You might be amused (?) to learn that while I was reading that Guardian piece, I was thinking, "These people desperately need someone like Dave Karpf, only without any conscience," because they're absolutely clueless about communicating with people who don't share their insanity. A competent publicist wouldn't have let them within a mile of a Guardian reporter, at least not without heavy chaperoning.
But then I got to thinking: if, in fact, they're basically grifters, which they probably are (Rick Perlstein has argued for years that American conservatism is basically a gigantic grift), then being pilloried in The Guardian could end very well for them. For the kind of people apt to give them money, The Guardian is a hated symbol of The Liberal Elite (or something like that), so being "smeared" by The Guardian is a veritable badge of honor. Just recently, The Guardian has been trying to drum up subscriptions by quoting King-in-his-own-mind Elon as calling it, with typically imbecilic bluster, "the most misanthropic publication on Earth". So I expect the Collinses will monetize this thing to a fare-thee-well.
Also, you know, child abuse has a very large constituency in the USA. My own mother was part of it, as were the fundie christianists who ran the schools to which I was sent. Their violence toward their own children, including me, was one of my earliest clues that they were full of shit.
I feel genuinely sorry for the Collins children. Their names alone are almost a form of child abuse.
Naming the daughter "Industry America" sure is something...
Fair point about the polarized hate-funding dynamic. But I still suspect this is going to really dampen their publicity efforts. I doubt Elon et al *mind* that they hit their kids, but that isn't supposed to be one of the main features of their little "movement."
Give it a few years and I'm sure some other Thiel-adjacent couple will make up an identical grift with a new name though.
"Praxis is newsworthy because the utterly unqualified “founder” raised $19.2 million for his project."
This is a sidebar to this but this particular thing has really bugged me. That's a lot of money for you and me - as you note, pocket change for tech billionaires - but it is laughably insufficient to start a freaking CITY, by several orders of magnitude. People - and credulous reporters are very much included here - have really lost the plot of how BIG society is. Even the very richest humans can only plausibly use their wealth to gain power in/of a society/country - not build a new one. Jeff Bezos, if he wanted, could build a small-to-medium-sized city (he would hate it), but the list beyond that isn't very long. State-level resources - and obligations - are just a different thing than individual.
I have a stock answer I use when someone comments on some ostentatious display of wealth: "there's an awful lot of money at the top sloshing around with no place to go". As you note, a half-mill from a billionaire is a dollar in the tip jar to the rest of us. And the libertarian utopia of a "rational" city-state is an old dream going back to Galt's Gulch, and will never die as long as men dream of authority without responsibility. We are well into The Guilded Age 2.0 now, and it's only a matter of time before the oligarchs get their hands on government again and end up just like the first Guilded Age, except this time a much bugger percentage of the population will be in the cities. Be there, will be wild!
These guys are blatantly racists. But nearly all pronatalists have dodged the implications of the fact that global fertility is still above replacement, and that global population is unlikely to fall much before the end of the century. So, any countries with low fertility can stabilise their population by allowing more migration (unless they are so sad, no one wants to come there, which seems like a separate problem).
In Australia, we have the absurd situation where the population is increasing faster than our housing industry can respond, but the Treasurer is urging people to have more babies (maybe supposing that they will never need rooms of their own, let alone houses)>
I've been writing a bunch of critiques of pronatalism, but after this fiasco, it looks as if I could have saved myself the trouble. I'll cite this one for the record
Perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect where people have who have amassed money believe falsely that they are endowed with wisdom in completely different fields and end up supporting cranks. Because they don't know what they don't know.
That’s a pretty shocking Display of bad parenting and while the journalist is right there. Slapping a toddler just because he bumps into the table! Unconscionable and he must think it’s okay.
I can't hear about a place called "Praxis" without thinking of the space opera novels by Walter Jon Williams. I wonder whether the techbros can either. A Torment Nexus situation.
I died a little inside when they said their kids have iPads around their necks all day. And hitting a toddler in the face, oh my God. (And I say that as a sincere Christian not taking the Lord's name in vain). They want to have a houseful of kids but don't actually understand, honor, enjoy, or appreciate children in the abstract or their own as individual human souls with dignity. People are not widgets in some weirdo agenda. Just awful.
