Elon Musk thinks voting rights out to be tied to parenthood. You will pump out offspring, or risk losing your citizenship.
datahazard: Democracy is probably unworkable long term without limiting suffrage to parents.
Helps solve the procreation problem, too.
Musk: The childless have little stake in the future
Fantastic fascist dystopia he wants to build here.
Also, what procreation problem
? There’s only a problem if you have a prior belief that procreation is necessary to be a worthy human being.
What stake does Musk have? He doesn’t seem to care much about his kids.
Sounds like our recently banned troll.
We don’t have a “procreation problem”. What they have is a problem with not enough white people who think like them.
Isn’t he a notoriously shitty dad? One of his daughters legally cut ties with him
“Next step”, ? “pro life” states would call it “current step”. Now Elon Musket wants to move back to old Prussian traditions apparently, where sex for reproduction after marriage was compulsory , because they needed people (men of course) for the army. Imagine being reduced to a resource by people (totalitarian kooks and fascists) who scream “freeeedom”. That is the reality of the forced birthers, causing suffering and taking away your rights as a PERSON
“Would you like to know more?”
Right, because the only children we care about are our own. And sometimes not even them, right, Elon?
Convenient way to discriminate against asexuals. It’s not like I form social bonds with younger people who I want to see prosper, oh, wait, I do.
Those with children have exactly the same stake in the future as those who don’t and already have proven they are capable of killing the planet. It is people without empathy and care for the planet that have been destroying our environment and continue to do so. A large number of people with children have specifically voted to not only make life miserable now for others, but also ensure that nothing is done to halt climate disaster.
Who is this “datahzard”, some kind of Christian Nationalist?
…and given the CN’s attacks on people’s rights, “democracy” is not “unworkable” in any term, the US has already failed the test, at least in part
One Republican presidential candidate wants to raise the voting age to 25. Seems more people want to find ways of curtailing voting rights.
What if your children are sterile?
Suffrage should be only for grandparents.
This would reduce the number of young voters. It would also reduce the number of very poor voters, like people who work in Amazon warehouses. And perhaps people who work insane hours, like engineers at Tesla and Twitter. Billionaires who don’t see a lot of their kids would have no problem qualifying. All of this would benefit one party over the other.
Besides, I think 8 billion of us is enough. Really it is.
If it’s about “having a stake in the future”, then surely voting power should be inversely proportional to age.
We already have a precedent for multicameral legislatures, so we could make them according to age groups. The old (supposedly wise) people can offer advice and moderation, but the young people make the final decision, since they have to live with it for longer. Seems fair to me.
jeanmeslier @5:
We don’t have to imagine; it’s already old news.
Off-topic for this thread, but it triggered me.
@billseymour
Yes, it is old news, called “late stage capitalism”, unfortunately regressives find a way to intensify that reduction more and more as we speak. Their doctrine :increase our might, reduce their rights
@billseymour
That one has bugged me for years. I am not a resource.
Operation Lebensborn # 2.
The “longtermism” philosophy to which Musk subscribes to embraces white supremacy and eugenics. Musk decries overpopulation out of one side of his mouth while out of the other side declaring that people are not having enough children. When he decides to be more specific about either of these premises, he points out overpopulation as a problem with regards to certain people – namely black people and brown people and Asian people. When he points to people who aren’t having enough children, he points to exactly the same people that eugenicists have been saying this about for over a century – white people, rich people, smart* people (*as measured by IQ tests that were created and still maintained today by a white supremacist view of intelligence).
Musk is just a goddamned Nazi and we shouldn’t treat him as anything other than that.
More comments on Musk.
“Space Karen digs himself another hole”
https://youtu.be/QAevtp8LmNI
@ dangerousbeans : “Isn’t he a notoriously shitty dad? One of his daughters legally cut ties with him.”
Yes – see :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2022/06/21/pity-elon/
You know, Scandinavian countries encourage parenthood with stuff like “parental leave” and subsidised kindergarten.
kome @20 mentioned “…smart people (as measured by IQ tests …)”.
I’ve taken a few of those over the years; and although I tend to score around the 85th percentile, give or take, I’ve mostly been a failure at academics.
The aptitude tests that I’ve taken seemed to be all about manipulating symbols, as in language or mathematics. I’m not sure how, beyond a minimal proficiency, that helps one get through the day (although I suspect that it makes getting through the day more interesting).
We already have a form a compulsory pregnancy.
Thanks to the US Supreme court, half the states have outlawed abortion.
People who get pregnant and get an abortion have to travel to other states.
