I'm at a loss for words with this
How have I never heard that Elon has 11 fucking kids? Every bourgeois "hero" pushing this movement deserves
.
If decreasing birth rates are scaring you so much for the future of humanity, as if you ever really gave a shit about it, then stop enslaving the working class to the point that they have no time or money for kids.
Capitalists heighten contradictions. They don't solve them. Proletarianization destroys the productive basis for the nuclear family while the capitalist state upholds it as an institution. Only the socialist state can resolve this contradiction with socialized childcare & childrearing, children's autonomy, abolition of marriage, etc. (sorry USSR you didn't go far enough). The capitalist solution is reaction, a return to 19th century working conditions, family relations, and religiosity that saw high birth rates. Unfortunately that all existed within the context of things, so it's probably impossible to recreate at large scale.
It's the definition of a non-problem. Oh no, there won't be enough children to care for you in your old age? So? Suffer and die like literally every other human ever. Manufacturing new people to drive you to dialysis is fucking weird. Just... acept your mortality with at least an iota of dignity.
Actually if we rearranged our productive modes we could absolutely care for the elderly instead of abandoning people to die a la social murder
Right, I just think it's worth emphasising this point as the communist response to capital just letting humans die without dignity in order to save a buck.
Saying only that people should just accept their horrible approaching deaths as inevitable is defeatist and myopic.
I should clarify. There are two separate issues here; Providing the necessary resources and support for people to have a dignified, comfortable old age is good and important. We absolutely should do that and it is an important priority.
Separate from that is the idea that we should create more people to care for existing people. This is generally phrased as though existing people are owed the labor of people yet unborn, and that creating more people specifically to benefit from their labor is morally neutral or good.
A dwindling population will create hardships for people currently living, but I do not think that justifies or necessitates creating more people specifically to maintain the status quo. Having kids for the joy of having children in the world is good, but there's something very perverse about John Capitalist telling you to have kids specifically so that John can benefit from their labor right up until he dies and doesn't care about any of it anymore. There's an unspoken "I got mine fuck you" where John Capitalist is only worried about lower populations in so far as it will effect him and the systems he thinks are important.
Save the world from what? Climate change? Even ol' Elon has jumped in on the climate change denial trend.
And why do I think every single one of them wants to sterilize anyone who isn't 100% white?
Eugenics has always been about genocide against the other. I honestly think if birth control was only available for colored people then conservatives wouldn't have a problem with it. Abortion too. Liberals and even well meaning progressives will sometimes fall into the trap of pitching abortion and birth control as a part of the solution to poverty. Not realizing that they're actually saying the poors aren't allowed to have family.
Edit: I don't like how I worded this but I'm also finding it hard to express what I've observed and the problems I've noticed with it. I'm very much for access to birth control and abortion for everyone. The issue I have is when people want to discourage people from having kids if they're not wealthy as a part of solving poverty. And somehow I get the feeling that the bar is often high for low income black and brown people. Like the aspiration towards progressivism is there but there's still some unchecked racism and classism leading towards support if eugenics. Not to mention I see a lot of support for out and proud eugenics against disabled people and neurodivergent people.
Liberals and even well meaning progressives will sometimes fall into the trap of pitching abortion and birth control as a part of the solution to poverty.
But access to abortion and BC does help alleviate poverty. When women are unable to choose to not have unwanted pregnancies and children, it does create a serious strain on them and their community, exacerbating poverty and everything associated with it. That isn't some idealist liberal delusion, it's very well documented reality.
Edit, adding:
I honestly think if birth control was only available for colored people then conservatives wouldn't have a problem with it. Abortion too
It's just the opposite. One of the main reasons reactionaries tend to be so anti-abortion is because forcing women to have unwanted children helps to perpetuate poverty, locking communities into a cycle of impoverishment they can't escape. Meanwhile, those who are rich and white have access to abortions whether they're illegal or not, which is by design. If a rich old gammon-chud's daughter gets pregnant and she doesn't want to keep it, he's likely to help her quietly get an abortion even as he ensures people of color never have that kind of opportunity. Wealthy white people want (and generally have) the freedom to do whatever they want while they simultaneously limiting the freedoms of poor BIPOC people, all to maintain or strengthen the white supremacist system.
