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A Year To Soon Be Forgotten
The ending year has been a displeasing one.
Health wise it was the worst year I have ever had. For nearly half of it I was not able to work as much as I like. Even now, as I am recuperating, the challenge remains.
More disturbing for me though was the total breakdown of 'western' concepts that were, until recently, held high.
Liberalism, as an economic and societal concept, has broken down.
Globalism is no more. Free trade has been replaced with a myriad of tariffs and sanctions. The U.S. is forcefully pressuring its 'allies', especially in Europe, to buy its goods and to do its bidding. There is, astonishingly, no noticeable resistance to this.
The fake concept of 'fighting disinformation' is being used to implement outright censorship. Political activism gets threatened whenever it challenges the current Staatsräson as decreed from the top. Insulting politicians for their lack of consistency is now lèse-majesté that needs to be punished. Making fact based arguments is no longer seen as sensible reasoning but as taking partisan sides.
Most horrifying though is the breakdown of humanitarian concepts the 'west' once claimed to hold high. Mearsheimer says it best when he decries the the moral bankruptcy of the West:
Given the West’s presumed commitment to human rights and especially to preventing genocide, one would have expected countries like the United States, Britain, and Germany, to have stopped the Israeli genocide in its tracks.
Instead, the governments in those three countries, especially the United States, have supported Israel’s unimaginable behavior in Gaza at every turn. Indeed, those three countries are complicit in this genocide.
Moreover, almost all of the many human rights advocates in those countries, and in the West more generally, have stayed silent while Israel executed its genocide. The mainstream media has made hardly any effort to expose and challenge what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. Indeed some key outlets have staunchly supported Israel’s actions.
One wonders what people in the West who have either supported Israel’s genocide or remained silent tell themselves to justify their behavior and sleep at night.
All the above already had started some time ago. But it culminated in 2024 in ways that were more noticeable than ever.
The mask is off. The 'West', as we knew it, is done with.
Currently my best hope for 2025 and beyond is for a more sane East to arise.
@ Paranaense | Jan 1 2025 4:20 utc | 137
The decline of the total fertility rate is general throughout the world. Not a single country is at the previous normal human maximum, about 8 children per woman. Currently even the highest fertility rate in any country, that of Niger, is only about 6.6 and is also starting to fall. The fall has been swift and spectacular everywhere. The question is, where is the bottom for this fall?
If we look at South Korea, where there is an aggressive women’s movement to reject marriage and childbearing, the TFR has fallen to 0.7-0.9 according to different sources; some even claim it is now 0.5. As the replacement rate for modern societies with decent health care is 2.1, this means a spectacular and rapid shrinkage of the population is likely. Here in the US, the TFR is 1.6-1.8, much higher than South Korea probably mostly because of some recent immigrants having large families but still below the replacement rate. The US population continues slowly to grow, but only because of immigration.
While the reasons you give about “ease of access to abortion, a decrease of committed religious faith, destabilizing the relationship between men and women, and loss of hope in younger generations that they will ever be able to attain the kind of life their parents had” are all true, in my view it is primarily the last one that is the crucial one: the youth have simply lost hope in the future altogether, everywhere. And indeed, what is there, except for a privileged few? The thieves and robbers of finance simply are saying to the world, “We’ve got you, and you can’t do anything about it. Either you submit to being our slaves and producing new slaves for us, or else you try to revolt, which won’t work and will just make a mess of everything for you.” Why should the younger generation have children when that is how they are going to be treated? And then there is the relentless message of today’s capitalist leaders, “You give us your money, your resources, your bodies, and we will give you nothing in return. We will always cut costs to the bone, which in the end leads us to providing nothing in exchange for you paying us.” If they could, they would privatize the streets and sidewalks to collect rent and tolls, but they would never provide any repairs and services.
Of course, pregnancy and birth still happen, but with ever less frequency. Far from Paul Erlich’s Population Bomb, it looks now more like a general population crash is in the offing.
Capitalism requires continuous growth in order to survive. A continuous population decline, if sustained, will mean the end of capitalism. Economy will go on in some fashion, of course, but not the way it has done.
The disappearance of opportunities for profit and rent extraction are already causing the economy to eat itself. In Michael Hudson’s estimation, the capitalism of building and construction is being replaced by the capitalism of plunder and robbery, as in his book Killing the Host. Because the decline of the fertility rate is slow, this development will take a while, but not too long.
Posted by: Cabe | Jan 1 2025 5:28 utc | 140
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