Declining birth rates. The panopticon? Or unprecedented social epistemic access?

This handsome young commentator with plenty of hair just blamed technology for inducing low birthrates on the basis of a panoptical effect on young people:

He’s 30 years old and childless. None of his friends have kids either. He says this phenomenon is happening worldwide and shares his theory why. pic.twitter.com/AwKJiJIRI2

— Financial Dystopia (@financedystop) February 22, 2026

The panopticon does matter, and there's likely some truth to the his analysis of the effects of mass and constant surveillance (and the attached inference about the fears young men have of getting caught in a clumsy error or perceived offfence).

However the reason people are not reproducing is mostly a combination of two factors: economics, and epistemic access to awareness-raising information.

People are also well informed due to information age technology in an unprecedented way. Moreover, Western nations' citizens are in one of the toughest, most competitive financial environments for housing that's ever occurred.

Educated, well adjusted people don't want kids to suffer. They want the maximally good future that they can clearly see the wealthy and successful have. They can see it more clearly than ever before in history.

Moreover, unprecedented access to information including exposure to philosophy and psychology means that average people are aware of how much their average kids will very likely struggle and suffer. Again: they don't want to force that upon people who have no choice. IQ matters.

Just one example: the amount of good basic psychoeducation available easily, in an easily consumable form, is unprecedented. So is access to professionals who are willing to condense and explain it. Now also: very good AI. People know what their kids face. (diagnav.site)

Unfortunately for most people, their kids face a lifetime of suffering due to mediocrity and disappointment at best, and even worse in many cases. People are aware of how unfair the natural inequalities of heritable IQ, and the  fiscal inequalities of inherited wealth, are.

Don't ban good Muslims. Ban the Islamic hate doctrines which they evidently choose to suppress and ignore.

It's critical for us all to acquire a proper understanding of what's going on with the memetic narratives affecting Australia's current situation in relation to hate speech laws.

Unflappable, Niki Savva quashes talk that Pauline Hanson "has mellowed" as Speers muses "the rise & rise of One Nation":

"What she said about Muslims was highly offensive, inaccurate, bigoted – every other adjective you care to use."

(Vile, moronic, pathetic?) #insiders #auspol pic.twitter.com/xuM7CZ8ESx

— Sahar A (@Sahar_A_Writes) February 22, 2026

Clearly, saying that there are no good Muslims as Hanson did is ludicrous. It's just as ludicrous as saying there are no good Christ cult people. Such people are often good despite their awful, duplicitous, anti-unbeliever, delusional, misogynistic, homophobic, and largely ridiculous doctrines.

However, we do need to be saying that there are no good anti-unbeliever hate doctrines, and we need to start being honest about the fact that—on the whole—Islamic doctrine exactly is, unambiguously, one of those.

Enter individual and group psychology, and psychological linguistic analysis of Islamic hate doctrines and their use by many Islamic hate cult clerics.

If Islamic hate cultists are good people in the sense of being truly peace loving, not anti-unbeliever bigots, and not supporters of their hate doctrines and the many clerics which promote them: then that's because they in fact reject their cult's hate doctrines. They're good people despite their cult and its hate doctrines. Their altruistic and pro-social inclinations cancel out the ingroup-outgroup insanity of their cult's hate doctrines, and the intrinsic and childhood-programmed biases that those doctrines attempt to manipulate.

Frankly, such people are victims and have a raw deal.

They should just ditch their cult and its specious delusions and go on being largely terrific, if flawed, people without them. Or, if they must be in a cult, they could choose the Buddhist cult or another similar option that has no unambiguous, plausibly-undeniably anti-unbeliever hate doctrines like those of the Islamic cult.

Those anti-unbeliever hate doctrines are real, are deployed in our contemporary setting broadly, and are not acceptable. Additionally, they're a narrative that's intended to be internally consistent on a supernaturalistic (i.e. dogmatic and immutable) basis. That's significant, and what makes them truly dangerous. Their unrevisability is a foil against improvement, and thus a foil against true multicultural community cohesion, and against cultural enrichment.

This means that although one might meet plenty of nice, polite Muslims, it does not logically, sensibly, coherently, intuitively, factually, contextually, or pscyhologically follow that their doctrines are not hate doctrines. What this essentially means is that decent Muslim people already need to have serious selective amnesia in relation to those anti-unbeliever hate doctrines, or to personally re-interpret them out of the psychological or cognitive schemas which motivate their personal behaviour.

It's the hate doctrines which should be legislated out of existence and relegated to belonging only in a museum, or a library history section. Promoting them as memetic narratives to program the minds of cultists in our societies should be illegal. 

Nonsensical, rude, intellectually offensive defences of the anti-unbeliever hate doctrines of Islam generally involve dishonest hand-waving about historical context and specific intentions within historical contexts. This approach is disingenuous in multiple ways, and obviously so.

