JK Rowling: hello children
Rowling: i finally know why the ungrateful kidss thesse dayss have been rejecting harry potter
Barker: we all figured that out a long time ago
Poe: clive
Barker: oh i'm sorry edgar
Barker: am i wrong?
Poe:
Poe: no you're not wrong
Rowling: you know why the children today don't like harry potter?
Barker: oh this is going to be good
Rowling: it'ss becausse they've fallen out of love with liberalisssm
Barker: ah haha ha
Barker: oh MAN ha ha
Barker: i knew it was going to be good
Barker: i didn't know it was going to be THAT good
Rowling: sssee, the kidsss today don't like liberalisssm ergo they don't like harry potter
Barker: hmmm yeah i don't know about that
Barker: pretty sure it's the transphobia
Rowling: NO
Rowling: it'ss becausse of liberalisssm
Barker: is it tho?
Rowling:
Rowling: sshut up
Rowling: look, it'ss obviouss that kidss today jusst don't religioussly follow this thirty year old media property for arbitrary and unknowable reassonsss
Barker: yeah i don't know about that
Rowling: ITSSS TRUE!!
Rowling: IT WAS IN THE NEW YORK TIMES!!!
Barker: oh the new york times! oh of course!
Barker: oh yeah the new york times
Barker: definitely the paper that i would trust to have an accurate read on this situation
Lovecraft: you know what they say about the new york times
Barker:
Poe:
King:
Koontz:
Lovecraft: it's all run by potterheads
Poe: I was not expecting that
Louise Perry: hey there louise perry here, ace reporter, with the real scoop
Perry: your trusted source for all wizarding world news
Perry: you may remember me from such pieces as "we need a sorting hat for larynx size" and "what voldemort got right about mass internment"
Perry: JK Rowling, how does it feel to be the most persecuted woman in all history?
Rowling: oh louisse it'ss sso hard
Rowling: the children today, they jusst don't appreciate all that i've done for them
Rowling: but i ssmile through my tearss
Perry: brave words from history's greatest warrior
Perry: the important thing to remember is that harry potter has definitely fallen out of favor for reasons completely unrelated to the author's transphobia
Rowling: oh of course of course
Perry: because everyone loves that
Rowling: yess it'ss very popular
Some anthropologists argue that ancestor worship is more universal than almost any other social practice. Humans seem to share an instinctive assumption that there is an ongoing connection between the living and the dead, and often an open channel of communication, too. Ancestors expect—and sometimes angrily demand—kind words and ritual offerings. In most times and places, they receive both.
Our own culture is fast becoming an exception to this rule. We have historically venerated our ancestors, as everyone else has. We erected statues to our former leaders, built war memorials and established commemorative traditions. On All Souls’ Day we prayed for the dead, and on Memorial Day we prayed for the dead who had died for us.
At some point around the turn of this century, the practice of ancestor worship began to collapse across the Anglosphere. The process accelerated in the 2020s. Statues were torn down in displays of mob violence that recalled public executions. The names of historical figures were removed from the institutions they founded. A total of 17 states and Washington, D.C., renamed Columbus Day as Indigenous People’s Day, in condemnation of the European settlement of the Americas.
While these iconoclastic efforts were initially directed at slave owners, they soon extended to other historical figures, indicating that this was more than a relitigation of the Civil War. During summer 2020, protesters in Madison, Wis., tore down a statue of abolitionist Col. Hans Christian Heg, along with an allegorical sculpture of a female figure representing the spirit of the state. In Boston, the city government removed a statue of Abraham Lincoln copied from an original purchased through donations by freed slaves and black veterans of the Union Army.
The breadth of the destruction shows us that these protesters don’t only object to certain political ideas, or to immoral behavior. They also object to something much more profound. They believe that the U.S. is built, as the pop star Billie Eilish recently put it, “on stolen land.” In other words, it’s an illegitimate project. In condemning the people who built their society, a faction of the left has turned away from the anthropological norm of ancestor worship and instead embraced its opposite: ancestor annihilation.
In Australia, acts of ancestor annihilation have been particularly aggressive. Statues of Captain Cook, the explorer who claimed the eastern coast of Australia for Britain in 1770, have been a focus of repeated vandalism. The official national day, Australia Day, is now met every year with protests and demands that it be renamed Invasion Day.
Land acknowledgments are far more common in Australia than in the U.S., having become suddenly ubiquitous during the 2020s. When I flew into Australia last year, cabin crew reminded us that we were about to land on the “unceded” territory of indigenous Australians. The same kind of statements are on websites and signs all over the country. In a park, I noticed that a land acknowledgment sign has been erected right next to a war memorial. The contrast was jarring: a display of gratitude to men who had died for Australia (including some of my relatives), paired with an insistence that Australia was never actually theirs.
