But what's the phenomenon where you can no longer distinguish mocking from the actual endorsement, because the actual premise is so far gone and yet people keep going further?
Poe's Law? Not going to spend a lot of time digging around a site that prominently fawns over Roger Scruton. Also, "the arguments advanced in Mercator are based on universally accepted moral principles, common sense and evidence" -- right, those things that have never been controversial. So glad they're finally back.
Yes, Poe's Law. And I actually lol'd at "universally accepted moral principles."
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Has anyone read through to the full story about a revered doctor at a Helena, Montana hospital who was also apparently responsible for "a documented trail of suspicious deaths"? Charley? (As a reader or someone aware of the case, I mean.)
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They call me Mercator, because I'm all about the distorted projections.
They call me Mercator because I make Russia loom large.
5 Yes.
2 I've read about it, but not yet talked to the Helena docs I know. And they'll know everything.
Guessing there are a lot of hookups at a pro-natalist conference?
I went to their About page, and also to their front-page to look at their articles. This Mercator thing is just a front for tradcaths, it seems.
SP@7: haha, I remember back in college, the word was, the fastest path to getting laid was joining the God-squadders. I'm sure that hasn't changed.
6: Thx, Charley. I imagine the guild is small.
(And good grief, I had no idea how small Helena was until I went and looked it up. One-fifth the population of Murfreesboro, Tennessee.)
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Doug, Georgia thoughts?
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Guessing there are a lot of hookups at a pro-natalist conference?
Finally, an appropriate context to refer to raw dogging.
My daugher has been mentnioning liberal natalists lately. Watch for one to show up on Ezra Klein soon. I think there was a NYT op-ed a month or two ago.
Having spent a lot of time in Italy and some time in Japan, collapsing birth rates are a real issue for how we organize and fund our societies. And, at least in Italy, there are some young couples who say they can't afford to have kids even though they'd lke them. I don't know how seriously to take that, sometimes I suspect the cost is more about expected lifestyle, but I hear it's an increasing talking point in the US too.
Since I'm not a regular, I suppose I should highlight the (hopefully) obvious that I am NOT endorsing some crazy handmaid's tale shit treating women as obligated to have children. Just saying we are not ready for the demographic collapse that is underway in quite a lot of countries.
I think if I were organising an event about the simple joy of family life I would try to have fewer speakers who can only appear under an alias.
And, at least in Italy, there are some young couples who say they can't afford to have kids even though they'd lke them. I don't know how seriously to take that, sometimes I suspect the cost is more about expected lifestyle, but I hear it's an increasing talking point in the US too.
That is absolutely why my wife and I don't have more kids. We couldn't afford it.
She was in a job with no maternity provision, and I was working in an academic-related job on the equivalent of a junior academics salary. While she was on maternity leave, our outgoings just for rent and bills were basically my entire salary and we ended the year she was on maternity leave in debt. When she went back to work, the child care costs were well over 1000 UKP a month and rose to significantly higher by the time by son was about 3. Childcare for two kids would have been more than her net salary--more than the average net wage in the UK, for sure--and, as a person on a junior academic's salary living in the south east of England, I couldn't afford to support an entire family on a single wage.
There's a sort of U shaped curve where people on very high incomes can afford for one parent to not work, or to pay for a full-time nanny, and people on low incomes get state support with rent and free childcare.* We fell in the middle.
N.B. I am totally in favour of supporting people on low incomes. This isn't a rant about that.
I know a lot of people in our situation. The people I know with 2 or more kids were in three situations:
* on state benefits
* on high incomes (as in top decile at least)
* work in public sector jobs where their maternity provision basically matched their salary, so there was no financial hit in the first 12 months or so
My former boss at Oxford was in the latter category. She was quite poorly paid for the role she had, but in four years, she had three kids, and she was on maternity leave for most of the time we worked together. She also had virtually no child care costs until her kids were approaching school age, as she was almost always at home.
Again, that's not me complaining about her maternity benefits. It's great she had them, and I wouldn't want those taken away. It just sucks to be one of the many people that couldn't get the same benefits.
10: It's an uphill climb for the opposition. On the plus side is the widespread nature of the demonstrations: not just Tbilisi, and not just Batumi and Kutaisi (population more than 100,000 each), but in smaller cities and towns throughout the country. Also on the plus side, some EU states are sanctioning Georgian leaders, and their diplomats are visiting protestors who have been beaten by police. The opposition seems to be united, which was not always the case previously.
On the I dunno side, there were protests against Georgian Dream's win in 2020. These were followed by an opposition boycott of parliament, settled by EU mediation and an agreement five months after the election. Nowadays, the 2020 elections are seen as largely fair, though there was misuse of administrative resources and an unfair media environment.
