seems like an odd choice to so emphatically phrase this as a quality of "the left" when there are so clearly many plausible confounding factors (education, wealth, employment status, do you live in a small city apartment, etc.)
Agreed, although one thing I'll grant is that these days it seems like extremely large families in the US are almost always evangelicals, who obviously skew conservative, and there's not really a counterpart to that on the left. So even if families are getting smaller in general across the political spectrum, could it be that the outliers are imbalanced?
The left reproduces indirectly, so this isn't as much of a problem as they might think. In fact, I'd say it's the opposite of the surface conclusion.
If the left reproduces via external means (e.g., media), then they've effectively outsourced biological reproduction and all its costs to the right. The right will successfully reproduce their political alignment sometimes, of course, but they also effectively act as the breeder population for the left. The right expends the resources bootstrapping civilization into their biological offspring, Oedipalizing them into the world as linguistic subject, which ends up being the vector for the brood parasitism of their own socio-cultural opponents. So, if you're the right, you're the host of this parasitism, and should be looking for some kind of antiparasitic social solution in the form of impenetrable cultural barriers.
It remains to be seen if the indirect strategy of converting people originating from different backgrounds holds or fails in the 21st century. All that we can say is that it used to work against some traditional Christian churches and more liberal Jewish groups.
That does not mean that it will work against all of them. Some high-fertility groups of today don't seem to be particularly prone to losing their members to left-wing or even just generic secular persuasion: there are very few ex-Amish or ex-Haredi leftists, and some, but not very many, ex-Muslim and ex-Mormon leftists.
One thing that appears to be missing is any mention of non-heterosexual couples, some of which are biologically incapable of having their own children and it's unclear how adoption or surrogacy gets counted in here.
And I think it's fair to say that in the US non-heterosexual people are overwhelmingly on the left, for fairly obvious reasons.
Everything about this thread is weird and woefully online.
As an n of 1, we are surrounded by so many births that we just trade baby gear since we are either a handful of months ahead or behind many other parents. Our assumption was that we were in a stealth baby boom. Truly everyone we know has a minimum of one very young child with a high number of parents with between 2 and 4.
It certainly runs counter to many online discussions but reality often does.
Captain Planet literally told children who cared about environmentalism to "keep families small" to save our planet.
https://youtu.be/tZCg9HsDntY
It's not difficult to take that to the next logical conclusion, no children means less resources used.
seems like an odd choice to so emphatically phrase this as a quality of "the left" when there are so clearly many plausible confounding factors (education, wealth, employment status, do you live in a small city apartment, etc.)
Agreed, although one thing I'll grant is that these days it seems like extremely large families in the US are almost always evangelicals, who obviously skew conservative, and there's not really a counterpart to that on the left. So even if families are getting smaller in general across the political spectrum, could it be that the outliers are imbalanced?
The left reproduces indirectly, so this isn't as much of a problem as they might think. In fact, I'd say it's the opposite of the surface conclusion.
If the left reproduces via external means (e.g., media), then they've effectively outsourced biological reproduction and all its costs to the right. The right will successfully reproduce their political alignment sometimes, of course, but they also effectively act as the breeder population for the left. The right expends the resources bootstrapping civilization into their biological offspring, Oedipalizing them into the world as linguistic subject, which ends up being the vector for the brood parasitism of their own socio-cultural opponents. So, if you're the right, you're the host of this parasitism, and should be looking for some kind of antiparasitic social solution in the form of impenetrable cultural barriers.
It remains to be seen if the indirect strategy of converting people originating from different backgrounds holds or fails in the 21st century. All that we can say is that it used to work against some traditional Christian churches and more liberal Jewish groups.
That does not mean that it will work against all of them. Some high-fertility groups of today don't seem to be particularly prone to losing their members to left-wing or even just generic secular persuasion: there are very few ex-Amish or ex-Haredi leftists, and some, but not very many, ex-Muslim and ex-Mormon leftists.
One thing that appears to be missing is any mention of non-heterosexual couples, some of which are biologically incapable of having their own children and it's unclear how adoption or surrogacy gets counted in here.
And I think it's fair to say that in the US non-heterosexual people are overwhelmingly on the left, for fairly obvious reasons.
Everything about this thread is weird and woefully online.
As an n of 1, we are surrounded by so many births that we just trade baby gear since we are either a handful of months ahead or behind many other parents. Our assumption was that we were in a stealth baby boom. Truly everyone we know has a minimum of one very young child with a high number of parents with between 2 and 4.
It certainly runs counter to many online discussions but reality often does.
Oh great, Idiocracy as a scientific paper.
That'd imply that those leftists are truly smart which seems rather oxymoronic - pun intended.