Fair Start Movement

Category: News & Fair Start Headlines

Freedom Without a Fair Start In Life For All Kids? No Such Thing.

When we talk about freedom we are really concerned with relative self-determination (some level of capacity to consent, or level of choice), which would logically start with an account of our deontological population ethics – including egalitarian thresholds for entry into the world that free us from others – because all systems derive from some level of obligation. The climate crisis has taught us that the borders of human power are not lines on a map, but the creation of humans into the nonhuman world. We would thus have to start with a creation norm, or first and overriding principle / universal family planning policy, that looks to comprise systems of governance where population growth is directly inverse to absolute self-determination. This would look like systems akin to 0123…0, with point zero being the absence of power (nonpolity or nature), self-determination being relative to point zero, and offset equally as new persons enter, up until division or subdivision of the system is required.

That norm would precede and thus override all competing norms and rights, including property rights that would otherwise block the redistribution of wealth and resources children need to be empowered enough to offset others equally over the phase in which they enter our systems.

Even if we reject the demanding norm above we can ask anyone making any sort of claim what minimum levels of: 1) welfare, 2) equality of equality of opportunity, 3) ecological biodiversity and health, 4) ability to meaningfully impact the rules under which one must live, and of 5) efficiency in terms of ensuring high levels of personal development, they would require for each child born.

Most will give answers that show they have little, if any conception, of ensuring any levels for any child. After all, having kids is private stuff – the business of would-be parents.

This is not about traditional notions of population as counting people, but power relations created between people – and with their ecologies – as they are born, and a unity of value (one that far exceeds what Ronald Dworkin saw) that is within reach during this process.

Put another way, try to think, say, or do anything that does not derive from some set of theoretical or actual power relations, relations that would have had to derive from whatever norm created the people between whom those relations exist. Not possible. So we always start everything with an ecosocial fair start in life – and the ecocentrism of starting at zero – in order to maintain the capacity to consent to the power of others. Older theories of justice missed this, never dealing with actual relations because they ignored the creation of those relations. Without this account we cannot be free because we cannot account for our obligations to others, and their obligations to us. Those ignoring or blocking this account inevitably contradict the values they exhibit in their own lives, refusing them to others. They are preconstitutional and a threat to freedom, and can be targeted – as described in this Newsweek writing – as such.

And yet this accounting and reform are absolutely doable, and through means that are themselves just.

That right to a fair start precedes and overrides all others because we have to first empower each new person equally, and from the time that it was feasible to do this – around the middle of the Twentieth Century – it should have been the baseline for assessing all costs and benefits. The right comes before nations can assign property rights that otherwise derogate from fairness.

Unless someone is willing to claim that people should not be empowered equally to control the rules under which they must live, then they must admit they made a critical mistake by not using that baseline (seeing creation of persons as the first human border of human power and freedom, or compliance with the Children’s Convention that ensures minimum levels of welfare, equity, biodiversity through climate restoration, the efficiency of maximizing each person’s potential, and participatory democracy) in the past, a mistake that harmed many.

This is not altruism. Free people will want the capacity to consent, as equals, to the influence others would have over them – including incoming citizens. They will not submit to sharing democracy with those not prepared by the conditions of their birth and development for self-rule.

In practice this looks like redistributing wealth as climate reparations to pay young women to collectively plan their children with delay and smaller families, with that being done as the praxis of the first and overriding human right as recognized by the United Nations. It would look like avoiding babies dying in the workers’ bathrooms at U.S. slaughterhouses. Wealth at the top was built at cost to freedom by using ecosocially unsustainable family policies that for decades slowly converted town halls to shopping malls via growth and a lack of investment in kids. Those at the top owe the difference in value, with that amount to be used to reverse the process and create natural participatory democracies in the future, the most effective way to protect the most vulnerable.

Many concentrations of wealth and power fund distracting nonprofits that appear to do good work but are actually blocking effective reforms that challenge the power structure. There is an easy way to test these nonprofits – do they advocate for using the Convention, climate restoration, birth equity etc. as a family planning standard? I have seen funders choose organizations that refused to do this, and have been wasting millions of dollars letting growth undo their own work, rather than fund a mostly-volunteer organization whose work would benefit billions of people, but which threatens the growth funders want and rely upon.

