[nashashmi]

I think you have assumed the worst from my comment.

A culture where both men and women are expected to work and have the same roles and responsibilities is the worst treatment. It does not respect gender differences and strength differences.

You asked me to quote birth rates so I looked up birth rates of Russian minorities. I could not find any but I did find this: https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/26/world/mother-russia-makes...

[theprincess]

> I think you have assumed the worst from my comment.

I assumed that you are against gender equality. Gender equality meaning that men and women are given the freedom to do as they wish without being sanctioned. I think you'll find that men and women tend to gravitate toward very different lifestyles in the most egalitarian societies - look at gender ratios in various job fields in Norway or Sweden - but life is much easier for those men and women who are not typical. It seems rather wasteful to organize society around the needs of 80% while forcing 20% into a box that doesn't fit them. Better to let people self sort.

If you think gender equality means that women are being sanctioned for doing traditionally womanly things like home making or mothering I'd have to ask where you got the information that led you to that conclusion because it doesn't fit with my own experiences growing up in the United States.

> A culture where both men and women are expected to work and have the same roles and responsibilities is the worst treatment. It does not respect gender differences and strength differences.

This comment is just a roundabout way of saying that you believe gender equality is bad.

> You asked me to quote birth rates so I looked up birth rates of Russian minorities.

Why minorities? What makes them substantially different from, say, an Orthodox white Russian who lives in St. Petersburg, or one who lives in Yakutia for that matter?

[nashashmi]

> What makes them substantially different

They are conservative, do not have modern interpretations of gender equality, and have higher birth rates.

I'm going to steer clear of the gender inequality debate. It has been hijacked by reactionary comparison-justifying women trying to claim there are no differences between men and women and try to fight gender inequality without having an accurate idea of what gender equality looks like.

Instead, I'm going to claim if the strength of women cannot be respected, their abilities are not recognized, and their high functioning roles as mothers are not honored, and yet the male obligations are held in higher regard, the female will be stretched too thin in trying to have equal authority and importance in matters. This is pure distortion and not rectifiable by authority.

[theprincess]

> They are conservative, do not have modern interpretations of gender equality, and have higher birth rates.

What are their un-modern interpretations of gender equality that you'd like to see emulated in the USA, Australia and Western Europe?

It's also curious that you're noting that some groups have high birth rates, also global population growth is still rising, while also worrying about underpopulation. The subtext is that you're concerned about white and northeast Asian people in particular yes? That would fit into a worldview that's been called "Human Biodiversity" (HBD) iirc?

If you weren't familiar with HBD people, the gist is that they think that western European and northeast Asian people should be preserved because their genes are precious.

I can remember reading Steve Sailor and some other such HBD people when I was younger and feeling persuaded by them at first -- easy because I'm white and blonde haired and blue eyed so they appealed to my vanity lol. After thinking on it for a few years however, I came to the conclusion that HBD is just a weird little religion that hasn't actually thought much about the consequences of its propositions beyond some romantic vision of a glorious Evropean golden age -- that their proposed policies would never be able to create, since they'd destroy everything unique and interesting about the same groups that they want so badly to 'save' from themselves.

Secondarily, why do you think birthrates need to be increased above replacement level? A lower population along with technological developments, particularly recent ones around improving AI, would likely create much higher standards of living so long as the correct economic policies were laid into place.

> I'm going to steer clear of the gender inequality debate. It has been hijacked by reactionary comparison-justifying women trying to claim there are no differences between men and women and try to fight gender inequality without having an accurate idea of what gender equality looks like.

Any examples of this that aren't just Twitter hot takes? Gender roles are alive and well all over the world. People today, in some ways more than ever, revel in adhering to them. IME it's just seen as taboo to try to force people to adhere to them.

> Instead, I'm going to claim if the strength of women cannot be respected, their abilities are not recognized, and their high functioning roles as mothers are not honored, and yet the male obligations are held in higher regard, the female will be stretched too thin in trying to have equal authority and importance in matters. This is pure distortion and not rectifiable by authority.

The point is that every group has outliers. 80% of women might have dispositions that lend themselves very well to mothering but some 20% will have dispositions that lend themselves better to other things. Similarly about 80% of men seem drawn to developing stereotypically masculine traits, but some 20% will have a more stereotypically feminine disposition. It makes no sense to attempt to organize all of society around pretending that 100% of men and 100% of women fit into the same mould as that 80%. It's equally delusional to the idea that men and women have no differences at all.

It's trivial to measure just about any trait that varies between the sexes and notice that they form two overlapping normal distributions. You've accused 'modernity' of pretending that the distributions overlap completely while simultaneously pretending that the distributions have no overlap at all.

You're on HN so you probably like technological development. Human efforts are wasted when we don't let people do what suits them. Technological development will move more quickly if we aren't wasteful.

My husband and I have a child and I would be more open to having a few more if we could maintain our standard of living on his salary alone. Despite my strange propensity for studying extremist literature online and then trying to de-radicalize people I'm otherwise pretty normal so I'd hazard a guess that fixing economic inequality would do as much to drive up birth rates as abolishing gender equality, but the former would cause much less human suffering.

[nashashmi]

You have seriously misunderstood the entire premise of my comment and created a shadow of it that you are now fighting.

This seems like a feminist take/fight. Feminism is a hate masquerading as a fight for women's rights. And I am not engaging any further.

[theprincess]

> You have seriously misunderstood the entire premise of my comment and created a shadow of it that you are now fighting.

Okay.

> Feminism is a hate masquerading as a fight for women's rights. And I am not engaging any further.

But then you follow up with this, which makes me even more confident that I didn't misunderstand you. From the start my impression has been that you're a little shy about saying exactly what you mean, thus my attempts to read between the lines so that we can have a real direct conversation in lieu of beating around the bush so to speak.

I don't know you, but when I read your responses I can't help but imagine that you're in a dark place. When life has hurt us in some way it's easy to project that negativity out onto the world, but a part of healing is separating what's inside of us versus what's outside. I hope we can all get there. Sending good vibes.