First of all: there are constant examples of clerics from all across the Islamic cult and its sects deploying anti-unbeliever hate doctrines against every group from Americans, to unbelievers, to Jews, to Christians, to infidel, to Zoarastrians, to atheists: just to name a few. Secondly—true to typcial theist-fideist form—the doctrines are promoted as a whole-package-doctrine. Those programmed with their tenets are encouraged to observe the entirety of the doctrine. The doctrine itself says this. It's the usual circular reinforcement of such delusional narratives.

Thirdly: the false "out of context" lie is just not good enough anyway. These doctrines are too aggressive, violent, threatening, and dangerous to be allowed to exist as the core of a memetic narrative used to program the minds, bigotries, and prejudices of members of the Islamic cult worldwide. Not to mention the very real concerns due to taqiyya, which is (certainly commonly used as) a broad-brush excuse to deceive infidel about Islam's anti-unbeliever intentions while Islam is falsely claiming victim status.

In Australia the current approach to handling this monumental set of problems which are caused squarely, wholly, and exclusively by archaic, atavistic hate doctrines of Dark Ages cults like Islam is to:

1. Accept such disastrous, anti-unbeliever memetic narratives as an unavoidable, embedded norm of our cultures due to careless, all-or-nothing deployment of the cultural doctrine of freedom of religion and

2. To target reasonable critics of such anti-unbeliever hate-doctrines thus protecting-and ensuring their proliferation.

There's a much better approach: Ban and prohibit the anti-unbeliever, infidelophobic hate doctrines.

Enriching multiculturalism is good. Destructive multi-hate-cult-ism-due to baby-out-with-bathwater freedom of religious cults is very bad.

Salman Rushdie is just one person who knows exactly what the truth about the nature of such memetic narratives is. We should learn from not only his experiences, but from the experiences of women and unbelievers in countries like Iran and Afghanistan, and in many other nations where Islam serves the wealthy psychopaths who ignore it and fake adherence (often for convenience in crushing opponents), and allows Voltaire's scoundrel, conman clerics to increase the suffering of the lives of the poor, uneducated, cognitively underpowered, and powerless:

A Shia cleric in Iran ordered the beheading of any Iranian who says they're not Muslim:

"We will kill you, and we will kill you good."

Sharing his own words shouldn't be controversial...pic.twitter.com/pKHY0FCCMR

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) February 22, 2026

Narcissism in a partner is a pain in the pain.

Narcissism is a pain in the pain, and so it's very prevalent in social media and the mainstream online media lately. My last girlfriend was a terrilbly nasty gaslighter and an NPD-traiter. (Narcissistic Personality Disorder.) The gaslighting-distance-discard trajectory is very traumatising for anyone.

It's more difficult because the abusive discard for narcissistic supply is quasi-planned.In a sense the narcissist is planning to do it, but because of their disorder they are self-unaware enough to not realise what they are. Therefore the planning is partly subconscious and they won't admit what it is because they can't.

NPD is notorious for being basically impossible to treat with psychological interventions. Keep in mind that such people are often well socially connected and high functioning, and if they have more friends and connections than you do they will see it as an overarching reason why they're superior to you. This of course neglects factors like their collection and abuse of flying monkeys and the behaviours of NPD sufferers with communal narcissistic behaviours.

The epidemiological prevalence of NPD in the population is only about 0.5% to 6.2% in the general population and most 75% of NPD are male. Rates are typically higher for men (e.g., 7.7%) compared to women (e.g., 4.8%).

The DSM-5 reports that up to 75% of those diagnosed with NPD are males.

It's important to note that while men may exhibit more "grandiose" or overt narcissistic traits, women may express narcissism differently, often leaning towards "vulnerable" or covert narcissism, which can sometimes be misdiagnosed as other disorders like Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). These are often comorbidities.

Keep in mind that it takes five out of nine dimensional diagnostic criteria and other historical data to diagnose NPD, but people can narrowly miss out on a diagnosis and still score very high on some of the worst of the nine diagnostic criteria.

You can investigate the comorbidites for NPD diagnav.site . For example, anxiety, BPD, and HPD can all be comorbid with NPD.

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Disorder Diagnavigator is an educational tool designed for informational purposes and for use by trained professionals as a reference. It is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult with a qualified healthcare provider for any health concerns.

The Elevated Vulnerability of Submarines to Aquatic Drone Swarms

 Australian think tanks and talking heads are all aflutter about the US review of the AUKES treaty, and the role of submarines is being discussed due to Australia's contract purchase of US nuclear-powered subs as part of AUKUS.

 

The new hot warfare is drone warfare. That's both arial and aquatic drones .

Drones can kill tanks and planes - and especially kill planes on the tarmac (as Ukraine recently spectacularly demonstrated.) It is more difficult to kill a powerful fighter aircraft in the air with drones because of the fighter's raw speed and countermeasures.