Yes, this is the trap.
Liberals will contribute to the creation and maintenance of a economic system that causes poverty and forces certain people to avoid having children, and then throw up their hands and say "it's very well documented reality" as though they haven't created the very problem family planning eugenics is intended to alleviate.
To imply that abortion is the cure for poverty or that not having access to it is the cause is indeed false and a typical liberal refusal to look at the broader systems. But to deny how much unwanted pregnancy, along with the health risks and increased mortality rate that come with it, the burden on poor communities to provide adequate care for children when they are already overworked, etc, all contribute to and worsen poverty is absurd, and just as much a failure to recognize material reality.
I think I chose the wrong wording in my original post, I'll update for clarity but I just wanted to say I agree. I'm by no means against universal access to abortion and birth control. I just see it being talked about in a way that isn't priotizing the well-being and actual desires of minorities and low income households. And sometimes in the name of outright unashamed eugenics by advocating for abortion if the child would end up being neurodivergent or physically disabled.
I honestly think if birth control was only available for colored people then conservatives wouldn't have a problem with it. Abortion too.
No, if the poor POC population dries up, so does their cheap labor. But they just want more bourgeois to keep the poors from out-populating them in revolutionary numbers.
But they just want more bourgeois to keep the poors from out-populating them in revolutionary numbers.
I think there are a lot of conservatives that are more scared of being outnumbered than they are scared of missing their labor pool. Especially amongst working class conservatives that see immigrants as competition in the job market.
Of course you're right, their way of life is sustained in large part by the very people they want to get rid of, which is a huge contradiction.
It’s because the child is viewed as a luxury and an “unnecessary” expense. That’s the message my Texas sex ed module in health class sent. Abstain (rather than cover all forms of birth control) because you’d otherwise have a baby and pay $700 in rent while at minimum wage.
I’ve had this convo with my wife. Birth control is the only solution they are pitching. When we could be looking at affordable housing, affordable childcare, healthcare, funding schools, cheaper college and vocational programs. Then kids wouldn’t feel like a burden.
Population collapse due to low birthrates is a much bigger risk to civilisation than global warming. (And I do think global warming is a major risk),
This is not Quiverfull, the fundamentalist Christian belief that large families are a blessing from God. The Collinses are atheists; they believe in science and data, studies and research. Their pronatalism is born from the hyper-rational effective altruism movement...
yeah ok there it is. technofascists, like the real ones.
Oh no…that kid is gonna end up murdering his parents (good for him)
As of 2024, they have four children. They are, by order of birth: Octavian (son), Torsten (son), Titan Invictus (daughter), and Industry Americus (daughter).
The state of these poor kids, especially the state of the last two names
Imagine giving your kids hokey ass pig latin names and not committing to bit by naming them, in order: Primus, Secundus, Tertia, and Quarta.
I'm imagining right now a very young kid with the voice of a full grown space marine yelling "FOR THE DADA!"
they're objectifying their own children by seeing them as the means to fulfill some weird ideological goal. Reading their kids names definitely adds proof to that. Who names their child "Industry Americus"??? WTF? They sound like product releases from some weird Silicon Valley company.
There was a set of kids in my school named Nation, Justice, and Allegiance. Thankfully 2 of them became lefties lmao.
I had thought the main thing that made it hard was that it’s now so incredibly expensive to raise children.
“No,” Malcolm says. “Not at all.”
Also, wasn't
into this shit, too?
CEOs and non-profit entrepreneur
so, they run a vulture capital enterprise that has a tax evasion subsidiary.
if they don't end up in prison for fraud, one of their kids is gonna shoot them with one of their mounted guns after seeing a sibling getting smacked one too many times.
