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mariedhorne

The New Covid-19 Strain in South Africa: What We Know - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...frica-what-we-know-11609971229

South Africa covid-19

shared by mariedhorne on 19 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • A new variant of the coronavirus is driving a powerful second wave of infections in South Africa. The variant has already spread to other countries and raised concerns over how it will respond to Covid-19 vaccines.
  • he discovery and spread of the South African variant has coincided with a powerful surge in infections in the country. New daily cases and deaths have already surpassed those seen in the first wave, which peaked in July, and infections are still going up. South African researchers say they also believe that the new variant is more transmissible, since it has quickly crowded out other versions of the virus circulating in the country.
  • So far, laboratories in at least 14 countries—including Canada, France, Germany and China--have found the variant in coronavirus tests, although mostly in people who had recently traveled to South Africa. Researchers in the U.K., Botswana and Zambia say they have found cases of local transmission of the variant in their countries.
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  • Researchers who have studied the E484K mutation say it may make the existing Covid-19 vaccines less effective against the new variant, but is unlikely to be totally resistant to the shots.
  • Laboratory experiments have shown that the E484K mutation can make the virus resistant to some important antibodies the body uses to fight off Covid-19.
  • “The challenge like here in [South Africa] is in knowing whether reinfection is more likely with these variants,” said Richard Lessells, an infectious-disease specialist at the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform, “or whether they are just seeing reinfection with these variants because they are the viruses circulating at the moment and immune responses from first episodes have waned.”
  • South Africa expects to get its first one million doses of a vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca PLC this month, with the second shipment of 500,000 doses due in February.
Javier E

The Equality Conundrum | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...the-equality-conundrum

