I totally agree with Katie that most of people who claim that the world is too fucked up to have kids don’t want kids anyway and are using the news as an excuse.
My advice (about to have my third kid) is always that if you’re on the fence about having kids, you should do it. You’ll be too busy fetching snacks and wiping butts to stay overly invested in the news. Plus, the libs need to reproduce - it’s not like conservatives are slowing down.
Fact is, having kids kills your social life. Dead. Unless you're an absolute piece of trash of a parent, you're not going out and partying all night every week and sleeping in till 3pm anymore. Even if you're ever single again, no more guilt free one night stands. Hobbies? Yeah. You have a hobby now. Not the ones you had.
And that's why so many younger adults don't want kids. They're not "fun". They're a huge obligation.
Now, they're also great. Rewarding, "best thing I ever did" all true, but blah blah blah.
When I was growing up, young adults that didn't do the "graduate from high school immediate job/marriage/kids" thing said they didn't want kids cause they wanted to party and hang out with friends.
Now, they say "because the world is so terrible" because it sounds more noble. BS, imo.
Yeah my most boring/conservative/trad early middle age belief is that actually marriage and kids and at least a loose affiliation to organized religion is good for most of the population.
I think community is good for human well being. I think being part of a religious community is good.
I also think not thinking is good. As in, the more you can delegate decisions to some kind of authority the less stressed you feel. It sounds bad, but it's an essential heuristic people need to not get overwhelmed by the minutiae of day to day decisions.
Religion seems particularly suited to satisfy those needs for a lot of people.
I don't think religion is necessary. Maybe not even optimal or ideal. But it's easy and generally available to most people in the US.
I think the Western cultures where you see low religiosity that seems to work are ones with a very clearly defined cultural identity. So that national and cultural identity provides that role.
And, yeah, marriage and kids can do that too. All of a sudden you _care_ about shit in your community that you really didn't have a vested interest in before. And the _reasons_ you care are shared with...all the other parents and it binds you together despite any other differences.
"As in, the more you can delegate decisions to some kind of authority the less stressed you feel."
Not only is there some comfort in outsourcing these tough decisions, it's also true that religious tradition has the advantage of being tested against real world conditions for centuries.
I mean, I think religion satisfies a need for community.
I think it's a pretty poor source answers to the more fundamental questions in life regarding health, happiness, and what its good and ethical.
In many ways, it's been tested and failed epically over and over again.
For example, it's true that in low trust societies (like the US) religiosity is correlated with higher happiness scores. But in high trust societies it is not. Which implies it is the foundation of communal trust that is the "magic sauce" to increasing relative happiness....not religion per se.
And historically, it's an objective fact that across all measures of well-being people are better off today compared to 100, 200, etc years ago. . . . and they are significantly less religious. The main driver being improvements across the board in economics, health, life expectancy, etc. So not _caused_ by less religion..
But is a concrete demonstration that other factors outside of religion are far, far more important to increasing the baseline happiness for any given community.
I think marriage and kids is the right choice in terms of their personal long-term happiness for 90-95% of people. Now I would prefer a lot of people unsuited to being responsible parents actually didn't have kids, but just from a selfish perspective I think it is a no brainer.
It is how we are wired and it makes the existential angst so much less biting.
The research shows the benefit comes from an affiliation to any social community. The religion of that community is incidental.
On a society-wide level religiosity is correlated with less prosperity, well-being, and egalitarianism (think Norway vs. Romania or Massachusetts vs. Mississippi). Though, I suspect religiosity may help some individuals suppress their anti-social inclinations.
Yes. You see, when you pay attention to things other than internet bullshit, you tend to learn about the scientific consensus on meaningful issues. Give it a try!
I'm a scientist in a university, as are very many other people who comment on this podcast. What I mean is: what research?
If you think there are simple answers to the questions of the psychology of religion, that's an anti-intellectual point of view that is obstructive and frankly not welcome, at least not where I work.
here is one perspective, from a clinician rather than a social scientist:
I agree with you both that the “I don’t want kids because the world is so bad” excuse is largely bullshit, and most people who don’t want to be parents just aren’t interested in having kids, don’t want to do the work of parenting day-to-day, don’t want to change their lifestyle, etc. (which are perfectly legitimate reasons IMO, and forcing someone into parenthood who doesn’t want it is bad for everyone involved, especially the kid). But I understand why people feel the need to come up with a more “noble” rationale, since people who don’t want kids - and especially women - are constantly called selfish and some people get extremely, irrationally angry about it.
I only have one kid and have been called selfish for it by people who have no idea what my life circumstances have been. I feel like it’s better to tell those nosy shame-y weirdos to fuck off (or annoy them further by saying “yep, super selfish!”) instead of making up excuses about how you’re not actually selfish or whatever.
I’m sorry you’ve experienced that. I’m childfree (kinda by choice, kinda by life circumstances, but I’m ultimately fine with it) and I’ve mostly dealt with that from anonymous dorks online whose opinion I don’t give a shit about. My response, if I were dragged into that conversation, would probably be to point out all the ways that choosing to have kids is also a selfish decision. (To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with “being selfish” when it comes to making decisions about your own future and having kids, whether or not one chooses to have them. But parents who are sanctimonious about having kids really hate to be called selfish and it usually shuts them up haha.)
Everyone I know said they were waiting to be married and financially stable first. No one wanted to party. They wanted to like, finush paying their loans from grad school.
As my mother said...."honey, you never think you can afford kids. You just do it and it works."
I think people are terrible at telling you the truth about why they do things.
There's been ample effort in other countries to address the affordability issue. In some countries, that already have extensive social programs for kids/parents, they literally offered to pay people to have kids. Cold hard cash plus free child care.
It had no measurable effect on birth rates.
When people say "I can't afford kids for...reasons" I think what they're actually saying is "I'd have to make sacrifices to my current baseline standard of living, free time, etc. And I don't want to do that. If I had more money, I could keep what I have now and afford kids."
But it's a moving target. Once you make more money, you have a new standard of living you want to maintain and there are still sacrifices to make.
I might be flippantly describing that in maximally selfish terms of "I want to party". But I do think these are more socially acceptable euphemistic proxies to "I don't want to make trade offs to have kids."
But....there's no way around that. Having kids is fundamentally a trade off.
That's why parents do things like....move out of the expensive urban area where they can't afford a 4 bedroom apartment into the suburbs and make a 1h commute. The entire idea of "settling down" is the process of making trade offs for your kids.
> Unless you're an absolute piece of trash of a parent, you're not going out and partying all night every week and sleeping in till 3pm anymore. Even if you're ever single again, no more guilt free one night stands.
Zoomers don't do any of this anyway though, right?
In zoomer terms, you can't raise kids while being hyper online and staring at your phone all day. You have to actually put it down and take care of someone else.
And you can't play MMO's till 4am then sleep all day either.
It's (parenting) just a change in social life, not a deadening. Little league games and open house and hanging with the kids is better than anything else I've experienced. Plus most of your friends also have kids so you hang with them and the kids and it's great.
This is totally true, especially as we get older and many of our friends have kids - the people without kids become the minority in our previous social circles, and all the parents naturally gravitate away from their childfree friends and start having “kid friendly” hangs or socializing at their kids’ activities without us. Unless you already have a large circle of friends who also don’t have kids, being childfree in middle age can actually be more isolating than being a parent, especially because it’s hard for older people to make new friends (and extra especially if you don’t live in an urban area). I think people who have kids young can definitely feel left out as their friends continue to do the party/bar thing, but this kind of flips at a certain point and the older people without children are the left out ones. All my friends with kids have very active social lives.
Yes, those things are awesome. I do really enjoy them. And I enjoy the more community centered, grounded conversations I have today.
But that's my "today self" talking. I'm pretty sure my 22 year old self would have found much of the same activities and conversations the definition of torturous boredom.
But...I was pretty over the top wild. Almost constantly in trouble. And would have absolutely been more comfortable hanging with Keith Richards over Danny Tanner.
Sounds like my 22 (or 25) yr old self would have enjoyed hanging with yours for sure. Never hit Keith level but not for lack of trying.
It keeps moving in the direction you describe as years pass (just hit 60 here) But hanging with kids and friends around fire pit with goods tunes going ain't too bad. Just the evolution of the process, passing the torch.
This is so true. Another benefit I’ve personally noticed about having kids is that it also makes you too busy to ruminate too much about what’s going on with you internally. It forces you to refocus outside of yourself which I think can be really helpful, especially for people who tend towards internalization (including myself here). I used to be the type of person who thought everyone should be in therapy, until I had kids and realized most of the issues I felt like I needed therapy for just kind of went away.
Congrats on baby 3! I have 3 also, it’s the best :)
Fellow three-kidder here and I can’t agree with this enough. Nothing snaps me out of my ruminating tendencies than the actual real-world needs that only I can attend to for my children.
So glad I never felt the need for an excuse for why I didn't want to have kids.
Although, now I realize it was because I was terrified to have kids with a bad man or a man who couldn't provide for a family. And I refused to entertain marriage proposals from any guy who "definitely wanted kids", because I wanted to be loved for myself and not because I could provide children to someone.
It's so obvious now that I simply hadn't met the right man.
Now I have. We could have had kids when we first met, he even suggested it. But at that time, I did not trust enough.
Now I do, and now it's too late - but I honestly don't think I made a "wrong decision" at any point. I know exactly why I made those choices and I respect mysel for making them. Having children is the most serious thing a person can do. It's mind boggling to me how many people seem to treat as just something that happens, dont bother being married, don't think about who will raise them, etc.
This is a great post. It amazes me how many people assume that a woman who just ends up without kids as a result of going through life and having the chips fall that way must be SO MISERABLE and feel like a FAILURE. I mean obviously the people making this assumption are just not secure in their own lives and decisions, but still, it’s annoying, and I love seeing anecdotes like yours.
I also waited for the right man. Best decision of my life. We were able to have one, when he was 52. When I wanted another, six years later, he thought he would be too old to father and provide in the way he thinks a child deserves. That’s why he is the right one. Children deserve good fathers. Solidarity PNW
No, I suppose it's technically still possible. I do still have regular periods. But he has grandkids! I think he might be past the point of wanting any more children, even though he was down for it 10 years ago.
I have brought it up a couple times, saying that I regret not being open to it earlier, and he didn't have much to say, and certainly wasn't enthusiastic or encouraging. So yeah, I'm pretty sure it's too late.
It's ok. I mean, I'm probably going to die alone while Mr PNWGirl's daughters are chomping at the bit to get their hands on the house, but maybe my nephews will come to my funeral.
Agreed. I’ve seen FAR too many secret “I regret having kids/I love my kids but if I had it to do over again I wouldn’t” confessions to think it’s a responsible gamble. Children are not an experiment, there are no take backsies, and even mildly resentful/uninterested/regretful parents can really fuck an innocent child up for life.
Nahhhh, the people who write those essays or give those quotes to journalists are super unrepresentative. Most parents who stick around physically and don't get sucked into hardcore addiction rise to the occasion. Stats bear these claims out.
I’m referring to places like Reddit or other forums where people can speak anonymously - thousands of these stories out there (especially, sadly, amongst parents who have kids with disabilities). I’m sure there are just as many, if not more, parents who were on the fence at first and feel like they ultimately made the right decision to have kids. But my point like I said is I don’t think it’s a good thing to gamble on - the stakes are incredibly high. Great for the people it works out for, but much more awful for the people it doesn’t.
