this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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First-world problems will never get as bad as famine or Japanese occupation. Get a grip.
If you think 2040 USA is ever going to get anywhere as bad as WW2 genocidal occupation and famine, you are seriously uncalibrated.
Why do you assume I'm talking about the USA? Seems very Americabrained. Much of the world is not able to feed its own population and has to import a great deal of food. My country imports around half. In the event of global famine and caloric shortfall due to the consequences of climate change (eminently possible by 2040), what is going to stop famine for billions if capitalism and imperialism continue to exist? What is going to stop a state and political order that is becoming openly authoritarian and reactionary from carrying out genuine atrocities on a large scale to manage this crisis? You don't seem to have grasped how serious climate change is.
Do you think it's morally acceptable for Gazan Palestinians to have children, knowing that their children may live short, painful lives terminated by a violent death?
Was it acceptable for European Jews to have children during the Holocaust, knowing full well that they all might end up hanging on meat hooks?
Is it morally acceptable to have hope for the future?
Is it morally acceptable to resist genocide by having children?
Or do you think that anything less than a perfect life is unacceptable?
I'm not the person you were talking to, but in their defense, it doesn't look to me like they ever implied that any of what you listed is not "morally acceptable." By framing it that way, you're assigning them a position they never took and skirting around the valid issues that they are talking about. Acknowledging that anyone born today or in the coming decades will very likely see large scale ecological collapse that will only accelerate with time and the inevitable drastic decline in living standards (or even the very ability to live at all on a rapidly warming planet) doesn't necessarily have anything to do with whether a person thinks it's morally acceptable for victims of genocide to have children. It is worth giving pause and consideration to the kind of horrors that your children will have to face if you're in the privileged position of deciding on whether or not to make the conscious decision of having some (especially when there are so many already that need parents and don't have any). It is both stupid and reactionary to shame people for having children, especially if the people being shamed are "underprivileged" and facing dire circumstances. But taking into consideration the kind of future those children are almost certain to have should be part of a prospective parent's moral calculus.
I fundamentally disagree with so much of this I don't know where to even start, and as a communist and aspiring revolutionary who can't have children, it's downright offensive.
This is all nonsense, equating concern for the future and those who have to live in it with "nihilism" and pretending that the lack of such concern is "belief in a better future.*
"You can only afford to stop caring when you have no skin in the game." Disgusting. All those people who literally can't afford to have children have "no skin in the game." Fuck you.
"Having children forces you to care." Bullshit heaped on more bullshit. I have known many parents, some even in my own family, who didn't give a single shit about their children beyond what they could get from them or out of them. It's ridiculous and antirevolutionary to say that having children is a revolutionary act and it spits in the face of the many real revolutionaries who choose for themselves not to have children, despite very much wanting to out of their love for people and the health of their community that already is overburdened without enough adults to care for the children already in it. All of this also either pretends that adoption doesn't exist or worse, implies that parents who adopt don't or can't love their children every bit as much as biological parents. Fuck you even more for discounting the profound love that parents who made the decision to adopt have for their children.
According to you, I guess the quiverfull movement are the true revolutionaries. Not reactionary at all!
Recognizing the inevitability of what climate change is going to do to this planet and the consequences that future generations will face is not nihilism. Burying your head in the sand and pretending that climate change isn't the existential threat that it is because you "believe" that "a better future is possible" isn't revolutionary. It's just climate denial.
Funny, since that's exactly what you've been doing to everyone who responded to you, and was the reason I commented in the first place. But no, quoting what you said and responding to it is not misrepresenting what you said, just because you're now realizing how ridiculous what you said is when there's just a tiny bit of context around it.
So does loving adults. So does loving your community. So does loving people in general. So does loving non-human animals. None of that requires bringing more people into a hostile world, which is the crux of this entire conversation.
I never said you said that. You are just misrepresenting what I did say, which is that whether or not someone has biological children means fuckall as to whether a person "has skin in the game" or has the slightest fucking bearing on how committed a revolutionary a person can be. Which is all shit you did say. Stop trying to get out of what you actually said by lying about people misrepresenting you.
Everyone you've been accusing of anti-natalism have only said things that are entirely consistent with the adoption of children being a perfectly viable solution to the moral quandary of having biological children. Notice how the whole conversation is based on "bringing a kid into" this world? The issue here is biological reproduction. Adoption totally alleviates all the concerns of everyone you have been arguing with and calling nihilists, for fucks sake! So who is the one arguing against a spectre?
No, you just repeatedly claimed that having children is a virtue, and a revolutionary virtue at that. Just own up to what you said, jesus.
You completely discounted everything someone was saying about the effects of climate change that they are already suffering from, writing all of that off as nihilism because you "believe in a better future." That is some common and known climate denier tactics for trivializing climate change. You're not a climate denier? Then stop using their rhetoric to disparage comrades' concerns (and actual experiences) of climate change.
Liar. I even explicitly talked about not shaming anyone for having kids, especially underprivileged people, and the closest thing to anti-natalism I said was that prospective parents should "give pause and consideration" to what the future their children will live through is likely to look like. Ooooh, that's such a Bill Gates thing to say!! Fuck you. You whine about people misrepresenting what you're saying and then you pull that shit? Go back to reddit.
God what a fucking smuglord thing to say. I have thought about all of this. A lot more than you apparently have, given all the nonsense about "nihilism" you've been accusing some of us of while pretending you're the REAL revolutionary because you believe in procreation!
I wasn't, and even gave you the benefit of the doubt when you were blatantly misrepresenting the person you were replying to. I was much more polite than I should have been, until you started lying about people misrepresenting you and throwing around accusations of nihilism because some of us have the audacity to care about human suffering.
You fucking reddit-tier debate-bro loser. Shut the fuck up. What are you even doing on hexbear?