MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Greta’

Doug Casey on the Use of Children in Propaganda

Posted by M. C. on November 27, 2023

And now comes young St. Greta. She’s proof of the ignorance of children. But, more importantly, she illustrates the stupidity of the public, who are apparently willing to believe a kid devoid of experience, expertise, or even a reasonable education. It’s actually a laugh riot when she gives a lecture to adults for having ruined her childhood.

by Doug Casey

Doug Casey on the Use of Children in Propaganda

International Man: Throughout history, governments have always used propaganda to drum up support for war. Often, their atrocity propaganda features children to get the maximum emotional response.

For example, during World War 1, the US media whipped up a frenzy by claiming that the Germans were bayoneting Belgian babies. The atrocities never happened.

In the run-up to the Gulf War in 1991, Americans were told that Iraqi soldiers were ripping babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals. President George H.W. Bush later repeated the story. It was a pivotal event that increased support for the war. Later, the incident was revealed to be fake, and the woman making the claims was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington, someone who had a motive to get the US involved in the war.

More recently, the media told us about the Palestinian Hamas beheading 40 Israeli babies. President Joe Biden repeated the incident. It was later revealed not to have occurred.

These are just a few examples of this propaganda tactic.

What is your take on all of this?

Doug Casey: It’s long been said, quite correctly, that “The first casualty in war is truth.” Especially when it comes to war reporting, you never know what to believe. It’s impossible to separate truth from propaganda most of the time. Emotion almost always triumphs over reason.

Americans are particularly vulnerable to emotional arguments because they always see themselves as the “good guys.” Although their interventions almost always made things worse—starting with the US fomenting the Spanish-American War, then prolonging World War I and setting up the conditions for World War II. Foreign disasters have gotten worse since—in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Now, in the Ukraine and Gaza. And lots of others on the runway. Americans are particularly vulnerable to seeing themselves as saviors when they should just mind their own business.

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Are Car Seat Laws Driving Down America’s Birthrate?

Posted by M. C. on December 14, 2020

An unintended victory for progressives.and Greta lovers.

Are Car Seat Laws Driving Down America’s Birthrate?

A provocative new study claims the steady upward creep in the age at which states mandate that children use car seats is prompting women to either postpone or opt out of having a third child.

The paper, published on the Social Science Research Network, by finance professors Jordan Nickerson of MIT and David Solomon of Boston College, argues that most vehicles can fit only two car seats in the back row, necessitating the purchase of a larger car to accommodate three young children at once. That added cost, they argue, disincentivizes some women from having a third child.

“We find that when a woman has two children below the car seat age, her chances of giving birth that year decline by 0.73 percentage points” below where they’d be if only one or none of her existing children were required to be in a car seat, write Nickerson and Solomon. “This represents a large decline, as the probability of giving birth for a woman age 18-35 with two children already is 9.36 [percent] in our sample.”

The nationwide average minimum age at which children are allowed to ride in cars with just seat belts has risen from less than 3 in the mid-1980s to just under 8 today. This steady increase, the paper suggests, could help explain why fertility rates have declined in the last decade despite a long-running economic recovery that would normally encourage more childbirths. To tease out the impact of car seat laws, the paper controls for variables such as urban density, household income, and whether a male parent is present.

While these laws are intended to save children’s lives in the event of an automobile accident, Nickerson and Solomon argue that the effect on birthrates is much bigger. The changes “prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017,” it says. “Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90 [percent] of this decline being since 2000.”

There are reasons one might be skeptical of Nickerson and Solomon’s conclusion. They may not have controlled for all the variables that could account for the correlation they found, for example. And a commenter at the rationalist blog LessWrong questions the paper’s underlying premise, noting that parents could avoid the cost of buying a larger vehicle by instead using narrower safety seats that make it possible to fit three children even in small cars.

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