i don’t personally love seeing antinatalism stuff on my feed especially since it tends to attract really nasty proto-eugenics types
can we not, or at the bare minimum mark this nsfw?
I don’t want to continue my bloodline because of looming threat of climate change.
And also cause I’m ugly and have self-esteem issues.
What’s eugenics gotta do with it?
/gen is this sarcasm or are you not aware that you answered your question with your second sentence :(
Check my other reply.
Seriously I’ve never seen it discussed as a eugenics thing. Ive certainly seen it in population control discussions (obviously) but normally childfree and antinatalist discussion is focused on the self
I’m ugly and have self-esteem issues
That’s eugenics. Choosing not to reproduce for genetic reasons.
Choosing to not have kids yourself, for whatever reason, is definitely not eugenics. I don’t even get how you’d come to this idea.
Yeah, I don’t think you can really apply eugenics to yourself. It’s more something that one exerts on others.
yes. and to be clear, it’s not eugenics to make that choice yourself. problem starts as soon as it becomes about others though. seen far too many internet conversations go from
- “i won’t reproduce” to
- “it’s my responsibility not to reproduce” to
- “it’s our responsibility not to reproduce” to
- “the poor and disabled should be sterilized.”
this post is already getting pretty damn close to step 3 right there. reddit was awful for this so i encourage us to just be aware when stuff like this comes up.
Alternately: choosing to reproduce for genetic reasons. Positive eugenics is still eugenics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior.
Emphasis mine, though seems people rarely get called out for the latter.
I meant that in a ‘no woman would want me’ way and not in ‘I don’t want to propagate my genes’ way.
Curious about your age and social group. Pretty much everyone I associate with doesn’t want to have kids, usually citing the world their children would inherit. These definitely aren’t the type of people that support eugenics, in any way. Are you of the belief that we should be increasing the world’s population? If so, why?
Yeah I have no idea why this person is on about. Antinatalism has literally nothing to do with eugenics. It’s all about saying “fuck you I’m not going to make more cogs for the machine.”
I’ll be honest it was a huge question that hung over my wife and I when we were trying to decide whether to have kids or not. But we were in our mid 30s and it was a ‘now or never’ type situation.
Believe it not there is positives in raising kids. We’re definitely not judgemental of people who decide they don’t want to. But I love my kids more than I knew it was possible. And we’re trying to raise them with an understanding of the world that’s a bit broader than the ra-ra pro-capital values we were taught as kids.
no, i have no belief regarding the world’s population in either direction. this comment pretty much explains the rest of my position.
Huh, it won’t load. Does that mean I’m banned?
no it just means lemmy sucks probably 🙃
“Positive” eugenics is also eugenics, i.e. nations that want more (insert racial or ethnic group) and encouraging those groups to reproduce are engaging in eugenics.
i don’t disagree but positive eugenics is literally not the topic at hand that’s why no one had brought it up
The OP isn’t about eugenics of any sort. No one was talking about (negative) eugenics either until someone shoehorned it into the conversation.
I think it is intellectually dishonest to mention one type of eugenics while completely ignoring the other type, hence my bringing attention to a topic which has already been broached.
You need to go learn about Demographic Transition. The world’s population is naturally going to cap itself this century.
People choose to have less kids since there’s less of a need to invest in human capital. It’s a conscious choice, what’s your point?
i just have a feeling raising kids will get harder and harder, because the economy is getting worse and more unequal. even factoring out climate change, its expensive to afford even my own survival.
this community refuses to put slurs behind nsfw tags but idk i hope u can convince some
yeah i would also support putting slurs behind nsfw tags that kind of seems obvious to me wow
One perk of running my own instance is that I can just ban ppl that post slurs outside nsfw tags & without CWs 👀😎
shoutout to users having control of their own internet experience 😎
shoutout to spujb for being epic 😎😎😎
Or, you know, fight to see the system change hopefully within your lifetime and provide a better future for the generations to come. Because they will come, no matter whether you personally have kids or not. Your procreation choices are entirely up to you.
Yes, you are not responsible that someone else fucked up. That masses of people fucked up. You are not responsible to clean up the mess it caused. But, you know, you can still help.
Sounds like something the people on top would say to ensure I work more hours.
laughs in unemployment
Until I saw thia message, I entirely thought that this post was suggesting using a condom to choke oneself to death.
God that’s depressing
Exactly how it should be.
Getting a vasectomy is the biggest possible middle finger I could have hoisted to the parasite class
Vasectomy 🎉❤️🐇😘
For The Win.
Cost 650 dollars and saved tens of thousands.
$35 copay! Best money ever.
