Have ya'll ever met eugenicists and racists? those are some of the most natalist motherfuckers out there. You think all the mystic woo woo "having children is like +1 good" bullshit you want, THOSE PEOPLE THINK THAT HARDER THAN YOU DO!!!
This rant is sponsored by yesterday's grandma demanding in the form of a question when I'm going to shit out babies for her and also random strawman comments in an obscure subreddit.
Edit: ITT: people actually starting to bully me for not wanting to have kids. Did not expect this on "leftist" website.
There is a difference between "I would rather not have children" and "Having children is morally wrong". The first is just a personal preference. The second is anti-natalism.
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The problem is that personal ethics doesn’t actually really exist. It’s kind of just… nonexistent navel gazing.
No, you can't. Unless you think "I believe abortion is wrong, and I would never have one, but I believe they should be available to others" or "I believe homosexuality is immoral but the government doesn't have any business policing peoples' sexuality" are normal and good takes.
Believing that something is immoral but supporting and apologizing for those who do it makes you worse than a bigot, it makes you a hypocrite.
How about "Cheating on your partner is wrong, but adultery shouldn't be illegal"?
Bigotry is worse than hypocrisy.
I struggle to see how that isn't being pro choice. I thought the whole point was that no one should be forced to give birth
But the second isn’t eugenics, it’s the idea that no one should have kids.
But on any practical level they're both ideologies which cannot be implemented without the forcible suppression of the reproductive rights of billions of people. To me, that's a kind of "it's not racism, Islam isn't a race" kind of distinction where it's technical to the point of pointlessness.
I think the misunderstanding there is that anti-natalism is not (necessarily) an “ideology” to “implement”. It’s just a moral standpoint. i.e. you morally shouldn’t have kids because the world you’d be bringing them into is incredibly fucked*, but no one is going to forcibly stop you from having kids.
* not in a Malthusian “excess population” kind of way, but just that things are getting worse as capitalism decays into fascism and climate change ramps up because capitalism has done nothing to stop it. It’s not that having kids makes things worse, it’s that things are already bad and you’d be subjecting them to that.
The point of any philosophy, including moral philosophy, is to change the world with it. And there's no real way to implement anti-natalism without Malthusian eugenics or genocide.
Or sci-fi tech or world peace and if it’s the latter, good luck convincing people to not have kids because life apparently can suck. Not saying that argument wouldn’t be true in that case, even- just that people are not going to buy it.
I think that there are people who treat it as either or both. That said, I think the personal expression and ideological expression are very different things. Like how a disabled person who doesn't want to have kids so as to not pass on their disability isn't the same as a eugenicist.
Yes, they're different, but the latter doesn't exist in any serious capacity. There are no groups of people practically trying to express anti-natalism as a sterilize everything movement.
For the vast majority, this is somewhere between a thought exercise and a gentle plea to others to consider not having kids. Not disabled others, or poor others, but any others.
There was one user here with a long established post history who did argue to the point of a temporary ban (so I won't name the name) that no one should reproduce, and no animal for that matter, until and unless some magical means to determine consent for the unborn before they were born could be established. That was their absolutist position, and may well effectively be a sterilization mandate as a nihilistic power fantasy.
The thing about materialism is that it's trying to describe the way the world the way it is, and why it is that way, and what we can do to achieve a better future. It's inherently political.
Theres no practical way to even pursue the goal of sterilising everything. It's purely a moral philosophy with no possible praxis. There's no way to build a political movement out of this. When people here talk about natalism, they seem to want to believe it's motivating people into action, but how could it? It's lile believing everybody should be able to summon portals --A cool thought, but at the end of the day, an idea that doesn't exist on any political spectrum.
That particular user with the "nothing should ever be born again" take was terminal-stage idealistic about a nihilistic proposition. I didn't even know how to respond except by posting this comic.
Whatever caused you to post this comic thank you 😂😂
Which is the issue. It can’t really be acted on except as bastardizations of the idea that end up hurting people.
There's quite a crockoduck from either of those to racism and eugenics.