Russian President Vladimir Putin is urging Russians to have more children.
"Large families must become the norm," Putin said in a speech Tuesday.
Russian birth rates are falling amid war in Ukraine and a deepening economic crisis.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is urging women to have as many as eight children as the number of dead Russian soldiers continues to rise in his war with Ukraine, worsening the country’s population crisis.
Addressing the World Russian People’s Council in Moscow on Tuesday, Putin said the country must return to a time when large families were the norm.
“Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, had seven, eight, or even more children,” Putin said.
I find it hard to imagine wanting to have kids just so your dictator has more meat to feed into his meat grinder. Perhaps the only good news is Putin hopefully doesn’t have 18 more years in him, so the kids won’t have to deal with him directly, but who knows who will sit in the throne next…
I doesn’t work either. Appeals to nationalism, religion, and even straight up paying and providing luxury benefits to people, in order to have them start having more kids just did nothing in the long run. The world is different. Your children are more likely to become independent adults when you put your resources into a smaller number of children. The cost/benefits ratio of having large families to produce stability, and increase the chances at least one child will be successful, has completely reverse from 100+ years ago.
Putin will open rape/baby factories for female prisoners next. Just watch.
That might end up being the scary reality for the women and girls who have been abducted in Ukraine.
The scale at which they would need to do this would make even forcing pregnancy and birth not really sustainable. Especially when the child are being birthed into the world where the economics are against large fertility rates.
I think the irony is that you don’t even need to do something like that. Just open a bunch of “orphanages” that are all about hammering absolute loyalty to the dear leader, offer to pay money for any kids that are left there, reap the rewards in a couple of years. As a double whammy, parents are also free to continue fully dedicating to work.
Libertarians would probably have the weirdest hate boner if that happened, selling kids (great!) to the govt (horrible!)
Christ my mind went somewhere else. I thought you were gonna suggest that after they open the orphanages and they get populated they would offer the kids a bunch of benefits once they were of age to start breeding. I bet a significant portion of those kids would take it in a heart beat since the alternative is being kicked out at 18 without anywhere to go or money.
since the alternative is being kicked out at 18 without anywhere to go or money.
Legaly, all orphans who don’t already own home, will get one from state. But governor wants 5th yacht too.
Not to say I would put trying out of the question. It just won’t work either.
Putin will open rape/baby factories for female prisoners next. Just watch.
If anything, they would outlaw contraception first, before going down that road that you’re describing, not that that road would be successful in either case.
I don’t know if or when they ended the Maternity Medal, Order of Maternal Glory, and Mother Heroine awards for having large families in Russia. I don’t know much about the programs, just what a friend who emigrated told me about them (and what wikipedia says)
You’re already projecting compassion he doesn’t have by assuming he’d wait for them to turn 18. If he thought it would work, he’d march 5 year olds in bomb vests over the border then have Elon announce that Ukraine kills children.
Dont give him ideas
Yeah “make more people for me to kill” doesn’t seem like a winning message.
I mean it’s unlikely Putin lives another 16 years, so even if they’re sending 15 year olds to the front this won’t help the war machine
It’s more about long-term population loss. There’s a reason combined-arms forces are used and mass infantry assaults are not. Problem is, Russian military hardware sucks for a lot of different and systemic reasons so that option isn’t realistic over a large theater.
Putin is straight up bleeding Russia out and it’s really sad that this many people are displaced and dying over one man’s ego and lust for his station.
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What doesn’t make sense to me is that even if women start churning out babies putin will be dead by the time theyre at fighting age? Is he just trying to help the next war hungry dictator after him?
He’s trying to repair the damage he’s done so that it doesn’t last a hundred years.
The entire reason he started this war was for legacy. He wanted to be the dictator that rebuilt the USSR like he always dreamed, and he’s running out of time, so he forced it and dug his heels in.
He does not want to be remembered as the dictator that killed off a generation with nothing to show for it, and set back Russia 100 years.
Unfortunately for him, that’s how he’ll likely be remembered anyway. At least in most of the world.
Well that and the end of russia itself maybe
He’s trying to be the legend who remade the Russian Empire of the late 1800s. It doesn’t matter so much that he’s alive for the Great Payoff™ – he needs to be the biggest name in the history books for centuries to come.
He knows he’s old and will die, and he knows he’s not going to achieve his big goals soon enough to directly benefit. So now he’s looking at his legacy.
That’s the stage when dictators *and narcissists become truly dangerous, by the way, because knowing they won’t directly see the fruits of their labour, they have less to lose.
e: added a word*
Maybe he wants to lower the fighting age too. Wouldn’t be the first time some a-hole sent children to kill and die in a stupid war.
That is a brilliant summation, well done!
