I’d guess that having children, in the long run is more environmentally harmful than you eating meat the rest of your life.
This just strikes me as silly. What is the “environment” but children of various species? Obviously an environmentally harmonious life is best, but life isn’t just what the environment is for, it’s what the environment is. This is the same mindset as people who have a couch that no one’s allowed to sit on.
When one species growing prevents others from doing the same there is a problem in that ecosystem. For example too many wolves in an area can cause a reduction in prey which is also bad for the wolves. We’re just smart enough to see what we’re doing is harmful to the world around us and we can do things to limit our damage.
And not enough wolves causes an unchecked increase in prey which is bad for the rest of the environment. As I said, harmonious coexistence is best. We have the knowledge and tools to live harmoniously. My problem is with the trend of un-nuanced universal anti-natalism.
That’s not really a salient argument. Can you think of even one place where it would be appropriate to say there aren’t enough humans? Besides that, humans and wolves have completely different impact on the environment.
Additionally, after the advent of agriculture and industrialization, I think there is a fair argument to be made that humans are no longer capable of living an environmentally harmonious life. Think of all the resource depletion and fossil fuel consumption required just for you to post that argument on the internet.
Until we regain the ability for, not just individuals, but entire societies to live in harmony with the environment, I believe there is a strong argument for reducing your impact by not having children.
All I’m saying is that there’s a logical breakdown at play. Any argument in favor of “the environment” had to be based on the value of individual life. I’m not even saying that we shouldn’t be moderating our population growth, we should. I’m just saying the environmentally friendly angle is a logically strange argument, from first principles.
As does every other life form, given the chance. We are the only one, that we know of, which even has a concept of conservation. We have the power to consciously regulate our behavior.
In the end, my point is that either life is valuable for its own sake, including humans, or it isn’t, including the rest of the ecosystem. Any philosophy which posits that the existence of other life forms is more valid than that of humans is foundationally inconsistent. I’m certainly not saying that human life is more valid than others, but either life is valid or out isn’t. Humans aren’t special one way or the other.
That’s just garbage talk. Sure we can enjoy life now and not consider the future of the planet but is your life more worth than the future of our own species? I find it deeply concerning that we as humans know what to do to not go extinct, buy don’t do it.
I don’t expect all human reproduction to just stop. But cutting down on the human population by either having no children or only one, would substantially reduce the load humans place on the planet and mayne even increase quality of life. Not to mention that it would improve the chances of other species to thrive.
Sure. But your framing of not having children as “environmentally friendly”, if embraced, results in only the unconscientious people having kids. That’s literally the premise of Idiocracy.
There is absolutely no scenario in which everyone stops having children. If everyone who could be convinced not to have children is convinced, there will still be plenty of human beings.
As I’ve said, if you convince everyone who considers their environmental impact to not have children, who does that leave having children? What becomes of the environment when it’s only the environmentally negligent raising future generations?
I find a lot of people can kind of fall down from this path, into anti-natalism, and then malthusianism, and then ultimately eco-fascism and eugenics, through what I like to call the “idiocracy deduction”. Name pending. The sort of idea that, if stupid people are the only one having kids, only stupid people will promulgate, and then we’ll all be stupid. Substitute stupid, for whatever political ideological group you don’t really like (or even minority group), bam, shit’s wacked. So, logically, stupid people, or, my political opposition, or, people I don’t like/who can’t be trusted to have kids, shouldn’t be allowed to have them. After all, you know, it’s more ecologically conscientious to not have kids, so we should just kind of force everyone to not have kids. A lot of this is also going to come down to like, third world countries tending to have higher birth rates because of higher infant mortality, and also tending to have higher emissions, and those two are connected because ???. It’s sort of the inverse of christian conservatives who want to force every white anglo saxon protestant into having 70 billion kids, and then do things like ban abortion on those grounds.
I think there’s also this like, really stupid idea that if we have more people, somehow those people will not have any jobs, based on some naturalistic concern. This is stupid. It’s less that we’ve surpassed the planet’s carrying capacity, and more that we all are just fucking morons who live in an 18th century economic hellsystem. That’s the core of why mathusianism doesn’t work, because there is no “hard” carrying capacity to the planet. People in ancient times had to occupy much larger portions of land in order to support themselves, because their crops were not selectively bred to maximize their calories, and because of diseases and shit, which is part of why agriculture sucked back in the day compared to hunter-gathering, (even though in practice the two aren’t really that different, hunter-gatherers just move around more and thus have access to that larger space which they need to “grow their crops”). In any case, you’d have to build some argument that we’ve entered a period of natural technological stagnation, which is pretty fucking hard to do because you have to thoroughly discount any conceivable future technologies that might help, and you have to discredit the amount of blame resting on the current economic system.
