind the bill.
Before looking, guess which party pushed hardest for this change in the law?
As a bonus, on what date did the Act receive Royal Assent?
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
Out of my three closest friends and me, none of us have children. One has a step son. We haven’t become friends by default as not being part of the whole parenting world, we’ve been friends since a mix prep school and early twenties.
Out of my wider circle of friends (rather than acquaintances) of six chaps there are another two who have no children.
None of us didn’t have children for financial reasons as everyone has great careers and/or family wealth.
Two of us just never settle in relationships and other reasons are that their partners don’t want children or met current partners when partners are past wanting more children.
I think we are a relatively unusual group in the lack of children for men in their forties but not sure.
Personal question (you are not obliged to answer!) - do you ever regret this? You don’t strike me as full of wistful remorse so probably not
Many of my childless friends (and like you I have a lot) seem to cycle. At certain points they are struck with sadness - something missing. At other points they relish the freedom and the lack of financial pressure
I wouldn’t say I regret it, more I wonder what life would have been like as I see how people get a load of joy and love from their children but the one time I was in a relationship where it might have worked for me my partner didn’t want children.
I regret allowing my parents stopping me from joining the army - they threatened to defund me if I took up my place at Sandhurst before university and so I put the idea off until after uni then after four years in London I was too booze and drug addled! That to me is my regret that haunts me but not the children issue.
I’m fine with it, I have nephews and nieces who fulfil certain elements of younger family for me and I don’t have to worry about my child’s safety, health, happiness.
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
This garbage about overpopulation is no different to what Malthus was writing about - it was rubbish then and it's rubbish now.
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
Apart from the bollocks about other planets, I agree with Leon!
So do I. Worrying isn't it when you read the bollocks he posted at the end of the last thread.
My esteemed editor at the Gazette sent me some fascinating data the other day. Might become an article
It’s from a scientist who studied the effects of overpopulation on rats. He made rats live at varying levels of overpopulation - from moderate to severe. Each scenario was termed a “universe”
In “universe 25” - extreme overpopulation - the rats suddenly reacted very strangely. Female rats refused to have sex and became more aggressive and masculinised. Male rats became more feminised and sperm counts plummeted. Anxiety and self harm proliferated and the rats got more and more atomised - interacting less, isolating more
Eventually all the rats in Universe 25 died out. The rodent baby bust could not be fixed
Are we in the human equivalent of Universe 25?
I am aware of the Calhoun studies and they have many flaws. Having said that I think we are quite capable of wiping ourselves out by other means anyway.
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
Out of my three closest friends and me, none of us have children. One has a step son. We haven’t become friends by default as not being part of the whole parenting world, we’ve been friends since a mix prep school and early twenties.
Out of my wider circle of friends (rather than acquaintances) of six chaps there are another two who have no children.
None of us didn’t have children for financial reasons as everyone has great careers and/or family wealth.
Two of us just never settle in relationships and other reasons are that their partners don’t want children or met current partners when partners are past wanting more children.
I think we are a relatively unusual group in the lack of children for men in their forties but not sure.
Personal question (you are not obliged to answer!) - do you ever regret this? You don’t strike me as full of wistful remorse so probably not
Many of my childless friends (and like you I have a lot) seem to cycle. At certain points they are struck with sadness - something missing. At other points they relish the freedom and the lack of financial pressure
I wouldn’t say I regret it, more I wonder what life would have been like as I see how people get a load of joy and love from their children but the one time I was in a relationship where it might have worked for me my partner didn’t want children.
I regret allowing my parents stopping me from joining the army - they threatened to defund me if I took up my place at Sandhurst before university and so I put the idea off until after uni then after four years in London I was too booze and drug addled! That to me is my regret that haunts me but not the children issue.
I’m fine with it, I have nephews and nieces who fulfil certain elements of younger family for me and I don’t have to worry about my child’s safety, health, happiness.
A thoughtful and illuminating answer - thankyou
I’m a bit like you. If I regret one big thing it’s overdoing the drugs. I stopped at 30 and started having a great time (and making money). But then I went back on them - deeply damaging my life and relationships - and only finally quitting at 37. What a twat I was
I’ve been blessed with a lucky if not wonderful career since then, also kids I love, but I always wonder what I might have done if I hadn’t wasted those precious years in my 30s
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
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
Apart from the bollocks about other planets, I agree with Leon!
So do I. Worrying isn't it when you read the bollocks he posted at the end of the last thread.
My esteemed editor at the Gazette sent me some fascinating data the other day. Might become an article
It’s from a scientist who studied the effects of overpopulation on rats. He made rats live at varying levels of overpopulation - from moderate to severe. Each scenario was termed a “universe”
In “universe 25” - extreme overpopulation - the rats suddenly reacted very strangely. Female rats refused to have sex and became more aggressive and masculinised. Male rats became more feminised and sperm counts plummeted. Anxiety and self harm proliferated and the rats got more and more atomised - interacting less, isolating more
Eventually all the rats in Universe 25 died out. The rodent baby bust could not be fixed
Are we in the human equivalent of Universe 25?
I am aware of the Calhoun studies and they have many flaws. Having said that I think we are quite capable of wiping ourselves out by other means anyway.
Ah. Are these studies well known? They are totally new to me - and fascinating
Are they questioned by scientists? Serious query - I might write about them
Trump is a depraved freak show of a president, however I note with pleasure that my US investments are now doing rather nicely, after an initial slump when he went all tariff-y
So, as ever, swings and roundabouts
It’s not over yet but I sense we’re in the endgame.
I was lucky, my company DC I transferred at the right time and I have been drip feeding it back in since I moved to ii (with Malcs assistance).
That's revealing - but how typical is it? I might call it "deluded" rather than "deranged".
It's another one where the individual was entitled to be in the USA< and was following the track to citizenship -she had a small conviction 15 years ago and was working her way back (that's also a problem with the USA's crazed legal system). Trump broke the policy and went straight to a "anything at all wrong with them, get 'em out and f*ck the consequences" route in defiance of the rule of law.
The guy still believes that Trump's regime will follow due process, and that she is in just for questioning, and that he will get her back. His loyalty to Trump holds.
The question is how widely and how severely that will be broken. How tenacious are the different segments of Trumpists?
There was a fascist (Mussolini, then later Hitler) sympathetic radio priest in the 1930s called Father Charles Edward Coughlin who reached a weekly audience of 30 million from 120 million population. There's a strong analogy to the siloed interpretation of current events being put out by Fox News, News Max, Twitter and so on.
One question is is what will it take to wake up people like this guy.
Trump's BBB will be taking 10-15 million people off Medicaid, and rural hospitals are already closing or reducing services.
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
Out of my three closest friends and me, none of us have children. One has a step son. We haven’t become friends by default as not being part of the whole parenting world, we’ve been friends since a mix prep school and early twenties.
Out of my wider circle of friends (rather than acquaintances) of six chaps there are another two who have no children.
None of us didn’t have children for financial reasons as everyone has great careers and/or family wealth.
Two of us just never settle in relationships and other reasons are that their partners don’t want children or met current partners when partners are past wanting more children.
I think we are a relatively unusual group in the lack of children for men in their forties but not sure.
Personal question (you are not obliged to answer!) - do you ever regret this? You don’t strike me as full of wistful remorse so probably not
Many of my childless friends (and like you I have a lot) seem to cycle. At certain points they are struck with sadness - something missing. At other points they relish the freedom and the lack of financial pressure
I wouldn’t say I regret it, more I wonder what life would have been like as I see how people get a load of joy and love from their children but the one time I was in a relationship where it might have worked for me my partner didn’t want children.
I regret allowing my parents stopping me from joining the army - they threatened to defund me if I took up my place at Sandhurst before university and so I put the idea off until after uni then after four years in London I was too booze and drug addled! That to me is my regret that haunts me but not the children issue.
I’m fine with it, I have nephews and nieces who fulfil certain elements of younger family for me and I don’t have to worry about my child’s safety, health, happiness.
I'd say you are unusual - but not THAT unusual in a way you would have been 50 years ago. I'm 50, so at a stage where in any group of contemporaries breeding is almost certainly finished. And in almost any group of contemporaries I select, we are well beow replacement levels. The number of people for whom - for reasons similar to those you describe - it just didn't happen is sadly large. There are all sorts of reasons for not breeding: medical, financial, just-not-wanting-that-life - but the not-meeting-the-right-woman-at-the-right-time is the most tragic. Because in theory, with all the women in the world available at the touch of a button, that reason should have gone. In practice, the availability of *everyone* seems to have made finding the right partner much, much harder than when it was simply a matter of selecting one from the 40 or so realistically available.
