This is a really funny satire, even from someone on the opposite end.
Some of this I support unironically, though as a piece of satire it is embellished.
I have no desire to encourage 'child-free' though, and declining birthrates are a concern. That being said, if we HAVE to have a declining population, we need to 1) reduce the burden on the taxpayer by normalising euthanasia, and 2) make sure that the 'population rump' is as genetically valuable as possible.
I'm against gay marriage as you know, however the 'privatisation of marriage' almost certainly would lead to all kinds of marriage types like what you describe.
I also kind of want the Trad Christians to do the 'demographic heavy lifting', so I don't oppose them completely, as I think the evidence proves that religiosity is correlated with fertility, meaning from a Darwinistic point of view it is the superior social arrangement. Though, it also may be that competency declines as the children born into religious families become 'chuds'.
I hope in the future, an Amish settlement living with 19th century technology (plus a few innovations they've decided to adopt), can co-exist with a Blade Runner-style city only a few miles away.
The criticism of Brave New World is that the lives being lived weren't very vital. Just comfortable and predictable.
One could of course quibble with the practicality of many of these proposals, maybe it wouldn't work in the real world (how do you take away old age benefits from a voting population that is old), but certainly Huxley already figured out this is where utilitarianism would lead if the transitional problems could be solved.
1) from my own experience, and as recommended by the Substack literati, less is more. While you clearly enjoy writing these posts (as I enjoy mine) the average reader has about maybe 2 or 3 minutes of attention span, especially when the material actually requires the firing of brain synapses. So I usually give a early draft to my wife and ask her to cut in half. Just sayin'
2) you're using IRONY which just might be a little (or a lot) over the heads of some of your readers, ie, they might take you seriously, especially if they agree with you. Again from own experience on substack and from the veteran substack literati, just say what you want to say, straight out, no fancy-dancy irony or satire. Maybe add some color (like replace red MAGA hats with tin-foil hats) and definitely humor - but simple humor, like "Democrats eat babies, and you think I'M crazy?" Or, if you believe Trump won in 2020, then you should be investing in my latest crypto plan: guaranteed 10% return every week. DM me for the secret password to get in on the ground floor. Offer ends at midnight.
3) and always include George Soros and Hunter Biden's laptop in every post.
>2) you're using IRONY which just might be a little (or a lot) over the heads of some of your readers, ie, they might take you seriously, especially if they agree with you.<
I think people who actually call themselves "vitalists" should take this completely seriously and I would be curious to hear what their criticisms of it would be other than "well it'll just never work" (which of course isn't a rebuttal of the underlying principles and assumptions).
1) I got bombarded with wham-bam-scams, so the Google search algorithm clearly associates the vitalism crowd with scam-bait,
2) I didn't realize that it's all based on "psionic powers," so now for sure I'm all in for vitalism. I'll take a dozen.
3) either you're a brilliant satirist (just having fun breakin' vitalist balls), or you believe this stuff (psionic powers? as in Marvel Comics?) in which case I'm selling tin-foil hats at discount this week.
4) people of certain age might remember a Readers Digest column called "Laughter is the Best Medicine". Now that's something I truly believe in, and I think whoever cracks the best jokes and makes me laugh will win tomorrow's Great Debate.
I tried to look it up too and didn’t find much of value. I didn’t see anything about psionic powers though, that’s definitely a big selling point! I’m basing my understanding of it on the “secular dissident right vs Christian trads” mini-drama that’s been on Substack recently. A lot of people on the secular side of it seem to identify with some flavor of this “vitalism” concept.
I don’t believe in any of the shit in this post, it is for sure satire. However it is meant to be a serious steelman of the principles these people seem to espouse regarding religion, sex, reproduction, etc. If I actually accepted their beliefs I can then follow them to these conclusions very easily.
I would call myself a Christian reactionary and I believe that social norms must be kept closely in line with natural law (something which is a near-synonym with God/God’s word), and that if you stray too far outside of this paradigm, things go off the rails in ways that you can’t necessarily predict or control. But if you’re an atheist who rejects this premise and you worship something like “progress through technology” instead, then why would you still cling to traditional conceptions of family, sex, etc.? We literally have the technology to make natural reproduction completely obsolete, right now, if enough people wanted it to be.
"I don’t believe in any of the shit in this post, it is for sure satire" - great sigh of relief.