I have sat with the heads of foundations (the wealth of which was built by externalizing ecosocial costs on others) who were passing control – in nepotistic moves – to their own children, and who would rather see the missions of the foundations fail than turn to Fair Start reforms.

Free people will fight for a restored and democratic future, and against the shill organizations and those funders behind them that hide this truth about the baseline for costs and benefits, as well as the white supremacy that the hiding – including refusing to ensure birth equity – entails. To think that one is obligated to follow the law when they were created for shopping malls (and media covered falling fertility rates shows that we all were created as such) rather than town halls is called the “constitutive fallacy” – basing one’s obligation to follow the law on top-down instruments like written constitutions rather than bottom-up family reforms that actually empower people without disempowering others, and in an objective and measurable way. The acts of mass violence we see today could very well be driven by this disempowerment, and ending them may require the sort of empowerment family reforms can ensure.

TAKE ACTION: WE ARE AT A CROSSROADS – BACK THE SEEDS FOR THE FUTURE EFFORT TO BEND THE ARC OF GROWTH TOWARDS JUSTICE.

March 24, 2023
Dr. Breeze Harper Issues Her Statement on the Need for Fair Start DEIJ Internal Reforms.

Today the Fair Start Movement is releasing the assessment of Dr. Breeze Harper on the need for internal DEIJ reforms at the Fair Start movement, and the organization’s response to the findings and advice.

We are honored to have worked with Dr. Harper, found her to be the best consultant we had worked with to date, and agree that we have work to do, and commit to making the changes described below by May, 2023. We have begun by augmenting our Board and leadership with the promotion of attorney Esther Afolaranmi, and the platforming of fundraising projects by organizations in the Global South, and will continue to make changes.

We highly recommend Dr. Harper to other organizations, as she was able to digest our complex need and provide sound advice quickly, advising changes that many others find fitting.

Statement from Dr. Breeze Harper:

I have worked with Carter Dillard with FSM as a consultant over the past several months. Through our collaboration, I have helped FSM better articulate their intentions and outcomes more equitably— particularly through a more decolonized lens. My suggestions urge FSM to frame the concept of equitable family planning through:

● Alternatives to Eurocentrism, materialism, and utilitarianism methodologies

● Alternatives to [un]conscious white saviorism and paternalism

● Acknowledging that we live in a Plantationocene (as opposed to the more popular Anthropocene)

● Indigenous and Afrofuturism Methodologies, Ontologies, and Cyclical Systems

● Putting the leadership of Black, Indigenous, and other non-white racialized women and other gender minorities at the forefront, equitably redistributing resources to them as leaders in this movement, and prioritizing their decision making-power.

● Removal of “smaller families” language/requirement and shifting to language such as ‘equitable families’ which is more about restorative justice vs. quantity and quotas.

● It is important to highlight Carter’s positionality: He acknowledges his multiple levels of privilege as a white cisgender man born into wealth. Also, because he is childfree, he does not carry the embodied knowledge and challenges that parents face every day. The impact of his positionality is that he is unable to fully comprehend, reflect on, and represent communities most negatively affected by inequitable systems – Black, brown, indigenous, and other nonwhite people in the universal reforms Fair Start proposes.

In response to Carter’s awareness of his positionality, he has disclosed this: “While not a parent I developed an interest in reproductive ethics while working for the federal government, and did the base research and fundraising that led to the publication of his book, Justice as a Fair Start in Life, and much of the modeling, campaigns, and messaging of Fair Start.” Carter believes even the childfree are obligated to constitute just societies because the norms that create them foist costs on some to benefit others, and to orient from such norms and systems (as opposed to striking back at unjust power and going to prison, for example) is to endorse and support that inequity.

Response from the Fair Start Movement leadership and Board:

The Board and Executive Directors are grateful to Breeze for her work, and will be implementing her recommendations for the most part, though the recommendation on altering our messaging on family size presents the greatest challenges to our work and is discussed at the end.

