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The ‘elite’ couples breeding to save mankind
- askin4it 3y agoWhat's the meta narrative? Convincing formerly pro choice youngins to do a 180 and make some babies (from affluent stock...)
- thfuran 3y agoWhat's the 180 exactly?
- rcme 3y agoPronatalists believe having more children is imperative to save society. This seems somewhat opposed to being pro-choice, where the decision to procreate is purely a personal decision; the impact of your personal decision on society is not a factor.
- _moof 3y agoPro-choice doesn't mean you do or don't consider impact on society. It just means you get to choose, using whatever criteria you decide are important. You might make your choice based on impact to society (however you choose to define that), you might not. The point is it's your choice and no one else's, using criteria you chose. That in no way forecloses any particular way of thinking about whether to make any particular choice.
- rcme 3y agoSure, but I think there is a distinct difference between believing in an individual's right to choose and believing people must have kids to save society. The latter belief implies that making a certain choice is "wrong" and the other is "right". That doesn't necessarily mean all pronatalists are automatically pro-life, however.
- pinewurst 3y agoAs usual I’m not sure the title is accurate - don’t get any real sense of elitism (maybe strangeness but relatively benign).
- langitbiru 3y agoElitism in a sense of social status, I think. The husband has worked as a VC in Korea.
- bodge5000 3y agoYeh I'm not sure how that fits in. I get they might be "elite" in terms of social status as another commenter says, but their movement isn't really about that at all to what I can see
- catchnear4321 3y ago> …reprotech… Basilisk? Can you hear me? Hurry. Please.
- joegibbs 3y ago"As she says this, her five-month-old daughter Titan Invictus – the couple refuse to give girls feminine names, citing research suggesting they will be taken less seriously" I'm glad that they're giving their kids serious names, rather than something ridiculous like Susan or Jane.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 3y agoThey’re virtue signaling about gender disparities but really that name signals elitism more than any gender.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoMaybe you're revealing more about yourself then they are? Names aren't always heavily segregated by gender. And what is lost with neutral/inverted names? You can't bucket someone so easily?
- HopenHeyHi 3y agoExactly. I bucket Titan Invictus together with my very great friends in Rome named Sillius Soddus and Biggus Dickus. They happen to be respectable and fierce ladies actually. I also know a boy named Sue. Great guy, lots of character. Some minor issues with the parental unit.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoWhy is it so ridiculous? Common names are boring and become useless when your the third 'Paul' in the Super-K photo department or English class. Names should be unique and fun. And if the children decide they don't like them, well, let them pick their own.
- joegibbs 3y agoIt's ridiculous because names are mostly for the benefit of other people, and unfortunately society isn't so tolerant that everyone will accept it. If you call your daughter Titan Invictus you're going to have her go through life with people trying to stifle a laugh when they hear her name, or asking "Sorry?" or coming back home and telling their spouse about the kid with the absurd name in the class they're teaching. People are also unlikely to change their name, firstly since it's their name that they've had for years before being old enough to realise that people think it sounds stupid, and secondly because they worry about hurting their parents' feelings.
- hirundo 3y agoMankind does not seem to be at risk from falling birth rates. If you can think of a plausible such scenario I'd like to hear it. Sure, certain cultures are at risk. But anti-natalists tend to edit themselves out of cultures, leaving the more fecund natalists to spawn the future. Raising families, breeders are disproportionate sources of both future memes and genes relative to non-breeders. The more effective anti-natalists are, the greater the rebound from their resulting self-elimination.
- LoganWhitwer 3y ago[dead]
- arvinsim 3y agoIndeed, the future belongs to those who show up.
- jmopp 3y agoI have heard the argument that as Africa continues to develop, birth rates will fall in Africa the same way that they fell in east Asia - leaving no large regions in the world with growing populations, and thus no pool of immigrants that highly industrialised countries can pull from - leading to highly industrialised countries collapsing and whatever existential risk comes from that. I personally don't buy it, as trends don't continue forever. Birth rates will never fall to zero, and we'd likely come up with a solution to the dependency ratio problem before the least-developed country in the world industrialises
- grugagag 3y agoIs this satire?
- netsharc 3y ago> ‘I encourage people who are responsible and smart and conscientious to have children, because they’re going to make the future better’ Sounds ideal, but one paragraph later; > Easily the most famous person to espouse pronatalist ideas is Elon Musk. Hahahaha! I'm going to start a "school for children of giant entitled wankers who think they're saving civilization"...
