What is the acceptable level of tragedy to impart upon a non-consenting progeny? I vote for zero
You’d have to be immortal, first. Most kids are gonna live to see their own parents pass.
Tragedy is a part of life.
It’s easily avoidable tragedy, unaddressed by those who could do something about it, that’s the problem.
Even worse, there’s potentially extinction level tragedy happening right now, going unaddressed by those who can do something about it.
Tragedy is a part of life
Yes. And tragedy is categorically bad, and tragedies cannot be experienced by that which is not alive (i.e. non-sentient). Thusly, a total absence of (sentient) life would be a total absence of tragedies and vice versa; in other words, sentient life and tragedy are virtually biconditional. The continuation of sentient life and tragedy is wholly avoidable if the relevant capable parties were willing, and it can often be abated on a small scale on an individual basis.
Most kids though? I’m not going to go looking for stats but let’s just say 95% of children are outliving their parents right now. Awkward sentence there. I mean parents who are dying today, 95% of them didn’t outlive their children. I hope that makes sense. Yes that’s not how statistics work, I’m trying to make a point.
What’s an acceptable level to drop to before we say fuck this we’re done having kids? I knew I didn’t want kids when I was a kid, but I’m an outlier.
Let’s say 85% is the number for kids born today. I believe that’s already unacceptable. It’s so unnatural.
I think the number is worse than that. The mass climate migration/water wars are going to really get moving in the 2040s if not earlier. I don’t want to live through that. I definitely don’t want a child to live through that.
Historically we’ve tolerated MUCH higher rates of infant and child mortality than we do today. People will keep having kids even if most of them will die.
People will keep having kids even if most of them will die
“even if”? Biologically, knowing that most of your offspring are going to die is a reason to have as many kids as possible.
Agreed. It’s just now we have more options. At least we did before the Christian Nationalist Supreme Court made abortion illegal in half of the US. Even with this there are still more options and more education than in the distant past.
tolerated
I don’t think many women had a choice in the matter.
Thats one of the reasons i’m not having kids. I have a decent life by any metric but I had to work my ass off and face a tonne of resistance in my career. It always feels like I’m playing catch up with the cost of everything going up and up to the point where I’m just exhausted and depressed. Like, what is the point of living?! it honestly feels like theres just nothing left to enjoy anymore, everything has been monetized to hell and back. They told us as kids that you can be anything you want when you grow up, the future is bright and if you work hard you will be rewarded and its just not true. I can’t do that to another person, these problems are only getting worse with no end in sight.
That’s the point? The left get demoralized and the right can’t be because they have no morals. Its part of the reason right wingers tend to have a dozen children, it’s quite literally biblical drown them in numbers bullshit.
it’s quite literally biblical drown them in numbers bullshit.
Yes, it’s called (disgustingly) the “Quiverfull Movement”
Idiocracy is a documentary
It absolutely isnt
President Comacho has a problem, finds the most qualified person to fix it, does so (reluctantly) and then dosen’t take credit. This so divorced from reality that it should be concidred high fantasy.
That’s the only thing preventing it from being categorized as a documentary.
I thought about it and it’s just unfortunate kimbo slice died before he could eventually be president. He could have been the one.
Yeah, Idiocracy has this basic assumption that people are generally acting in good faith, even the ones with more selfish tendencies. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but didn’t someone else get frozen along with the MC and started out with a “fuck you, I’ll take care of myself however I need to” before later pivoting to a “we need to work together to save the world!”
Just like that Batman scene where the boat full of civilians and the boat full of criminals have the trigger for each others’ bombs. In the real world, I’d bet the guard that was handed the trigger on the prisoner boat would have pressed it almost immediately. And if he didn’t, there would have been a riot on the civilian boat to push it rather than a calm vote that decides against it, followed closely by the same thing on the prisoner boat. And many from both boats would have just bailed into the water rather than trust the other boat to not kill them. Joker would have been completely right in his prediction of how things would go. Especially in a city like Gotham. The catch should have been that the boats had their own trigger instead of each others’.
Would you press the button?
Well I’d assume Joker was lying and that each boat actually controlled their own bomb to fuck with the ones who didn’t press the button, because who would believe they didn’t press it? It would cause so much more chaos that way (actually max chaos might be to rig both buttons to blow up the prisoners, though I could also see reasons for him to rig up both to blow up the civilians).
I’m not even sure I’d be on the boat in the first place, though it’s easy to say that in hindsight, knowing how things turn out. I’d probably have made every effort to gtfo of Gotham earlier than that if I could.