Millions of women may be willing to meet you, but many of them are doing so while looking over your shoulder to see if anyone better might be available.
Most of their victims never want to admit (to themselves, let alone anyone else) that they did something stupid/greedy/dishonest.
The thing that's a bit different here is that the conman isn't doing a runner, because he doesn't need to.
Could it simply be that Trump voters continue to fear the alternative more? The Dems aren't exactly going out of their way to court the middle ground of American opinion.
I genuinely don't understand your interpretation of reality. Have you been watching Fox and Friends?.
Mainstream Dems are generally rather conservative. They are not Jeremy Corbyn clones. Even AOC and Bernie, by our standards would be relatively New Labour.
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
Apart from the bollocks about other planets, I agree with Leon!
So do I. Worrying isn't it when you read the bollocks he posted at the end of the last thread.
My esteemed editor at the Gazette sent me some fascinating data the other day. Might become an article
It’s from a scientist who studied the effects of overpopulation on rats. He made rats live at varying levels of overpopulation - from moderate to severe. Each scenario was termed a “universe”
In “universe 25” - extreme overpopulation - the rats suddenly reacted very strangely. Female rats refused to have sex and became more aggressive and masculinised. Male rats became more feminised and sperm counts plummeted. Anxiety and self harm proliferated and the rats got more and more atomised - interacting less, isolating more
Eventually all the rats in Universe 25 died out. The rodent baby bust could not be fixed
Are we in the human equivalent of Universe 25?
I am aware of the Calhoun studies and they have many flaws. Having said that I think we are quite capable of wiping ourselves out by other means anyway.
Ah. Are these studies well known? They are totally new to me - and fascinating
Are they questioned by scientists? Serious query - I might write about them
That surely would depend on your scientist. You can usually find a scientist to question anything if you want a voice, rather than a consensus.
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.
Most of their victims never want to admit (to themselves, let alone anyone else) that they did something stupid/greedy/dishonest.
The thing that's a bit different here is that the conman isn't doing a runner, because he doesn't need to.
Could it simply be that Trump voters continue to fear the alternative more? The Dems aren't exactly going out of their way to court the middle ground of American opinion.
I genuinely don't understand your interpretation of reality. Have you been watching Fox and Friends?.
Mainstream Dems are generally rather conservative. They are not Jeremy Corbyn clones. Even AOC and Bernie, by our standards would be relatively New Labour.
No AOC and Bernie would be left of Labour but most Dems would be New Labour, LD or even One Nation Tories in UK terms.
Only most Reform voters here backed Trump over Harris in polls last year
Trump is largely doing what he said he would so his supporters are mostly unsurprisingly still supportive.
He's doing very few of the things he said he would do
He said he would deport immigrants, cut taxes, impose tariffs on imports, not give more aid to Ukraine and slash woke and EDI funding and he has done all of that
Most of their victims never want to admit (to themselves, let alone anyone else) that they did something stupid/greedy/dishonest.
The thing that's a bit different here is that the conman isn't doing a runner, because he doesn't need to.
Could it simply be that Trump voters continue to fear the alternative more? The Dems aren't exactly going out of their way to court the middle ground of American opinion.
I genuinely don't understand your interpretation of reality. Have you been watching Fox and Friends?.
Mainstream Dems are generally rather conservative. They are not Jeremy Corbyn clones. Even AOC and Bernie, by our standards would be relatively New Labour.
Economically, perhaps. Culturally they would be Sultanas. Have you seen the front runner for the mayor of New York?
Most of their victims never want to admit (to themselves, let alone anyone else) that they did something stupid/greedy/dishonest.
The thing that's a bit different here is that the conman isn't doing a runner, because he doesn't need to.
Could it simply be that Trump voters continue to fear the alternative more? The Dems aren't exactly going out of their way to court the middle ground of American opinion.
I genuinely don't understand your interpretation of reality. Have you been watching Fox and Friends?.
Mainstream Dems are generally rather conservative. They are not Jeremy Corbyn clones. Even AOC and Bernie, by our standards would be relatively New Labour.
Economically, perhaps. Culturally they would be Sultanas. Have you seen the front runner for the mayor of New York?
The new Dem nominee for Mayor of New York who wants to abolish billionaires? Even Starmer and Reeves aren't as socialist as that
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
Out of my three closest friends and me, none of us have children. One has a step son. We haven’t become friends by default as not being part of the whole parenting world, we’ve been friends since a mix prep school and early twenties.
Out of my wider circle of friends (rather than acquaintances) of six chaps there are another two who have no children.
None of us didn’t have children for financial reasons as everyone has great careers and/or family wealth.
Two of us just never settle in relationships and other reasons are that their partners don’t want children or met current partners when partners are past wanting more children.
I think we are a relatively unusual group in the lack of children for men in their forties but not sure.
Personal question (you are not obliged to answer!) - do you ever regret this? You don’t strike me as full of wistful remorse so probably not
Many of my childless friends (and like you I have a lot) seem to cycle. At certain points they are struck with sadness - something missing. At other points they relish the freedom and the lack of financial pressure
I wouldn’t say I regret it, more I wonder what life would have been like as I see how people get a load of joy and love from their children but the one time I was in a relationship where it might have worked for me my partner didn’t want children.
I regret allowing my parents stopping me from joining the army - they threatened to defund me if I took up my place at Sandhurst before university and so I put the idea off until after uni then after four years in London I was too booze and drug addled! That to me is my regret that haunts me but not the children issue.
I’m fine with it, I have nephews and nieces who fulfil certain elements of younger family for me and I don’t have to worry about my child’s safety, health, happiness.
I'd say you are unusual - but not THAT unusual in a way you would have been 50 years ago. I'm 50, so at a stage where in any group of contemporaries breeding is almost certainly finished. And in almost any group of contemporaries I select, we are well beow replacement levels. The number of people for whom - for reasons similar to those you describe - it just didn't happen is sadly large. There are all sorts of reasons for not breeding: medical, financial, just-not-wanting-that-life - but the not-meeting-the-right-woman-at-the-right-time is the most tragic. Because in theory, with all the women in the world available at the touch of a button, that reason should have gone. In practice, the availability of *everyone* seems to have made finding the right partner much, much harder than when it was simply a matter of selecting one from the 40 or so realistically available.
Millions of women may be willing to meet you, but many of them are doing so while looking over your shoulder to see if anyone better might be available.
We would have had kids if we’d met earlier.
There would have been positives but also negatives. For one I’d still be working.
I like our lifestyle. We’re not massively wealthy but we have enough and enjoy ourselves.
Morning all. England to win today? Quick burst of wickets then Crawley knocks em off one handed?? And i spotted two proposed names for the dried fruit party yesterday - Collective and Arise. Oh dear. A dreadful 'charity single group' or Breakfast telly?
Cannot see us bowling them out - it’ll be up to the Indians to set a target and we’ll see how brave or not they are…
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
Apart from the bollocks about other planets, I agree with Leon!
So do I. Worrying isn't it when you read the bollocks he posted at the end of the last thread.
My esteemed editor at the Gazette sent me some fascinating data the other day. Might become an article
It’s from a scientist who studied the effects of overpopulation on rats. He made rats live at varying levels of overpopulation - from moderate to severe. Each scenario was termed a “universe”
In “universe 25” - extreme overpopulation - the rats suddenly reacted very strangely. Female rats refused to have sex and became more aggressive and masculinised. Male rats became more feminised and sperm counts plummeted. Anxiety and self harm proliferated and the rats got more and more atomised - interacting less, isolating more
Eventually all the rats in Universe 25 died out. The rodent baby bust could not be fixed
Are we in the human equivalent of Universe 25?
I am aware of the Calhoun studies and they have many flaws. Having said that I think we are quite capable of wiping ourselves out by other means anyway.
Ah. Are these studies well known? They are totally new to me - and fascinating
Are they questioned by scientists? Serious query - I might write about them
That surely would depend on your scientist. You can usually find a scientist to question anything if you want a voice, rather than a consensus.
I’m now doing a deep dive. In Universe 25 Calhoun identified a particular kind of rat which he called “the beautiful ones”
The Beautiful Ones were narcissistic, passive mice who groomed constantly - but refused to interact. No sex no babies
Don’t they feel hauntingly familiar? Think of:
Influencer culture Rising loneliness in an online world The phenomenon of beautiful Onlyfans virgins…
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
Out of my three closest friends and me, none of us have children. One has a step son. We haven’t become friends by default as not being part of the whole parenting world, we’ve been friends since a mix prep school and early twenties.
