From a Guardian article with a long headline: "America’s premier pronatalists on having ‘tons of kids’ to save the world: ‘There are going to be countries of old people starving to death’/ Elon Musk (father of 11) supports their cause. Thousands follow their ideology. Malcolm and Simone Collins are on a mission to make it easier for everyone to have multiple children. But are they really model parents?"
"As well as having separate offices, Simone and Malcolm sleep in different bedrooms. Her office has a playpen in it, an elliptical exercise machine, and a standup desk across a treadmill, where Simone walks while she works. Does she ever stop? She smiles. 'I am autistic, and I really feel uncomfortable sitting still.'... She and Malcolm see her autism as an asset. At the recent Natal conference in Austin, Malcolm says, 'one of the big jokes was how autistic the movement was. Like a third of the people there had autism.' There is an AR-15 assault rifle mounted on the wall of Simone’s office.... Instead of Christmas, they have Future Day. 'The Future Police come and take their toys, and then they have to write a contract about how they’re going to make the world a better place, and they get their toys back with some gifts and stuff. They get more gifts when they do whatever they said they were going to do. What does Christmas teach them? Get random toys if you’re vaguely good?'"
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43 comments:
Insane.
"But are they model parents?" Imagine the Legacy Media ever posing that question at two gay parents, the single mothers along with their baby daddies, or ANY Hollywood celebrity other than the few vocal conservatives that exist.
Babies daddies? Hahaha. As a teacher I've had 5 brothers and sisters ALL of them sired by different man. Completely commonplace in today's America.
Every movement has its crazies. They are living their beliefs, I’ll give them that, and those beliefs aren’t based on nothing, but they are extremists. Living as though your every effort needs to maximize your values (lots of kids + giving away as much as you can) is nihilistic.
You have a right to exist and, within reason, you have a right to be self-indulgent, to enjoy things without worry about their effects on the wider world (which will do just fine even without your relentless vigilance). And if they think Christmas is about getting toys for being vaguely good, well, they are atheists. It’s not surprising they miss the point.
The democrat media will print anything disparaging of people having more children. That leads to more deplorables
She's in long sleeves with a long skirt, but the husband and the kids are all in short sleeved shirts. I don't think the home is "very cold".
The Future Police come and take their toys, and then they have to write a contract about how they’re going to make the world a better place
I think this was lifted from Hillary's planned reeducation camps.
As a teacher I've had 5 brothers and sisters ALL of them sired by different man.
That's known as "a woman diversifying her post-birth income streams by diversifying her pre-birth incoming streams".
Someday a drug dealer with win the Nobel in Economics for his well-crafted rap about the practice.
To each his own. Whatever floats your boat. It's a free country. Celibate Diversity.
Whatever you think of quiver-full natalists and tradwives, their offspring are going to control the future, and the purple-haired girl bosses are not.
She's a natural wife, not a rent-a-womb for a modern family, not a taxable commodity for a progressive project, and her and her husband have reconciled, as a man and woman do, to conceive "our Posterity" in an evolutionary tradition of love wins.
A very cold home in the woke of an energy dearth of a Green renewable outage where the wind blows out of range, the sun shines at a glancing angle or through a dark veil, or the infrastructure is aborted in a catastrophic climate.
In the course of my own life and my observation of the lives of others, I've come to appreciate the value of adopting customs that have "stood the test of time" - a cliche but accurate. Or call it Chesterton's Fence. Or plain old small-c conservatism. Trying to make up your own customs, particularly with regard to things as foundational as family life and child-rearing, and to have those customs actually serve the functions you intend and be stable - what a struggle.
I'm not advocating never changing a custom. But I have concluded, for myself, that most long-standing customs seem to be more functional and less harmful than most new attempts at customs being created out of whole cloth. But I do think it's a good thing that we live in a society that can absorb a pretty high ratio of mistakes to winners, so we all can see what ends up working.
For instance - there was never a time or place in human history until the 20th century West in which ordinary women (or men, but I'm going to focus on what I know best) had significant leisure. It's my opinion that the so-called "norm" of the mid- to late-century American "housewife," who had a vacuum cleaner, a washing machine, possibly a dryer, a gas or electric oven and stove, a refrigerator, some form of whole-house heating, and the legal requirement that she outsource care of her children for six hours a day, five days a week, didn't really work. It seems to have led to a sense of frustration, ennui, and - again in my opinion - misdirected anger among several generations of women like me.
Prior to the wide accessibility of all those conveniences that slashed the time necessarily spent on what had been ordinary women's work throughout history, sure, women weren't afforded the rights that they should have had, but they did know how vital they were to their families and to society.
(Obviously men's work in the West also changed dramatically and, for many, got a whole lot less physically arduous than it had ever been. But they were still putting in the hours.)