I disagree with your disagreement. Kids don’t need parents that are 100% committed after they are 6 or 12 years old. Kids should start to be independent and free at around 6 years old. Then they don’t need your 100%.
I interpret the "have kids if you're on the fence" as a "there is no way to be absolutely sure about some things for some of us, so it is okay to have some trepidation on this question too".
I don't think I ever felt fully ready, but as someone on the fence that had kids, I realized that I just had to make the call. It was the same with marriage, starting the search for a new job, etc. Very fee decisions in life have been 100% certainty, so I was setting a false standard for the children question.
I think making this the most monumental decision is what makes parenting feel overwhelming. For the vast majority of humanity people have had children. It may not have been right for every single person, and certainly not everyone was a good parent, but it has been a decent choice for the vast majority. The modern world makes this seem much harder because of the choices we have. I am not arguing whether the choice is bad, this is just natural output of the current system.
I was never "ready" and now I'm one of those annoying "best decision I ever made, most rewarding thing in my life" people (I think this, but don't say it to anyone except other parents, for the record). Fervor of the converted, I guess. But to an earlier point, I'm upper middle laptop class, can afford a great daycare, etc.
You can't know what it's really like until you do it. It's pretty rational to have some trepidation about that. I was pretty sure from about age 20 that I wanted kids, and now I am blessed with two, but before having them there was always that little bit of doubt.
I like Pinker but I get the criticism. I think it's worth studying into his field. His intro-psych and Rationality courses are free online through Harvard.
Pinker claims he's watched students progressively underperform in his intro-psych course over 20 years despite though the course hasn't really changed much.
I'm about to have my third kid and all of mine at 3 years apart so I've been wiping butts for what feels like a really long time haha. But yes, parenthood is amazing.
People can’t imagine the impact of kids until they have them. I think pop culture makes parenting look like a total slog. Reality is they make us better people, and if all goes well we don’t die alone.
It sounds like you have had a tough experience, and I'm sorry. Parenting is not for everyone. What I mean is that having kids (for many people) means we ourselves have to grow up and set good examples rather than giving into selfish pleasures or bad behavior.
No, you don't have to, at all. I don't understand why people say this. Becoming a parent doesn't turn people into magic responsible adults and there are no requirements that it do so. Your statement that "we have to grow up and set good examples" is simply false, through and through. No one has to do anything and parenthood does not change people.
I have a cousin who does this. The world being screwed up is a reason for him not to have kids or not to do anything substantial with his life. I tell him that is an excuse. If you don't want to be responsible for kids just say so.
Am I scared about the state of the world? Yeah. But I think if that was my only reason, I probably would have had a kid. I spent most of my 20s and some of my early 30s with a dude who was chronically ill and who eventually turned abusive—I loved him, but I couldn’t imagine him doing half the work of raising a kid, and I was barely making enough money as it was. (And I didn’t have an STRONG desire for kids. And the world was going to shit. And I continued eating meat, so according to certain sources, the best way I could contribute environmentally was by not bringing another white American human into this world.) And then that all went to shit. Later I began seeing my current partner—the only person I’ve been able to envision myself having kids with…right as the pandemic hit. And we discussed kids several times. And I came to the conclusion that I care more about the raising of a kid than the carrying on of my DNA, so I would prefer to adopt (there’s been a long throughline of adoptions in my family’s history)—and for him, the genetic continuity would be more important. But it wasn’t a strong desire for either of us. And as I am rapidly nearing 40 and we haven’t revisited this in a while and I grow more used to our lives as they are, kids do not seem to be in the cards.
…But I am sponsoring the education and material needs of a three-year-old on the other side of the world now. I will probably never meet this kid. But alongside my friends’ and cousins’ kids, this gives me some stake in the future of our species.
See my curse-free edit. I am changing. I’m trying to better hide my contempt for contemptuous ideas.
Speaking of, feel free to explain why you think religious social rituals and support networks are inherently better for well-being than secular social rituals and support networks.
Feel free to explain why societies that rank highest on human development rank lowest on religiosity.
If your position were true, we’d expect societies with low religiosity to also have low levels of human development and well-being.
Is it clearly understood how beach erosion happens? Reading Grok, the results seem to tell a story hermitically and conveniently circular.
Some beaches are artificial or artificially enlarged such as Miami Beach.
I find these narrative astrological circles potentially destructive speaking of depression. It's the center of my complaint with parts with my education or the expectations of dealing well with itter’s education.
A mystic reduction is essentially given religious prestige coupled with harmonious overconfidence.
One huge thing undiscussed in the "breach erosion" discourse is it is 100% natural and normal for a lot of these structures to move around all the time anyway. So even in totally undeveloped areas with zero human impact, you will go to a beach one year and it will be giant and amazing, and then some particular set of storms and currents for the next year will leave it 10% of its previous size. And some other beach 10 miles away will have grown.
That happens a lot.
Not that humans can't have negative impacts, but a huge portion of what gets written off or framed as "human impacted" or "climate change driven" beach erosion is actually just the sand wanting to move around as it naturally does and human developments/visitors not being ok with it because humans want everything to stay the same.
Some of the really high profile "beach rescue" projects are more about people fighting nature than people "preserving" nature.
I'm a foil hatter when it comes to climate change in that I think it's intentionally been used as a way to distract from other environmental issues in part because the solution is MORE CAPITALISM.
100% climate change isn’t 1/20th the problem all the human land use and overexploitation (particularly of fish) is.
Climate change will subtlety change a forest over centuries. Pasting it over with a ranch or farm or sub development will immediately nearly completely destroy it. It is hugely worse and driving much more extinction.
Yeah, thank you. That's what I figured. It's not that I doubt Climate Change, although it's funny I just capitalized it for some reason, I think the political narrative reductions have consequences. It's not just Climate, either. Evolution is another. You can believe it as an item but take care you don't learn so much about it you undermine the activist modes in the first place. How dare a person understand their own politically leveraged confusion
It's also so unromantic to be sequestered off rgetirucally and through wonky knowledge from actually having novel ideas. I know that's not entirely true but it's no wonder at all that conspiracy theorizing is the new original sin.
Also if you are a rich person whose needs millions of dollars to preserve your beach "climate change is ruining our beach", or even "human development is ruining our beach" makes a much more compelling argument to the public/government for funding than "the beaches move around on yearly or decadal timeframes and I just didn't understand much about the beach when I built my property here".
As you said climate change absolutely is an issue for some tiny number of beaches, and human development for a much larger set of them. But people have this religious desire to pretend the natural world is stagnant when it isn't.
I've seen this dichotomy of liberal vs conservative happiness quotient up close.
My most progressive friend couldn't go out of the house for at least a week after Russia invaded Ukraine because she was furious that people kept on living their lives. She actually said, "I can't stand people being happy while there's a war on." You can imagine her state of mind today.
On the opposite side, I volunteer in an organization (must be vague here) and the woman I work with, her eldest daughter, and husband are all undocumented from a Latin American country. She is also one of the most cheerful, happy people I know, despite the fact that she is vigilant about ICE. I believe this is because she is extremely religious and believes that God will protect her and her family.
The undocumented woman is grateful to be in the U.S. despite all its flaws. My friend is ashamed to be American. It's not a mystery why one is depressed and one isn't.
The news algorithms are designed to make us perpetually angry and upset, and it clearly works on a large set of the population. It's sad. A lot of people are wasting away the best years of their lives being angry at people and situations they have absolutely no contact nor control over.
Not that you shouldn't be aware of what's going on in the world, but I don't think a tenth of the perpetually outraged class of citizens here in the west have even taken a glimpse into the truly horrible events going on outside the Eurosphere, such as in the Congo or Sudan. That stuff would actually make me queasy seeing daily.
Best advice I can give to someone feeling furious about people living their lives when terrible shit is happening is—don’t go to the mall, or the grocery store, or the club (not at first). Go to the woods. Take a walk in nature, listen to birds, touch a tree, feel the water of a stream running over your hands or feet. Lie down in the grass and look at the sky. I have been in that state of mind before and I know for a fact that that EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE SUCKS mindframe will not resolve by holing up in your apartment and doomscrolling, but that going to places where the purpose is Normal Everyday Living can be exhausting and jarring. Being in nature is the only thing that helps reset me.
This is has been my experience. Most of my friends that are overtly liberal never share good news without disclaimers on how the world is messed up. There is also the constant therapy talk with most advocating for therapy as routine maintenence. I can't even do book clubs with them anymore because they don't want to read fun books. Its the same few topics presented in different ways all the time.
Did your progressive friend realize that there is rarely a time on this planet where you can’t find a war happening somewhere? Is she OK with people being happy when the war is somewhere far away in the Third World like Myanmar? Was she happy at all during the Syrian Civil War? Only mentioning because it’s a golden opportunity to call an anti-racist racist for not becoming over invested in wars that have nothing to do with her life.
She believes ALL war is evil, wherever it is. However, there are gradations. When I asked why she wasn't as outraged by the Syrian Civil War as she was by the war in Gaza, she said because America wasn't allied with Syria. A lot is about being ashamed of this country.
In my experience, they believe that war was justified against the Nazis because otherwise what's the point of calling everyone Nazis?
The question of whether any particular act of war against the nazis was justifiable is almost always "I would have done it differently". If you ask them what we should have done about Imperial Japan, I suspect you will the response you would expect to get from someone who forgot that Japan fought in WW2.
The second woman is just delusional in a different way. Will she still be happy when it turns out there's nothing or nobody protecting her from being deported?
I don't think she's delusional unless you feel belief in God is delusional, which you might. Rather, she feels God will ultimately protect her and her family and if she is sent back to her country, she and her family will start again.
The belief that her belief will protect her is delusional yes. I suppose being delusionally happy is better than deluding yourself into being miserable.
I can’t help feeling part of the reason young people are more depressed is because it’s their first time getting all this bad news. I’m in my 40s and I’ve seen enough of these things go around multiple times in my lifetime that they just don’t have the same effect on me. I think I’ve been through three over-population panics, of course there was the ozone layer, global warming, the panic about the drop in the birth rate which can somehow exist at the same time as over-population panic. I have personally witnessed at least twice when traditional sea shanties became mainstream. The more cycles you live through, the less they should panic you.
I’m 53 and was thinking the same exact thing. I was mentally going over all the imminent environmental catastrophes I’d heard about all my life, beginning with (as you mentioned) overpopulation as a kid (and you left off the disappearance of the rain forest at that)
I got really obsessed and kinda panicky with the idea of “peak oil” back around the late 90s, I think Kunstler was the guy I was reading a lot who was pushing that. Now that that’s turned out to be another obvious panic, I’ve chilled out on just about all of it.
There's also this issue where environmental problems that were successfully mitigated look overblown in hindsight, because we don't see the counterfactual where we did nothing. Ozone depletion was addressed by the Montreal Protocol, which banned certain ozone-depleting substances internationally. Acid rain was addressed through scrubbers at coal power plants and much more stringent emissions requirements on vehicles. I don't endorse panic or making yourself miserable, but it's also not totally reasonable to just shrug and assume everything will work out. Maybe in some perfect world the regulators and experts would solve these problems on their own, but in the real world it can take a big push to overcome inertia and regulatory capture.