Out of my wider circle of friends (rather than acquaintances) of six chaps there are another two who have no children.
None of us didn’t have children for financial reasons as everyone has great careers and/or family wealth.
Two of us just never settle in relationships and other reasons are that their partners don’t want children or met current partners when partners are past wanting more children.
I think we are a relatively unusual group in the lack of children for men in their forties but not sure.
Personal question (you are not obliged to answer!) - do you ever regret this? You don’t strike me as full of wistful remorse so probably not
Many of my childless friends (and like you I have a lot) seem to cycle. At certain points they are struck with sadness - something missing. At other points they relish the freedom and the lack of financial pressure
I wouldn’t say I regret it, more I wonder what life would have been like as I see how people get a load of joy and love from their children but the one time I was in a relationship where it might have worked for me my partner didn’t want children.
I regret allowing my parents stopping me from joining the army - they threatened to defund me if I took up my place at Sandhurst before university and so I put the idea off until after uni then after four years in London I was too booze and drug addled! That to me is my regret that haunts me but not the children issue.
I’m fine with it, I have nephews and nieces who fulfil certain elements of younger family for me and I don’t have to worry about my child’s safety, health, happiness.
I'd say you are unusual - but not THAT unusual in a way you would have been 50 years ago. I'm 50, so at a stage where in any group of contemporaries breeding is almost certainly finished. And in almost any group of contemporaries I select, we are well beow replacement levels. The number of people for whom - for reasons similar to those you describe - it just didn't happen is sadly large. There are all sorts of reasons for not breeding: medical, financial, just-not-wanting-that-life - but the not-meeting-the-right-woman-at-the-right-time is the most tragic. Because in theory, with all the women in the world available at the touch of a button, that reason should have gone. In practice, the availability of *everyone* seems to have made finding the right partner much, much harder than when it was simply a matter of selecting one from the 40 or so realistically available.
Millions of women may be willing to meet you, but many of them are doing so while looking over your shoulder to see if anyone better might be available.
Not with me - I’m bloody amazing in real life (I hide it on here).
Most of their victims never want to admit (to themselves, let alone anyone else) that they did something stupid/greedy/dishonest.
The thing that's a bit different here is that the conman isn't doing a runner, because he doesn't need to.
Could it simply be that Trump voters continue to fear the alternative more? The Dems aren't exactly going out of their way to court the middle ground of American opinion.
I genuinely don't understand your interpretation of reality. Have you been watching Fox and Friends?.
Mainstream Dems are generally rather conservative. They are not Jeremy Corbyn clones. Even AOC and Bernie, by our standards would be relatively New Labour.
No AOC and Bernie would be left of Labour but most Dems would be New Labour, LD or even One Nation Tories in UK terms.
Only most Reform voters here backed Trump over Harris in polls last year
You have been watching Fox and Friends too, haven't you? It'll make you go bonkers you know.
Leanne Mohamad was with Jezza at a do yesterday discussing the new collaborative/ community led party (that's always coming but never arrives) so we can assume Wes is firmly in their sights for 2029. She will very easily beat him if Labour's fortunes do not improve ( and quite possibly even if they do). Chicken run incoming......
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.
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
Most of their victims never want to admit (to themselves, let alone anyone else) that they did something stupid/greedy/dishonest.
The thing that's a bit different here is that the conman isn't doing a runner, because he doesn't need to.
Could it simply be that Trump voters continue to fear the alternative more? The Dems aren't exactly going out of their way to court the middle ground of American opinion.
I genuinely don't understand your interpretation of reality. Have you been watching Fox and Friends?.
Mainstream Dems are generally rather conservative. They are not Jeremy Corbyn clones. Even AOC and Bernie, by our standards would be relatively New Labour.
Economically, perhaps. Culturally they would be Sultanas. Have you seen the front runner for the mayor of New York?
He's certainly put the shits up the right in the USA and wider world. Their latest wizard wheeze to take him out is that he put down African American as one of his identities on a college application. Perhaps it's just me but it seems a fairly accurate description for someone born in Uganda but brought up and living in the US.
Most of their victims never want to admit (to themselves, let alone anyone else) that they did something stupid/greedy/dishonest.
The thing that's a bit different here is that the conman isn't doing a runner, because he doesn't need to.
Could it simply be that Trump voters continue to fear the alternative more? The Dems aren't exactly going out of their way to court the middle ground of American opinion.
I genuinely don't understand your interpretation of reality. Have you been watching Fox and Friends?.
Mainstream Dems are generally rather conservative. They are not Jeremy Corbyn clones. Even AOC and Bernie, by our standards would be relatively New Labour.
Economically, perhaps. Culturally they would be Sultanas. Have you seen the front runner for the mayor of New York?
The new Dem nominee for Mayor of New York who wants to abolish billionaires? Even Starmer and Reeves aren't as socialist as that
You think Starmer and Reeves are socialists? If you do, I have an invisible Boris Johnson Garden Bridge I can sell to you for just £62m
Je ne transmettrai à personne les aggravations et la honte de l'existence. As Flaubert wrote...
On topic... Maganauts will rationalise that any diminution in their personal circumstances is not Trump's fault and is the fault of somebody else. Democrats, Soros, 'Woke', etc.
Most of their victims never want to admit (to themselves, let alone anyone else) that they did something stupid/greedy/dishonest.
The thing that's a bit different here is that the conman isn't doing a runner, because he doesn't need to.
Could it simply be that Trump voters continue to fear the alternative more? The Dems aren't exactly going out of their way to court the middle ground of American opinion.
I genuinely don't understand your interpretation of reality. Have you been watching Fox and Friends?.
Mainstream Dems are generally rather conservative. They are not Jeremy Corbyn clones. Even AOC and Bernie, by our standards would be relatively New Labour.
Economically, perhaps. Culturally they would be Sultanas. Have you seen the front runner for the mayor of New York?
He's certainly put the shits up the right in the USA and wider world. Their latest wizard wheeze to take him out is that he put down African American as one of his identities on a college application. Perhaps it's just me but it seems a fairly accurate description for someone born in Uganda but brought up and living in the US.
But this identity is specifically aimed at actual black people. And lots of actual black people in the USA - and NYC - are enraged at Mamdan (an enormously privileged nepo-baby) piggybacking on their historical suffering
To continue the theme and bring it back to the thread
Strikes me there are TWO existential processes at work in the world, right now. As in: unprecedented challenges for humankind
One I cannot mention, so I won’t
The other is the collapse in fertility. This is having enormous second order effects all around the world, often going unnoticed
eg it can be argued that Trump is a consequence of the baby bust. American demographics are bad. Not as bad as east Asia, but bad. Below replacement and ageing fast
The answer then is immigration - but that means white people very quickly becoming a minority in the USA, and of all the white populations in the world it is Americans who are most likely to fight back against this (violently, if needs be). So we have Trump - a more-or-less openly white supremacist president
Different versions of this dynamic are playing out around the planet
I would say we would be getting 'bad' immigration whether we were in a baby bust or not. Some immigration is a result of us needing more workers - but if that was all it was, we could choose our immigrants and integrate them. This is what is happening in my home suburb - it is a lot less white than it was 20 years ago, but the new faces are HK and Indian and integrate well (especially at the cricket club) and are largely middle-ish class. For the other face of immigration however look at Piccadilly Gardens, or at Cheetham Hill. These aren't immigrants we asked for, they are immigrants who came because their home countries are medeival shitholes and because getting to the UK is now just about possible in a way it wasn't 40 years ago. They'd be coming regardless of our demographics.
Most of their victims never want to admit (to themselves, let alone anyone else) that they did something stupid/greedy/dishonest.
The thing that's a bit different here is that the conman isn't doing a runner, because he doesn't need to.
Could it simply be that Trump voters continue to fear the alternative more? The Dems aren't exactly going out of their way to court the middle ground of American opinion.
I genuinely don't understand your interpretation of reality. Have you been watching Fox and Friends?.
Mainstream Dems are generally rather conservative. They are not Jeremy Corbyn clones. Even AOC and Bernie, by our standards would be relatively New Labour.
No AOC and Bernie would be left of Labour but most Dems would be New Labour, LD or even One Nation Tories in UK terms.
Only most Reform voters here backed Trump over Harris in polls last year
You have been watching Fox and Friends too, haven't you? It'll make you go bonkers you know.
No, Yougov last year found 54% of UK Reform voters wanted Trump to win the US election and just 26% Harris.