But for an answer that doesn’t completely sidestep the question, I don’t know. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma and I know the optimal solution is if both sides trust each other, but I’d also have a hard time trusting both the other prisoner as well as the “guards” (in this case Joker) setting up the whole situation, knowing there’s no reason they need to be honest about the outcomes of each choice. Like even in the movie, Joker was going to just blow up at least one of the boats anyways when neither of them pressed the button.
Best bet would probably be to go for a swim.
What about you?
Sammy Hager? Sheesh.
The catch-22 is that if the people with environmental values don’t have kids, those values aren’t passed on to the next generation (unless they become teachers or media personalities).
For all those values, even in yourself. There’s no better motivator to make an effort for the future, than having a kid you want the best for. If you don’t have a kid, you’re not passing your environmental values, or you educational values, or all the other values you may have for what makes a better society. Nor do you have any reason to hold to them yourself.
I don’t mean to try to push anyone toward having kids, but if you do want to have kids but give up thinking the world is getting worse, that decision is part of the world getting worse. If you do want kids, there’s all sorts of opportunity to make this a better world for both yourself and them, and longer, and plenty of opportunity to make an actual difference
Just passing along the value of the bidet may be worth it, according to the comic
I don’t need to have a child to care about passing down a habitable planet to the next generation.
By that rote though everyone that has had children in the past has cared for their future and the future of the social and actual environment they will inherit. We wouldn’t be having this discussion if any semblance of that was true.
There are plenty of reasons to think this true, and plenty of reasons the world is getting better over time. Maybe not the next four years, and maybe not for everyone, but there are so many stays at global and national levels that have trended up for decades and continue to do so.
And before someone single-minded chimes in about Gaza. War and atrocity has always been an ugly part of our history and also has trended downward over the last several decades. Just the fact that we can get so worked up about ending atrocities somewhere else in the world that doesn’t affect us, is a great sign for the future
If you don’t have a kid, you’re not passing your environmental values, or you educational values, or all the other values you may have for what makes a better society. Nor do you have any reason to hold to them yourself.
…
Why does it have to be my kid for me to care?
Like actually. Are you seriously saying being a parent somehow intrinsically makes someone a better, more caring, and impactful, person? Or that parenthood is the only way to achieve true conviction? That’s literally not how any of this works.
Not bringing children into the world in no way prevents you from caring about making the world a better place, and acting to make it so. And doing the things that make the world better doesn’t functionally require having a kid. All it takes is some basic fucking decency.
Which is something people already have, but get taken away by the grind of survival or material success. That is maybe why you have this fucked up idea that people get it by having a kid, but in reality that’s just a huge life event that wakes some people up enough to take a look around and start caring again.
And passing good things on doesn’t require having descendants. If you’ve ever changed someones mind on something for the better, you’ve successfully passed on “values you may have for what makes a better society”. The person whose mind you changed doesn’t even need to be younger than you, thought doesn’t procreate through fucking genetics.
Plenty of parents are made no more profound than they were before by the act of procreating, and will conently continue to do nothing to improve the world. There are parents who will protect their own to the detriment of everyone else.
Kids though, if raised by caring parents, care from the start, but then have that heart crushed by society until they too have a kid of their own.
But in there is way for everyone to care, all the time.
The whole idea that it’s ok not to care about and deal with bad stuff unless you personally are somehow impacted is the whole reason we’re in this mess, and it’s perpetuated by people being forced to live in a constant scramble of stress and consumerism.
Not by people not having children.
I would add that the sentiment is also wrong in the other direction. I’ve personally encountered multiple parents and grandparents who hit me with the “well it won’t affect me, I’ll be long gone” reasoning regarding climate change.
So yeah. What a stupid and offensively self centered thing to say. If you personally didn’t give a shit about other people before, that’s actually a character flaw, not a rite of passage you complete by roping children into this mess
You don’t need to have kids to pass on values. The basic premise of your statement doesn’t hold up.
Well, like I mentioned you still need some sort of interaction with kids. Or maybe influence their parents enough to have them indirectly pass on those values you imparted on them. But I still think that if the smartest, kindest, most compassionate people among us stop having kids… well then that’s not great for that next generation. I’ve just always felt that giving up one of the primary factors of life, reproduction, seems very defeatist. But on the other hand, if someone genuinely doesn’t want children then by all means don’t.
Yeah this has always pissed me off with my non-parent friends. You really think you have that much influence on random kids you have fleeting interactions with? Unless you’re a teacher or in some other position where it’s your job to interact with kids, your opinions aren’t getting passed down to anyone.
They could always get more involved with their community. They don’t have to be a parent or have some specialized education to be a coach or volunteer at a youth center.
My scoutmaster did more to instill honesty, leadership ability, and respect for community in me than my mom or absent father ever did.