I think when it comes to climate change that some of the predictions of doom are unrealistic even in a "do nothing" scenario, and this is bad and it destroys credibility while also making people feel the situation is hopeless (which ironically removes the energy to do anything about it). On the other hand I can definitely understand people freaking out that we aren't doing enough. Our whole global civilization pretty much runs on fossil fuels so it's a vastly bigger project than just phasing out certain refrigerants or whatever.
Well, you could argue that knowing the world has been able to take action in the past to avert disaster means you wouldn’t panic or get depressed.
That’s basically what happened each time with overpopulation concerns. The pace of agricultural improvement has consistently been higher than population growth, so after a while it’s reasonable to conclude that will continue happening.
I'm going to be a pedantic twat here but I can't help myself. The description of the Schrodinger's Cat experiment and its purported significance was brutally inaccurate. To be fair, most physicists also get it wrong, so I can't totally blame Jesse. But I'm still going to.
The setup: a cat is placed in a totally opaque box along with a capsule of cyanide, a mechanism for detecting particle decay, and some small amount of an unstable element. If and when the mechanism detects that the element has decayed, it smashes the capsule which releases the cyanide which kills the cat. The timing of the decay is fundamentally probabilistic.
The puzzle: on the classical picture of the world, there is one right answer to the question 'Is the cat alive or dead?' at any given time after the box is closed and before the box is opened, i.e. either the cat is alive, or it is dead. But the mathematics of quantum mechanics seems to say that, in fact, the cat-capsule-detector system is in a state of superposition such that there is no fact of the matter about whether the cat is alive or dead at a given moment, only a certain probability for each scenario. (Importantly, these probabilities are somehow about the world itself, not our ignorance about it) That is, until we open the box and check. But as long as we don't open it, the cat is apparently both alive and dead in some sense.
The popular belief is that the experiment shows that the world is somehow affected by our 'observing' or 'measuring' it. But this is exactly the opposite of what Schrodinger concluded. He took it as a reductio argument against the claim that quantum mechanics is a complete theory. Of course there's a fact of the matter about whether the cat is alive or dead at any given moment. Einstein actually made the same point earlier using barrels of gunpowder (I think) in his example. Their point is that the conclusion of the thought experiment is so obviously absurd that quantum mechanics cannot be a complete theory even at the micro level.
TLDR: the thought experiment was originally meant to demonstrate the incompleteness of quantum mechanics. Only later did people misunderstand it as affirming what Schrodinger thought was self-evidently absurd.
"But the mathematics of quantum mechanics seems to say that, in fact, the cat-capsule-detector system is in a state of superposition such that there is no fact of the matter about whether the cat is alive or dead at a given moment, only a certain probability for each scenario."
That's fundamentally correct, as I understand it: there is no fact about the matter of if the cat is alive or dead; there are probabilities, and those probabilities are the *actual* state. I *think* the point here is that it's absurd to believe that until the "particle-wave" interacts with something, it's not in an actual state that we'd recognize. I think the problem with this thought experiment is that the particle-wave of the decay *is* interacting with something: the detector. As soon as it does that, we get a decoherence and the cat dies.
However, you then go on to state that "the cat is both alive and dead in some sense." But it is not both alive and dead, not really. The double-slit experiment makes that clear, though hard to "understand" using metaphors from our world. If you look at superposition, something "real" actually happens, but it's simply not something we can describe with our normal knowledge: it's radically un-intuitive because it suggests a world that is far, far less static (metaphysically) than it seems to be -- that effectively, all of reality is a process of probabilities colliding with each other and sort of "resolving" (I think the term used is "decohereing") into what we experience. If you're into this sort of thing, here's a pretty good video summary (it's still reasonably long at 20 minutes, but it's pretty accessible -- I'm certainly not a physicist).
Actually, let me just refine myself here: under Many Worlds Interpretation, I suppose it's accurate to say that the cat is both alive and dead. But not in any sense that we have access to or interacts with our reality in any way.
What is it about Mamdani that makes normies feel comfortable? The man has *vowed to arrest the Israeli Prime Minister*. His city hosts the UN. Do you think that he's lying about that? Why does that make you more comfortable? Do you think that this is acceptable?
If your starting point for this argument comes from your belief that Netanyahu has an arrest warrant out for him, I BEG you to do some research on the difference between the international court of justice (ICJ) and the international criminal court (ICC), why the US and Israel are not party to the Rome Statute, and the US posture towards the ICC generally. It is inexcusable, at this point, to be reporting on this without understanding the difference.
If you don't care about the arrest warrant, and just assume that the Israeli PM is guilty of war crimes, then I beg you to remember that these allegations are brought to you by the same people who call denying children access to hormones genocide. The people who include details about the people killed in airstrikes like "soccer coach" but omit details like "member of Hezbollah" in a transparent attempt to *ameliorate the actions of a man who tried to blow up a preschool*.
Mamdani can be absolute trash on that issue, but you have to admit, Bibi has pretty much made it his mission to alienate normies worldwide since October 7th. I don't subscribe to the "he helped facilitate Hamas' attack" worldview, but the guy is clearly corrupt and letting the absolute worst side of Israeli politics guide his decisions (settler violence, expansion, etc.), and Trump is outright demanding the Israeli justice system acquit him of crimes he pretty clearly committed. You can generally support Israel's right to exist while also think Bibi should go.
You're a violent extremist if you think that arresting the Israeli head of state is not a *disqualifying* position for the New York mayor to hold.
The role of a normie is typically to assume that things are too complicated to understand, and unweight their confidence accordingly. Journalists act against this impulse, by pushing people into the dunning-kruger valley with a particular set of facts. If you allow this to get done to you, you stop being able to call yourself a normie.
Let's take the corruption charges as an example. Donors donate to politicians that represent their interests. The question of whether any such activity constitutes corruption is *always* something that can be investigated if you're going to run a democracy on political donations,
The most corrupt institution in Israel is it's least democratic one, the high court. This institution (along with the office of the chief prosecutor) has used this investigation into Netanyahu donors to forcibly limit Netanyahu's participation in his own government. If you are unwilling to look at the details of the case rather than wikipedia's summary, then just understand that this case has been in trial for 6 years, and by *FAR* the main effect that it has had is the injunction issued by the office of the prosecutor to prevent Bibi from exerting any influence over the institution of the court and the office of the prosecutor itself. This is a massive injunction to impose on the PM. It should therefore be noted that this injunction occurs against a strong proponent of judicial reform.
At least consider the *possibility* that you have victim and offender reversed.
I don’t think that any position that is about a foreign country’s president is disqualifying for a mayor whose job is to actually run a city. I also know that we live in a country where we have the president constantly talking about arresting all his political rivals and yet we just focus on the mayor of New York as being the one who’s a problem, even though he’s never gonna do anything to the head of Israel.
You have a misunderstanding of the distribution of powers in American democracy. The mayor of New York is utterly subordinate to the Federal government in matters of foreign policy. Period.
Again, if you believe that Mamdani is lying about this plan, you must explain why that is ok, and if you do not, then you are an extremist, and I beg you to realize that.
I think that you confuse a pledge of a mayor around holding up international law with an actual threat. He’s not gonna do anything to him because he’s just not capable of it. I think it’s a campaign pledge that’s not gonna go anywhere.
I also know that the federal government is trying to arrest people and actually has the power to do it and that’s a lot more concerning.
The mayor of New York is absolutely endowed with the power to have people arrested in New York. "Upholding international law", in this case, is in express contravention of federal law. I think the word treason is actually appropriate. Mamdani is not an agent of any state that has a treaty recognizing the ICC. The president is, and I have said this probably 8 times on this forum, *preauthorized to bomb the netherlands* in the event that the ICC attempted to prosecute an allied head of state.
I really do not give a shit about Israel or the New York mayor's stance on it. It really is that easy, a lot of people don't care so much about the same issues that you do care about.
you care about the constitution presumably though? The issue at hand is not Israel. It's the Mayor of New York vowing to arrest a head of state because he's a fucking lunatic.
I follow Substacker in Israel who is 8 months pregnant with a long-awaited first child, and she has been running in and out of the shelters several times a day for the past few weeks like everyone else. Her hospital has moved all operations, including labor and delivery, deep underground. She is not stressing. I think a lot of us Jews are keenly aware that our predecessors went through a hell of a lot to get us to be walking on the planet today, and that to voluntarily snip the chain that connects us back millennia, to end our line, would be a tragedy greater than whatever the doomers are talking about. Whatever you do, you must survive, you must continue to bring forth life.
That’s a main reason for why Israel is constantly ranked in the top happiest countries. The ability to carry on with your life, rejoice in the mundane, and continue to bring children into this world despite everything going on there shows what thousands of years of resilience can do for a people.
It also helps with perspective for any Jews who may be nervous about the current state of affairs in the diaspora. We live in the best time to be a Jew in our entire history. We have the ability to defend ourselves and our ancestors would kill to be in our shoes.
There are also an infinite number of enemies around every corner and you have to be constantly vigilant or you might become one of them by forgetting one of the prayers you're supposed to say.
I went to college at Bryn mawr with the individual on This American Life! My parents told me about that interview at the time, and I had SMOKE COMING OUT OF MY EARS at that goddamn math and science comment. Still do. F that. (I was a physics major, bryn mawr was second only to MIT in raw numbers of female physics majors at the time)
Fascinating. I still remember snickering in shock at my desk at that quote. I didn't know how to feel about it! But man, that was indeed an unforgettable episode.
I also remember that This American Life episode. In my imperfect memory, the lesbian woman on testosterone (because she identifies as a man) is talking about what a good feminist she is but how upset she is that the testosterone makes her lust after strange women on the street. She’s “objectifying” them as sex objects! Oh no! She imagines having sex with them—and she can’t help herself. She feels bad and guilty about it.
That was a moment in which I (a normal heterosexual woman who considers herself a feminist) realized that feminism, at least the kind this trans identified woman believed, had pathologized normal heterosexual male sexuality. There’s nothing wrong with lusting after women. That’s not assault or rape. It’s normal. Attacking women is bad, but finding them attractive—well, that’s good. It’s not sexism to be attracted to a woman.
I’m afraid such pathologizing of normal sexual attraction might be a factor affecting any number of social problems today (reduced sex lives, lower marriage rate, transitioning, etc).
Also: the women in “This American Life” didn’t all have higher testosterone than the men; there was one woman who had much higher testosterone than the other women.
I personally enjoyed the notion that the average male NPR reporter has the T level of a gallon of oatmeal milk while the average female NPR reporter is sweating pure T crystals through her masculinized brow.
Yes, I believe normal male levels are exponentially higher than normal female levels—for the women to have tested higher than men they would have had to be taking exogenous testosterone.
The amount of confusion about these hormones is insane. Bob Ostertag’s book about hormones is an eye opener!
As a straight male with a lot of female feminist friends, this is something that has always worried me about american feminism - they conflate a man wanting to have sex with a woman with a man disrespecting a woman. Obviously the two do go hand in hand too often, but it is pretty natural for a man to want to have sex with a woman. The way he expresses that can be problematic, but the fact itself shouldn't be.
Ira Glass spoke at my college and named that as one of his favorite segments. He really admires Howard Stern, and wanted that segment to be like the Stern show.
So Jesse & Katie mentioned in this episode an old episode of This American Life. I remember the episode because I heard a presentation about it. But I don’t know the episode number. I looked on Wikipedia lists of episodes but couldn’t locate it. It was broadcast sometime before 2009.