86% of LDs, 83% of Labour voters and 57% of Conservative voters though wanted Harris to win
Morning all. England to win today? Quick burst of wickets then Crawley knocks em off one handed?? And i spotted two proposed names for the dried fruit party yesterday - Collective and Arise. Oh dear. A dreadful 'charity single group' or Breakfast telly?
Cannot see us bowling them out - it’ll be up to the Indians to set a target and we’ll see how brave or not they are…
I was being patriotically optimistic! They'll set us 500 In just under 4 sessions i think is the most likely outcome
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.
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.
Most of their victims never want to admit (to themselves, let alone anyone else) that they did something stupid/greedy/dishonest.
The thing that's a bit different here is that the conman isn't doing a runner, because he doesn't need to.
Could it simply be that Trump voters continue to fear the alternative more? The Dems aren't exactly going out of their way to court the middle ground of American opinion.
I genuinely don't understand your interpretation of reality. Have you been watching Fox and Friends?.
Mainstream Dems are generally rather conservative. They are not Jeremy Corbyn clones. Even AOC and Bernie, by our standards would be relatively New Labour.
Economically, perhaps. Culturally they would be Sultanas. Have you seen the front runner for the mayor of New York?
He's certainly put the shits up the right in the USA and wider world. Their latest wizard wheeze to take him out is that he put down African American as one of his identities on a college application. Perhaps it's just me but it seems a fairly accurate description for someone born in Uganda but brought up and living in the US.
But this identity is specifically aimed at actual black people. And lots of actual black people in the USA - and NYC - are enraged at Mamdan (an enormously privileged nepo-baby) piggybacking on their historical suffering
Most of their victims never want to admit (to themselves, let alone anyone else) that they did something stupid/greedy/dishonest.
The thing that's a bit different here is that the conman isn't doing a runner, because he doesn't need to.
Could it simply be that Trump voters continue to fear the alternative more? The Dems aren't exactly going out of their way to court the middle ground of American opinion.
I genuinely don't understand your interpretation of reality. Have you been watching Fox and Friends?.
Mainstream Dems are generally rather conservative. They are not Jeremy Corbyn clones. Even AOC and Bernie, by our standards would be relatively New Labour.
Economically, perhaps. Culturally they would be Sultanas. Have you seen the front runner for the mayor of New York?
He's certainly put the shits up the right in the USA and wider world. Their latest wizard wheeze to take him out is that he put down African American as one of his identities on a college application. Perhaps it's just me but it seems a fairly accurate description for someone born in Uganda but brought up and living in the US.
But this identity is specifically aimed at actual black people. And lots of actual black people in the USA - and NYC - are enraged at Mamdan (an enormously privileged nepo-baby) piggybacking on their historical suffering
Yes, it's all over for the Zohran.
On the contrary, he will likely win. He’s charismatic and he appeals to virtuous silly young people, and anti semites like you
Most of their victims never want to admit (to themselves, let alone anyone else) that they did something stupid/greedy/dishonest.
The thing that's a bit different here is that the conman isn't doing a runner, because he doesn't need to.
Could it simply be that Trump voters continue to fear the alternative more? The Dems aren't exactly going out of their way to court the middle ground of American opinion.
I genuinely don't understand your interpretation of reality. Have you been watching Fox and Friends?.
Mainstream Dems are generally rather conservative. They are not Jeremy Corbyn clones. Even AOC and Bernie, by our standards would be relatively New Labour.
Economically, perhaps. Culturally they would be Sultanas. Have you seen the front runner for the mayor of New York?
He's certainly put the shits up the right in the USA and wider world. Their latest wizard wheeze to take him out is that he put down African American as one of his identities on a college application. Perhaps it's just me but it seems a fairly accurate description for someone born in Uganda but brought up and living in the US.
But this identity is specifically aimed at actual black people. And lots of actual black people in the USA - and NYC - are enraged at Mamdan (an enormously privileged nepo-baby) piggybacking on their historical suffering
Yes, it's all over for the Zohran.
On the contrary, he will likely win. He’s charismatic and he appeals to virtuous silly young people, and anti semites like you
Which candidate would best appeal to self confessed racists like you?
To continue the theme and bring it back to the thread
Strikes me there are TWO existential processes at work in the world, right now. As in: unprecedented challenges for humankind
One I cannot mention, so I won’t
The other is the collapse in fertility. This is having enormous second order effects all around the world, often going unnoticed
eg it can be argued that Trump is a consequence of the baby bust. American demographics are bad. Not as bad as east Asia, but bad. Below replacement and ageing fast
The answer then is immigration - but that means white people very quickly becoming a minority in the USA, and of all the white populations in the world it is Americans who are most likely to fight back against this (violently, if needs be). So we have Trump - a more-or-less openly white supremacist president
Different versions of this dynamic are playing out around the planet
I would say we would be getting 'bad' immigration whether we were in a baby bust or not. Some immigration is a result of us needing more workers - but if that was all it was, we could choose our immigrants and integrate them. This is what is happening in my home suburb - it is a lot less white than it was 20 years ago, but the new faces are HK and Indian and integrate well (especially at the cricket club) and are largely middle-ish class. For the other face of immigration however look at Piccadilly Gardens, or at Cheetham Hill. These aren't immigrants we asked for, they are immigrants who came because their home countries are medeival shitholes and because getting to the UK is now just about possible in a way it wasn't 40 years ago. They'd be coming regardless of our demographics.
The entire story of human existence is one of migration. You're not going to stop it if people really want to move, as successive governments have found out. Accept and celebrate.
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
Out of my three closest friends and me, none of us have children. One has a step son. We haven’t become friends by default as not being part of the whole parenting world, we’ve been friends since a mix prep school and early twenties.
Out of my wider circle of friends (rather than acquaintances) of six chaps there are another two who have no children.
None of us didn’t have children for financial reasons as everyone has great careers and/or family wealth.
Two of us just never settle in relationships and other reasons are that their partners don’t want children or met current partners when partners are past wanting more children.
I think we are a relatively unusual group in the lack of children for men in their forties but not sure.
Personal question (you are not obliged to answer!) - do you ever regret this? You don’t strike me as full of wistful remorse so probably not
Many of my childless friends (and like you I have a lot) seem to cycle. At certain points they are struck with sadness - something missing. At other points they relish the freedom and the lack of financial pressure
I wouldn’t say I regret it, more I wonder what life would have been like as I see how people get a load of joy and love from their children but the one time I was in a relationship where it might have worked for me my partner didn’t want children.
I regret allowing my parents stopping me from joining the army - they threatened to defund me if I took up my place at Sandhurst before university and so I put the idea off until after uni then after four years in London I was too booze and drug addled! That to me is my regret that haunts me but not the children issue.
I’m fine with it, I have nephews and nieces who fulfil certain elements of younger family for me and I don’t have to worry about my child’s safety, health, happiness.
I'd say you are unusual - but not THAT unusual in a way you would have been 50 years ago. I'm 50, so at a stage where in any group of contemporaries breeding is almost certainly finished. And in almost any group of contemporaries I select, we are well beow replacement levels. The number of people for whom - for reasons similar to those you describe - it just didn't happen is sadly large. There are all sorts of reasons for not breeding: medical, financial, just-not-wanting-that-life - but the not-meeting-the-right-woman-at-the-right-time is the most tragic. Because in theory, with all the women in the world available at the touch of a button, that reason should have gone. In practice, the availability of *everyone* seems to have made finding the right partner much, much harder than when it was simply a matter of selecting one from the 40 or so realistically available.
Millions of women may be willing to meet you, but many of them are doing so while looking over your shoulder to see if anyone better might be available.
We would have had kids if we’d met earlier.
There would have been positives but also negatives. For one I’d still be working.
I like our lifestyle. We’re not massively wealthy but we have enough and enjoy ourselves.
Yeah, I was lucky to meet the right woman just in time. I'd be a few years off retirement if I hadn't had so many children. Not complaining, of course - they were my choice and I wouldn't be without them. And 75% of the reason I'm well enough off to be potentially almost retired were it not for having to support three kids is inheritances - wasn't my money to start with, and what better purpose for unearned wealth than allowing an extra baby or two an opportunity at life?
