Haha, funny. Do all articles these days end with the appeal to engagement? I shall try it.

A couple of things I like about the film are the fact that babies are wonderful and children are wonderful, even if that world realizes it only through their absence. I think the practice of this is going to be simply people substituting this experience with other things they consider luxuries, and then supporting a shifting tax burden so that the few productive and reproductive carry the weight of the machine.

The shift from relying on one’s own children to take care of one in one’s old age to other people’s children doing so is that fewer people need allocate any of their effort into it. Free-riding off other people’s children is now fairly typical. Simply having paid someone else’s social security isn’t actually good enough. The agreement only worked when you did that and created the means in aggregate for your generation’s social security to be paid for by successors.

But the old parasitise the young in the West (at least, not exclusively). “Tax exemptions for the rich” primarily takes the form of older people just being free of various forms of society’s needs. Already the median French pensioner has a higher income than the median French worker, with the latter eager to try to make his way into the formed class so that he too may transform from the stepped on to the stepper on.

The other thing I like is that the movie is unambiguously hopeful. Kee and her child reach the rescue ship, hurray! Movie’s a bit bleak so nice to have a happy ending.

But I really wonder about what happens afterward. Is it Kee’s responsibility as the only fertile woman to have as many children as she can? Mother of Modern Man she’ll be remembered as. Fun thought.

So what do you think about what the movie implies and about the factors that bias society against the young?