Not that I blame them, as someone who doesn't want kids, those types are annoying.
i mean you're not far off base except that they have valid points, not "excuses." we are the harbingers of death to countless thousands of species and ecosystems. never being born means never experiencing happiness but also never experiencing suffering, which is a net neutral, as opposed to being born with only a chance of happiness and absolute certainty of suffering, a net negative. and the selfishness of making a new child when there are thousands of children who already have sentience and need a parent.
basically if you think you should adopt/rescue an animal instead of paying someone to breed more, and then apply that to humans, you're antinatalist. it really has little to do with what other people expect of your reproductive goals. that is on a personal basis depending on how much one cares what others think.
as a related side note, im getting my tubes removed tomorrow morning :floppy-parrot:
never being born means never experiencing happiness but also never experiencing suffering, which is a net neutral, as opposed to being born with only a chance of happiness and absolute certainty of suffering, a net negative. and the selfishness of making a new child when there are thousands of children who already have sentience and need a parent.
well said comrade
and congrats, hope the process goes well. :af-heart:
"To be aware is to be miserable and I resent my parents for wrenching me from the infinite peace of oblivion" has been a great way of getting out of conversations in general.
Anti-anti-natalists are just people with children making philosophical excuses to assuage their guilt about bringing a child into H E L L W O R L D . Change my mind.
Anti-anti-anti-natalists are just contrarians making philosophical excuses to stir shit up and distract us all from the spectacle of a dying planet. Change my mind.
Anti-anti-anti-anti-natalists are the only true force for good here, trying to root the discourse back in material existence.
If I could kill every Anti-anti-anti-anti-natalists, I… wouldn’t… That’s right, I’m not some mass murdering monster or Hitler type figure. Yet that’s how the admin team sees and treats me. In reality I’m actually a pretty nice progressive girl. I’m just sick of all this stupid shit. MANY more people are too they just do not want to be instabanned and referred to as Anti-anti-anti-natalists by a community they once felt welcome in. I’ve seen so many people leave the site and even have babies. I know of at least one person that considered joining the Anti-anti-natalists as a direct result of the past week. Never would have happened if we didn’t openly pander to the types of people that shit themselves during “natalist breeders” meetings and blame the lack of diapers. I think we all know the type. The people getting banned are not bad people. YOU are vilifying US, not the other way around. I hope banning random people to get your tiny little dick hard is worth turning this site into an absolute dumpster fire. One day in the near future this website will be nothing but that cuck based ball and the horrible and undeserving 0.01% of Anti-anti-anti-natalists that need and mandate everything to constantly about them. That require their offspring being tucked away and kissed. The people that kill everything they’re apart of. Fascist losers that ought to be ridiculed nonstop. Nobody would go near them on real life. And that’s a fact! If you agree with me, DM me on Reddit. u/jarnvidr. I have so much more to say.
Why would I have kids when I could adopt kids, and why would I adopt kids when taking care of kids sounds like absolute hellworld
As someone who is child free, I resent the anti Natalist comparison. Very different
Edit: for more details on my views, see my post below, or DM me on Reddit at u/jarnvider, as I have so much more to say about Anti-anti-anti-natalists
Yeah, I think antinatalists start from 'I don't want to have children' and somehow trick themselves into a philosophical position that is like two steps away from pure misanthropy.
What about those of us who think you can have kids if you think it is the correct decision to make, but are otherwise misanthropists?
The only materialist analysis in this entire thread
Antinatalism as a philosophical exercise is quite interesting I think, however the misanthropy and child-hate that are sometimes co-morbid with the belief are uncool and counter-revolutionary.
I understand not wanting kids, but antinatalism is just dumb to me. What's the point of building a better future if we're just gonna stop having kids? People are not going to stop fucking. When there's fucking, there is sometimes babies.
It just sounds like a bunch of people that hate themselves and want to project it in a way that doesn't immediately sound misanthropic.
to be fair I can't say I've seen many antinatalists pushing it onto others. we realize its a bit radical and deeply unpopular. it's more of a personal belief that is discussed to bring to light the heavy biases toward procreation that can make childfree people feel misunderstood and downright judged or excluded for exercising choice. like someone said elsewhere in this post, a lot of, if not most, children are unplanned and parents who can't really afford to give them great lives are heavily encouraged by everyone around them to let their mistake rule the rest of their lives. its not surprising that unexpecting parents often decide that parenthood is great, because no one wants to regret irreversible choices.
We still have incentive to make a better world because we know most people won't stop having kids. Duh.
It isn't fucking radical lmfao the main argument I see with antinatalism is "kids can't give consent to be born and the world is shit so don't have kids" which is true on the surface, but the actual radical solution isn't to eliminate the children FFS it's to eliminate the suffering.
