Tucker Carlson has been fired, Elon Musk has been exposed as an incompetent twit, so let’s look back at those heady, long-ago (a bit more than a week) times when the two of them would sit down as equals and solemnly discuss the important stuff — like how birth control is destroying civilization.
annnnd it turned into an aside about how birth control and abortion are dooming the human race pic.twitter.com/MgZeE3cWlZ
— Kat Abu (@abughazalehkat) April 19, 2023
CARLSON: I mean, the urge to have sex and to procreate is – after breathing and eating – the most basic urge. How has it been subverted?
MUSK: Well, it’s just, in the past we could rely upon, you know, simple limbic system rewards in order to procreate. But once you have birth control and abortions and whatnot, now you can still satisfy limbic instinct, but not procreate.
So we haven’t yet evolved to deal with that because this is all fairly recent, the last 50 years or so for birth control. I’m sort of worried that hey, civilization, if we don’t make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization’s going to crumble. The old question of like, will civilization end with a bang or a whimper? Well, it’s currently trying to end with a whimper in adult diapers, which is depressing as hell.
CARLSON: The most depressing.
MUSK: I mean, seriously, yeah.
CARLSON: War is less depressing.
MUSK: Yeah, I’d rather go out with a bang.
CARLSON: With your shoes on, not with your diaper on.
I’m really curious to know how he thinks we would “evolve” to deal with birth control. We seem to be reproducing just fine, population numbers are generally going up, and voluntarily reducing child birth seems to be a good way to deal with the other “problem,” the radical reduction in infant mortality rates, thanks to modern medicine and hygiene. I would think environmental stressors, gross economic inequities, and the assault on successful institutions, like education and democracy, are going to be a far bigger problem for civilization than the fact that the growth curve is flattening. Maybe what he’s worrying about is more that capitalism is crumbling, not civilization. Those aren’t synonyms for each other, you know.
Also really revolting is the idea that war is less depressing than reproductive freedom. Please, Elon, if you find it so horrible, do “go out with a bang.” The sooner the better.
Hey, maybe Carlson getting fired is how “evolution” is dealing with it, and Musk’s rapid erosion of reputation and wealth is simply Darwin’s invisible hand.
Tucker Carlson doesn’t get enough respect. Do you think it is easy to maintain that constant look of bewilderment that conveys “contemplating a topic well beyond his understanding while constipated”?
And yet Musk doesn’t seem to be in any rush to having his employees unionize so that they can afford to have children.
@2 Silly rabbit. Musk is worried about his ability to procreate. Not yours, mine or anyone else’s.
The world’s population is now 8 billion and still going up.
We aren’t going to run out of people soon.
Elon Musk is wrong on simple facts here.
It isn’t known what the sustainable carrying capacity of the earth is. We may well be in an overshoot phase and be beyond it. It is certainly obvious that we are stressing our life support systems in every way you look at.
Here is one reason why the birth rate is low in the USA.
The average cost to raise a US middle class child from 0 to 18 is now $16,500 X 18 = $297,000 total. College is at least another $100,000.
Meanwhile the ultra-rich get richer and take an increasing share of our national GDP.
People don’t have children for many reasons but the economics is one of the main reasons.
Some of the other reasons are likely related to the current economic setup. Young people put off child bearing because it takes time to get a college degree, become established in a career, meet someone, buy a house and car, and pay off huge student loans.
By that time, they are 50 years old and their ovaries have packed it in and gone to sleep.
Whenever people start going on about how we’re not reproducing enough, I can’t help but mentally translate that into outright racism. Because, as has been pointed out, there are plenty of people in the world, and more every day. So, who’s “we”, paleface?
It’s also prophetic that they’re taking about war as the alternative, because that’s exactly what it is. If populations keep growing, then sooner or later well run out of something (food, water, land, etc.) and people will fight over who gets to have it and who doesn’t.
