Permanently Deleted
Women being able to enter the workforce and generate their own income also usually precedes a drop in birth rates.
Also, as you raise standards of living, the need for 8 children as free labor disappears and people have less kids because they're annoying and really only worth it as pets/free labor.
Also, to anyone who doesn’t value bodily autonomy over their own stance of natalism… I have some words
I suppose extreme anti-natalists could argue that allowing someone to create a child is subjecting that child to a lifetime of potential suffering it didn’t consent to, so others are justified in intervening against it.
It’s a bizarre inversion of anti-abortion arguments really.
I mean you could argue giving birth to someone is itself an ethical gamble that the person most affected by has no say in.
Like idk, if it were hypothetically possible to contact beings before they came into existence I really do wonder how most would feel about the question: “hey would you rather continue not experiencing anything at all, including the desire to experience things, or take a massive gamble that could result in you either experiencing great joy, great pain, some combo of the two or just sheer boredom and mediocrity for between 1 and 90ish years?” what most people’s response would be. Parents deciding to have kids are basically answering that question for their potential kids.
True
I’m just drinking and grappling with my own weird internal anti-natalist sympathizes.
Any community dedicated to discussing a subject will head down a certain trajectory in the end, usually some kind of literal interpretation of the most extreme possible hot take.
Like the "Kids Are Fucking Stupid" subreddit for example.
It started out as basically funny gifs of children failing to grasp intuitive things, and making bad decisions in surprising and weird ways that illustrate a lack of brain capacity that we typically take for granted. Like repeatedly trying to push a toy through a solid object, or repeatedly hitting a screen door and not understanding, etc etc.
Eventually I saw a post there with a 6 month old baby flailing its arms, playing with a balloon that was tied to its wrist.
Title of post: Look at this stupid piece of shit, that doesn't do anything fucking idiot
I think Reddit structurally accelerates this process by 1) encouraging "communities" built around repeating a single specific narrative or comedic template, 2) providing the means to filter through all those iterations on the same idea and remove anything critical of the dominant thinking, complex, or challenging to the audience in any other way. 3) incentivizing individual posters to try to win that race to the bottom with a little point counter
this is where I become pedantic and ideological. personally I think the old BB-style forums had mostly the right ideas about how to design an asynchronous web message board, even if culturally they could be shitty. I think we ought to remove voting and order comments and posts strictly chronologically (and heck, why not enable more rich text features?) Reddit's design was never meant for this; it was originally just a successor to Digg and StumbleUpon and other link aggregator-type services.
That said, I understand that the Reddit lineage, not to mention the ambition to federate with other Lemmies, means these changes will never happen, so I guess the best we can do is try to be more aware of how we use this site.
i used to play wow with this guy who was like a cornerstone of our guild. very cool guy, always there to help out, friendly, well adjusted for a wow player. one day we were raiding and he had to go afk. he was gone for like 45 minutes and when he came back was just nonchalantly like "sorry about that guys, i had to give my dad his foot massage." probably the first and only time our voice comm went dead fuckin silent.
no point to this story whatsoever but you made me think of it
I mean considering how many people have announced they’ve given up porn on here, and the anti-polygamy crowd...
something like this also happens with subreddits centered around showing off the products you own, like r/EDC or r/fountainpens, where every member of the community eventually ends up buying the same things. what started as a subreddit to show off what you carry around in your pockets every day becomes a kind of club you can join by buying a certain type of pocket knife, a zippo, a handkerchief and a pry bar.
You're forgetting the Colt 1911 with backup pocket .32 ACP for their Job as a Sysadmin
also a copy of the United States constitution for some fucking reason
Any group actively advocating for antinatalism is basically eugenics. Which is what r/antinatalism is/does.
But the Position itself isn't opposed to leftist values for the individual. I'm not really comfortable creatinge life because neither do I know if i don't fuck them up nor am I really clear on what they'll have to live through and the expectation's don't look all that rosy to me.
But Kids will still be born through no fault of their own, so we best get to improving the world for them.
Any group actively advocating for antinatalism is basically eugenics.
Why?
Because at that point it crosses the line from "I don't think me having kids is a good idea" into "I don't think you having kids is a good idea."
But like the point is that anyone having a kid is bad idea. The subject here is the (potential) kid, not the parent.
I'm sorry, I honestly do not understand what you mean here, could you phrase it differently?
I'm trying to point out that antinatalism isn't about pointing out who should and who wouldn't have kids. It's the idea that no one should have kids out of concern of those kids.
I genuinely don't understand how that can be construed as eugenics.
Because as far as I know antinatalism in general is only really discussed in the West. With everything you know about Western governments do you honestly believe any actual mass implementation of antinatalism is going to be done to them? Fuck no antinatalism is going to be used as an excuse to stop brown people (who tons of Western people already believe are using too many resources) from having babies
Which is eugenics.
Eh, it's an extremely fringe idea hardly compatible with any mainstream "western" ideology. You see a lot of leftists showing their disdain to antinatalist ideas, image what chuds and conservatives think about it. Talking about how MyPillow guy would implement it is nonsensical. By this logic any environmentalism in the west is inheritely ecofascism.
image what chuds and conservatives think about it.
They think it's a great idea and will implement it on the global south, which was my main point. Obviously nothing is inherently ecofascist, but you can at least see how a position like antinatalism is so vague and devoid of actual structure that it could absolutely be absorbed into a fascist framework right? And as material conditions get worse that is most likely how it will be implemented?
The thing is what you're describing isn't antinatalism. That's like saying communism is fascism, actually, because when you say "abolish private property", the obvious implementation you'll see in US is taking away property rights of minorities. And sure, NazBols are kinda a thing, but if some lib tells you that communism is antisemitic you'd laugh in their face.