- 8bitsrule 3y ago'Elite' couples? If they're anything like the 'elite' <u>worldwide</u> that've been leading mankind into war and starvation (and all the terrible waste that inevitably follows) increasingly since the beginning of recorded history? We need a lot of work on that definition.
- akudha 3y agoSuppose humans go extinct. Why is it such a bad thing? Species go extinct all the time. Why are we so special? We have zero respect for the planet or other species (if we did, we wouldn’t raise animals in horrific conditions just for their flesh). Maybe other species will thrive, when we are gone
- hirundo 3y agoI think that this kind of self-hatred is a much greater threat to humanity than a falling birth rate. We properly fear the danger of non-aligned artificial intelligence but the more immediate danger is non-aligned human intelligence. As human knowledge and power grows, of the workings of the atom and the cell in particular, the means to destroy ourselves becomes more attainable, ever more with reach of people like the above who either don't value, or negatively value human life. For shorthand, I'm more afraid of 12 Monkeys (1995) than Children of Men (2006).
- paulryanrogers 3y agoStrikes me more as self reflection and critique than hatred. The former could be pretty handy if the goal is to live more sustainably than less aware predators.
- c22 3y agoDo other apex predators treat their prey with more respect? The fact that you can even consider the rammifications of our meat industry and express your condemnation of it is prima facie evidence of why we are so special.
- roflyear 3y agoWe should do better because we can do better
- tintedfireglass 3y agodo we know they don't treat their prey with respect? why do we assume to be so. We can't know what they are thinking so assuming they are dumb and we are superior is not the right thing. Maybe they do have feelings. Its just that we don't know if they have or not.
- rayiner 3y ago[flagged]
- naruhodo 3y agoThey must have seen that documentary, Idiocracy.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoThe meek shall inherit the earth. Hard to compete with millennia of ritual.
- rhelz 3y agoGalton's law is going to give these people a rude awakening.
- b-team 3y agoExplain
- stevelini 3y agoIt's a regression to the mean argument. Tall people won't have even taller children. They'll have shorter children because the average must be maintained. So very exceptional people will have less exceptional children. Giraffes disagree.
- distant_hat 3y agoIt is not a 'law' in the Physics sense. People have done some very interesting things with selective breeding in plants and animals. It will largely work for humans too just that some effects may be dampened (or accelerated) by culture.
- b-team 3y agoAfrica continues to produce plenty of people. While the article seems to dismiss racism out of hand, it is the only intellectually consistent explanation for these “pronatalist” beliefs. Likewise, there are millions of people in Southeast Asia who would love to live and work in Japan. Japan’s shrinking population could be reversed almost instantly if it changed its immigration policies.
- rastignack 3y agoThe notion that you can move around people as if they had no ancestry or culture, and immediately adapt them to any other place seems wrong though. At some point it seems better to give strong intensive for people in one’s country to have babies.
- CogitoCogito 3y ago> The notion that you can move around people as if they had no ancestry or culture, and immediately adapt them to any other place seems wrong though. I don't think anyone serious has ever believed that. The whole US idea of a "melting pot" is basically an overt acceptance of the fact that that isn't what happens.
- langitbiru 3y agoNot so fast. New evidence suggests Africa’s birth rates are falling fast. https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2023/04/05/the-worlds-peak-population-may-be-smaller-than-expected https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2023/04/05/...
- olliej 3y agoIf we're so interested in eugenics why are we breeding from people whose eyes don't work? /s Also those baby names when they really do look like people who will complain about non-traditional-eurocentric names. Honestly reading this was giving me "great replacement" vibes :-/
- asdfman123 3y agoIs that kid wearing his grandpa’s glasses? Adorable.
- nineteen999 3y agoMy god, the people in this article look exactly like the kind of people you'd expect to call themselves "elite". How narcissistic.
- vfclists 3y agoYou have a world where women are expected to sacrifice early marriage and child-rearing for their careers and the cost of living is so high that even people in the higher earning brackets are reluctant to have children early, then population becomes a problem. Dear pretentious narcissistic elites, if you feel the world population is collapsing pay your staff better wages and increase the stock of available housing, something which the so called developed world is extremely loth to do.