A question [politics?]

[rebeccmeister]

Yesterday I wound up reading a NYT article about how an exorbitantly wealthy man who owns an electric vehicle company and a government tax dollar rocket ship siphoning company is trying to buy a cluster of houses in Austin, TX so all of his kids with different mothers will be nearby and have chances to get to know each other.

That is how I learned that there are certain people who are supposedly concerned about some notion of "depopulation," which basically involves thinking that demographic shifts that result from declining birth rates (or increased generation lengths) are going to cause massive problems for societies/economic systems.

But this notion seems in this case to actually be cover for supremacist/eugenics thinking, as part of it is apparently tied to the idea that "smart people in particular are having fewer babies." But in this case "smart" appears to be conflated with "economically and racially privileged," as there is mention of reproduction by more highly educated people, and there's bias in who has access to higher ed.

It does NOT appear to be "How can countries and the global population as a whole coordinate and reorganize to help each other based on our different demographies, and expand access to education?"

I guess my question is: WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS?

And, HOW CAN ANYONE BE BUYING PRODUCTS FROM THIS COMPANY????

And, WHY DID THIS STORY HAVE TO GET WRITTEN IN THIS FASHION TO MAKE IT CLEAR WHAT'S ACTUALLY GOING ON HERE?

Sorry for yelling. I just can't even, today.

By the way, it sounds like the house-buying and family aggregating efforts are going about as well as you might expect, as in, not well at all. Really, the Mormons seem to have done a better job of figuring a lot of that out. Not that they're any less patriarchal or potentially horrifying, mind you.

I have honestly been trying hard to avoid learning more about this person because I was so disgusted by the whole social media purchase maneuver.

I might have to take this post down at some point. On the other hand, perhaps there are rebuttals I should hear out?

Comments

[slydevil]

I might have to take this post down at some point.

But why? Your reaction is entirely the correct one.

[rebeccmeister]

At least to judge by responses so far, it seems I am far from alone in being rather horrified by this stuff! But I don't want to be all full of political outrage all the time, is all.

The way this particular story got written and published in that particular newspaper is especially interesting to me. I'm glad it was written and published, but have to think the process by which that happened must have been...interesting.

[altamira16]

How much do you think that his eldest daughter, who is transgender, and dropped his last name wants to live there?

[rebeccmeister]

Oh, she has definitely rejected / been rejected by these other people already, and hopefully has found far better people to be her family by now. Although I do hope for her that someday some of her relations will see the error of their ways and understand how to welcome her back into their lives. Because I know that being rejected by family is a deeply traumatizing experience, even when one's family is so maladjusted.

[twoeleven]

it is apparently tied to the idea that "smart people in particular are having fewer babies."

FWIW, it's an old idea. One should note that the author was not advocating the idea.

[rebeccmeister]

One of so many of the zombie ideas that refuse to die!

I am pretty sure I still hold a number of zombie ideas, myself. But definitely not that one.

[twoeleven]

A bit late, but given the date... braaaaains! Braaaaains! Zombie idea want braaaaains! :)

[mellowtigger]

Today I learned a potential inspiration for Idiocracy.

[graydon]

Generally, there's something of a tangle between the crazy-pants eugenics stuff and the lamentably real issue that the structure of the economy assumes continuous growth in ways that mean continuous population growth and nobody's got all that forthright about what reorganizing for a declining population would look like. (Rather like going off fossil carbon extraction—by analogy, not spending from credit—is going to look like a decrease in prosperity, and nobody's tackling that politically, either.)

[rebeccmeister]

A "tangle" is a helpful description. I've seen some people note that something is needed other than people trained as economists, because traditional economists are so deeply steeped in growth notions that they really can't even begin to picture anything other than what they've been indoctrinated into.

So as a society there's a lot of work and rethinking that need to happen. But I don't think "continued population growth of our particular genes and babies" is an appropriate solution. (so yeah, tangle)

[graydon]

On the one hand, if there's anything that has actual selective pressure for it, it's "I want descent". (Though it's not clear if that works in any direct way in humans.)

On the other hand, the folks with the eugenics ideas aren't after anything that looks like a consensual definition of "our" about genes or babies, so it's a lot closer to "that I find useful/aesthetically pleasing/untroubling to my established axioms".

(And that's leaving out the whole vast befuddlement about genes and descent.)

(As a society? It's about what creates power.)

[rebeccmeister]

As a biologist, I wind up interpreting a lot of it as, "Looks like they read Dawkins and stopped there, not realizing the entire field moved on about 2 decades ago."

I think I encountered some version of this story recently: https://news.rice.edu/news/2016/most-british-scientists-cited-study-feel-richard-dawkins-work-misrepresents-science

[moodyduck]

I think he's been on that track for a while. Maybe he's actually worried about declining birth rates but I suspect he just wants to reproduce extensively because he's a narcissistic sociopath that thinks his DNA should be widely shared.