I follow a woman on social media who is constantly posting photos of her adorable toddler and using them as a jumping point for political diatribes about how terrible the world is. There’s something profoundly distasteful about it to me, and I’ve struggled to put my finger on it. But I think Katie nailed it- having the physical safety to raise a healthy child is one of the greatest privileges on earth, and it’s narcissistic to constantly talk about how sad you are because of xyz tragedy. To be clear, I am deeply saddened by what’s happening in the middle east right now. But I have to be honest- if the tables were turned, I don’t think I would expect or even want people to be endlessly maudlin about my tragedy. Especially if they had little to no power to change the situation. I think the greatest way we can honor those who suffer (if we can’t change their material circumstances) is to send them our love and prayers, and then to fully live and embody our own lives.
It’s also obvious but ignored hypocrisy to claim the world is horrible and your own nation is responsible but reap the benefits of that nation’s “rapacity”. Its the “land-acknowledgement-but-keep-the-land” lifestyle. Virtue signaling but with actions that make the signaling clearly bullshit.
A school full of children being bombed by American missiles is bad, it's shameful and I would argue that as Americans (not sure you are, don't want to assume) we SHOULD be upset and ashamed about this, should demand better from our military, should feel some measure of disquiet. It isn't "just life." It's a war crime, actually.
You know nothing about me or what I want, I am disgusted about the double tap strike on the Iranian school. Prove that "if it wasn't this it would be whatever the other thing about the war" (that's not even a sentence, btw.) I have plenty to be mad about, don't you ever fucking project your shit onto me again.
The war is to remove a regime that has terrorised its population for generations. If you had offered those people one school for all the other lives lost, I'm sure they would have taken it.
You've just amortised their suffering so aren't as sad about it.
You don't know what you're talking about, nor do you know what I've "amortised" (pretty sick metaphor to accuse me of by the way). Do you know anyone from Iran? I do, and she is equally heartbroken at the atrocities of the regime and the atrocities of the United States Military, and she would absolutely reject your disgusting "offer ." You also seem confused about the purpose of this engineered war as well as regime change in general, I would recommend this recent interview with Michael Hudson, it might enlighten you. https://youtu.be/htA0_7BSHHs?si=TsXs4YlWUy7rurlY
Calm down. I do know lots of people from Iran, yes. I lived with several of them at university, and we are still friends. Does that suddenly make me someone you'd listen to now, or what?
I'll watch that interview, thanks. But I don't think I'm confused about anything? I think this is a poorly messaged and poorly planned version of a better war, but it's the war we've got, and it's a necessary war.
Lol, nice touch telling me to calm down. No thanks. I reject that kind of patronizing stuff, I don't accept it, sorry.
Are you in touch with your friends from university? Do you know beyond a shadow of a doubt they would trade one school full little girls for everyone who died in Iran prior? Are you willing to make that claim and provide evidence for it?
You began this by ascribing a hideous metaphor of ledgers and debts to my understanding and conception of lives lost during a war my country is waging on another country with my tax dollars.
Hope you like the interview. I think you have been successfully propagandized to about what the United States is doing and why.
In high school saying “peace in the Middle East” as a goodbye was pretty common. Which is to say the place has been constantly in conflict for a long ass time.
Jesse is very pro-Mandani, it's pretty weak. "I don't think Mamdani is trying to cover it up." Hmm, so Mamdani just accidentally bashed Americans legally protesting, and implied that Lang's side became violent...by accident? That seems pretty hard to do accidentally.
Jesse crushing the millennial male references this episode with both Alive with the Glory of Love (a staple of my High School Driving Around playlist) and Dick in a Box.
The lack of basic historical knowledge on is maddening. Most of human history, everyone was pretty much on the edge of subsistence. Per capita consumption was pretty flat from like the beginning of agriculture until the early modern era. Something like 20% of people didn’t see the age of 5. Even the wealthy were a bad harvest or a bad infection away from death. That’s assuming someone doesn’t invade your home, enslaving those they don’t murder, while raping all the women. This was warfare until the 16th century in Western Europe, and until like the 19th century everywhere else. This only changed, slowly, first in the West after centuries of exhaustion, the enlightenment, and the development of capitalism. That’s when we start seeing wealth creation and improvements in..everything related to human flourishing.
It looks like a tomahawk hit a school on or near an IRGC facility, which is absolutely terrible and shouldn’t have happened, as a result of dated intelligence. But how many of the same people, like McMansionHell lady or Freddie De Boer, 1) celebrated October 7th or 2) denied the well documented sexual violence. It’s dumb Chomskyite drivel.
Here's an amazing story from the Calvin Coolidge entry on Wikipedia:
The Coolidges had two sons: John (1906–2000) and Calvin Jr. (1908–1924). On June 30, 1924, Calvin Jr. played tennis with his brother on the White House tennis courts without putting on socks and developed a blister on one of his toes. The blister subsequently degenerated into sepsis. He died a little over a week later at the age of 16.
So the son of the President of the United States of America dies from playing tennis at the White House without socks only 103 years ago. That's unimaginable today but it happened.
Even mid-century America - it is often looked upon with nostalgia. By modern standards, 1950s Americans lived in poverty. It was a huge improvement over even 20 years ago, let alone the 19th century. Some of that nostalgia is from the fact that most people remember their childhoods positively, the 60s were tumultuous, and the 70s sucks, and the Boomers dominated culture for a long time. A lot of it is historical ignorance.
A lot of people take prosperity and “progress” as a linear thing. In fact, it’s a very fragile thing, and it can be lost. There is a reason the early medieval period was called the dark ages, and the Renaissance means. Much of the knowledge of the Greco-Roman world was lost to those in the lands of the former Western Roman Empire. The engineering model to build things, like aqueducts, known in antiquity, were lost, for generations. Lots of ancient texts were in private libraries and in the greek-speaking East, but collected dust.
All four of my grandparents had multiple siblings who don’t make it to adulthood. They went though periods of extreme poverty- at a time when being poor meant you were skinny because you couldn’t afford food.
During the depression one of
My grandpas was a lawyer. I have a letter my grandma wrote during that time. She tells her friend that her husband needs eyeglasses to do his work, and she needs better shoes for her lame foot so she can walk better. They are trying to figure out who should get what because they can’t afford both. They both work in their garden all the time to secure the extra food they need.
Across town, my other grandpa, a laid off autoworker, tried to find whatever day laborer job he could so his family could eat. Most days it was cabbage soup; on an excellent day they had a bit of meat they could add to it.
Anytime I hear people who regularly order door dash complain about things, I have a little bit of disgust.
This is one of my issues with the wellness/MAHA crowd - they ignore that while we are fatter than we've ever been, we are also living a lot longer and are generally healthier in a lot of ways. most of my elder relatives didn't live past 70, they had siblings that died much younger, and several of them died in their 50s. That has changed a lot during my lifetime, largely due to people smoking less and changes in modern medicine. Granted, we do eat too much crap and don't exercise enough, but this idea that we are totally unhealthy doesn't jibe with my experience. My grandfather was thin and died in his 50s.
I think this, the virtue signaling that your feelings make you morally superior, is the thing I hate the most. It used to be a churchy rightwing thing mostly. I go to church more, tithe more. As a teenager it was straight edge youth group shit where I saw it most. Now the left has ascended culturally and have the same lazy religiosity.
It’s the laziest form of ego boosting “achievement”. Its enough to feel bad about a thing, maybe some shitposting slactivism or sign shaking at what is basically a social event, thats all thats needed to be A Better Person Than Thou.
The worst thing is that their actions make it clear they don’t really GAF, they just wish to appear virtuous, all while benefitting from that which they lazily decry. Its such hypocritical bullshit, just sticks in my craw.
Hmm, I see what you're pointing at, and I don't disagree as such, so far as you take it. But I think there are elements of conservative thought which also espouse that same externality - immigrants are dangerous and local culture is unable to sufficiently defend itself, the path to success is through following of tradition rather than individual ingenuity and action, etc. But maybe the effect of this is offset by the focus on discipline and personal responsibility
I totally agree with Katie that most of people who claim that the world is too fucked up to have kids don’t want kids anyway and are using the news as an excuse.
My advice (about to have my third kid) is always that if you’re on the fence about having kids, you should do it. You’ll be too busy fetching snacks and wiping butts to stay overly invested in the news. Plus, the libs need to reproduce - it’s not like conservatives are slowing down.
100%.
Fact is, having kids kills your social life. Dead. Unless you're an absolute piece of trash of a parent, you're not going out and partying all night every week and sleeping in till 3pm anymore. Even if you're ever single again, no more guilt free one night stands. Hobbies? Yeah. You have a hobby now. Not the ones you had.
And that's why so many younger adults don't want kids. They're not "fun". They're a huge obligation.
Now, they're also great. Rewarding, "best thing I ever did" all true, but blah blah blah.
When I was growing up, young adults that didn't do the "graduate from high school immediate job/marriage/kids" thing said they didn't want kids cause they wanted to party and hang out with friends.
Now, they say "because the world is so terrible" because it sounds more noble. BS, imo.
Yeah my most boring/conservative/trad early middle age belief is that actually marriage and kids and at least a loose affiliation to organized religion is good for most of the population.
I think community is good for human well being. I think being part of a religious community is good.
I also think not thinking is good. As in, the more you can delegate decisions to some kind of authority the less stressed you feel. It sounds bad, but it's an essential heuristic people need to not get overwhelmed by the minutiae of day to day decisions.
Religion seems particularly suited to satisfy those needs for a lot of people.
I don't think religion is necessary. Maybe not even optimal or ideal. But it's easy and generally available to most people in the US.
I think the Western cultures where you see low religiosity that seems to work are ones with a very clearly defined cultural identity. So that national and cultural identity provides that role.
And, yeah, marriage and kids can do that too. All of a sudden you _care_ about shit in your community that you really didn't have a vested interest in before. And the _reasons_ you care are shared with...all the other parents and it binds you together despite any other differences.
"As in, the more you can delegate decisions to some kind of authority the less stressed you feel."
Not only is there some comfort in outsourcing these tough decisions, it's also true that religious tradition has the advantage of being tested against real world conditions for centuries.
I mean, I think religion satisfies a need for community.
I think it's a pretty poor source answers to the more fundamental questions in life regarding health, happiness, and what its good and ethical.
In many ways, it's been tested and failed epically over and over again.
For example, it's true that in low trust societies (like the US) religiosity is correlated with higher happiness scores. But in high trust societies it is not. Which implies it is the foundation of communal trust that is the "magic sauce" to increasing relative happiness....not religion per se.
And historically, it's an objective fact that across all measures of well-being people are better off today compared to 100, 200, etc years ago. . . . and they are significantly less religious. The main driver being improvements across the board in economics, health, life expectancy, etc. So not _caused_ by less religion..
But is a concrete demonstration that other factors outside of religion are far, far more important to increasing the baseline happiness for any given community.
I think marriage and kids is the right choice in terms of their personal long-term happiness for 90-95% of people. Now I would prefer a lot of people unsuited to being responsible parents actually didn't have kids, but just from a selfish perspective I think it is a no brainer.
It is how we are wired and it makes the existential angst so much less biting.
Whenever these annoying online people say they don't want kids, I want to say "no backsies!"
The research shows the benefit comes from an affiliation to any social community. The religion of that community is incidental.
