to form babby, or not to form babby

though i did have the distinct feeling, mid commercial, that Trivago guy would one day kill us all

Trivago girl otoh ❤️❤️

To sum up, the position taken by Kirsten Dunst’s character in Melancholia, as paraphrased by treesh and which he maintained is "compelling", is in my view logically untenable and ethically way off base. We should buy copies of the script and jeer at them.

better change your surname to 'von jeer' bc that's what we'll do to the many copies of your script we bought, lars

at some point, they'll plead with us: "just pay somebody to watch Melancholia on Hulu and transcribe it" or "please buy one script and print multiple copies" but we'll say "that would be ethically way off base". so we will keep buying the script from scripts.com, one per Jeerer (rip netherlands euro 2020), to prove how logically untenable it is.

It’s not my position, as should be clear from the posts I made above, section 1c, third clause. I was just trying to tease out the conclusions of silby’s premises. This is making me remember one day, years ago, when I was logged in and posting in this kind of way and silby said “this isn’t the agora of athens treeship my god”

Which was funny i thought

it seemed to me when I watched the movie that Kirsten Dunst's character was not espousing a position so much as she was feeling a hitherto unknown sense of equilibrium as the world outside of her became as apocalyptic as the world inside her, but I didn't pay very close attention so I could be wrong.

classic

xp

Ultimately having a kid or not is an incredibly personal choice and shrouds not be judged by outsiders that one who chooses not to have kids had some ulterior motive like “wants to
party unimpeded by responsibility” or that those who choose to have kids “just wanted mom to shut up about not having grandkids”.

otm

Personally I am inclined to not have kids because it's hard enough as it is, teaching all these brilliant, curious, hopeful middle schoolers and wondering what kind of world they're inheriting, but I also think there's an argument to be made for continuing to do lovely human things like raising kids for as long as it's possible. My cousins in Juneau AK have a bunch of kids who run around fishing and camping and messing about in boats like the Swallows and Amazons, and whatever happens to them in the future, they've undoubtedly had a charmed childhood.

ppl shd be able to have 1 kid, as a treat

my partner and i had dinner at her friends' apartment the other night and they have a kid who like... clearly both had a better childhood and is way smarter than any of us. i get the impulse

t'ship, isn't the Earth dying a big part of why "being alive is bad" (particularly as applied to future beings itt). By saying "being alive is bad so it's good the Earth's dying", you are really bringing "the Earth's dying so it's good the Earth's dying" to the table.

also seems obvious, if the goal is to minimize suffering, that you'd need to rule out any alternative to the Earth dying, which is going to yield much suffering, to see the Earth dying as a net "good".

ppl shd be able to have 1 kid, as a treat

Three tykes and you're out.

if you feel we are on an irrevocable march to Earth death, perhaps you can take a small comfort in the thought. it seems a bit monstrous or pompous to be so certain in one's knowledge of the future to take that comfort, though (even if you end up being correct).

Life on earth will end eventually and the longer you push this date back, the more people will live and suffer in the interim. Better to peacefully extinguish the species, kind of wind it down, by stopping procreation now. This is the anti-natalist argument. It is not my position at all, I want to be a father.

but it seems like you could "wind it down" without extinguishing the species. though, that sounds like an awful idea that could be used to justify a lot of suffering if ever taken beyond simply not having children.

I accept "life on earth will end eventually", but only because it's so vague to be definitely true. one is making a pretty big bet if they use that thought to justify decisions that will play out over the timescale of one human life.

i dont think we shd work to end the human race, i do think we shd end capitalism, i think we will need to have children to grow up and end capitalism, sry kiddo, those means arent gonna seize themselves!!!

i wonder if the character 'forky' was invented by a pixar ilxor with a soft spot for silby. there's even the series of shorts framed around asking "New Questions".

while my heart is with silby (and by extension VHEMNT and various forms of anarcho-primitivist nihilism) in terms of "yup bad idea", my head always remembers the wise words of a fellow enviro-activist: "you can't let the assholes have all the kids"

also, kids rule

u know what gandhi said "breed the change u want 2 see in the world"

no shame if you and yr partner are awesome and want to bring more of that energy into the world

I understand the logic of a single kid but I gotta say having 2 prevents their parents from having too much influence

(with appropriate apologies to the only kids here)

um i am LITERALLY the perfect father so i mean i guess i see how that would affect OTHER parents

if roads and public transport are both closed because they melted, does that have an influence

this thread has gone to some weird places: some edifying, some useless

one thing that has always frustrated me about being on the fence w/this topic is that no one who has & is raising babby will tell you out loud that having babby was a decision that they regret, even though there are babby-formers who must certainly feel that way

huh that's so weird!

xp youve obv never talked to parents with large families

in my sons lil hoops league we had an end of season party at pizza video games house and the team mom (of 4) said she wished she had stopped at 2 (NB: we are not close or intimate enough friends to have had this conversation), not within earshot of those 2 but you know...*shrugs* lol

no one who has & is raising babby will tell you out loud that having babby was a decision that they regret

perhaps it is because they understand that such an act would do harm without doing the slightest bit of good. also, most feelings of regret are temporary, while parenting is lifelong and encompasses every known feeling a thousand times over.

I have a friend whose mom told him she would have aborted him if it had been legal at the time, which I don't think did wonders for his self-esteem, so, yeah.

look even if it would be a crushing unrecoverable psychological and spiritual blow for someone to coldly realize & admit such a horrifying thing, it would mildly assist me in my decisionmaking process therefore they should just do it

i imagine someone has called into 'beautiful anonymous' with this crucial info

I can see regretting it in the first few months when they do nothing but cry and ruin diapers but having a kid so fundamentally changes who you are that it's a little scary to imagine anyone having that thought after a couple of years

having a kid is a big risk, requiring optimism even without climate catastrophe. I'd imagine only the luckiest parents face their greatest challenges in the soiled diapers and crying years. I wouldn't want anyone to feel bad about experiencing regret in any stage, as it's easy to imagine circumstances where it's very rational and human. it's only the open sharing of the thought, depending on perhaps venue and who is listening, that could potentially be offensive.

lol i second guess it all the time

you spend most of your free time dealing with the little shits, and some of your non-free time too

news flash, kids are little shits. even the “nice” ones. they’re megalomaniacal, selfish little shits who expect you to do everything for them and then they complain about it. YOU WERE THE SAME WAY.

i was a demon kid until at least 7

I'd imagine only the luckiest parents face their greatest challenges in the soiled diapers and crying years.

very true but I mean if it's your first one there are definitely some thoughts at first of "I don't know if this is for me"...by 3 or 4 they're such a part of your life that you can't imagine being without them even when they irritate the shit out of you. I've definitely had those "it might not have been a good idea to bring kids into this world"/"I'm not sure I'm meant to be a parent" thoughts but if anything happened to them I'd probably never recover

Agreed, the absolute worst thing about being a parent ime is the constant awareness that something bad might happen to them. It subsides to background noise over time but never goes away.

Casper made up a genuinely awesome joke the other day. Not sure he understood the mechanism in an intellectual level but he nailed it.

Knock knock?
Who’s there?
Amanda
Amanda who?
A Mandalorian

Casper is three and technically still has cancer, though it’s been in remission thanks to targeted gene inhibiting drugs since he was about 9 months old. He loves Iron Man and eating garden peas straight out of the pod.

Form babby. What’s the worst that can happen?

that's a great one! hope he continues to see improving health, helluva card to be dealt at such a young age :(

very high quality stuff from Casper