We acknowledge the Eurocentric nature of the work and modeling, the continued process of colonization, and are in the process of looking for alternative models as you suggest, including Indigenous and Afrofuturism Methodologies, Ontologies, and Cyclical Systems which can be promoted as preferable alternatives to the atomizing and self-determination based Eurocentric human-rights model we use now. We are looking at those focused collectively on human duties and obligations, ones that would not have created the crises that beset us now. We have begun to make progress in this regard, assessing group circle organizational models. To the extent Fair Start can defeat colonization using its own atomizing premises, without harming the alternative mode, we will continue to promote it separately. This is especially crucial because starting from individual rights as building blocks can protect the vulnerable from group dominance, as in the context of FGM, other anti-patriarchy advocacy, or extreme child abuse of the youngest of children, for example and we are keen to ensure that – to empower while never disempowering – here in the context of existential justice that creates oppression ending empathy in children via improved birth and development conditions.

We will attempt to use Plantationocene where possible, other than where it would cause reader confusion or where impossible to convey particular meaning. We appreciate the thickness of the concept in capturing the oppression and inequity in something largely caused by colonizing forces.

We acknowledge the need to increase the leadership of Black, Indigenous, and other non-white racialized women and other gender minorities at the forefront, equitably redistributing resources to them as leaders in this movement, and prioritizing their decision making-power. We decline to remove white leadership currently in place and may preserve other white leadership including self-identifying males in a minority position going forward, because we want this message to come from a diverse set of voices, but with express statements of positionality – as you have included – that make clear the power dynamics at play. In this regard we will highlight Carter’s role and positionality, as you have begun to do. We will be altering Board membership as part of this process.

We understand the importance of removal of “smaller families” language/requirement and shifting to language such as ‘equitable families’ which is more about restorative justice vs. quantity and quotas. We have long wanted to abandon quantitative thinking in favor of purely qualitative approaches can imply equity between generations and the “just savings” requirement that entails direction for family choices. Equity can imply sustainable or regenerative family policies because it can imply one’s equal share of political systems (including decolonized forms of organization). And it can conceivably imply children-rights otherwise necessitated by a “smaller family” requirement if we abandon nuclear and other atomizing forms of families in favor of collective models. But as you have agreed, there are regional differences in how the changes in modeling we promote might be applied, and regions that think and word these issues exclusively in terms of population and the inherent dangers of exponential growth linked to family size, and we do not want to exclude those differences. We also have to achieve our deontological goal of creating a first principle that all could truly practice universally, here and forever, and one which triggers property rights-override for things like climate reparations, and as consumption rises such a rule becomes impossible without some visions of sustainable family sizes. We do however think we can achieve this by focusing on high consumption white families, like the Baldwins, and will focus there.

Carter and FSM leadership hold the dismantling of oppression of all beings as a core tenant of FSM’s mission, and decolonization and total liberation as the move to consensual relations between all sentient beings, now and in the future. We admit that many of us were beneficiaries of the ecosocially unjust family models Fair Start attacks, the ones many rich white men exploit to enrich themselves and their children at harm to others. They do so, benefiting from ecocidal growth, the acceptance of free markets in the absence of participatory democracy, and extreme birth inequity, things many decolonization organizations do not challenge. As such, FSM continues to purposefully platform BIPOC and PGM activists across the globe in order to elevate their voices in the movement for liberation and to bolster their regional projects through FSM’s platform.

March 21, 2023
Florence Blondel Tells Her Story of the Most Effective Work One Can Do

Florence Blondel is a leader whose impact far surpasses most of the work being done in sustainable development today, work that is being undone by policies that choose climate-destructive growth over fundamental justice for future generations.

Here Florence tells some of her story, and hints at a better future – one that is possible if we can all focus on what will best define the future: Liberating young women around the world.

Now listen to Florence:

Florence Blondel on liberating women.