On a society-wide level religiosity is correlated with less prosperity, well-being, and egalitarianism (think Norway vs. Romania or Massachusetts vs. Mississippi). Though, I suspect religiosity may help some individuals suppress their anti-social inclinations.
"the research" …. ?
What a boorish question. Please refrain from interrupting the omniscient one’s revelations.
Yes. You see, when you pay attention to things other than internet bullshit, you tend to learn about the scientific consensus on meaningful issues. Give it a try!
I'm a scientist in a university, as are very many other people who comment on this podcast. What I mean is: what research?
If you think there are simple answers to the questions of the psychology of religion, that's an anti-intellectual point of view that is obstructive and frankly not welcome, at least not where I work.
here is one perspective, from a clinician rather than a social scientist:
https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/docs/default-source/members/sigs/spirituality-spsig/resources/spirituality-special-interest-group-publications-simon-dein-religion-and-mental-health-current-findings.pdf
I agree with you both that the “I don’t want kids because the world is so bad” excuse is largely bullshit, and most people who don’t want to be parents just aren’t interested in having kids, don’t want to do the work of parenting day-to-day, don’t want to change their lifestyle, etc. (which are perfectly legitimate reasons IMO, and forcing someone into parenthood who doesn’t want it is bad for everyone involved, especially the kid). But I understand why people feel the need to come up with a more “noble” rationale, since people who don’t want kids - and especially women - are constantly called selfish and some people get extremely, irrationally angry about it.
I only have one kid and have been called selfish for it by people who have no idea what my life circumstances have been. I feel like it’s better to tell those nosy shame-y weirdos to fuck off (or annoy them further by saying “yep, super selfish!”) instead of making up excuses about how you’re not actually selfish or whatever.
I’m sorry you’ve experienced that. I’m childfree (kinda by choice, kinda by life circumstances, but I’m ultimately fine with it) and I’ve mostly dealt with that from anonymous dorks online whose opinion I don’t give a shit about. My response, if I were dragged into that conversation, would probably be to point out all the ways that choosing to have kids is also a selfish decision. (To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with “being selfish” when it comes to making decisions about your own future and having kids, whether or not one chooses to have them. But parents who are sanctimonious about having kids really hate to be called selfish and it usually shuts them up haha.)
That sounds a little absurd. It's hard for me to figure out how that comes up in conversation to begin with.
Why don't they keep the shit talking about other parents between them and their spouses where it belongs!?
Everyone I know said they were waiting to be married and financially stable first. No one wanted to party. They wanted to like, finush paying their loans from grad school.
As my mother said...."honey, you never think you can afford kids. You just do it and it works."
I think people are terrible at telling you the truth about why they do things.
There's been ample effort in other countries to address the affordability issue. In some countries, that already have extensive social programs for kids/parents, they literally offered to pay people to have kids. Cold hard cash plus free child care.
It had no measurable effect on birth rates.
When people say "I can't afford kids for...reasons" I think what they're actually saying is "I'd have to make sacrifices to my current baseline standard of living, free time, etc. And I don't want to do that. If I had more money, I could keep what I have now and afford kids."
But it's a moving target. Once you make more money, you have a new standard of living you want to maintain and there are still sacrifices to make.
I might be flippantly describing that in maximally selfish terms of "I want to party". But I do think these are more socially acceptable euphemistic proxies to "I don't want to make trade offs to have kids."
But....there's no way around that. Having kids is fundamentally a trade off.
That's why parents do things like....move out of the expensive urban area where they can't afford a 4 bedroom apartment into the suburbs and make a 1h commute. The entire idea of "settling down" is the process of making trade offs for your kids.
> Unless you're an absolute piece of trash of a parent, you're not going out and partying all night every week and sleeping in till 3pm anymore. Even if you're ever single again, no more guilt free one night stands.
Zoomers don't do any of this anyway though, right?
In zoomer terms, you can't raise kids while being hyper online and staring at your phone all day. You have to actually put it down and take care of someone else.
And you can't play MMO's till 4am then sleep all day either.
You don't get to play video games either.
yeah. Tell me about it. My console is there more for inspiration and to remind me of simpler times. lol
It's (parenting) just a change in social life, not a deadening. Little league games and open house and hanging with the kids is better than anything else I've experienced. Plus most of your friends also have kids so you hang with them and the kids and it's great.
This is totally true, especially as we get older and many of our friends have kids - the people without kids become the minority in our previous social circles, and all the parents naturally gravitate away from their childfree friends and start having “kid friendly” hangs or socializing at their kids’ activities without us. Unless you already have a large circle of friends who also don’t have kids, being childfree in middle age can actually be more isolating than being a parent, especially because it’s hard for older people to make new friends (and extra especially if you don’t live in an urban area). I think people who have kids young can definitely feel left out as their friends continue to do the party/bar thing, but this kind of flips at a certain point and the older people without children are the left out ones. All my friends with kids have very active social lives.
Yes, those things are awesome. I do really enjoy them. And I enjoy the more community centered, grounded conversations I have today.
But that's my "today self" talking. I'm pretty sure my 22 year old self would have found much of the same activities and conversations the definition of torturous boredom.
But...I was pretty over the top wild. Almost constantly in trouble. And would have absolutely been more comfortable hanging with Keith Richards over Danny Tanner.
Sounds like my 22 (or 25) yr old self would have enjoyed hanging with yours for sure. Never hit Keith level but not for lack of trying.
It keeps moving in the direction you describe as years pass (just hit 60 here) But hanging with kids and friends around fire pit with goods tunes going ain't too bad. Just the evolution of the process, passing the torch.
Though kids bring you a new social life, weirdly like university with all sorts of different people throw together at the school gate.
Yes, it does. But it's very different. And very centered on the kids.
Yes true. However, I have noticed my child-free friends slowing down anyway, or becoming seedy and sad.
Not true at all.
But, the community you build with other parents is much different than the pre-kids friendships.
This is so true. Another benefit I’ve personally noticed about having kids is that it also makes you too busy to ruminate too much about what’s going on with you internally. It forces you to refocus outside of yourself which I think can be really helpful, especially for people who tend towards internalization (including myself here). I used to be the type of person who thought everyone should be in therapy, until I had kids and realized most of the issues I felt like I needed therapy for just kind of went away.
Congrats on baby 3! I have 3 also, it’s the best :)
Fellow three-kidder here and I can’t agree with this enough. Nothing snaps me out of my ruminating tendencies than the actual real-world needs that only I can attend to for my children.
This was my experience exactly.
So glad I never felt the need for an excuse for why I didn't want to have kids.
Although, now I realize it was because I was terrified to have kids with a bad man or a man who couldn't provide for a family. And I refused to entertain marriage proposals from any guy who "definitely wanted kids", because I wanted to be loved for myself and not because I could provide children to someone.
It's so obvious now that I simply hadn't met the right man.
Now I have. We could have had kids when we first met, he even suggested it. But at that time, I did not trust enough.
Now I do, and now it's too late - but I honestly don't think I made a "wrong decision" at any point. I know exactly why I made those choices and I respect mysel for making them. Having children is the most serious thing a person can do. It's mind boggling to me how many people seem to treat as just something that happens, dont bother being married, don't think about who will raise them, etc.
This is a great post. It amazes me how many people assume that a woman who just ends up without kids as a result of going through life and having the chips fall that way must be SO MISERABLE and feel like a FAILURE. I mean obviously the people making this assumption are just not secure in their own lives and decisions, but still, it’s annoying, and I love seeing anecdotes like yours.
I also waited for the right man. Best decision of my life. We were able to have one, when he was 52. When I wanted another, six years later, he thought he would be too old to father and provide in the way he thinks a child deserves. That’s why he is the right one. Children deserve good fathers. Solidarity PNW
Are you 100% sure it's too late?
No, I suppose it's technically still possible. I do still have regular periods. But he has grandkids! I think he might be past the point of wanting any more children, even though he was down for it 10 years ago.
I have brought it up a couple times, saying that I regret not being open to it earlier, and he didn't have much to say, and certainly wasn't enthusiastic or encouraging. So yeah, I'm pretty sure it's too late.
It's ok. I mean, I'm probably going to die alone while Mr PNWGirl's daughters are chomping at the bit to get their hands on the house, but maybe my nephews will come to my funeral.
I totally disagree. If you're on the fence, don't do it. Kids deserve parents who are 100% committed and into it.
Agreed. I’ve seen FAR too many secret “I regret having kids/I love my kids but if I had it to do over again I wouldn’t” confessions to think it’s a responsible gamble. Children are not an experiment, there are no take backsies, and even mildly resentful/uninterested/regretful parents can really fuck an innocent child up for life.
Nahhhh, the people who write those essays or give those quotes to journalists are super unrepresentative. Most parents who stick around physically and don't get sucked into hardcore addiction rise to the occasion. Stats bear these claims out.
I’m referring to places like Reddit or other forums where people can speak anonymously - thousands of these stories out there (especially, sadly, amongst parents who have kids with disabilities). I’m sure there are just as many, if not more, parents who were on the fence at first and feel like they ultimately made the right decision to have kids. But my point like I said is I don’t think it’s a good thing to gamble on - the stakes are incredibly high. Great for the people it works out for, but much more awful for the people it doesn’t.
I disagree with your disagreement. Kids don’t need parents that are 100% committed after they are 6 or 12 years old. Kids should start to be independent and free at around 6 years old. Then they don’t need your 100%.
WTF dude.
I hope you're trolling with the advice "have kids if you're on the fence."
Having children is the most monumental decision that human beings make.
I've seen far too many parents who have no business being parents. I wish they had made a different decision.
I wonder if this discourse is skewed when everyone involved is college educated, professional managerial class.
You're not supposed to say this out loud but 95 percent of the poor parents I've witnessed come from the poor or working class.
Those of us on Substack may think only about the people who would be more likely to be good parents. We may not get exposure to the other side.
I interpret the "have kids if you're on the fence" as a "there is no way to be absolutely sure about some things for some of us, so it is okay to have some trepidation on this question too".
I don't think I ever felt fully ready, but as someone on the fence that had kids, I realized that I just had to make the call. It was the same with marriage, starting the search for a new job, etc. Very fee decisions in life have been 100% certainty, so I was setting a false standard for the children question.
I think making this the most monumental decision is what makes parenting feel overwhelming. For the vast majority of humanity people have had children. It may not have been right for every single person, and certainly not everyone was a good parent, but it has been a decent choice for the vast majority. The modern world makes this seem much harder because of the choices we have. I am not arguing whether the choice is bad, this is just natural output of the current system.
I was never "ready" and now I'm one of those annoying "best decision I ever made, most rewarding thing in my life" people (I think this, but don't say it to anyone except other parents, for the record). Fervor of the converted, I guess. But to an earlier point, I'm upper middle laptop class, can afford a great daycare, etc.
I was never ready either and honestly I probably shouldn't have done it, all things considered. So there's your counterexample.
Nothing annoying about admitting that you were not interested in being a parent. I wish more had your level of self-awareness.
I could understand some trepidation on the timing, but there shouldn't be any on the idea of having children.
You can't know what it's really like until you do it. It's pretty rational to have some trepidation about that. I was pretty sure from about age 20 that I wanted kids, and now I am blessed with two, but before having them there was always that little bit of doubt.
In my case, I really was not sure if I wanted kids. But I understood that I almost never am 100% in anything, so it fit the same pattern.