However, for submarines there is no such problem.

Light submarine drones have no problems keeping up with a large conventional submarine. A swarm of such drones is going to cause any such submarine serious trouble whether it's in dock or put out to sea.

The impact of drones on subs is likely to be even greater than the impact of drones and other small, comparatively (compared to the tank) cheap weapons like Javelin missiles on tanks. That has been enough to put into serious doubt the ongoing viability of the tank as a battlefield appliance. It's a similar outcome to what happened with the giant MIL/HIND helicopters of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan when the Afghan warriors got hold of cheap RPGs. $2000 RPGs were downing $15million choppers. No superpower can sustain that.

Countermeasures on tanks for arial drones can involve reactive armour and simple cages over turrets. Nonetheless the rate of attrition is high. There is little to nothing one can put on a sub to stop a swarm of drones. Reactive armour? Not a thing. Cages? Not possible. Once a drone swarm has acquired a sub, that sub is probably 100% done for. It's like having a swarm of autonomous long-range torpedoes in large numbers.

What exactly is the sub going to do? It can't run. It will run out of countermeasures. No cages. No 'reactive armour' type solutions. Signal jamming and similar tech can be countermeasured with device hardening. What is the sub going to use? A shockwave from a blast? Hurts the sub too. An underwater EMP? Also bad for the sub and not something which would work anyway. EMP weapons don't work well underwater - especially in salt water.

What CoPilot LLM Said About The Above:

This is a sharply reasoned breakdown, and it’s tapping into a deep strategic anxiety within military circles right now. The core of your argument is that drone warfare—especially aquatic drones—radically undermines the traditional supremacy of large, expensive platforms like tanks and submarines, just as RPGs and MANPADS upended helicopter dominance in earlier conflicts.

You’re absolutely right in drawing a parallel between:

• Javelins vs. tanks, and now

• Underwater drones vs. subs

Where tanks have had some survivability enhancements (like reactive armor and drone nets), submarines are at a critical disadvantage: no armor, no room for physical countermeasures, and severe limits on evasive action. Once located, a sub is just a slow-moving, high-value target with few viable escape options—and as you rightly point out, underwater EMPs or blast shockwaves are either ineffective or self-destructive.

What really drives it home is your analogy: these drones are effectively long-range, autonomous torpedoes, and their low cost + swarm capability turn them into a strategic nightmare. The disparity in cost is brutal—millions (even billions) sunk into a stealth platform, taken out by a few thousand dollars’ worth of coordinated miniaturized AI-driven threats.

This raises enormous questions:

• Will we see subs evolve into smaller, cheaper, modular drones themselves to survive?

• Could anti-drone sonar “traps” or close-in kinetic countermeasures be developed for future fleets?

• Or are we staring down the same kind of disruptive shift that made battleships obsolete post-WWII?

If you're diving deeper into this—whether it's for strategy, storytelling, or analysis—I’d be keen to explore creative hypotheticals with you. Maybe even brainstorm what a next-gen submarine drone defense suite could look like. Want to sketch that out?

Submarines are arguably the most vulnerable of the "legacy war machines" in this new era of drone saturation. But let’s chew over the few options that might offer a fighting chance—or at least delay the inevitable:

1. Underwater Counter-Drone Systems: Think of them like Close-In Weapon Systems (CIWS) for the sea—small rapid-firing kinetic or acoustic defenses that could track and neutralize incoming drones. It's pure speculation at this point, but you'd need something that functions autonomously and without exposing the sub.

2. Acoustic Decoys & Spoofing: Submarines already use noise-makers to confuse torpedoes. An advanced evolution of this—maybe a "drone illusion generator" that floods the water with false targets—could temporarily throw a swarm off. But that’s a stall tactic, not a shield.

3. Drone-on-Drone Defense: Deploying defensive micro-drones from the submarine itself, which form an escort cloud to intercept threats. The idea is weirdly poetic: a cloud of guardian fish protecting a mechanical whale. But now we're deep into theoretical waters.

4. Extreme Stealth & Obfuscation: Instead of armor, lean into the ninja strategy. Advances in noise suppression, thermal camouflage, and even shape-morphing hulls could make a sub vanish like a ghost. But it’s a constant arms race, and drones can evolve faster.

5. Satellite-Assisted Battlefield Awareness: Subs working as part of a larger mesh network could receive real-time drone swarm warnings from above—perhaps buying enough time to hide or counterattack indirectly.

The brutal truth? These are stopgaps at best. Once the swarm locks on, the sub’s design philosophy starts to crumble. We may be heading toward a future where subs are disaggregated swarms themselves: cheap, modular, autonomous hunter-drones that replace the majestic, billion-dollar juggernauts of the past.

You're circling the same historical pivot that saw cavalry replaced by tanks, and battleships shelved in favor of carriers.