Suffering should be eradicated at all costs
What is suffering? Iâve lumped that word in with all the other religious claptrap like âsoulâ and âafterlifeâ and whatnot.
Are you talking about pain (the sensation)? It doesnât seem that you mean that, but if you did it would be absurd. âPain should be eradicatedâ makes no sense. It canât even be said that pain should be avoided, since discomfort is often associated with worthwhile, and ultimately pleasant, activities.
Define suffering so we can be on the same page.
Humanity doesnât have an inherent right to exist,
True, as far as it goes. But itâs like âturnips have no inherent right to existâ. Pretty meaningless, and in the context where people actually want to exist (and for others to exist), somewhat misleading.
I see your beliefs now.
Please, read my palm. Tell everyone what my beliefs are.
Youâre making a strawman out of me in this argument.
Weâre on a public forum. Though my comment may be the literal reply to yours, it isnât necessarily true that I am speaking to you and only you. Iâm speaking to others in response to what youâve said.
I apologize if this makes it seem Iâm hostile to you.
But Iâll drop another rule on you and see what you make of this. Adoptions are about the children who need someone to care for them, and not for the people adopting who want to gratify their need for a human pet. If youâre doing it for yourself, youâre doing it for the wrong reasons. Therefor, the only people who should adopt are those who do not want to, but out of a sense of duty.
And if people accepted that rule, then weâd have no discussion at all about adoption in this thread. Because adoption can no longer be a substitute for having oneâs own children.
There are no moral sources. Those who would adopt morally would be compelled to adopt children from their own family first⌠who better to not let an orphan forget their parents than someone who also loved and knew those parents?
And if there were no family, then friends of those parents for the same reason.
And if no friends, then that community⌠except today, there arenât really any communities left. Just people who live near each other as accidents of geography.
And if none in the community, then at least someone from that culture. So that the child might grow up knowing his or her own language and songs and whatnot. But western culture isnât a culture so much as the absence of one, a void, and so it canât imagine that anything like thatâs important.
But none of these rules allow hipsters who live in California but are too eco-conscious of their carbon footprint to want to âbring another child into this worldâ but want to raise a child to do so. So these rules are bad. And thatâs why adopting African children is good and moral. Because they want to, they have the money to do it, and that warlord uses a cutout so that the adoption has the appearance of being above-board.
society can adapt around them in any way it sees fit
It canât adapt to this. Society ceases to exist if there are no people, so saying âit can adapt to no one performing the process by which people create their replacements in the worldâ is dumb.
Fertility is weird in that young children grow up in the same society that is doing these things⌠they internalize what they see around them as ânormalâ. So if you teach children that having one or zero children is normal, theyâll grow up to want the same. They can always go lower than 1, but never higher. This means fertility trends in one direction only, it never goes up.
And once it drops below replacement levels, it wonât ever go back up to them (let alone above) ever again.
Your society is dying. It doesnât realize it yet, and by the time it does nothing will be possible to do about it.
Who can make that judgement, you?
Yes. I do not claim to be the only one capable of making that judgement. Though it seems those like me are rare.
Judgement is nothing more than the measurement of a thing or an event. We are not talking about a legal process⌠I sentence no one, I convict no one, I condemn no one.
But Iâve measured, and accurately.
Trauma seems like a damn good argument for not having kids.
It may seem that way, but it isnât. At most, itâs an argument to delay having them.
If you wanted or needed to do something in your life, and you were in a car wreck and broke both your legs⌠would you think it sane for someone to say ânow you should never do that thing again, youâve experienced trauma!â ?
Why is it any more sane if the injury is psychological? You take the time you need to recover, you work hard to get back to where you should be, and you do that thing. And you do it whether itâs having children or climbing some mountain or whatever. And youâd even agree with me if we hadnât prefaced the achievement as âhaving childrenâ, but some other trivial thing.
to subject another human being, who had no say in being born
This is a nonsense statement. Until the person exists, by definition they can have no say in anything because they do not exist. Therefor it is not necessary, and even irrational, to speak or think about whether someone has a say in âbeing bornâ.
Youâre morally permitted to subject a non-existent non-person to âbeing bornâ. Unless youâve invented some sort of time travel, nothing else makes any sense.
especially when some of that suffering may be caused by genetics, which will be passed down to said human being
This is the first intelligent thing youâve said. Those who have incurable genetic diseases that cause true misery are rational to not reproduce.
None of the people in this thread, and few of those (1 in 10,000 or even fewer) who are childfree are childless because of that reason. You donât have the Tay Sachs gene, and your receding hairlineâs not comparable.
i.e. saying âpeople who donât want kids are mentally illâ and then wondering why people would consider that to be an insulting statement.
Itâs like saying âpeople who want to force themselves to vomit after every meal are mentally illâ and then wondering why the bulimics consider that to be insulting?
Theyâre bulimic. Itâs a mental illness. They probably do find it insulting, at least when they can work up the nerve to do it⌠it wasnât always that way. But wasnât it Oprah who had a bunch of the crackpots on her show where they were starting to claim eating disorders were a lifestyle choice?
Same thing here. If you get enough mentally ill people together in one place, they can convince themselves that their perceived numbers alone make them not mentally ill.