Getting major Mutterehrenkreuz vibes.
I wonder if women will start getting medals for babies, like soviet times? Another question, if these women are raising 8 kids, and all the men are dead in a sunflower field south of Avdivika, who the hell is supposed to be working in Russia for the next generation? Just banking on enslaving Ukraine to pay for the cost of enslaving Ukraine?
That’s probably what Russia was roughly planning to do, yeah.
This whole endeavor has been top to bottom stupid
From Russia’s end: absolutely.
But also from the NATO end - why in the ever loving fuck aren’t we just giving Ukraine enough to actually restore their borders? All the counterarguments effectively stem from deeply wrongheaded and dated geopolitical strategies that Kissinger would have not only loved, but in fact specifically made efforts to personally support.
I think winning is not the goal of the Western military, the goal is to reduce the amount of military equipment in Russia to a historic low. This can’t be accomplished by winning quickly.
People need to understand the west aren’t exactly acting in the name of moral good, but pragmatic egoism, instead. Just because helping Ukraine is good in this instance, doesn’t mean governments do it for the same reasons for why most people think they should get help.
It’s realpolitik, and human lives don’t matter. As much as I despise that thought.
The west may be better, but it’s still not good.
Currently, just like at any other time since they attacked, it’s entirely up to Russia to decide how much equipment they will lose on the war. The speed of Ukraine defense won’t impact the result.
That’s an interesting possibility that I hadn’t considered.
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Well, don’t forget that this was planned as a few day operation.
The ol’ Napoleon strategy.
I’ll just invade the Cossacks, this should only take a few days
…Oh Fuck…
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Napoleon knew that declaring an end to serfdom wouldn’t have worked in Russia. The people of Russia were staunchly behind the Czar, and Napoleon knew it; partly due to the fact that they knew Napoleon had no love for them at all; just the opposite in fact.
Absolutely, and they pretty much have to commit to that plan at this point.
Before their losses started piling up the way they have been, I’d assumed his plan was to install a puppet government and “annex” useful provences into theSoviet UnionRussian federation.
But with the population losses that require women to become livestock for the sake of the country, he’s absolutely going to enslave able bodied workers in every region he’s able to hold onto.
They actually introduced pretty much that exact thing back in 2008, the Order of Parental Glory. Have more children to fuel the machine, please
Wait, what? Interesting. I didn’t know about its existance.
Narayana Murthy: People should be working 70 hours/week.
Vladimir Putin: Why so few?
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He will probably do it between 2024 and 2030
Hey Putine, let me help ……
All you gotta do is excuse people from military service for being a parent. Pretty soon all military aged males will be parents and you’ll greatly reduce the number of deaths in Ukraine. Win-win
That’s actually pretty brilliant. Although it would also grind new recruits to a halt. It’s almost like he should retreat and take the L and try rebuilding
All you gotta do is excuse people from military service for being a parent. Pretty soon all military aged males will be parents and you’ll greatly reduce the number of deaths in Ukraine. Win-win
Sorta kinda exists, but you need at least 4 children below 18 years. But I don’t think this increases amount of military aged males or any doctors being parents.
Oh, so you need to start at the age of 14 max.
I mean children’s age))))
He meant that you’d have to start fathering children at 14 so that you could have 4 of them under 18 by the time you turn 18, which would be the age for military service.
Or you can start at 17, but you will need 4 of them. MIMO approach. Or MISO. Depends how you view it.
Ah. I got it. So you won’t be conscripted after school. Well, there are other ways to delay it like leaving country or getting professional or higher education.
Yeah, I know. I was joking. The ol’ Lemmy switcheroo.
I bet Putin sucks at StarCraft
we know he plays zerg at least
Jfc calm down bro. Didn’t need to go that far.
I’m waiting in line for my food giggling like a motherfucker at this comment. 🤣
Requires more
pylonspeons.
That’s one way to deal with an ageing population demographic.
Another way is to perhaps not throw every able-bodied young man into a militaristic meat grinder because you still yearn for the Soviet Union days.
He’s probably yearning for the Russian Empire instead of Soviet Union.
Russian governmental officials have some really outlandish views for an average Russian person.
They’re very religious, believe in conspiracies, actively anti-lgbt, don’t support abortions, antisemitic to name a few. None of these qualities are present in the general masses. They are in their own informational bubble.
As far as I understand it, he believes that the Russian Empire and collective Europe were always at each other’s throats, and that never changed for over 200 years. At the same time, Russia is a successor of the Russian Empire, and USSR is being omitted for some reason. That’s the simplistic explanation of it.
For you to understand how crazy that is, Russians (in general) have little to no idea of how the Empire worked and what the views those people held. USSR essentially wiped out all of that culture.
