This comment has some real "Lancelot seducing Guinevere" energy.
- Posts
- 3
- Comments
- 582
- Joined
- 2 yr. ago
- Posts
- 3
- Comments
- 582
- Joined
- 2 yr. ago
Don't get me wrong, we here in Lemmy have got the screaming part down. However, any revolutionary effort that doesn't go toward either mutual aid or grinding the system to a halt is, ultimately, ineffectual.
Except, what everyone seems to be ignoring is that those buildings literally aren't filled with the evil dudes most of the time. I was born in DC. Those buildings are almost entirely empty, and there are always multiple orders of magnitude more tourists in and around them than there are potentates. Most of the most powerful people in the country don't even live in DC most of the time, because they're rich enough to just fly in whenever they need to, or drive in from nearby states, where they have massive mansions. I've given my perspective in a different reply which you are welcome to read, but torching DC is an inane idea, tantamount to screaming and breaking a plate so you can feel like you're helping the situation.
As I said to a different response: when demolishing buildings, we use high explosives, not gasoline. I was born in DC. The buildings didn't do anything wrong, nor did the people who live near those buildings. Very few of the traitors to the nation even live in the capital most of the time. Burning a city to the ground is never an acceptable solution to any problem; It wasnt appropriate in WWII for Dresden, London, or Hiroshima, it wasn't in the war of 1812 for D.C., and it isn't now. Large-scale retaliation will only cause collateral damage and put up a smokescreen. It would be nothing more than senseless violence amounting to stomping your feet on the ground. Any action which has a hope of success in bringing justice must be done in an orderly and methodical manner, I don't go in for all the modern second amendment crap, and am a conscientious objector, because the one part of that amendment which is most important is this: a well-regulated militia is necessary to protect the rights of the people. The declaration of independence makes it clear that we have a right and a duty to throw off this government, which is openly seeking to reduce us under absolute despotism, but that doesn't mean just burning some uninhabited buildings with god knows how much collateral damage is a good plan. It would be nothing but theatre with an extreme innocent death toll.
Are you aware of how large-scale fires work? Don't be dense yourself. There's a reason we demolish buildings with high-explosives, not fucking gasoline and matches.
"Remember, just one more and then you all go home!!"
You mean the D.C. that is famously full of people of color, none of whom have representation, despite having a larger population than two states, and who have been historically marginalised, in large part because a few blocks of the city have some marble buildings filled with ethnonationalist, corpofascist kakistocrats? You're suggesting we burn down that D.C.?
- JumpDeleted
Permanently Deleted
An unexpected, but welcome, nichijou reference.
Cannot tell if deeply out-of-touch art person with no conception of the incomprehensibility of the nonsense they're spouting or AI... Hmm... Bloviation or AI...
Response is the same, though: ↓
Isn't the idea of a Boltzmann Brain not that it poofs out of existence, but that there is no way to prove that you are not a Boltzmann Brain, and all of your perceived experiences could be confabulation? In such a scenario the Brain needn't poof out of existence; merely continuing to exist for but a moment would belie the true nature of their consciousness, as the brain quickly suffocates and dies, losing its contents.
Fair enough, I suppose
You're missing the joke. One of the chief conservative complaints about immigrants is that "they don't assimilate into american society".
- JumpDeleted
Permanently Deleted
Wholeheartedly agree, though I think that such a person could also simultaneously be trying to repress the rights of women, not just have a sex kink. It can be both things.
- JumpDeleted
Permanently Deleted
Yeah, that sounds like someone seriously in need of mental healthcare. I guess I just haven't seen all of these crazies you claim make up the entirety of the group. I honestly do believe that anyone who is still pro-natalist is either not thinking very clearly, or is likely to be part of the groups making it immoral to have a child, because it seems like a very simple logical conclusion. I just believe that such arguments are clearly superior to anything pro-natalists have offered, and so all that is necessary is to talk to people. Just put off having kids for a few years until you know whether irresponsibly risking creating a life of misery is right for you!
