I’m an epidemiology professor and I write a weekly “weather report” outbreaks [1]. These communication and data blackouts are coming at a bad time. We’re having an unusual flu season—activity has rebounded unexpectedly. I’ve been having to scramble for data, last week by visiting each state health department website. It’s really troubling and consequential.
This is intentional. They're mad about the covid response, and want to prevent mask mandates or lockdowns at any cost. At any cost. Including suppressing information about bird flu for as long as possible.
I’m curious about what will happen if they get to the parts of this Project 2025 like agenda that involves telling people to do things, or banning things people like.
We already see that abortion bans are unpopular. When they are put to a vote they lose, even in very red states.
How much more will people take? How will the Joe Rogan dudebro crowd react to banning porn? That’ll be interesting.
I’ve been predicting for years that it’s these guys — the Christian Nationalists / NatCons — who are going to mass confiscate guns. Would that be the third rail?
I mean the current game plan, from what it seems, is to make porn a shameful and taboo thing. Same as abortions as well.
There’s a heavy pro-natalism push for obvious reasons, and I have no idea why, but it feels like current government is trying to fix it through wrong methods. They know they’re royally fucked if people having 0-2 kids max.
Those definitely affect the choice, but ultimately, there’s just no real cultural push to have more kids nowadays. Rich people aren’t having kids either, as you can see in top 10%, 1% brackets. Like, I don’t have a single girl friend that even wants 3 kids. Anyone whom I’ve talked to always has a range between 0-2. Can’t blame them. Giving up at the minimum 6 years of your life for no real benefits kinda sucks.
It's a complex issue. IMHO it's only a real problem when birth rates are consistently below replacement or when they fall way below replacement as they are in a few places like Korea.
In that case, step one is to remove obvious barriers like insane housing prices and pervasive workaholism so that people who want to have kids find it easy to do so. Create a culture that is a supportive environment for families.
I don't see the Project 2025 crowd doing much of that. Many of the billionaires backing the project are pushing work cultures and social policies that will have the opposite effect. Think Musk's "hard core" work cultures are conductive to family formation?
I think it's because their real goal is fundamentalist theocracy and/or fascism. Just like the climate protestors who are actually hard-core Marxists or anti-industrial Neo-primitivists hoping to collapse society to realize their vision, these people are "problemists." The problem is a good thing because it's a hook they can use to sell a whole agenda. Solving the problem without implementing that whole agenda would be, to them, a failure.
Christian Nationalists don't want to fix declining birth rates without implementing Christian Nationalism any more than the people throwing paint on works of art in Europe want greenhouse gas emissions fixed without collapsing capitalism.
> I mean the current game plan, from what it seems, is to make porn a shameful and taboo thing. Same as abortions as well.
Uhhh no, they're pushing to make these things illegal. One is a social norm, the other is utilizing the power of the state to assert a specific opinion.
Reach out to the developer behind 91-DIVOC. That won't cover red states that go dark when and if they do, but it was invaluable to me during the covid pandemic.
I'm a CS professor who used to write and develop the software behind a daily and weekly Pennsylvania covid report. I get the pain here. It's a messy, incompatible jumble without the CDC.
Would you like me to see if there are some CS folks here to provide programming support to help with what you're doing?
I -hope- this is transient but I'm not holding my breath either.
[1] https://caitlinrivers.substack.com