(Looking further back, I went to see large-scale protests against Saakashvili in 2009 and 2011. Neither resulted in appreciable change, though they did prepare the way for his party's defeat in 2012. I am sure that the EU and US encouraged a peaceful transfer of power, something I don't think that Georgian Dream is prepared to do.)
On the minus side, the protestors didn't take physical possession of parliament in the very first days. The security forces do not seem to be going over to the opposition either. Right now in Tbilisi, the demonstrations are concentrated on Rustaveli, the main downtown boulevard that also runs in front of the parliament building (and is a lovely English-language bookstore, Prospero's). That can settle into a more ritualized protest and occupation, which is of course better for the incumbents. A couple of times on Twitter, I've asked when the demonstrators are going to threaten the house lair of the oligarch who's behind Georgian Dream. That would get some attention! (It's only a few hundred yards from the current site of protest, though the last hundred is a very steep mountainside.)
On the wait and see side, three months passed in Ukraine between the start of the Maidan demonstrations and the fall of the Russia-oriented president. In both Ukraine and Georgia, the prospect of a definitive turn away from Europe is what gave the demonstrations their staying power. People really are willing to fight and die for a European (free and wealthier) future. Push has not yet entirely come to shove in Georgia.
Next steps are the installation of a new president and probable passage of crackdown legislation. The current president is the last to be popularly elected, and her term is set to expire quite soon, though I forget the exact day. She has been solidly on the side of the opposition, even though the powers of her office are limited.
I would expect a push to clear the demonstrations during Western Christmas, when the external powers that matter will be distracted. I don't have a good way to tell from here whether I think that will succeed.
12, 14 and 15: I know plenty of people who would like 2 kids but stop at 1 because childcare is too expensive. I'm not exactly pro natalist, but Indo hin'it would be good for us to subsidize childcare massively and figure out ways for people to slow down the pace they progress in their careers without going off track.
I think what people can afford if they have local family capable of providing childcare is different from what 2 income families can afford.
Women physicians delay childbearing, because it's really hard to be a resident and a parent. That's fine if they're right at 30, but if they don't to school right away or pursue a really long period of training, they find that they have to pursue infertility treatments. Maybe that's a choice, but ai don't think it would be bad if there were a way to make a 3 year residency 4 years and massively subsidize childcare if it allowed women who wanted to try to have kids in their mid to late 20's to have them.
Basically, there's not a lot of room for productivity improvements in early childhood education. If you want anyone decent to go into the field, you need to pay them ok. That means that over time it becomes more and more expensive and takes up a greater share of GDP. Which is ok. Food production takes up a much smaller share of GDP. Society can afford it, but individuals can't particularly not at the time that biology is telling them to have kids.
Therefore, we need to soak the rich to subsidize childcare for everyone who wants it.
We also need to soak the rich to subsidize elder care for everyone who needs it and not just the poorest.
I think we should soak the rich because they are a threat to democracy. I don't even see old people and babies.
15: I'm not sure what the right amount of time completely absent from work is. I do think we need to structure full time work to be more flexible to allow people to do caregiving without dropping out.
In a lot of areas there's still almost an expectation that there will be a stay at home spouse who can take care of the business of life during the workweek, but that doesn't work if everyone is at work during the entire workweek. Higher-income earners can get a nanny, but that's basically aphid stay-at home spouse.
Good for the kids, bad for the roses.
21: "aphid" was basically a result of autocorrect and my terrible binocular vision. Looking forward to getting strabismus surgery for the intermittent exotropia in January, because my ability to focus on text gets worse and worse.
re: 21
One of my personal arguments with my son's school used to be that they used to make the assumption that there was a parent at home, all the time. My wife is (now) a teacher, which sounds like a convenient job for childcare but it's actually the polar opposite, as she can never be available any time between 8am and 6pm any day of the week, any week that schools are open.
So, everything sits with me.
The school would do things like cancel after-school activities at an hour's notice, or make some sudden change to the length of the school day, and if I'd been in the office that day rather than at home, it would be a real problem.
9 Helena is a cute little town. The population figures are a little deceiving, because there's a lot of people living just outside the city limits, in the valley. Still, it's small. We're over there a couple of times a year: me for work or politics, wife to take pictures of birds. I guess I have a case there, but it's pretty dormant right now.
On the 2016 iteration of that ski trip to the Alps I do from time to time, I bunked with an obgyn from Helena. He's delivered a whole lot of babies in Helena, and sees patients pretty much every time he goes anywhere. He's my age, so a lot of the babies are pretty grown up.