- JumpDeleted
Permanently Deleted
I very clearly stated "as someone who understands, if not necessarily openly espouses, anti-natalist ideology". I am suggesting that I, personally, think that my original 7th premise is becoming closer and closer to logical truth. I believe, as something close to an anti-natalist, that everyone needs to do their own cost-benefit analysis to determine whether they can accept the culpability of deciding to bring an unconsenting entity into the horrific world in which we currently live. So, just because I don't believe in forcibly converting everyone to the cause, doesn't mean I don't believe in it, just like not every Christian is an evangelical. Anyone who believes that there is a moral imperative to forcibly stop others from having children is clearly fundamentally misunderstanding the reasons why anti-natalist principles are so attractive (much like how evangelicals display a fundamental misunderstanding of Christian theology)
- JumpDeleted
Permanently Deleted
That's all fine and well as an internal idea why you don't want to have kids, but when anti-natalism became a "thing" that started attracting like-minds it became another group of insane people online pushing their anti-society ideals
And lastly, mostly, the idea quickly attracts people who just hate children and that's something we need to fight with all our might as a species.
You said that anti-natalists dislike when their beliefs are challenged, but the first thing you do is concede that point and start talking about your personal perspective on the history of anti-natalism. I'm trying to present as close as you can get to a logically-valid anti-natalist argument, but it seems like your personal experience with people you perceive to be anti-natalists has tainted your ability to engage with that perspective. Claiming that an idea attracts crazy people is just an anecdotal ad hominem, not an actual issue with the idea. If you want to talk about why you perceive it to attract crazy, antisocial child-haters, then first establish that that is the case and suggest what it is about the idea which makes such an attraction dangerous. Fascism isn't bad because the worst people rally around it. The worst people rally around it because of the things which make it bad, such as the ease with which those in power in a fascist state can exploit the weak for personal gain.
It appears, to me (though it is ambiguous, so let me know if I'm off-base), that you believe that the biggest danger of anti-natalism is in the potential of population decline. If a significant portion of the population agreed with an anti-natalist argument, such that they actually did believe it was morally irresponsible to have a child, I contend that the problem which must be solved is not their exposure to anti-natalism, but the things which caused it to be a convincing argument, namely the fact that the future of a child born into this world is a deeply risky bet, due to the reasons I've listed and more. I don't think that people taking a rational cost-benefit analysis of a situation is a problem. The problem would be the situation.
In fact, it seems like (again an implication, so correct me if I'm wrong) you are concerned that an anti-natalist would try to forcibly prevent people from having children, but such an action would increase the suffering of those alive, and the actor would be morally culpable for such an act. As such, if you are, instead, suggesting that anti-natalists believe in forced sterilisation or otherwise, then I think that it might not be the anti-natalists projecting their own problems onto the world.
All that aside, I still think it's a narrow perspective, because unless you know something I don't, we don't know if there's an alternative to existing and experiencing things, I mean... you're going to die, and you will be dead forever. If you're a teacher you should know the basic ideas about the universe and how everything appears to be probabilistic in nature. Eventually, after all the stars die and a number of years pass that make time meaningless, it will eventually all happen again. In some form or another. The universe will always be experiencing itself, not having kids now just means that conscious experience is going to express somewhere else, some distant configuration. It happened once already, and few things in nature are singular.
As an earth and space science teacher, why yes, I DO know some things about the cosmos. For instance, I know that the "big bounce" theory (everything repeating) is only one of many potential interpretations for the future of our universe, and is by no means the most popular among astrophysicists, since it appears inconsistent with a universe in apparently-accelerating expansion. Far more likely is heat death or the big rip, which would make all effort to come before existentially meaningless, unless some method of information transfer outside of our universe or beyond our current understanding were to be achieved. It's a good thing that none of us will be around to experience those eventualities. If you'd like to chat about existential nihilism, absurdism, or other concerns, I'm happy to do so, but I don't perceive them to be particularly germane to the argument at hand, unless you're trying to use a nihilistic argument to tear apart a fairly common position among nihilists. Utilitarianism itself is, ultimately, a response to the lack of meaning in the cosmos, and is an attempt to ascribe meaning by our own, subjective definition, so of course it's human-biased, but it can be applied evenly, even to animals, which seems to be a primary concern for you.
and if we're going to go out quietly into the night, we should do it with the least amount of harm, and I would rather we put that energy into taking better care of the people we already have.
