Comments by "William Innes" (@williaminnes6635) on "Whatifalthist"
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I don't know that this will be as bad as you think.
Japan does the world's product development. Japan does not do immigration. More than one foreigner per village is one too many in their view. Japan has known it has had issues with its birth rate since well before pandemic. During the aftermath of the Baby Gammy fiasco, in which an Australian woman who has managed to remain anonymous abandoned a child she had paid a surrogate to bear in Thailand because the child, Baby Gammy, had been born with Down Syndrome, the Thai authorities cracked down on the surrogacy industry. One apparent customer was a Japanese businessman who was in a nursery with eleven or twelve children, forget which. He claimed he was their biological father, and that he just loved children. This was accepted as a sufficient explanation by the Thai authorities.
After that point, various developments in artificial reproduction began to be reported. A sheep embryo was grown to a healthy lamb in a plastic bag. A technique for turning stem cells into gametes was discovered. This stuff all made the press, and should all still be up on the internet. So, there is the motive - for Japan to survive as a country which does not do immigration and which has a low birth rate - and the means - Japan is the number one product developer in the world - and then a pattern of pure research innovations which suggest that artificial reproduction had been moving forward, all in the press, all prior to pandemic.
My suspicion is that the idea is to sandbag this technology, keeping it a strictly Japanese thing, for as long as possible, to prevent it from leaking to mainland China, in order to use demography as a strategic weapon against the Xiists. A bit of mass migration will provide a medium term patch for the rest of the traditional developed world. Whenever the Xiists collapse, the tech will be allowed out of Japan, which will allow for replacement to occur artificially, at the moment in which what I might term "the great deshitholeization" - a general advancement, powered by the spread of modern infrastructure, of most current actual Third World countries toward the level of upper middle income nations, and of enough upper middle income nations toward the level at which for instance Greece or Chile are today - the liminal First World - will be nuking the incentive for people to leave traditional sources of mass migration and those birth rates lower to the point that the population pressure comes off.
Most likely organizations similar to central banks, but carrying the mandate to maintain a steady expansion of the supply of population, rather than a steady expansion of the supply of money, will take on the role of ensuring that population is kept up at the gentlest of rates of increases, similar to the old argument that a one to two percent rate of inflation was preferable to truly sound money. This would also provide the opportunity for a bit of salutary eugenics, arresting the Idiocracy scenario by the simple expedient of making sure the genes of high IQ people were overrepresented in reproduction, and perhaps also compelling the reproduction above what would occur given birth control of the genes of more attractive people as well. The world would be too depressing were it full of fuggos alone. The establishment of such organizations would also allow for the more rapid peopling of anything we as a species are able to terraform between one and two centuries from now.
Not to get overly techno optimistic about it, but people aren't potatoes, they don't just sit there, especially during existential crises.
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@MrWick-fi8vo Winnipeg I think is more affordable, at least if you can work remote, but the weather is even worse, I have heard they have mosquitos and blackflies, and IIRC the homicide is Thunder Bay like. The one guy I knew who doubled back to the 'peg used to say that everything was nicer in the fairly humble corner of the western Toronto suburbs where we lived - he'd make this comment while we were rolling down one of the chronically underdeveloped streets - and illustrate his point by the relatively more attractive appearance of our drug addicted prostitutes. Anyway upon arrival in Winnipeg I believe he was almost instantaneously imprisoned, which was my takeaway after he began posting a bunch of stuff about how the behaviour of the local FNs really got to him following a long hiatus. When I helped some people I knew move cross country, the other guy with whom I was driving who had done the drive before made a point to avoid Winnipeg. I also knew one guy who trained nurses on hospital equipment who said Winnipeg was the grimmest place he had ever visited, that it made the bad bits of western Toronto suburbs look nice. It might be it's fine so long as you stay out of town on the right side of town with the right overlap of police patrols, but it sort of makes the impression on people that it makes. Southeastern Manitoba did look sort of appealing, if you're a remote worker, especially in late summer when you basically get two climates in one by going east one hour uphill into Ontario.
