to form babby, or not to form babby

Use offer code ILXOR for 20% off your first month

Use offer code SILBY for 100% off your first babby

wow harsh

love to spread

Forming a babby and raising it to adulthood is a massive undertaking and I humbly submit that you will learn a lot about yourself and human nature, however that is also the case with any similar scale investment of time and energy so the way the question is framed shouldn’t be forming babby vs not but rather vs whatever else you could do with the massive amount of time and energy you would save. You could go for a PhD or live in a foreign country for a few years or lots of things that would pay dividends in new experiences. Admittedly this overlooks the main reason to reproduce which is to have a child to love and cherish assuming all goes well.

There’s still nobody arguing positively that it’s in a child’s best interest to be born regardless of impact on its parents.

glad you consider your children equivalent to macaroni collage of boats

silby, was this meant to be a piss-take of the quality of specific art I've previously created, or a general assumption that anything I had created would be inherently without value?

if i'm at a party with a friend and there's a good a onion dip, i say 'friend, you have to try this onion dip'. if my friend doesn't like the onion dip, i say 'fuck you, friend, i know a good onion dip'. the earth is the party. existence is the onion dip. my kids have got to try this onion dip. they don't enjoy it? maybe some literal onion dip will help.

that can't possibly be argued convincingly so if that's the condition you need satisfied, you "win" I guess. xxp

consider having kids so that they might win like that one day

Babies are great for use as emergency footballs

There’s still nobody arguing positively that it’s in a child’s best interest to be born regardless of impact on its parents.

this is because the question is stupid and based on a faulty premise - prior to being born the child does not exist, ergo they do not have any "best interest"

kinder you wrote:

I don't create anything in case it makes anyone feel worse than if I hadn't

― kinder, Thursday, February 13, 2020 2:21 PM (yesterday)

it seems ridiculous bordering on monstrous to me to treat procreation as comparable to any other creative act, such as you might do for your own amusement. Hence the macaroni collage comparison.

also i have conclusively proven itt that it is in the interest of the universe for babbies to be formed, with reference to green machine elves

i get the dread of existence. i get it. the probability for horrible things happening in a person’s life is pretty near 100% regardless of how many other moments of joy or satisfaction or bursts of insight you have too. so if you, say, asked an AI if on balance, life as a human being was worth the risk of heartbreak and abuse and addiction and poverty and painful death or just insufferable boredom and loneliness and all the other horrors that potentially await even the most advantaged kid, it might say “an interesting game, doctor falken. it appears the only winning move is not to play”. i mean, i can totally understand that point of view. but that’s life. that’s the risk of life. most people accept the risk. given the alternative. parents aren’t culpable for the inherent riskiness of embodied life as a human being on planet Earth.

procreation is the *original* creative act, it is the ur-text for all other creative acts

xps

So now we've gotten to the point where ILXers are being demonized for having babies for the Rong reasons

They are though, that's what I'm saying xps

culpable

that's my point

free will doesn't exist, ergo there is no culpability

Maybe we should find a way to talk to fetuses

shakey I did not invoke fucking free will, jesus

"do u want 2 be born? Yes/no"

"Oh btw shakey mo would be yr daddy"

asserting something many times isn’t quite enough to make it true afaik

I mean whose fault is it I exist?

Maybe we should find a way to talk to fetuses

Xxpost Idk, Lisa *did* need braces

I mean whose fault is it I exist?

the universe?

to the extent my parents are part of the universe, sure, but the universe isn't a moral agent

citation needed

but then I'm a pretty strict determinist. everything is as it is because of all the events that went before it, determining precise points of causality for something general like "suffering" (or even the particulars of your specific existence) is a fools' game with no end.

xps

silby, why did you think my creative act would be macaroni-collage level?

There’s still nobody arguing positively that it’s in a child’s best interest to be born regardless of impact on its parents.

This is exactly what I argued, when I said that the average person's desire to continue living should be our expectation of how anyone would view starting life from behind the veil of ignorance.

(and wanting to continue living doesn't imply dreading death. dreading death is culturally specific. it's an avoidable phenomenon.)

Thread is now a Charles Ives piece

christians: fetuses have rights

ilxors: fetuses have rights before they're created

I mean whose fault is it I exist?

mine, because you are all figments of my imagination

silby are you a Buddhist by any chance?

seems more like a nihilist

silby, why did you think my creative act would be macaroni-collage level?

― kinder, Friday, February 14, 2020 10:30 AM (one minute ago)

I mean it could be Beethoven's 9th or Don Quixote, the moral standing of any work of art vanishes to nothing set next to a human person

I'm a Jew

Well if your chief claim is that existence is dukkha then the sole way out is through nirvana.

I mean Kohelet has things to say on the matter

Sure, but you seem to believe that to escape the endless wheel of birth and rebirth so as to achieve some form of nothingness or oblivion, i.e. return to the non-existence when we came, is the greatest good. Or not really, but you catch my drift.

*whence

Although I quite like 'when' too in this context.

No I believe extant people should live full and vigorous lives and expect nothing, my concerns are for pre-extant people who might be spared having to post on messageboards if they are not born.

There’s still nobody arguing positively that it’s in a child’s best interest to be born regardless of impact on its parents.

Well, that's a completely unfair type of gotcha! because of how you asked the question. You asked parents to explain themselves, and to explain why they had children. So of course parents will answer in terms of what parenting provides them. They list their particular joys and satisfactions and reasons etc. And then you whirl round on them to say "ah HA! You are using the children instrumentally, for your own selfish ends."

Do you see that that's kind of a shitty rhetorical trap?

Imagine if you asked people in romantic relationships why they are with their partners. You might presumably get answers like "she makes me laugh" or "I love having sex with him." They would speak primarily in terms of what they get out of the relationship. (Jeez, how selfish!) It doesn't follow from that that the relationship is not a two-way street.

It seems to me that a heck of a lot of people like being alive. So to them, having-been-born is a gift, not a punishment. So go find some people who are glad they are alive: that's your positive argument. Evidently you disagree about life being, on balance, a good thing. Which is of course your right. But to impose your rather bleak and hostile view of the world on everyone who's ever been born seems kinda insane to me.

I didn't mean to trap anyone, I've obviously gone around the bend a bit in the course of this conversation

my concerns are for pre-extant people who might be spared having to post on messageboards if they are not born.