How western sensibility is killing us

By Andrew Atkin:

Imagine if we had a traditional society, where people took having kids seriously. So seriously that it was taboo not to have them and not to have them young. With the effect being that nearly every woman has given birth to 3 or more children before she was 25 years of age.

Now imagine also that the planning was minimal. So kids first - poverty eradication second. Better to be fertile and poor than infertile and rich.

What would happen if we were still running a society like that?

Well, there would be enormous pressure on the government to engineer a society that facilitates fertility, to keep the financial pain of bringing children into this world at a minimum. And this is where the heart of my point is.

We've lost that political pressure. Because nowadays if it's hard to have children, then we just don't have them (excluding the truly reckless, of course.)

Now that would be alright enough, except for the fact that the political-pressure to hold to family-friendly policies has largely collapsed. The result, is that public policy has been overwhelmingly engineered to take care of the interests of older people, rather than young families, and in turn amplifying our collapsing fertility rates.

Today, we've got all these young people making perfectly sensible decisions about not having children until they can most comfortably afford it. Resulting in both heavily delayed and greatly reduced fertility. And fertility usually below even social replacement levels.

We've become so sensible with our decision making as individuals, that our governments no longer have to be. And it's literally killing us.

These are some of the key policy movements that probably would not have survived if we went back to being foolish, and had well-sized families at the younger and healthier times of our lives:

1. The property market would not have been allowed to artificially inflate.

-This has been a nightmare for the young, though profitable for the older generations.

2. Educational demands would not have been allowed to inflate.

-You wouldn't need a degree for a job requiring just good communication skill and diligence, and most people would hardly need high school in fact. Young people (and society in general) would win back at least 5 years of their lives.

3. Pensions would be strictly means-tested.

-The idea of paying pensions to old people who don't really need them, would no longer be tolerated. Not with too many families with young children struggling.

Conclusion:

The final result of all this reduced fertility, and bloated privilege to the elderly, is that the third world is set to replace us. Because when it comes to having kids, as individuals we're just too damn sensible. In turn we've made it too easy for our governments to ignore pro-fertility policy, and in fact facilitate anti-fertility policy.

It's time for a re-think.

The Ultimate Spy Device

Andrew Atkin: 

Smartphones are the ultimate spy device. Even when you think they're off, they could nonetheless be recording everything you're saying, with time and location included, and converting it into a file to be uploaded later just as soon as you connect to the Internet. 

That file can then be processed on an outside server where your speech is converted to text, and your words are scanned for anything considered 'concerning'. It's easy and the technology supporting this exists today. It could happen in the background operations of your phone, so you won't even know it's happening.

Anything that you do online in general can be recorded and decoded, and with no matter what kind of an app you think you're using. All code can be decoded.

If you're worried about any kind of big brother snooping into your life, then worry no more. There's every chance this sort of thing is happening already, or will happen, so you might as well presume that it is.

But it's not all bad news. If it's not abused, spying can provide a excellent public service. In theory at least, it's never been harder for a terrorist group to successfully organise a violent attack. Only the silent lone-wolf terrorist should be a threat in our modern age, and even then only if he doesn't talk to himself.

Yet there is still a bad side, and a potentially devastating bad side. 

What happens when a less-than-benevolent government gets into power, takes the opposition parties out back for execution, and then shuts down future elections?

How do you organise opposition to a government gone so badly wrong, when the government can and will sniff-out organised dissent the moment it happens; along with who and where exactly the dissenters are?  Well you can't. 

Hence government becomes inherently dangerous as a social system, as it probably can't be redeemed for when and if the worst ever happens. You would probably have to wait for it to redeem itself in maybe the far distant future.

So should we throw away our smartphones? Unrealistic, of course. The best we can do is focus on laying down some strong defenses today.

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Some suggestions to keeping the government straight:

1. Decentralise government into small local units, so no all-powerful centralised government can develop in the first place. (Radical decentralisation has advantages on many levels. This is just one).

2. Develop a constitution for all law enforcers on all levels to follow, that strictly controls for the potential abuse of power from central governments.

-A finalised constitution should only be modified through public referendum, which should be respected as the highest authority of the land. Law enforcers should be instructed that a government that tries to illegitimately over-rule the constitution is their enemy and should be treated as such.

3. Make all policy and operational systems of the secret service as transparent as possible.

4. Eliminate all hate speech laws that threaten to criminalise free speech.

-The problem with 'hate speech' is it's inherently subjective. The bottom line: With hate speech laws you are creating the legal infrastructure to shut down free speech. This is extremely dangerous in any circumstance. If people can be spied on and ultimately criminalised for their political speech alone, then needless to say you've got yourself a creeping tyranny.

5. Make tight reforms and protections, as required, while your nation still can. Fixing problems before they happen is obviously the way to go.