But the question remains: are these so-called vitalists even aware of the concepts of satire and irony?
These days, the pseudo-scholarly conversations and newly-minted ideological/intellectual self-classifications make my head spin. (I think I noted a "conservative progressive" recently.)
That's why I go for the simple stuff in my posts - just say what I think (which is basically that Trump is the Ultimate Scammer and that America is now the Home of the Duped and Delusional. Plus I try to add humor, especially self-deprecating humor. And good pics. I hate Twitter but I love it for finding great pics.)
I think maybe the internet has created all of these internet-scholars and internet-doctors and internet-intellectual-taxonomies. (I got my PhD the old fashioned way, ie, pre-internet.)
So satire-on, my friend. Let's see how the vitalism-crowd responds.
>These days, the pseudo-scholarly conversations and newly-minted ideological/intellectual self-classifications make my head spin. (I think I noted a "conservative progressive" recently.)<
Yes, some of these people will also call themselves "right wing progressives," which is highly amusing. This post is also somewhat of a jab at all the weird ideological classifications people come up with, like their manifesto for how they're now a post-rightist neo-pagan furry liberalistarian futurist or whatever.
ps, i'm quite enjoying my "conversation" with one of your posters: Eugine.
I think he's definitely cult-material, but that what he thinks about me.
The difference, as I just pointed out to him, is that some of us actually write articles, whereas his site is EMPTY, and all he does is re-post other people's posts in Notes.
But it is scary how many cultists don't realize they're in the cult, and think that everyone else is nuts.
Best example I know is a real interview I saw with a woman holding a sign saying "Democrats Eat Babies", and when the interviewer asked her if she didn't think that sounded a little crazy, the woman said "Democrats eat babies, and you think I'M crazy?"
I mean, you can't make this stuff up. And like you, I think humor (and satire and irony) are good tools to use.
And I think that whichever of the 2 oligarchs is FUNNY will win tomorrow's debate.
Wow. That all sounds really bad. So everything that got us to this point is stupid and lame, and we should completely on a wholesale level just change how humans operate even down to how we reproduce and raise kids? Whatever. Traditional values are making a comeback as a direct consequence of ridiculous ideas like this. My god, the attempts to be something other than “traditional “ or “normal” make people downright seem insane.
>If it’s making the world more vital, then it’s increasing utility, and vice versa.
But WHY make the world more vital? I can tell you why. Humans are a storytelling species, so our value instincts, our terminal goals often revolve around "whatever would look cool on the movie screen". Basically achievement for the sake of achievement, just climbing mountains because they are there, because doing so creates a cool story.
I reject cutting off old people from the social safety net, if for no other reason that some of them might live to age 110+ and set new extreme longevity records in due time.
But the rest is actually very reasonable. I'd love to reproduce eugenically with a smart egg donor and a couple of Mexican surrogates and also use IVF plus embryo selection for desirable traits/genes, but this technology is going to cost me a lot of money which I currently don't have. The best way to compensate for this would be to have the state fund me in regards to this, even if I will subsequently give these kids up for adoption in the form of an open adoption because I'd still want to maintain a strong relationship with them post-adoption but will nevertheless be personally too poor to actually afford to raise them by myself.
Americans are obese. There’s a place to start. Low energy slobs aren’t much use to any tradition or future.
No one with a <100 IQ needs an above replacement birthdate. There isn’t any inherent value in mere life itself, especially 1+ billion Africans. Not to mention leftoids.
Smart beautiful people need to have 3 children. It’s the quality not quantity of life that matters. The better should inherit the future.
Not sure what most traditionalists agree with here. Certainly leftists don’t want to have kids & they seem obsessed with abortion access for minorities, if even for the wrong reasons.
There is no such thing as a right-wing progressive. You are a Marxist trying to convince yourself that you aren't. Each of your talking points is a part of the communist/socialist idea.
Hi, I'd like to help but after looking through the options for both this post and my profile, I don't see any settings for "audio playback." Have you tried listening to the post through the Substack app?
This is a really funny satire, even from someone on the opposite end.
Some of this I support unironically, though as a piece of satire it is embellished.
I have no desire to encourage 'child-free' though, and declining birthrates are a concern. That being said, if we HAVE to have a declining population, we need to 1) reduce the burden on the taxpayer by normalising euthanasia, and 2) make sure that the 'population rump' is as genetically valuable as possible.
