So, I recently started working a wonderfully mindless office job for the first time in my whole 40 years of existence and it just so happens that my office is in a near total deadzone for mobile phone connection and I will never sign in my personal phone to the work wifi for obvious reasons, and also I tend to hit my data cap now within 5 days of it renewing since the job has me mostly just sitting browsing hexbear till I get a phone call.

diethex has been a fucking godsend because the horrible data cap that kicks in after I used my measly 2gb of data still is just enough to keep looking at all your shitposts if I wheel my chair over to a very specific spot in the middle of the office between our cubicles where we all huddle to try to get just one bar of reception.

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.

As liberal critics of the Trump presidency have scrambled for traction since January, one historical analogy seems ubiquitous: “If you want a model for what’s happening to America,” economist Paul Krugman wrote in April, “think of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.” From the New York Times to the Guardian to a slew of Substacks, commentators have presented Donald Trump as the U.S. incarnation of the Great Helmsman.

Like Mao Zedong, these pundits say, Trump is mobilizing an insurrectionary base to destroy bureaucratic and cultural elites, has created a cult of personality in which the leader’s will overrides all else, and is brutally intolerant of his ideological enemies.

What are we a bunch of Asians?!