October 23, 2016

Cancel student debt to boost sagging family formation (Jill Stein)

Unlike the typical Democrat, here is the Green Party candidate framing it as a bad thing that we have a falling birth rate, delayed age at first marriage, and other signs of decaying family formation:

“There are 43 million young people and not-so-young people who are locked into predatory student loan debt,” Stein said. “The birth rate is plummeting in this country because we have a generation that’s basically become indentured servants. They don’t have a place to live, they don’t have relationships, they don’t have a future, they don’t have families, they don’t have a job. We really have a generational crisis right now that we’re in the midst of. And there’s one way that crisis can be solved with the stroke of a pen. That debt can be canceled, and I’m the only candidate who will do that. Those 43 million votes have only one place to go.”

Republican voters like the idea of "affordable family formation" (Sailer), but their politicians never discuss falling birth rates, delayed marriage, etc. -- unless to argue for why we need ramped up immigration, so they can make the babies that Americans just don't want to make.

At most, Republican politicians will pay lip service to the "culture of life" to appeal to the natalist voters and donors. But that is a values topic in the broader culture war, not a material matter of how young people are supposed to be able to afford starting a family, owning a home, and so on.

The Democrat base is increasingly veering off into sheer hedonism territory, where the voters actually desire to never get married, have any kids, or raise them personally if they ever did. Transplanting yourself to some careerist urban jungle where you can diddle yourself in total anonymity, and occasionally indulge in a random drunken hook-up from Tinder, is what the Democrat mainstream must appeal to.

Bernie brought up affordable family formation, which shows how his supporters are craving normality in their lives, but can't find it in our fucked up world. It's the opposite of the Democrat base, who seek to further destabilize society and encourage and celebrate abnormality -- or at the very least, who turn a blind non-judgmental eye toward falling birth rates, delayed marriage, and so on.

These people don't view family formation in ideological terms like the natalist Republicans. It's just something normal that you're supposed to get around to, and if you are not, it's because something is lacking in your material situation -- not your priorities, your morality, or whatever else, that the values-voter would blame for the Bernouts' minimal family formation.

Ivanka Trump, through her childcare plan, has started to lead the Republicans away from framing family formation in moralistic terms, and back to the material question of making it affordable.

Adding the debt angle as Stein does is a necessary further step, since it's not just expensive childcare that prevents family formation -- it's also starting off your 20s with $50-100K in debt.

This debt stems from a great big scam (higher ed bubble), where the loans are made in bad faith: they know the borrower won't be able to pay back in most cases -- crappy college, crappy major -- and if anything goes wrong, the bubble will be too big for the taxpayers not to bail it out. And the loans are made to people whose brains aren't mature enough to make decisions about borrowing tens of thousands of dollars. That alone is reason to cancel the debt, with the understanding that it be one-time-only and after that, there will be no more higher ed for all.

I favor raiding the universities to re-coup the losses from federal student loans that will never be paid back. They fattened themselves up with that free money, they ought to give all of that ill-gotten wealth right back. Seize their liquid assets, then take control (militarily if need be) of their high-value property and structures and start liquidating them. How many world-class stadiums and the like have been built during the higher ed boom with that ill-gotten wealth? Time to sell it off and pay the piper.

Apart from administering justice to a system that's gone completely outta whack, canceling student debt would also allow young people -- and now, not so young people -- to go through the normal milestones of social, kinship, and community integration. All that costs money, not just willpower.

By blindly defending the massive transfer of wealth from the taxpayer trough (student loans) to privately managed university endowments, salaries, building booms, and so on, so-called conservatives are not only encouraging the highest degree of rent-seeking, they are also preventing family formation from being achieved by average Americans.

I wonder how conservatively these people will vote, behave, and influence society, who have abandoned hope of starting a family and have resorted to rootless urban hedonism?

Conservative "intellectuals" are proving useless as usual. Greater common sense on these inter-related matters is coming from Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, and Ivanka and Donald Trump.

41 comments:

  1. Don't have babies, import immigrants. This idea has been part of the background noise for in the US for decades, presumably as a byproduct of feminism and the ascendancy of post-Christian hedonism. I'm sure it has its source in the bicoastal ruling elites and was later adopted (in the most monstrous fashion) by the Swedes and Germans. The rest of the Euros (including the Brits) bumbled into it and are still not fully aware of what they're doing.