Ah, so Russian women are broodmares for the state now?
Always have been.
“Women will birth more”
Where are these women going to find suitable partners to pick from? The smart ones left or will leave, the others will be growing sunflowers.
pick
I think you’re making an assumption that this monster is not
You said rape twice
Imma start up a mail order groom app for those russian ladies
*Male order
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Putin seems to be in a competition with Trump for the stupidest authoritarian prize.
Javier Milei, Matteo Salvini, Boris Johnson, Geert Wilders, Jair Bolsonaro & a frightening whole lot of others have entered the chat.
Why past tense? They’re still dying.
Shh, don’t let those still alive know that!
Well … I don’t want to say literally Hitler, but …
Literally Hitler
(No need to thank me)
There’s competition for that in America, right now.
Not Hitler, not even close. Im not allowing what he did nor defending him, but what Hitler did compared with Putin is major difference. It does not change the fact that both of them deserve a special place in hell
I mean Hitler didn’t start by genociding. Give Putin time.
Hitler started by getting hold of a PA system. Today that is AM radio and the internet.
That’s why even if Russia wins the war or got some concessions, it will be a Pyrrhic victory. They’re already experiencing population decline because of massive emigration aside from lower birth rate (which is why Putin is paying lip service to the conservative religious Russians to promote more birth, and in turn endeared him to conservatives across the world). The war will add to the burden of the Russian people on top of corruption and debt after the conflict.
They need the dogma of out breeding the competition so they can maintain a labor class without giving up any of the hoarded resources.
No sane people want to breed in our current conditions anywhere, so gotta make them insane with promises of eternal hurrdurr if only you crank out babies for God.
They need the dogma of out breeding the competition
That’s why the far-right in the West would love women to go back to their old baby churning role…
They’re working on it. Alongside the abortion fight, there are also Republicans fighting no fault divorce and there are Republicans fighting minimum marriage age laws.
So, basically, Putin is telling Russian women to “get fucked for Putin”?
Maybe “You got fucked by Putin and now go get fucked for Putin”
…angry upvote…
Nice. The dad jokes are improving… Well, actually it’s sorta an uncle joke.
Happy Friday
Thanks for helping me start my weekend with a laugh after a rough week.
Isn’t that what Elon said too ?
If this is true, this has to be the ultimate way of not really dealing with the population crisis upon us. Not saying any government is doing a great job here as they are all beating around the bush and not addressing root causes, but this one from Putin has to be the most delusional of them all.
There is no population crisis, unless you mean there are too many people. Most of the work we do is entirely unnecessary and only exists to help billionaires become trillionaires. At least that’s the case in countries that don’t need meat to throw in front of bullets.
Necessary jobs are mostly farming, mining, manufacturing, and customer service. The first two have already been automated to need only a tiny percentage of the workforce they once require. Manufacturing is mostly there as well, and is getting closer all the time. Customer service still employs a lot of humans, but even those jobs are being replaced or augmented with physical or logical bots.
There is no population crisis, unless you mean there are too many people.
Barring climate change or World War 3 doesn’t get us first, if things are going the way it does now, we’re expecting global population decline or it could plateau. Countries across the world is experiencing increase in standards of living so we can expect decline in birth rates too in proportion.
That is a GOOD thing. So not a crisis.
What makes that a bad thing?
This is fantastic. Humans are shit.
The crisis is that without enough babies, there will not be enough young people to support the older people. It is why places like Canada have such high immigration as it offsets the lack of births from Canadian citizens. Now, it is a crisis from a planet health perspective. No. It is the best thing that could happen right now as we really could use less people and their associated carbon emissions, but it will still impact the economy hard especially since it is becoming a steep birth rate decline in so many countries. Feels like a free fall right now and to address is going to take as much change as it will take to fix the climate emergency. Might even have some of the same solutions.
I say this as someone who had lots of kids - you cannot build an economy on a continuous explosion of population. That is ridiculous. There are enough people - the population of the earth has more than doubled in my lifetime. I’d much rather work till I die, than tell someone else they must reproduce. Let people who want kids have them, let people who don’t want kids not have any, it’s working out and population growth has slowed and hopefully population will decrease. That’s fine, yes many of us will be old at once, that’s not the fault of the non-reproducing people. There wouldn’t be fewer old people even if everyone had kids, it has to happen before things settle back out.
Very much agree. Besides, it is looking like we really are entering an era of significant human life extension if you believe all the longevity breakthroughs.
