roadkill on the information superhighway

at work: i will start every project and clean my room and learn a new language and read a book and exercise

My great uncle is Neil Postman, who wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, a book that critiqued the prevalence of television as a means for conveying information versus providing entertainment, and now I really want to resurrect him and get his opinion on Tenna.

right wing handwringing over birth rates has always unsubtly been a combination of wanting more white babies/wanting control over women, so it's bothersome that the popular response to that is just pointing out the cost of living. "we Would be having more kids if you guys made some positive changes to society" and such. pronatalist sentiment is becoming so much more explicit that I don't think many self-styled progressives are ready to reconcile with the fact that many women simply do not want to have children. we already see how women are demonized for refusing to undertake the thankless burdens of their mother and grandmother's generations lol, I can't imagine how full abdication from child rearing will come across to some people.

I think this rhetoric also ignores that the right wing want the inverse for Black and brown people - this logic of “raise living standards and we’ll have more kids” is a white perspective that ignores white supremacist medical violence, forced abortions, forced sterilisation, mass deportations, mass incarceration, police murder, imperial aggression, and forced removal of children from families as institutional programs of population control (Canadian residential schools, for example, were built for this exact purpose).

bluesky post: we need to stick it to the DICKtator in chief by funding my new ttrpg zine