Those that can’t end up being forced to give birth.
This would include pregnant children under age 18, the poor, and people who just can’t get it together soon enough.
It’s caused a lot of misery so far.
It will get worse.
Most of those unwanted children born due to the GOP/fundie xian’s Forced Birth-Female Slavery program will grow up in poverty.
This is cosmically stupid.
Whether one is a parent or not has nothing to do with a concern for the future.
Everyone has more relatives than just their children.
I have 8 billion cousins. Everyone on earth is related at the level of at least 70th cousins.
It’s not that big a deal, you also have 8 billion cousins.
Elon Musk is a terrible person, a sick in the head evil person.
I even lack the words to explain my complete contempt for him.
About all I can do is be very careful to never buy anything even remotely associated with Elon Musk. I don’t even have a Twitter account.
@raven
Exactly, and the end goal is discouraging people less financially and societally/hierachically fortunate (.i.e marginalised people and minorities) from having intimacy altogether, widening the gap, increasing misery and suffering. It goes along with the very telling S”C”OTUS ruling since “Dobbs”.
@billseymour #24
Hey, take me! I scored on the 98th %ile and still i have not yet discovered any use for the , obivously useless, number from that test
The only important thing is that everyone talks endlessly about whatever falls from Mr Musk’s pen.
There is a potential problem in the future with not enough children being born.
Replacement is 2.1 births per woman.
South Korea is at 0.84.
Japan is 1.34
USA is 1.66
Europe 1.49
And so on. The developed world has fertility rates below replacement.
.1. With 8 billion people on the planet and a still growing world population, this isn’t an immediate problem.
.2. You could even argue that we are saving the world by reducing the world’s population to something sustainable.
There is nothing magic or desirable about having a huge population.
.3. In the very long run, you do need to have a replacement fertility rate or ultimately the human species will disappear.
.4. South Korea and Japan are on the path right now,
“Japan’s population of more than 125 million has been declining for 16 years and is projected to fall to 87 million by 2070.”
However, Elon Musk and his band of shallow nonthinking fascists are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
If Elon Musk was serious about the future demographics, he would enter a religious order with voluntary silence and never be seen or heard from again.
People don’t have children today in the USA because they can’t afford them and the future looks pretty dismal.
Jobs are insecure, the social safety net is being dismantled, student loans are voluntary slavery until middle age, housing is way too expensive, etc..
We need to develop a society that works for all of us, not just the 1%.
re: IQ tests. There was an argument that, for all their flaws, IQ tests are still the best predictor of future career success. I remember finding this mildly persuasive until it occurred to me that IQ tests are used to admit students to selective schools, to decide who gets scholarships, and to select candidates for senior management jobs. It predicts future success because we use it to distribute success. I’m not saying it has zero value as a predictive measure, but it’s only one of many important factors and a foolish obsession with IQ score becomes self-reinforcing.
“Procreation” is incomplete in mammals until the offspring are ready to produce more offspring. So that means somebody has to stay home with the kids until they’re grown.
Right?
Maybe this is how Mu5k intends to deal with the “problem” of having women in the workforce: Keep ’em pregnant, in the kitchen, and changing diapers. So there’ll be more Good Jobs for teh Mens (who still have responsibility to raise teh kiddums, but only with manly things).
Well, there is if your plan is to have a massive resource war in the future.
raven@30–
I live in Australia which has a birth rate of 1.58 per woman, way below replacement level, and yet our population has growing at about 1.3% per annum for the last 30 years. The reason is immigration. Birth rates really only matter in the context of the whole world, not country-by-country. Globally the birth rate is still 2.3 per woman — above replacement rate. What we’re looking at here is not a population crisis, but a change in distribution of nationalities and ethnicities.
Even with our current global birth rate having fallen to 2.3 (from 5.3 in the 1960s) we are still growing the world population by 0.9% per year. To put that in context, the growth rate for the 12,000 years prior to the Industrial Revolution was 0.04%. So we’re still growing at over 200x preindustrial levels.
It’s difficult to predict population change from birth rate because it depends on other factors such as life expectancy but the clever wonks who do a lot of number-crunching think that by 2050, Europe’s population will be declining by about 0.3% per year. That still means it will take 250 years for Europe’s population to halve. The idea that we can predict people’s reproductive habits for the next 300 years is pretty optimistic. Also I suspect that if it becomes a genuine problem for future humans, they will have had another few centuries to figure out better strategies than the barely-disguised sex cult fantasies of today’s billionaire class.