Except not really because due to the actual material conditions of minorities in the US, they largely don't own private property lol.
The difference being policy that is favorable to western interests has been, is, and for the foreseeable future will be implemented on the global south like it has for centuries already. Just because you're ignorant of that fact doesn't mean everyone is.
Yeah, I'm sure when westerners continue to sterilize people in the global south it would be couched in the argument that only kinda appeals to a tiny bunch of misanthropic nerds and not the usual racist eugenic arguments that appeal to like a half of westerners as they always done.
Uhhh... So we should fight for a better world, and if we achieve our goal, we should just stop bringing new people into that world?
Then what is the point of fighting for a better world in the first place?
Then what is the point of fighting for a better world in the first place?
There going to be people that already alive who want the world to be better.
Honestly that sounds selfish as fuck. We finally create a world that has minimized oppression and that's the point we decided to stop people from being born?
That's the only time a child could reasonably be born according to antinatalists. This is why antinatalism is just misanthropic and should be disregarded.
The idea of antinatalism isn't that living sucks because of capitalism or scarcity or whatever. The idea is that living sucks inherently.
I understand the concept. I just think that it's dumb and leads nowhere. To those people I say there will most likely be assisted suicide in FALGSC so have at it.
Well that would be a more orthodox form of antinatalism than all those grand ideas about stopping everyone from procreating going on in this thread.
said who asswipe? fuck off with that dumbass shit. some ppl prefer not to have kids. Some women are deathly afraid of getting pregnant. You have no right to judge.
lol are you a leftist rly? yeah I did fucking choose this path. You know sometimes ppl just dont want kids, it's not because they cant afford or against them they literally dont want them. Capitalism isn't to blame for everything you absolute moron. Plus I'm gay, but I guess that means I'm a loser. This is a weird fucking hill, I'd expect this from like my boomer parents but I guess I should learn to be less wide eyed
Yep. Procreation is the goal of all life. Thinking that it is any different for us humans is some misanthropic doomer bullshit.
And it is definitely incompatible with any sort of socialism.
Yes indeed. Antinatalism is something that r*dditors love.
As long as it only applies to poor brown people, of course.
I can believe an advanced, falgsc human society would be capable of eradicating the possibility of life in the solar system, but I don't think that there is any version of human society that could substantially alter the course of the heat death of the universe, or that could prevent the potential for life across all of space.
Right, at a minimum, the difference between the universe and the 'observable universe' is going to put limits on human reach, but maybe there are enough similarly minded organisms in the universe to overcome that.
The problem with an automaton based approach is what characteristics they would need to get the job done. To match the scale of altering the entire reachable universe, they would have to be self reproducing. To be able to prevent life from existing, given all of the different environments in the universe that could lead to the rise of life, and all of the different forms that life could take, they would have to be able to adapt to the local environment, and have enough complexity of information processing to be able to identify previously unanticipated forms of life, and find the best way to disrupt it.
At this point, you've, at the very least, severely blurred the lines of what life is, and most likely created a new form of life that is much more prevalent than naturally occurring life ever was.
There's still a lot we don't know about the universe. Maybe we can trigger false vacuum decay or some such.
Yeah, that would destroy all life that currently exists, but it would also essentially re-roll the whole universe, and create new conditions for the development of life that didn't exist before. 'Destroy all life' is one thing, but 'prevent any possibility of the development of life' is a much harder job.
Because we deemed it immoral for new life to be brought into the world
The majority of humanity is never going to believe this.
My first reaction was to argue why an advanced human society would come to a different conclusion, but thinking about it I'm more interested a different question. For anyone that agrees that this issues needs to be investigated by a higher form of civilization, what reason is there to put any weight in your own conclusion on the issue if you're limited by living in the lower form of society?
We need to reach communism, which means those of us who are otherwise willing and able should go ahead and produce more socialist.
We already got Harris and Buttigieg out of those socialist breeding programs. Isn't that enough?
It costs like $200000 on average to raise a kid in US. I'm sure if you put all that money and time into activism and organising you'd get more than one socialist/vegan/antinatalist/whatever out of it.
I feel like Catholics were onto something when they came up with the idea of prohibiting their most ardent believers from procreating. Can't argue with success.
reactionary misanthropism demands the existence of revolutionary misanthropism
Sometimes my brain reads a sentence and chooses not to try and understand it.
Animals help each other all the time. Not gonna go through a whole list but you can look it up at any time. Also even in nature a typical predator prey relationship doesn't always end in killing, if the predator had recently eaten it isn't gonna go out of it's way to kill another prey, that's just a waste of energy.
Even most combat in nature rarely ends up in death. If two animals are fighting for territory or a mate it's usually just until one of them gives up.
if the predator had recently eaten it isn’t gonna go out of it’s way to kill another prey, that’s just a waste of energy.
Then why are house cats psychopaths?
If I had to guess it could be because of domestication. Living in nature is way more taxing on your body and just like people have to work out in order to stay physically fit since our lives are easier, maybe house cats will hunt for pleasure for the same reason?
I cringe when people assign sentience to a phenomenon like nature or evolution as if it has some sort of intention. It's like saying "Fuck the number 2. The number 2 is always fucking me over when I just want 1 thing. Clearly, the number 2 wants us all to suffer."
Fuck climate change. This planet is full of amazing creatures. How dare anyone take that away.
Imagine thinking suffering is critically meaningful in a way that existence and all of the rest of its facets aren't.
"I FULLY SUPPORT CLIMATE CHANGE" is just a real powerful statement on its own
