Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Thursday that teenagers now have less sperm and testosterone than 65-year-old men.
  • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
    164·
    10 days ago

    Yeah, I’m not taking ANY advice from this dumbass. What does he even do for a living anyways???

    checks job title

    SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES??? HOW THE FUCK DID THAT HAPPEN???

    looks at world

    Oh. Right.

  • Tramort@programming.devEnglish
    1131·
    10 days ago

    this administration spends more time thinking about teenage sperm and circumcisions than is justifiable

    • chaosCruiser@futurology.todayEnglish
      13·
      10 days ago

      Put a picture of Trump under the pillow before you go to sleep. During the night, the supreme wisdom of Trump will be focused by the pillow and absorbed by your subconscious mind. In the morning, you’ll just know the correct answer.

      Also works with university exams. No need to read any books as long as you have the photo of the relevant professor under your pillow.

    • LegoBrickOnFire@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      9 days ago

      Hmmm, even if we allow for empirical scientific evidence, is there a non weird way he knows about the sperm count in the semen of adolescents? I hope he’s making shit up because the alternative is a lot grosser

  • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    593·
    10 days ago

    Today, the average teenager in this country has 50% of the sperm count, 50% of the testosterone as a 65-year-old man. Our girls are hitting puberty six years early, and that’s bad, but also our parents aren’t having children.

    Let’s practice some critical thinking. Join me!

    Teens have half the sperm count of a senior citizen? I’d maybe believe they’re equivalent? Maybe? He’s getting this from dropping teen pregnancy rates.

    Teens have half the testosterone of a senior citizen? Boolshit on it’s face. So senior men are more aggressive, more horny, stronger and hairier than teens? Stronger bones too! Also, seniors have more zits. Are you teen boys even trying any more?!

    Parents aren’t having children. OK. I’ll let the audience stew on that one a minute.

    We are below replacement right now. That is a national security threat to our country…

    True! Not so much a security threat as an economic threat, maybe the same difference? So what’s the solution? Kick out the foreigners? Hey yo, Japan! How that working out?

    Money says these idiots do what Russia did about their shrinking birth rates. National holiday to stay home and fuck for the Motherland! (Not even joking here.)

    • TheDoozer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      391·
      9 days ago

      Our replacement rate has been low for a long time, but our population has stayed relatively steady… because of immigration.

      Low replacement rate is only bad if you’re racist/xenophobic. Otherwise there’s usually (in a supposedly first-world country) an easy solution.

      And if you think this is a dig on specifically the US, it isn’t. Japan and South Korea are about to have insane difficulties with a very obvious and simple solution, and the US had that solution and are destroying it in favor of racism and xenophobia.

      • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        131·
        9 days ago

        I don’t think immigration is bad, but if the “problem” of fertility below replacement is caused by the other problem of people who might otherwise want kids not being able to have them because of economic constraints, focusing on solving the first problem by importing competitive and ambitious skilled professionals seems at least kind of questionable.

        • TheDoozer@lemmy.worldEnglish
          72·
          9 days ago

          That is not the problem. Population declines as countries move to first world status, and I think the people not having kids due to financial constraints are few and far between. Otherwise population would not start and continue diminishing as an area becomes more affluent. People have less (or no) kids because they don’t want kids, don’t want a bunch of kids, and can reasonably expect the kids they have to survive to adulthood. And access to birth control, education, and other opportunities (mostly for women) makes having less kids (by their own desire) possible.

          So bringing capable workers in means they pay into taxes that support the aging and school-age population, and never had to have their school-age years paid for. They’re a productive member with half the cost over their lifetime.

          It’s a no-brainer… as long as you’re not worried about changing the… shade or hue… of your population over time.

          • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            4·
            9 days ago

            The reason I’m thinking of it is I recently read this lemmy thread. The article itself is probably AI and not that convincing but I think people are making some good points about the pressures imposed by expense of housing and how those affect the desirability and difficulty of having children.

            Of course a prerequisite for that to matter is that not having children is more of a real choice than it is for people with no resources in a state of poverty. But it isn’t necessarily the case that the difficulty of raising children decreases with country-wide affluence, because wealth inequality is a thing, required resources (like housing space) might become more expensive relative to income despite overall increase in income, and other factors like an increasingly atomized career focused society where community can’t be relied on as much to help raise children and the expectations placed on parents are higher, maybe requiring high daycare expenses.

            So bringing capable workers in means they pay into taxes that support the aging and school-age population, and never had to have their school-age years paid for. They’re a productive member with half the cost over their lifetime.

            I agree in principle with the logic here, but if those capable workers are being placed in competition with a population that is financially struggling, and those taxes are not being used to give those people more breathing room, that productivity isn’t helping and is being employed on the wrong side of a class struggle.

          • Daftydux@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            1·
            8 days ago

            I think your assertion is unfounded and based on your own unreliable assessment.

            There is no mystery to the fact the all the wealth is silo’d to a small class of people. Your big assumption is that developed country’s are substantially more hospitable to a majority of the population.