Multiple studies have shown that choosing smaller families easily has the most impact on environmental crises like climate change. From Paul Hawken’s book Drawdown, to previous studies on climate change, population size has been shown to be the primary driver of the climate crisis That’s also the case for the downstream impacts of climate change like ocean acidification, and for other forms of ecocide, like the loss of biodiversity / mass extinction of other species. Thus, sustainable family planning is the most significant act that we can take to reduce our impact.

By 2100 world population could vary by billions of people, depending on whether the average woman in the world today has one child more or one child fewer in her lifetime. A simple statement from the Secretary General could have a huge impact on the direction we go.

Our current family planning systems provide no minimum standard of wellbeing for future children, allowing children to be born into failing state systems because their parents cannot care for them. That exacerbates inequity, and ensures rich kids stay rich and poor kids stay poor. The most effective way to improve child welfare and equity, at the same time, is through a cooperative family planning model pegged to the standard of a fair start in life for every child.

Take Action: Visit Florence’s website to learn more about her work: https://florenceblondel.com/

March 21, 2023
By Intentionally Ignoring Growth and Inequity Nonprofits, Media and Business Leaders Created a Fantasy World of Progress That Prevented Real Climate Reforms, and Will Kill Millions

Many nonprofits raised billions of dollars over the last several decades claiming to have protected various ecosystems, saved animals from factory farms, hauled children out of dangerous conditions, or improved human rights and democracy.

Media ran thousands of stories containing stealth advertising, claiming reductions in climate emissions from things like dietary change, or energy conversions, while simultaneously pushing women to have more kids in order to grow the unsustainable economies relied upon by their advertisers and parent companies.

Businesses sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising their green, sustainable, environmentally friendly, and other claims.

Fair Start reforms work by taking the wealth made through unsustainable growth – which externalized costs on the most vulnerable – and using that wealth to invest in equitable family planning that creates smaller, more equitable and biodiverse communities where each person is empowered with an effective voice in their democracy.

That’s basic justice, there are programs underway to do this, and nothing has a greater impact.

FairStartMovement.org

None of those claims told the whole story, and they almost always omitted a crucial fact.

Those claims hid the fact that those making the claim maintained policies simultaneously increasing demand in a way that was undoing the claims, and ensuring ongoing and unsustainable population growth. That growth – the whole time – was reversing the beneficial impacts underlying the claims being made, growth that was enriching leadership at the entities described above, and exacerbating the climate crisis – reversing roughly 3/4ths of the climate emissions reductions the world was attempting.

The climate crisis will cause extreme suffering and death to the vulnerable many nonprofits and others claimed to be protecting.

The claims almost always left out the fact that the claimants’ family and population growth policies were putting more animals in factory farms and other horrible places, ensuring more children were born and raised in conditions of suffering and deprivation, and ensuring each person had less of an effective voice in their political systems – the systems that might have otherwise prevented the crisis. The claims at the same time hid the need for fundamental family reforms that, through family planning incentives/entitlements, could have saved millions of lives.

That growth, which benefitted few at cost to many, is setting us all towards a future of ecocide, extinction, and death to many of the most vulnerable children. Hiding that growth evaded policy changes that save lives, like the ones described below, including equitable family planning entitlements.

These claims all hid the impacts of what one Nobel laureate called a pyramid scheme of unsustainable but profitable overpopulation in rich, industrialized and high climate emissions nations, growth all of these entities knew was simultaneously undoing the majority of climate change and other environmental protection efforts, and ensuring dangerous and destabilizing vast inequity between rich and poor. The claims hid the fact that the entities described above – or really their senior leadership – chose self-serving family policies that were undoing the claims by increasing demand for ecocidal, but profitable, production and pollution.

And the wave of deadly climate emissions that flowed directly from the population growth and expanding inequity these claims routinely omitted and covered up will now help ensure the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates.

Why cover up these growth-based or fundamental impacts? The family reforms that would prevent them, when correctly researched and assessed, ensure all children a fair start in life by overriding current property rights to ensure that all children get enough of what they need in order to physically compromise legitimate democracies cable of actually and fairly assigning property rights. Fair starts come first.

