Welcome to c/news! We aim to foster a book-club type environment for discussion and critical analysis of the news. Our policy objectives are:
To learn about and discuss meaningful news, analysis and perspectives from around the world, with a focus on news outside the Anglosphere and beyond what is normally seen in corporate media (e.g. anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, Marxist, Indigenous, LGBTQ, people of colour).
To encourage community members to contribute commentary and for others to thoughtfully engage with this material.
To support healthy and good faith discussion as comrades, sharpening our analytical skills and helping one another better understand geopolitics.
We ask community members to appreciate the uncertainty inherent in critical analysis of current events, the need to constantly learn, and take part in the community with humility. None of us are the One True Leftist, not even you, the reader.
Newcomm and Newsmega Rules:
The Hexbear Code of Conduct and Terms of Service apply here.
Link titles: Please use informative link titles. Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed.
Content warnings: Posts on the newscomm and top-level replies on the newsmega should use content warnings appropriately. Please be thoughtful about wording and triggers when describing awful things in post titles.
Fake news: No fake news posts ever, including April 1st. Deliberate fake news posting is a bannable offense. If you mistakenly post fake news the mod team may ask you to delete/modify the post or we may delete it ourselves.
Link sources: All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. If you are citing a Twitter post as news, please include the Xcancel.com (or another Nitter instance) or at least strip out identifier information from the twitter link. There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance, such as Libredirect or archive them as you would any other reactionary source.
Archive sites: We highly encourage use of non-paywalled archive sites (i.e. archive.is, web.archive.org, ghostarchive.org) so that links are widely accessible to the community and so that reactionary sources don’t derive data/ad revenue from Hexbear users. If you see a link without an archive link, please archive it yourself and add it to the thread, ask the OP to fix it, or report to mods. Including text of articles in threads is welcome.
Low effort material: Avoid memes/jokes/shitposts in newscomm posts and top-level replies to the newsmega. This kind of content is OK in post replies and in newsmega sub-threads. We encourage the community to balance their contribution of low effort material with effort posts, links to real news/analysis, and meaningful engagement with material posted in the community.
American politics: Discussion and effort posts on the (potential) material impacts of American electoral politics is welcome, but the never-ending circus of American Politics© Brought to You by Mountain Dew™ is not welcome. This refers to polling, pundit reactions, electoral horse races, rumors of who might run, etc.
Electoralism: Please try to avoid struggle sessions about the value of voting/taking part in the electoral system in the West. c/electoralism is right over there.
AI Slop: Don't post AI generated content. Posts about AI race/chip wars/data centers are fine.
Remember back in the 90s when the message was that overpopulation will starve us all and now that the birth rate is declining in response to environmental and economic stress that's an equally huge crisis
population increase.
Bill Gates : "In populations where we don't want it..."
What a cool, stable economic system
Shhh if we talk about it too loudly the stockmen will get skittish and might balk, causing an economic downturn because they reacted to the possibility of one by dialing up the rat fucking in anticipation, heightening tensions and contradictions, and invariably causing a hiccup with a plethora of aftershocks.
It’s in the rulebook
Really cool how the porks are never ever at fault for anything despite literally being the authority.
“Aww sorry kiddo, no job for you! I scare easy and growing jobs numbers might make the money sad! Too risky!”
At the very least, these lazy ceos should be fired for gross incompetence. They failed to put the masses to work and should be fired for their incompetence.
“Overpopulation will starve you, here’s why that’s a good thing!”
Made me realize, the nuclear family is a failed concept under capitalism. When every facet of raising children is commodified, the working class is going to just stop having children. Though I also think there is a psychological factor to it too, with the alienation under capitalism making one question what is the purpose of bring a child into this world. And yet all of this is necessary for capitalism to reproduce itself, which is a huge contradiction that is only alleviated a bit by immigration.
Besides Engels' book, is there any other marxist analysis of the family structure?
Some books on my infinite to-read list:
The Anti-Social Family, by Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh
Abolish the Family:A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, by Sophie Lewis
No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, by Lee Edelman
And that’s ignoring climate change
I’m not gonna bring a child into a world on fire
Very well put!
I remember over the summer hearing on NPR (mandatory puke sounds) about how the fertility rates are dropping below replacement everywhere (it's not) and nobody knows why (we do)
Nobody has a single clue as to why this could possibly be happening!?!!!!!1!!!?! Why does no one wanna kids!?!?!?!
Anyway it was real fucking frustrating to have pundits and the supersmart scientists dancing around the causes and painting all the white countries having declining birthrates as the biggest existential problem the world has ever known.
This kind of response makes perfect sense when you can't question underlying capitalist relations as being the source of the problem.
Yeah and it hurts so badly when you're forced to listen to libs orbit around the obvious problem but never able to see it or address it.