That is... Exactly my point. Are you sure you are disagreeing with me? We need to be actively taking better care of the world, so that no one need feel afraid of bringing a life into this world, only for it to experience unspeakable suffering.
Do you know for sure if you're actually reducing suffering? Or just reducing your own guilt? For all we know, this is as good is as it gets.
Such a thing is fundamentally unknowable, but our definition of suffering is fairly consistent, and of course It's all about personal moral culpability, because that's the whole idea of morality. If you're going to take so many nihilistic and moral relativist stances, I don't see why you're so concerned with population collapse or animal welfare.
We don't know if the alternative to this is better, odds are it isn't, we don't know if you are actually deciding if you're bringing in a new life or only changing the shape of your own conscious experience in this universe. We don't even know if you have a choice at all, and are not just post-hoc rationalizing decisions you've already made.
While it is fair to attack the postulates of an argument, this is not, in my opinion, a particularly compelling argument. Sure, I assume that not creating a life does no harm, but to say "ooh, free will might be an illusion" doesn't actually negate my point, because, at worst, this means that it doesn't matter whether you're anti-natalist.
[a] crustacean that gets cronched by some predator or a primate who suffers horribly and dies after her family is murdered by another tribe.
My argument does not apply to animals in a state of nature, as those animals are not reasonably expected to have responsibility (If I were to learn that a species of animal did, in fact, have sufficient mental capacity to understand existential philosophy, then I would probably be having this conversation with a dolphin, rather than a lemming). Humans are the active cause of the current mass-extinction event, and we have the wherewithal to potentially stop it. That is, from my perspective, a moral imperative. Humans are the cause of a great deal of suffering, both human and among other animals, and one of my precepts claims that suffering can have a net-negative effect on the value of life. Another precept enjoins us to act, as the failure to act constitutes negligence. Do i believe that we must all stop procreating? no. Do i believe that there are cases in which it is actively irresponsible and negligent to bring a child into the world? Absolutely, yes. Do I think that I have a moral responsibility to stop people from fucking? No I do not. Do i believe that everyone must be educated on the responsibilities, risks, costs and benefits of parenthood, so they can be informed when they consent to engage in procreation? Yes. Do I think I have a moral responsibility to make the world a better place for the inevitable products of the aforementioned fucking? ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY
Yeah, if you're looking to get into Tchaikovsky, I'd recommend either Children of Time (if you like sci-fi) or The City of Last Chances (if you like fantasy). His work is always based in his experience as a zoologist, so his environments and animals are second-to-none (even the series of which City of Last Chances is a part contains well-considered biology whenever "monsters" from "the grove" are described)
You should read "Vaster than Empires, and More Slow" by Ursula K Leguin, which is basically this. Also "Shroud", and "Alien Clay" by Adrian Tchaikovsky have somewhat related ideas, but are full-blown examinations of the concepts of utterly alien intelligence. Honestly, you'd probably like most of Tchaikovsky's work. He does a lot with "alternative manifestations of sapience".
- JumpDeleted
Permanently Deleted
That's fair, and I can't speak for others, but at the very least, it's a generalisation which I believe is unwarranted. I can simultaneously believe that it is morally questionable to choose to have a child, but also that a child, once born, places upon all members of society a moral duty of care in its upbringing, not only for harm reduction, but to work toward the betterment of society writ-large, so that we can potentially make the future act of procreation less morally concerning.
Is this the first time you've seen a leather-covered headboard? They're fairly common in hotels, for their ease of cleaning.