Indeed hardly. If you want to push up the birth rate, do the reverse of what is done to (sensibly) limit it: stop girls from getting an education, promote means of maintaining a patriarchal society (e.g, specific branches of organised religion), limit independent journalism, block foreign media — there is a huge list of actually effective strategies to boneheadedly resort to.
Anti-LGBT+ laws serve a different purpose: useful scapegoats. How is this different from Hungary and Poland?
A prominent world-award-winning fantasy author summarized a convincing argument on the subject a number of years back.[1] His argument is that heterosexual marriage is both necessary and challenging because of the natural differences between the sexes. If we remove stigma from same-sex unions, such as through the efforts of activists, men will tend to prefer same-sex relationships because they are simpler and more enjoyable:
> Men, after all, know what men like far better than
> women do; women know how women think and feel far
> better than men do. But a man and a woman come
> together as strangers and their natural impulses
> remain at odds throughout their lives, requiring
> constant compromise, suppression of natural desires,
> and an unending effort to learn how to get through
> the intersexual swamp.
So the argument is that if being gay is legal, straight men will turn gay because it's easier than dealing with women? And that strikes you as a convincing argument, does it?
Assuming you aren't trolling, it sounds like you are actually homosexual, you don't know it due to your upbringing, and you're projecting because you think (just like you do) all men are suppressing their inner homosexual desires.
That is quite a creative hypothesis to level at the author of this essay and the significant fraction of the world's population who agree with its sentiment.
> ... men will tend to prefer same-sex relationships because they are simpler and more enjoyable
(emphasis mine)
The world's population who agree with this sentiment is usually called "gays." Also, there's nothing wrong with being gay. Don't be like one of those preachers who get caught in bed.
It doesn't, but if you try to ground your homophobia in "evolutionary science" or "social capitalism" then you're not a bad person, you're just staying "facts"!
They adopt. There are plenty of children in the foster care system or orphanages depending on the country whose lives would be greatly improved if they lived with parents regardless of the combinations of genitals or gender identity of those parents.
Or those who are richer and/or in richer countries can use various artificial means.
I think the overwhelming majority of adopted children would disagree.
One's "real" parents aren't always one's biological parents, even outside of formal adoption (cf. plenty of Americans realizing that their older "sister" is actually their mother).
You’d do well to not speak generally but specifically to the case. Sperm bank for women and surrogate moms are non-existent in Ghana. Take a walk on any random street and ask (1) how that woman became pregnant (2) why the child calls the parent mom or dad and you'll get traditional answers. That said, child birth/procreation isn't what the bill protects. We have no such issue in the country.
Yes, I 100% agree that reality is complicated and not everything is about race, but some things are still about race and we shouldn't be afraid to talk about it.
Racists aren't idiots, most of them know they can't openly spout racial slurs any more and still be taken seriously, so they use proxy issues framed in ways that do more harm to the groups they hate than to middle class white Americans.
You can't simultaneously solve every single social problem in existence out of fear of being called the real bigots, and making it all about whichever example of bigotry or injustice you're talking about in the moment. Sometimes you have to zoom in on a particular sub problem, be it income, education, crime, pollution, housing, disability, race, class, homelessness, or whatever.
So no, in short I don't think the worst racists of today are the ones who talk about the privileges or difficulties that come with being born into one race or another. The worst racists are still the same people they've always been, the people who try to hurt or kill the racial groups they don't like using every tool at their disposal, be it he media, the police, the law or whatever.
Maybe I've misunderstood, I'm not a climatologist, but I thought climate change means certain events become more likely but it's still impossible to say if climate change caused any single individual event.
For example, if climate change makes it 7% more likely to rain somewhere, it doesn't mean every rainy day is climate change. You can only say climate change made it 7% more rainy on average.
So climate change increases the chance of phenomena like "World's largest iceberg", but you can't say for sure if this iceberg in particular was generated by climate change.
I think that's all the article was trying to say with "could"
Still, it's a bad editorial move because the average reader doesn't understand the nuance. Worse, some may even read that and conclude that global warming still may not even be real...
Cats can be trained quite well do to activities and if you can understand them correctly. It is still very rare, tho. I've seen videos of cats doing skateboard and other things their human trained them to do, but he was a cat behaviourist.
I always wanted a dog growing up. My parents finally agreed to a cat, so I made do. She knew sit, shake, high five, would "play" the piano, and could be sent off to touch a mark. When my sister's cat came to live with us for a few months, I taught him to sit and to jog on the treadmill. The treadmill trick was no longer allowed after the day mom was running on the treadmill and he jumped on and ran up between her feet.
That's damn cute. While I've always grew with cats I've never been able to make one do things! They always loved me deeply (in their own ways, for example my first one was always walking me to school and doing silly things for fun on the walk, coming back at the pause, and coming back to search me when school ended).
I think I only accomplished any of that because I was a kid before kids having their own computers was a thing. So I had nothing but time to spend and all the patience an 8-15 year old could muster. Once I got a job and could drive places, I never really taught any more tricks.
I thought the early reluctance to recommend masks was because there was a shortage and medical staff needed them more, and there was the fear that constantly touching your face to adjust a mask and incorrectly wearing or removing masks might increase exposure.
That was part of the message, but another part was that it was "not airborne" (and that messages to the contrary are misinformation) and that healthy people wearing masks has "no medical benefit". All while they were walking around in bunny suits and full face masks in china.
I actually ran into this once not as a joke. I was using some software which had an option that would change the default base it used for all numbers. After typing <command> 16 and fiddling about in hexadecimal I tried switching back to decimal using <command> 10, yet I was still in hex mode. It took me a few more seconds than it should for me to realise what had happened.
It's a way programmers have to show off, have fun or be artistic. You write a programme but you restrict yourself in some way such as creating it for a 1980s era computer or by file size say the entire thing has to fit inside 4KB or some other extreme limit, and then you try to do things using visuals and/or music that you initially wouldn't think are possible.
Basically half of the main cast (7 out of 14 or 15 depending on how you count) have died below life expectancy for their birth year. The causes of their deaths are all different or at least had very different comorbidities. That is really weird.