Any answer to that question that doesn't ultimately end at that answer is just misanthropic and unhelpful.
Thats a fair point, but I don't think its possible to eliminate suffering. Even if we perfect global communism and no one has to suffer for lack of material needs or opportunities, suffering still has to happen. Interpersonal conflict, grieving lost loved ones, illness, natural disaster, etc etc. The next best thing would be to remove the sufferers, no?
No you are correct that elimination of suffering is an unattainable goal. At the same time is it attainable to stop the creation of life? Also no and you'll even see anti natalists in this very thread admit that. What's the point of antinatalism if someone believes at the same time that suffering cannot be eliminated and the creation of life cannot be stopped?
Also the idea that the next best thing to do is remove the sufferers is some serious lib shit. I can absolutely see libs saying "we're not killing the homeless, we're stopping their suffering"
It's the exact word games they love to play.
Comparing alive people to nonexistent ones is a slippery slope and not what I said, but you're right in that you can always count on libs to misconstrue. The point of antinatalism is that it's purely a personal choice. It isn't an evangelical belief, but a discussion to help people who have those opinions see that it's a valid lifestyle, in the face of a lot of hounding and condescendence from people with children.
One-child / two-child policy was the real centrism all along.
No, that's bad too, and it arguably didn't even work. You can look at the start of the one-child policy in China and similar population control policies the U.S. essentially forced on India, and it took about a decade after their implementation to see population growth rates start to drop.
What does work to reduce population growth -- voluntarily -- is giving women rights, education, economic independence, etc. Turns out when women have a meaningful choice in the matter they usually have fewer kids.
I think that it is fundamentally wrong to make a massive decision for another person without any input or consent from them. That is what it is to create a child. You are just deciding for another person that they must now accept the responsibilities of existing for the next 80 years or so, and that comes with the added detail that you'll make them feel bad about it if they want to opt out at any point before that.
It's just wrong. Fundamentally, without any context about my own feelings on raising children, it is the morally wrong thing to do to another person. If you want to raise kids, go adopt a kid.
Well you haven't established that consent is necessary for every action. For instance, I can take my neighbors trash to the curb if they are about to miss the garbage truck. Almost all would consider this an act of kindness. So is it possible giving something life is an act of kindness that does not require consent?
Taking someone's trash out for them is not a massive decision about their life the way forcing someone to exist for (ideally) 80 years or so is.
Furthermore, it is an action almost certain not to cause any suffering whatsoever, while the act of creating a child is 100% certain to cause suffering to that child.
Okay fine.
But even if you are correct about this idea, do you really want it to rise to prominence? Do you think the world would be a better place if people thought this idea? I don't mean to sound dramatic, but do you really want humanity to go gently into that good night?
completely 100% irrelevant to everything, because that would never happen.
A famous piece that touches on antinatalism deals with just that! httpss://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah It's short and an enjoyable read imo. If you check it out I'd be interested to hear what ya think.
Arguably you're talking about something like implied consent in that situation, which wouldn't necessarily translate to having a child.
Pretty much my feelings on the topic. That said, I have a hard time blaming people for having kids. There are a million factors that contribute to people having them that are impossible to boil down to "you're selfish".
it still does boil down to selfishness, even if they dont see it that way. at the end of the day, if they thought about it at all, they decided that their desire to procreate is more valuable than the autonomy of the child they would be creating that way . thats just selfish however you look at it
i dont hate people for having kids of course. in the grand scheme of bad things you can do, it's pretty mild. it's still on the list of bad things you can do, though
I guess I see selfishness as a trait you can only attribute to people who understand the consequences of what they're doing and choose to do it anyways. For that reason, I don't call people "selfish" who have kids because they lack access to contraception or because they sincerely believe that bringing more kids into the world is legitimately good and that they're doing the right thing, whether that be due to ignorance, religious belief, societal norms, or necessity for their own survival. The "desire to procreate" isn't always literally just the desire to create a new person in your own image and I think it's really reductive to say it is.
I still think it's wrong regardless of who is doing it, but I would only call it selfish when it's the intentional plan of educated people who have their material needs met and understand that whatever happiness they're creating is likely to be equalled if not outweighed by suffering. I realize that's a load of caveats, but that's how I see it.
Speaking from personal experience, there's a disturbing overlap in the rhetorical venn-diagram of antinatalists, malthusians, voluntary extinctionists, eco-fascists, and first-world chauvinists.
If you don't want kids, just say you don't want kids; it's your prerogative.
I have a kid, and love my kid more than anything, and would never encourage anyone to have a kid.