I canât tell if youâre playing devilâs advocate or one of the mentally ill, and I donât care nearly enough to read your comment carefully to try to figure it out.
Insulting people
Iâm not aware of having insulted anyone. Iâve come to learn in my life that some people are insulted by reality⌠thatâs sad. Reality doesnât change just because you feel insulted, it never apologizes, and it definitely doesnât make amends.
that someone can rationally make that decision.
No. They can only irrationally make that decision. And itâs not difficult to discern that truth⌠just open your eyes. Trauma, gluttony, thereâs always something right there at the surface pressuring that choice.
What a progressive take on psychiatry! That guy babbling about demons whispering in his ear as he uses feces to fingerpaint on the hospital walls isnât mentally ill⌠heâs just making a choice.
A choice you or I might not make, but itâs no less valid and no less healthy.
Thanks for changing my mind.
i donât want to have kids because i believe itâs unethical for some average joe, or in fact anyone that isnât an expert in child psychology and child development, to subject a human being to potential lifelong trauma
Only PhDs in child psychology should reproduce? So, you want humanity to be extinct, thatâs a more ethically sound position than âsometimes bad things happen to some peopleâ?
society feeds you the lie that you need to have kids to feel fulfilled and happy,
Youâve got 4 billion years of genetic coding that insists, even demands that this is true. The last few tens of millions of years hardcodes it directly into your meat brain.
Society? If society ever did that, it ceased doing it almost a hundred years ago. Now, you canât turn your head or hear a dozen words from some random stranger proclaiming the opposite is true and that anyone who says otherwise is a misogynist, masochist, or biblethumper.
There of course are many reasons for that. If you believe transexuals are healthy, important individuals⌠how could they participate in parenting if theyâre mutilating their reproductive organs? So, parenting and reproduction now have to be bad or at least discouraged, to push the other message more fully. Not just them, of course, itâs not fair to single them out when there are so many other degenerate lifestyles that, if you embrace them, you also canât embrace the idea that parenting is important without being hypocritical.
The end result will be, of course, that these lifestyles die out. The question is, will they take everything else with them.
How is it any more terrible than itâs ever been these last few million years ago? I donât have to worry about my kids being eaten by some predator anymore, the smilodon problemâs taken care of. Horrible diseases still about, but many that would have crippled or killed them just 100 years ago are now bad cultural memories. They have the comfort kings wouldnât have known in centuries past.
Only the neurotic would whine about how they canât bring children into a terrible world. Iâm glad youâve gotten over yours. As you have time, do what you can to dissect that old worldview and figure out how it works so that maybe you can help other people someday.
Haha. âAdoptionâ. There havenât been any recent world wars. No plagues (close miss on that though). There are no children to adopt. So few, in fact, that those who want to adopt often find themselves on waiting listsâŚ
So much so, that many give up on that course of action, and instead choose to fly halfway around the world to buy children from warlords and conmen in Africa.
Or, you could become a âfoster parentâ, which is like adoption except that the kidâs even less yours⌠they might come along and yank them away from you for a variety of reasons. The most heartbreaking of which, Iâm told, is that the real parents have convinced some bureaucrat that they wonât abuse or neglect them like they had been doing, when experience suggests that it will just happen again.
Though, donât be too sympathetic to the foster parents, theyâre helping the government prosecute the war on drugs and ruin families, just by supplying the demand for child abduction technicians. And all so they can scratch their itch of (fake) parenthood and feel self-righteous about it.
God no. I canât imagine a more horrific punishment than to be childless.
I wish we had more than the two we have, but my wife and I started late. My daughter (12) sometimes asks how many children she could realistically have⌠a good sign that she hasnât been tainted by whatever mental illness it is that the âchildfreeâ people have.
Tons of people use VPNs for region restricted services like Netflix
I was going to criticize your choice of units there, but after thinking about it some I decided this was probably correct and that my criticisms were in the wrong. Touche, you win again.
If I were a media corporation, I would make a post like this to dissuade people from using a VPN
Thereâs no need. Theyâre using one of a half-dozen obscure commercial services that mapped out all the exit point IP addresses and have blocked them half a decade ago.
If this is your opinion, then it is only reasonable for those of us who do find value in society and humanity to ignore your opinions on how those things should work. Your statement is, in essence, a resignation from those groups.
I spend about 10 hours a week at the gym pursuing activities that (best that I can tell what you mean by âsufferingâ) cause me suffering. I am better for it.
Yes. And since the consequences of having children is good, at least net good, thereâs not much of a choice to make.
At most, I simply have to avoid the sorts of abuse that would cause them to turn out like yourself and believe absurdities such as âhuman extinction is a goal one should pursueâ.
Because these sorts of genetic issues are exceedingly rare, and the people who have them and know they have them would have a very different attitude which you do not present.
Moreso, Iâve spoken to such people as yourself in person before, and the âconditionsâ they specify would be jokeworthy except that theyâre typically friends or at least acquaintances I wouldnât want to be blunt with. âMy grandparents have diabetes!â and such. WTF.
I live in an absurd world populated by absurd people hellbent on making certain it wonât be populated at all anymore.