I'm against gay marriage as you know, however the 'privatisation of marriage' almost certainly would lead to all kinds of marriage types like what you describe.
I also kind of want the Trad Christians to do the 'demographic heavy lifting', so I don't oppose them completely, as I think the evidence proves that religiosity is correlated with fertility, meaning from a Darwinistic point of view it is the superior social arrangement. Though, it also may be that competency declines as the children born into religious families become 'chuds'.
I hope in the future, an Amish settlement living with 19th century technology (plus a few innovations they've decided to adopt), can co-exist with a Blade Runner-style city only a few miles away.
The criticism of Brave New World is that the lives being lived weren't very vital. Just comfortable and predictable.
One could of course quibble with the practicality of many of these proposals, maybe it wouldn't work in the real world (how do you take away old age benefits from a voting population that is old), but certainly Huxley already figured out this is where utilitarianism would lead if the transitional problems could be solved.
a modest response to your modest proposal:
1) from my own experience, and as recommended by the Substack literati, less is more. While you clearly enjoy writing these posts (as I enjoy mine) the average reader has about maybe 2 or 3 minutes of attention span, especially when the material actually requires the firing of brain synapses. So I usually give a early draft to my wife and ask her to cut in half. Just sayin'
2) you're using IRONY which just might be a little (or a lot) over the heads of some of your readers, ie, they might take you seriously, especially if they agree with you. Again from own experience on substack and from the veteran substack literati, just say what you want to say, straight out, no fancy-dancy irony or satire. Maybe add some color (like replace red MAGA hats with tin-foil hats) and definitely humor - but simple humor, like "Democrats eat babies, and you think I'M crazy?" Or, if you believe Trump won in 2020, then you should be investing in my latest crypto plan: guaranteed 10% return every week. DM me for the secret password to get in on the ground floor. Offer ends at midnight.
3) and always include George Soros and Hunter Biden's laptop in every post.
>2) you're using IRONY which just might be a little (or a lot) over the heads of some of your readers, ie, they might take you seriously, especially if they agree with you.<
I think people who actually call themselves "vitalists" should take this completely seriously and I would be curious to hear what their criticisms of it would be other than "well it'll just never work" (which of course isn't a rebuttal of the underlying principles and assumptions).
i had to look up "vitalist" and
1) I got bombarded with wham-bam-scams, so the Google search algorithm clearly associates the vitalism crowd with scam-bait,
2) I didn't realize that it's all based on "psionic powers," so now for sure I'm all in for vitalism. I'll take a dozen.
3) either you're a brilliant satirist (just having fun breakin' vitalist balls), or you believe this stuff (psionic powers? as in Marvel Comics?) in which case I'm selling tin-foil hats at discount this week.
4) people of certain age might remember a Readers Digest column called "Laughter is the Best Medicine". Now that's something I truly believe in, and I think whoever cracks the best jokes and makes me laugh will win tomorrow's Great Debate.
I tried to look it up too and didn’t find much of value. I didn’t see anything about psionic powers though, that’s definitely a big selling point! I’m basing my understanding of it on the “secular dissident right vs Christian trads” mini-drama that’s been on Substack recently. A lot of people on the secular side of it seem to identify with some flavor of this “vitalism” concept.
I don’t believe in any of the shit in this post, it is for sure satire. However it is meant to be a serious steelman of the principles these people seem to espouse regarding religion, sex, reproduction, etc. If I actually accepted their beliefs I can then follow them to these conclusions very easily.
I would call myself a Christian reactionary and I believe that social norms must be kept closely in line with natural law (something which is a near-synonym with God/God’s word), and that if you stray too far outside of this paradigm, things go off the rails in ways that you can’t necessarily predict or control. But if you’re an atheist who rejects this premise and you worship something like “progress through technology” instead, then why would you still cling to traditional conceptions of family, sex, etc.? We literally have the technology to make natural reproduction completely obsolete, right now, if enough people wanted it to be.
"I don’t believe in any of the shit in this post, it is for sure satire" - great sigh of relief.
But the question remains: are these so-called vitalists even aware of the concepts of satire and irony?
These days, the pseudo-scholarly conversations and newly-minted ideological/intellectual self-classifications make my head spin. (I think I noted a "conservative progressive" recently.)