“Always was, always will be Aboriginal land,” is the phrase that activists have adopted to proclaim that nonindigenous Australians are, at best, unwelcome visitors. It has become common for public events to be opened with a “welcome to country” ritual, during which an indigenous person venerates his ancestors, and reminds attendees that they’re in indigenous territory.
These displays demand something quite strange of the nonindigenous Australian public, most of whom are descended from the British and Irish settlers whose names and likenesses are now being removed from public spaces. While indigenous ancestor worship is celebrated, other Australians are asked to participate in ancestor annihilation.
Plenty of Anglo-Celtic Australians have cheerfully agreed to abide by this double standard, interpreting it as an act of politeness, as well as a show of sympathy for indigenous people who have truly suffered.
They also realize, deep down, that it’s fake. Land acknowledgments are a show of strength, as well as humility. No one would dare offer a land acknowledgment in a region that was truly contested. You’ll notice that Israelis don’t offer land acknowledgments to the Palestinians, and nor do Ukrainians offer land acknowledgments to Russians. When wealthy Australians participate in this political display, they do so confident that no indigenous group is going to take their multimillion-dollar homes from them. The military, economic and technological might of Anglo-Celtic Australia remains unchallenged.
Not all Australians are willing to go along with the ancestor annihilation rituals, fake as they may be. There is a backlash under way, with some Australian conservative politicians who initially acceded to the demands for land acknowledgments now refusing to do them. Pauline Hanson, leader and founder of the right-wing populist One Nation Party, who is currently ahead in the polls, has always refused to participate. Last year, One Nation senators turned their backs while a land acknowledgment was spoken in Parliament. “They have had a gutful,” Ms. Hanson later said in defense of her senators, adding that she does not want “to be disenfranchised from my own country.”
Last week the welcome-to-country rituals at Anzac Day dawn services in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth were met with booing and jeering. The same thing happened last year. Reports suggest that veterans were among those who booed, and RSL Australia—an organization that supports Australian Defence Force members and their families—is now reviewing its policy on whether welcome-to-country addresses should be mandated for future Anzac commemoration events. It seems that the institutional acceptance of ancestor annihilation has hit its high-water mark, at least in Australia.
Anyone with any knowledge of history or anthropology could have seen this coming. Indeed, the fiercest critics of Anglo-Celtic Australia should have been the first to see this coming. If you truly believe that people of European descent are some of the most violent, devious, hateful villains to have ever walked the earth, why would you also believe that these people would gladly embrace their own self-abnegation? The human instinct is toward ancestor worship of one kind or another. It shouldn’t surprise us that efforts to suppress this instinct are prone to failure.
==
The thing about "Welcome to Country" is that paid grifters and woke virtue signalers have culturally appropriated and misrepresented an Aboriginal tradition. It is a private practice, by and for Aboriginal people.
But these frauds and freaks have been using it to abuse the Australian people ever since.
All of us are likely to be tempted by our worst instincts every now and again, & we are much more likely to indulge them in a culture that encourages hedonism.
Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution
Whatever the reason turns out to be, it won’t fit neatly into any mainstream political ideology.
When I first encountered the data on falling fertility rates, I was confident that I could explain them. The problem, surely, was that other people had failed to embrace my preferred political program. As both a conservative and a mother, I assumed that if we all embraced a culture that was more pro-family—and particularly pro-motherhood—then birth rates would shoot up. It all aligned perfectly with my ideological commitments. How neat.
I’ve since realized that this is how most people respond to this issue because the data on fertility rates tend to function as a Rorschach test. Conservatives blame the collapse of marriage rates and the rise of feminism. Progressives blame a lack of affordable child care and fathers failing to do enough housework. Housing advocates blame property prices. Environmentalists blame the climate crisis. Everyone has an explanation that supports a pre-existing political agenda.
Meanwhile, the apolitical people I speak to in the real world always offer one of two explanations for why they personally haven’t had children, or don’t intend to have any more: either children are too expensive, or they haven’t yet found the right spouse.
There are serious problems with all of these explanations.
The first thing to know is that fertility rates are falling almost everywhere. More than half of all countries and territories were below the population replacement level as of 2021, including all sorts of countries that aren’t especially rich. Southeast Asia and Central and South America have seen particularly dramatic drops in fertility, with some countries now at the ultralow fertility level that was once seen only in the richest parts of Northeast Asia.
You might be surprised by some of the countries that are now below the replacement threshold. Did you know, for instance, that Iran is a low-fertility country? Between 1980 and 2000, Iran experienced the largest and fastest fall in fertility ever recorded. This is a country in which women are subject to compulsory veiling and homosexuality is strictly criminalized, and therefore presents a challenge to those in the West who try to pin falling fertility rates on feminism or liberalism.
