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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2642 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 16, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I understand a wealthy man having a mistress or two besides his wife, and having children with all of them. I can understand having a harem of women who have his kids. I can get a man who wants children regardless of his interest in their mothers.

But of Elon’s thirteen children, possibly only one was conceived naturally. He takes no interest in the rest besides paying bills. Uh, what gives? I mean there’s an interesting point about IVF and family bonding to be made but WTF? He doesn’t have an array of beautiful women and if babies happen they happen. He doesn’t take much interest in the rearing of his deliberate children, which you’d expect to be the case if he just wanted kids. Is this just some weird autistic compulsion?

I guess I can understand wanting to have kids, and I can understand wanting to have sex. I can’t understand going out of your way to father children when you don’t want either.

I understand. It's tedious to raise children, and it makes no difference anyway.

And I'm not a natalist because I want to spread my genes either.

No, it's the Gift of Life. The more, the merrier.

As a parent, I don't get it. At all. It's not, in fact, tedious to raise children--or if it is to you, that's all right, but it isn't to everyone, and certainly isn't to me. There are really no people I'd rather be around than my own sons. Men who can just walk away from their kids, to me, aren't real men. They're something like man-boys, and I don't have any particular respect for them.

Call it a personal preference. Young parents look an act like zombies. All of feminism represents people who did not like it. But some find it fulfilling, for sure. And if they can use their hobby to give more humans the gift of life, so much the better.

I‘m not sure what I‘m supposed to do with a claim of unmanlyness. If I call a man unmanly, for being a coward, for example, I‘m referring to a shared understanding of what a man should be ; accusing him, in effect, of failing to act according to his own ideals. You and I share no such understanding on the topic of parenting.

Note I didn't intend to call you unmanly. I'm talking about dads who don't dad, who don't give a rat's ass about their own children.

I think everyone being confused in this thread is strange. I don't act on the urges that Musk and Cannon do but I have the same ones. I think my genes are awesome, and the world would end up better with more people having them in the world.

The rules of society are my primary reasons for not sowing my wild oats. After becoming a parent, there's some FOMO. But that's it.

"I don't deny myself to women, Mandrake. But I do deny them my essence."

Maybe its easier to uphold a pre-partum financial agreement if there's no sex and no 'relationship' that would otherwise let these women gold dig beyond what is allocated in the contract.

Much easier if you don’t have a kid, no? Like why is he having these kids if he has no interest in them or their mothers.

I think he genuinely wants to spread his genetics Genghis Kahn style. Ok maybe not quite Kahn style, but you get what I mean.

I'm surprised he hasn't opened a sperm bank and rolled out mass production. Must be legal issues or that he can't choose the genes of the mothers.

I'm confused by the confusion. He thinks his genes are superior and wants to spread them, and he has the means to avoid having to raise them personally.

But he doesn’t seem to want kids at all. He’s not just hiring a nanny. He doesn’t seem to have custody agreements where he gets the kid for just long enough to be the perpetual cool parent, except for his kid with grimes. The only thing is that the kids exist.

I can understand a rich guy simply paying child support to his nubile concubines and otherwise taking no interest in his offspring. I can understand creating kids because he wants them. But he doesn’t seem to.

Did Genghis Khan want any of these things? Of course not - he just wanted to spread his seed.

Genghis khan presumably enjoyed having sex with these many, many women.

Yes, but I assume he also wanted numerous offspring.

No, there is a difference. Most men who want this also want to have some influence over the way their sons are raised, how they are educated, what they believe. They want an army, a legacy, a legion of sons who look up to them and who follow them and who carry on their essence in ways that are substantially but not solely genetic. Elon doesn’t really do any of this, these kids are going to grow up to be the generic lib children of their prostitute mothers. That is less usual.

Thank you, this is what I’m getting at- when my aunt’s husband divorced her after selling a patent, he was more than happy to use money as a substitute for doing any of the actual work involved in parenting. But he was very very particular about how other people did the work, he wanted to see report cards, decide on schools, residence, etc.

This is the sort of thing that would be far more typical of Musk.

He doesn't want to be a parent. He wants to be a sire. What you've described is in line with this. It may well be unusual or alien but it isn't confusing and lines up with his stated preferences, so yeah my vote is "autistic compulsion".

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