Children could always eat them for extra nutrients like with some insects. Incidentally, do you think Vance is planning to have any more, or is it time for him to start contributing to the next generation in other ways?
Infertile/impotent men are supposed to become soldiers or grunt-workers on tasks like mining or underwater-welding, or subjects for testing drugs or safety equipment; the only way to avoid the lowest level of such jobs until death is to produce children prior to becoming infertile/impotent, which at least offers a ‘middle management’ position.
This is all intended to be quite, quite sarcastic, by the way.
Whatever the opinion of his book might be, I’ll submit that Vance talks like he knows his captive audience is ripe for buying a series of very specifically-structured horror novels: far-right people who cannot say the words “progressive” or “diversity” or “inclusive” without a disgusted shudder.
if you think that’s painful, buddy… imagine childbirth
and let’s not overlook the complete lack of “father” in any of this caretaking. let alone the idea of taking his wife’s money for a nanny because - i guess - it’s really his money, and that’s what a wife is for?
EDIT:
Guys, I despise Thiel as much as the rest of you, but simply assuming that a gay man cannot be a family man isn’t quite the vibe we want here on BB is it?
“That’s the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female, in theory,”
Kinda curious what “theory” he’s referring to here. The Theory of Creepy Shit I Made Up?
The other day, I found myself thinking, “They really didn’t vet this guy very well, did they?” But then I realized none of this is really a red flag in MAGA world, so it’s not so much they missed it as they probably just didn’t care regardless of whether they knew about or not.
Therefore this trait must have been selected for its evolutionary utility. We just have to figure out what it was.
This is, of course, bullshit. Evolution selects traits based on relative fitness. Any trait which doesn’t kill you outright will be selected for based on relative advantage, over extended periods of time, given a healthy amount of sheer luck. Traits aren’t always traits, they’re emergent, or accidental, or necessary consequences of something else. And maybe it didn’t have any utility, it just came across with some other trait because of gene expressions or, it used to have utility, but it isn’t needed any more and isn’t harmful enough to have been selected against.
And when this sort of person starts going on about what its “Evolutionary utility” was, they’re usually coming up with their theories by pulling it out of their arse and looking for evidence for whatever they’ve thought up.
See also almost the entire (closely related) field of Evolutionary Psychology. Ex post facto Just So Stories to “explain” why men like to fight each other and women secretly like to be… well, you can guess.
It’s almost all bullshit, and the few still valiantly trying to do actual science under the paradigm are drowned up by the “researchers” getting funding from billionaires to explain why billionaires are simply better than normal people, and writing turgid potboiler popsci airport books about “those people” for 400-600 pages each.
Someone could theorize that because postmenopausal women can no longer have children, they must contribute to the group in other ways. And it turns out they’d be right! They could look at humans around the world and find women helping with collecting food, providing shelter, healing injuries, making useful things, discovering and preserving valuable knowledge, creating the art that is so important to us…literally all the non-reproductive activities that have made Homo sapiens such a success. It’s only someone incapable of seeing women as anything more than baby factories that would only notice helping with grandkids.
“That’s the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female, in theory,”
What theory? Just shit he thought in his head in the shower? Grandparents can be a treasure, but get the fuck out of here with this “purpose” bullshit.
Author Larry Niven came up with a whole convoluted alien origins mythology for his “Known Space” universe stories just to explain why humans often live so many decades beyond their prime childbearing years because the idea of humans living in cooperative societies where individuals care about things beyond their own DNA being passed down wasn’t good enough for him.
Some of the most successful species on the planet, ones that have done so well anyone can find many just outside their door, are ones where the great majority of individuals are never even fertile in the first place. So why is this such a hard concept?