The highlight for me is coming up with some weird pseudoscience justification for why it’s okay to hit your kids.
Valley Forge, PA
Yep, checks out.
hmm I don’t actually know the context here, mind sharing?
York and the surrounding counties are currently very much a culture war battleground. There’s a bunch of school board initiated censorship, bomb threats against libraries (and then subsequent defunding of those unless they promise not to do anything that could cause offense to domestic terrorists), that sort of thing. (Edit: forgot to mention the hate tracker, some more stuff I didn’t think I wanted to know about my own neighbors)
That crap is done by people and I imagine these folks are among those doing it, and so are their friends and neighbors.
deleted by creator
Congrats! I am on the other side of mine and am going to verify a sample to get cleared.
Malcolm and Simone Collins with their children – Octavian George, four, Torsten Savage, two, and Titan Invictus, one – at home in Pennsylvania.
bye
they definitely missed out on naming two of the daughers ursa minor maior and ursa maior minor.
Their next kid will be named Ultima Thule, and they will claim very loudly that this is just because they are so big fans of astrology and that they never heard of the controversy regarding the name.
jfk
Ultima Thule was a Swedish white nationalist band back in the day.
Ow yeah I’m joking here. But it was really weird that they tried to name the asteroid Ultima Thule (and it is also odd that this controversy isn’t on the wikipage).
@gerikson The name predates the white nationalist band by *several centuries*. Per wiki: “In classical and medieval literature, ultima Thule (Latin “farthest Thule”) acquired a metaphorical meaning of any distant place located beyond the “borders of the known world”.”
I suspect they renamed the KBO Arrokoth precisely to avoid the unfortunate recent connotations of the name.
and here i just assumed the name was original to ffxiv
Oh I am aware of the term’s history[1], but just like the humble swastika some stuff can become tainted (although I believe that Ultima Thule the band is only locally infamous here in Sweden). I do know that if someone presented themselves as Ultima Thule I’d do a spit-take, but so would I if I was presented by someone named Titan Invictus.
Arrokoth is a fucking metal name tho.
[1] pretty sure the first I heard of it was in one of Evan S Connell’s great collection of essays.
In the spirit of denying the regular suspects any unearned cultural territory…
This discussion reminded me of a story that Margaret Killjoy at Cool Zone Media released last year about the residents of Valhalla doing some anti-fascist work. Alas, I couldn’t find a transcript.
Nazis Don’t Go To Valhalla https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/nazis-dont-go-to-valhalla-spooky-week-5/id1449762156?i=1000540089027
Titan Invictus … Are they playing Star Citizen?
they’re nazis, bob
Guardian failed the “don’t promote these specific cunts for 14 months challenge”
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/apr/20/pro-natalism-babies-global-population-genetics
Perhaps the NRx-curiosity is a natural consequence of the Guardian’s “gender-critical” editorial stance? Look at all the other TERFs jumping into bed with actual masks-off Nazis.
My vibe is that the Guardian UK still thinks it’s a left wing feminist stance to be transphobic 1, and unrelatedly, the Collins articles keep getting printed because everyone involved — the Collinses, their PR people, the Guardian – know perfectly well what ragebait is. A click is a click.
1: Somehow. What the hell is in the water in the UK? 2
Is it me or are the names getting weirder as they go along?
perhaps they named the child after this fucking gobshite?
Does anyone else feel like we are setting up to a near future where people who choose not to have kids are seriously discriminated against?
as far as I can tell that has been the situation at every point in western history, although I see what you mean about it getting worse compared to the status quo
It’s already here. I was sterilized (I don’t want kids, have a SEVERE genetic disability that I’d passn on, can’t afford my own house, like to sleep in, enjoy traveling, think the world is overpopulated enough, etc) and get attacked by men and women anytime I mention it.
I’ve apparently
- “destroyed my body”
- “Fucked up the only reason women exist”
- “Chosen to die alone”
- “Failed my country and family”
- “Made a selfish decision”
- “Chosen to be a slut instead of a mom”
- “Become useless to any man”
The list goes on. If I change my mind, I’ll adopt. There’s nearly 400,000 children in the US foster care system and that number has nearly DOUBLED since Roe v Wade…
Only failures and dissapoints are the people who attack you. Like what’s the gain for them?
Not sure. I just view it as “the trash taking itself out”
“Chosen to be a slut instead of a mom.” Wow. I’ve heard some madness in my time but that is a magnificent sentence that says so much more about the speaker than it ever could about you.
