The good news is, the specter of overpopulation turns out to not be a very big worry from this point forward. Birth rates are dropping almost everywhere. The bad news is, modern capitalism seems to offer so many disincentives to having a family that only those with a strong compulsive desire for children are still motivated to reproduce, meaning that this trait is going to be selected for.

and I notice that nobody seems willing to spell out what their mystical secret "red pill" insights actually are. They're clear what it's not -- feminism, in a word -- but nobody seems to quite agree what it is. It seems to be anything and everything that can be used to justify having less respect for women.

I wonder if racists will also start framing their race science -- excuse me, "human biodiversity" -- ideas as a secret insider knowledge available only to a select elite of superior individuals who have what it takes to face the truth. If it works for the misogyny crowd...

But this red pill stuff doesn't remind me of racism so much as of something like Al Qaeda, where people are recruited to violence through hate propaganda that gives them someone to blame for their lives. Except without the religious angle... of the "manosphere" stuff I've seen, the conservative Christian wing is the least offensive faction. Maybe a better analogy than Al Qaeda would be something like the antigovernment militia movement.

This morning I woke up to a campaign ad from some dickhead running for assembly named Steve Glazer. (CA district 16, which I lived in a few years ago.) And his campaign issue is that last year's strike by BART transit workers was harmful, and that sort of thing should be stopped. It casts him as mister bravery for standing up to union power. It implied that he was running as an independent, though I could not verify that he does or doesn't have a party affiliation anymore.

Surprisingly, he is, or recently was, a Democrat.

Apparently he thinks that if people are providing a truly vital service, they should not be allowed to strike. He's saying that if you do something that people need, he is ENTITLED to the fruit of your labor.

Let me clarify something. Just as to be employed is a privilege, not a right, it's also a privilege, not a right, to employ someone. If another person is working for you, either directly as an employer or indirectly as a customer, their labor on your behalf is not something they owe you. It is something performed only by mutual agreement. If you disagree with that -- if you think essential labor should be mandatory for workers to perform -- then I hope you also think that it should be mandatory for companies to hire the unemployed, until there's no unemployment. Is holding a job voluntary or not?

Organized labor has of course come out strongly against Glazer, and the corporate media are lining up to label their opposition a "smear campaign". But the only smear I've heard was Glazer's own ad, and that's plenty for me.

I hope it's true that this asshat is running as an independent. I hope that he is thoroughly shunned by his former buddies in the Democratic party. Governor Brown is apparently on that buddy list; let's see how he reacts.