We already have far more people than we know what to do with or can reasonably manage. If we don’t check our rampant need to procreate, we’ll end up like most species that came before. Unlike them, however, we actually have a choice in the matter. So far, we’re consistently choosing extinction, but we could, in theory, choose different. We’ll see.
Guru-boy Muskrat may want to stop using archaic terms like “limbic system” or continue to parade his pop-psych views on stuff for which he has minimal clue. Surprised he didn’t go full bore triune brain…it’s implicit in the term.
LOL, what? No. I know Melon Husk thinks everyone but him is stupid, and people born before him are even stupider, but turns out, people in the past were as smart as they are now, and had multiple methods of birth control going back to ancient history. And I’m not just talking about Romans using herbal abortifacents. From what we now call the rhythm method to all sorts of barrier protections, to just non-PIV sex- people have understood where babies come from and recognized that babies are frequently inconvenient, and thus have found ways to have sex without the babies happening.
In the last 50 years, we’ve made it far easier to manage, and horror of horrors, given the people most impacted complete control over it. Now, you or I might think this makes sense, but if you’re a Musk type, viewing women as incubators for your spawn, it is the worst thing imaginable.
Got to love two people who never served anyone anything, let alone military service talk up and glorify war and demonize diapers, while in actuality, were they to be in the midst of a war, incessantly fill up those diapers.
It’s also telling how both manage to keep to the Russian party line, even before the party line is announced, thoroughly scooping the official press every time.
While giving the bonus of the myth of perpetual growth, incessantly championing for growth, while never sowing, tending or bringing in anything, but only outputting brown fertilizer from their mouths.
@remyporter: That was also my thought when I red the Musk nonsense. A quick look at Wikipedia shows that Musk was – based on written evidence – by slightly over 3800 years off.
@7, I’ve not heard from the triune brain since the 1960’s, where most of Muskrat’s notions seem to have originated. A decidedly odd affair, given his birth/hatching occurred in 1971.
Of course, being lectured on history by Carlson is entertaining, given his birth in 1969 and he’ll happily revise history one has personally experienced.
Carlson, a man whose only talent is contemplating a topic well beyond his understanding while constipated, while suffering from diarrhea of the mouth and Musk, a man whose singular talent is not only not being right, but being not even wrong.
What an odd couple. Of what, I’m entirely uncertain, but a couple.
Said two people who have never been nearer a war than their TV set. They could test their assertion: Ukraine and Sudan have active wars. Perhaps they should volunteer. They don’t even have to fight. They could do humanitarian work in a war zone. There’s an organization that is providing food to refugees in Ukraine. I’m sure they could use the physical help of two reasonably healthy middle-aged men. If Jimmy Carter could build houses in Iraq and Syria at 80+, I’m sure they could do something to help in Ukraine.
Why would anyone want more people? 100 million world wide seem reasonable. Let nature reclaim most farmland and almost all cities. Leave just enough economy for some universities and a space program, for fending off asteroids.
Raven @ 5
The arch-catholic nations Italy and Spain have a very low birth rate today because of the costs and the weak support from society.
By contrast, nations that invest in welfare have better demigraphics (plus, they welcome immigrants).
The “replacement ” of the WASP demographic in USA is self-inflicted.
Julian Simon, a pro-natalist, argued that more people means more entrepreneurs and problem solvers to devise solutions to our most pressing problems. Those two bozos are evidence that he was wrong.
I first came across the triune brain hypothesis when reading Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden many years ago. I remember thinking that he was taking the idea too literally: I thought it was a metaphor with uncertain utility. Same a little later with all the right brain/left brain pronouncements.
I first came across the triune brain hypothesis when reading Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden many years ago. I remember thinking that he was taking the idea too literally: I thought it was a metaphor with uncertain utility. Same a little later with all the right brain/left brain pronouncements.