I flat out write “childfree” on dating and social apps, so people think that gives them permission to attack. I’ve encountered a LOT of men with breeding kinks.
I think the worst was after RvW got overturned, several of my other childfree friends got rape threats because then they’d be forced to carry their psychotic fan’s child. (I’m a professional cosplayer, so are the girls that got these messages)
I’m watching all this US from a distance and it’s just fucking…bewildering and surreal to see it go as it does
but I still remember that it happens to real people, and then to read things like this. fuck. that’s so fucking grim.
I’ve seen so many girls posting that if aborting a rape baby will get you the death penalty, than you might as well take the rapist out while you’re at it. I’m so glad I’m sterilized.
The entire “the world is running out of people” meme is just an attempt to find a non-religious rationale to limit reproductive choice.
i thought it’s mostly repackaged great replacement at this point
porque no les dos?
Yeah, when talking about certain countries and groups of people it’s suddenly “oh no we are having overpopulation” and “[people in africa/asia/with a different skin colour from mine] need to stop breeding”
Yeah, I don’t even tell people that that’s the reason I don’t have kids. Just that me and my husband are infertile, which is true because he had a vasectomy years ago.
Yes. Alongside a resurgence in anti-lgbt stuff.
All I have to do is read the kids names and, poof, I can tell they are both idiots and narcissists.
There are already way, way too many people on the planet.
nah. there are too many billionaires though.
Two things can be true at once
yes. but “there are too many people” is just a tired white supremacist trope; there are not too many people out there. (the “non-white” is usually silent in these statements. this is also how some people can be both pro- and antinatalist.)
I don’t care what color people are, and you have no idea what you’re talking about.
We’re using resources way faster than the planet can provide them, we’re running out of land, we’re driving both global climate change and the fifth ever mass extinction of life in the billions of years of Earth’s existence.
There are way too many people on the planet, we passed carrying capacity decades ago.
those are extraordinary claims and i’m sure you can give pointers to peer-reviewed materials that back them up.
when you will be doing that, please consider which parts of earth you feel are overpopulated, what quantum of global resources are they getting and what should be done with it; please convey the results of your considerations back to us.
The world has enough for everyone’s need, just not for everyone’s greed.
On average we humans use too much, yes. I don’t know if WWF (not the wrestling one) still does their yearly report, but anyway they used to and the only part of the world that in average was over carrying capacity was the West (the first world, the golden billion). And within countries there are also stark differences.
Placing the blame on the poor billions of the world is at best ignorant and at worst racist (not saying that you are, but placing the blame on poor people with more pigments has been very common). Placing it on the billionaires is more fitting, though really it’s societal structure that upholds the growth obsession and produces billionaires. But at least the billionaires has power, and in general fights every attempt at making things slightly better, which makes it more fitting to blame them.
We are “running out of land” because instead of using that land for our food we use it to grow food for cattle which we then eat which is really shitty energy efficiency. We are “running out of land” because of our addiction for cheap meat. Which by the way is also a big driving factor for climate change.
Over 50% (!!) of the country I live in (hint: 6th biggest country by area in the world, so it’s a big bit of land) is used for cattle grazing.
Sure, a fair amount of that land isn’t ideal for cropping, but a large portion of it would be, and the rest is what we have left of native vegetation. It’d be great if we stopped letting cattle trample it, and who knows, maybe we’d even have some land available for serious land-back and treaty talks??
nope, this is diet eugenics and we’re not having it
I suspect quite a few of them are going to be unalived in the next 30 years, given the way things are going politically in various countries.
Could be many millions, especially if Modi’s India gets really bad and it overflows into Pakistan.
Still not enough to make much of a dent in the total world population though.
Nah, to do that you need widespread ecological collapse, famine, lack of clean drinking water, and ideally a really good infectious disease.
@gerikson I have some news…
@fuckingkangaroos @sneerclub Not because the planet cannot carry 8 billion humans, but because no known humane socioeconomic system can provably do so. That problem is exacerbated by the fact that all evidence suggests that the best first step towards a solution would be to lose the richest billion, not the poorest, and absolutely not the folks actually doing the hard work involved in directly feeding and caring for their fellow humans.
@fuckingkangaroos @sneerclub The TESCREAL (I prefer “STREACLE” but that ship has sailed) worldview implies a future with far fewer actual humans on Earth, something also foreseen as necessary for a widespread sustainable high standard of living by people who don’t share their essentially fascist views. We should not get there by having any set of “elites” self-select their own survival. The inevitability of an outcome does not justify any arbitrary path to that end.