And no, I will never buy anything from his companies. Decided that a long long time ago.

[rebeccmeister]

I was just so utterly disgusted, and I can only hope that thanks to that news article more people will reach an understanding of what he is actually advocating for.

I am VERY ANNOYED that trying to move away from fossil fuels is so fraught because a substantial fraction of what's available is being sold by awful people.

[twoeleven]

A substantial fraction of anything is being sold by awful people. I think most people are ethical, but I think there's a fair amount of "selective pressure" for unethical people in business.

[rebeccmeister]

True enough! And it's challenging to maintain good working knowledge of which businesses one should patronize, and which ones need to have been stifled, as of yesterday.

And this is also all why so many laws exist, right?

[twoeleven]

Yup.

A net.friend on another forum was complaining that hospitals owned by "private equity" (ie, individual rich people out to maximize their take) do worse at treating people that non-profit hospitals.

While it's certainly true that a problem is greedy, immmoral people, the other problem is that the regulations are so loose that hospitals only work right if you assume everybody is nice. This is a bad assumption, since there will be horrible people.

Edit to add: ...and lazy people and incompetent people and...

[rebeccmeister]

I think we just reinvented government, here.

Assuming there are ways to keep the current one going and actually serving the people most of the time. (*sigh*)

[twoeleven]

I think we just reinvented government, here.

Of course! I have many ideas for reinventing government. Would you like to subscribe to my newsletter? :)

Assuming there are ways to keep the current one going

There are. Some are nice, some are less nice. I've become agnostic about the matter.

[ivy]

This is basically my "there is no good answer here" moral sticking point. If anyone else made a viable long distance electric car, I would happily support them instead. At the time I got my car, it was really the only one that could support my driving patterns. I am disappointed that that's still the case. I really really don't want to give him more money that he can donate to fascists and advocate for awful positions, but I also do feel like it's meaningful to have switched my consumption patterns towards the eco-friendlier as a result. Gaaaaah.

[rebeccmeister]

I do remember you doing a lot of investigating and thinking when your Subaru got too old, and from what I've seen so far of my brother's experience with long-ish distances in their electric vehicle (forget what it is but a different manufacturer) - it does seem like other manufacturers aren't there yet in the USA. It was also interesting to learn about some of the decisions the Chinese have made with regard to charging management (battery swaps instead of charging stations, which introduces a different set of constraints).

For my own lifestyle for the time being I had to figure that a used combustion engine vehicle would have a smaller net footprint than a newly manufactured or even used hybrid or electric.

Honestly, at the end of the day it's all kind of bad calculus in my book, because for me it would be preferable to just be less auto-dependent altogether...but I do realize that that isn't especially practical for reaching places like SAR sites in an expedient fashion, of course. :^)

[ivy]

Yeah, I ended up going with a one-year-used full electric... the original hope was to replace some of my flights with electric car drives. I did do that, but man, that is a really unpleasant trade experientially. That last winter cross-country drive, I came back swearing that I was not going to do that again for "fun". It was terrifying and not fun. (I'd do it in an emergency, but I flew to Florida last week to bail out my family rather than trying to drive again. For the time limits I had, safety won.)

I am making a feature of this current job search "does not have to regularly fly for work". We'll see if I can get it, but, I'm trying.

Haha, yeah, to bad calculus. I did manage to not have a car commute, that's something at least. We'll see if I can keep it. But flying is my #1 remaining source of carbon, and seeing how hugely disproportionate of an effect that has... it basically outweighs everything else I'm doing to try to be eco-friendly, and also it's super hard to change despite many attempts. Whenever (hopefully a long time from now) I need to replace my car, we'll see what the viable options are then.

[rebeccmeister]

I did actually want to get your thoughts on winter cross-country routes at this point, because we're looking at one in mid-December with the boat on the trailer, originating from the Bay Area near Sacramento. I'm planning on having as few time constraints as possible, so as to have some leeway on what route to take. But I've observed the aftermath of similar "freak winter storm" events in the southern US that were like what you experienced (although I wasn't there in the moment), so I'm giving that option the side-eye. On the other hand, multiple people have commented about the strong winds across Wyoming, so I'm not sure I want to experience that while in a car towing a relatively lightweight sail boat and trailer. S would like to go through Omaha. So in any case, thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated!

And: it is so very hard to avoid flying. I suppose it's in the same category as trying to avoid paying money to companies run by horrible people, when it gets down to it. I was a little disheartened to learn, not too long ago, that because Amtrak uses diesel locomotives, cross-country train travel has an even larger CO2 footprint than flying does. It *could* be more efficient, but we live in the USA, which has prioritized individual motor vehicle transit. Sigh.

