the_dunk_tank

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.