To continue the theme and bring it back to the thread
Strikes me there are TWO existential processes at work in the world, right now. As in: unprecedented challenges for humankind
One I cannot mention, so I won’t
The other is the collapse in fertility. This is having enormous second order effects all around the world, often going unnoticed
eg it can be argued that Trump is a consequence of the baby bust. American demographics are bad. Not as bad as east Asia, but bad. Below replacement and ageing fast
The answer then is immigration - but that means white people very quickly becoming a minority in the USA, and of all the white populations in the world it is Americans who are most likely to fight back against this (violently, if needs be). So we have Trump - a more-or-less openly white supremacist president
Different versions of this dynamic are playing out around the planet
I would say we would be getting 'bad' immigration whether we were in a baby bust or not. Some immigration is a result of us needing more workers - but if that was all it was, we could choose our immigrants and integrate them. This is what is happening in my home suburb - it is a lot less white than it was 20 years ago, but the new faces are HK and Indian and integrate well (especially at the cricket club) and are largely middle-ish class. For the other face of immigration however look at Piccadilly Gardens, or at Cheetham Hill. These aren't immigrants we asked for, they are immigrants who came because their home countries are medeival shitholes and because getting to the UK is now just about possible in a way it wasn't 40 years ago. They'd be coming regardless of our demographics.
The entire story of human existence is one of migration. You're not going to stop it if people really want to move, as successive governments have found out. Accept and celebrate.
Exodus, movement of the people. Saint Bob.
Or, as Bob Marley sang, “Exodus, movement of Jah people”.
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.
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.
» show previous quotes That's a good point; but 'feeling' and 'being' safer are two different things.
Anecdotally, the 60s, 70s and 80s were not exactly safe times for women on Britain's streets.
Thanks for mansplaining to me what it was like to be a female in the 80s, as a student nurse and then a staff nurse back then on nights out in Aberdeen and Edinburgh, we were always even back then making sure we all got home safely from nights out as that was really important to us and we had to have great safe guards in place even then. I could dine out on the amount of times that groups of drunk men would spot and single out a lone female thinking they were being helpful when they were being anything but and causing them real distress when they were traveling on public transport or standing in taxi line!
Also FPT:
And I've heard similar stories from my own mum, and others of her generation, of what things were like in much earlier decades. Including one where a man followed my mum (also a nurse at the time) back to the nurse's accommodation and tried to follow her through the door. An anecdote I've said on here before.
In the past I've said that a female friend of ours refuses to run in the dark, even in our safeish town, and that it's terrible that she feels (reasonably so) unsafe doing something I feel perfectly safe in doing - running in the dark. So I'm not exactly anti-women on this, and I want women to feel safer on our streets.
As for 'Mansplaining': your saying that in no way invalidates what I said.
To continue the theme and bring it back to the thread
Strikes me there are TWO existential processes at work in the world, right now. As in: unprecedented challenges for humankind
One I cannot mention, so I won’t
The other is the collapse in fertility. This is having enormous second order effects all around the world, often going unnoticed
eg it can be argued that Trump is a consequence of the baby bust. American demographics are bad. Not as bad as east Asia, but bad. Below replacement and ageing fast
The answer then is immigration - but that means white people very quickly becoming a minority in the USA, and of all the white populations in the world it is Americans who are most likely to fight back against this (violently, if needs be). So we have Trump - a more-or-less openly white supremacist president
Different versions of this dynamic are playing out around the planet
I would say we would be getting 'bad' immigration whether we were in a baby bust or not. Some immigration is a result of us needing more workers - but if that was all it was, we could choose our immigrants and integrate them. This is what is happening in my home suburb - it is a lot less white than it was 20 years ago, but the new faces are HK and Indian and integrate well (especially at the cricket club) and are largely middle-ish class. For the other face of immigration however look at Piccadilly Gardens, or at Cheetham Hill. These aren't immigrants we asked for, they are immigrants who came because their home countries are medeival shitholes and because getting to the UK is now just about possible in a way it wasn't 40 years ago. They'd be coming regardless of our demographics.
I don’t understand why, if Islam is so popular, even in “medieval shitholes” why so many Muslims choose to move to Christian countries? After all there are Islamic countries that aren’t shitholes.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
On current polls Nigel Farage will be next UK PM and undergo a purge of the political class and a war on immigrants and the migrant boats.
Immigration fell on the latest figures thanks to the tighter immigration restrictions Sunak brought in
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.
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.
Yes, if you look at the report I linked to that certainly seems to be the trajectory
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.
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
And God so loved the Earth that He overpopulated it.
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.
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.
To continue the theme and bring it back to the thread
Strikes me there are TWO existential processes at work in the world, right now. As in: unprecedented challenges for humankind
One I cannot mention, so I won’t
The other is the collapse in fertility. This is having enormous second order effects all around the world, often going unnoticed
eg it can be argued that Trump is a consequence of the baby bust. American demographics are bad. Not as bad as east Asia, but bad. Below replacement and ageing fast
The answer then is immigration - but that means white people very quickly becoming a minority in the USA, and of all the white populations in the world it is Americans who are most likely to fight back against this (violently, if needs be). So we have Trump - a more-or-less openly white supremacist president
Different versions of this dynamic are playing out around the planet
I would say we would be getting 'bad' immigration whether we were in a baby bust or not. Some immigration is a result of us needing more workers - but if that was all it was, we could choose our immigrants and integrate them. This is what is happening in my home suburb - it is a lot less white than it was 20 years ago, but the new faces are HK and Indian and integrate well (especially at the cricket club) and are largely middle-ish class. For the other face of immigration however look at Piccadilly Gardens, or at Cheetham Hill. These aren't immigrants we asked for, they are immigrants who came because their home countries are medeival shitholes and because getting to the UK is now just about possible in a way it wasn't 40 years ago. They'd be coming regardless of our demographics.
The entire story of human existence is one of migration. You're not going to stop it if people really want to move, as successive governments have found out. Accept and celebrate.
Exodus, movement of the people. Saint Bob.
Or, as Bob Marley sang, “Exodus, movement of Jah people”.
There's a second assumption in the threader; that the man actually *likes* his wife, and wants to remain with her.
I would be unsurprised if some people were alerting ICE to their spouse's immigration status, because it might be easier (monetarily and/or socially) than either divorce or murder...
To continue the theme and bring it back to the thread
Strikes me there are TWO existential processes at work in the world, right now. As in: unprecedented challenges for humankind
One I cannot mention, so I won’t
The other is the collapse in fertility. This is having enormous second order effects all around the world, often going unnoticed
eg it can be argued that Trump is a consequence of the baby bust. American demographics are bad. Not as bad as east Asia, but bad. Below replacement and ageing fast
The answer then is immigration - but that means white people very quickly becoming a minority in the USA, and of all the white populations in the world it is Americans who are most likely to fight back against this (violently, if needs be). So we have Trump - a more-or-less openly white supremacist president
Different versions of this dynamic are playing out around the planet
I would say we would be getting 'bad' immigration whether we were in a baby bust or not. Some immigration is a result of us needing more workers - but if that was all it was, we could choose our immigrants and integrate them. This is what is happening in my home suburb - it is a lot less white than it was 20 years ago, but the new faces are HK and Indian and integrate well (especially at the cricket club) and are largely middle-ish class. For the other face of immigration however look at Piccadilly Gardens, or at Cheetham Hill. These aren't immigrants we asked for, they are immigrants who came because their home countries are medeival shitholes and because getting to the UK is now just about possible in a way it wasn't 40 years ago. They'd be coming regardless of our demographics.
I don’t understand why, if Islam is so popular, even in “medieval shitholes” why so many Muslims choose to move to Christian countries? After all there are Islamic countries that aren’t shitholes.
There are fewer consequences for bad behaviour in our societies than in the Islamic world, because we are “civilised” (or decadent and weak, depending on one’s POV).
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.
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
And God so loved the Earth that He overpopulated it.
The religious have more children, on current figures the groups having most children globally are Muslims followed by evangelical Christians.
Both groups are LGBT sceptic and believe in traditional gender roles and that women should focus on raising families above all.
The collapse in fertility rates is most acute amongst atheists, especially in the West, so by 2050 the world will be more Muslim and evangelical Christian than it is now and that may see a return to more social conservatism in much of the world and hence a reversal of declining fertility rates in many nations
To continue the theme and bring it back to the thread
Strikes me there are TWO existential processes at work in the world, right now. As in: unprecedented challenges for humankind
One I cannot mention, so I won’t
The other is the collapse in fertility. This is having enormous second order effects all around the world, often going unnoticed
eg it can be argued that Trump is a consequence of the baby bust. American demographics are bad. Not as bad as east Asia, but bad. Below replacement and ageing fast
The answer then is immigration - but that means white people very quickly becoming a minority in the USA, and of all the white populations in the world it is Americans who are most likely to fight back against this (violently, if needs be). So we have Trump - a more-or-less openly white supremacist president
Different versions of this dynamic are playing out around the planet
I would say we would be getting 'bad' immigration whether we were in a baby bust or not. Some immigration is a result of us needing more workers - but if that was all it was, we could choose our immigrants and integrate them. This is what is happening in my home suburb - it is a lot less white than it was 20 years ago, but the new faces are HK and Indian and integrate well (especially at the cricket club) and are largely middle-ish class. For the other face of immigration however look at Piccadilly Gardens, or at Cheetham Hill. These aren't immigrants we asked for, they are immigrants who came because their home countries are medeival shitholes and because getting to the UK is now just about possible in a way it wasn't 40 years ago. They'd be coming regardless of our demographics.
