Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Red Love Is No Love at All" video.

  1. American Poet Robert Frost from the poem "Mending Wall". The first line is, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall" Last line, "He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’"
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  2. You can get a co-op to become an "intentional community" and all wash the dishes when they're supposed to, but you have to be EXTREMELY exclusionary about who you invite in. Even with that care taken, you have to kick out about 15% a year, as interpersonal dramas become too disruptive. Please consider, this is among Silicon Valley types, who are all well-paid (no resource shortages to cause arguments or stress) and are either culturally homogenous or so oppressive-Leftist-dominanated that no one raises any disagreements. It's also worth noting that despite a stated desire on the part of many of the women in the house to have children, it seldom happens for them. The women involved here who DO have children (typically, in spite of birth control), are (unsurprisingly) some of the most divisive when it comes to inter-personal conflict.
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  3.  @JeffCaplan313  As Paul Vanderklay says though, in Europe, the stones themselves cry out. In past years, King's College has had an excellent Christmas program. You might consider attending this year, and inviting your friends as well.
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  4. "The government should be doing more to encourage people to have families" That's not the government's job. That's the church's job. Do you really want an organization with physical and financial coercive power, in charge of family formation? No, most of the wisdom of the West was to SEPARATE responsibility for moral formation from government coercive power. How many clips have I seen here from Lotus Eaters, decrying policing of "non-crime hate incidents"? Churches may have busybodies (i.e., those whose moralizing is not appreciated), but at least they can't throw you in jail.
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  5.  @skylinefever  And it's impossible for the government to avoid this sort of (dis)incentive, unless the government's scope is minimized. That said, marriage and family should (must) be incentivized in a healthy, functioning society capable of propagating itself (surviving) into the future. One of the only institutions capable of this, appears to be the church. Christians in America have a healthy birth rate; seculars do not. Muslims in England and the rest of Europe have a similar high birthrate. Europe has three options: Christianity, Islam, and oblivion. Oblivion is the least likely of these options, considering the potential (and actual) expansiveness of the other two.
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  6.  @skylinefever  Generally the "holy figure" just tells people to get over themselves and their excuses for not getting their lives together to the point that they can be unselfish enough to have kids, which is all to the good. Sometimes this is genuinely a material concern, but more of the time it's psychological. If a new father and mother cooperate (especially with others in the same situation), it's surprising how inexpensive having kids can be. The only thing birth control is doing to us genetically, is breeding people for whom it is unpleasant to use or ineffective. Oh, and estrogen in the water supply is probably having huge negative health impacts on men, but we're not supposed to talk about that. The good news is, your own children are far more appealing to you than anyone else's, and you literally have instincts to provide for and protect them. Again, much of the disdain for children is culturally conditioned, and falls away when people actually have them. If the US scales back its strategic overwatch, the global economy will collapse. After a period of mass starvation and deprivation on most continents (although probably not North America), we'll be back in another era of constant imperial wars. The genocides of the 21st century will dwarf the genocides of the 20th, in this scenario. So, no thank you. And no, it isn't the case that but for the threat of the draft (which we haven't had for fifty years) childless people in the US would have kids. This argument isn't just nonsense, it's dangerous nonsense, even moreso than the idea that a computer model involving 100s or 1000s of convection cells has any predictive power better than the cracking patterns in charred chicken bones. As far as pension plans go, someone has to have the children to keep up the tax base and the value of the equity those pension plans rely on, not to mention to do the actual labor that those pensions would pay for. China is looking at a future where there is *only one working-age adult per pensioner*, which will definitely lead to economic stagnation and/or collapse, and probably mass compulsory euthanasia. (Or more "lab accidents" with viruses that are primarily lethal to the old). Other European countries will see similar disasters, although some may happily see an influx of recently-converted Christian Africans, who are probably their most realistic hope of retaining anything like positive cultural values. Whatever culture survives to the year 2100, will look back at the current-day anti-natal excuses and say, "Wow, those people were incredibly stupid, weren't they. I'm glad we've stuck to the traditional wisdom they ignored."
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  7.  @JeffCaplan313  Drop by your local church, see what there is to see.
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