I haven't had a career in about a decade, and before that I wouldn't call my paid work a "career" - it was nominally part-time and was nothing in which I'd been trained or interested. My primary role has been "housewife" for many years, including now, when we no longer have children at home. And I can keep a cleaner house than was even possible for a 19th-century woman, and a much larger one than that ordinary woman would have had, in somewhere between one and two hours a day. I can prepare and clean up after a main meal of such variety and nutritional value as that woman couldn't have dreamt of in no more than two hours, usually more like one. And throughout my adult life, while doing these things and bringing up the kids and trying to contribute to my community and church by volunteering and so on, I've struggled with feelings of guilt and unease, because it's no longer clear that I'm pulling my weight. The psychic cost has felt heavy, though the physical burdens have been lighter than ever before.
Why not just wear hair shirts or sack cloth and ashes?
These insane people need to be shunned and vilified rather than praised and lionized.
“ Every decision the Collinses make is backed by data. “Nominative determinism is a heavily studied field,” Malcolm tells me, when I ask about his children’s names. “Girls that have gender neutral names are more likely to have higher paying careers and get Stem degrees.” Names like Titan and Industry are much more than gender neutral, I say. “We wanted to give our kids strong names. We want our kids to have a strong internal locus of control,” he continues, as Octavian waves a plastic rubbish truck in front of my face.”
I’m sorry, those names are completely ridiculous and unAmerican.
Assault rifle?
Who is it assaulting, sitting motionless on the wall?
Sounds scary.
Will it shoot me if I walked into the room and looked at it?
1. Torsten is called Toastie. There’s a strong name!
2. “ they give everything they can spare to charity (their charities). “Any pointless indulgence, like heating the house in the winter, we try to avoid if we can find other solutions,” says Malcolm.”
Your first DUTY is to yourself and to your family. You have no duty to give away money to no good NGOs.
3. There two people are fucked in the head.
This reminds me a little of when they caught the Unabomber and we heard a lot about how crazy he must be to live in that spartan cabin; someone pointed out that his craziness consisted of actually living the way people like Al Gore kept saying we all ought to be living.
Likewise, the Future Police manage to be too Guardianista even for the Guardian.
Seems everything people do these days has to be ridiculously performative. Can't anyone just act "normal" anymore? It's all gotta be niche, and curated, and TikTok-ready. Look at me! I'm a special little flower! And my every obsession, kink, and neurosis makes me an "influencer" who's better than you. Follow me! Over the cliff, kids! Blech...
Social Media truly is the Krell Machine.
>There is a wider perception that pronatalists are also largely white;<
Speaking of things that are good for the future of mankind...
"As a teacher I've had 5 brothers and sisters ALL of them sired by different man [sic]." What does being a teacher have to do with having five brothers and sisters all sired by different men?
Follow the link and read the whole thing. Some of it is actually pretty funny.
And, this couple has enough money to literally buy a bus to transport the family, as well as own the house next door where the babysitter lives for free.
Affluent white folks with a few kids and a stay-at-home Mom. That’s the base reality here. I work with quite a few younger men who have the same thing going on. Usually with some homeschooling thrown in.
It’s the chance to portray them as crackpots that’s drawn the Guardian to them. Reading the article, I was repeatedly reminded of the people Orwell writes about in the second half of The Road to Wigan Pier. The sandal-wearers and vegans. Ironically, the average Guardian reader…
I would go for what seems like the young seem to obsess over these days.
I would say ‘Don’t be a Nazi. Have children’
Equate childlessness with Nazism.
Pretty insane alright. Here's a more child-friendly form of the family that would incentivize parents to have children: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
@Jamie
FWIW, I have tremendous admiration for you and enjoyed your excellent comment very much. Thank you.
I think these people are the outliers to the outliers.
An attempt by the Anglosphere's deep state slime machine to link in public's conciousness the notion that this family and everything its parents support is laughable, ridiculous, and utterly wrong. Oh those dreadful people. "That is why they [common people] must be led, sir, driven, pushed!” (Clockwork Orange, Burgess, 1962).
The sad thing is this tactic works pretty well too. Remember "Doomsday Preppers", (Nat Geo Chan, 2011-14) although sometimes it does not (All in the Family,CBS, 1971-8) because the plebs actually identify with the people they're supposed to hate. There are many, many more examples of this propaganda campaign. Don't fall for it. Think for yourself.
I have long felt a sense of guilt and regret for not having had any children. So I am grateful to those who choose to have many.
I'll second what Meade said.