Hundreds of thousands
Tubes tied 4 years ago
Sorry - genuinely don’t understand this one. What’s the connection? No kids means… no future workers?
no kids means no slaves means no slavery
I’m not sure that any kids I might have are going to become slaves….
“Slave” like any word has contextual meaning. In this context I’m using it to refer to the workers who find themselves caught in a coercive political-economic system. Other similar words are wage slave, proletariat, or just working class. The point is that there is an involuntary aspect which likens it to slavery in the more narrow sense. (The narrow meaning of slave I have in mind being “someone forced into labor without pay”.)
All that said, in the U.S. there are still slaves as defined narrowly as people who are forced to work without pay. Slavery is used in prison systems, for example, and is not uncommon among human trafficking victims and immigrants (e.g. read Tomatoland). If your children are women, indigenous, black, are born or become disabled, or belong to various other minority statuses they are at even greater risk of getting swallowed into those forms of “literal” slavery as well.
I would also lump military service under “coercive”. The incentives are significant and can be life changing, but it still leads to people being considered government property at the end of the day
Ok. How about you say working class and not fucking “slave” then lol. It’s insulting to compare working at TJ Maxx for 40 hours a week to literal slavery.
there are different forms of slavery brah.
Yeah sure, as long as you don’t associate any meaning with the word.
Slavery is people literally kidnapped and forced to work in fields without wages or actual housing. Well, also, it’s kind of just when you make kind of close to minimum wage. Well, actually, it’s when you’re a computer programmer but you wish you got paid more. Who cares. It’s all the same word.
That is not the only form of slavery, and modern slavery very rarely resembles the specifics of the Atlantic slave trade.
Regardless, neither has very much to do with wage slavery, but it nonetheless remains a term in use and not a totally random use of the word.
why didn’t I say working class instead of slave? I don’t think most people have in mind the same meaning of “working class” as I intended, while the term slave immediately communicates the situation and the reasoning of the meme
Sure, my communication could have been more specific, but then it would have been more verbose as well. This is just how we use language, to communicate effectively. I don’t want to dismiss your point that being too glib or broad with our language can be offensive to some, but I also think the TJ Maxx worker is closer to that literal slave in the field than you think. To me, solidarity for the working class and cooperation is preferable and pragmatically more likely to achieve political successes than gatekeeping suffering.
What’s the minimum wage where you live?
More than literal slaves got.
In your view, what’s the most important feature of slavery that makes it slavery and not something else?
Not the same person but the answer is non-biological coercion of labor even if that’s not the way it’s often defined. If one lives in a system where they are compelled to sell their labor to survive so that someone can skim value from their labor this is a form of slavery.
I wonder what you mean by non-biological here, why is that a helpful distinction?
I don’t see why we couldn’t think of human coercion of other humans isn’t “biological” in some sense, so I also don’t understand what distinction exactly you are making with “non-biological”, but I might just be a bit slow today.
Still, I agree with you that coercion seems central to the idea of slavery.
I think it’s insulting to compare working 40 hours a week to afford to live to literal slavery
First of all, I think I completely understand where you are coming from. This was the same reaction I had when I heard words like “slave” or “slavery” being thrown around to describe contemporary working conditions.
Coming from a U.S. context where slavery overlaps with racism, it seemed even racially insensitive to me that an office worker would be compared to a slave, which in my mind was an African slave working in a cotton field.
The reality is that working conditions vary considerably in the U.S., so when we speak of the working class we include everyone from the undocumented immigrant who is forced to live in shacks and pick crops without pay or even basic access to sanitary or safe conditions all the way up to cozy financial workers who work in skyscrapers. Something as big as an economic or political system is a difficult thing to analyze and talk about.
But I noticed you did not answer my question. If you’re not open to a discussion I understand, at least I have had a chance to put some of my thoughts out there. I just want to offer the opportunity to discuss the topic if you would like to, but no worries either way.
I think it’s more like, can’t take advantage of me if I’m not born. It’s a little odd to me as well.
I got more of a, “You can’t continue to take advantage of us if we don’t have anymore children and kill off your workforce through gained apathy to our future.” Kinda vibe.
It helps if you look at it from the perspective of the capitalist class. Workers are a form of free capital. Capitalists don’t have to assume any of the burdens involved in creating life, raising a child, acculturating them to social standards that make them suitable workers, etc. They don’t even have to pay for the education or training that makes them capable as human capital in various industrial contexts.
All those costs are dumped onto the working classes, not just as parents (usually the woman) who are expected to deliver a baby, nurse the baby, raise the resulting child until they are the age of the majority all without any wages, access to benefits like retirement plans or health insurance, etc. but also onto taxpayers who subsidize the rest of the costs outside of the home such as their schooling and transportation to the schools.