Now in my career I take mentoring new hires more seriously than anything other than general safety. My company hires a lot of young men with no direction and shitty childhoods. It’s not as good as getting to them when they’re young, but when I’m their only friend 200 or 800 miles from home I get the privilege to impart some important ideas and philosophies.
Scoutmaster is a job that works with kids, so I agree with you there. And mentoring is important too. But these things are less important than the impact you make as a parent. For most people the family is the anchor.
I know at least one friend that wants to adopt/foster once they’re ready, instead of having biological children.
The justification was similar to what you said, where they want to pass on their values / legacy, but don’t care about the genetic side
This is the answer. The problem is the huge expense to adopt at least in the US. Money that could make a better life for the child being adopted is taken by the state.
We need to streamline adoption while still vetting the potential parents as unlikely to be abusive.
lol fucking obliterated
Any society that doesn’t impart those values across the board to its citizens will devolve into shit regardless.
It’s basically just math.
People with zero values are going to fuck like rabbits and people with values aren’t.
If trash family has 5 kids they can’t take care of and a dad that leaves, that’s at least 4 really mad poor kids that are going to blame a lot on somesuch minority for their problems in 18 years.
It seems like vanishingly few people in the US care about the good of broader humanity anymore. Destroying the environment is fine as long as it creates jobs. Poisoning the water tables forever with fracking is fine as long as it makes cheap gas. Genocide was supported by both parties in the last election. Both parties are waving guns around even as school kids die in ever more frequent mass shootings. Its a race to the bottom and no one cares to change course.
If I ever decide to have kids then I’m adopting because I can’t in good conscience bring a life into this shitty world
Given the glut of unwanted children from our abortion prohibition, we’ll be needing a lot of new adoptive parents in the near future.
Babies get adopted quickly. It’s the older children who need homes.
Not foster kids. Foster parents/adoptions are always needing people, even babies. Sometimes the babies have to sleep in the DHR office, because there’s nowhere for them to go.
Good to know. Thank you for sharing.
Talked to a social worker - kids in DHS care sleep in homeless shelters, hospitals, DHS offices. Teen group homes are inherently damaging to them; I’ve never seen a good one.
Foster teens. Short term commitment. They will have severe trauma and can be hard to deal with, but you would be amazed at how they respond if you can genuinely provide love. Love and Logic is fucking magic.
If you can’t foster, you can be a child advocate. Many states have CASA programs. Visit the kid once a month, let them know someone cares, and tell the court what you think is best for them. Even just something like a phone call “hey, kid left something behind at the group home - any way we could get that moved?”
Or even just someone to protect them from the group home. A dozen seriously traumatized kids, with staff paid less than $15/hr on a week of training. A place that provides opportunities for people to be around children, who are already isolated and have limited access to supportive adults… and financial incentives to cover anything up.
I don’t think there’s much hope for the future, but we can focus on the now and helping the children who are already here.
Ceaușescu’s Romania
Ironically, if temperature gets to a high degree enough, so much water vapor, methane and carbon dioxide will be on the atmosphere capturing heat (which will eventually escape), but more importantly, reflecting it on the upper atmosphere layers, that we will freeze to death before even feeling the burn LMAO 🤣
I fucking wish
Water vapour is quite good at absorbing heat, and it insulates the atmosphere too(it’s often warmer at night if its cloudy), would it reflect enough heat for that sort of cooling to happen? Sounds like something that would take a lot longer to happen than the time it will take to get too hot for us to survive without living underground or something.
Im amazed at how much X has had kids. Seems nuts. Then I realize I might have done it if I had went 4 years to college and started working right after and if within a few years made a family raising type of wage. That double major and one year in a PhD may have saved me.
Craziest thing about this graphic is that it leaves so many major issues off while also covering so much horseshit.
Was gonna say, wheres the fascism going retro?
no board is big enough to put all the problems
I mean it’s clearly a pandemic era comic. The whole no toilet paper thing and deadly viruses.
Our parents and grandparents had kids - depending on your age - when there was a world war and tens of thousands of people were dying daily in their country, or in the 50 years where the world was always on the brink of getting destroyed in a nuclear apocalypse if one of the two world powers made the wrong move. Were they dumb?
Not to downplay on the current emergencies which are existential and terrifying, especially seeing how little as a species we are doing to address them - but they are a bit of a silly reason not to have kids.
If you don’t want kids don’t have them, you do you :) far too many people have children out of peer or societal pressure or just carelessness, and we could really use much fewer of those, considering the societal damage of absent or careless parenting. But just be honest with yourself, no need to blame viruses and “no toilet paper”.
How many of those kids were intentional though? Birth control and abortion were restricted or just not available. I’m sure most of the people who had kids in the past did not regret it but I’m not going to pretend they meant to get pregnant.
And the toilet paper thing is obviously a joke. A bit of levity in the horror.