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  2. Random Dude on the Internet10/23/16, 8:59 AM

    It wouldn't be a bad idea if there was a program where the government would "pay back" the loans if people did certain things that helped normalize family formation. For example, the government will pay back $500/month in student loans per household if you have a child, an additional $250/month if you get a house, etc. Make it so the government will essentially pick up the entire tab if you have a nuclear family, own a home, and have at least two kids.

    Also these kids will have less incentive to pull up stakes and move to places like New York City if they don't have $50,000 in loans to pay back. They will be more apt to stay with family and friends in Normieville, Wisconsin for example.

    The usual identity politics lobbies will wail (LGBTBBQWTF advocates, barren feminists on both sides of the political spectrum, etc.) but as people move away from identity politics, those people will just be drowned out by the millions of new families being created all throughout America.

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    1. My problem with this idea is some of these young people, men in particular, might want to start a family but not be able to attract a mate. Due to hypergamy, women are only interested in a relatively small % of men. I believe this (along with the obvious economic factors) is a main reason birth rates and family formation are in decline.

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  3. Good stuff. It absolutely drives me up the wall to hear normie "conservative" people talk about how we need to import Squatemalens to pay for Social Security because white people aren't having enough kids (why will poor mestizos have lots of kids when poor whites won't? An impenetrable enigma to these people). Possibly the single most cuckservative policy argument in the world. HEY ASSHOLES, HOW ABOUT WE MAKE IT EASIER FOR OUR OWN PEOPLE TO HAVE KIDS INSTEAD, AND PRESERVE SOME KIND OF A COHERENT SOCIETY WHILE WE'RE AT IT?

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  4. I've definitely warmed up to the idea of canceling student debt for the reasons you mention above but I think a lot of the Republican opposition comes from their value of personal responsibility. It's like with abortion: pregnancy is not something that "just happens" so if you make a bad decision you should suffer the consequences. This has to be balanced with pragmatism, though. Not everyone, and especially not most young people, are going to have the wisdom, experience, and intelligence to get those decisions right all the time.

    Also, I worry that even if the debt barrier is removed, the institutions of marriage and family have been so thoroughly trashed in 2016 that they're not going to recover. For every happy young family there's plenty of 20's women that want to "find themselves" before settling down and young guys who hear about "spreadsheet guy" whose wife won't sleep with him and wonder if that's the life they really want. It's hard to see these cultural forces reversing course even if financial barriers are removed.

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  5. Maybe one should change divorce and child support laws in order to make marriage less of a retards bet for men.

    But hey, only neckbeards think that amirite?

    Btw, one can have families without marriage.

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  6. But hey, only neckbeards think that amirite?

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  7. "a lot of the Republican opposition comes from their value of personal responsibility."

    That feels like more of a rationalization for serving concentrated wealth's interests above average people.

    Do Republican voters really think that a 17 year-old has the brain to decide whether to take on tens of thousands in debt, if so how many tens, and how likely / how quickly they'll be able to pay it back, given what they plan to major in and pursue work in after graduation?

    They certainly didn't take out the equivalent of tens of thousands back when they were in college, and didn't have that millstone around their neck during their 20s. So it's not a case of "I had to go through this, and now so do you. Just one of those things, son."

    Personal responsibility also doesn't apply when there's widespread fraud and deception, coming from the higher ed sector. "Apply, get a degree, get a good job, pay us back the tiny little loan you took out, and pocket the difference for yourself!"

    Beyond fraud, there's the well-meaning disinformation from literally every responsible adult the student has ever heard from. If they've all said this is how you get a good enough job to start affording adult responsibilities, who is the 17 year-old to assume that they're all wrong?

    It's like if the adults have been raising the child how to hunt and gather, then he finds out in early adulthood that there are no game animals or wild nuts and berries -- only cultivating crops. Whoops, what's he supposed to do now?

    You can't really go after the well-meaning adults who've been steering young people in the wrong direction, but you can easily go after the sources of fraud and deception. Not just to administer justice, but to start paying down the debt that they have caused.

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  8. "a program where the government would "pay back" the loans if people did certain things that helped normalize family formation."

    I hear that, but their financial troubles are not coming from nowhere, like rising sea levels or something. The higher ed industry has been inflating a bubble for 30-40 years, using their rent-seeking spoils to fatten up the salaries and perks of administrators, and spending on conspicuous consumption / leisure (stadiums, gyms, dining halls, etc.).