Lucky we have automation and AI making everyone jobless, will be plenty of people and machines to look after the older generations
That is a real crisis on the horizon as the evidence so far is that there is no support for those who get displaced. I am counting down the days till my career is replaced. I am Imagineering a VR Theme Park and am certain that in the years to come you will be able to ask AI to make you one via a prompt and it will customize it to your tastes. When that happens I need to find a new career. Unsure what but I am hopeful that new careers will open up that we cannot foresee today. That or we will all be in a hellscape of which I have positioned myself to weather.
I think if we don’t change the system then we’re going to have a world of hurt for pretty much everyone, if we do change the system into something that facilitate an existence where people can survive periods without work or with minimal work then it could become a golden age.
A lot of the big problems with that comes from legacy obsessions which persist even when technical solutions have displaced the need or reason behind them. Building sites are already nothing like they used to be, the cost of construction has fallen dramatically especially in labour time but house prices rise because they’re not tied to construction cost but availability, which is often kept purposely low so rich people who run government can have big numbers in their balance s sheets. At some point this stress point will fracture.
Subtle automation already makes things like surveying and designing incredibly easy, we’re not far from the point where ai assisted architecture tools are as easy to use as the Sims and will produce plans which can be automatically passed or rejected for the technical side of planning. Not only will more visible forms of automation like concrete shuttering and pouring become more widely adopted this again reducing the time and cost of construction but they’ll have sensor driven analysis which can be uploaded to local authorities for instant inspection and verification. Likewise for cable routing, pipework, insulation, plastering, brickwork, roofing, decorating…
When a house can be demolished and rebuilt in weeks for the cost of machine rental and materials then the housing crisis will fade away, especially when industrial areas shrink due to efficiency of automation, office space gets repurposed, and transport infrastructure gains efficiency - areas like where I live in the UK with absurd property prices are almost certainly going to see automated construction tools take a lot of industry and transport underground - shooting cargo down small underground networks could replace a huge amount of road and rail usage which would be a huge positive for people and free up space for housing.
I got off track but what I’m getting at is we can use these things to solve major problems in our society, but we need to make sure people can lose their job and go through peeiods of adjustment without it ruining their life.
I agree, but as you pointed out, we already have many tools to solve most of our global issues, but instead we carry on like we like in a scarcity world. I am concerned about the AI disruption as I am not seeing evidence of us really caring for those impacted let alone the millions impacted daily by how the global economy is run. We can fix so many things, but don’t. Heck, even getting rid of day light savings is a cause too far it seems despite overwhelming support.
That is depressingly true, though I do think there’s hope. I’m in a lot of open source dev and design communities, they’re flourishing and growing steadily because they’re able to build on all the prior developments. Every day people are writing code to improve design tools, and writing code to improve programming languages and development environments so that it’s easier to make better design tools … and the better the design tools get the easier it is to make better designs on them, easier to build on prior open source designs and improve or customise them.
I already use AI coding tools in my open source project, they’re awkward and not always useful but for certain tasks they can save hours - for example I got it to divide a circle into an arbitrary amount of sections and return the quadrant coordinates, I could have worked it out and coded it myself but not doing things like that allows me to make much more progress. The easier it gets to code the more time I’ll be focused on making it do useful things which will result in a far better product.
Likewise the complexity and quality of stuff I see on 3d printing model sites continues to improve, printers continue to improve… We can’t be far away from ai assisted pick&place enabling complex electronics to be built into designs - there will be a cheap open source printer that can make everything except the magnets in the motors. A lot of companies are going to find the their entire product line is completing against items that can be made better and cheaper in any tech guys garage.
It wasn’t eBay that took down Tandy and Maplins it was the people with any garage space buying the same bulk orders of components but selling them without the overheads. The same will happen to Hotpoint and Logitech, people who have bootstrapped high quality fabrication labs in the garage selling things made from open source designs.
They won’t be able to stop it, they might slow it for a while but progress is as a river in that you can only hold it back so long.
Don’t care, I’ll be dead.
Maybe. There is serious breakthroughs with longevity tech with aging and diseases perhaps being a thing of the past in the decades to come. Maybe.
The crisis is that without enough babies, there will not be enough young people to support the older people.
So you didn’t read a word I said beyond the first sentence. Got it.
I do not understand your comment as my comment was building upon yours as you went down the billion support path and I just added the old age pension path.
Necessary jobs are mostly farming, mining, manufacturing, and customer service.
And elder care, which is set to be a real growth industry
That’s fair, but even in that there is a whole lot that automation can do to address the ratio of elderly to caregivers. Japan is ahead of the curve on population decline, and they are not exactly fond of immigrants. That has been a huge driver behind the development of technologies for elder care.
That and healthcare are counted as services iirc, which can contribute to some confusion when you look at 70% ish of the economy being made up of that. But most jobs being created now are like the top commenter said, minimum wage service jobs that don’t meet the needs of employees and aren’t great for customers, either
