to form babby, or not to form babby

warming up the eStork

i'm not hearing a bid

also, how, exactly are you warming it up?

You want a punk cohort? Here are mine vibing to that Fugazi cover on YouTube:

https://www.instagram.com/p/B8Dr6LaJXZt/?igshid=8fbnl9f8w1b0

ahem CHANGE TO THE STARTING BID, we've done a reappraisal based on the latest video

do I hear $1,000, $1,000 anybody....how about you in the tweed hat and the checkered jacket?

I disassembled my shitty bed which I hate last night and I feel a lot better now

To form bedd or not to form bedd

If you hate your baby and you disassemble it you get in big trouble!

now he tells me

i put mine back together but i had lost some of the parts during moves so the kid has two left arms now, it's ok tho he wasn't gonna be a baller anyway

any post containing "babby" i'm mentally reading in the voice of Noddy Holder, ay it?

So ya think ive gotta babby formed

Any kid you have at this point is going to have a briefer, worse life than you, most likely. Don’t have kids.

People's reactions to this question come from such an internal place, largely subconscious, that there's almost no room for discussion on either side.

Obtain informed consent from babby first.

I think the science & philosophy of it on both a personal and a general bumanity-wide level are an interesting debate which we probably need to have ASAP.

I also think it's a kind of shitty and inconsiderate thing to suddenly announce to a load of people, some of whom have young children, on a Sunday afternoon.

It’s 9 am in Seattle and we are going to break the June high temperature record set yesterday, which will be broken again tomorrow. Because I am well off I could drop $700 to get a hotel room and avoid spending this interim in our uninhabitable house. I will probably kill myself circa 2050.

silby considers this to be a public service announcement

One of the things I tried to understand after my parents died was how they had the faith in life that their sons would thrive even without them there. I don't share that optimism, I couldn't set something in motion that I won't see to completion.

I’m with silby

lol at this:

I also think it's a kind of shitty and inconsiderate thing to suddenly announce to a load of people, some of whom have young children, on a Sunday afternoon.

did you read even read the thread title?

tbf the stated point of the thread is “state ur reasons” not “tell ppl what to do”

I won’t have kids personally, but I’m hoping my nieces can carry my torso (no limbs after being tortured by Great Lakes Water Guardians) on the back of their motorcycles as they cross the parched desert of what once was northern Minnesota.

Well yes I did read the thread title and tbh it did not prepare me for suddenly thinking about my kids dying.

Among the many reasons I won’t have kids is I assume I would constantly be thinking about them dying

mind your own business

I am all for abolition of the family and of the tyranny parents and other adults hold over children but this seems like a different issue than whether reproduction is good or bad in any particular instance or in general. I am much happier making sweeping statements in the first case than the second since the enduring popularity of malthusianism in the parts of the world most responsible for fucking everything up (not, in general, the parts with higher birthrates) is way more worrying to me than someone having a child. my own lack of interest in doing so just seems kind of arbitrary

I would have preferred not to have been born so there is an emotional appeal but I trust that people who seem glad to be here aren't just pretending

Any kid you have at this point is going to have a briefer, worse life than you, most likely.

I have never had any significant interest in having kids, but once, in a school discussion in 1992, classmates and a teacher found this insufficient reasoning for expecting not to. Under beration, I reached for an argument that I thought would be definitive, and proposed that it could be morally unjustifiable to bring children into this world when climate collapse was likely to occur within their potential children’s lifetime.

I learnt, in the ensuing seconds, that stating this as an individual reasoning prompts people to take it as a personal condemnation. It had not previously been my reasoning: I merely thought it so incontrovertible that it would counter the near-personal-condemnation I was receiving, and allow the conversation to move off me.

I didn’t think much about the exchange for a couple of decades, but have recalled it several times a week in more recent years, and wonder if any other classmates remember it at all.

I'm sure they talk about it all the time

i’ve heard variations of that reasoning over the years and even entertained it myself from time to time. i’m convinced that it’s pretty much always a deflection away from other, real-er reasons. the number of people willing to deliberately plan their own lives so drastically purely for morality’s sake isn’t zero but i think it’s pretty small. like folks who live in huts off the grid. there’s lots of terrible shit in the world. i dunno.

There is always evidence for hopelessness and despair, but the human mind is such that it will always try to avoid these conclusions. People hope against reason. Having children is an expression of this tendency, for good or ill.

- Bob Marley

Children of the current upper middle class will probably be fine. Grandkids, OTOH…

Maybe he would say that idk.

I think the implication of a lot of the posts on this thread is that having hope in the future is not just delusional but ignorant and selfish. I think I disagree. Even if the melancholic apocalypticism on display here is more reasonable, it’s not realistic to expect the majority to embrace a perspective like that. People want to get up in the morning and have something to work toward and feel like existence is a good thing not a bad thing.

And in more pragmatic terms, would the world actually be improved by people en masse taking an anti-natalist stance, with all it implies? Would that society, and its institutions, be more caring and responsible than ours? I think it is possible. But it is also possible it would be worse. I don’t know.

it’s 1650, and your partner is pregnant. “my dearest love. while you know that a child would bring me the greatest joy a man can know, the treaties of westphalia that have recently concluded are fragile. indeed, mercenary bands of shattered armies roam the provinces. no farmer’s family is safe. would we bring a child into a world that harbors the horrors of magdeburg? where soldiers spit young children on their lances for sport? it would be an immorality. i have spoken to you of this many times and yet you still see fit to carry this seed to its fruition. it is with deep regret that i must go.” the letter left on the rough table built into wall of the croft, the horse gone.

i think i identify as an anti-natalist but largely refuse to tell anyone about this bc i also fundamentally identify with thinking experience, maybe as distinct from "existence," is a super cool thing that i'd love to continue doing and maybe share with someone else who could maybe have an easier time overcoming all the mental illness i've endured in the process, or who maybe wouldn't have to contend with a bunch of fake and shitty ideas that we have for some reason orchestrated society around, though there's not a lot of evidence that that would happen

the number of people willing to deliberately plan their own lives so drastically purely for morality’s sake isn’t zero but i think it’s pretty small.

In 1991, the Australian government scrapped plans to set a zero-emissions target for 1995, just as CO2 concentration topped 350 parts per million, In 2021, the Australian government is refusing to set an emissions target to reduce concentration to 350 ppm by 2050.

I agree that the number of people planning around the projected effects of CO2 concentration above 350 ppm appears to be very small.

also telling anyone you're anti-natalist is pretty much a non-starter for civil conversation ime and i completely understand why xp

Can CRISPR give future generations gills?

Feelin brad on existence

In the wider scheme its all just unfolding universe lads

thank you Tracer Hand
anyway my kids have better ideas and attitudes than me, I’m happy they’ll replace me in the world. Their lives will be very different to mine but none of us can know exactly how.

Definitely sweatier.

I don’t have much to add to this discussion but this is a good book that gets into it without getting too big philosophy brained about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_from_an_Apocalypse

i’ve heard variations of that reasoning over the years and even entertained it myself from time to time. i’m convinced that it’s pretty much always a deflection away from other, real-er reasons.

Tracer otm. People saying this are fronting imo. (NB I have said this and I don't have kids).

Fronting for what?

I wonder what percentage of generations legitimately believed they were living in the end times

something's always ending

Fronting about the real reasons they don't have/want to have kids.

I dont want kids because it would impinge upon my many future holiday plans and meals out