@fuckingkangaroos @sneerclub I’m just glad that I’m old enough that I likely won’t have to watch the process by which we get to a smaller and more sustainable human population. I fear that what we’ll actually get is the first movers towards a smaller (and on average better-off) human species are those who salivate at the prospect of slaughtering “undesirables” for the good of the race. Those of us who just want to tax the rich to build better lives for all will lose.
I don’t know where to start.
the fascism is strong in those
the eugenicist language and narrative should’ve been at least strongly challenged
These people are full of shit popping off like they do after THREE kids. Big fucking deal, my parents had three, and my brother and I were accidents. And they let us have heat in the winter and they didn’t hit us. Three is still normal!
There are some more lovely sneers in r/longreads
Nice link ,but man is Reddit shit to read nowadays with the newish layout.
old.reddit.com still works… but for how long?
even the old version randomly hides comments under “load more comments”, for no ohter reason than for literal clicks as far as I can see
I saw this unprompted in my social media feed and now so must you: these two think it’s racist to criticise them for hitting their kids, because black people hit their kids. Apparently. Can you genetically select for shamelessness? How about vicious stupidity?
well, they are fascists, being obnoxiously racist is par for the course.
The couple both said they found the backlash they faced on social media to be racist since, they argued, minorities often hit their children without the same backlash.
“We are kind of shocked by the racism threaded throughout this recent controversy. It is pretty well-documented that African Americans and other minority groups practice corporal punishment much more than other groups,” Simone Collins said via email, linking to a CNN article published in 2011.
Malcolm Collins said it was “uniquely offensive” to him considering “the majority of Americans practice some form of corporal punishment, as you can see from the statistics with specifically that being the minority groups of Americans. So yeah, I think it’s an arguably racist position.”
this is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve read all year
I will have to agree.
Every article on pronatalism in the past few years has been these two Thiel-sponsored white nationalist dweebs and nobody else. Why the fuck does the Guardian fall for this shit too.
I contacted the reporter via her website, to ask what motivated the story when the Guardian just wrote about them last year, and if the couple’s PR rep (who I assume exists) had instigated it.
I don’t really expect to hear back but it sure would be interesting to know.
It’s worth noting in the Grauniad’s defence that the piece which mentioned them (among others) last year wasn’t a commissioned interview article, it was a column by Arwa Mahdawi. Columnists usually have a regular gig to write opinion pieces on some topic relevant to their interests and then submit them for publication – in other words, they don’t have an editor telling them to go and cover something, they write about what they feel like writing about even if it turns out to be at odds with the paper’s editorial policy (e.g. Simon Jenkins, who is a Guardian columnist despite regularly expressing some highly un-Guardian-reader views). As Mahdawi is a columnist who regularly focuses on feminist issues and the United States this would be entirely within her field of interest.
Still doesn’t mean these people deserve yet more coverage, though. I hope their kids get out of this toxic family having suffered as little harm as possible from a mother who apparently thinks that the only solution to “cheap, good-quality snowsuits bought from Russia” not fitting when you’re pregnant is dressing like a tradwife and a father who really doesn’t seem to like them and who does an abuse in front of a journalist which he thinks he can just explain away with pseudoscientific bullshit as “hey, that looked like abuse but it wasn’t, it was SCIENCE”.
I really really don’t get how wearing a corset* while you’re pregnant is somehow the most rational option
*Don’t come @ me corset fans, I’m sure they are very comfortable, but while you’re pregnant? Eight months pregnant?
i pinged her on twitter too
My Papaw has ten brothers and sisters and dropped out of the sixth grade to become an entrepreneur, but I don’t see the Guardian beating a path to his door.
Honestly any day the Guardian isn’t publishing transphobia wearing a feminism mask is a good day for them.
That’s because there is no “movement” and the whole thing is a stunt to promote the ideas of the least thoughtful of all the unthoughtful people who nonetheless consider themselves intellectuals.
The Collinses are atheists; they believe in science and data, studies and research. Their pronatalism is born from the hyper-rational effective altruism movement
This is just gonna be eugenics, isn’t it?
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.”
What’s that now? Neo-alt-right? You can’t just add another fucking prefix anytime your stupid fascist movement goes off rails.
One of the reasons why I chose to have only have two children is because I couldn’t afford to give more kids a good life; the bigger home, the holidays, the large car and everything else they would need.
Yeah, what about giving them love or a warm relationship, or, you know, time?
And then they wonder why those generations have shitty relationships with their parents when they seriously believe that what they need is a big fucking car, as if that’s the variable that was missing in all of this.
Excuse me while I go and hug my daughter. I need to de-rationalize myself after reading this.
These idiots are atheist and conservatives? Morons, they’re morons. The only thing that conservatives do to atheist is put them up against the wall when they have the chance. You throw it nationalism and it’s a damn guarantee
They’ll stop being atheists and start fully being “tradwivies” the very instant their ingroup requires it. Give or take 7 seconds after the purges begin.
They aint nothing but disengenious.
What’s that now? Neo-alt-right?
I assume it is neoreaction. Not sure if you are a recent poster here, or were aware of sneerclub when it was on reddit but we talked about NRx there every now and then. (Not a fan).
I don’t know if the Collins are NRx, what I do know is that neoreactionary podcasters love the Collins. (According to a quick google search). And bonus for David Gerard, Grimes has reached out to the Collins source is the grimezs long post on Grimes her links to all this shit
they are sponsored by Thiel, so ‘ave a bleedin’ guess
Ow yeah, it certainly paints them in a very bad light, and I will not argue against others calling them NRx, or neo-nazis, I just like a little bit more proof myself because im a bit pedantic at times, but in practice it doesn’t really matter if the ‘we worry about great replacement r-strategists(*) racists’ are NRx/nazis or not).
*: For those just tuning in. (Turn back! Stop reading! Go away, innocence once lost cannot be regained!) claiming non-white people are r-strategists while white people are K-strategists is a big far right foghorn. (wiki page on the theory) In their bs theory they ignore that this is about differences between species (of course they are also racists so yeah, this isn’t hypocritical on their part, just a sign of racism), and r-strats are physically impossible for humans, as we don’t have enough nipples + we take too long to mature etc.
yeah, at that point we’re past “quacks like a duck” and “precise subspecies of mallard” into which groups are hanging out in which ponds this week
Yeah and a lot of “precise subspecies of mallard” people don’t really seem to care that the ducks keep attacking the children playing in the park and have learned to shit on peoples heads. In fact, they start to call the people who are being attacked by the ducks, ducks themselves (some of the ‘worried about subspecies’ people even look suspiciously like 3 ducks in a trenchcoat).
Well damn, I used to lurk on old sneer club, but I gotta admit I missed that particular rabbit hole so far.
I love how the journalist just reprints their reskinned Great Replacement theory at face value.
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.
Ah, so the reason you’re concerned about falling white birth rates and don’t want immigration is because it’s racist to allow “people from Africa” to immigrate to your country. Got it.
I appreciate that the journalist was shocked by the bad parenting but I’d have appreciated a little more fact checking on the naked racist conspiracies.
What’s that now? Neo-alt-right? You can’t just add another fucking prefix anytime your stupid fascist movement goes off rails.
It reminds me of how terrible sports teams will frequently change their logo and uniforms. (e.g. Vanderbilt’s University’s gridiron football team). Obviously, their lack of success is a branding problem.
some weird pseudoscience justification for why it’s okay to hit your kids.
It is to me so weird how often this comes up. A big plot point in starship troopers (the book) was that due to not hitting kids (and a vague handwave at criminals but mostly kids) western democracies fell for example.
Now I wonder how the NRx with their pro corporal punishment stance (which iirc Scott liked) feel about hitting kids.
Im also annoyed at how much words are written about the Collins. Stop promoting these doofuses. (They have come up in sneerclub before) (Late edit: She said she was really unsettled by this interview on twitter Sorry to hear you stared into the abyss Jenny, and I didn’t mean this as a personal attack towards you (not that you will read this but yeah))
E: a thing I was wondering about, with the pronatalist technofetishists, who say that both we will all die out by lack of births as old people starve, and who fetishize AGI and robot labour causing a post scarcity world, that seems contradictory, I wonder how the Rationalists deal with this contradiction.
I mean in this article they claim that girlfriend will be able to have seven kids, spaced a year and a half apart, and homeschool them, and still keep her career. They’re obviously not too concerned about contradictory statements.
Yeah saw the whole longread reddit comments tear them apart over this, esp as she is 36 already and had a few c-sections or something, which isn’t all that great for your body.
She is obviously not a very nice person but he really is a piece of work. Yeah, go on, encourage your wife to risk her health and her life to have kids you aren’t even interested in.
Im also annoyed at how much words are written about the Collins. Stop promoting these doofuses. (They have come up in sneerclub before)
Apologies. First time poster, all that stuff.
The corporal punishment thing is a weirdly Anglophone obsession – assaulting (sorry, “smacking”) your kids has been a crime here since 1977 and the kids seem to be alright as well as having the bonus of being less likely to have grown up surrounded by violence and the threat of violence. In 7 years here I’ve seen exactly one person hit a child in public (looked a lot like a visiting grandma from elsewhere) and it came as a real shock. The more the Collins types (and, of course, fundie types) try to justify this as “normal” the less normal it appears to everyone else.
Starship troopers was written in 1959 so it predates the ban by a bit at least. (I assume there was already research on it being bad in the works then, as ST goes out of its way to decry the social sciences as fake research, but their moral system which is based on math (never explained in the book, which is prob good as it would be highly contradictory, as going to war to save a few POWs is seen as just, no matter the number of lives lost) is correct. It is a really weird book to read in 2020).
I’ve actually read Starship Troopers a long time ago and it’s probably not too far out of line politically from other “silver age” SF. Heinlein had a weird career…
FWIW from memory Samuel R Delany (Black gay SF author) wrote somewhere that the realization that Johnny Rico was from the Philippines (he speaks Tagalog near the end) was very liberating for him personally as a form of inclusion. And Heinlein could probably truthfully state the only way he was “racist” was he was against the Bugs but for the entire human race.
The movies’ lack of any PoC character whatsoever was probably Verhoven’s way of playing with the Nazi imagery.
yes, it was deliberate choice (along with using nazi-borrowed uniforms and tons of visual quotes from fucking leni riefenstahl.)
And for many people, the references whooshed over their heads in low earth orbit.
The movie and the book are a lot closer together than you would think btw. Might want to give it a re-read, esp with what you know now about the common (far)-right arguments. Not that the arguments in the book are good mind you, it mostly falls back on ‘this is a science trust us’ which is quite weak.
The movie also does have black people in it, in fact the strategic savior of the human race was a black woman. Source (the rest of the propaganda clips also has quite a lot of poc in it, even if the principle cast included none.
And that brings me back to the racism in the book, while it doesn’t have overt ‘I need to shout slurs at nonwhite people’ racism, it contains quite a lot of 'other species/animals/countries (it nicely never uses the terms in a racist way, but it speaks about these groups in similar matters, so it is quite obvious that this just leads to racist bs as we have seen a lot in our times) as in conflict and the one breeding faster (!!!) wins the conflict. It seemed clear to me on which side of the debate about for example native americans vs europeans the book would be (I’m from city X and I say …).
Other fun fact about the book vs movie. You prob know the ‘violence solves more problems bla bla bla’ ‘what would the cityfathers of hiroshima say’ lines from the movie, these are also in the book, but there the argument (due to in part being about animals) is worse.
So long story short, I’m happy for Samuel R Delany that there was some liberation for him which is good (also note that the realization about the non-white people should have come a little bit earlier as the girl is called Carmencita Ibanez (I’m very western European btw, so I might be wrong here as I’m not that great about all the subtleties of various racial interplays in the Americas), also she was apparently a bit of a hussy according to Juan “Johnnie” Rico) esp as it was a different time, and science fiction from that era can be dire (before that it gets even worse!) compared to our current morals, but the book itself is still very problematic (it gets weirder if you interpret the book as being told by an unreliable, slightly dumb nepobaby, which imho the book supports).
now you’ve got me wondering if it’s anglophone imported culture war, or are there some other influences, like catholic church, and to what degree
when corporal punishment was banned in my country in 2010, it was preceded by informational campaign on the state side and intolerable bitching by conservatives. when the law passed, conservatives shut the fuck up about it seemingly forever, it would make sense if it was cultural import that is if they never really held these opinions
I believe it’s true of more or less any country: most people are pro-hitting kids until you ban the practice and it becomes obvious that it’s unacceptable (at least in overt discourse). Premier exemple of the educational potential of a law. (And now the right can pivot to racist rhetoric about which demographics don’t accept our rules and hit their kids.)
Ah these are the dudes with the unbelievably cringe Reddit dating history.
I’m calling it now: these kids will have terrible childhoods, and seeing the moral bankruptcy of right wing ideologies up close will radicalize them into being militant leftists.