The pertinent part of Musk’s sentence,
“I’m sort of worried that hey, civilization, if we don’t make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization’s going to crumble.”,
is his hint that a group of people are declining in population and civilization will collapse if that continues. He is being racist there. He knows it, Carlson knows it, and their audience knows it. The civilization he means is Western Civilization which they think was created exclusively by white men and needs to be protected for white men. It’s YADW (yet another dog whistle) as usual.
LOL.
Yeah, I remember Julian Simon.
His idea assumes that the rate limiting factor in human progress is the number of talented, smart people (defined however you like including high IQs).
It is obviously just plain flat out wrong.
The rate limiting factor is more likely to be…money defined as resources.
That is why the USA is a world leader in science and technology. Not so long ago, the USA with 5% of world’s population was spending 50% of the world’s R&D budget.
If Simon was right, the world leaders in progress, science, and technology would be the high population countries such as China and India. They aren’t.
There are many talented “problem solvers” in China and India. Or were.
They almost all moved to the USA where the money and stable, progressive supporting society is.
Einstein was born into an upper middle class family in Germany, at the time a world leader in science and technology. How many Einsteins were and are born in a mud hut in say, Libya, and spend all their time and ingenuity just trying to survive. Or trying to run the borders into the EU or North America.
Tucker’s “parting” from Fox gets some more WaPo ink: For the Murdochs, Tucker Carlson became more trouble than he was worth. It’s a hot story this week’s news cycle. Next week…who knows.
And then there’s this about Ted Cruz scheme to overturn the 2020 election results coming from a recording by a former Fox producer: Audio of Cruz’s talk with Fox host sheds light on plan to challenge 2020 results. Not sure this shows anything surprising, but Fox was deeply involved. The Fox host is Maria Bartiromo who is rumored to be next on the firing line.
strangerinastrangeland: birth control 3,800 years ago was a hell of a lot less effective than today’s. The pill really was a revolution, and (mostly) reliable condoms helped a lot too. An Egyptian sheepskin condom is just not on the same level.
@erik333#13
That seems low to me, but perhaps that just highlights the issue: What number of people makes sense? Has anyone even tried to work out what it might be?
The one thing I am absolutely sure of is that “more is better” is a sure path to disaster.
@skeptuckian#15
<
blockquote>Julian Simon, a pro-natalist, argued that more people means more entrepreneurs and problem solvers to devise solutions to our most pressing problems.
<
blockquote>I suspect the issue is not the number of problem solvers (however that’s defined), but the ratio. It’s easy to generate more “genius” people by just generating more people, generally. The problem is that this approach also generates more problems to be solved.
As I see it, we have all the brains we’ll ever need already, but if all we do with them is to find better ways to scam each other, it’ll never amount to anything. We don’t need more people, we need better people. We need a society where the priority is to make other people better, so we’re all better off.
Dammit! Sorry about the borked tags. I hope it’s still sensible.
Most of the places where the world population are going up are places where birth control is not readily available/not affordable, or already anathema. Or they’re unstable places where the risk/cost of raising a child is just one of many big risks any potential parent already has to their survival so rationally: why not? Saying ‘there’s billions of people already’ is like bringing a snowball into the United States’ Congress and claiming ‘where’s your global warming now?’.
That this is true however, this truth has nothing to do with any rise or collapse of civilization. That this is true however, this truth has nothing to do with the need to have less people on Earth.
They’re even wrong about the timeline, the first oral contraceptive pill was approved in the USA in 1960. After giving birth to her sixth child my mother was put on it in the 60s.
You people probably knew this, but I didn’t.
To have your own mother, a good person and interesting, leave such a final statement about her disappointment with you!
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tucker-carlsons-mom-leave-him-1-in-her-will/
@6 LykeX said: If populations keep growing, then sooner or later well run out of something (food, water, land. . . .