Just a series of unfortunate events, odd happenings co-occuring. Nobody knows how to put the peices together, and you can't either - don't try - since our smart well paid scientists tell us they're just as stumped as we are.
since our smart well paid scientists tell us they're just as stumped as we are.
Animals in captivity usually don't breed in large numbers. The animals we domesticated historically were the handful of weird species that would breed in captivity.
Humans are animals. The more and more people feel they are in captivity, the fewer children they will have.
The animals we domesticated historically were the handful of weird species that would breed in captivity.
Do you have a citation for this claim? My understanding from work experience when I was younger is that in modern agriculture, most stock is forcibly bred.
thats why they want to control women.
Women control birth rates and can choke the machine.
They don't really have an answer to the natural reaction to austerity. Women can just stop fucking the loser men who support it and/or just stop having kids entirely.
That's why theyre pushing all this religious crap.
Redpilling the youths is backfiring because the men buy it and the women don't.
Those Who Didn't Have The Means to Leave Omelas But Fuck If They're Gonna Socially Reproduce It
life in Omelas is "good" though. if it's supposed to be an analogy for the imperial west then comparison has been broken even for the so-called middle class, and it was never really applicable to various minorities.
My children shall remain non-existent because they deserve a better future than what America will provide them with
My friends: "If you hate America so much, why do you still live here?"
Me, aloud: "I don't have any money."
Me, muttering: "If you love your children so much, why are you raising them here?"
Basically.
Personally, I think I’d be a fine parent as long as I get my shit together (and a fuckton of therapy.)
And it is for that reason I think that if I got a gf and pissed out a baby now, especially in Amerikkka, I’d be worried the pearly gates would flag me for child abuse just for that.
Ummm…porky, no one OWES you kids. Stop being so entitled!
Oh no such sudden population decline will be catastrophic
Anyway let's kill immigrants trust me it will fix something
No paid leave for parenting, and that is just the tip of the iceberg of parenthood problems in an atomizing society, what do they expect?
It's really expensive here and I didn't have to pay a dime for the hospital and clinic visits or delivery or anything. I truly dont know how US people do it
A lot of us don't. I mean I guess that's the point of the article. My partner and I have said for years "maybe, someday, when we can afford it" and just... never could afford it. Now pushing 40 and still can't. A kid would be a catastrophic cost for us at the moment. Simple as.
they fight, get divorces, move in with parents, work extra hours at shitty jobs they hate, carry debt at 20% interest, and jobs that have OK insurance + parental leave are very competitive, and many don't blink twice at directly exploiting many others if it means their offspring are secure. because that's all that matters: the legacy of direct lineage.
The people I know with kids started families in their 30s when they had 2 partners with PMC jobs and lived near grandparents or other extended family. The boomers were able to have kids in their 20s and buy a house with one full time income. Shit is totally unsustainable.
It was also way more common for relatives/neighbours to watch & take care of the kids if the parents were busy. It does take a village to raise a child and now the village got bulldozed for 8-lanes of traffic and black and white condoslop.
Yeah the dissolution of community is a big part. I remember when Sister Hillary had a book titled "It Takes a Village" and people were roasting her, but the people lambasting her grew up with that extended support! They might even talk about how it used to be that way!, and then not make the connection that losing that informal extended support is a factor in people having fewer kids or having kids later.
Something else that I think disrupts this is the expectation that people will have to move away from their home towns and families to become established economically. And even have to pick up stakes and make significant moves every few years to maintain their standard of living through moving for jobs. Capitalism has uprooted people and now the upshot is that people aren't reproducing the workers, this is not complicated to savvy.
Maybe the answer is more austerity?
always is
: Capitalism is so good and freedom-inducing that we'll continue raising prices and worsening material conditions for the working class. Want a family? You gotta hustle and work 900000+ jobs to earn a fifth of what 1 job could have earned you before
: WHY AREN'T YOU MAKING BABIES
I will never stop being stupified that an airline pilot had enough money to essentially raise 3 families, and they often did!
Yeah all thw other comments on here I agree with but.... Have you seen the men 
There's even more redpill brainrot around and mf use AI to chat with women. Can you truly blame women its slim pickings
big assumption that men want kids either outside of some extra freak conservative groups
feeling mildly better about not being able to bear a child knowing that even if i was physically capable of doing so i would never be financially capable of it
I love the "(at least arguably) good news presented as catastrophic because of the inherent contradictions of capitalism" genre of reporting
They need that to go along with the “everything is fine, bad things are good” Steven Pinker style slop
yeh ok good
All I will say is that extremely frustrating trying to protect kids from the horrors of continued colonialism re: patriarchal norms, especially when you have divorced / split families and not a lot of influence due to alienation. That's certainly a huge factor for me, lack of support and hundreds (or thousands) year long patriarchal oppressions in the context of colonialism in both the colonized side and in the violence of the settler's private lives.