But there are lots of good reasons for us to keep trying, wherever and whenever we can.

[ivy]

I worry that the majority of companies are run by horrible people, but I don't necessarily know the details of their horribleness, and it's a ridiculous (and depressing) amount of work to find all that out for everything. Having a lot of money is not generally amazing for peoples' characters, which also makes me despair of human nature. You'd think we'd be curing cancer more often than becoming fringe theory wait-WTFers.

Cross-country routes: I'd go all the way south on the least mountainous way possible, and then across the bottom. I think the biggest mistake I made was making my southward jag along the Rockies to accomodate seeing a friend in Denver. "Along the spine of the Rockies, the whole USian way" is a stupid stupid choice in winter if you don't have to. If I had it to do over again, I'd just go south immediately, and then east when I hit I-10. On that same trip, they closed the highways in Wyoming for just that high-winds reason, stranding me and Hazel overnight. We got through in the one available window before they shut it again... and we weren't trailering a literal sail. [rueful grin] So, probably I-5 south to I-10, and then I-10 the whole way across the bottom of the country. Once you get past New Orleans, your choice whether it's better to take 65/75/81 north up the Appalachians (less populated, less traffic, snowier) or I-95 north up through the cities (way more traffic but less snow).

I will keep trying! <3

[rebeccmeister]

There are also very real limits to how much energy a person can spend on figuring out the most ethical/sustainable way to live! I would just like to see better action by politicians when it comes to taxing the rich, argdarnit!

And, thank you so much for that recommendation! I've spent a good chunk of time driving I-10, so it's also a known quantity. I will have to see what S winds up wanting to do, since he has expressed interest in visiting family in Omaha and Iowa...so we might wind up cutting north sooner due to that. But once again I do have experience with that maneuver, too. No matter what I have a sense there will be some adventures for that leg of the journey, too...

[ivy]

I agree on better action by politicians... though, generally being rich themselves, I imagine they have a vested interest in not doing that regardless of its ethicalness. :/

No matter which route you take, I wish you all a safe journey, and I look forward to reading about your adventures. Fair winds and, er, no more following seas than one might reasonably expect. (I don't want y'all chased by an ocean all the way across the country!)

[house_wren]

Ha. I was just discussing this today. It's like a poorly plotted horror sci/fi novel.

Ok, sorry, that's an insult to sci-fi. I take that part back. Just a poorly plotted novel.

I know three people who bought the vehicles this person sells. They all are interested in alternative energy. Only one of them has sold the car; he realized it was actually from Hell.

I am always thinking HOW CAN ANYONE BE BUYING PRODUCTS FROM THIS COMPANY????

[rebeccmeister]

I really appreciate knowing I'm not the only one asking that question!

[tylik]

I don't actually associate the pushing for increased birthrates (...among wealthier white people) with that particular shitbird. There's a whole branch of the Christ-fascist movement that is big on it - whether you're talking the quiverfulls or trad catholics. JD Vance is a big proponent, as is Peter Thiel.

It's called natalism, BTW.

(I think at least half of the inspiration is wanting to get women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen once again.)

[rebeccmeister]

From the sound of the article, you should also associate it with him, too!

I was aware of it, among other people, although in those cases I don't think it's *quite* as associated with the idea that "smart" people should reproduce more.

Also, in his case, at least some of the women involved have more autonomy and interesting careers (e.g. neuroscientist).

Ugh!!

Feature

[awwaiid]

I prefer the world embracing woman education and access to birth control, and the correlation to decreasing birth rates makes sense.

Yeah, per parallel thread the "quiver full" movement is a proven strategy of fundamentalists with pretty much the opposite goals for their women constituents.

Re: Feature

[rebeccmeister]

Me, too. It seems no accident that birthrates decline when women gain access to education and generally better living conditions!

There's some paranoia woven into a lot of this stuff: "Who will take care of us when we're older?" I think that concern actually has more to do with some very specific cultural flaws that are tied to urban planning and public policy.

Americans have created built environments that make it extremely difficult for someone who cannot drive to live in a fulfilling way, and we tend to build assisted living facilities that isolate the elderly, instead of putting them in spaces where the elderly can continue to engage with their broader community.

[threemeninaboat]

No one else has mentioned that the decline in birthrate in the US is that we have done numbers in eliminating teen pregnancy....

[rebeccmeister]

Really good point!!!

[ranunculus]

Donald canceled his satellite subscription and quit talking about those specific cars as an option. For him this was amazing as he is a huge space proponent.
Don't even get me started about fundamentalists. Taliban anyone?

[rebeccmeister]

I'm glad to hear that he took action!

And, yes, regarding fundamentalists. It's so sad and frustrating that humans develop these thinking/behavioral tendencies! I'm grateful to all the people in the world who are dedicated to working to counteract these things.

[scrottie]

Thank you.