& others made similar comments
I say: you are so right. In fact, it is already happening: Water Wars among the states that rely on the Colorado River for water. Scarizona has housing developments that are without water already. Wells in Scarizona and California are going dry (the water table is dropping like a rock). But, Phoenix in Scarizona is still adding thousands more houses, people, swimming pools each month, WTF! How stupid, selfish and destructive are these people??? (should be a rhetorical question)
Ashkenazi Jews underwent a demographic transition before many other populations in Europe. Increased faster in the 19th century, but slowed down very fast in the early 20th. My grandparents’ generation had families of 7-10 children, my parents’ generation 1-3. Yes, people who wanted to reduce their reproduction had ways of doing so before birth-control pills (though it was less convenient, and likely less fun).
People reduced their child-bearing either out of (justified) pessimism (ie poor economical prospects, political instability etc) or finally when the probability of children born to reach adulthood was high enough to be considered a near-certainty. Not sure what happens if the latter gets turned around. Will people go back to having spare kids just in case, so at least some survive, or will they just decide the whole thing is pointless?
“I mean, the urge to have sex and to procreate is – after breathing and eating…”
After breathing, yes. Eating? Well, I can put aside my hunger pangs for a while. And it’s not necessarily, in fact it’s not even, the urge to procreate. I never wanted kids!
@ ^ bassmanpete : The urge for sex and intimacy is exceedingly common – if not quite universal (e.g. asexuals), the desire of endless procreation far less so and odd that Musk can’t separate the two even if so many others – probly the majority of people (?) do.
Musk may know a little rocket science and engineering from employing those that do but this makes it very clear he knows nothing or next to nothing when it comes to ecology and environmental sustainabilty.
@StevoR he also seems to know nothing of 3 AM diaper changes and feeding, which rather tempers the urge to procreate.
oh cool, the millionaire and billionaire would rather we go out in a bang fighting in a war (probably to protect them).
How about no?
How is our civilisation damaged if the population drops to five billion rather than rising to ten? Oh, he means white western people might be out-bred by brown asian people. It’s just standard white supremacy talk. No wonder he was welcome on Carlson’s dreadful show.
raven@19,
List of countries by number of scientific and technical journal articles (and note that this is for papers in English). And World Intellectual Property Indicators. Crude measures, admittedly, but as regards China, and to a lesser extent India, they do suggest that sheer number of people (or at least, of educated people) is a significant factor. The USA, incidentally, is not particularly near the top of the rankings for scientific and technical journal articles per capita. Number 1 in that ranking is, amusingly, Vatican City, but quite a number of European countries, and a few others, out-do the USA. On Nobel prizes the USA is still well ahead (the numbers include literature and peace, I haven’t tried to exclude those), but they have been awarded since 1901. Come back in 20 years and I’d expect fairly significant changes.
I’ve seen a few stories about population/age demographics in many parts of the world and how this changing (ageing) population will stress economies- the fertility rate is at or below the replacement rate (2.1) in much of Europe, China, Japan, Countries in southeast Asia, much of the Americas including Mexico, the United States, Brazil plus Malaysia, India, Russia, etc. I don’t this this is going to be the end of civilization – but (for example in the USA) an increasing proportion of the population being at or over retirement age and proportionately fewer ‘workers’ paying taxes and funding pensions puts stress on the ‘system’. An obvious solution (and mentioned earlier by other commenters) is to liberalize immigration -the world as a whole still has a growing population – these things can balance out without engaging one of the four horsemen (which tend to take care of overpopulation)
Until I stop hearing about ‘migrant crisis’ (as something bad that we have to build walls to stop or exit the EU to control) and the fertility rate (globally) is still somewhere above 2.2 – talk about civilization’s decline is just that , ‘talk’ (and thinly veiled racism) Many countries need to figure out how to run institutions and economies with declining (or ageing) populations and as a planet IT IS A GOOD THING to have a more sustainable population size
Elon is an idiot, a huckster, and a con-artist
Tucker is a Facist and a propagandist
Well, there is one replacement theory that is true.
The kids will soon replace us. ;)
For some of us, sooner than others.