    They bear the responsibility for where young people are financially, and must be the primary target for adjusting things back to normal. The hell with the government paying down student debt -- take back from higher ed what they have been taking from the taxpayers.

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  9. "I worry that even if the debt barrier is removed, the institutions of marriage and family have been so thoroughly trashed in 2016 that they're not going to recover."

    I think you're over-estimating how common that is by judging from internet personalities.

    If there were so many Bernie supporters in urban areas and college towns who were clamoring for affordable family formation, rather than National Slutwalk Month, I have hope for the future.

    I was surprised by how wholesome the Bernie crowd appeared, judging from pictures, interviews, and what issues they wanted addressed. There was no sanctification of diversity and degeneracy -- albeit no shunning of it either, but that's a major improvement over 2015.

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  10. On a hunch, I checked to see if either Bernie or Jill marched in a gay pride parade to pander to homos and their enablers -- nope.

    That would be closeted Clinton, who walked a few blocks in the New York pride parade this summer, before her cunnilingus-caused throat cancer took over and made her go back to resting.

    Think of all the locations and events that the Bernie/Jill campaigns placed their candidates at, to rally their base and pick up new like-minded voters. Those places did not include gay pride parades. Good sign.

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  11. Married births, including married white births, are going up, not down. Married white women are having 2-4 kids in their 30s, while birth rates are dropping for pretty much all other groups under 30, including NAMs.

    Bringing in immigrants always assumed they'd never adopt the host country's lower birth rates, but they have in America.

    Things are not quite as bad as people think, there are some positive spots. And divorce risk drops to almost nothing once a woman has 3+ kids.

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  12. That's the bad news -- people are waiting to get married much later, and starting a family in their 30s.

    They're supposed to get married and own a home in their early 20s like my parents did (not a glamorous home, nor in a hot location). And they were not from middle-class backgrounds (working-class fathers, stay-at-home mothers, neither of their parents having college degrees).

    My parents' parents got started even earlier and had even more kids. That was the Great Compression, before the higher ed bubble, inequality, etc.

    My grandmother first became a grandmother in her early 40s (during the early 1960s). Unthinkable today.

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    1. That was a temporary blip. It's never been that normalized. American women have had 3-4 kids as the norm for a long time. People live a lot longer. Women aren't dying at 47 after kid number six anymore, either. We shouldn't try for the 1950s, though, that era had a lot of problems and one of them was high pressure to marry far younger than historical norms. Well, not unless we're going to let women have the leisure and relative independent time to volunteer and have hobbies that marked much of the 1950s.

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    2. Right, the late 1940s and 1950s in America were very atypical regarding how many people married and had children while in their early and mid 20s. When I went through my English-American family tree, I was astonished by how many of my ancestors married and had children in their 30s.

      I'm all for Affordable Family Formation policies, but trying to induce Europeans northwest of the Hajnal Line to have children in their early 20s is too much for them. Northwestern Europeans need to mature, and then they'll be ready to have 3-4 kids in their 30s. Maybe women having children in their mid 20s is best, but northwest European men are psychologically fit for child raising once they reach their late 20s or so.

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  13. >Married births, including married white births, are going up, not down. Married white women are having 2-4 kids in their 30s, while birth rates are dropping for pretty much all other groups under 30, including NAMs.

    Do you have sources for this?

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  14. This makes we wonder if all the feminist crapola that's been pushed (and be honest, embraced by much of the populace) since 1990 is to make women who've been denied a naturally fulfilling life feel better about themselves. It's pushed hardest by the most poorly adjusted women (aka dykes) and most enthusiastically embraced by the childess, urban dwellers, sluts, and lonely woman who failed to find/alienated a long term husband/father.

    The absurdity of telling 20something women to put family/serious relationships on hold as they pass through the fertility prime!

    Meanwhile, the post-modern economy means that not only is the nominal "working-class" (whatever that mean when so many are cubicle-bound) menfolk struggling to make money, but even much of the "upper-class" among Gen X-ers/Millennials is broke as hell too. There's also the lingering problem of doofus Boomers who out of either sheer greed (I want the biggest house or the coolest car on the block) or their fiscal imprudence are still monopolizing many of the more higher level positions. How do they feel, hiring so many AA ghetto dwellers and immigrants while not hiring, or, firing, or not promoting younger whites who've never gotten a fair shake?

