this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
1580 points (95.6% liked)

Political Memes

8172 readers
2441 users here now

Welcome to politcal memes!

These are our rules:

Be civilJokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.

No misinformationDon’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.

Posts should be memesRandom pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.

No bots, spam or self-promotionFollow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.

No AI generated content.Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Sivecano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 27 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Like, they are bad for societies though. Not just in terms of keeping them around but also in terms of demographic makeup, no? Children are an important part of the social fabric. There is a point at which the old outnumbering the young does bevome a bad thing.

[–] InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago

Yes, but our consumer society isn't raising the alarm for those reasons (for the most part)

[–] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 0 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Why though? Those statements might or might not be true, but they’re totally unqualified.

[–] Ledericas@lemm.ee 15 points 6 days ago

that is why countries wont even dare discuss why its occuring instead trying to low effort coerce people into having more children.

[–] Rooty@lemmy.world 12 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Trap people in a work - consume - die paradigm

People refuse to bring new life into the hellscape you created

Cry about it in your propaganda channels

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 6 points 6 days ago (2 children)

That depends, really. I'm sorry, but these anti capitalism memes always show such over simplified view of the world, this is not how things work.

Take South Korea, for example. The way they are going right now, 50 years from now it might not even exist anymore. Granted, the underlying causes there for the low birth rates have a lot to do with uncontrolled capitalism, but communism won't save the country from this problem.

You still have a shrinking work force to do the required work, you still have a relatively expanding section of elders that won't work anymore but requires care instead, being an extra "burden" on the country. Less people will have to do more work over time and it causes a huge list of issues that communism really isn't going to solve.

The actual solution for South krea would be in tightening laws on their capitalist system, allowing people more time to have children in the first place. Then they need immigrants, and probably quite a few of them. Like Japan, South Korea is rather homogeneous, they're in for a surprise, I guess.

Either way, just posting these "but of course communism will solve this, communism solves everything" memes is so naive it's just child level dumb.

Communism hasn't worked well anywhere, how about some pragmatism and we start hard limiting capitalism instead, which we know does work

Birth rates are so low

[–] HelixDab2@lemm.ee 4 points 6 days ago

The low birth rates aren't just rampant capitalism though; it's also SK women having a choice to not get married and have children, combined with a culture that's almost rabidly misogynistic. If I were a Korean woman, I absolutely would not want to get hitched to a Korean man and have children with him, because I know that it would be very unlikely that I'd treated like a real person or an equal partner. But the culture--much like Japan--seems to prize people that put in horrifically long hours, and even if you fix the cultural misogyny, you're still stuck with not having much time to spend with your partner.

[–] Tattorack@lemmy.world 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Being against capitalism =/= supporting communism.

Why do you believe everyone who hates capitalism thinks communism is the only viable alternative?

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

The meme implies “not capitalism is the answer” and you’re not answering OP’s question.

I’m with Phoenix here, this is a fundamental labor/production problem, not an organizational one. Even if wealth and work was magically, perfectly redistributed via some system (take your pick), life would still suck for younger people in SK.

[–] Tattorack@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

But "not capitalism" is the solution.

A lot of the low birthrate comes from people choosing careers over families. Gee i wonder what system propagates such behaviour?

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

It’s too late for SK.

And even if it weren’t, there’s a lot of policy problems (immigration, sexism, internal cultural ones) that fall outside economic systems. “Just switch the economic system so people will want to have babies” is the other side of the coin of the hard right’s “just value traditional families so people will want to have babies.”

To reiterate, I am saying this meme is wrong in portraying low birth rates as mostly a problem of the neoliberal capitalist economic system, even though it is a major contributor. A magic switchover would not fix it.

[–] SnarkoPolo@lemm.ee 3 points 6 days ago

Hence the agenda of the current American regime. Outlaw birth control. Eliminate public education. Health care will be too expensive for most workers. And over it all, evangelical Christianity keeps a poorly educated workforce in line. So you end up with a working class who breed fast, die young, and have no concept that life could be any other way.

[–] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

The word "for" does a lot of heavy lifting in there.

My condo building just got rid of the company that meters our water. After years of this we could finally break the contract.

My water bill usage was something like $15/mo and they had an admin fee of $13/mo. In a building of like 150 apartments, those guys were raking in like $2k a month from us for keeping their automated shit plugged in.

The managers said they would just stop metering and our monthly fees would pay the bill. After a year, they would adjust our monthly rates to balance it out.

They never had to balance it out - that’s how little the overall water usage cost was.

[–] BoycottPro@lemm.ee 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

The so-called birthrate crisis is manufactured by morons like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk who clearly didn't pay attention in science class and didn't learn about logistic population growth https://www.britannica.com/science/population-ecology/Logistic-population-growth and those who see a line going down and assume it will keep going down at the same rate forever.

[–] grte@lemmy.ca 138 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

People understand the concept of, "no infinite growth on a finite planet," but then refuse to accept that that holds true for us as well. The world population has more than doubled in my lifetime. Obviously we can't do that forever. Especially in the context of a climate crisis that is making less land livable over time. For completely practical reasons we are going to have to set up some kind of system that can function in equilibrium rather than requiring growth.

[–] PlaidBaron@lemmy.world 33 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (11 children)

This is true but people focus so hard on the population they miss the wider issue. Its not the number of people thats the issue right now, its the massively uneccesary amount of resources each person uses.

The world can accomodate a lot of people IF we shift the way we do things. If we all live like the world is an endless piggy bank, it wont work.

Without considering the way we live and the system we've built, people begin sliding into borderline eco-fascist ideas of population control because its an easy thing to understand and latch onto. But the situation is much more complicated than that.

So yes, there is a finite human population limit but that doesnt mean we've hit it or are even going to hit it.

load more comments (11 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 64 points 1 week ago (17 children)

I said it before and I'll say it again ....

It's not about the quantity of life

It's about the quality of life

If you make the world a capitalistic hell hole where people are constantly worked to the bone without much reward and no time to enjoy their lives, then chances are, they won't be motivated or even healthy enough to want to have children. In the premodern wild, people had many children because they had time and they knew that conditions had the possibility of improving in the future. Sure, many of their children died but they knew that the ones who did survive would have a chance to survive if they worked hard enough because they knew their work would be rewarded.

In our current world .... you can work until your hands fall off and you won't be rewarded. More and more people are realizing that they don't want that for themselves so why should they do that to their unborn children?

The conditions for humanity are falling everywhere and people are so compassionate for their children that many of them feel like they don't want to bring their children into this hell hole we've created if 99.99% of everyone has no chance at a good life.

load more comments (17 replies)
[–] ahornsirup@feddit.org 54 points 1 week ago (22 children)

Unless you expect people to work until they drop dead it's a crisis regardless of the economic system, especially coupled with the increases in life expectancy. You have fewer and fewer people of working age who have to provide for and take care of more and more old people for longer and longer. Even if you eliminate profit motives, you're placing an outsized burden on younger generations.

load more comments (22 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›