If justice and systems of justice (that obligate us) start with fairness to all, how do we get there without fair starts in life for all kids? We do not. Being free means being obligated only to follow laws which begin by empowering each person, to be relatively self-determining, in a measurable way.

They hid the fact that family reforms enable truly just climate reparations that correct a fundamental baseline error (inaccurately assigning costs and benefits by ignoring externalization in economic modeling) which created the climate crisis, and avoid a situation in which those least responsible for the climate crisis suffer its worst impacts.

They avoided reforms that reveal that rich white families in the United States (like Ezra Klein and his family) and Europe were literally using deadly growth to create population-based profits for their already wealthy white kids, at cost to children of color in the global south.

A process for avoiding and correcting that fundamental injustice is already underway, being modeled in Uganda, detailed in a proposal in India, and systematized before the United Nations.

This change is doable, and for the global majority who would receive funding, very desirable.

That is the truth many uber-wealthy funders (mostly white rich families in the United States and Europe) backing nonprofits, media and businesses wanted to hide. They would rather exploit children as consumers, future workers, and taxpayers in a pyramid scheme of growth the puts growth based and unsustainable wealth in the hands of a few at cost to the majority.

They are hiding the baseline error because solving it increases their liability for climate reparations, both in terms of 1) the amount owed and 2) the way those reparations are prioritized relative their claims to their wealth. Not only were many of the growthwashing claims false, they are now skewing the standard for climate reparations.

The Fair Start Tell the Truth campaign seeks to solve the rampant growthwashing by nonprofits, media and businesses that helps drive the climate crisis and will ensure the death of millions.
See https://fairstartmovement.org/justice-without-a-fair-start-in-life-dont-fall-for-it-help-us-target-companies-greenwashing-population-growth/

Any claims that suggest progress, while the claimant’s underlying family and other environmental policies are exacerbating overshoot, will constitute growthwashing and can be subject to litigation. To the extent those making the claims rely on the fact of falling birthrates to justify their claims, they can be urged to back policies to accelerate that fall and improve its qualitative aspects, like promoting birth equity.

These lies disempower us at the most fundamental level.

That growth has also been converting the freedom of functional democracies comprised of citizens who were born and raised with what the Children’s Rights Convention promises them into a system of overcrowded shopping malls filled with people born and raised in conditions that fell well below the Convention standards and who are all the while destroying their own ecosystems.

Freedom for many has been converted into wealth for a few, according to one Nobel Laureate.

Organizations that work in public interest ignore growth because in many cases their wealthy funders are making money on that growth, the same funders who are driving a popular media narrative that the world is simply underpopulated. Organizations that claim progress while ignoring growth, and the inequity and ecocide it causes, are not being accurate. It’s a way of fundraising, called the #famscam, that has disastrous consequences. The harm to future generations, especially in the Global South, is immense.

I’ve sat with uber-wealthy funders who were making money on growth through things like their plant-based investments, growth which was doing more harm to animals than the nonprofits, media and businesses they funded were doing good through their low-impact campaigns, and these funders simply decided to continue what they were doing. I’ve sat with foundation managers given the position by their wealthy parents who refuse to fund campaigns that simply urge conversations about birth equity. I’ve seen tenured professors at leading law schools choose to promote funding for family models that undercut everything they proclaimed to value because those models gave their kids – their rich, white kids – underserved head starts and massive privileges in life.

They are choosing wealth over children, animals and the environment. As many die in the climate crisis, we can ensure justice by targeting high-profile concentrations of wealth and p ower pay what they owe.

TAKE ACTION:

Urge anyone making claims about bettering the world to disclose their underlying family policies and how they have impacted the claims, and to back mandating those disclosures by law under ESG frameworks. If they refuse understand that they are likely to back systems that exploit and oppress the most vulnerable, and as such threaten your and your family’s freedom.

We can reverse this process by moving the wealth that was made at cost to others into programs like the Seeds for the Future campaign, a process of reforesting the land, and creating savings accounts for kids in a way that pays them back for what we did, and sets a norm of smaller and more equitable families as the first human right and obligation.

