I wonder if there's anything they could be doing to reduce the deaths of their young men who are of age to start building families (20-30 year olds)? It must be a total mystery if they're resorting to using female prisoners as breeders. I guess we'll never know.
After my Russian wife was browsing the internal news yesterday to see what level of information is provided over there she mentioned that their solution in the abortion debate is to have everyone give birth, and just give up the kids to be raised by the state if you don't want them.
Also there seems to be a proposal to exclude women from higher education unless they've given birth.
JFC all the guy said is that people convicted of minor charges should be released, and if they're released they'll have babies because they're, y'know, not in prison.
How much of a hard on does Lemmy have for keeping prison populations high?
Not an expert on this at all but I feel like it's less of "the human race is going to die out" vs the owner class needs cheap labor and bodies for war to continue infinite growth.
My running theory is in the United States, Republican's obsession with abortion is tied to the fact they need poor and broken families to pump out kids for future cheap labor and the prison industrial complex to make a nation function moving forward. That and the gray sunami of a upside down pyramid with not enough young to take care of the older generations (I think Japan and China are experiencing this currently).
Well in Russia it's about replacing all the kids and men dying in Ukraine. The Russian losses are staggering and Russia is basically throwing their people into a meat grinder.
If only a fraction of a percent are coming home "after the war" Russia is in big big trouble regardless of population growth or shrinkage due to other causes.
In the USA I'd agree it's about cheap labor. They don't want to let the Mexicans in too so gotta keep those white babies flowing.
In germany the sheinking population or rather the aging population is causint serious issues for the pension system. The current working population is paying the pensions for the current pensioners. So what happens is fewer and fewer people pay for more and more people, leading to my generation not being able to get state pension, instead needing to get private plans
The US has an easy way out of the demographic trap through immigration. Countries like China and Japan don't have that because no one wants to immigrate to China and Japan basically doesn't allow it at all.
That requires long term planning that I doubt they are capable of or willing to engage in. It takes a minimum of 16 years to go from conception to worker in the developed world. In practice over 20 if you want them to be able to make real money for you.
Who plans for 16 years ahead? No one. The horizon is way too long. No one is going to lobby a politician today for an investment that might pay off that far in the future. You could get about 7% return on an index fund this year alone and instead you want to try for the slim possibility that you can pay a worker less in 16 freaken years? Companies usually won't go beyond even a 5 year investment, 8 if they are a utility. This would be an investment that is literally over twice as risky as a nuclear power plant.
Population collapse for the human race isn't so much a problem, we'll weather through it as a species. For an economy, population decline is very not good though. You need working age people to support the young and old, as well as everything else your taxes go to.
Lol invade Ukraine after promising not to. Getting entire generations of sperm makers killed in illegal war. Force female prisoners to be baby factories. Ladies and gentlemen: the bad guys.
Sounds like somethings that needs a steady stream of new convicts and flexible legislation that can be wielded to that purpose. Just like with US corporate correctional system. I think they can manage it.
That reminds me. Anyone here ever hear about the bureaucratized rape in West Virginia coal mining camps back in the day? If a man was injured and couldn't work his wife could take "Esau scrip" which she would have to pay back with her body. Capitalism! The entire situation is a stark reminder that capitalists wil LITERALLY rape and murder you to protect their position.
“We’ve had multitudes of women and tell us as little girls they remember their mothers coming to the company store and one of the things that a lot of more the lovely ladies had to do was come upstairs. Some of the young girls had the stories shared by their mothers stating that they would be escorted in the shoe room. There would be a selected guard that would be waiting for them and they would receive a brand new pair of shoes with no accountability other than to perform whatever the service the guard wished to have in lieu of pay. We had one woman in particular share with us that her mother was a young girl about 25 years old and bought her first pair of shoes here and the women’s entire life those shoes remained in the shoe box on her closet shelf never to be worn and she refused to wear another pair of shoes her entire life. She made her shoes out of cardboard, newspapers and twine.”
- Joy Lynn, owner and tour guide, Whipple Company Store
Yeah, they don't teach a lot of things in school. I only know about it because of BtB. The whole episode on The Battle of Blair Mountain is nuts and shows how far the owner class will go to keep people in line.
Prisons in russia are starting to look like revolving doors. Women get out if they choose to give birth, men if they choose to throw themselves into the meat grinder.
True, but Its 100% possible for us to get knocked back into the iron age, and if that happens, there's a very real chance we won't be able to climb up again.
Easy to access sources of a lot of the resources needed to rebuild a modern civilization are gone, the only reason we can get to the remaining deposits is because we already have the advanced equipment to extract it. It's entirely possible that if we get knocked back down the tech ladder, we may never climb back up again
This sounds much easier than creating a society where people feel happy and secure enough to have families. I wonder when 45 will add this to his campaign checklist.
The plans included funding for new mothers and not just "maternity capital" for families with two or more children, in addition to welfare benefits for low-income families and free school meals for a four-year period.
Hey regressives! You love Russia so much, why don’t we follow their example?
A member of the Russian State Duma has proposed releasing women convicted of minor charges from prisons so they can conceive, part of an effort to boost the country's low birthrate amid a period of high mortality.
Julia Davis, journalist and creator of the Russian Media Monitor, posted a photo Thursday on X (formerly Twitter) showing a billboard featuring a split image of a baby in the womb on one side and a young child wearing military fatigues and saluting.
In a piece published Thursday by The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), Davis documented how Russia's population dwindled by about 997,000 people between October 2020 and September 2021—its largest ever peacetime decline.
She also noted that the Kremlin has attempted to combat the population decrease by forcibly bringing in Ukrainian refugees, women and some 700,000 children—of which war crime warrants were issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, commissioner for Children's Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation.
The foundation, which has allegedly received grants and funding directly from the Kremlin, also openly instructs its volunteers to employ "manipulation" and deceit when talking with pregnant women.
Dasha Yakovleva, co-founder of the Feminitive Community women's group, told the Associated Press last month that a public protest involving 60 or so pro-choice advocates at a bookstore in Kaliningrad was meant to send a message to Putin and his ilk about attempts to ban abortions in private clinics.
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Infinite growth is inherently incompatible with life. It does not work. The biosphere is under immense pressure already. Humanity extinct 4 species every day and has killed off 90% of wild animals in the last 100 years. Nature is the greatest repository of knowledge that we have. It is invaluable to our science, though we treat it as expendable. It's like burning all libraries. We are simply using too much land in an effort to support a shitty economical model that is based on population growth, forever. This is the kind of problem that humanity has proven to be ineffectual at solving. Long term and noone will take action unless it blows up in their faces, personally, right now. Let the next generation deal with it. That is what they said in the 50s and that is what they will say in 10 years too. The damage done to the biosphere is practically permanent. Once an animal or plant is extinct, it is gone. Once enough of them is gone, the planet no longer supports complex life.