equality philosophy political theory history politics

shared by Javier E on 26 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • The philosopher Ronald Dworkin considered this type of parental conundrum in an essay called “What Is Equality?,” from 1981. The parents in such a family, he wrote, confront a trade-off between two worthy egalitarian goals. One goal, “equality of resources,” might be achieved by dividing the inheritance evenly, but it has the downside of failing to recognize important differences among the parties involved.
  • Another goal, “equality of welfare,” tries to take account of those differences by means of twisty calculations.
  • Take the first path, and you willfully ignore meaningful facts about your children. Take the second, and you risk dividing the inheritance both unevenly and incorrectly.
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  • In 2014, the Pew Research Center asked Americans to rank the “greatest dangers in the world.” A plurality put inequality first, ahead of “religious and ethnic hatred,” nuclear weapons, and environmental degradation. And yet people don’t agree about what, exactly, “equality” means.
  • One side argues that the city should guarantee procedural equality: it should insure that all students and families are equally informed about and encouraged to study for the entrance exam. The other side argues for a more direct, representation-based form of equality: it would jettison the exam, adopting a new admissions system designed to produce student bodies reflective of the city’s demography
  • In the past year, for example, New York City residents have found themselves in a debate over the city’s élite public high schools
  • The complexities of egalitarianism are especially frustrating because inequalities are so easy to grasp. C.E.O.s, on average, make almost three hundred times what their employees make; billionaire donors shape our politics; automation favors owners over workers; urban economies grow while rural areas stagnate; the best health care goes to the richest.
  • It’s not just about money. Tocqueville, writing in 1835, noted that our “ordinary practices of life” were egalitarian, too: we behaved as if there weren’t many differences among us. Today, there are “premiere” lines for popcorn at the movies and five tiers of Uber;
  • Inequality is everywhere, and unignorable. We’ve diagnosed the disease. Why can’t we agree on a cure?
  • In a book based on those lectures, “One Another’s Equals: The Basis of Human Equality,” Waldron points out that people are also marked by differences of skill, experience, creativity, and virtue. Given such consequential differences, he asks, in what sense are people “equal”?
  • According to the Declaration of Independence, it is “self-evident” that all men are created equal. But, from a certain perspective, it’s our inequality that’s self-evident.
  • More than twenty per cent of Americans, according to a 2015 poll, agree: they believe that the statement “All men are created equal” is false.
  • In Waldron’s view, though, it’s not a binary choice; it’s possible to see people as equal and unequal simultaneously. A society can sort its members into various categories—lawful and criminal, brilliant and not—while also allowing some principle of basic equality to circumscribe its judgments and, in some contexts, override them
  • Egalitarians like Dworkin and Waldron call this principle “deep equality.” It’s because of deep equality that even those people who acquire additional, justified worth through their actions—heroes, senators, pop stars—can still be considered fundamentally no better than anyone else.
  • In the course of his search, he explores centuries of intellectual history. Many thinkers, from Cicero to Locke, have argued that our ability to reason is what makes us equals.
  • Other thinkers, including Immanuel Kant, have cited our moral sense.
  • Some philosophers, such as Jeremy Bentham, have suggested that it’s our capacity to suffer that equalizes us
  • Waldron finds none of these arguments totally persuasive.
  • In various religious traditions, he observes, equality flows not just from broad assurances that we are all made in God’s image but from some sense that everyone is the protagonist in a saga of error, realization, and redemption: we’re equal because God cares about how things turn out for each of us.
  • Waldron himself is taken by Hannah Arendt’s related concept of “natality,” the notion that what each of us share is having been born as a “newcomer,” entering into history with “the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting.”
  • equality may be not a self-evident fact about human beings but a human-made social construction that we must choose to put into practice.
  • In the end, Waldron concludes that there is no “small polished unitary soul-like substance” that makes us equal; there’s only a patchwork of arguments for our deep equality, collectively compelling but individually limited.
  • Equality is a composite idea—a nexus of complementary and competing intuitions.
  • The blurry nature of equality makes it hard to solve egalitarian dilemmas from first principles. In each situation, we must feel our way forward, reconciling our conflicting intuitions about what “equal” means.
  • The communities that have the easiest time doing that tend to have some clearly defined, shared purpose. Sprinters competing in a hundred-metre dash have varied endowments and train in different conditions; from a certain perspective, those differences make every race unfair.
  • By embracing an agreed-upon theory of equality before the race, the sprinters can find collective meaning in the ranked inequalities that emerge when it ends
  • Perhaps because necessity is so demanding, our egalitarian commitments tend to rest on a different principle: luck.
  • “Some people are blessed with good luck, some are cursed with bad luck, and it is the responsibility of society—all of us regarded collectively—to alter the distribution of goods and evils that arises from the jumble of lotteries that constitutes human life as we know it.” Anderson, in an influential coinage, calls this outlook “luck egalitarianism.”
  • This sort of artisanal egalitarianism is comparatively easy to arrange. Mass-producing it is what’s hard. A whole society can’t get together in a room to hash things out. Instead, consensus must coalesce slowly around broad egalitarian principles.
  • No principle is perfect; each contains hidden dangers that emerge with time. Many people, in contemplating the division of goods, invoke the principle of necessity: the idea that our first priority should be the equal fulfillment of fundamental needs. The hidden danger here becomes apparent once we go past a certain point of subsistence.
  • a core problem that bedevils egalitarianism—what philosophers call “the problem of expensive tastes.”
  • The problem—what feels like a necessity to one person seems like a luxury to another—is familiar to anyone who’s argued with a foodie spouse or roommate about the grocery bil
  • The problem is so insistent that a whole body of political philosophy—“prioritarianism”—is devoted to the challenge of sorting people with needs from people with wants
  • the line shifts as the years pass. Medical procedures that seem optional today become necessities tomorrow; educational attainments that were once unusual, such as college degrees, become increasingly indispensable with time
  • Some thinkers try to tame the problem of expensive tastes by asking what a “normal” or “typical” person might find necessary. But it’s easy to define “typical” too narrowly, letting unfair assumptions influence our judgment
  • an odd feature of our social contract: if you’re fired from your job, unemployment benefits help keep you afloat, while if you stop working to have a child you must deal with the loss of income yourself. This contradiction, she writes, reveals an assumption that “the desire to procreate is just another expensive taste”; it reflects, she argues, the sexist presumption that “atomistic egoism and self-sufficiency” are the human norm. The word “necessity” suggests the idea of a bare minimum. In fact, it sets a high bar. Clearing it may require rethinking how society functions.
Javier E

Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-global-decline-cause-ddaf8be2

population demographic revolution decline global response

shared by Javier E on 14 May 24 - No Cached
  • The world is at a startling demographic milestone. Sometime soon, the global fertility rate will drop below the point needed to keep population constant. It may have already happened.
  • Fertility is falling almost everywhere, for women across all levels of income, education and labor-force participation.
  • Governments have rolled out programs to stop the decline—but so far they’ve barely made a dent.
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  • It’s dropping in developing countries, too. India surpassed China as the most populous country last year, yet its fertility is now below replacement.
  • “The demographic winter is coming,”
  • Smaller populations come with diminished global clout, raising questions in the U.S., China and Russia about their long-term standings as superpowers.
  • Some demographers think the world’s population could start shrinking within four decades—one of the few times it’s happened in history.
  • A year ago Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida declared that the collapse of the country’s birthrate left it “standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.”
  • Had fertility stayed near 2.1, where it stood in 2007, the U.S. would have welcomed an estimated 10.6 million more babies since
  • In 2017, when the global fertility rate—a snapshot of how many babies a woman is expected to have over her lifetime—was 2.5, the United Nations thought it would slip to 2.4 in the late 2020s. Yet by 2021, the U.N. concluded, it was already down to 2.3—close to what demographers consider the global replacement rate of about 2.2
  • He has found that national birth registries are typically reporting births 10% to 20% below what the U.N. projected.
  • China reported 9 million births last year, 16% less than projected in the U.N.’s central scenario. In the U.S., 3.59 million babies were born last year, 4% less than the U.N. projected. In other countries, the undershoot is even larger: Egypt reported 17% fewer births last year. In 2022, Kenya reported 18% fewer.
  • In 2017 the U.N. projected world population, then 7.6 billion, would keep climbing to 11.2 billion in 2100. By 2022 it had lowered and brought forward the peak to 10.4 billion in the 2080s. That, too, is likely out of date
  • the University of Washington now thinks it will peak around 9.5 billion in 2061 then start declining. 
  • The falling birthrates come with huge implications for the way people live, how economies grow and the standings of the world’s superpowers.
  • In the U.S., a short-lived pandemic baby boomlet has reversed. The total fertility rate fell to 1.62 last year, according to provisional government figures, the lowest on record.
  • In 2017, when the fertility rate was 1.8, the Census Bureau projected it would converge over the long run to 2.0. It has since revised that down to 1.5. “It has snuck up on us,”
  • Historians refer to the decline in fertility that began in the 18th century in industrializing countries as the demographic transition. As lifespans lengthened and more children survived to adulthood, the impetus for bearing more children declined. As women became better educated and joined the workforce, they delayed marriage and childbirth, resulting in fewer children. 
  • Some demographers see this as part of a “second demographic transition,” a societywide reorientation toward individualism that puts less emphasis on marriage and parenthood, and makes fewer or no children more acceptable. 
  • In research published in 2021, the University of Maryland’s Kearney and two co-authors looked for possible explanations for the continued drop. They found that state-level differences in parental abortion notification laws, unemployment, Medicaid availability, housing costs, contraceptive usage, religiosity, child-care costs and student debt could explain almost none of the decline
  • “We suspect that this shift reflects broad societal changes that are hard to measure or quantify,” they conclude.
  • while raising children is no more expensive than before, parents’ preferences and perceived constraints have changed
  • “If people have a preference for spending time building a career, on leisure, relationships outside the home, that’s more likely to come in conflict with childbearing.” 
  • Once a low fertility cycle kicks in, it effectively resets a society’s norms and is thus hard to break, said Jackson. “The fewer children you see your colleagues and peers and neighbors having, it changes the whole social climate,”
  • Fertility is below replacement in India even though the country is still poor and many women don’t work—factors that usually sustain fertility.
  • Urbanization and the internet have given even women in traditional male-dominated villages a glimpse of societies where fewer children and a higher quality of life are the norm. “People are plugged into the global culture,
  • mothers and fathers, especially those that are highly educated, spend more time with their children than in the past. “The intensity of parenting is a constraint,”
  • Sub-Saharan Africa once appeared resistant to the global slide in fertility, but that too is changing. The share of all women of reproductive age using modern contraception grew from 17% in 2012 to 23% in 2022