I thought you were just making a tangential Menendez brothers reference, but no they hit their kid in the face in the article
wasn't an article on these people written in american media like nine months ago
EDIT: yeah it was a Chapo reading series in episode 682 Longpsermism from November 2022, so I was off by like a year
I've definitely read about them before. I remember because they are impossibly repellent in every way
They're some of the most emblematic, embarrassing examples of how with a certain amount of wealth you can't fail no matter how smooth brained you are
The Yuddites/Effective Altruists/Quakers before the Basilisk/Friends of the Status Quo/Singularity Seekers are a popular topic of scorn here.one of many incredily weird terminally online subcultures we have extremely legitimate beef with.
Malcolm and Simone Collins are some of the most moronic people alive. They're both failson inheritors of their parents' wealth and have "jobs" operating their own foundations or some shit. They are actual firm believers in Effective Altruism and nominative determinism, which is why all their kids have fucking stupid names. They're both actual redditors with full bazinga brain.
They genuinely believe their genetics are imperative to pass down because the ability to accumulate wealth is, as far as they're aware, genetic. Their genetics also gave both of them the smoothest brains ever recorded, I'm talking SI standard for frictionless surface.
The one benefit to their harebrained scheme to populate the world with billionaires is that all of their children will be failures from the get-go, having been raised by secular Calvinists, and with so many children their wealth will wither and vanish in a series of unsuccessful artists, honorary MBA entrepreneurships, and the hordes of by-the-hour lawyers each child will hire to wrest pennies from each other's inheritance.
True, and having large amounts of heirs with no skills or education needs a term like "inheritance imbreeding" since they will end up diluting the wealth-gene pool until they are left with nothing and hopefully go extinct after all the wealth has been absorbed into the general population. Or more likely, absorbed by a grifter.
It was messy, but the fuedal system did have a way of filtering out talentless failchildren that capitalism seems to lack 🔪
These people think wealth is generic, which is why it's imperative to have as many kids as possible so they too can collect all the money and do a better effective Altruism at some point in the future. They're devour followers of that Big Yud school of thought
True, and having large amounts of heirs with no skills or education needs a term like "inheritance imbreeding" since they will end up diluting the wealth-gene pool until they are left with nothing and hopefully go extinct after all the wealth has been absorbed into the general population. Or more likely, absorbed by a grifter.
Whoever convinced the idle rich to do the opposite of a single child policy to split their family fortune up is a pretty funny bit. A few generations and the rich will breed themselves down to middle class.
You remind me of an interesting cultural habit in ancient Ireland, where they would shave off branching families, cutting them from the family name and inheritance to maintain large holdings within the main families.
a girl they plan to name Industry Americus Collins
Hello? Is this CPS?
Their pronatalism is born from the hyper-rational effective altruism movement
Hyper-rational, or post-rational?
In practice EAs choose to work within a system that makes altruistic efficiency impossible. They don't challenge the system or build dual power. Why let their efforts be captured? Probably because defending the existing system is in their personal interests, even if it makes altruism impossible.
Population collapse due to low birthrates is a much bigger risk to civilisation than global warming.
Conveniently Musky boy never wants to discuss why birth rates are falling, or what the consequences of global warming look like with the rampant pronatalism he so desires.
In the short term, this is creating a pension timebomb, with not enough young people to support an ageing population. If current trends continue, human civilisation itself may be at risk.
It doesn't threaten civilization, it threatens the world's biggest pyramid scheme.
“There are going to be countries of old people starving to death,”
So let's make more mouths to feed? If this was actually about feeding people then they'd be organizing to get people out of bullshit jobs and into regenerative agriculture.
That’s basically halving the population every generation. For anyone who’s familiar with compounding numbers, that’s huge.
For anyone who's familiar with compounding numbers, they do not compound forever in natural systems. (And for anyone who's familiar with systems theory, compounding positives - as they desire of finance/industry - are not necessarily better than compounding negatives. Why should we keep their assets compounding by manipulating population trends?)
Malcolm sees South Korea as a vision of our near future: the problem is most acute in countries that are “technophilic, pluralistic, educated, where women have rights”.
