Conversation

Replying to
In case the logic isn't clear, if you're forced to invest identity into essentially cosmetic attributes of yourself, it means your underlying "economic" role is fungible and you're trying to add premium mediocre superfluous differentiation.
1
14
I'm putting "economic" in scare quotes because I don't mean it in the same sense market fundamentalists do. It's broadly the subset of attributes that determines how you fit into the world.
1
3
One of the "tells" that this pattern is going on is that people who believe in it assume promoting more child-bearing is the solution, studiously ignoring that kids grow up to be their own people, making their own life choices unless actively restrained by trad geronto-autocracy.
3
11
Once I made up a near-future sci-fi story based on the sudden, mysterious disappearance of the Indian subcontinent via a rogue micro-blackhole, just to poke at the conceit that a well-posed history of humanity requires you to be represented in it. It wasn't easy to think through
1
6
I also tried thinking through the same thought experiment, but using the disappearance of all white-majority parts of the word and that was vastly harder, because the West is so much more central to the past millennium of history than India.
4
4
But for better or worse this conversation is likely to dominate the next decade of US politics, once the "vacation" from the culture wars that is the pandemic fades away.
2
5
For anyone interested/invested in this conversation from any direction, I strongly recommend looking into the history of such cases where white people were NOT involved. Recognizing the universality of this shitshow pattern is kinda liberating and creativity-catalyzing.
1
9
For guilt-ridden whites -- don't worry you didn't invent a new pattern of moral failing. For minorities -- your "people" have probably done the same/worse when they were the majority. For believers in "white replacement theory" -- relax, not humanity's first rodeo of this sort.
2
5
Long term, if you triangulate from falling birth rates with development, rising anti-natalism, and the fact that in an open society kids will grow up in unpredictable ways, there is actually no policy model that can guarantee all 3 of identity purity, high fertility, development
1
8
Replying to
The only real choice is: close societies and age out and die (Japan), or keep them open, and let whoever wants to make babies do so (until recently, the US).
2
8
I don't generally comment on racially charged topics, since Asians share in the white privilege of being able to sit out the uncomfortable conversation with basically zero consequences, which I usually exercise. But this feels kinda important.
1
6