  • Jose Rimon, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University, credits that to a push by national leaders in Africa which, he predicted, would drive fertility down faster than the U.N. projects. 
  • Mae Mariyam Thomas, 38, who lives in Mumbai and runs an audio production company, said she’s opted against having children because she never felt the tug of motherhood. She sees peers struggling to meet the right person, getting married later and, in some instances, divorcing before they have kids. At least three of her friends have frozen their eggs,
  • Danielle Vermeer grew up third in a family of four children on Chicago’s North Side, where her neighborhood was filled with Catholics of Italian, Irish and Polish descent and half her close friends had as many siblings as her or more.
  • Her Italian-American father was one of four children who produced 14 grandchildren. Now her parents have five grandchildren, including Vermeer’s two children, ages 4 and 7.
  • The 35-year-old, who is the co-founder of a fashion thrifting app, said that before setting out to have children, she consulted dozens of other couples and her Catholic church and read at least eight books on the subject, including one by Pope Paul VI. She and her husband settled on two as the right number.“The act of bringing a child into this world is an incredible responsibility,” she said.
  • Perhaps no country has been trying longer than Japan. After fertility fell to 1.5 in the early 1990s, the government rolled out a succession of plans that included parental leave and subsidized child care. Fertility kept falling.
  • In 2005, Kuniko Inoguchi was appointed the country’s first minister responsible for gender equality and birthrate. The main obstacle, she declared, was money: People couldn’t afford to get married or have children. Japan made hospital maternity care free and introduced a stipend paid upon birth of the child. 
  • Japan’s fertility rate climbed from 1.26 in 2005 to 1.45 in 2015. But then it started declining again, and in 2022 was back to 1.26.
  • This year, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida rolled out yet another program to increase births that extends monthly allowances to all children under 18 regardless of income, free college for families with three children, and fully paid parental leave.
  • noguchi, now a member of parliament’s upper house, said the constraint on would-be parents is no longer money, but time. She has pressed the government and businesses to adopt a four-day workweek
  • If you’re a government official or manager of a big corporation, you should not worry over questions of salary now, but that in 20 years time you will have no customers, no clients, no applicants to the Self-Defense Forces.”
  • Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has pushed one of Europe’s most ambitious natality agendas. Last year he expanded tax benefits for mothers so that women under the age of 30 who have a child are exempt from paying personal income tax for life. That’s on top of housing and child-care subsidies as well as generous maternity leaves. 
  • Hungary’s fertility rate, though still well below replacement, has risen since 2010. But the Vienna Institute of Demography attributed this primarily to women delaying childbirth because of a debt crisis that hit around 2010. Adjusted for that, fertility has risen only slightly, it concluded.
  • The usual prescription in advanced countries is more immigration, but that has two problems.
  • With no reversal in birthrates in sight, the attendant economic pressures are intensifying. Since the pandemic, labor shortages have become endemic throughout developed countries. That will only worsen in coming years as the postcrisis fall in birthrates yields an ever-shrinking inflow of young workers, placing more strain on healthcare and retirement systems.
  • worsening demographics could make this a second consecutive “lost decade” for global economic growth.
  • The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation found little evidence that pronatalist policies lead to sustained rebounds in fertility. A woman may get pregnant sooner to capture a baby bonus, researchers say, but likely won’t have more kids over the course of her lifetime.
  • As more countries confront stagnant population, immigration between them is a zero-sum gam
  • Historically, host countries have sought skilled migrants who enter through formal, legal channels, but recent inflows have been predominantly unskilled migrants often entering illegally and claiming asylum.
  • High levels of immigration have also historically aroused political resistance,
  • Many of the leaders keenest to raise birthrates are most resistant to immigratio
  • As birthrates fall, more regions and communities experience depopulation, with consequences ranging from closed schools to stagnant property values. Less selective colleges will soon struggle to fill classrooms because of the plunge in birthrates that began in 2007, said Fernández-Villaverde. Vance said rural hospitals can’t stay open because of the falling local population.
  • An economy with fewer children will struggle to finance pensions and healthcare for growing ranks of elderly. South Korea’s national pension fund, one of the world’s largest, is on track to be depleted by 2055
  • There’s been little public pressure to act, said Sok Chul Hong, an economist at Seoul National University. “The elderly are not very interested in pension reform, and the youth are apathetic towards politics,” he said. “It is truly an ironic situation.”
Javier E