That's why I go for the simple stuff in my posts - just say what I think (which is basically that Trump is the Ultimate Scammer and that America is now the Home of the Duped and Delusional. Plus I try to add humor, especially self-deprecating humor. And good pics. I hate Twitter but I love it for finding great pics.)
I think maybe the internet has created all of these internet-scholars and internet-doctors and internet-intellectual-taxonomies. (I got my PhD the old fashioned way, ie, pre-internet.)
So satire-on, my friend. Let's see how the vitalism-crowd responds.
>These days, the pseudo-scholarly conversations and newly-minted ideological/intellectual self-classifications make my head spin. (I think I noted a "conservative progressive" recently.)<
Yes, some of these people will also call themselves "right wing progressives," which is highly amusing. This post is also somewhat of a jab at all the weird ideological classifications people come up with, like their manifesto for how they're now a post-rightist neo-pagan furry liberalistarian futurist or whatever.
internet-scholars
ps, i'm quite enjoying my "conversation" with one of your posters: Eugine.
I think he's definitely cult-material, but that what he thinks about me.
The difference, as I just pointed out to him, is that some of us actually write articles, whereas his site is EMPTY, and all he does is re-post other people's posts in Notes.
But it is scary how many cultists don't realize they're in the cult, and think that everyone else is nuts.
Best example I know is a real interview I saw with a woman holding a sign saying "Democrats Eat Babies", and when the interviewer asked her if she didn't think that sounded a little crazy, the woman said "Democrats eat babies, and you think I'M crazy?"
I mean, you can't make this stuff up. And like you, I think humor (and satire and irony) are good tools to use.
And I think that whichever of the 2 oligarchs is FUNNY will win tomorrow's debate.
Wow. That all sounds really bad. So everything that got us to this point is stupid and lame, and we should completely on a wholesale level just change how humans operate even down to how we reproduce and raise kids? Whatever. Traditional values are making a comeback as a direct consequence of ridiculous ideas like this. My god, the attempts to be something other than “traditional “ or “normal” make people downright seem insane.
Is this a joke?
Yes.
>If it’s making the world more vital, then it’s increasing utility, and vice versa.
But WHY make the world more vital? I can tell you why. Humans are a storytelling species, so our value instincts, our terminal goals often revolve around "whatever would look cool on the movie screen". Basically achievement for the sake of achievement, just climbing mountains because they are there, because doing so creates a cool story.
Satire aside, this is all the direction of travel. People may study this in one hundred years time and puzzle over "how did he know"?!
They will revere me as a prophet!
I reject cutting off old people from the social safety net, if for no other reason that some of them might live to age 110+ and set new extreme longevity records in due time.
But the rest is actually very reasonable. I'd love to reproduce eugenically with a smart egg donor and a couple of Mexican surrogates and also use IVF plus embryo selection for desirable traits/genes, but this technology is going to cost me a lot of money which I currently don't have. The best way to compensate for this would be to have the state fund me in regards to this, even if I will subsequently give these kids up for adoption in the form of an open adoption because I'd still want to maintain a strong relationship with them post-adoption but will nevertheless be personally too poor to actually afford to raise them by myself.
See, I can do vitalism better than the actual vitalists. Sad!
Americans are obese. There’s a place to start. Low energy slobs aren’t much use to any tradition or future.
No one with a <100 IQ needs an above replacement birthdate. There isn’t any inherent value in mere life itself, especially 1+ billion Africans. Not to mention leftoids.
Smart beautiful people need to have 3 children. It’s the quality not quantity of life that matters. The better should inherit the future.
Not sure what most traditionalists agree with here. Certainly leftists don’t want to have kids & they seem obsessed with abortion access for minorities, if even for the wrong reasons.
I just learned that vitalism as a term was coined by Yarvin. A hard no from me, dawg.
Some old people do have sex. Hot, steamy, juicy sex. You wouldn't bang Elizabeth Hurley?
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We are right-wing progressives.
There is no such thing as a right-wing progressive. You are a Marxist trying to convince yourself that you aren't. Each of your talking points is a part of the communist/socialist idea.
Please can you enable audio playback?
Hi, I'd like to help but after looking through the options for both this post and my profile, I don't see any settings for "audio playback." Have you tried listening to the post through the Substack app?
Yeah I'm on the app. There's just no play button for this article for some reason.
I'm sorry, I really don't know why that would be or how I can fix that for you.
You just crafted the ultimate vitalist manifesto.
I think you've just gained a convert