(raven, I should add in case it wasn’t clear I’m not saying you agree with those mad fantasies! Just pointing out that population loss is not that big a problem, barring catastrophic cases like the Black Death or post-contact Mexico. The people who are most terrified by population loss are economists terrified of the capitalist Ponzi scheme collapsing without a geometrically increasing supply of people to exploit.)
@chrislawson #34
“The idea that we can predict people’s reproductive habits for the next 300 years is pretty optimistic”
sounds like EvoPsych to me
My first thought is simply this.
Elon Musk, primary candidate for spontaneous human combustion.
Well, assisted spontaneous human combustion, ignore that petrochemical odor at the scene of the incident. And that empty fuel can…
chrislawson @31:
I tested at a moderately high IQ but as my father used to jibe at me… “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?”
As for Elon’s comment, there was a time in America when you had to own property in order to vote because that gave you a stake in the future. There’s always some reason to think that “the others” don’t deserve to get a vote.
Breeding is easy when you are rich and can bully people better than you into making things for you. Musk is looking for anything he can use as political power. Breeding is easy when you aren’t rich too unfortunately. I judge Musk’s value relative to how he treats people. As a parent he is as worth as much as red algae.
@30.raven :
“If Elon Musk was serious about the future demographics, he would
enter a religious order with voluntary silence and never be seen or heard from again.fund studies and efforts to see more children survive in better conditions and live happier lives with more opportuinties to equally have mor echildren doing likeise for all Humanity.Fixed It For you?
Things like addresing poverty and malnutrition and the most unatural of disasters caused by Global Overheating and wars that are forcing so many demographic changes and pressures and stresses on societies and nations globe-wide. Also working to discourage xenophobia and other forms of bigotry and yeah, why not, settling other planets,terraforming them where this can be done without destroying existing lifeforms and expanding humanity beyond just Earth as well and other SF dreams too. Because not mutually incompatible.
for all of his supposed genius and “vision” he sure has a very narrow view of things. except for his money he lives in a very pinched world.
Is this the xtian terrorist equivalent of Professors’ ‘publish or perish’? I pointed out in the post “https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/07/03/the-incentives-are-all-wrong/” the whole idea of focusing on quantity instead of quality causes all of society to be horribly degraded. We all have seen the disastrous results of these mega families. I have seen some very stunted, damaged and damaging, dim-witted personalities result from this ‘breed like lemmings’ insanity. Adding millions more drooling idiots who can’t even understand what critical analytical thinking is will further push society into the massive failure column. And, as others here point out, how is adding millions of mouths to feed with their massive additional energy and resource consumption going to help our environment? Welcome to the apocalypse.
@30 raven mentioned: The developed world has fertility rates below replacement.
I reply: you are correct. But, many, many responsible decent people I know are not ‘breeding to meet the replacement quota’. However, I have seen too many that are breeding like lemmings who have no ability to reason or think analytically and who gobble down all the rtwingnut xtian terrorist propaganda. I fear that could lead to society being up to its eyeballs in drooling cult members.
So will only those who have reproduces fight in our country’s many warzones? They have stake in the country after all.
I know a lot about them.
The fundie xian Quiverfull movement. The arrows in the Quiver are children, being weaponized to outbreed us and take over our society.
This is also known as biological colonialism.
It rarely works.
Growing up in large families is often really dismal for a lot of reasons.
The next generation doesn’t want to repeat it because they have better things to do with their time and money than try to outbreed 330 million people.
This is even happening to the Duggars, the weird breeder cult on TV with 20 children. Some of their kids have escaped the family.
My friend the ex-Catholic grew up in a well off family of 6 kids. Even though they were well off, resources were always limited.
The 6 kids between them had…6 kids total.
It’s adorable that these comfortable dudes, who’ve never known adversity in their life, think that they’re literally invulnerable and they can just go sips wine points “you there, you…hmmm, childless people, is it? you no longer get rights. Now get under mye feet, daddy needs a footstool, chop chop” and that all those people will just go “ok…” instead of making them bleed
@Walter Solomon #44
For that matter, isn’t it an American principle that there should be “No taxation without representation”? Why should people have to pay for a country that they apparently “have no stake in”?
Let Musk pay the difference. He’s good for it.
Aaaand again EM reminds us what a repulsive human being he is. Par for the course, nothing to see here.
As for the subject of human population, in the last years we have been seeing a lowering of overall human fertility, which at long last could put away for good those “population explosion” fears we had since the 60s at least.