Opinion | Manliness, Cat Ladies, Fertility Panic and the 2024 Election - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ra-klein-podcast-election.html

Democratic party republican post-liberalism conservatism election politics culture crisis GOP

shared by Javier E on 18 Aug 24 - No Cached
  • post-liberalism. And I think that’s a very important term here. It’s also a loosely defined one. And that comes from people like law professor Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen, who is a political theorist at Notre Dame. And they basically take an argument or vision of the world that challenges liberalism’s emphasis on the individual. Instead of saying the state is meant to be an engine for individual self-fulfillment or to allow people to live life as best they want it, they argue that there’s a shared telos, a purpose, a common good to politics. And for them, it’s primarily defined by Catholic doctrine, and the purpose of politics should be moving us toward that goal. And part of that envisions the nation almost as an organic whole rather than a series of discrete individuals making choices. So it’s the question of what is good for the body politic as a unit, and that includes perpetuity, survival, children — hence the natalism that’s so important in Vance’s thought.
  • You’ve made this point about the differences between what you call sort of the neopatriarchy right and the Barstool conservatism right. And the Barstool conservatism right has been a little less excited about some of what it is hearing from Vance. Can you walk through the difference there?
  • The neopatriarchal right, the one that Vance has really aligned itself with, is a group that says a major focus of the state should be on fostering traditional morality and family formation. They don’t explicitly say women shouldn’t be working most of the time — though sometimes they do — but it basically means an emphasis on traditional loosely defined family structure. So you got to have kids, you got to get married, you shouldn’t be having sex out of marriage, birth control is probably bad. You can see some of this in the book by the head of the Heritage Foundation, which JD Vance wrote the foreword to. The publications have been delayed, but some of the excerpts have leaked, and he makes exactly this kind of argument about birth control specifically and other family planning choices.
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  • So that’s one version of conservatism when it comes to views of the family, but another one, which honestly I think fits Donald Trump a little bit better, is this Barstool conservative. It’s a term that’s named after Barstool Sports, the popular sports website. The term was coined by Matthew Walther, a conservative columnist. And Walther’s argument is that these kinds of conservatives aren’t social conservatives like he is. They are people who really are frustrated with the left’s control of culture in the same way that the neopatriarchal right is, but for completely different reasons. They’re angry that they can’t say sexist stuff in public. They’re angry that sexual harassment has become something whose prohibitions are strictly enforced and they think prevent, you know, flirting in the workplace or something like that. They like seeing cheerleaders at football halftime shows.
  • And these dudes — I use that term very explicitly because it really speaks to the self-identity, right? These dudes are very, very different from the people who are telling you, don’t have sex before marriage, have a family as soon as you can. And while those distinctions are papered over when they’re fighting and at loggerheads against the left in a kind of alliance, they really disagree fundamentally on certain key issues.
  • Emba: One of the things that is unspoken in this clip, but seems very important, is the idea that citizens have to create the citizens to replace them in whatever country they’re in, which sort of negates the idea that immigration could be a possible way to help expand a society or prop up a civilization. This idea that, in fact, immigration is a bad thing and we should be wary of it, is a huge part of the Republican Party’s platform.
  • Right now, we’re seeing men only earn about 74 bachelor’s degrees for every 100 that women earn. Wages for men, especially working-class men, have basically stagnated since the 1970s or even declined — wages for men everywhere except the very top of the economic ladder. And so I think that men now in competition with women generally are feeling a little bit of anxiety — perhaps more than a little bit, I would say — and uncertainty about where they fit in America, both in a social sense and in the economy. That stress was already on the ground and underlying our political landscape.
  • And then, especially around the #MeToo movement in 2018, when the terrible behavior of certain men became really noticeable and women felt compelled to speak out about their own experiences, there was a general aura that masculinity was a bad thing. And a lot of men, I think, felt attacked. They felt that women were not just succeeding but actually holding them back and discriminating against them. In real life, I think this was not necessarily the case. I think that men and women clearly need each other to survive. But the discourse — especially the popular discourse on TV, on podcasts, did seem, I think, offensive to a large group of men and made them resentful.
