Elon Musk (father of 11) admires them. Thousands follow their ideology. Malcolm and Simone Collins are on a mission to persuade everyone to have multiple children. But are they really model parents?
The highlight for me is coming up with some weird pseudoscience justification for why it’s okay to hit your kids.
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.
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.
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.
"Malcolm had a turbulent childhood that he clearly doesn’t want to talk about. He comes from a wealthy family and grew up in Dallas, but was sent to a “troubled teen” residential facility when he was 11. The only reason he can give me for being sent there was that his parents were getting divorced and were locked in a bitter custody dispute, and the judge “thought I shouldn’t be with either parent”. After that, he lived at a private boarding school, with his fees and expenses covered by a family trust. “I have no beef with my parents. My childhood was hard, but my adulthood has been easy. Can I say a parent did a bad job if I’m happy with my life today? I don’t think so.” "
L to the O to the motherfucking L. These people are just reacting to their trauma and acting like they've found some magical answer to life being hard. Their poor children.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
The imminent arrival of their fourth child, a girl they plan to name Industry Americus Collins, turns out to be only the first in a string of surprises – and one really shocking thing – that I will encounter during my day with the pronatalists.
Their pronatalism is born from the hyper-rational effective altruism movement – most recently made notorious by Sam Bankman-Fried – which uses utilitarian principles and cool-headed logic to determine what is best for life on Earth.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has invested in several reproductive technology startups, one aiming to engineer human eggs out of stem cells, another screening embryos for health outcomes.
Simone shows me some decorations in the living room; they relate to the “intentionally constructed religion, technically atheist” that they have developed to provide a moral framework promoting their values for pronatalist families.
They discounted embryos with high risk factors for cancer and what Simone calls “mental health-related stuff where there’s just no good known treatments” including schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, depression and anxiety.
On the way back to the farmhouse, Malcolm tells me that he and Simone have developed a parenting style based on something she observed when she saw tigers in the wild: they react to bad behaviour from their cubs with a paw, a quick negative response in the moment, which they find very effective with their own kids.
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