There is a huge leverage here that the working class does not take by organizing the production of themselves. If we all agreed to not have children and demanded fair compensation for any new production of human capital, society would be much more just and the capitalist class would have less room to exploit us.
i think this is also the reason the far right pushes so hard against contraception and abortion.
also the marxist concept of reserve army of labour: the more imporvished and desperate workers are lining up for shitty jobs to survive, the less then can get away with paying.
It certainly does benefit the right to some extent, but I wouldn’t ignore the strategy that the right uses of exploiting Christians, and that’s where contraception and abortion come in as issues (stemming from theological convictions).
No future workers. No future consumers (including being bent over a barrel for essential goods). No future taxpayers. No future people to fight their wars.
That seems like super lame throwing in the towel.
You (and a great many number of people) disagree with it. I’m simply explaining the concept.
The point for people adopting this mindset isn’t to win. It’s too avoid losing. It’s a risk management strategy.
I don’t think you’ve avoided losing if you’ve made major life changes in order to not give some CEO down the line $50,000 in equity.
That sounds like the biggest form of losing I can think of.
Not “$50K” of equity, an entire lifetime(s) of equity. A child will have a lot more than $50K of impact of their lifetime if we are talking about first world developed nations.
Obviously it can make life easier on the would-be parents as well, but that isn’t really the main focus here.
I don’t think you’re really getting the point if the main thing you got hung up on there was “calculating the approximate value of a worker to a CEO during their tenure at a company”
I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything here. Just explaining what the position is. You obviously disagree with it, as does the majority of the population. It is an unpopular position.
The labor market is a market - that means it is regulated by supply and demand.
Now, there’s a demand for workers.
Now, think about what happens when the supply goes down - prices go up.
In other words: If there are fewer workers on the labor market, that means the price for labor goes up, in other words: wages go up.
Ok. That’s a very fine system if everyone in the country works in a button factory where they just push buttons on a keyboard all day and don’t actually produce anything.
What do you think businesses are… making products for??
I love inspirobot
It truly is amazing.
safe sex is the best sex I don’t care about that “it feels bad” crap you get to fuck someone else what else do you want? A cookie?
I mean… a cookie WOULD be nice.
I disagree, I prefer bareback. But I also only have sex with someone once we’re dating and exclusive, and we both get tested. Also my tubes are tied.
The good news is I consider one partner/testing/IUD, tubes tied etc to be “safe sex”
Yes. I want a cookie. Cookies are delicious!
Fuck yeah. I got fixed a few years after the ACA (Obamacare) was enacted. Prior to the ACA almost no providers covered voluntary sterilization, or there were difficult hoops to jump. Now I make a point to scream to all my ladies in the states, your health insurance is absolutely REQUIRED to provide coverage for female sterilization.
While this is noble of you, it is absolutely harder to get a hysterectomy than a vasectomy. Not because insurance won’t cover it, but because many doctors won’t do it unless you’ve had kids, or a husband’s “permission”, or are older.
Yeah I hear you, I live in the PNW and it still took me three obgyns before a doctor would finally approve. At the time I was a child free never pregnant 22 year old,. The doctor still required that I write a letter stating I understand it’s irreversible. Still pretty condescending imo. You aren’t wrong, it’s hard and depending where you are in the us impossible to access humane women’s healthcare.
But you are wrong to assume women seeking sterilizations all get hysterectomies. There are at least a handful of options, I got Essure but I think that it’s no longer on the market. I walked out of my appointment, still more of an ordeal for ladies but not necessarily as dramatic as a hysterectomy.
That’s a pretty big decision for a 22 year old. I understand your point about it feeling condescending, but I can’t help but feel like the doctor was doing you a massive favor. It may have been an inconvenience but that’s better than the chance of a lifetime of regret.
People have kids at 22. That’s a really big permanent decision too that completely changes the trajectory of one’s life. If having a kid at 22 is ok, then taking steps to make sure that you don’t have one should also be ok. Otherwise that is promoting a double standard.
A 22 year old is an adult. I should have the ability to make 100% of decisions regarding my body. If a mistake was made it was mine to make. I could get a middle finger tattooed on my face without a note. I can have a whole litter of babies and no one makes me write a letter. So imo you can kindly fuck off.
❤️antinatalism❤️
Tf?
I mean I don’t want any kids, but what the fuck is that supposed to mean? Eugenics for poor people?
Inspirobot
destroy the upper class,
take it up the ass.