This makes me (just a bit) moderately optimistic that, thanks to sizable world population decreases after say 2100, the climate emergency can be decently addressed, with less humans consuming and emitting. IF of course Momma Nature doesn’t decide to blow up in our faces well and good before then…
Speaking of Global Warming and its effect on human populations, here is one study that looks at it.
.1. ” Here, we demonstrate that for millennia, human populations have resided in the same narrow part of the climatic envelope available on the globe, characterized by a major mode around ∼11 °C to 15 °C mean annual temperature (MAT).
.2. That empirically determined human ecological niche is going to shrink by a lot by 2070.
Now, just about everyone lives in our historical ecological temperature niche.
By 2070 at present trends, 3 billion or so people will be living outside of this climate optimum.
.3. We have no idea what that means though.
Will all these people just adapt to it, by for example, building a lot of air conditioning?
How adaptable are we humans to living outside our historical ecological niche anyway?
Will they all migrate, which is starting to happen now.
Will they just gradually die off? That is also happening.
.4. “Nevertheless, in the absence of migration, one third of the global population is projected to experience a (Mean Annual Temperature) MAT >29 °C currently found in only 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara.
We don’t even know if humans can even live long term in an area with a Mean Annual Temperature of greater than 29 degrees C (84 F) but they might not.
This study has its problems but at least they collected a huge amount of data and came up with some scenarios and asked some questions.
raven @49
Doesn’t that describe the majority of the tropics particularly places like the Sahel in Africa?
raven again @50
My mistake. The question was answered in your quotation.
Has he always been this insane or is this a fairly new development linked to the era of Trump? Or did we not notice his insanity before because of his supposed “genius”?
@nomdeplume #52
Most of his “genius” ideas were actually “insane”, or signs of typical grand capitalist megalomania, the few he actually had a fair share in, were developed firther and executed by people working for him, as usual when it comes to billionaires, society’s endoparasites.
I see that you got that right now, only…”0.8% of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara.” has a Mean Annual Temperature (MAT) greater than 29 C.
And almost no one lives there.
What makes this even more complicated and unlikely is that our animal livestock and food crops are also adapted to the same ecological niche, which is a mode from 11-15 C MAT.
So even if humans can survive long term with a MAT greater than 29 C, we don’t know if our subsistence agricultural plants and animals will do so.
Also don’t forget we are talking about Mean Annual Temperature day and night, winter and summer of 29 C. That is 84 F, which doesn’t sound too bad. It is 84 F here right now.
However, it means a lot of days are going to have temperatures a lot hotter than 29 C.
By “parents” do they mean “parents” or Fathers?
Would it not be easier to just hatch clones in a lab, like the daleks?
@42, @43 Shermanj –
Re credulous idiots outbreeding people with decent reasoning skills (and, I’d add, the empathy-deficient (e.g., MAGAts) outbreeding the compassionate):
You’ve just described “Idiocracy”. It’s well underway.
But I don’t know how that can be countered except by draconian restrictions on who can have kids (here we are again), based on some measure of intelligence, which, however well-intentioned and/or based on the complex metrics we’ve developed so far for what constitutes intelligence (there are multiple forms of it, including emotional and social intelligence) and even supposing that we didn’t live in a world full of white supremacists in power who have a very different (eugenicist) metric which could easily be dressed up by them in dishonest “pro-intelligence” rhetoric (as fascists have already done in some cases in the 20th century), such restrictions are likely to be hijacked by the unscrupulous to their authoritarian ends.
@raven #54:
I’m pretty sure that large areas of the MIddle East and North Africa that are currently marginally habitable in summer (A/C, etc.) will, within a generation or two, become completely uninhabitable during much of the year. It doesn’t even have to be year-round; people will not be able to continue living there.
Barring a shift in rainfall patterns to equatorial Africa, the Sahel may expand down into the jungles of coastal Africa. The Amazon may shift to savannah. We just don’t know where exactly the patterns will shift, what exactly will happen to the monsoons, etc., especially with a slowdown or cessation of the North Atlantic current and the way that would affect global ocean currents, but it’s certain that people will be be squeezed poleward, for sure. Wars will ensue.
Good discussion here.
Some links that really undermine my hope that nature is not going to kick our asses to the curb too soon:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people/hotter-human-body-can-handle-pakistan-city-broils-worlds-highest/
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2021621/world
the item I was looking for was BBC I think, but search for “Pakistanis leave cities in hot summer” and you get flooded with such news, some as old as 2015.
Sooner or later someone will have to bite the bullet and make an official map of “locations we lost ’cause they got oven-hot thanks to our stupidity”. It won’t be pretty, or small.