I don’t understand why, if Islam is so popular, even in “medieval shitholes” why so many Muslims choose to move to Christian countries? After all there are Islamic countries that aren’t shitholes.
There are fewer consequences for bad behaviour in our societies than in the Islamic world, because we are “civilised” (or decadent and weak, depending on one’s POV).
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.
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.
On current polls Nigel Farage will be next UK PM and undergo a purge of the political class and a war on immigrants and the migrant boats.
To continue the theme and bring it back to the thread
Strikes me there are TWO existential processes at work in the world, right now. As in: unprecedented challenges for humankind
One I cannot mention, so I won’t
The other is the collapse in fertility. This is having enormous second order effects all around the world, often going unnoticed
eg it can be argued that Trump is a consequence of the baby bust. American demographics are bad. Not as bad as east Asia, but bad. Below replacement and ageing fast
The answer then is immigration - but that means white people very quickly becoming a minority in the USA, and of all the white populations in the world it is Americans who are most likely to fight back against this (violently, if needs be). So we have Trump - a more-or-less openly white supremacist president
Different versions of this dynamic are playing out around the planet
I would say we would be getting 'bad' immigration whether we were in a baby bust or not. Some immigration is a result of us needing more workers - but if that was all it was, we could choose our immigrants and integrate them. This is what is happening in my home suburb - it is a lot less white than it was 20 years ago, but the new faces are HK and Indian and integrate well (especially at the cricket club) and are largely middle-ish class. For the other face of immigration however look at Piccadilly Gardens, or at Cheetham Hill. These aren't immigrants we asked for, they are immigrants who came because their home countries are medeival shitholes and because getting to the UK is now just about possible in a way it wasn't 40 years ago. They'd be coming regardless of our demographics.
I don’t understand why, if Islam is so popular, even in “medieval shitholes” why so many Muslims choose to move to Christian countries? After all there are Islamic countries that aren’t shitholes.
There are fewer consequences for bad behaviour in our societies than in the Islamic world, because we are “civilised” (or decadent and weak, depending on one’s POV).
The west is also - insanely - much more tolerant of extreme islamism than many moderate Muslim countries. Eg multiple Muslim countries have no qualms about banning the burqa - even as we hand-wring about it
I suspect this period of western equivocation is shortly coming to an abrupt end. As actual Islamist parties arise in western politics - so will much more intolerant, countervailing forces
Utterly and totally o/t but looking at today's cricket fixtures I see that Jersey are playing Netherlands in a Qualifier for the mens T20 World Cup. Opening tor the Netherlands are players with the long established Dutch names of Edwards and O'Dowd.
There's a second assumption in the threader; that the man actually *likes* his wife, and wants to remain with her.
I would be unsurprised if some people were alerting ICE to their spouse's immigration status, because it might be easier (monetarily and/or socially) than either divorce or murder...
To continue the theme and bring it back to the thread
Strikes me there are TWO existential processes at work in the world, right now. As in: unprecedented challenges for humankind
One I cannot mention, so I won’t
The other is the collapse in fertility. This is having enormous second order effects all around the world, often going unnoticed
eg it can be argued that Trump is a consequence of the baby bust. American demographics are bad. Not as bad as east Asia, but bad. Below replacement and ageing fast
The answer then is immigration - but that means white people very quickly becoming a minority in the USA, and of all the white populations in the world it is Americans who are most likely to fight back against this (violently, if needs be). So we have Trump - a more-or-less openly white supremacist president
Different versions of this dynamic are playing out around the planet
I would say we would be getting 'bad' immigration whether we were in a baby bust or not. Some immigration is a result of us needing more workers - but if that was all it was, we could choose our immigrants and integrate them. This is what is happening in my home suburb - it is a lot less white than it was 20 years ago, but the new faces are HK and Indian and integrate well (especially at the cricket club) and are largely middle-ish class. For the other face of immigration however look at Piccadilly Gardens, or at Cheetham Hill. These aren't immigrants we asked for, they are immigrants who came because their home countries are medeival shitholes and because getting to the UK is now just about possible in a way it wasn't 40 years ago. They'd be coming regardless of our demographics.
I don’t understand why, if Islam is so popular, even in “medieval shitholes” why so many Muslims choose to move to Christian countries? After all there are Islamic countries that aren’t shitholes.
There are fewer consequences for bad behaviour in our societies than in the Islamic world, because we are “civilised” (or decadent and weak, depending on one’s POV).
It's much more multifaceted than that IMV. We are generally freer societies; if you want to be slightly different in some of these cultures, it can be rather difficult. There are stricter expectations of the way men and women should behave and act; expectations we have thankfully broken down over the decades. That's a powerful pull factor for some. Big issues occur when some want to use the advantages of our freedoms, but also use their traditional restrictions on others, e.g. women.
Then there's the financial factors; not just about benefits, but about opportunities. Wages can be higher over here, but so are living costs. But corruption is also generally less endemic, which means getting a job can be fairer if you have skills and do not have the contacts. And IMO we have let the black market in jobs go far too unhindered.
There's also the advantage that English is a global language, and if you know or learn it, there are many more countries you can move to - including the and of riches, America.
There are many push and pull factors for immigration; a mix of personal, social and economic that will vary from immigrant to immigrant.
Utterly and totally o/t but looking at today's cricket fixtures I see that Jersey are playing Netherlands in a Qualifier for the mens T20 World Cup. Opening tor the Netherlands are players with the long established Dutch names of Edwards and O'Dowd.
Must be some migration going on!
And Good Morning one and all!
Always been the way with Dutch cricket. They also have a few Saffers in the squad.
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
Out of my three closest friends and me, none of us have children. One has a step son. We haven’t become friends by default as not being part of the whole parenting world, we’ve been friends since a mix prep school and early twenties.
Out of my wider circle of friends (rather than acquaintances) of six chaps there are another two who have no children.
None of us didn’t have children for financial reasons as everyone has great careers and/or family wealth.
Two of us just never settle in relationships and other reasons are that their partners don’t want children or met current partners when partners are past wanting more children.
I think we are a relatively unusual group in the lack of children for men in their forties but not sure.
Personal question (you are not obliged to answer!) - do you ever regret this? You don’t strike me as full of wistful remorse so probably not
Many of my childless friends (and like you I have a lot) seem to cycle. At certain points they are struck with sadness - something missing. At other points they relish the freedom and the lack of financial pressure
I wouldn’t say I regret it, more I wonder what life would have been like as I see how people get a load of joy and love from their children but the one time I was in a relationship where it might have worked for me my partner didn’t want children.
I regret allowing my parents stopping me from joining the army - they threatened to defund me if I took up my place at Sandhurst before university and so I put the idea off until after uni then after four years in London I was too booze and drug addled! That to me is my regret that haunts me but not the children issue.
I’m fine with it, I have nephews and nieces who fulfil certain elements of younger family for me and I don’t have to worry about my child’s safety, health, happiness.
I'd say you are unusual - but not THAT unusual in a way you would have been 50 years ago. I'm 50, so at a stage where in any group of contemporaries breeding is almost certainly finished. And in almost any group of contemporaries I select, we are well beow replacement levels. The number of people for whom - for reasons similar to those you describe - it just didn't happen is sadly large. There are all sorts of reasons for not breeding: medical, financial, just-not-wanting-that-life - but the not-meeting-the-right-woman-at-the-right-time is the most tragic. Because in theory, with all the women in the world available at the touch of a button, that reason should have gone. In practice, the availability of *everyone* seems to have made finding the right partner much, much harder than when it was simply a matter of selecting one from the 40 or so realistically available.
Millions of women may be willing to meet you, but many of them are doing so while looking over your shoulder to see if anyone better might be available.
We would have had kids if we’d met earlier.
There would have been positives but also negatives. For one I’d still be working.
I like our lifestyle. We’re not massively wealthy but we have enough and enjoy ourselves.
I think that's the thing - if we hadn't had the twins we would be retired (or as close to as makes no difference). Instead I'm probably working another 10-12 years but hey I mostly enjoying doing so.
