We’ve got a bunch of new people now so let’s bring back a classic post. What low stakes conspiracy theory do you believe that you cannot prove but feels right to you?
I’ll start: I believe that dating apps have made a concerted effort to smear in person meeting people and tie it to being “creepy” through social media so you are forced to meet people online(which was the creepy option just 15 years ago)
The american ruling class’s recent decision on abortion rights is because they’re concerned about birthrates and need more (white) births/labor resources in their country. Subsequent clampdowns on women’s or lgbt rights in the empire (e.g. maybe thinking that gutting gay marriage will somehow lead to more heterosexual relationships and thus babies?) will be carried out for similar motivations.
My take on this is similar but also somewhat different. Neoliberal capitalism has advanced to a stage where they no longer need more labor (which has mostly been exported to the Global South) but more consumers (read: debt slaves). The rentier class needs people to borrow more to earn interests from them, and what better way to do that than to turn them into consumers.
In the post-war Keynesian era of industrial capitalist society, women’s rights were advanced in the bourgeois capitalist West to practically double to workforce to increase productivity. However, as we entered the neoliberal finance capitalism era of the 1980s, with much of the jobs exported to the developing world (thanks to automation and the invention of just-in-time global supply chain) and with the US deindustrializing itself (to crush the rising labor movements and trade unions in the US, of course!), they needed to expand the consumer markets to drive profit while keeping real wages stagnant.
First, credit cards were invented to force people to spend the income that they haven’t earned yet (which means the banks earn lucrative profit from interest payments). Then, the consumer market was extended to previously under-privileged minorities (ethnic minorities, queer minorities etc.) which came as a “progressive turn” in the early 2000s. Now, as even these demographic segments are becoming saturated/approaching their spending limits, combined with falling birth rates due to decades of promoting career-driven women in the labor force, it is only natural that to keep the rate of profit from falling, they needed to reverse the declining birth rates in order to continuously expand the consumer market from which the rentier class can profit from - more family members means you need a bigger house, more expenses for childcare, more products to consume etc.