Funny, I look at SK and see a right-wing shithole.
The only places where the birthrate is not falling to unsustainable levels are countries where the average citizen earns less than $5,000 (£4,000) a year, he continues.
And when the average citizen earns less than US$5k a year, people have to do a calculation to see how many hands they need working to keep a roof over their head. But you want to
put in labour to support non-working white people
rather than give the average citizens their fair share so that they can have their own reproductive freedom. In the US people usually have many children because they are wealthy enough to have the relative comfort of doing so. That's not why people have large families in other countries are having children when they make less than US$5k a year. It's an incredibly ethnocentrist viewpoint.
“We don’t mind being human clickbait – that’s kind of our job – so long as we get the message out before things get too bad,” Malcolm tells me.
Professional trolls lol. Maybe I shouldn't be reacting.
pronatalism is beginning to be accepted as a core conservative value.
Like it's not already. People just aren't used to having to defend it, and even many pronatalists are going to question whether you can take care of 7-11 children properly.
Donald Trump agrees. “I want a baby boom!” he declared at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference, adding, “You men are so lucky out there.” Malcolm describes their politics as “the new right – the iteration of conservative thought that Simone and I represent will come to dominate once Trump is gone.”
Props to the Guardian for this juxtaposition.
The average pronatalist is “young, nerdy, contrarian, autist,” Malcolm says, proudly.
jfc
he is aware that, in promoting the idea that our culture faces existential crisis unless we reproduce, the aims of pronatalists overlap with those of racist conspiracists who believe in the “great replacement theory”
So much overlap the Venn diagram is a single circle. He's literally saying it is an existential risk to civilization and spearheading a "solution" to it.
Malcolm insists pronatalism is about pluralism. “Humanity improves through cultural evolution. For that you need cultural diversity.”
...
I don’t care if environmentalists don’t want to have kids.
Again, he's clearly not actually concerned about anyone's long-term well-being.
Simone and Malcolm want to show me that you can raise a family according to entirely rational, data-driven principles designed to alter the course of human civilisation for the better; that you can make large families work; that you can promote pronatalism without being racist.
No. They cannot show that. They are not billionaires or trillionaires (or probably even net millionaires). They will not be the ones to command the next generation's labor. Their progeny will be at the mercy of the rat race, even if they are privileged. Their children will create unbelievable amounts of emissions with that privilege. And it's already been made pretty clear that final statement is in bad faith.
I am the first British journalist to see what pronatalism in action looks like by visiting the Collinses in their home. When I leave them, I will be utterly lost for words.
We're just getting started?!? I'll report back if I survive...
Edit 1:
“Pronatalist parenting is intrinsically low-effort parenting,”
AAAAAAAHHHH
edit 2:
they have to reluctantly leave about 18 months between babies so her uterus can heal
make it stop...
e2.1:
“Eventually, I’m going to go in for surgery and I’m going to start haemorrhaging, and they’re going to take it [her womb] out,” Simone sighs.
e1.1:
She tells me it’s because she’s “bored out of my mind” when she’s stuck with a newborn. In what they hope will be the beginning of political careers for both of them, Simone is running for Pennsylvania state government as a Republican. The primary is two weeks after she’s due to give birth.
e3:
god help my rage bait addiction.
“In China, they’ve already restricted access to vasectomies and abortions,” Simone adds.
e4:
Simone has a history of eating disorders that have affected her fertility; she can only get pregnant through IVF.
fucking lady can't take a sign
e5:
They didn’t select against autism, which they consider part of a person’s identity.
e6:
Last year’s big pronatalist conference was organised by Kevin Dolan, who “used to be much more on the ethnonationalist side of things,” Malcolm concedes. Proponents of the great replacement theory attended, but they were outnumbered by the “autistic, nerdy” pronatalists, he says. “People are like, ‘Why do you allow the racists to come to your events?’ and I’m like, ‘Because we convert them.’
not a single ounce of self awareness
e1.2 i can't stop send help:
Will Octavian and Torsten like Thai food? Malcolm scoffs. “I will give them a white rice, stick ’em with their iPads, they’ll be fine.”