    Silents, of course, are hogging all kinds of entitlements and attention. They never felt appreciated or content as youngsters, and that insecurity means that the majority of them won't stop harassing us and rifling through our pockets until they're dead. In that, they are united. The nice thing about the Boomers is that they never feel harmony with anyone, their generation mates included. Boomers as they near the end we'll still be questioning and punishing everyone. Except perhaps their own children. We can expect a phasing out of elder indulgence as elder Boomers would rather spoil (and live with) Millennials than they would spoil/live with other Boomers. X-ers aren't going to oppose this; they've always let Boomers get their way and that won't change. The main concern of Gen X will be reassuring Millennials and guarding Homelanders. By the time they hit their 50's and 60's, they'll see the Homelander time bombs began to detonate, much like how the Lost Generation watched in dismay as Silents "woke-up" from their conformity.

    So between modern culture telling women to be careerist, and so many dudes being broke and therefore unappealing, of course people aren't settling down and starting families at a young age. During the Post WW2 era thru even today to some extent, Silents and Boomers have fought over issues and choices as a matter of morality/fashion/cultural identity since neither generation ever lacked material comfort. Nowadays, younger people don't really "choose" anything. More like they get thrust into situations, some of which are quite difficult, out of circumstance, elder ignorance, and bad timing (arriving after the two most spoiled generations in history, the first of which is likely to be the longest lived and most financially entitled generation of their epoch).

    BTW, the greater liberalism of Western Europe can be put down to higher density living. White people prefer to have families in lower density environments; less crowded living means less urban means more kids means more conservatism. It's going to take a long, long time for much of the US to be anywhere near W Europe in terms of density, for which we should be grateful. I don't think diversity really matters, either. Packed urban areas, however white, still deter white people from having kids.

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  15. Gawd, I'm too sick and tired right now to be writing. Sorry about the typos and goofy grammar in the previous post. Hopefully you can discern what I was trying to say.

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  16. "We shouldn't try for the 1950s, though, that era had a lot of problems and one of them was high pressure to marry far younger than historical norms."

    It wasn't social pressure, it was the good and improving material conditions that let them get started early and often on what they truly wanted to do.

    Peter Turchin's work on historical cycles shows that age at first marriage tracks inequality. Rising inequality, later marriage; falling inequality, earlier marriage.

    Historical demographers have also shown that Europeans married earlier in good material times, and postponed it in worse times.

    So the 1950s was not a blip, but one of many instances of falling inequality leading to greater family formation.

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  17. The ongoing re-alignment is a good test for where the conservatives truly stand on the issue of family formation.

    Those who feel creeped out by talk (let alone policy decisions) about narrowing inequality, which leads to greater family formation, were fakes. The movement conservatives all go here.

    Those who are getting over their cerebral aversion to minimizing inequality, for the benefit of family formation, were just wimpy cucks. They held back progress, but can now be relied to give a boost to a movement for affordable family formation.

    And those who've been making this issue front-and-center in the Bernie/Jill movements are discovering that they're more socially and culturally conservative than they thought.

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  18. "So between modern culture telling women to be careerist, and so many dudes being broke and therefore unappealing, of course people aren't settling down and starting families at a young age."

    Modern culture pressures men to be careerist, too -- meaning, beyond having a job and paying bills for the household, making career-climbing more important than family, friends, neighborhood, church, and so on.

    This ties back into the higher ed bubble, which pushes young people out of the area they were raised in, makes them start their social circle formation all over again in college, and then hit the reset button yet again in each of the various cities they move to in search of a career after graduation (and/or further education).

    It's trivial to meet and marry someone from your own neck of the woods in your early 20s, especially if you went to school with them or know them from church, around town, etc.

    The uprooting caused by the higher ed bubble guarantees that it will take you 5-10 years longer to even meet your future spouse, let alone get married and have kids.

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  19. And on the qualitative side, a marriage with someone you've socially imprinted on during the open social developmental window (adolescence), is going to be based on a strong bond of trust and familiarity.

    In the old days, worst-case scenario was waiting until college to find a spouse (getting an MRS degree). Now it's taken for granted that you won't be able to afford family formation out of college, so even those years when the social window is still open, are wasted on drunken hook-ups at best.

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  20. This also shows (as though there were any doubt left) how bullshit the whole "young fogey" put-on was. It was cosplay -- dressing up like an old man, and pretending to be grumpy like one too.

