Dean Spears does not want to alarm you. The co-author of After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People argues that alarmist words such as crisis or urgent will just detract from the cold, hard numbers, which show that in roughly 60 years, the world population could plummet to a size not seen for centuries. Alarmism might also make people tune out, which means they won’t engage with the culturally fraught project of asking people—that is, women—to have more babies.
Recently, in the United States and other Western countries, having or not having children is sometimes framed as a political affiliation: You’re either in league with conservative pronatalists, or you’re making the ultimate personal sacrifice to reduce your carbon footprint. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, Spears makes the case for more people. He discusses the population spike over human history and the coming decline, and how to gingerly move the population discussion beyond politics.
When republicans are using the same exact language along with christian fascism to justify banning abortion your damn right it's political. People also aren't not having children as some sort of noble self sacrifice you dipshit we can't afford to have kids if we want to. If the population does plummet that much in 60 years it would be because you ghouls are killing us, starving us, and destroying the planet.
I fucking hate Dean Spears so much. Someone should throw him in a swamp in the everglades and film him getting ripped apart by alligators.
More individualizing the "solutions" to systemic problems.
Get a load of this guy in here basically regurgitating the shit we are dunking on.
I'm saying this piece is doing that. Like "stop being selfiah, and have kids already". Ignoring the material conditions that lead people to have fewer children and making it an individual responsibility to " fix" the problems (real and imagined) that are the result of our decaying capitalist system.
No you are doing the other thing. The strawman that this dipshit Dean Spears is presenting that the only other alternative is "woke" anti-natalism. You seriously need to read the rest of the comments in this thread. You not having kids is not going to help anyone that wants to have kids. Individualist liberal bullshit is not the answer AT ALL. Not having kids is nothing revolutionary it's just a personal choice or should be if everyone was allowed to make that choice based on adequate material conditions. You are the one missing the fucking point.
I'm not antinatalist lol. I don't have kids, but only because we couldn't. Fuck, dude we spent a lot of money trying if you need to know. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the context here, since I only read the excerpt you posted. And yes, material conditions is exactly what I'm talking about: people can't afford it, people lack the requisite hope for the future. Ignoring those systemic problems and saying "people should just, like, have more kids" is a form of individualizing a systemic issue. It's akin to blaming plastic pollution on people using straws. I'm not at all saying not to have kids, I'm saying that if you want people to have more kids, the system needs a major overhaul.