  • Beauchamp: The other thing I want to add is that trans issues play a really important gluing role in the conservative coalition. We’ve been talking a lot about the distinction between Barstool conservatives and neopatriarchal conservatives. One way that you get people who have such different views on gender and social roles to align is by creating a shared enemy. And trans people are, for different reasons, disfavored by both groups. These two factions, they can both agree that liberals should not be allowed to be deciding what gender means or changing the way the bathrooms work or letting men into women’s sports in their view.
  • Emba: I think you’re actually observing something really real, and I would agree with you there. First of all, we have to think of the material conditions of the last couple of decades. We’ve seen a shift in the economy away from traditional and perhaps masculine-favoring manufacturing jobs and labor jobs to social skills jobs that have tended to favor or at least allow women to enter the marketplace. Post the 1970s, women who were previously barred or kept out of schools and employment entered the work force and entered the educational market and have really succeeded and, in many cases, are outpacing men.
  • Emba: In the past, Republicans have put themselves forward as the party of masculinity. The Democrats, the liberals are sort of the female party. But Tim Walz versus that vision of masculinity is turning that vision on its head. In the same way that Republicans seem to have gone from the party of freedom to the anti-freedom party, they have gone from the party of real masculinity, of men who shoot guns and work in the yard to, I don’t know, World Wrestling Federation performers?
  • So often when you see conservatives talking about a lack of family formation, they’re talking about a specific kind of family that aligns with their ideals. Which is why, even though there’s a lot of talk about how Americans aren’t having enough children, how there aren’t enough babies, how we’re below replacement rate, politicians like JD Vance have still voted against policies that would allow Americans to access I.V.F. and fertility treatments. There is the right kind of family that’s supposed to be reproducing, and that’s the family that they’re worried about.
  • Beauchamp: Apocalypses, imagined or real, tell you a lot about a political movement. And one thing I think that’s really interesting is the shift in the conservative vision of a future apocalypse from being the debt and the deficit, which used to be really the centerpiece of conservative fears about the future. And that’s declined in prominence in conservative movement rhetoric, with a lot of the family formation stuff and declining birthrates becoming a much more central theme.
  • Beauchamp: If you listen to Harris’s speeches — or Tim Walz’s, for that matter — there’s one word that they use over and over again, and that word is freedom. And there’s good reason for that. Freedom is one of those contested American values that used to be the centerpiece of Republican rhetoric
  • if you can convince voters that Republicans are anti-freedom — and Dobbs was really the opening here, Dobbs and election denial, right? They’re going after your freedom to have the kind of family you want and your freedom to vote
  • Those two things end up becoming really, really powerful in making Democrats seem like the live-and-let-live party, the one that wants to embody the American ethos of freedom.
  • Harris is not just saying, vote for me because my policies will give you a better world. What she’s saying is, vote for me because I’m the one who stands up for this essential American and crucially liberal value of freedom
  • If JD Vance wants to be the candidate of post-liberals, Harris is saying, great, I’m going to be the candidate of liberals. I’m going to be the candidate of liberalism. I’m for freedom. And what are you for? You’re for weird attacks on childless cat ladies and vague ideas about a structured society that you don’t even really want to own, because they’re unpopular. And it’s put her on immensely effective rhetorical ground.
  • The Great Replacement Theory is something that the right has mentioned often and that Tucker Carlson mainstreamed on his show — that Democrats and liberals are somehow going to bring in immigrants to replace American citizens who aren’t having enough children, to fill up America by themselves basically, and that this is a bad thing.
  • Democrats seem to have gone or are trying to go from a party of feminized soy boys — as they used to be insulted by Republicans — to, yes, the party of Tim Walz, a dad who wears a camouflage hat. The memes circulating of him online are of a guy from the Midwest who’s straight-talking, loves eating meat and will help you fix your car when it’s on the side of the road. And this is a vision of masculinity that is still very stereotypically masculine. He’s a football coach. He was in the military. But also positive. One might call it a tonic masculinity. He’s male, but he’s helpful. He supports women, but he says he’s not trying to be in their business and legislate how they should use their uteri.
Javier E