    Getting a decent-paying job, getting married and having kids, paying taxes -- borrrinnnnggg.

    The Bernie/Jill supporters are agitating politically so that they can finally start paying taxes and raising a family -- yet *they're* the liberals and freakshows? No, that would be the barely-closeted homos in the Young Republicans club, who fetishize bow-ties and crotchety mannerisms.

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  21. Stein has also said that Trump is preferable to Clinton's warmongering foreign policy (much to chagrin of wholly owned European leftist parties).

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  22. We know too much about de novo mutations and their link to advanced parental age to keep pushing the "we're healthier now" line. Do people, especially young people, look healthier compared to the 80s and before? What's doubly bad about the higher-ed and housing bubbles is you didn't get any benefit from fewer and less healthy kids. No, immiseration.

    I can't be the only one who sees more genetic problems on my wealthier side, but better health and good looks on my poorer side.
    And I know it's got to be much worse for the desperate class-strivers than the Old Money types.

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    1. Yeah, the fertility data that anyone else can look up for themselves.

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    2. Doh that was a reply to the person asking where the married birth data was. I was in the wrong thread, sorry!

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  23. OT but Trump is now down in the LA Times poll.

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  24. Before I knew anything about "affordable family formation":

    1) I realized my job couldn't earn enough to support a family
    2) Quit my job
    3) Left late-80s SoCal (right before the post-Cold War crash there) and moved back East
    4) Went back to school (STEM area)
    5) Found wife / formed a family
    6) When interviewing for current job, told interviewer one reason I went back to school was "to be able to support a family" got hired anyway

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  25. Aren't we just talking about a point or so? Let's relax. I still think that the majority (as in 70-80% of people) knew in their hearts ages ago who they were going to vote for. I remember somebody saying weeks ago that the 1st debate is most important since many non-partisan voters who aren't locked in usually make up their minds after the 1st debate. In other words, poll fluctuations in the last several weeks aren't a big deal, even if we're talking about the handful of legit polls.

    We're not getting a Hillary landslide in terms of sheer votes; here in MN a lot of people seemed to have a sour attitude towards the election, which to me means that even in a Dem friendly place people just aren't champing at the bit to vote Hillary like they were to vote Obama in '08. Come to think of it, Bush in '04 (yep, even in MN a lot of Bush stickers were apparent in the mid 2000's) had a decent amount of enthusiasm, even in MN, what with the early 2000's revival of high(er) spirits.

    I've seen more Trump and Johnson yard signs by far. I saw two pick-ups side by side with Trump/anti-Hillary stickers. In an industrial area, one company had several Trump signs.

    With Hillary's continuing abysmal level of trust ratings, and the media's own trust ratings falling in tandem with Her Bitchiness, it would figure that Trump's numbers in the legit polls are still pretty good in spite of the unprecedented onslaught against him.

    One inspiring development that's arisen from the hatred at Trump is the growing effort to develop alternative media. VDARE is hinting at establishing something beyond a website. Perhaps the combined and growing camaraderie of the Alt. media will create a platform from which to launch future populist candidates. These dissident zones will offer refuge and support so as to ward off future attempts by the system to destroy rebellious candidates.

    Stephen Miller has already infiltrated the system; what if ideological analogues who've been marginalized like Steve Sailer got to lend advice/write speeches/write policies for future Trumps? Peggy Noonan pilfered his "Invade the world, invite the world" catch phrase, proving once again that plenty of people are interested in alt-right culture but fear public knowledge of their interests. Noonan, for the record, can't let go of culture war snobbery when she scolds Trump's temperament and decorum even as she hints that his populist ideas are long overdue after decades of insular charlatans have proven ineffective.

    Eric Cantor got booted in the earliest phase of the current populist revival, though some of that can be put down to Dave Brat being an incredible challenger (very smart, loquacious, and with unassailable integrity) while Cantor had been exposed as a dorky globalist whore. Brat didn't even use any PAC money.

    There are more Trumps and Brats waiting to emerge, some of whom aren't going to jump in the water until it warms up. The Infowars and Breitbarts and VDARE's of the world will need to unite against a common enemy.

    Last thought: Hilary's Onion worthy efforts at personally campaigning. High school gyms, bussing in a squad of (paid?) diverse supporters, secrecy, and harassing well behaved opponents observing her lame rallies (compare that to the kid-gloves treatment given to violent anti-Trump protesters in liberal Dem areas). The few earnest supporters who show up are middle aged womyn, airheaded Millennials who couldn't tell you what the 1st and 2nd amendments are, and blacks who didn't have anything better to do.