In the car on the way to the restaurant, Malcolm tells me how much he doesn’t like babies.
“The kids who I haven’t had yet, they are just as precious to me as the kids I already have.”
e1.3:
ok who is actually american and can call cps?
Torsten has knocked the table with his foot and caused it to teeter, to almost topple, before it rights itself. Immediately – like a reflex – Malcolm hits him in the face.
Malcolm tells me that he and Simone have developed a parenting style based on something she observed when she saw tigers in the wild: they react to bad behaviour from their cubs with a paw, a quick negative response in the moment, which they find very effective with their own kids. “I was just giving you the context so you don’t think I’m abusive or something,” he says.
e who cares anymore:
They insist they are prepared to accept everyone willing to make those adjustments into their movement – even self-proclaimed white nationalists – in order to save human civilisation.
“My kids are going to be like me, but better. They would probably think that I was well-meaning, saw some real issues, probably exaggerated some of the consequences, but that it was necessary in the moment, to make the right political changes.”
final edit:
This article is well worth a read - even if they are rage-baiting trolls, they have all the populist names on board with their project. I admit that as a result of climate change I have a positive view of voluntary childlessness in high-consumption countries, with a first step being reduction of (what Malcom actually confirms) the support that can make it almost profitable for for well-to-do families to have many children. Pay to help kids who need it, absolutely, but don't enable wealthy GRT eugenicists. That's my opinion anyway.
I worry that the left is slow to react to this white nationalist development. It's not just quiverfulls pushing this. And I cannot stress enough that war is the solution to an overpopulation of discontent young men. Are wealthy white people in over-developed countries having less kids? Well, maybe nature is trying to tell us something. We ignore it at our own peril. A double peril: That which nature brings, and that which our states will introduce when they no longer need a surplus of labor.
she observed when she saw tigers in the wild: they react to bad behaviour from their cubs with a paw, a quick negative response in the moment, which they find very effective with their own kids. “I was just giving you the context so you don’t think I’m abusive or something,” he says.
Oh so they beat their kids too and lie about?
TIGERS CANNOT TALK AND HUMANS HAVE LANGUAGE, WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE
I hate the "I saw wild animals doing it" argument. Not only is it constantly used to justify fascistic beliefs and actions it's also so fucking dumb. What's next? Giving a TED talk about how anthropology isn't needed anymore because I stared at a tank full of fucking sea monkeys?
At one part of the article the interview got interrupted because one of the children gabbed the poop from their diaper and ran around with it in their hand. The parents seemed distraught over this, but it's obviously okay because the child is doing chimpanzee behavior. Chimps are closer to humans genetically than tigers, so if anything, running around with hands full of poop has a stronger leg to stand on than tiger swatting
Their pronatalism is born from the hyper-rational effective altruism movemen
Wait wat the actual fuck? I thought this was quiverfull freaks. Now the Basilisk humpers are doing it?
Listen this isn’t being a doomer, this is just reality. America will lead an eco fascist alliance of western nations against allowing refugees in their nations. America will likely have a full scale war with at least half of Asian before 2050. America will prevent the world from making global solutions towards climate change. We need to understand as the left that all these things will happen BEFORE the left even rises from its death in 1991.
The imminent arrival of their fourth child, a girl they plan to name Industry Americus Collins, turns out to be only the first in a string of surprises – and one really shocking thing – that I will encounter during my day with the pronatalists
I can’t read this. You can’t make me
It's okay. You don't have to. There's no pssible advantage that could come from learning about new ways that Yuddites are being weird technofreaks.
If she, one day, redacts her progenitor, I consider it self defense.
birth rate is such a bad modifer though it's better late game to move on to women's suffrage laws for that +%workforce bonus while focusing on immigration to boost your population
The people that believe they have the greatest genetics in the world to carry the future human race have terrible eyesight and need glasses apparently.
Not that I'm against glasses or anything but you know it's clown shit when people that are naturally blind claim to have the best genetics.