Hardly surprising for Mr Musk
Over the weekend, Elon Musk appeared in a Twitter post to endorse the idea of taking the right to vote away from people without children.
Yet again, where are the editors? Musk didn’t appear in a Twitter post. That’s silly: nobody can appear in a Twitter post. But anyway – Musk said the thing.
The billionaire Tesla co-founder replied “Yup,” to a series of posts from Twitter user @fentasyl, which argued “democracy is probably unworkable long term without limiting suffrage to parents.”
Yo Eelzee baby, maybe it’s the other way around. Ja ever think of that? Maybe it’s parents who shouldn’t be allowed to vote, because they’re so likely to favor their children over everyone else.
These opinions are hardly surprising for Mr Musk, who has long expressed concerns about declining birth rates in the US and the lack of “smart” people having enough children, views which critics have argued are verging on eugenicist.
In 2022, Musk, who has fathered nine children, wrote on Twitter that, “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.”
Super nice of him to do his bit. Mind you, his bit is a whole hell of a lot easier than the woman’s bit, so he’s not really making much of a sacrifice.
Earlier this year, he elaborated, telling former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson that society hasn’t “evolved” to respond to abortions and contraception, which the billionaire incorrectly claimed were invented in the last 50 years.
“I’m sort of worried that hey, civilisation, if we don’t make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilisation’s going to crumble,” Musk said. “The old question of, will civilisation end with a bang or a whimper?”
What “old question” would that be exactly? It’s certainly not what T. S. Eliot meant by the phrase.
Capitalism isn’t equivalent to “civilization”, much as our resident billionaires seem to believe it is…
I really have no idea why they harp on this since overpopulation is a driving force behind climate change. I know that one fear is a reduction in the “native” workforce, so that older people will not have enough of a tax base from labor to pay for the pension and social security to support us.
So, naturally, we need to stop immigration or send refugees to Rwanda.
Because the more people, the more twitter subscribers and Tesla drivers. Cha ching!
So how does it work? You get one vote for each child? If so, the Catholics and Mormons will be running the country.
Since my child has grown up and moved away, do I have to give up the vote? And my son doesn’t have kids, but does have stepkids…do those count?
The human birth rate is nowhere near “collapse”, maybe slowing down a bit. And we’re in line for a selection of dangers that will be worse than a slight reduction of the birth rate.
Said the bacteria just before consuming the last of the growth medium in the petri dish.
Musk demonstrates that he is yet another person who doesn’t understand basic arithmetic.
A declining average birthrate can still lead to an increasing population; look what has happened over the last century and a half. The birthrate plummeted; it used to be quite common for women to give birth a dozen times or more, only to lose all of them before they were five. Despite high birthrates, it took the entirety of the existence of life on this planet for our species to reach two and a half thousand million (around the time I was born). But, with most lethal childhood illnesses prevented by vaccines, the vast majority of the babies born in the last fifty years grow to adulthood and survive to reproduce in their turn. Adults are also living much longer. Being able to predict the survival of their children, plus reliable contraception, has enabled women to have small families or none. Despite this precipitous decline in the birthrate, the population of the planet has more than tripled in my lifetime, and I could easily live to see it quadrupled if we don’t do something about it.
Shorter:
When you quadruple the number of women of reproductive age, even if they only have two children each instead of six, the population is going to increase.
Ah, the common banal fascination with ‘smart’ people by those who like to consider themselves ‘smart’.
I am also concerned about smart people not passing their genes on, but we can get those smart people via immigration, rather than importing “smart” people from shithole countries like South Africa…
Surely the “be fruitful and multiply” crowd figure he’s a genius.