I like Pinker but I get the criticism. I think it's worth studying into his field. His intro-psych and Rationality courses are free online through Harvard.
Pinker claims he's watched students progressively underperform in his intro-psych course over 20 years despite though the course hasn't really changed much.
I think it's insight into the problem.
Also, you're busy wiping butts for a very short amount of time. Watching these people become their own selves is fascinating and fulfilling.
I'm about to have my third kid and all of mine at 3 years apart so I've been wiping butts for what feels like a really long time haha. But yes, parenthood is amazing.
People can’t imagine the impact of kids until they have them. I think pop culture makes parenting look like a total slog. Reality is they make us better people, and if all goes well we don’t die alone.
"Reality is they make us better people" Do you hear yourself? This is obviously false and a huge generalization.
It sounds like you have had a tough experience, and I'm sorry. Parenting is not for everyone. What I mean is that having kids (for many people) means we ourselves have to grow up and set good examples rather than giving into selfish pleasures or bad behavior.
And, frankly, your last phrase, "if all goes well we don't die alone"? This says a lot about your motivations and it isn't good.
No, you don't have to, at all. I don't understand why people say this. Becoming a parent doesn't turn people into magic responsible adults and there are no requirements that it do so. Your statement that "we have to grow up and set good examples" is simply false, through and through. No one has to do anything and parenthood does not change people.
I have a cousin who does this. The world being screwed up is a reason for him not to have kids or not to do anything substantial with his life. I tell him that is an excuse. If you don't want to be responsible for kids just say so.
I wrote about climate anxiety/depression a while ago, connecting it to the book of Ecclesiastes. https://thecholent.substack.com/p/depressed-read-kohelet
Am I scared about the state of the world? Yeah. But I think if that was my only reason, I probably would have had a kid. I spent most of my 20s and some of my early 30s with a dude who was chronically ill and who eventually turned abusive—I loved him, but I couldn’t imagine him doing half the work of raising a kid, and I was barely making enough money as it was. (And I didn’t have an STRONG desire for kids. And the world was going to shit. And I continued eating meat, so according to certain sources, the best way I could contribute environmentally was by not bringing another white American human into this world.) And then that all went to shit. Later I began seeing my current partner—the only person I’ve been able to envision myself having kids with…right as the pandemic hit. And we discussed kids several times. And I came to the conclusion that I care more about the raising of a kid than the carrying on of my DNA, so I would prefer to adopt (there’s been a long throughline of adoptions in my family’s history)—and for him, the genetic continuity would be more important. But it wasn’t a strong desire for either of us. And as I am rapidly nearing 40 and we haven’t revisited this in a while and I grow more used to our lives as they are, kids do not seem to be in the cards.
…But I am sponsoring the education and material needs of a three-year-old on the other side of the world now. I will probably never meet this kid. But alongside my friends’ and cousins’ kids, this gives me some stake in the future of our species.
I came here to say this is a good post, but also I really like your user name 😊
See my curse-free edit. I am changing. I’m trying to better hide my contempt for contemptuous ideas.
Speaking of, feel free to explain why you think religious social rituals and support networks are inherently better for well-being than secular social rituals and support networks.
Feel free to explain why societies that rank highest on human development rank lowest on religiosity.
If your position were true, we’d expect societies with low religiosity to also have low levels of human development and well-being.
How do you explain observations to the contrary?
Is it clearly understood how beach erosion happens? Reading Grok, the results seem to tell a story hermitically and conveniently circular.
Some beaches are artificial or artificially enlarged such as Miami Beach.
I find these narrative astrological circles potentially destructive speaking of depression. It's the center of my complaint with parts with my education or the expectations of dealing well with itter’s education.
A mystic reduction is essentially given religious prestige coupled with harmonious overconfidence.
One huge thing undiscussed in the "breach erosion" discourse is it is 100% natural and normal for a lot of these structures to move around all the time anyway. So even in totally undeveloped areas with zero human impact, you will go to a beach one year and it will be giant and amazing, and then some particular set of storms and currents for the next year will leave it 10% of its previous size. And some other beach 10 miles away will have grown.
That happens a lot.
Not that humans can't have negative impacts, but a huge portion of what gets written off or framed as "human impacted" or "climate change driven" beach erosion is actually just the sand wanting to move around as it naturally does and human developments/visitors not being ok with it because humans want everything to stay the same.
Some of the really high profile "beach rescue" projects are more about people fighting nature than people "preserving" nature.
I'm a foil hatter when it comes to climate change in that I think it's intentionally been used as a way to distract from other environmental issues in part because the solution is MORE CAPITALISM.
100% climate change isn’t 1/20th the problem all the human land use and overexploitation (particularly of fish) is.
Climate change will subtlety change a forest over centuries. Pasting it over with a ranch or farm or sub development will immediately nearly completely destroy it. It is hugely worse and driving much more extinction.
Yeah, thank you. That's what I figured. It's not that I doubt Climate Change, although it's funny I just capitalized it for some reason, I think the political narrative reductions have consequences. It's not just Climate, either. Evolution is another. You can believe it as an item but take care you don't learn so much about it you undermine the activist modes in the first place. How dare a person understand their own politically leveraged confusion
It's also so unromantic to be sequestered off rgetirucally and through wonky knowledge from actually having novel ideas. I know that's not entirely true but it's no wonder at all that conspiracy theorizing is the new original sin.
Also if you are a rich person whose needs millions of dollars to preserve your beach "climate change is ruining our beach", or even "human development is ruining our beach" makes a much more compelling argument to the public/government for funding than "the beaches move around on yearly or decadal timeframes and I just didn't understand much about the beach when I built my property here".
As you said climate change absolutely is an issue for some tiny number of beaches, and human development for a much larger set of them. But people have this religious desire to pretend the natural world is stagnant when it isn't.
You are bang on the money here. We build entire cities around beaches. It is deeply inconvenient to the investors that nature moves them.
I've seen this dichotomy of liberal vs conservative happiness quotient up close.
My most progressive friend couldn't go out of the house for at least a week after Russia invaded Ukraine because she was furious that people kept on living their lives. She actually said, "I can't stand people being happy while there's a war on." You can imagine her state of mind today.
On the opposite side, I volunteer in an organization (must be vague here) and the woman I work with, her eldest daughter, and husband are all undocumented from a Latin American country. She is also one of the most cheerful, happy people I know, despite the fact that she is vigilant about ICE. I believe this is because she is extremely religious and believes that God will protect her and her family.
The undocumented woman is grateful to be in the U.S. despite all its flaws. My friend is ashamed to be American. It's not a mystery why one is depressed and one isn't.
The news algorithms are designed to make us perpetually angry and upset, and it clearly works on a large set of the population. It's sad. A lot of people are wasting away the best years of their lives being angry at people and situations they have absolutely no contact nor control over.
Not that you shouldn't be aware of what's going on in the world, but I don't think a tenth of the perpetually outraged class of citizens here in the west have even taken a glimpse into the truly horrible events going on outside the Eurosphere, such as in the Congo or Sudan. That stuff would actually make me queasy seeing daily.
My life has been so much better since I stopped watching the TV news.
Agree 100%
I think volunteering with disadvantaged people really helps keep depression at bay. Also faith in God
They don't need to do that. They're better informed than you because they're more educated and have done the work.
Best advice I can give to someone feeling furious about people living their lives when terrible shit is happening is—don’t go to the mall, or the grocery store, or the club (not at first). Go to the woods. Take a walk in nature, listen to birds, touch a tree, feel the water of a stream running over your hands or feet. Lie down in the grass and look at the sky. I have been in that state of mind before and I know for a fact that that EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE SUCKS mindframe will not resolve by holing up in your apartment and doomscrolling, but that going to places where the purpose is Normal Everyday Living can be exhausting and jarring. Being in nature is the only thing that helps reset me.
This is has been my experience. Most of my friends that are overtly liberal never share good news without disclaimers on how the world is messed up. There is also the constant therapy talk with most advocating for therapy as routine maintenence. I can't even do book clubs with them anymore because they don't want to read fun books. Its the same few topics presented in different ways all the time.
Did your progressive friend realize that there is rarely a time on this planet where you can’t find a war happening somewhere? Is she OK with people being happy when the war is somewhere far away in the Third World like Myanmar? Was she happy at all during the Syrian Civil War? Only mentioning because it’s a golden opportunity to call an anti-racist racist for not becoming over invested in wars that have nothing to do with her life.
She believes ALL war is evil, wherever it is. However, there are gradations. When I asked why she wasn't as outraged by the Syrian Civil War as she was by the war in Gaza, she said because America wasn't allied with Syria. A lot is about being ashamed of this country.
…Does she think the US should have sat out World War 2 on the grounds that war is evil?
In my experience, they believe that war was justified against the Nazis because otherwise what's the point of calling everyone Nazis?
The question of whether any particular act of war against the nazis was justifiable is almost always "I would have done it differently". If you ask them what we should have done about Imperial Japan, I suspect you will the response you would expect to get from someone who forgot that Japan fought in WW2.
I've been afraid to ask...
Her father served in the Navy, so maybe she thinks that war was justified.
Also, as a classical violinist, it actually does matter to be able to bridge feel, cognition, and physics without corrupting perception psychology.
I'm starting to suspect that you are an AI.
The second woman is just delusional in a different way. Will she still be happy when it turns out there's nothing or nobody protecting her from being deported?
I don't think she's delusional unless you feel belief in God is delusional, which you might. Rather, she feels God will ultimately protect her and her family and if she is sent back to her country, she and her family will start again.
The belief that her belief will protect her is delusional yes. I suppose being delusionally happy is better than deluding yourself into being miserable.
I find my progressive friends very exhausting to be around because of this, at times.
I can’t help feeling part of the reason young people are more depressed is because it’s their first time getting all this bad news. I’m in my 40s and I’ve seen enough of these things go around multiple times in my lifetime that they just don’t have the same effect on me. I think I’ve been through three over-population panics, of course there was the ozone layer, global warming, the panic about the drop in the birth rate which can somehow exist at the same time as over-population panic. I have personally witnessed at least twice when traditional sea shanties became mainstream. The more cycles you live through, the less they should panic you.
I participated in one of the 7 waves of ska, which might explain why I'm a bit less panicky than other people
I’m 53 and was thinking the same exact thing. I was mentally going over all the imminent environmental catastrophes I’d heard about all my life, beginning with (as you mentioned) overpopulation as a kid (and you left off the disappearance of the rain forest at that)
I got really obsessed and kinda panicky with the idea of “peak oil” back around the late 90s, I think Kunstler was the guy I was reading a lot who was pushing that. Now that that’s turned out to be another obvious panic, I’ve chilled out on just about all of it.
The rainforest! I forgot about that! And that’s right, we were supposed to run out of oil by now, right?
I’m 47 and I remember living under the threat of nuclear annihilation. Things are better now
The threat of nuclear annihilation never went away, we just stopped talking about it as much
There's also this issue where environmental problems that were successfully mitigated look overblown in hindsight, because we don't see the counterfactual where we did nothing. Ozone depletion was addressed by the Montreal Protocol, which banned certain ozone-depleting substances internationally. Acid rain was addressed through scrubbers at coal power plants and much more stringent emissions requirements on vehicles. I don't endorse panic or making yourself miserable, but it's also not totally reasonable to just shrug and assume everything will work out. Maybe in some perfect world the regulators and experts would solve these problems on their own, but in the real world it can take a big push to overcome inertia and regulatory capture.
