2016-01-24
kars 1
Lyman Stone on discourse around people who do not want to be associated with the term pronatalism. Sometimes it seems to me that a lot of people are actually quite autistic about feminism, like someone who is obsessed with trains who will look for any excuse to link the current topic towards their own special interest1. It is possible to view feminism as a totalizing ideology from which one must view any interaction between one or more genders, but it doesn’t seem to me that has to be the case, nor does it seem to be the most effective approach generally. In the case of low birth rates, it seems to me that feminism is neither the primary cause nor a potential solution. But, it is true that various proposed solutions could be viewed either positively or negatively from a feminist perspective. In which case, it seems strange that many have not learned the lesson of the past decade, that opting out of an adjacent but orthogonal movement is not a means of strengthening your negotiating position, and casting disapproval to isolate those you disagree with will not make them go away. Instead, such moves represent an abdication of the responsibility of participation, and merely renders you unable to steer outcomes towards any of your preferred directions.
Misha Teplitskiy with interesting commentary on the recent paper by Lu et al. on the anticorrelation between cancer and Alzheimers.
Trevor Klee summary and comments on A Brief History of Intelligence.
Matt Clancy Abundance linkthread.
Edit: CHH on this phenomena of people trying to tie their own pet topics to pronatalism. Also Revana Sharfuddin on how the policies are what actually matters.