SubstantialNothingness

That's just projection of her own preoccupations onto the rest of us. (Which I suppose is extremely common among those who pursue seats of power.)

I just read Biden's egotistical letter saying that he won't drop out. I honestly thought he was going to drop after reading donors were backing out and with Schiff calling him out. I'm not convinced that he won't yet, but to me it looks like he's really going to keep in it. Anyway I had a realization at this part:

"Watch. Watch. I'm getting so frustrated by the elites - I'm not talking about you guys," he said, referring to hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, "but the elites in the party. 'Oh, they know so much more.' If any of these guys don't think I should run, run against me. Go ahead - announce for president. Challenge me at the convention," he said.

It occurred to me that Biden is probably one of those dweebs who lurks on front page reddit looking for confirmation bias, but who refuses to comment because they know they'd be rightfully ripped to shreds for anything they say. So they just huff huff huff up the copium and then unleash their confidence on the real world.

"Elites?" You mean the friends you've made in half a century of manipulating your country? I know he thinks it makes him sound cool but it's jarring coming at it from a perspective where he is elite. And those big fighting words? As if he could say it to anyone's face. We saw him debate. We all know we could walk right over him in an argument, whether over ice cream flavors or nuclear war.

Tangentially, on that last point, I've seen a number of redditors questioning who is really calling the shots in the WH since they've started to realize what a pushover he is (in relation to Ukraine in particular). Some of these people sound shook.

Argentina's beef consumption is the lowest in 110 years

45kg, jfc that's still a shit ton of beef. Even Americans are averaging about 27kg I think! The poor Amazon :(

No one really wants to be responsible for 'replacing' Biden because they think winning against Trump is a long shot, and if they lose they'll be blamed for losing the election (even if they come closer to winning than Biden would have).

If there is a different candidate, the candidacy will be assigned rather than claimed. The candidate will want to be able to point to the party in the case of a potential failure.

Would Newsom turn down the assignment? I think probably not, but maybe.

The word "conditions" is not defined here.

I suppose if an individual believes higher consumption = better conditions then this could be true for the individual. That's a silly definition imo, but I guess it's somewhat popular.

To me better conditions means a more equitable and less exploitative society where people aren't driven to mental health crises and deaths of despair. I don't give a damn about the treats. I'm more concerned about ending cycles of trauma than boosting industrial output. By this definition, it's essentially a transformative rather than reformative process, and I can't imagine rich countries improving without also causing significant improvement in the countries they currently exploit.

It might be an easier game and that's fine (maybe Miyazaki is getting worse with age), but I never imagined that they expected standard players to opt out of using major gameplay features just to have a normal / balanced run. That would be so unlike FromSoft.

Simulacra and simulation.

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.

Their outsized influence in the organizations is a benefit for them, but in the long run imo it doesn't benefit them to have a table for everyone to sit at and speak. Especially in the information age. I do think they see it as a growing threat to sovereignty and hegemony and are at this point trying to burn it down.

Sounds like they have an October surprise planned.

hero