From their described childhoods alone, it is clear those people are PROFOUNDLY broken and in desperate need of basic education in human development, therapy to address their difficulties with relationships, and a spiritual awakening.
These people love Ayn Rand don't they? I just have a feeling. Because they have strong selfish twat libertarian vibes and I have to assume that translates to loving shitty sociopathic writing.
There’s so much good and bad with this “movement” (for lack of a better word). It is good to have children, and I’m glad there are people with the power to influence things advocating doing so. It would be more helpful if they used their power to change the system to make family formation more affordable and made it easier to avoid negative influences (the ‘tech’ from which they made their money). The downside is that there’s no larger spiritual purpose to this; they want things to continue as the are and are smart enough to realize that the money stops coming in for their class if there’s no one around in the future to use PayPal. Thus, there needs to be more people, a few high IQ types to manage things and a larger biomass to consume. It’s ugly and reductive, and goes to a point a made a few days earlier about our “elite human capital” being nothing more than vulgar engineers adaptable and amenable to the current system.
I don’t hit my own kids, and never would. It’s not because I think it’s always inherently bad (Theodore Roosevelt hit his kids) but because I’m 6’4 and 260 pounds and I would never take the risk of hurting them on the balance of whatever good it would do. It’s not my nature to use force when even the slightest hope of persuasion will work, and so far my girls haven’t suffered from any forbearance on my part.
As for the guns, I suspect it’s a cultural thing. Here in the South, they’re everywhere, and even little girls grow up accustomed to them (and aware of their dangers). I don’t know a single family that doesn’t have guns. I’m not sure about gun culture among Silicon Valley tech lords, but hopefully they’ve taught their children responsible gun use and safety.
I mean... the oldest kids are 2 and 4, and their parenting strategy is to hand the kids an iPad and "bop" 'em whenever they stop staring at it. So I'm gonna venture a guess that they aren't devoting a *ton* of time to teaching responsible gun use and safety.
You might want to look up Theodore Roosevelt's kids. Alice was a famously erratic person who sometimes disdained or mocked her father, Kermit committed suicide (and was closest to TR generally), Archibald was a far-right extremist given to conspiracy theory. Quentin died in combat in World War I. Ted died of a heart attack during World War II but commented several times that he had been close to a nervous breakdown during his adult life in part out of fear of disappointing his father.
It is not at all obvious that hitting children causes negative outcomes, but it is obvious that people with negative outcomes were more likely to have been hit as a child, but the causality could go either or both ways on that. It seems obvious if you frame it as “people who misbehave as children are more likely to get hit and also more likely to misbehave as adults” that is not a result people would find surprising, though it isn’t obvious that it must be true either. Nobody is conducting controlled trials to figure out if hitting children causes behavior problems, because the ethics of that is terrible and it is not getting approved. I didn’t see a single bit in this piece where you discussed the actual evidence, you just suggested by analogy that some things do have full consensus in the scientific community because they are obviously true. I very much doubt that, as evolution and the shape of the earth are about as obviously true as you can get and there are still people who don’t agree with them, even very educated people who should damn well know better. I don’t think hitting your kids is a good idea but I rather doubt the evidence supporting that is nearly as good as you seem convinced it is.
I think time will tell. Kids are difficult. Having them to advance a cause won't get the parents through the hard times. And when they get frustrated, they'll take it out on the object of their resentment, the children. You gotta love em' - A lot.
I thought they were accusing people of anti-*black* racism. “Oh, you disapprove of corporal punishment…but you know who does that a lot? Bet you don’t feel so liberal now, huh?”
You might be amused (?) to learn that while I was reading that Guardian piece, I was thinking, "These people desperately need someone like Dave Karpf, only without any conscience," because they're absolutely clueless about communicating with people who don't share their insanity. A competent publicist wouldn't have let them within a mile of a Guardian reporter, at least not without heavy chaperoning.