Sure, those were separate arguments. The intentionality part was about contemporary, potential parents.
Lol having a planet that won’t sustain us because we’re actively murdering it is absolutely the silliest reason ever not to have kids. Go on, progeny! Enjoy your water wars and starvation! It would’ve been incredibly silly not to create you just so you could endure it.
Were they dumb?
Yes.
Woah handle all that edge with care!
I hate that it’s apparently the edgelord opinion to think bringing a child into a world where they will suffer is a bad thing. Anyone having a child is either a victim, an idiot, or a sociopath.
Being self centered and tribal is more the norm than ever before in my lifetime. Its going to be a very bumpy next 50 years for people who come into the world now.
It might’ve been more clear if you just said “I don’t think they were dumb. Therefore…”
lol, yes Millennials and Gen Z are trying so much harder to fix the situation by voting for change… ohhh wait
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/yes-trump-improved-young-men-drew-young-women-rcna179019
Yeah I’m afraid that the lesson is that Gen Z is not actually the future, they are going to repeat the past. What makes me sad is that they should have been the future but social media made sure that didn’t happen.
Did social media make sure that didn’t happen, or did the fact that virtually every generation ultimately repeats the mistakes of the one before it ensure that didn’t happen?
That they could have been so much better without Zuckerberg, Savage, Peterson, etc.
but the system is rigged or my vote doesn’t count or genocide joe or some stupid shit
Look at this guy thinking that we can vote our way out of this when we only have two, corporate sponsored, candidates.
This entire thread sums up the utter misery of Lemmy.
Exactly. I love it. These people are basically self pruning their evolutionary branches all by themselves!
There should be a Darwin awards category for this
Intelligence pruning itself out of a malicious environment isn’t really a great showcase of evolution.
It’s not technically incorrect - we are changing, but a species actively taking steps backwards by inflating itself with idiots doesn’t quite hit that stronger/faster/smarter progression that the concept of evolution implies.
These are darwinism’s death throes.
It wouldn’t be intelligence pruned. Plenty of smart people are committed to fighting for humanity, are prospering, and won’t succumb to doomer echo chambers.
Big time Homer energy in this thread.
I wish their children and grandchildren etc the best of luck in finding comfort in the hellscape we’re building for them. I have a feeling they won’t find it in the knowledge that their grandpappy owned a boat or some shit, but I’m sure they’ll be able to science-miracle their way out of all the problems the generations before them allowed to bottle up to a breaking point.
My own children will be happily non-existing, cuz I love them far too much to cast them into this dumpsterfire, especially as pawns against a horde of morons doing their damnedest to strip everyone’s rights.
So…have kids in a dying world so you have mating success? That’s an asinine reason to procreate.
Evolution determined by mating is basically over for humans. In the time it takes a species to meaningfully change, humans will be genetically engineered.
I’m all up for that
It’s a fuckin doomer tumor.
garbage health care
mass shootings
violent racism
When we go down we are taking all of you with us.
Don’t worry we know
RIP Alaska, Hawaii, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula
Look at this guy who thinks the USA invented racism and holds a monopoly on it.
In Europe it’s just sparkling “let them down in the Mediterranean and/or make sure they stay in their own neighborhoods.”
I was going to say… I don’t see the UK anywhere on this map
Not the same level of problems with mass shootings in the UK. And whilst I take the point about healthcare it’s a very different kind of issue, and if you get triaged conveniently it can work out for you… Really just depends what you need and how old you are, but at least having a baby and keeping it alive is fairly well covered
The comic is very America-centric if you look at the problems mentioned in totality.
I mean, the UK has 2 out of 3 of those. And most countries have the violent racism.
the UK has 2 out of 3 of those
Change “shooting” to “knifing” and its 3 for 3. The UK has a huge hooliganism problem. The country is rife with domestic violence. But no (non-police) guns!
Most countries have racism, some have violent racism… and there are some in which terrorist organizations like KKK are freely roaming the streets and are ok for some reason.
Anyway, it feels wierd to speak shit of the USA when there currently are countries actively working on ethnic cleansing.
Most countries have less violent racism now than at any other point in history.
That bar you’re bragging about stepping over is subterranean.
r/iam14andthisisdeep
The US is far from the only country with violent racism. In terms of healthcare, the privatization. The Canadian healthcare system is being increasingly enshittified by conservatives up here, too.
Kudos to those not having kids. I’ve had two recently fully knowing it’s going to be tough on them, but I’m going to do the responsible thing and teach them self defense and how to disrespect authority.
Plus as a bonus, I’m going to get those additional family members when we’re protecting the homestead from raiders.
No, noone is under any obligation to do so.
Remember what they say on airplanes. Secure your own mask before helping others.
I’m not.