Elon Musk's Creepy Politics of Birthing - by Alan Elrod - 0 views

www.thebulwark.com/...ks-creepy-politics-of-birthing

culture natalism family right-wing musk

shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 24 - No Cached
  • Across today’s hard right, white procreation is being held up as a solution to both America’s demographic challenges and its political and cultural ones
  • This marks a drastic shift from the old conservative politics of family values, which emphasized principles of freedom and dignity
  • Musk believes that immigration will lead to civil war in Europe, recklessly posting about the inevitability of such violence during the far-right riots that erupted across the United Kingdom in August. It’s worth pointing out that these riots were fueled in part by anti-immigrant misinformation that many participants found through Musk’s own platform.
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  • Musk and other right-wingers who bemoan a coming “population collapse” tend to oppose foreign immigration. Musk—once an immigrant himself, and possibly an illegal one, for a time—consistently emphasizes the ways in which immigrants weaken or threaten American society. He’s even trafficked in conspiracy theories, such as the story that President Joe Biden was secretly flying hundreds of thousands of immigrants into the country. Musk has publicly affirmed his belief in core aspects of Great Replacement Theory.
  • These positions have led Musk into obvious contradictions. Despite claiming the world is “basically empty of humans,” Musk has also posted, “America will fail if it tries to absorb the world.” Why would America “fail” if there’s nothing to absorb?
  • Instead, the new pronatalism of the hard right is exclusionary and authoritarian. Instead of being portrayed as equal partners with men in building stable families, women in this paradigm are understood as either mere tools for reproduction or targets of sexual violence who require men’s protection. Family is not a good in itself, in this picture: It receives its value instrumentally, as a method of achieving the deeper goals that underlie right-wing cultural politics.
  • All this makes clear that Musk’s interest in raising birth rates is about producing not more people per se but more of what he considers the right sort of people. It’s why he claims that “the culture of Italy, Japan, and France will disappear” if the women of those countries don’t have more babies. In today’s right-wing pronatalist picture, children, like women, are demographic tools.
  • Musk has become a leading voice of right-wing pronatalism in the United States. Malcolm and Simone Collins, the oddball couple described by the Guardian as “America’s premier pronatalists,” celebrate Musk as one of their most important allies in spreading their vision for a genetically selective, IQ-focused, eugenics-adjacent pronatalism. “What Elon stands for, largely, I wholly support. Our politics are very aligned,” Malcolm told a profiler just after interrupting himself to smack one of his children in the face.
  • The demographic anxieties that give rise to these sorts of concerns also shape right-wing pronatalist views of white women. On Wednesday, Dave Rubin implored Taylor Swift to rethink her endorsement of Harris, invoking the threat of sexual violence from immigrant men: “You are a young pretty girl, do you know what the gang members from Venezuela do to young pretty girls? It ain’t pretty!”
  • Attractive, white American women are not fellow subjects or citizens so much as sexual prizes that must be protected from the threat of violence by foreign men. Men like Musk might offer, seriously or not, to give them a child. Rubin might act as if he’s protecting them from sexual savages. The common thread is that the role of women in all of this is to be beautiful, to produce children, and to remain unsullied by foreigners. There’s nothing pro-family about any of that.
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