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.
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.
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.
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
And God so loved the Earth that He overpopulated it.
The religious have more children, on current figures the groups having most children globally are Muslims followed by evangelical Christians.
Both groups are LGBT sceptic and believe in traditional gender roles and that women should focus on raising families above all.
[snip]
Are anti-semites going to be "Hebrew-sceptic" next, I wonder?
But seriously, the sheer idiocy of the things you say is getting so extreme it's almost inspiring.
There's a second assumption in the threader; that the man actually *likes* his wife, and wants to remain with her.
I would be unsurprised if some people were alerting ICE to their spouse's immigration status, because it might be easier (monetarily and/or socially) than either divorce or murder...
I served with somebody on my USN exchange who bitterly rued the fact that he was at sea when 9/11 happened. He reckoned he would have shot his Mrs, buried her in the woods and then claimed she was on a day trip to NYC. Golden opportunity missed.
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.
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.
Utterly and totally o/t but looking at today's cricket fixtures I see that Jersey are playing Netherlands in a Qualifier for the mens T20 World Cup. Opening tor the Netherlands are players with the long established Dutch names of Edwards and O'Dowd.
Must be some migration going on!
And Good Morning one and all!
Always been the way with Dutch cricket. They also have a few Saffers in the squad.
The two I cited probably are. One Dutch (or Afrikaner) grandparent or something, as with Pieterson playing for England.
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.
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.
Iran, Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are all below replacement level, as is the UAE. Kuwait is at replacement level.
Syria, I grant you, is above replacement. As are Gaza and Israel.
To continue the theme and bring it back to the thread
Strikes me there are TWO existential processes at work in the world, right now. As in: unprecedented challenges for humankind
One I cannot mention, so I won’t
The other is the collapse in fertility. This is having enormous second order effects all around the world, often going unnoticed
eg it can be argued that Trump is a consequence of the baby bust. American demographics are bad. Not as bad as east Asia, but bad. Below replacement and ageing fast
The answer then is immigration - but that means white people very quickly becoming a minority in the USA, and of all the white populations in the world it is Americans who are most likely to fight back against this (violently, if needs be). So we have Trump - a more-or-less openly white supremacist president
Different versions of this dynamic are playing out around the planet
I would say we would be getting 'bad' immigration whether we were in a baby bust or not. Some immigration is a result of us needing more workers - but if that was all it was, we could choose our immigrants and integrate them. This is what is happening in my home suburb - it is a lot less white than it was 20 years ago, but the new faces are HK and Indian and integrate well (especially at the cricket club) and are largely middle-ish class. For the other face of immigration however look at Piccadilly Gardens, or at Cheetham Hill. These aren't immigrants we asked for, they are immigrants who came because their home countries are medeival shitholes and because getting to the UK is now just about possible in a way it wasn't 40 years ago. They'd be coming regardless of our demographics.
The entire story of human existence is one of migration. You're not going to stop it if people really want to move, as successive governments have found out. Accept and celebrate.
Exodus, movement of the people. Saint Bob.
Or, as Bob Marley sang, “Exodus, movement of Jah people”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Iran, Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are all below replacement level, as is the UAE. Kuwait is at replacement level.
Syria, I grant you, is above replacement. As are Gaza and Israel.
And the trend is plain, even in countries with above replacement birthrates.
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.
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
You seem to blithely assume that birth rates in Africa will not continue to decline.
Why won't they follow the same path beat by the West, the East, and even countries like Bangladesh?
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.
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.
Iran, Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are all below replacement level, as is the UAE. Kuwait is at replacement level.
Syria, I grant you, is above replacement. As are Gaza and Israel.
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
Out of my three closest friends and me, none of us have children. One has a step son. We haven’t become friends by default as not being part of the whole parenting world, we’ve been friends since a mix prep school and early twenties.
Out of my wider circle of friends (rather than acquaintances) of six chaps there are another two who have no children.
None of us didn’t have children for financial reasons as everyone has great careers and/or family wealth.
Two of us just never settle in relationships and other reasons are that their partners don’t want children or met current partners when partners are past wanting more children.
I think we are a relatively unusual group in the lack of children for men in their forties but not sure.
Personal question (you are not obliged to answer!) - do you ever regret this? You don’t strike me as full of wistful remorse so probably not
Many of my childless friends (and like you I have a lot) seem to cycle. At certain points they are struck with sadness - something missing. At other points they relish the freedom and the lack of financial pressure
I wouldn’t say I regret it, more I wonder what life would have been like as I see how people get a load of joy and love from their children but the one time I was in a relationship where it might have worked for me my partner didn’t want children.
I regret allowing my parents stopping me from joining the army - they threatened to defund me if I took up my place at Sandhurst before university and so I put the idea off until after uni then after four years in London I was too booze and drug addled! That to me is my regret that haunts me but not the children issue.
I’m fine with it, I have nephews and nieces who fulfil certain elements of younger family for me and I don’t have to worry about my child’s safety, health, happiness.
I'd say you are unusual - but not THAT unusual in a way you would have been 50 years ago. I'm 50, so at a stage where in any group of contemporaries breeding is almost certainly finished. And in almost any group of contemporaries I select, we are well beow replacement levels. The number of people for whom - for reasons similar to those you describe - it just didn't happen is sadly large. There are all sorts of reasons for not breeding: medical, financial, just-not-wanting-that-life - but the not-meeting-the-right-woman-at-the-right-time is the most tragic. Because in theory, with all the women in the world available at the touch of a button, that reason should have gone. In practice, the availability of *everyone* seems to have made finding the right partner much, much harder than when it was simply a matter of selecting one from the 40 or so realistically available.
Millions of women may be willing to meet you, but many of them are doing so while looking over your shoulder to see if anyone better might be available.
We would have had kids if we’d met earlier.
There would have been positives but also negatives. For one I’d still be working.
I like our lifestyle. We’re not massively wealthy but we have enough and enjoy ourselves.
I think that's the thing - if we hadn't had the twins we would be retired (or as close to as makes no difference). Instead I'm probably working another 10-12 years but hey I mostly enjoying doing so.
I was 30 when our youngest (of 3) was born, so by the time I was 50 he and the older two were off doing their own thing. He, on the other hand, didn't get married and start a family until he was in his late 30's and then he and his wife had a third child when he was in his late 40's. He's going to be supporting her, probably, into his late 60's.
Utterly and totally o/t but looking at today's cricket fixtures I see that Jersey are playing Netherlands in a Qualifier for the mens T20 World Cup. Opening tor the Netherlands are players with the long established Dutch names of Edwards and O'Dowd.
Must be some migration going on!
And Good Morning one and all!
Always been the way with Dutch cricket. They also have a few Saffers in the squad.
The two I cited probably are. One Dutch (or Afrikaner) grandparent or something, as with Pieterson playing for England.
I saw them play in the ICC Trophy in 1982 and predominantly Dutch side and mediocre.
Comments
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
Most of their victims never want to admit (to themselves, let alone anyone else) that they did something stupid/greedy/dishonest.
The thing that's a bit different here is that the conman isn't doing a runner, because he doesn't need to.
So, as ever, swings and roundabouts
England to win today? Quick burst of wickets then Crawley knocks em off one handed??
And i spotted two proposed names for the dried fruit party yesterday - Collective and Arise. Oh dear. A dreadful 'charity single group' or Breakfast telly?
Out of my wider circle of friends (rather than acquaintances) of six chaps there are another two who have no children.
None of us didn’t have children for financial reasons as everyone has great careers and/or family wealth.
Two of us just never settle in relationships and other reasons are that their partners don’t want children or met current partners when partners are past wanting more children.
I think we are a relatively unusual group in the lack of children for men in their forties but not sure.
Will the whole house of cards collapse without the great conman ?
It’s from a scientist who studied the effects of overpopulation on rats. He made rats live at varying levels of overpopulation - from moderate to severe. Each scenario was termed a “universe”
In “universe 25” - extreme overpopulation - the rats suddenly reacted very strangely. Female rats refused to have sex and became more aggressive and masculinised. Male rats became more feminised and sperm counts plummeted. Anxiety and self harm proliferated and the rats got more and more atomised - interacting less, isolating more
Eventually all the rats in Universe 25 died out. The rodent baby bust could not be fixed
Are we in the human equivalent of Universe 25?
JosiasJessop said:
» show previous quotes
That's a good point; but 'feeling' and 'being' safer are two different things.
Anecdotally, the 60s, 70s and 80s were not exactly safe times for women on Britain's streets.