The eugenics societies realized around the year 2000 that there was an oncoming birth dearth which would destroy every society in which it occurred. The birth dearth would lead to shrinking economies and that, to the collapse of the welfare states. So the eugenics societies became pro-natalist and sought for ways to increase births among the groups which were eugenically desirable. Without going into who they thought that was, I can report that they were completely unable to lift the birth rate among European secularists who are a huge majority in this generation in Europe. I read their reports on their efforts and those of people they funded in Biodemography and Social Biology and in Demographic Research and I concluded that the eugenicists have proved that only truly religious groups can maintain their birth rate over time. All other social solutions fail although centralized social planners are unable to believe that this is so.
Why is it so?
Read Jamie's excellent post on all the difficulties she faced. Whatever her reasons for persevering, you can see that in this day and age there are major difficulties in raising a family and one of them is the way society brings down the morale of the moms. If the moms were thieving, tent-dwelling, addicts it would probably be easier for them to feel good about what they were doing or not doing because society would be with them in their irresponsibility. They'd have no responsibilities which they acknowledged and, anyhow, no conscience about how they fulfilled responsibilities.
But you can't raise kids that way.
But, then, if you are going to have a conscience, you need to be right with it. So then the question of what is right and why, emerges. Our Betters think our society does not need to give an answer but Our Moms and Dads must have one. Or we'll have no Moms and Dads, just a post-modern version of the Shakers, i.e., the Consumers. "They were there as a majority just before The Big Dark," Moms and Dads will be explaining in the future to the kids. "They kept their children inside, or on leashes outside, and made them eat Frosty Flake Crickets for breakfast, and would only use renewable utilities for heat which, as you know, is insufficient. Naturally, the kids were hungry, cold, mean and grabby in a sneaky way, and sickly. They became the ones you don't want to have around so the Consumers stopped having them around. No kids. And the Consumers all died off. The next generation, the Renewers, was better and that's who we came through The Dark Time with."
We too live in a cold-ish house. It's too large and therefore foolish to heat the whole thing when only certain are used. So we adapt, heating what's necessary and sucking it up when we travel from one part of the house to another. Not great but it makes sense.
The article is worth reading. I'd say they're a mix of sensible -- you don't need to raise your kids like "retired millionaires" -- and extreme.
1. The charity they support is their pronatalism foundation.
2. The wife is autistic, as is one of the kids. They say that one-third of the people at their pronatalist convention are "autists."
3. Mom was an "accident." Her hippie dad knocked up his kids' babysitter. Dad was essentially abandoned at boarding school by his wealthy, divorced parents.
Wasn't "effective altruism" the same philosophy that Sam Bankman-Fried advocated? Those folks have two strikes against them already in my book.
The life of these people is apropos of nothing except their own lives.
These are basically Leftists who are smart enough to figure out that the Right is outbreeding their kind, and are trying to fight back by adopting aspects of the Trad lifestyle. I wonder if those two ideologies are ultimately compatible with each other? I suspect they are not, and they will end up going one way or the other.
Certainly, the Grauniad is just trying to make these people look weird. And well, they are, but lumping them in with people who practice this lifestyle based on faith is a long bow to draw.
but she can’t fit into them now, so she’s currently dressing in the clothes pregnant women wore in a time before central heating:
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pretty impressive to gain wiehgt as effective altruists
And well, they are, but lumping them in with people who practice this lifestyle based on faith is a long bow to draw.
I'd only change this statement this'll: lumping them in with people who practice this lifestyle based on faith and the evidence of thousands of years of relative success is a long bow to draw.
It seems to me - and maybe I'm being uncharitable to the non-tradwife and her husband, and I'll try to educate myself more about the atheist pronatalists - that these people think they invented the system they're... well, kind of aping. I do hope it works - kids are awesome personally and societally.
The dad slapped his kid. That’s wrong.
I agree with them that the declining birth rates in western countries is a major disaster in the making - but it strikes me that, in their personal and family life, they relish the wrong things too much, and it's not a product of autism.
"“And importing people from Africa to support a mostly non-working white population – because you didn’t put in labour to support non-working white people – has really horrible optics.”
Yes, but probably not in the way you're thinking. While western birth rates are in the toilet, the birth rates in the Muslim world are doing pretty well. So the future is likely to look something more like the hired help deciding they're not putting up with your sh*t any more, infidel, unless your atheist ass gets wise to Mohammed's miracle cure.
Blogger Dave Begley:
I’m sorry, those names are completely ridiculous and unAmerican.
You know Begley is Gaelic, not American, right?
I am also a sahm and I would say the solution to Jamie's problem lies with having more children. I've often wondered what someone with two or three kids who are in school do all day. But I don't see a time where I'm ever going to feel like I don't have plenty to accomplish.
I also have too many kids to helicopter parent. My kids, minus the baby, camped out in the backyard together last night. The oldest would be too old to do so for fun, but since there are younger siblings, it seemed like the perfect summer night activity.
effective altruists -- forever in search of the lowest common denominator.
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