@57 kaimatthews said: You’ve just described “Idiocracy”. It’s well underway. – – and added empathy deficiency
I reply: thank you for adding those important points. I agree, the ‘dumbing down’ is well underway. I see all kinds of deterioration in communication and reasoning skills while watching news broadcasts and reading some comments on other internet sites. Eugenics is a double edged sword that most don’t want to touch since ‘dramatic restrictions’ is a touchy subject and you handled it well, pointing out the dangers of who decides and based on what criteria. I have little faith in the honesty and compassion of our ‘billionaire class’ and of the current crop of rtwingnut xtian terrorists who want to govern everything.
People who have a stake in the future:
People who have kids and care about them
People who have friends and loved ones
People who hope to live longer
People with vision who work towards a future regardless of if they will see it
Musk is myopic.
Also the “they are outbreeding us” fear assumes culture and ignorance are genetic, which is BS.
@DanDare #61
Fashboy Musky is wrong about “GENETIC” but his idocy and far right reactonary trolling paired with totalitarian megalomania is surely CHRONIC
Why do I get the feeling that nobody in that conversation really cares about the future of this planet and catastrophic climate change? Fentasyl likely doesn’t believe it’s anything we’re doing and Musk’s plan is to move everyone to Mars.
@61 DanDare said: Also the “they are outbreeding us” fear assumes culture and ignorance are genetic, which is BS.
I reply: When I commented “I have seen too many that are breeding like lemmings who have no ability to reason or think analytically and who gobble down all the rtwingnut xtian terrorist propaganda. I fear that could lead to society being up to its eyeballs in drooling cult members.” I made no assumptions. I spoke from clear observation and I have always fully realized, and did not imply, that there is any genetic link to ignorance. I was clearly referring to the accepted likelihood that, as in too many cases I’ve witnessed, ignorant parents tend to downplay the importance of educating their children and often belittle and discourage their offspring from achieving any intellectual sophistication.
And I have read credible articles that validate @45 raven’s assertion that the Quiverfull movement does profess a desire to out breed us.
[such topic drift!]
shermanj:
You have also just read an article (this one!) where Elon Musk is shown endorsing the claim that only procreators should have suffrage.
Because, you know, they supposedly have a greater stake in the future than merely people who want to live their lives.
Or, as PZ put it: “Elon Musk thinks voting rights out to be tied to parenthood”.
So… Quiverfull want to have lots and lots of babies, so that only a woman’s capacity to bear so many so quickly is a limiting factor, and Musk agrees with the proposition that only breeders should have suffrage. Not exactly opposed.
(Are you?)
Anyway, point is that Musk’s wankings are hardly an endorsement of restricting breeders from doing their breeding, is it? Rather, the opposite.
So this tack taken is, well, not exactly about the OP.
—
I myself have no progeny. FWTW.
I don’t respond to flame bait, especially when my previous words are clearly pertinent to the topic of the post and they clearly answer the flame bait question before it was even asked. End of discussion.
shermanj, interesting to get a response to the effect that the response I got is something you don’t do, though you’re clearly just done just that.
What, Quiverfull? “Outbreeding us”? “rtwingnut xtian terrorist propaganda”?
(You really think they’re so pertinent?)
More like a flounce. But sure, end of it.
That the Quiverfull movement wants to take over the USA and world by outbreeding the rest of us, isn’t just a benefit.
It’s their entire reason for being a breeder cult.
And, it is no secret. They say so all the time.
It is also known as Biological Colonialism.
Other groups that have tried it are the Catholics and the Mormons.
Libby Anne, the author of the above blog would know.
She came out of a Quiverfull family.
We all need to understand that when an idiot like #QElon says something like this, it’s not because he really wants to have or influence any discussion of the subject, or even because he really believes it himself. He’s mouthing off like this because he wants attention, and because he’s doing what Republicans have been doing since the 1980s: control what people talk about from day to day. The famous rich brat speaks, and everyone else has to drop whatever they’re doing and scramble about in reaction to his meaningless pronouncements.
Sun Tsu wrote: “Appear where you are least expected force your enemy to run hither and thither in response to your actions.” This is what #QElon is doing here, and it’s working; just like it works when Republicans go from one ridiculous orchestrated meltdown to another and another and another… It doesn’t matter how wrong we show him to be, or how stupid he sounds — if we react to his bullshit, he wins; and we’ve lost time and energy.
Sun Tsu also wrote about starting brushfires in an operation when the winds are uncertain.
Musk sets them, ignoring the wind, like most of the GOP. It never ends well when you set the fire and the wind is blowing toward you.