For every parochial or partisan explanation there is a compelling counterexample to be found overseas. If you think that expensive child care is the problem, then you need to explain why the state-funded childcare available in the Nordic countries hasn’t remedied their low fertility. And, contrary to some feminist complaints, American fathers have been spending more time on child care and housework than ever before at exactly the same time that the fertility rate has fallen to historic lows.
Pinning the blame on marriage is also difficult. The average Turkish couple is still getting married in their 20s, and yet Turkey has a fertility rate lower than the U.S., suggesting that the age at which people get married isn’t the deciding factor. And besides, arguing that a surge in singleness is the cause of low fertility is a little like arguing that the reason people are no longer cycling is because they’re no longer buying bicycles. If someone doesn’t own a bicycle, it might be because bicycles are prohibitively expensive, or because of some other serious impediment to bicycle ownership. More likely it’s because acquiring a bicycle would demand a modest amount of cash, time, and effort and, in the end, they just don’t care enough about cycling to make these sacrifices.
You might think that contraception and abortion had an obvious role to play in falling fertility rates. After all, breaking the link between sex and babies is the whole point of these practices. But, again, the evidence suggests not. In Britain, the first country to industrialize, the fertility rate started falling in the early 19th century and actually fell below the replacement threshold in the 1930s, decades before the arrival of hormonal contraception or legal abortion. People of the past were able to control their fertility, but they mostly did so through strategic abstinence, rather than contraception and abortion.
In Europe, the countries with the most restrictive laws on abortion are also some of the countries with the lowest fertility. In Malta, for instance, where abortion is legal only when the pregnant woman’s life is at risk, the average woman gives birth to only one child across her lifetime. After Poland introduced tighter restrictions on abortion in 2020, its already low fertility rate dropped even further. It seems that, when people don’t have access to abortion, they adjust their sexual behavior rather than give birth to more children.
OK, what’s left? Well, the housing factor may have a small role to play. One cross-country study looking at data from 1870 to 2012 found that a 10% increase in house prices is associated with 0.01 to 0.03 fewer births per woman. But this is hardly an earth-shattering figure, and fluctuations in housing costs are difficult to disentangle from other factors associated with industrialization and urbanization, which are also associated with low fertility.
Plus the claim that young people nowadays can’t afford to have children just doesn’t pass the sniff test. Yes, a lot of young people may be downwardly mobile compared with their parents—certainly in Britain, much less so in the U.S.—which may induce a feeling of deprivation.
But in material terms, modern people are vastly better off than almost all of their ancestors, even when we account for increased housing costs. As recently as 1971, when the British fertility rate was still above replacement, 34% of Britons didn’t have a washing machine, 9% didn’t have hot running water in their homes, and 11.5% didn’t have an indoor toilet. And remember that this was before the mass adoption of disposable diapers.
Between 1911 and 2011, the population of England and Wales doubled while the number of rooms tripled, which is to say that houses became significantly less crowded. Modern people may not feel rich, but objectively our ability to keep our children clean, warm and fed has never been more assured.
One more factor has been the subject of recent speculation, including in an article last week by John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times. Mr. Burn-Murdoch points to what he describes as “the population threat in your pocket”—that is, the smartphone. It seems that there is some correlation between the adoption of these devices and a drop in fertility rates, which could intuitively be explained by smartphone overuse causing social isolation.
It is possible that smartphones, television and other forms of entertainment play a role in accelerating falling fertility, since there is some suggestive data from countries including Brazil, Malawi and China. But the wider trend long predates the invention of the TV, let alone the smartphone. Fertility rates in the U.S. started falling 200 years ago, and fell below the replacement threshold in 1972. This can’t just be explained by 21st-century technology.
The truth is that we don’t really know what is going on, and we certainly don’t know when the fertility decline might end. This uncertainty ought to alarm us. As the political scientist Samo Burja pointed out in a conversation we had last year, it’s as if we knew the earth was getting warmer, but we had no idea that the cause was greenhouse gas emissions. The study of humans is much more difficult than the study of climate, and unfortunately the social sciences are in bad shape right now, having been corrupted by fashionable political ideas that impede the search for truth.
Whatever is going on, my hunch is that it doesn’t fit neatly into any mainstream political ideology. When—or if—we work out the answer, I expect that we will find it strange, surprising, and quite possibly unwelcome.
"I lavish my resources on my children now because I trust that, when they grow up, they’ll reciprocate both by looking after me in my dotage and by caring for their children in turn. Micro-level communism is glued together by love.
But macro-level communism can’t rely on love. So, inevitably, it ends up relying on force. If your goal is radical egalitarianism—equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity—then you must take a large proportion of wealth from the rich and give it to the poor. Most people, being instinctive parochial altruists, won’t willingly give their wealth away to strangers they’ve never met and are never likely to meet. The process of redistribution has to rely on the threat of coercion—eventually, the backstop of violence."
https://archive.is/7cavB