I think when it comes to climate change that some of the predictions of doom are unrealistic even in a "do nothing" scenario, and this is bad and it destroys credibility while also making people feel the situation is hopeless (which ironically removes the energy to do anything about it). On the other hand I can definitely understand people freaking out that we aren't doing enough. Our whole global civilization pretty much runs on fossil fuels so it's a vastly bigger project than just phasing out certain refrigerants or whatever.
Well, you could argue that knowing the world has been able to take action in the past to avert disaster means you wouldn’t panic or get depressed.
That’s basically what happened each time with overpopulation concerns. The pace of agricultural improvement has consistently been higher than population growth, so after a while it’s reasonable to conclude that will continue happening.
I'm going to be a pedantic twat here but I can't help myself. The description of the Schrodinger's Cat experiment and its purported significance was brutally inaccurate. To be fair, most physicists also get it wrong, so I can't totally blame Jesse. But I'm still going to.
The setup: a cat is placed in a totally opaque box along with a capsule of cyanide, a mechanism for detecting particle decay, and some small amount of an unstable element. If and when the mechanism detects that the element has decayed, it smashes the capsule which releases the cyanide which kills the cat. The timing of the decay is fundamentally probabilistic.
The puzzle: on the classical picture of the world, there is one right answer to the question 'Is the cat alive or dead?' at any given time after the box is closed and before the box is opened, i.e. either the cat is alive, or it is dead. But the mathematics of quantum mechanics seems to say that, in fact, the cat-capsule-detector system is in a state of superposition such that there is no fact of the matter about whether the cat is alive or dead at a given moment, only a certain probability for each scenario. (Importantly, these probabilities are somehow about the world itself, not our ignorance about it) That is, until we open the box and check. But as long as we don't open it, the cat is apparently both alive and dead in some sense.
The popular belief is that the experiment shows that the world is somehow affected by our 'observing' or 'measuring' it. But this is exactly the opposite of what Schrodinger concluded. He took it as a reductio argument against the claim that quantum mechanics is a complete theory. Of course there's a fact of the matter about whether the cat is alive or dead at any given moment. Einstein actually made the same point earlier using barrels of gunpowder (I think) in his example. Their point is that the conclusion of the thought experiment is so obviously absurd that quantum mechanics cannot be a complete theory even at the micro level.
TLDR: the thought experiment was originally meant to demonstrate the incompleteness of quantum mechanics. Only later did people misunderstand it as affirming what Schrodinger thought was self-evidently absurd.
TLDRTLDR: Jesse hates science.
I am sitting in a box next to some decaying cesium which made reading this summary superpositionally enjoyable and annoying!
Superpositioned and thriving!
Thank you! I was quite annoyed listening to that summary.
I have had this explained to me so many times and I still don’t get it!
It’s either dead or alive!
It sounds like you agree with Schrodinger.
"But the mathematics of quantum mechanics seems to say that, in fact, the cat-capsule-detector system is in a state of superposition such that there is no fact of the matter about whether the cat is alive or dead at a given moment, only a certain probability for each scenario."
That's fundamentally correct, as I understand it: there is no fact about the matter of if the cat is alive or dead; there are probabilities, and those probabilities are the *actual* state. I *think* the point here is that it's absurd to believe that until the "particle-wave" interacts with something, it's not in an actual state that we'd recognize. I think the problem with this thought experiment is that the particle-wave of the decay *is* interacting with something: the detector. As soon as it does that, we get a decoherence and the cat dies.
However, you then go on to state that "the cat is both alive and dead in some sense." But it is not both alive and dead, not really. The double-slit experiment makes that clear, though hard to "understand" using metaphors from our world. If you look at superposition, something "real" actually happens, but it's simply not something we can describe with our normal knowledge: it's radically un-intuitive because it suggests a world that is far, far less static (metaphysically) than it seems to be -- that effectively, all of reality is a process of probabilities colliding with each other and sort of "resolving" (I think the term used is "decohereing") into what we experience. If you're into this sort of thing, here's a pretty good video summary (it's still reasonably long at 20 minutes, but it's pretty accessible -- I'm certainly not a physicist).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkHFXZvRNns
Actually, let me just refine myself here: under Many Worlds Interpretation, I suppose it's accurate to say that the cat is both alive and dead. But not in any sense that we have access to or interacts with our reality in any way.
What is it about Mamdani that makes normies feel comfortable? The man has *vowed to arrest the Israeli Prime Minister*. His city hosts the UN. Do you think that he's lying about that? Why does that make you more comfortable? Do you think that this is acceptable?
If your starting point for this argument comes from your belief that Netanyahu has an arrest warrant out for him, I BEG you to do some research on the difference between the international court of justice (ICJ) and the international criminal court (ICC), why the US and Israel are not party to the Rome Statute, and the US posture towards the ICC generally. It is inexcusable, at this point, to be reporting on this without understanding the difference.
If you don't care about the arrest warrant, and just assume that the Israeli PM is guilty of war crimes, then I beg you to remember that these allegations are brought to you by the same people who call denying children access to hormones genocide. The people who include details about the people killed in airstrikes like "soccer coach" but omit details like "member of Hezbollah" in a transparent attempt to *ameliorate the actions of a man who tried to blow up a preschool*.
Mamdani can be absolute trash on that issue, but you have to admit, Bibi has pretty much made it his mission to alienate normies worldwide since October 7th. I don't subscribe to the "he helped facilitate Hamas' attack" worldview, but the guy is clearly corrupt and letting the absolute worst side of Israeli politics guide his decisions (settler violence, expansion, etc.), and Trump is outright demanding the Israeli justice system acquit him of crimes he pretty clearly committed. You can generally support Israel's right to exist while also think Bibi should go.
You're a violent extremist if you think that arresting the Israeli head of state is not a *disqualifying* position for the New York mayor to hold.
The role of a normie is typically to assume that things are too complicated to understand, and unweight their confidence accordingly. Journalists act against this impulse, by pushing people into the dunning-kruger valley with a particular set of facts. If you allow this to get done to you, you stop being able to call yourself a normie.
Let's take the corruption charges as an example. Donors donate to politicians that represent their interests. The question of whether any such activity constitutes corruption is *always* something that can be investigated if you're going to run a democracy on political donations,
The most corrupt institution in Israel is it's least democratic one, the high court. This institution (along with the office of the chief prosecutor) has used this investigation into Netanyahu donors to forcibly limit Netanyahu's participation in his own government. If you are unwilling to look at the details of the case rather than wikipedia's summary, then just understand that this case has been in trial for 6 years, and by *FAR* the main effect that it has had is the injunction issued by the office of the prosecutor to prevent Bibi from exerting any influence over the institution of the court and the office of the prosecutor itself. This is a massive injunction to impose on the PM. It should therefore be noted that this injunction occurs against a strong proponent of judicial reform.
At least consider the *possibility* that you have victim and offender reversed.
I don’t think that any position that is about a foreign country’s president is disqualifying for a mayor whose job is to actually run a city. I also know that we live in a country where we have the president constantly talking about arresting all his political rivals and yet we just focus on the mayor of New York as being the one who’s a problem, even though he’s never gonna do anything to the head of Israel.
You have a misunderstanding of the distribution of powers in American democracy. The mayor of New York is utterly subordinate to the Federal government in matters of foreign policy. Period.
Again, if you believe that Mamdani is lying about this plan, you must explain why that is ok, and if you do not, then you are an extremist, and I beg you to realize that.
I think that you confuse a pledge of a mayor around holding up international law with an actual threat. He’s not gonna do anything to him because he’s just not capable of it. I think it’s a campaign pledge that’s not gonna go anywhere.
I also know that the federal government is trying to arrest people and actually has the power to do it and that’s a lot more concerning.
The mayor of New York is absolutely endowed with the power to have people arrested in New York. "Upholding international law", in this case, is in express contravention of federal law. I think the word treason is actually appropriate. Mamdani is not an agent of any state that has a treaty recognizing the ICC. The president is, and I have said this probably 8 times on this forum, *preauthorized to bomb the netherlands* in the event that the ICC attempted to prosecute an allied head of state.
The whataboutism is not appreciated.
I really do not give a shit about Israel or the New York mayor's stance on it. It really is that easy, a lot of people don't care so much about the same issues that you do care about.
you care about the constitution presumably though? The issue at hand is not Israel. It's the Mayor of New York vowing to arrest a head of state because he's a fucking lunatic.
I follow Substacker in Israel who is 8 months pregnant with a long-awaited first child, and she has been running in and out of the shelters several times a day for the past few weeks like everyone else. Her hospital has moved all operations, including labor and delivery, deep underground. She is not stressing. I think a lot of us Jews are keenly aware that our predecessors went through a hell of a lot to get us to be walking on the planet today, and that to voluntarily snip the chain that connects us back millennia, to end our line, would be a tragedy greater than whatever the doomers are talking about. Whatever you do, you must survive, you must continue to bring forth life.
Thank you for this beautiful post
That’s a main reason for why Israel is constantly ranked in the top happiest countries. The ability to carry on with your life, rejoice in the mundane, and continue to bring children into this world despite everything going on there shows what thousands of years of resilience can do for a people.
It also helps with perspective for any Jews who may be nervous about the current state of affairs in the diaspora. We live in the best time to be a Jew in our entire history. We have the ability to defend ourselves and our ancestors would kill to be in our shoes.
The progressive worldview is that nothing can ever be done about anything because that would be immoral. Sounds pretty fucking depressing to me.
There are also an infinite number of enemies around every corner and you have to be constantly vigilant or you might become one of them by forgetting one of the prayers you're supposed to say.
“ might become one of them by forgetting one of the prayers you're supposed to say.”
This got a whimpering depressed laugh at the state of the world.
I thought that was the conservative worldview.
Conservatives aren't allergic to doing things, they're allergic to changing how we do things.
Unless it’s for a good reason.
I was trying to produce a description about as glib as the one I gave of progressives
I went to college at Bryn mawr with the individual on This American Life! My parents told me about that interview at the time, and I had SMOKE COMING OUT OF MY EARS at that goddamn math and science comment. Still do. F that. (I was a physics major, bryn mawr was second only to MIT in raw numbers of female physics majors at the time)
Yeah, that was a terrible comment at the time. Did prove that testosterone can really make you come off as insensitive asshole.
Fascinating. I still remember snickering in shock at my desk at that quote. I didn't know how to feel about it! But man, that was indeed an unforgettable episode.
I also remember that This American Life episode. In my imperfect memory, the lesbian woman on testosterone (because she identifies as a man) is talking about what a good feminist she is but how upset she is that the testosterone makes her lust after strange women on the street. She’s “objectifying” them as sex objects! Oh no! She imagines having sex with them—and she can’t help herself. She feels bad and guilty about it.
That was a moment in which I (a normal heterosexual woman who considers herself a feminist) realized that feminism, at least the kind this trans identified woman believed, had pathologized normal heterosexual male sexuality. There’s nothing wrong with lusting after women. That’s not assault or rape. It’s normal. Attacking women is bad, but finding them attractive—well, that’s good. It’s not sexism to be attracted to a woman.
I’m afraid such pathologizing of normal sexual attraction might be a factor affecting any number of social problems today (reduced sex lives, lower marriage rate, transitioning, etc).