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  26. Sailer won't be writing any speeches for the Trump movement, which he feels he is above for whatever reason.

    Ditto anyone at VDare who isn't a populist and won't take on Wall Street, the media monopoly, off-shored / de-industrialized economy, etc., as antithetical to American middle-class prosperity and affordable family formation.

    That whole strain of the Cultural Right during the past 25 years has been nationalist rather than globalist, but not very populist -- some shill openly for corporate tyranny, and others float the idea of bringing back manufacturing jobs and then fold when their think tank paymasters threaten them.

    The basic ideology was yuppie nationalism -- get those immigrants out of SoCal, and it will be so much cheaper for professionals and managers to raise a family, while turning a blind eye to the plight of middle-to-lower class Americans, perhaps even earning a living by helping to off-shore their jobs, downsize their firm, and the like.

    Nationalism cannot exist without a working-class base -- and they do not care about "saving Western Civ," although they certain prefer Western to non-Western culture. Only people with enough wealth can afford to think about Western Civ at length, and feel motivated to fight for it.

    So, nationalism and populism must go together.

    I won't be blackpilled even if the good polls suggest Trump is behind by a few points right on Election Day -- people must have forgotten Brexit already.

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  27. "Do people, especially young people, look healthier compared to the 80s and before? What's doubly bad about the higher-ed and housing bubbles is you didn't get any benefit from fewer and less healthy kids. No, immiseration.

    I can't be the only one who sees more genetic problems on my wealthier side, but better health and good looks on my poorer side."

    Depends on what "health" means. Older generations looked tougher due to testosterone levels being much higher. It seems like the further you were born after about 1970, the smaller and weaker your muscles/bones are. Some of this might be due to poor nutrition or a lack of exposure to stressors, but I'd say the most important element is having abysmal levels of testosterone during development. I mean, go watch heavy metal or grunge videos from the 80's and early 90's. Some of those guys practically looked like they could play football (some like James Hetfield actually did). These were guys born in the 50's/60's, who had massive bone/muscle growth throughout their adolescence/young adulthood due to a combination of a rising crime environment and very high T levels. Christ, even some of the guys in Journey and Styx looked pretty rugged.

    One thing that jumps out to me is how in workplaces, you've got solidly built Boomers alongside frail Millennials. I guess it only does more to reinforce the Boomers sense of power.

    WRT to class differences in appearances, perhaps what you see is that after 3 decades of striving, the learned/cerebral/privileged class are reaping what they sowed with assortative mating. In the great compression, men of all types easily reproduced with no regard as to whether your offspring was Ivy League material. Since the early 80's we've seen how the post Silent generations have sorted out along cultural/intellectual lines, with the biggest strivers essentially knowingly inbreeding with their fellow elites (who by definition form a much smaller group of people than the proles). Men like Eric Cantor are much more likely to be found among the privileged elite than guys like James Hetfield (manual labor at a young age, father deserted him, helped raise his siblings, nasty temper, biker build). Steve Sailer has talked about how when he was a kid, Hetfield types were used during labor negotiations (remember when labor was organized and defended itself?)

    Perhaps Boomers and Gen X-ers are giving birth to two increasingly distinct classes: an effete, borderline autistic elite that doesn't care about national identity or manufacturing and an increasingly sullen and left for dead prole class. Thus the put-downs of Trump as a "strong-man", as if rugged masculinity was a trait of the ill-bred. The conservative battle lines can be put down to character; Trump supporters like Alex Jones and Micheal Savage are alphas who make fun of effete anti-Trumpers and take shots at the actual or seeming gayness of team Hillary. Meanwhile, George Will, the ultimate wimp (I remember alpha Jesse Ventura calling him a puke), makes a catty spectacle of his divorce from the GOP.

    The attempt to toughen up the GOP and the country ends up triggering the nerds and homos who feel their insecurity and inadequacy being exposed to too much light.

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    1. There are sports, some of the IT types are not effete and assortatively mating and producing strong, healthy kids, but we're not the majority and we take a huge amount of heat from other conservatives.

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  28. I'm against it, unless it nullifies your degree, because you can't have your cake and eat it too! And they sure did understand what they signed, they were college material future intellectuals after all. Hell, even people in trade school understand percentages.