So, yeah, I dunno. I find the whole dealio kind of dumb and stupid. Seems like an overcorrection, kind of like those hardcore atheists that were everywhere in the 2000’s and 2010’s, and you could tell they’d all grown up being raised by radical fundamentalist christian parents or whatever, or just that christians are fucking annoying (big if true), and then have kind of a limited perspective, even just on all religions, because of that, on top of not really being politically different enough from those christians, if you actually boiled it all down. Everyone’s a neoliberal, at the end of the day, everyone’s buying in to the same premises and arguments, even when they disagree on some issue, and then they all fail to see the bigger picture and just kind of end up splintering themselves into more and more radical extremist positions.
Actually you can stop reading here (if you even read all of that, good luck), but I kind of wonder if that’s just like, an inevitable facet of late stage capitalism. It sort of seems to me like the ideological version of spam, which I tend to think of a lot as an analogy for capitalism “maximizing efficiency”. Spam is nonsense, nobody wants to read it, and yet, it will inevitably eat up all the bandwidth if left unchecked, because those with the most economic resources want to cut out all other avenues of communication, and, “make efficient use of the bandwidth”. The fact that everyone eventually becomes kind of radicalized and pushed into these nonsensical extremist positions, totally lacking nuance, the fact that, you know, people slip into fascism, it seems kind of along the same lines. People get pushed to what the maximum extent of their political ideology will allow, through some mechanism, despite liberalism kind of inherently being a modest and compromising ideology at heart, one that becomes incoherent if you actually push it to any logical extremes. I dunno if there’s anything there, about how people’s conceptions of things gets shaped by like, the larger economic system at work.
Upvote for partial agreement, but why the attack on atheism? It’s not extreme to not believe, in fact, it sounds utterly ridiculous that you want moderate or liberal people to believe a little bit in fairy tales, but not too much. There simply is no middle ground with regard to religion, either you delude yourself or you accept the obvious implausibility, lack of evidence and irrationality inherent to them.
Theyre talking about atheists in 00s10s that were ex-Christians who were still closed minded and hateful, and essentially using the same flawed evangelism tactics as Christians (not great). They don’t recognize that not all religions are the same, that different ones have different goals, and never considered why someone would choose to practice any form of spirituality, labelling it as a form of religion.
This just strikes me as silly. What is the “environment” but children of various species? Obviously an environmentally harmonious life is best, but life isn’t just what the environment is for, it’s what the environment is. This is the same mindset as people who have a couch that no one’s allowed to sit on.
When one species growing prevents others from doing the same there is a problem in that ecosystem. For example too many wolves in an area can cause a reduction in prey which is also bad for the wolves. We’re just smart enough to see what we’re doing is harmful to the world around us and we can do things to limit our damage.
And not enough wolves causes an unchecked increase in prey which is bad for the rest of the environment. As I said, harmonious coexistence is best. We have the knowledge and tools to live harmoniously. My problem is with the trend of un-nuanced universal anti-natalism.
That’s not really a salient argument. Can you think of even one place where it would be appropriate to say there aren’t enough humans? Besides that, humans and wolves have completely different impact on the environment.
Additionally, after the advent of agriculture and industrialization, I think there is a fair argument to be made that humans are no longer capable of living an environmentally harmonious life. Think of all the resource depletion and fossil fuel consumption required just for you to post that argument on the internet.
Until we regain the ability for, not just individuals, but entire societies to live in harmony with the environment, I believe there is a strong argument for reducing your impact by not having children.
All I’m saying is that there’s a logical breakdown at play. Any argument in favor of “the environment” had to be based on the value of individual life. I’m not even saying that we shouldn’t be moderating our population growth, we should. I’m just saying the environmentally friendly angle is a logically strange argument, from first principles.
And what do we do with the prey when there are too many? Let them keep living or sell more hunting licenses?
We moderate, not eradicate. The middle path, not extremism.
Choosing not to have a child is extremism?
Didn’t say that. Un-nuanced universal anti-natalism is extremism.
No one mentioned that but you. No one here is asking for that or suggesting it.
That is the implication of
Humans have not only sat on that couch; we’ve slept on it, puked on it, taken a dump on it, taken it outside and set fire to it.
As does every other life form, given the chance. We are the only one, that we know of, which even has a concept of conservation. We have the power to consciously regulate our behavior.
In the end, my point is that either life is valuable for its own sake, including humans, or it isn’t, including the rest of the ecosystem. Any philosophy which posits that the existence of other life forms is more valid than that of humans is foundationally inconsistent. I’m certainly not saying that human life is more valid than others, but either life is valid or out isn’t. Humans aren’t special one way or the other.
That’s just garbage talk. Sure we can enjoy life now and not consider the future of the planet but is your life more worth than the future of our own species? I find it deeply concerning that we as humans know what to do to not go extinct, buy don’t do it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity
Where exactly does the future of the species come from if no one has kids?