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@falcor200 A scenario where Canada stops existing is the optimistic one, because it's one where the successor states are able to stay in the First World with some shreds of democratic institutions remaining for them.
The problem is that it became a postnational state starting in the 1960s with secularization. Ontario went in the direction of extending the minimum standard of citizenship rights guaranteed to Catholics as second class citizens to every other minority, then gradually equalizing the citizenship rights of all minorities, becoming stuck in time with the equalization of Catholic school funding in the 1990s under Premier Harris at the high water mark of multiculturalism as an ideology in America, creating a set of soft expectations that American-style rights would predominate, which was not hurt by heavy spending by the Koch brothers on propaganda meant to push the idea of individual rights in the American sense anywhere that spoke English. The reason why there has been no Rivers of Blood scenario in Ontario is because of the 1990s suburban midwestern overculture evolved within a context of enclaves being a feature and not a bug. Whether this survives boomer opposition to housing development sufficient to accommodate the increasing numbers of people with decreasing average points system scores is up for debate. Quebec had the francophone secular tradition which guided its evolution. Outside of obscure online libertarian circles - so this is specifically men, generally post college aged, who choose a specific ideological group - libertarian girls aren't the ones who argue about theory, libertarian girls want to put on their Gadsden bikini and shoot a carbine at an unregistered range until it is time to homeschool their kids. It's exactly the way male sports fans memorize the statistics and female sports fans make sure the bunting is up in the house for the big game - the French and English traditions tend to be oil and water.
Secularism and multiculturalism are not compatible as they exist in these provinces, since there can be only one overarching ideology. The writing should have been on the wall about what that means for over eight years at this point, or when Harper introduced the niqab as a wedge issue and Mulcair's optimism that he could bridge the gap had the effect that it had. It is fair in my view to term this result "Canadian defeat in the War on Terror." The absence of an overarching ideology or close working substitute means that there is not common set of civic values, therefore that in the Benedict Anderson sense of an imagined community, Canada has been failing as a nation for six decades. The pre1960s ideology arguably went back to the 1840s but was codified into a set of formal minimum standards for minority rights by MacDonald. For being one guy with Victorian norms, MacDonald did an excellent job, given there were no Canadian equivalent to The Troubles in Northern Ireland, which had a similar demographic situation of a Protestant majority and Catholic minority.* We have to remember, whereas America was a project of several years of intense discussion, Canada was significantly the project of a lone colonial official deep in a Scotch-powered shamanic meditation who did a three year rush job getting the buy-in from officials in other British possessions. The worst thing Confederation did was give MacDonald's counterparts in Cape and Natal Colony similar ambitions.
The main effect of the "patriation of the constitution" was to sever ties with traditional restraints held by the elites against state overreach. In the absence of these restraints and with nothing in common at the level of civic values between the different provinces, this means that democratic norms will inevitably erode to nothing, unless centralized authority does first.
Bilingualism has been an utterly failed policy whose primary role has been to entrench an unaccountable managerial caste whose collective instincts will always be those of the Stalinist apparatchik. I say this as a bilingual.
A controlled and gradual phase-out of Confederation would be the most logical course of action from the perspective of anybody who might have family who might have to stay in these provinces. Other than the monarchy as a legal entity west of the Rideau - or in provinces which were recognized in 1763 as Indian Territory - and loose cooperation through the Bank of Canada which would be needed to stabilize the value of world CAD deposits and oversee their orderly and controlled redemption into provincial currencies which would, ideally, be allowed to float against one another as much as possible to ward off the Dutch disease, there ought not to be any other shared institutions.
A logical first place to begin would be by devolving the Criminal Code to the provinces. Montreal has anxieties about tools termed varmint guns in points west of Thunder Bay since Quebec people actually become mass shooters. Trying to hold up some kind of half-measure of property rights in Quebec will just result in the collapse of property rights in other provinces.
*I blame the way the Indian Affairs bureaucracy evolved for the damage done to First Nations as economies and cultures. MacDonald is on record as wanting to incorporate the FNs as ridings within the Parliamentary system. Even Egerton Ryerson had nothing to do with the abuses by pedophiles and other bad actors enabled by bureaucrats in the residential school system.
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