Also: the women in “This American Life” didn’t all have higher testosterone than the men; there was one woman who had much higher testosterone than the other women.
Why let the truth get in the way of a good story?
I personally enjoyed the notion that the average male NPR reporter has the T level of a gallon of oatmeal milk while the average female NPR reporter is sweating pure T crystals through her masculinized brow.
It's factually established!
Yes, I believe normal male levels are exponentially higher than normal female levels—for the women to have tested higher than men they would have had to be taking exogenous testosterone.
The amount of confusion about these hormones is insane. Bob Ostertag’s book about hormones is an eye opener!
https://www.umasspress.com/9781625342133/sex-science-self/
As a straight male with a lot of female feminist friends, this is something that has always worried me about american feminism - they conflate a man wanting to have sex with a woman with a man disrespecting a woman. Obviously the two do go hand in hand too often, but it is pretty natural for a man to want to have sex with a woman. The way he expresses that can be problematic, but the fact itself shouldn't be.
Yes, I think this is such a misguided belief—possibly an overcorrection. It conflates normal desire with oppression.
And people wonder why marriage and birth rates are down, etc.
Ira Glass spoke at my college and named that as one of his favorite segments. He really admires Howard Stern, and wanted that segment to be like the Stern show.
On the episode about the psychopath test, didn’t Glass test high in psychopathy? Or am I wishcasting?
I don't think women appreciate just HOW domesticated men are and how much we have tempered our impulses in order to be compatible with civilization.
A man who makes it past teenhood polite and does not making his ogling obvious represents a mastery of control.
Yep, it was a revealing interview, and last I relistened to the episode, I thought it held up well.
What episode is this? A B&R one? Help me out here.
I found it, This American Life #220
So Jesse & Katie mentioned in this episode an old episode of This American Life. I remember the episode because I heard a presentation about it. But I don’t know the episode number. I looked on Wikipedia lists of episodes but couldn’t locate it. It was broadcast sometime before 2009.
I follow a woman on social media who is constantly posting photos of her adorable toddler and using them as a jumping point for political diatribes about how terrible the world is. There’s something profoundly distasteful about it to me, and I’ve struggled to put my finger on it. But I think Katie nailed it- having the physical safety to raise a healthy child is one of the greatest privileges on earth, and it’s narcissistic to constantly talk about how sad you are because of xyz tragedy. To be clear, I am deeply saddened by what’s happening in the middle east right now. But I have to be honest- if the tables were turned, I don’t think I would expect or even want people to be endlessly maudlin about my tragedy. Especially if they had little to no power to change the situation. I think the greatest way we can honor those who suffer (if we can’t change their material circumstances) is to send them our love and prayers, and then to fully live and embody our own lives.
It’s also obvious but ignored hypocrisy to claim the world is horrible and your own nation is responsible but reap the benefits of that nation’s “rapacity”. Its the “land-acknowledgement-but-keep-the-land” lifestyle. Virtue signaling but with actions that make the signaling clearly bullshit.
What even is happening in the middle east that is so bad? I would love to introduce these people to the entirety of human history. It is just life.
A school full of children being bombed by American missiles is bad, it's shameful and I would argue that as Americans (not sure you are, don't want to assume) we SHOULD be upset and ashamed about this, should demand better from our military, should feel some measure of disquiet. It isn't "just life." It's a war crime, actually.
Nah it is war. Bad things happen in war even schools getting hit by missiles. Thinking otherwise is silly and ignorant.
The idea you are going to precision nuance your way through a war is pure folly.
That school was "double tapped", do you know what that is?!!! Nuance has nothing to do with it. My God.
Bad/outdated intelligence, you really think we are intentionally destroying schools? Shit happens.
You just want to be mad about something. If it wasn't this it would be whatever other thing about the war.
You know nothing about me or what I want, I am disgusted about the double tap strike on the Iranian school. Prove that "if it wasn't this it would be whatever the other thing about the war" (that's not even a sentence, btw.) I have plenty to be mad about, don't you ever fucking project your shit onto me again.
Nothing proves the US cares about Iranian women like obliterating dozens of Iranian girls.
The war is to remove a regime that has terrorised its population for generations. If you had offered those people one school for all the other lives lost, I'm sure they would have taken it.
You've just amortised their suffering so aren't as sad about it.
You don't know what you're talking about, nor do you know what I've "amortised" (pretty sick metaphor to accuse me of by the way). Do you know anyone from Iran? I do, and she is equally heartbroken at the atrocities of the regime and the atrocities of the United States Military, and she would absolutely reject your disgusting "offer ." You also seem confused about the purpose of this engineered war as well as regime change in general, I would recommend this recent interview with Michael Hudson, it might enlighten you. https://youtu.be/htA0_7BSHHs?si=TsXs4YlWUy7rurlY
Calm down. I do know lots of people from Iran, yes. I lived with several of them at university, and we are still friends. Does that suddenly make me someone you'd listen to now, or what?
I'll watch that interview, thanks. But I don't think I'm confused about anything? I think this is a poorly messaged and poorly planned version of a better war, but it's the war we've got, and it's a necessary war.
Lol, nice touch telling me to calm down. No thanks. I reject that kind of patronizing stuff, I don't accept it, sorry.
Are you in touch with your friends from university? Do you know beyond a shadow of a doubt they would trade one school full little girls for everyone who died in Iran prior? Are you willing to make that claim and provide evidence for it?
You began this by ascribing a hideous metaphor of ledgers and debts to my understanding and conception of lives lost during a war my country is waging on another country with my tax dollars.
Hope you like the interview. I think you have been successfully propagandized to about what the United States is doing and why.
Well, that escalated quickly 🤪
In high school saying “peace in the Middle East” as a goodbye was pretty common. Which is to say the place has been constantly in conflict for a long ass time.
next year, in Jerusalem…
Jesse is very pro-Mandani, it's pretty weak. "I don't think Mamdani is trying to cover it up." Hmm, so Mamdani just accidentally bashed Americans legally protesting, and implied that Lang's side became violent...by accident? That seems pretty hard to do accidentally.
It's blatant propaganda dude.
Agreed, but Jesse will never see through the propaganda on this issue. It's maddening since he's so smart and discerning about other things.
Jesse crushing the millennial male references this episode with both Alive with the Glory of Love (a staple of my High School Driving Around playlist) and Dick in a Box.
And "Beachside Property."
The lack of basic historical knowledge on is maddening. Most of human history, everyone was pretty much on the edge of subsistence. Per capita consumption was pretty flat from like the beginning of agriculture until the early modern era. Something like 20% of people didn’t see the age of 5. Even the wealthy were a bad harvest or a bad infection away from death. That’s assuming someone doesn’t invade your home, enslaving those they don’t murder, while raping all the women. This was warfare until the 16th century in Western Europe, and until like the 19th century everywhere else. This only changed, slowly, first in the West after centuries of exhaustion, the enlightenment, and the development of capitalism. That’s when we start seeing wealth creation and improvements in..everything related to human flourishing.
It looks like a tomahawk hit a school on or near an IRGC facility, which is absolutely terrible and shouldn’t have happened, as a result of dated intelligence. But how many of the same people, like McMansionHell lady or Freddie De Boer, 1) celebrated October 7th or 2) denied the well documented sexual violence. It’s dumb Chomskyite drivel.
Here's an amazing story from the Calvin Coolidge entry on Wikipedia:
The Coolidges had two sons: John (1906–2000) and Calvin Jr. (1908–1924). On June 30, 1924, Calvin Jr. played tennis with his brother on the White House tennis courts without putting on socks and developed a blister on one of his toes. The blister subsequently degenerated into sepsis. He died a little over a week later at the age of 16.
So the son of the President of the United States of America dies from playing tennis at the White House without socks only 103 years ago. That's unimaginable today but it happened.
Things have gotten better.
People are really delusional about how privileged they are in any historical sense. Even very poor Americans live more or less like kings.
Even mid-century America - it is often looked upon with nostalgia. By modern standards, 1950s Americans lived in poverty. It was a huge improvement over even 20 years ago, let alone the 19th century. Some of that nostalgia is from the fact that most people remember their childhoods positively, the 60s were tumultuous, and the 70s sucks, and the Boomers dominated culture for a long time. A lot of it is historical ignorance.
A lot of people take prosperity and “progress” as a linear thing. In fact, it’s a very fragile thing, and it can be lost. There is a reason the early medieval period was called the dark ages, and the Renaissance means. Much of the knowledge of the Greco-Roman world was lost to those in the lands of the former Western Roman Empire. The engineering model to build things, like aqueducts, known in antiquity, were lost, for generations. Lots of ancient texts were in private libraries and in the greek-speaking East, but collected dust.
All four of my grandparents had multiple siblings who don’t make it to adulthood. They went though periods of extreme poverty- at a time when being poor meant you were skinny because you couldn’t afford food.
During the depression one of
My grandpas was a lawyer. I have a letter my grandma wrote during that time. She tells her friend that her husband needs eyeglasses to do his work, and she needs better shoes for her lame foot so she can walk better. They are trying to figure out who should get what because they can’t afford both. They both work in their garden all the time to secure the extra food they need.
Across town, my other grandpa, a laid off autoworker, tried to find whatever day laborer job he could so his family could eat. Most days it was cabbage soup; on an excellent day they had a bit of meat they could add to it.
Anytime I hear people who regularly order door dash complain about things, I have a little bit of disgust.
Average life expectancy increased about 5 years (from 35 to 40) between the Bronze Age and 1875.
It took thousands of years to live 5 years longer.
This is one of my issues with the wellness/MAHA crowd - they ignore that while we are fatter than we've ever been, we are also living a lot longer and are generally healthier in a lot of ways. most of my elder relatives didn't live past 70, they had siblings that died much younger, and several of them died in their 50s. That has changed a lot during my lifetime, largely due to people smoking less and changes in modern medicine. Granted, we do eat too much crap and don't exercise enough, but this idea that we are totally unhealthy doesn't jibe with my experience. My grandfather was thin and died in his 50s.
I think this, the virtue signaling that your feelings make you morally superior, is the thing I hate the most. It used to be a churchy rightwing thing mostly. I go to church more, tithe more. As a teenager it was straight edge youth group shit where I saw it most. Now the left has ascended culturally and have the same lazy religiosity.
It’s the laziest form of ego boosting “achievement”. Its enough to feel bad about a thing, maybe some shitposting slactivism or sign shaking at what is basically a social event, thats all thats needed to be A Better Person Than Thou.
The worst thing is that their actions make it clear they don’t really GAF, they just wish to appear virtuous, all while benefitting from that which they lazily decry. Its such hypocritical bullshit, just sticks in my craw.
Jesse calling the Strait of Hormuz "that canal" before they got into the stuff he got wrong about Iran in a previous podcast was good stuff
Yeah, everyone knows the canal is between England and France!
Not surprising when your ideology espouses an external locus of control
Hmm, I see what you're pointing at, and I don't disagree as such, so far as you take it. But I think there are elements of conservative thought which also espouse that same externality - immigrants are dangerous and local culture is unable to sufficiently defend itself, the path to success is through following of tradition rather than individual ingenuity and action, etc. But maybe the effect of this is offset by the focus on discipline and personal responsibility
Exactly, this is perhaps THE core fault of the whole woke program. The thing which makes it so destructive and harmful.