It’s not black or white. Or on and off
I don’t expect all human reproduction to just stop. But cutting down on the human population by either having no children or only one, would substantially reduce the load humans place on the planet and mayne even increase quality of life. Not to mention that it would improve the chances of other species to thrive.
Sure. But your framing of not having children as “environmentally friendly”, if embraced, results in only the unconscientious people having kids. That’s literally the premise of Idiocracy.
There is absolutely no scenario in which everyone stops having children. If everyone who could be convinced not to have children is convinced, there will still be plenty of human beings.
As I’ve said, if you convince everyone who considers their environmental impact to not have children, who does that leave having children? What becomes of the environment when it’s only the environmentally negligent raising future generations?
I find a lot of people can kind of fall down from this path, into anti-natalism, and then malthusianism, and then ultimately eco-fascism and eugenics, through what I like to call the “idiocracy deduction”. Name pending. The sort of idea that, if stupid people are the only one having kids, only stupid people will promulgate, and then we’ll all be stupid. Substitute stupid, for whatever political ideological group you don’t really like (or even minority group), bam, shit’s wacked. So, logically, stupid people, or, my political opposition, or, people I don’t like/who can’t be trusted to have kids, shouldn’t be allowed to have them. After all, you know, it’s more ecologically conscientious to not have kids, so we should just kind of force everyone to not have kids. A lot of this is also going to come down to like, third world countries tending to have higher birth rates because of higher infant mortality, and also tending to have higher emissions, and those two are connected because ???. It’s sort of the inverse of christian conservatives who want to force every white anglo saxon protestant into having 70 billion kids, and then do things like ban abortion on those grounds.
I think there’s also this like, really stupid idea that if we have more people, somehow those people will not have any jobs, based on some naturalistic concern. This is stupid. It’s less that we’ve surpassed the planet’s carrying capacity, and more that we all are just fucking morons who live in an 18th century economic hellsystem. That’s the core of why mathusianism doesn’t work, because there is no “hard” carrying capacity to the planet. People in ancient times had to occupy much larger portions of land in order to support themselves, because their crops were not selectively bred to maximize their calories, and because of diseases and shit, which is part of why agriculture sucked back in the day compared to hunter-gathering, (even though in practice the two aren’t really that different, hunter-gatherers just move around more and thus have access to that larger space which they need to “grow their crops”). In any case, you’d have to build some argument that we’ve entered a period of natural technological stagnation, which is pretty fucking hard to do because you have to thoroughly discount any conceivable future technologies that might help, and you have to discredit the amount of blame resting on the current economic system.
So, yeah, I dunno. I find the whole dealio kind of dumb and stupid. Seems like an overcorrection, kind of like those hardcore atheists that were everywhere in the 2000’s and 2010’s, and you could tell they’d all grown up being raised by radical fundamentalist christian parents or whatever, or just that christians are fucking annoying (big if true), and then have kind of a limited perspective, even just on all religions, because of that, on top of not really being politically different enough from those christians, if you actually boiled it all down. Everyone’s a neoliberal, at the end of the day, everyone’s buying in to the same premises and arguments, even when they disagree on some issue, and then they all fail to see the bigger picture and just kind of end up splintering themselves into more and more radical extremist positions.
Actually you can stop reading here (if you even read all of that, good luck), but I kind of wonder if that’s just like, an inevitable facet of late stage capitalism. It sort of seems to me like the ideological version of spam, which I tend to think of a lot as an analogy for capitalism “maximizing efficiency”. Spam is nonsense, nobody wants to read it, and yet, it will inevitably eat up all the bandwidth if left unchecked, because those with the most economic resources want to cut out all other avenues of communication, and, “make efficient use of the bandwidth”. The fact that everyone eventually becomes kind of radicalized and pushed into these nonsensical extremist positions, totally lacking nuance, the fact that, you know, people slip into fascism, it seems kind of along the same lines. People get pushed to what the maximum extent of their political ideology will allow, through some mechanism, despite liberalism kind of inherently being a modest and compromising ideology at heart, one that becomes incoherent if you actually push it to any logical extremes. I dunno if there’s anything there, about how people’s conceptions of things gets shaped by like, the larger economic system at work.
Upvote for partial agreement, but why the attack on atheism? It’s not extreme to not believe, in fact, it sounds utterly ridiculous that you want moderate or liberal people to believe a little bit in fairy tales, but not too much. There simply is no middle ground with regard to religion, either you delude yourself or you accept the obvious implausibility, lack of evidence and irrationality inherent to them.
Theyre talking about atheists in 00s10s that were ex-Christians who were still closed minded and hateful, and essentially using the same flawed evangelism tactics as Christians (not great). They don’t recognize that not all religions are the same, that different ones have different goals, and never considered why someone would choose to practice any form of spirituality, labelling it as a form of religion.