But then I got to thinking: if, in fact, they're basically grifters, which they probably are (Rick Perlstein has argued for years that American conservatism is basically a gigantic grift), then being pilloried in The Guardian could end very well for them. For the kind of people apt to give them money, The Guardian is a hated symbol of The Liberal Elite (or something like that), so being "smeared" by The Guardian is a veritable badge of honor. Just recently, The Guardian has been trying to drum up subscriptions by quoting King-in-his-own-mind Elon as calling it, with typically imbecilic bluster, "the most misanthropic publication on Earth". So I expect the Collinses will monetize this thing to a fare-thee-well.
Also, you know, child abuse has a very large constituency in the USA. My own mother was part of it, as were the fundie christianists who ran the schools to which I was sent. Their violence toward their own children, including me, was one of my earliest clues that they were full of shit.
I feel genuinely sorry for the Collins children. Their names alone are almost a form of child abuse.
Naming the daughter "Industry America" sure is something...
Fair point about the polarized hate-funding dynamic. But I still suspect this is going to really dampen their publicity efforts. I doubt Elon et al *mind* that they hit their kids, but that isn't supposed to be one of the main features of their little "movement."
Give it a few years and I'm sure some other Thiel-adjacent couple will make up an identical grift with a new name though.
OMG how many Thiel adjacent couples are there?! 🫠
"Praxis is newsworthy because the utterly unqualified “founder” raised $19.2 million for his project."
This is a sidebar to this but this particular thing has really bugged me. That's a lot of money for you and me - as you note, pocket change for tech billionaires - but it is laughably insufficient to start a freaking CITY, by several orders of magnitude. People - and credulous reporters are very much included here - have really lost the plot of how BIG society is. Even the very richest humans can only plausibly use their wealth to gain power in/of a society/country - not build a new one. Jeff Bezos, if he wanted, could build a small-to-medium-sized city (he would hate it), but the list beyond that isn't very long. State-level resources - and obligations - are just a different thing than individual.
I have a stock answer I use when someone comments on some ostentatious display of wealth: "there's an awful lot of money at the top sloshing around with no place to go". As you note, a half-mill from a billionaire is a dollar in the tip jar to the rest of us. And the libertarian utopia of a "rational" city-state is an old dream going back to Galt's Gulch, and will never die as long as men dream of authority without responsibility. We are well into The Guilded Age 2.0 now, and it's only a matter of time before the oligarchs get their hands on government again and end up just like the first Guilded Age, except this time a much bugger percentage of the population will be in the cities. Be there, will be wild!
These guys are blatantly racists. But nearly all pronatalists have dodged the implications of the fact that global fertility is still above replacement, and that global population is unlikely to fall much before the end of the century. So, any countries with low fertility can stabilise their population by allowing more migration (unless they are so sad, no one wants to come there, which seems like a separate problem).
In Australia, we have the absurd situation where the population is increasing faster than our housing industry can respond, but the Treasurer is urging people to have more babies (maybe supposing that they will never need rooms of their own, let alone houses)>
I've been writing a bunch of critiques of pronatalism, but after this fiasco, it looks as if I could have saved myself the trouble. I'll cite this one for the record
https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/mute-inglorious-miltons
Perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect where people have who have amassed money believe falsely that they are endowed with wisdom in completely different fields and end up supporting cranks. Because they don't know what they don't know.
That’s a pretty shocking Display of bad parenting and while the journalist is right there. Slapping a toddler just because he bumps into the table! Unconscionable and he must think it’s okay.
I can't hear about a place called "Praxis" without thinking of the space opera novels by Walter Jon Williams. I wonder whether the techbros can either. A Torment Nexus situation.
Pure Torment Nexus.
Brainstorming baby names?
I died a little inside when they said their kids have iPads around their necks all day. And hitting a toddler in the face, oh my God. (And I say that as a sincere Christian not taking the Lord's name in vain). They want to have a houseful of kids but don't actually understand, honor, enjoy, or appreciate children in the abstract or their own as individual human souls with dignity. People are not widgets in some weirdo agenda. Just awful.
From their described childhoods alone, it is clear those people are PROFOUNDLY broken and in desperate need of basic education in human development, therapy to address their difficulties with relationships, and a spiritual awakening.