We can also target those, like Lee Raymond, as well as his son John T. Raymond, who both converted our freedom – in nature and functional town halls – into their wealth, to return the costs they foisted on others to give back the costs and, do so by all means effective.

March 20, 2023
Don’t Get Scammed: Ensuring All Children a Fair Start in Life is the Most Just and Effective Work One Can Do
Want to Promote Freedom, Protect Children and Animals, and Reverse the Climate Crisis, All at the Same Time? Change Family Policy.

The Fair Start Movement is the most just and effective work one can do. Our work began at Yale and Oxford Universities, is frequently promoted by Stanford University, has been subject to multiple peer-reviews, and has appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, Salon, and the Washington Times, etc., and many other publications. There is no legitimate form of ethics that does not first ensure children minimum levels of wellbeing. Fair Start gets us there.

The Mistake

In the middle of the Twentieth Century world leaders made a terrible mistake, choosing to base the right to have children on parental autonomy, or personal ethics, rather than interpersonal ethics designed to ensure children birth and development conditions that comply with the Children’s Convention. This was done so that wealthy families would not have to pay to ensure those good conditions for poor children, and per one Nobel laureate, to ensure profit-producing but unsustainable population growth.

That move caused ecological overshoot and fundamentally created the climate crisis, and the massive inequity, that is literally killing children today. Growth has literally undone attempts to mitigate the crisis, and the birth inequity it causes is the most prominent and impactful form of colonization at work in the world today.

It externalized the costs of the extreme wealth we see today, against the most fundamental baseline for true cost / benefit analysis. Many have tried to hide that baseline, because its use in assessing the climate reparations described below would mean wealthy families and nations would have to pay substantial amounts.

When confronted with this reality, some concentrations of wealth and power have tried to hide what was done, and who is at fault. They have also engaged in concerted counter-measure media campaigns to convince audiences that the world is underpopulated. In fact many nonprofits have exacerbated this process, lying about their progress and creating a false sense of security by omitting the impacts of growth, and thereby putting millions at risk.

Be effective.

The Fix.

Climate reparations are a chance to reverse this mistake and ensure Convention compliance through climate restoration and birth-equity family planning entitlements, which pay that specific percentage wealth made – through growth and otherwise – by externalizing costs against a baseline of ecosocial child development consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention.

Also, because a fair start in life is the first and overriding human right, we can override the property rights that protect wealth at the top to fund this process. In the race of life a fair start always comes first. It is the first form of justice. The process of getting there is more about power than population (and actually creating just power relations rather than just theorizing them), and will avoid much of the mass violence we see today – which flows from the mistake, or what some see as a massive power grab, using bad family planning to enrich some at cost to others.

We cannot be inclusive without this change. We are otherwise not empathetic enough, giving kids what they need under the Convention, to constitute legitimate communities. And as such, we are never actually limiting the power others have over us. We should not be forced to live in a world impacted by children who did not get what they needed growing up just because wealthy investors want to use them as cheap labor and hungry consumers. That is oppression on all levels, and free people will target those behind this process to end the it, and to limit the power others – those with whom we share the world – have over us. They power up, bottom up.

TAKE ACTION:

Donate to FairStartMovement.org – the most just and effective work one can do.
- Engage in the #WholeTruth campaign to urge leaders, nonprofits and businesses to tell the truth about their approach to families, and the impact it has and will have on whatever they claimed to do, or will do.
- Call in (rather than out) those who refused to invest enough in family planning that complies with the Children’s Convention, including the climate restoration and birth equity in envisions. That refusal signifies not being sufficiently other-regarding to constitute just communities that actually empower, and thereby liberate, us all.
- Test people and institutions to see whether they are fundamentally unjust and a threat to freedom: Will they sign a letter to the the Climate Conference of the Parties urging them to support fair starts in life over growth-based profits?
- Or choose from dozens of other actions listed here to ensure fundamental fairness.
March 6, 2023
We Are Right to Target Ilya Shapiro, but for Reasons Beyond His Racism

Ilya Shapiro is a conservative thought leader who let slip his views in a tweet about persons of color, and has been ostracized and shuttled-off to far-right circles as a result. His visit at the University of Denver, Sturm College of Law, this week will continue the debate about where his speech belongs.