Thanks for mansplaining to me what it was like to be a female in the 80s, as a student nurse and then a staff nurse back then on nights out in Aberdeen and Edinburgh, we were always even back then making sure we all got home safely from nights out as that was really important to us and we had to have great safe guards in place even then. I could dine out on the amount of times that groups of drunk men would spot and single out a lone female thinking they were being helpful when they were being anything but and causing them real distress when they were traveling on public transport or standing in taxi line!
All those 1.5 millions plots that the developers are "sitting on" cost someone real money - probably the developer spent £50-£100k per plot buying the land off a lucky farmer once it was in a local plan, and then spent another £20k a plot getting detailed planning. Then in addition to building the house, there's probably another £25k of section 106 commitments, and they will make you sell a third of the site under market rate as "affordable housing". All those costs end up in the final price.
Housing is really expensive because we have made it really expensive to build houses.
Don't get me wrong, most developers are scumbags, but they are generally only following the market incentives successive governments have set.
Many of my childless friends (and like you I have a lot) seem to cycle. At certain points they are struck with sadness - something missing. At other points they relish the freedom and the lack of financial pressure
In terms of affordable housing, if we agree that housing is stifling the economy and harming us all, then we should fund medium-high density council housing as we have in the past. At the very least it could reduce the billions and billions we are shovelling to private landlords via housing benefit.
The bad news is the nagging fear that, whilst there will probably be elections in 2026/8, they might matter less than they used to.
Strikes me there are TWO existential processes at work in the world, right now. As in: unprecedented challenges for humankind
One I cannot mention, so I won’t
The other is the collapse in fertility. This is having enormous second order effects all around the world, often going unnoticed
eg it can be argued that Trump is a consequence of the baby bust. American demographics are bad. Not as bad as east Asia, but bad. Below replacement and ageing fast
The answer then is immigration - but that means white people very quickly becoming a minority in the USA, and of all the white populations in the world it is Americans who are most likely to fight back against this (violently, if needs be). So we have Trump - a more-or-less openly white supremacist
president
Different versions of this dynamic are playing out around the planet
Before looking, guess which party pushed hardest for this change in the law?
As a bonus, on what date did the Act receive Royal Assent?
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2024-05-17/debates/BED674EC-3E54-4CDA-8836-35E0A6A8D034/BritishNationality(IrishCitizens)Bill
I regret allowing my parents stopping me from joining the army - they threatened to defund me if I took up my place at Sandhurst before university and so I put the idea off until after uni then after four years in London I was too booze and drug addled! That to me is my regret that haunts me but not the children issue.
I’m fine with it, I have nephews and nieces who fulfil certain elements of younger family for me and I don’t have to worry about my child’s safety, health, happiness.
However his overall approval rating of 40% is not enough for the GOP to hold Congress next year or the Presidency in 2028
https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/07/04/trump-rating-tracker-majority-dont-want-us-involved-in-israel-iran-conflict/
I’m a bit like you. If I regret one big thing it’s overdoing the drugs. I stopped at 30 and started having a great time (and making money). But then I went back on them - deeply damaging my life and relationships - and only finally quitting at 37. What a twat I was
I’ve been blessed with a lucky if not wonderful career since then, also kids I love, but I always wonder what I might have done if I hadn’t wasted those precious years in my 30s
Oh well. No one lives a life without regret
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c628zy2584no
Are they questioned by scientists? Serious query - I might write about them
I was lucky, my company DC I transferred at the right time and I have been drip feeding it back in since I moved to ii (with Malcs assistance).
It's another one where the individual was entitled to be in the USA< and was following the track to citizenship -she had a small conviction 15 years ago and was working her way back (that's also a problem with the USA's crazed legal system). Trump broke the policy and went straight to a "anything at all wrong with them, get 'em out and f*ck the consequences" route in defiance of the rule of law.
The guy still believes that Trump's regime will follow due process, and that she is in just for questioning, and that he will get her back. His loyalty to Trump holds.
The question is how widely and how severely that will be broken. How tenacious are the different segments of Trumpists?
There was a fascist (Mussolini, then later Hitler) sympathetic radio priest in the 1930s called Father Charles Edward Coughlin who reached a weekly audience of 30 million from 120 million population. There's a strong analogy to the siloed interpretation of current events being put out by Fox News, News Max, Twitter and so on.
One question is is what will it take to wake up people like this guy.
Trump's BBB will be taking 10-15 million people off Medicaid, and rural hospitals are already closing or reducing services.
So there's more to come.
I'm 50, so at a stage where in any group of contemporaries breeding is almost certainly finished. And in almost any group of contemporaries I select, we are well beow replacement levels. The number of people for whom - for reasons similar to those you describe - it just didn't happen is sadly large.
There are all sorts of reasons for not breeding: medical, financial, just-not-wanting-that-life - but the not-meeting-the-right-woman-at-the-right-time is the most tragic. Because in theory, with all the women in the world available at the touch of a button, that reason should have gone. In practice, the availability of *everyone* seems to have made finding the right partner much, much harder than when it was simply a matter of selecting one from the 40 or so realistically available.
Millions of women may be willing to meet you, but many of them are doing so while looking over your shoulder to see if anyone better might be available.
Mainstream Dems are generally rather conservative. They are not Jeremy Corbyn clones. Even AOC and Bernie, by our standards would be relatively New Labour.
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
Only most Reform voters here backed Trump over Harris in polls last year
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/05/no-10-regrets-cabinet-secretary-chris-wormald
There would have been positives but also negatives. For one I’d still be working.
I like our lifestyle. We’re not massively wealthy but we have enough and enjoy ourselves.
The Beautiful Ones were narcissistic, passive mice who groomed constantly - but refused to interact. No sex no babies
Don’t they feel hauntingly familiar? Think of:
Influencer culture
Rising loneliness in an online world
The phenomenon of beautiful Onlyfans virgins…
Spooky
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
On topic... Maganauts will rationalise that any diminution in their personal circumstances is not Trump's fault and is the fault of somebody else. Democrats, Soros, 'Woke', etc.
86% of LDs, 83% of Labour voters and 57% of Conservative voters though wanted Harris to win
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/50752-who-did-britons-want-to-win-the-2024-us-presidential-election
They'll set us 500 In just under 4 sessions i think is the most likely outcome
‘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.
Exodus, movement of the people. Saint Bob.
And I've heard similar stories from my own mum, and others of her generation, of what things were like in much earlier decades. Including one where a man followed my mum (also a nurse at the time) back to the nurse's accommodation and tried to follow her through the door. An anecdote I've said on here before.
In the past I've said that a female friend of ours refuses to run in the dark, even in our safeish town, and that it's terrible that she feels (reasonably so) unsafe doing something I feel perfectly safe in doing - running in the dark. So I'm not exactly anti-women on this, and I want women to feel safer on our streets.
As for 'Mansplaining': your saying that in no way invalidates what I said.
Immigration fell on the latest figures thanks to the tighter immigration restrictions Sunak brought in
I would be unsurprised if some people were alerting ICE to their spouse's immigration status, because it might be easier (monetarily and/or socially) than either divorce or murder...
Both groups are LGBT sceptic and believe in traditional gender roles and that women should focus on raising families above all.
The collapse in fertility rates is most acute amongst atheists, especially in the West, so by 2050 the world will be more Muslim and evangelical Christian than it is now and that may see a return to more social conservatism in much of the world and hence a reversal of declining fertility rates in many nations
There's also. primarily, more job opportunities.
I suspect this period of western equivocation is shortly coming to an abrupt end. As actual Islamist parties arise in western politics - so will much more intolerant, countervailing forces
Opening tor the Netherlands are players with the long established Dutch names of Edwards and O'Dowd.
Must be some migration going on!
And Good Morning one and all!
Then there's the financial factors; not just about benefits, but about opportunities. Wages can be higher over here, but so are living costs. But corruption is also generally less endemic, which means getting a job can be fairer if you have skills and do not have the contacts. And IMO we have let the black market in jobs go far too unhindered.
There's also the advantage that English is a global language, and if you know or learn it, there are many more countries you can move to - including the and of riches, America.
There are many push and pull factors for immigration; a mix of personal, social and economic that will vary from immigrant to immigrant.
But seriously, the sheer idiocy of the things you say is getting so extreme it's almost inspiring.
Russia: despite traditional values and massive incentives has a birth rate comfortably below UK levels.
Syria, I grant you, is above replacement. As are Gaza and Israel.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cly8qwx5e4lo
Wi' jam in.
(Curtesy of Peter Kay).
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.
Why won't they follow the same path beat by the West, the East, and even countries like Bangladesh?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate