The highlight for me is coming up with some weird pseudoscience justification for why it’s okay to hit your kids.
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.
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?
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.
well, they are fascists, being obnoxiously racist is par for the course.
All I have to do is read the kids names and, poof, I can tell they are both idiots and narcissists.
the fascism is strong in those
the eugenicist language and narrative should’ve been at least strongly challenged
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.
i pinged her on twitter too
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?
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.
Honestly any day the Guardian isn’t publishing transphobia wearing a feminism mask is a good day for them.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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).
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.
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.
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.
They bought this house and the one next door for $575,000; they allow their neighbours to live in the second house rent free, in exchange for childcare.
Seems normal !
Wow, these people have not planned anything at all. They’re going to homeschool all 7+ kids? And go into politics, a job that infamously has long, unsociable hours?
No need to plan things when you can use Rationalism, nominative determinism, and first principles to get over any troubles. Also the people who give them gifts are very rich.
No, they’re counting on not spending time with their children. Their worldview is all about populating, not educating.
In fact, if you pester any of these people how they would plan to educate all these millions of new children you’ll quickly find out that either:
- That is actually not planned for at all (hand waving).
- They actually only want certain (White people of means) to be having lots of kids.
Or option 3: they subscribe to the mudsill theory, under which education will no longer be wasted on the lower orders of society, whose lot is to die in harness.
This is part of a whole thing where the journalist keeps presenting their framing without question. Is it “allow their neighbours to live in the second house rent free, in exchange for childcare” or is it “they have unpaid live-in nannies in a staff apartment”? Do they “give everything they can spare to charity” or are they landlords who own property they don’t live in? Is she wearing a corset and chemise from etsy because it’s practical, or because these weirdos have put on staged cosplay performances for every journalist who’s ever interviewed them, and you’re no exception?
This is part of a whole thing where the journalist keeps presenting their framing without question.
Yuuup, and at no point is it explicitly mentioned that what they’re doing is entirely unfeasible on a societal level. How on Earth will a couple dozen rationalist having 4, 7, or even 11 kids make up for the hundreds of millions of women in America having 1.5? Or the billions of women having under 2.1 kids in the rest of the world.
On top of that, they only have 3 kids and they’ve already put a shit ton of time and sunk themselves over half a million in debt just for housing and childcare. I absolutely believe these two can afford it, but this isn’t something most Americans can achieve, much less most global families. One couple trying to outfuck global population decline would be like if I tried to end global poverty by becoming really, really rich.
like if I tried to end global poverty by becoming really, really rich.
I have some exciting news for you. Have you ever heard of “effective altruism”?
😉
Yeah these people have found their weird PR niche. There’s nothing separating these people from other rich white Americans who can also comfortably provide for ~3 kids with good schooling and higher education. The real pronatalists are the scary Quiverful people who are a lot more numerous but are also religious fundies. There’s no way the Collinses can compete with them because that subculture already believes around 90% of what they believe but are more effective at spreading their memes.
My favourite bit is the bit about “you can afford it, just choose a more frugal lifestyle” while young people today literally can’t afford to feed themselves. Also how about your ability to love your kids? Didn’t see that in any of your spreadsheets and your kids will hate you for giving them a shitty upbringing.
Close runner up is the bit about how we’ve had centuries of population growth, and it’s a huge deal that we’re not growing anymore without noting that all those centuries also included events such as wars and epidemics regularly killing off sizeable percentages of the population which doesn’t happen on the same scale anymore.
Oh wait I got this, how about the bit about the oldest child taking care of the younger ones. They get to grow up fast and spend their precious time being an unpaid babysitter instead of actually being a kid pretty much ruining their childhood.
Or how about the bit where the parents deliberately have so many kids gambling one will get rich and take care of them when their old. These natalists are delusional and I actually know a few irl that have said or done these and frankly its fuckin disgusting to me
Oh wait I got this, how about the bit about the oldest child taking care of the younger ones. They get to grow up fast and spend their precious time being an unpaid babysitter instead of actually being a kid pretty much ruining their childhood.
Common practice among quiverfull creeps.
My mum grew up in Ireland in the 60s (one of 8 children) and witnessed some of this at school: little girls from families of 15 or 20, missing classes so they could mind their younger siblings.
I’m getting a vasectomy on Thursday. I won’t ever be able to afford kids, or likely my own home. The vasectomy is $228 out of pocket after insurance. That I can afford.
Congrats! I am on the other side of mine and am going to verify a sample to get cleared.
this is not necessarily true from the guardian
it is a prediction, but really fearporn to push people into accepting the guardian’s political agenda
hey, everyone, look a this fucking clown: a bona fide breivik-praising fascist
the commies’ favorite label, fascist
but I think fascism means at least 2 things: a social and a political definition
which one of these 2 do you mean (don’t say both)
and can you unpack your answer?
you should answer so you won’t look stupid in front of “everyone”congrats on the stupidest post I’ve seen this month
it really fucking was
literal fucking neonazi identifiers in post history, comes into our house, and then claims us to act like nazis. clever!
they’re such an obvious nazi I legitimately wonder if their shit works anywhere outside of the alt-right instances on the fediverse or if their miserable existence is just other people immediately and correctly calling them a nazi while they try to engage someone, anyone in a rousing round of “debate”
looked up their posts because I was curious how dumb it was. It was dumb. Noticed they reference Saul Alinsky, which is quite a weird thing. I noticed only the crypto far right and libertarians (I repeat myself) talk about this guys work. Quite a red flag.
wait, am I hearing correctly?
oh, I see,
it’s a commie gang attack
just like a neo-nazi gang attack
you guys are so similar
your dumb
fuck me those prior posts hurt. at least they wear their shitty little sign, saves us some trouble!
the whole server is chock full of this type; i defederated the trash from circumstances.
they’re now defederated from here too. I guess we’ve made it when even the shithead parts of mastodon want a taste. what’s a good way to keep up on which instances fucking suck on the mastodon side of things?
Seirdy’s. Seirdy’s fedinuke list is a perfect starting point; and you might want to review his tier0 blocklist (you will probably apply almost all of these).
fuck yeah, this is a lot higher quality than most blocklists I’ve seen. it seems like once I get back to Philthy, a CSV blocklist importer will be an important next feature (you might not be surprised to learn that the only bulk admin operations Lemmy seems to support are done directly on the database)
u wot m8
omg a neo-nazi with bad reading comprehension that’s so crazy
I don’t know where to start.
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