Is there a way to move beyond this gridlocked debate about speech, and how speaking can itself reflects power differentials? Can we drop the left v. right thing for a moment? Ilya’s views on race relations reveal much more about about him. Our focus on speaking during specific days and moments aside, he and the concentrations of wealth and power he represents – including their denial of the climate crisis – pose a clear threat to the freedom of future generations.

If we were going to look at harm to persons of color, that aspect of him is worse than his words.

Why? All of his speech and writings – especially his pro-birth advocacy under constitutional law – suggest that while he cloaks himself in the idea of freedom, he actually rejects its first necessary condition: That every child has a right to an ecosocial Fair Start in life, and that such a right overrides the property rights – here and now – of the interests Shapiro represents.

As explained in our letter to Dean Gerken at Yale Law School, Shapiro may not understand that concentrations of wealth and power – like the Supreme Court itself and fixed adherence to arbitrary standards he believes made Kentanji Brown Jackson a “lesser” choice – are themselves the product of a deeply unfair system of family planning that entrenched inequity, degraded democracy, and is destroying the ecologies future generations need to be free in a way that will kill millions.

His positions also reject animal rights, subjecting trillions of animals to suffering and death as the Plantationocene spreads across the planet.

Shapiro might be a target because his racist statement belies a willingness to oppress, and put many at risk, to benefit a few.

Is this changing the topic? Missing the idea of speech and power? Look at these sentences and see the pronouns that underlie them – that underlie all thoughts and claims, and then see the relations that underlie the creation of the people referred to by those pronouns. That is power.

True liberalism is concerned with relative self-determination/consent/choice, which would logically start with deontological population ethics, and a creation norm / first principle that would first limit the power others have over us, or where we would choose to be empowered in ways that do not disempower others. He rejects this, committing what is called the constitutive fallacy. His scholarship has risen to esteem not because it is true, but because its premises never threaten the most basic power establishment: Parents’ power over future children and nature, wealthy families’ power over poor families, the power of a coercive state over its people, etc.

Shapiro pretends to limit the power people have over one another, but ultimately embraces oppression and refuses to constitute free communities. He is a precon, ignoring the fact that freedom comes from objective values cabining subjectivity – something that must start in our creation.

If Shapiro were the target of a direct action perhaps the best reasons are not because he should not be allowed to speak. Perhaps he should. It is rather because he rejects the fundamental fairness and Rawlsian freedom that underlies the value of free speech – our first agreeing to first be in groups of free and equal people defined as such by their truly constitutive relations. Embracing that could save millions. Instead he chooses to protect concentrations of wealth and power built on oppression which could – were they today and by many means effective redistributed proportionally from him and his principles – be used to end it.

March 5, 2023
Nonprofits Are Ineffective Because They Silo Forms of Justice to Make Money. That Does Not Work.

It’s common to see nonprofits fundraising with pictures of sad dogs, hungry children, black people being disenfranchised, people dying in crackdowns on democracy by dictators, or polar ice melts in a climate crisis that is ravaging the world.

But does giving money to groups that silo – that focus on these individualized forms of justice – really make the world a better place? Not really. Usually nonprofits ignore the intersection that binds all forms of justice together – not what we could do – but who we could be.

That is the baseline for all justice, the one fundamental thing always present in and underlying all claims: People, and people who are disproportionally a product of the conditions in which they are born and develop. We cannot separate our values, like climate restoration, from who we should be. I’ve worked in well-known national nonprofits that made millions while knowingly undoing their work by choosing unjust policies – in what they thought were unrelated areas.

Current family policies ensure children are tortured to death by their own parents, more and more animals are subjected to suffering and slaughter, many other species are wiped out, the gap between rich and poor widens, children are robbed of their potential because we do not invest in them, and each person has less of a say in their political systems – turning town halls where many rule to shopping malls where few rule. These policies have created the political space for the reemergence of abortion and contraception bans, and enable influencers in media to openly push women to have more children to grow economies.

