NateNate60

I do not disagree with you on the reasons why women have fewer children. I think there is also a significant cultural shift in the number of children women were supposed to have. In pre-industrual Europe, women were expected to be quickly married and then have lots of children with their husband. Women today can enjoy long careers and fulfilling lives without marriage or a family while such options were not available to women of the past.

In the past, people had several children because most would die before adulthood. The 20th century population boom is because better sanitation and healthcare reduced child mortality but it takes at least one generation for women to adapt and have fewer children.

Somalia does not have a functioning state apparatus to enforce any of its laws in most of the country

Nooo not the billionaires!

I'm pretty sure Somalia does not have paid maternity leave

Entered the kitchen, complained about it being too hot

Governments are always offering weird wacky incentives for women to have children, when the solution is usually patently obvious: you can increase fertility by making it easy and affordable to have children. Stipends for food, paid maternity/paternity leave, free childcare services, affordable housing, and a good economy with an abundance of high-paying jobs.

I mean... there's a reason the baby boom happened in the 50s! But no, that would be socialism!!

I have to agree with the sentiment expressed by the social media posts shown in the article. If your country's electricity infrastructure is so fragile that a monkey could take it offline then it's probably time to take a hard look at investing in improving its resilience.

I want to add a third thing to this list:

3. Feeling left behind by mainstream political parties.

The parties in power surely pay lip service to the issues that concern the young but very rarely do they actually do anything about it.

I don't think anything I say will convince you, so I will make no further attempt to do so.

This comment is concerning. People believe things for a reason and to dismiss them as "cockamamie nonsense" is beyond useless; it's damaging.

For one, to believe that is to close one's eyes to the reasons that people are behaving in this way. They're not insane and if you want to simply assume that they behave this way because they are insane then you will make no progress at all in stopping the far-right from seizing more and more power while you're left wondering why a greater and greater number of your countrymen are acting "insane".

Venezuelan immigrants in the US are sympathetic to the rhetoric of Trump and other right-wing figures because the authoritarian Maduro regime in Venezuela is strongly associated with socialism. It is under the banner of socialism that Maduro has destroyed Venezuela's democracy and economy, so the strong dislike of anything even slightly resembling what was presented as "socialism" to them in Venezuela is a reactionary one.

There is a reason for people voting the way they do. And if you can understand the reason that things are the way they are, you can work to change them.

Machiavelli wrote about this. People don't need to love you for your power to be secure, and in fact, it's far preferable to be respected because people fear you than to be respected because people love you.