14: one really major issue the UK government needs to get after is that personal taxation and middle-class bennies like child benefit and childcare have ended up in a terrible kludgey mess for no reason anyone is willing to put their hands up to. After years of massive political concern about marginal withdrawal rates on benefits for the poor, we've ended up with a situation where there are multiple points on the income scale where earning more can leave you worse off (iirc 2 different ones between £60k and £100k, plus the pensions lifetime allowance thing where doctors especially are going part-time to avoid triggering a huge tax bill). Also, if you have a student loan, you're now facing a 29% marginal rate out of the box from the minimum wage up.
There's a huge political open goal there, and at the moment the only obstacle to hammering the ball into it over and over again is the Tories' addiction to culture-war bullshit.
I know some of the gang here are on Flickr; does anyone know what's up with the sudden wave of shouting and begging about everyone having to manually re-subscribe RIGHT NOW?
Yeah, my friend in Scotland (who now has three kids on one academic salary, but certainly struggles to afford it) was complaining about 27 (maybe not an actual decrease, but very little increase if his wife started working part-time). Which is the sort of thing people in America complain about but is mostly a fantasy here, but seems like it's maybe somewhat true in the UK?
India falling below replacement already is wild. Did not see that coming.
29: It exists for Americans but only at pretty low incomes for the same reason, abrupt phase-out of benefits. (EITC is phased out slowly, but not much else.) You're probably thinking of people misunderstanding the progressive income tax, which is of course epidemic.
re: 29 / 31
Yeah, the UK has some tax "shelves" that are non-progressive, where your income can drop at various points and can actually be lower than your previous net earnings. As Alex says, graduates with student loans also have a very regressive tax which is also set with loan-shark level interest rates, so, for example, my wife has been paying it for a year and a half, at the mandated rate, and now owes more than she started.
Yes I'm aware of the EITC issue and almost added that caveat, but I meant it's common for people who are nowhere near the EITC phaseout to complain about this kind of issue for entirely fantasy reasons. (Or more generously because they dumb and can't understand marginal tax rates.) This was in the context of middle-class salaries (£60k-£100k is $75k-$125k, and we absolutely don't have any of these kinds of inversions in that range).
I sometimes fantasize about getting out of the US, but the more I learn about the UK the more I lean towards other countries have their own problems that you just don't know about yet.
The "benefits cliff" concept in the US is very real for low/low-moderate income people. Basically, you start earning more at your job, and you get just barely over the threshold that makes you ineligible for a given public benefit, and you lose more in benefits than you've gained in wages.
Because public benefits in the US are so ferociously and unnecessarily complex to calculate (::cough:: racism ::cough::), people also fear benefits cliffs even in cases where it isn't really a risk. The Federal Reserve actually created a very useful Benefits CLIFF tool to help workers and case managers/social workers to calculate impact.
Not in the $75m-$125m we don't!
Also, I would be remiss if I did not grouchily point out that while Biden's "hard" infrastructure bill passed in 2021 (IIJA) is now merrily providing tens of billions of dollars for everything from roads to bridges to public transit to broadband, his care economy bill was DOA in Congress. Because caregiving jobs are lady jobs, not real jobs, y'know.
(It's easy to blame Joe Manchin for the legislation's failure, but there were many other points of spinelessness along the way.)
He did do an exec order on the care economy (childcare/early childhood education; elder care; care for people with disabilities), but EOs don't come with billions of dollars attached.
The "benefits cliff" concept in the US is very real for low/low-moderate income people.
One that I learned about somewhat recently is the "Medicare Cliff" in which people transitioning from Medicaid to Medicare can be worse off: https://nohla.org/reports/medcliff/
It's a huge deal for people on with psychiatric disabilities who would like to go back to work and are afraid of losing their benefits. There are special programs if you only work a certain amount, and I don't remember the details. But if you find a way to work full time, you're going to lose Medicare after a while. And if you can't maintain access to,a psychiatrist who takes your insurance *couugh*. Might not take your employer's Optum/United*cough* then it could all unravel.
37: I occasionally wonder if there is a way to organize women, not around abortion only, but their economic interests as women. I really think that this is the way to effect change in policy, but I also think that too many married women identify with their husband's success and don't think about their interests as individuals.
40: for a group to be organisable, I think you need to have a lot more between-group variance than you do within-group variance. And I don't think that's the case here: "who you're married to" probably explains a lot more about your economic welfare than "whether you're a woman or not".
37 would also make the point about the obsession with "bringing back manufacturing jobs" on both sides of the political debate.
Sounds like someone needs to start unionizing the caregivers.
42. In California (probably in other states, but I only know CA), the Department of Social Services will pay wages to in-home caregivers of elderly and disabled benefits recipients. The caregivers are, in most instances, family members who live with the patients. In many counties, SEIU and UDW have unionized the IHSS workers. It would be interesting to expand the scope of eligible workers to include people who work as primary caregivers for their own children.
