I read this quote today, and it resonated:
"The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn. - David Barbary, Methodist pastor
It certainly rings true for white American evangelicals, but it quickly occurred to me it applies pretty well to longtermists too. Centering the well-being of far-future simulated super-humans repulses me, but it seems very compelling to the majority of the EA cult.
Every server is sacred.
Is it me or is there a big ex-evangelical presence in rationalism?
Maybe I’m paranoid but I can’t help but feel that the recent spate of “omg people have having too few children!” on HN is just another way to promote anti-abortion policies to the non-religious.
Representative example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39499490 (linked article originally published on Quillette, natch)
It’s white supremacy mainly, but yes, treating women as wombs is absolutely part of the package.
From all I’ve read about classical fascism, misogyny is an integral part of it. It’s just not something that stands out since the baseline for misogyny was much higher in the interwar years.
And worries about population was widespread outside fascism too. Two of the patron saints of Swedish social democracy, the Myrdals, were famous for their polemic Kris i befolkningsfrågan (1931, sv_SE) which led to decisions about child support and the construction of flats that were better for families with children.
“en positiv befolkningspolitik bör icke inriktas på att få enstaka fattiga familjer att föda ett mycket stort antal barn, utan att förmå det stora flertalet att föda låt oss säga t. ex. 3 barn.”
Transl: a positive population policy should not focus on having fewer poor families having very many children, rather that most families should have let’s say 3 children.
They also mean “the wrong people are having too many children”.
Also:
Poor black people with lots of kids, using government assistance: “Don’t have kids you can’t afford!”
Middle-class white people putting off having kids because they can’t afford them: “Don’t give us that excuse, start breeding!”
@saucerwizard Rationalism overlaps with TESCREAL and stuff like Extropianism and Cosmism which was invented by a straight-up Russian Orthodox theologian and philosopher, Nikolai Federov, in the late 19th century, to provide a teleological imperative for space colonization. It borrowed its structural skeleton from Christianity.
The rapture *of* the Nerds, and I got the phrase from Ken MacLeod, who says he got it from someone else (but forgot who it was).
The design patterns of Christian fundamentalism show up strongly in singularitarianism (minus the God’n’Jeezus show). Not surprising given its ancestry lies in Russian Cosmism.
So advocating for “the uploaded” is like advocating for the souls of the elect in heaven, after the ain’t-happened-yet Rapture.
Perhaps present-day humans are more obviously aided by questioning literally any aspect of hyper-capital. Better to cast out to the far future and insist (without any real basis) that fellating billionaires is the best course.
Perhaps the beneficiaries of the most efficient public health interventions (the previous focus of the movement) are somehow more difficult for them to identify with…
It rings very true,
The [un]simulated, with the extra icky purpose of presenting of veneer of ethics to back any an all arguments under the sun, to pour money into the latest fad that tickles a billionaire’s fancy.
You can’t quite (yet) do that with pro-life advocacy.