Ask anyone making claims of progress in creating a better world to tell the #wholetruth by disclosing their approach to families:

What are they doing to ensure all children in the world birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention, like birth equity, backed by climate/biodiversity restoration?

Are they ensuring minimum levels of welfare for all kids, and equality of opportunity?

How are they ensuring all children born will have an effective voice in their democracies?

Chances are the person or organization making the claim is quietly undoing their progress by using an outdated approach to families, one that hurts kids, deepens inequity, destroys the environment, and makes sure the voice of most people does not matter in politics.

It’s time to tell the #wholetruth.

Urge any nonprofit you support to do so.

March 4, 2023
Politicians Promoting Child Labor? Target Them to Instead Pay for All Kids to Get a Fair Start in Life.

A lot of politicians are pushing to relax or eliminate child labor laws. This is the result of free-market economics where there is no real right or wrong, just the power of one’s wealth. But this nonsense was enabled by liberals who proclaim to support human rights but simply refuse to give all kids a fair start in life, the one move that would not only end child labor, but change the fundamental power dynamics that make it even possible.

What’s the solution?

Photo by Wavebreak Media Ltd/BigStock

No system of governance is legitimate if it does not give kids an ecosocial fair start in life, which means actually empowering and liberating them in functional democracies. Why would we follow rules we have no real role in making?

Politicians chipping away at child labor laws are thus vulnerable because their political authority relies on their supporting fair starts in life for kids. Very few support that, and they usually have uber-privileged children. We have a right to a proportion of the wealth of these families, the wealth those privileged children would otherwise inherit, because using it to invest more in all kids is the beginning of just and legitimate systems of governance.

TAKE ACTION: CONTACT STATE SENATOR JASON SCHULTZ OF IOWA AND URGE HIM TO PAY WHAT HE OWES. HE SHOULD PROTECT AND NURTURE ALL CHILDREN SO THAT HIS DAUGHTERS, JOSIE AND CAMRYN, LIVE IN A BETTER WORLD ONE DAY.

March 4, 2023
Nobody Would Talk About Underpopulation if We Had to Actually Invest in Kids. We Do Have to Invest. Target the Wealthy to Pay.

Countless media stories today are flooding our brains with stories of an underpopulation crisis, falling fertility rates, and women liberated from being mothers-in-waiting.

What if we had to ensure every child born a fair start in life, with all the things we would have needed and wanted as a child? It’s unlikely we would hear about any underpopulation crisis, or see so many men pushing women to have kids.

You would not see many abortion bans either. These conversations are premised on the idea that we can exploit children as cheap labor and voracious consumers.

But the truth is we do actually have to invest that level in kids, at least the minimum spelled out by the Children’s Rights Convention.

And guess who has to pay for it?

Extreme concentrations of wealth today do not reflect the costs it imposed on others, fundamentally, the costs its production imposed on our ecologies and climate (creating the deadly crisis), and the way it was produced through unsustainable population growth that was achieved by not ensuring children the expensive birth and development conditions – including racial equity – they are promised under the Children’s Rights Convention.

Instead they became dumbed-down consumers and cheap future labor. Governments went along with the lie because they got the benefit of more taxpayers.

Given that the Convention spells out the minimum standards necessary to ensure children what they need to build legitimate systems of human rights and democracy, our governments were never authorized to assign the property rights wealthy people think they have to their wealth. They would first have to pay the proportional costs, through things like family planning reparations to future generation, to own that wealth.

Be effective.

People like Elon Musk may be bemoaning falling population numbers, but the children of his native South Africa – and intending mothers – actually have a claim to his wealth to bend the arc of de-growth even further. He certainly owes it, born a rich white kid who fled South Africa with wealth during apartheid.

How those families take what they deserve, the distraction of effective altruism aside, is another matter.

But those trying to redistribute the wealth that was stolen, and to make a better future, are the freedom fighters of today.

March 2, 2023