41: Women who stay in unjapoy marriages because their spouse's health insurance is so
Much better than what they can get on their own because they dropped yo half tome work because the husband's salary was so much higher seems like a not negligible group, and there are many who could end ip in that situation but don't think about it in advance.
The whole elder care system is about to go sideways, I think. This is not the point in the Boomer life cycle when immigration cuts are easier.
43: Here you need to be on MassHealth to qualify for that and the wages don't make up for the cost of putting a career on hold.
45: This is the thing that angers me the most about boomers as a generation. Someone wrote a book called "How women became America's 'safety net'. That was about how women were mostly the ones who stepped in to cover the brunt of the effects of Covid. But I think it's always applied to elder care.
There's a profession that serves the well off called an elder care manager. It's either a nurse or a social worker that a family pays privately to help organize and coordinate care for an elderly perdon. I once heard it described as a 'paid daughter'.
38 Several friends have been surprised in the last few years at the transition from Obamacare to Medicare. Higher costs, less coverage.
Yes, here too the wages are very low -- it's not meant as a viable career for the caregiver, more as a benefit for the elderly or disabled patient.
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Hey, what's an analogy that is less crass but means the same thing as "as popular as a fart in an elevator."
I was thinking "turd in a swimming pool", but that's also crass. Maybe I could be a little crass here, but not super crass.
The context is to describe why Donald Trump disowned Project 2025 during the recent election, and trying to communicate this information to normies.
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Farting as you walk out of a crowded elevator is great.
I like that, but I think its still crass.
Fly/cockroach in a punchbowl, etc?
35: there was a huge effort here to iron this out, which ended up causing major collateral damage although out of scope. At the same time, though, we also got things like Child Benefit becoming taxable, free childcare dropping out, and income tax stepping up a bracket all at the same time unless you sock away everything over the threshhold into pension contributions in which case you get the freebie keep the money and get tax relief at 20%.
Cockroach in a sugar bowl has a nice southern appeal.
Maybe I can go with "as popular as bedbugs in your hotel room"
49: Yes, and an aging parent could guilt a daughter into taking that job to keep it in the family.
re: 57
At the time of the early Blair/Brown administration(s), I remember the efforts that were made to "make work pay" in terms of tax credits and smoothing out the benefits cliff was a life changing thing for both my mother and my sister who were single parents on low (or zero) incomes at the time. It suddenly made financial sense for them both to return to full time work or to increase the hours of part time work they were doing as there were tangible benefits to them to do so.
Why isn't 'he's a lying sack of shit who does not care that the people he is appointing are going to implement that plan' sufficient?
It's the free ride when you've already paid.
23, belatedly: You're welcome! Thanks for asking!
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the early Blair/Brown administration(s)
Has there been some official change in UK terminology? I sometimes see UK governments referred to as 'administrations' and assume it's just US parochialism.
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I was more struck by the "/" to be honest. I don't remember people ever talking about the "Major/Lamont government" or the "Thatcher/Lawson government".
thanks for all the thoughtful responses about how hard it is to have a kid or more than one kid on a normal income these days. sorry I wasn't around to respond yesterday.
I think it's just linguistic leakage. To be fair, Blair and Brown were a dyarchy (duocracy?) in a way nobody else really has been and remain bracketed together historically; difficult to talk about one without the other.
re: 68
Yeah, I used the slash "/" intentionally for exactly that reason. The use of "administration" was just linguistic leakage, though, and I probably should have used a different word.
I think it's related to the larger problem that the middle and upper middle classes are getting squeezed these days more than the bottom and top. Which is great for those at the bottom but not great for a stable and functioning society. (Solution: fuck eat the rich).
I have a job similar in status to my parents and probably one that pays a similar amount adjusted for inflation, but my $$ goes way less far than my parents did because the expenses for kids have increased far beyond the pace of inflation. Costs for childcare, healthcare, education, housing, and children's activities have been skyrocketing long before 2020. Ex. I went to sleep away camp for one week every summer. Inflation adjusted, my parents paid just under $450. That exact same camp is charging over $1000 a week for 2025. Day camp (aka summer daycare) is anywhere from $400-$700 a week in my area, depending if the kids are going to a traditional summer camp area or if they're hanging out at the local park. There are low cost or even free activities but they require lots of piecing together and caregiver time and flexibility that aren't compatible with a normal work schedule.
Make the cheapest day camp price ~$600 a week for 8 weeks. Prices have gone up since last year.
Right - day camp workers need to make a certain amount that is comparable with jib with similar status and education, but they are not more productive so the cost if day camp goes up faster than general inflation. Solution: Soak the rich.