These people love Ayn Rand don't they? I just have a feeling. Because they have strong selfish twat libertarian vibes and I have to assume that translates to loving shitty sociopathic writing.
Hint: The Venn diagram of the pronatalists & techies you covered & psychology I cover is a circle.
There’s so much good and bad with this “movement” (for lack of a better word). It is good to have children, and I’m glad there are people with the power to influence things advocating doing so. It would be more helpful if they used their power to change the system to make family formation more affordable and made it easier to avoid negative influences (the ‘tech’ from which they made their money). The downside is that there’s no larger spiritual purpose to this; they want things to continue as the are and are smart enough to realize that the money stops coming in for their class if there’s no one around in the future to use PayPal. Thus, there needs to be more people, a few high IQ types to manage things and a larger biomass to consume. It’s ugly and reductive, and goes to a point a made a few days earlier about our “elite human capital” being nothing more than vulgar engineers adaptable and amenable to the current system.
I don’t hit my own kids, and never would. It’s not because I think it’s always inherently bad (Theodore Roosevelt hit his kids) but because I’m 6’4 and 260 pounds and I would never take the risk of hurting them on the balance of whatever good it would do. It’s not my nature to use force when even the slightest hope of persuasion will work, and so far my girls haven’t suffered from any forbearance on my part.
As for the guns, I suspect it’s a cultural thing. Here in the South, they’re everywhere, and even little girls grow up accustomed to them (and aware of their dangers). I don’t know a single family that doesn’t have guns. I’m not sure about gun culture among Silicon Valley tech lords, but hopefully they’ve taught their children responsible gun use and safety.
I mean... the oldest kids are 2 and 4, and their parenting strategy is to hand the kids an iPad and "bop" 'em whenever they stop staring at it. So I'm gonna venture a guess that they aren't devoting a *ton* of time to teaching responsible gun use and safety.
I left the story wondering how people so disinterested in parenting are ever going to homeschool their kids effectively.
Khan Academy Kids app, most likely.
That’s certainly plausible, but I don’t know them. Maybe they have a butler for that.
By their works shall ye know them.
You might want to look up Theodore Roosevelt's kids. Alice was a famously erratic person who sometimes disdained or mocked her father, Kermit committed suicide (and was closest to TR generally), Archibald was a far-right extremist given to conspiracy theory. Quentin died in combat in World War I. Ted died of a heart attack during World War II but commented several times that he had been close to a nervous breakdown during his adult life in part out of fear of disappointing his father.
It is not at all obvious that hitting children causes negative outcomes, but it is obvious that people with negative outcomes were more likely to have been hit as a child, but the causality could go either or both ways on that. It seems obvious if you frame it as “people who misbehave as children are more likely to get hit and also more likely to misbehave as adults” that is not a result people would find surprising, though it isn’t obvious that it must be true either. Nobody is conducting controlled trials to figure out if hitting children causes behavior problems, because the ethics of that is terrible and it is not getting approved. I didn’t see a single bit in this piece where you discussed the actual evidence, you just suggested by analogy that some things do have full consensus in the scientific community because they are obviously true. I very much doubt that, as evolution and the shape of the earth are about as obviously true as you can get and there are still people who don’t agree with them, even very educated people who should damn well know better. I don’t think hitting your kids is a good idea but I rather doubt the evidence supporting that is nearly as good as you seem convinced it is.
...You think there is debate *within the scientific community* about the shape of the earth?
Just don't hit your kids, okay? Or, if you do, then you should be prepared for some dude with a blog is going to think you're an asshole.
I think time will tell. Kids are difficult. Having them to advance a cause won't get the parents through the hard times. And when they get frustrated, they'll take it out on the object of their resentment, the children. You gotta love em' - A lot.
I wrote a humorous piece about this if you're interested: https://sojournfortress.substack.com/p/build-your-own-supercomputer
I thought they were accusing people of anti-*black* racism. “Oh, you disapprove of corporal punishment…but you know who does that a lot? Bet you don’t feel so liberal now, huh?”