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  29. "Having their cake" = having a crappy job that their worthless degree did nothing to get for them.

    "Future intellectuals" = crappy college, crappy major, high school part 2.

    "Percentages" = interest formulas.

    You're an idiot.

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  30. "One inspiring development that's arisen from the hatred at Trump is the growing effort to develop alternative media."

    Seems like I'm always giving some $ to this or that independent journalist while at the same time, MSM are seeing friends laid off.
    BTW, when I see so, so many liberal journalists-they're a dime a dozen- so desperate to stand apart they're churning out things like, "Trump Repeatedly Called Lil John Uncle Tom", I think of Peter Turchin.
    (And writer was even wrong about "repeatedly", Lil Jon said it was once.)

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  31. Student loans have to be forgiven but resentment over the opportunity-cost from those who did pay theirs off should be taken into consideration.

    PA

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  32. Re: native fertility rates. I think its a mistake to assume the baby boom or high fertility was the norm for 20th and 21st century America

    The US TFR has been at or below replacement 2/3 of the time since 1930.

    Adjusted for higher infant mortality , it was at its lowest around the early 1930's (just before Roosevelt) and stayed that way till the Baby Boom

    However its not above replacement for a single year in close to half a century .

    Assuming the TFR comes adjusted already, the US still has had consistent low fertility for the majority of the industrial age and all of the post industrial age

    Some of this is cultural of course but many of those states during the low fertility years were not no fault divorce. New York didn't have it till 2010 but it did not have higher than average fertility

    Upstate New York, pretty Conservative and White has similar demography it did in 1960 and has had no population growth at all. All the boom babies left

    This suggests that a good chunk of the problem is economic and its not resolvable in any way. Too much automation and urbanization means a lower carrying capacity rather than higher one.

    Now getting rid of feminism, Cultural Marxism and near mandatory college along with no fault divorce and the like should increase the fertility rate a little, we might get 2.1 or If we deport a lot of people we if very lucky 2.2

    Otherwise we are just going to have to either have a regulated economy or accept perpetual population decline till the system fixes itself or mostly religious people remain.

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  33. Harvard et al are not going to go down swinging regardless of what anyone says about their education bubble. They love that everyone goes to college now. It gives them more prestige.

    For example, my alma mater, Duke, where Stephen Miller shored up his trolling abilities, does nothing with its class size but is somehow tricking more people into applying every single year. The other schools are no different. The student bodies at these sorts of places are very focused on status. And since the Wall Street-K Street axis is disproportionately filled with "my sorts," you can bet damn well they will do their best to keep up the student loan charade. They actually believe in propping up prole schools to demonstrate their status. During an alumni weekend event, when I brought up using certification exams for knowledge, application, etc. of various STEM fields, even the STEM majors around me were either bewildered or horrified.

    Of note, graduates of these schools typically have much less debt (better/richer families, "better" job prospects & more financial aid in form of grants) than average college students. They just mostly choose to delay family formation because so many come out as empty strivers (I for one am actually sad that there are fewer M.R.S. degrees than years past). I've seen my share of nice kids from Ohio, Illinois (not Chicago), Alabama, Georgia, Northern Florida, etc, get brought in and spit out into the same disgusting people who perpetuate the system.

    Maybe I am ranting, but good God, believe for every second that the elite will sink as many people as possible into their morass before they ever give up anything.

    Back to the main post, if he could pull this off, Trump would win terms for Donald Jr, Eric, Ivanka, Tiffany when she turns 35, and Baron too. However, it is imperative that the bailout really drains these universities a bit. As much as Scott Walker cucks for the Kochs, what he did to the University of Wisconsin system was gangbusters. Science faculty pay has typically been linked to grants earned and whatnot, so those are whatever and will be fine (the UW system did synthesize warfarin/coumadin after all, pretty big deal fyi). The basket-weaving arts and craft faculty (stormtroopers of the brainwashing) might actually have to go serve coffee to make a living - exciting! Get them away from the kids.

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  34. The biggest driver of fertility: teenage pregnancy. K-selection (ie reproductive continence) absent a religious culture of marriage at a very young age will keep birthrates low.

    PA

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  35. "The US TFR has been at or below replacement 2/3 of the time since 1930."

    Rising inequality / status-striving began in the mid-1970s, or half of the interval you mention.

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