            When kindness is considered hostility amongst the general population its no wonder why people wont have kids.

    • phutatorius@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      8 days ago

      So senior men are more aggressive, more horny, stronger and hairier than teens?

      I’m old. I’m definitely hairier. I’m also stronger than I was as a teen, though far weaker than I was as a young adult. I also weigh 50% more than I did as a teen, and some of that’s extra muscle. So those points aren’t really relevant.

      • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        8 days ago

        At 54 I got hair in weird places, but it doesn’t come back in like it did. Demonstrated great-grandpa’s WWI razor three weeks ago at a party. Forearm hair still bald. Shaved down lots into my 30s, hair rolled right back in. :)

        I’m stronger than I was as a teen, but as a teen I didn’t do much put pedal a bike. Was probably peak around late 20s to early 30s. I think strength is much up to the fact of our bodies automatic limiters. When we’re at peak, our brain still thinks we can handle the same loads, and we can, and sometimes hurt ourselves. Does that make sense?

  • njm1314@lemmy.worldEnglish
    52·
    9 days ago

    I swear he’s just such a no-good dirty lying bastard. Like I don’t even have any words for him anymore. Whole world would be better off if that worm had finished the job.

    The fact that the Kennedys lobotomized a young woman for no good reason and yet allowed this putrid pestilence to permeate our world. Shit.

    • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.worldEnglish
      151·
      9 days ago

      He’s the way he is because of how they treated Rose. He’s almost guaranteed to be ADHD, maybe ASD too. The psychologists at the time didn’t really recognize it until the 1960s, and that wouldn’t mean widespread acceptance of the idea. Before that they called it something else entirely, and the common use of drugs like Ritalin and Adderall for ADHD didn’t happen until the ‘80s even though they existed far earlier.

      So this dude was shipped off to boarding schools because he’s a “problem child” and a Kennedy. He was uncontrollable in schools, couldn’t stick to anything, got kicked out of boarding schools, and the only reason any of the schools put up with his shit at all was because he was a Kennedy. Got into drugs because that can happen to untreated ADHD people and people who have f’d up home lives. All this was swept under the rug by the Kennedys because they didn’t want the press to get wind of another Kennedy with “mental problems” and a drug problem. So he went untreated and unhelped. The worst thing that could happen to him was that he was born a Kennedy.

  • ByteOnBikes@discuss.onlineEnglish
    43·
    10 days ago

    Today, the average teenager in this country has 50% of the sperm count, 50% of the testosterone as a 65-year-old man. Our girls are hitting puberty six years early, and that’s bad, but also our parents aren’t having children. Parents who want to have children do not have access. I have seven children. I feel that God has blessed me with that and I can’t imagine how different my life would be if I did not have that blessing.

    RFK jr counting teenager sperm?

    • Capricorn_Geriatric@lemmy.worldEnglish
      22·
      10 days ago

      our parents aren’t having children

      If someone doesn’t have children, they’re… Not a parent.

      Unless you RFK means people with a child already, which makes no sense (and never did) except to religious nuts.

      People aren’t cats to have litters of up to 6 kittens, and kids don’t grow up in 6 months.

      They need to be fed, clothed, medicated and educated for 18+ years!

      P.S. If you dump your kids out on their 18th birthday, spoilers! You’re a bad parent.

      • KelvarCherry@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        6·
        9 days ago

        Large farm-like families of 7-9 kids is actually an ideal for the right-wing, especially the farther fringes that are afraid of “Great Replacement Theory” (having more people of color than white folks in a society). The right-wing will go on about “Muslims having large families” because they’re fundamentally afraid that their “pure white stock” will run out. None of these people should ever be parents.

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.todayEnglish
      101·
      9 days ago

      hes also a serial womanizer, slept with hundreds of woman and has a journal of sexual conquests and also to hurt her deceased wife drove her to suicide.

  • KelvarCherry@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    38·
    9 days ago

    This is so weird. This whole fertility thing is so weird. The Manosphere is so weird. I still remember seeing a bunch of near-divorce dad yelling “I am a Modern Day Knight!” like they were roleplaying a psuedo-KKK faction; So weird. The constant whining about childfree people is so weird. The restrictions on elective sterilization are so weird. This obsession with abortion and birth control is so weird. The endorsement of teen pregnancy is so weird. Is it wrong for teenagers to have low sperm counts? I never thought about this because thinking about teen boys’ sperm is weird; and the people obsessed with teen boy sperm probably belong on a list. They’re so weirddddddd.

    • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
      9·
      9 days ago

      This whole fertility thing is so weird

      The fertility thing comes across as so weird because its an actual problem that Republicans don’t want to solve in any reasonable way because that will involve threatening their donor’s bottom lines. Basically across all developed nations with easy access to birth control, education and modern mechanisms birth rates are falling and in many countries these rates are already well below replacement rate (2.1 children per couple, not percent like RFK Jr said)

      The United States was consistently staying above replacement rate via immigration but I have a nasty feeling that isn’t the case anymore

      The reason replacement rate is so important is Capitalism really depends on growth companies gaining new customers. The stock market in particular relies on new wallets to spend money, homebuilders rely on new people to build homes for, and offices rely on new employees to hire. When populations start stagnating or worse shrinking, Capitalism really starts to fall apart as that causes an ongoing recession as fewer wallets in an economy means less money flowing through an economy. Less money moving through an economy means a smaller GDP which means the the economy ultimately shrinks. Bad economic conditions also lead to people feeling less certain about bringing a new baby into the world so the cycle tends to accelerate before the actual population decline can accelerate noticeably

      The obvious solution is to decouple necessities of life from capitalism and significant state investment into improving existing infrastructure and planning for degrowth so that a long term recession and the effects of declining/re-balancing populations do not negatively impact the masses living through them. This is of course antithetical to capitalist and conservative goals, so as they realize this looming threat is upon them they’re getting extremely weird about it and trying to find ways to get more families to have lots of babies to try to reverse the trend.

      In short, these republican pundits are trying to have a serious conversation about what could be an extinction-level event for capitalism without cluing in the masses to the flaws of capitalism or the fact that its an entirely man-made crisis that doesn’t actually involve any scarcity of the necessities of life

      • KelvarCherry@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        51·
        9 days ago

        Bingo; But they don’t want that. The really ironic part is the USA population could still thrive as a nation of immigrants, even if birth decline was happening; But of course they don’t want that, because the “Great Replacement Theory” platformed by the New Zealand shooter. They could at least make life less miserable for existing parents with social services; But they don’t want that, because that’s “Communism” (and their donors make a killing from killing us).

        Living in the United States of America is like living as a dependent of a self-destructive parent who refuses to compromise, listen to any logic, or even do the bare minimum to sustain themself. Our infrastructure is literally crumbling around us and Dad’s back to rambling about how “fluoride cuts off your connection to God”. At least he’s off the stims, I think.

        • phutatorius@lemmy.zipEnglish
          4·
          8 days ago

          The US could also thrive with a slowly declining population, as long as there was capital investment to improve productivity at a rate faster than the rate of decline of the working population.

          Another factor is that many of the commonly reported economic metrics are aggregated over the whole population, not per-capita. So more people looks like more growth, even when it really means you’re standing still or regressing in terms of meaningful measures of quality of life. And there’s a well-known aphorism in business circles about what happens when you make a metric into a goal.

    • III@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      9 days ago

      They’re so weirddddddd.

      I prefer “they’re so pathetic.” It is way more accurate.

    • phutatorius@lemmy.zipEnglish
      3·
      8 days ago

      They can’t get it up with their wives because they’re really not into women, and/or their wives aren’t into their piglike Nazi husbands. But they can never admit that to themselves, so there has to be some external factor to blame.

    • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
      3·
      8 days ago

      Sexual anxiety, in all its forms, is a big part of the fascist formula. It ties into and reinforces the patriarchy stuff, the othering, the racism.

    • Heikki2@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      8 days ago

      The entire conservative movement is about children’s genitals and tax breaks for the rich

        • Taleya@aussie.zoneEnglish
          4·
          8 days ago

          I’m pretty sure the worm in his brain is just driving his apple-shaped car in little circles around the empty cavern going weeeee!

          This is not a Fry situation

    • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.onlineEnglish
      5·
      8 days ago

      While I am sure he would love it if he had made it mandatory to have all children in the country submit nude photographs of their children to him (for health and scientific research, of course… and they need a set taken on their birthdays from ages 1 to 17 from multiple angles and poses in order to make sure that they are developing correctly you see. No perv stuff!) The part where he said he could diagnose the kids was not when they were naked.

      Or maybe I didn’t hear the full quote, I don’t remember.

  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    361·
    9 days ago

    Bro why are these freaks so obsessed with kids’ penises? It’s so fucking weird.

    (this is a rhetorical question)

  • Pope-King Joe@lemmy.worldEnglish
    34·
    10 days ago

    sighs I want off of Mr. Bones’ wild ride.

    I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: we live in the dumbest timeline.

  • olympicyes@lemmy.worldEnglish
    33·
    9 days ago

    He’s probably mixing up sperm with testosterone level. Somehow the conversation of testosterone levels came up with a group of kids we work with. One of the young adults who is heavily into weight lifting knew his testosterone levels. The 65 year old man in our group had far higher levels. The reason? He nearly died from cancer and is now on hormone therapy. Apparently the levels are set quite high.

  • TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    32·
    9 days ago

    He has proof, he and Trump and the rest have been able to get a lot of teenage girls pregnant. Release the Epstein files.

  • Jhex@lemmy.worldEnglish
    30·
    9 days ago

    “Senile government official spews nonsense in press conference”

    … and the saddest part is that sentence is not specific enough, there are multiple options to choose from