Sorry guys, we had a good run

Blame Canada

I blame the agricultural revolution.

Saaame. We decided to adopt the cats instead 🤣

If you ever decide you do want kids, I'd endorse adopting. That way you're not bringing a new life into this shitty world, you're hopefully improving one that's already gotten dealt a bad hand in life.

Same, same. Well just in Germany. We haven't been hit as bad as the U.S. but your country stretches over three climate zones. However, we live in a small town on the Baltic coast and last year was nuts with the weather. And yes, some people are unfortunately very egoistical and make it even harder for the rest who just want to have a halfway decent life.

People weren't hoarding toilet paper because they thought it affected their bowels -- they were hoarding it because who knew what might happen where we'd have to stay at home or be isolated for a long time.

What's strange is, why toilet paper and not much else lol. At least where I lived. I wasn't hoarding, I was just trying to get some at the store because we were running out completely, and the shelves were empty. 💀 Had to buy some non-bulk expensive and fragile af paper.

Just FYI it does affect bowels. My mom had straight diarrhea for weeks while she had covid. I may have had it and my bf we both had the hits for over a week.

We had a long talk about it and the above statement is just the gist of it. If we lived in better times, sure. But not in this timeline. We both came to that conclusion and it is perfectly fine.

Absolutely nothing wrong with eugenics when applied properly. Like nuclear power, AI, the internet, eugenics would fix a lot that's wrong with humanity. If I could generically engineer myself into someone with no anxiety disorder or adhd or no postural tachycardia or naturally muscular body maybe even different color eyes and a different voice, I would. My genes aren't unique and my traits don't need to be passed on. I'm not a chinchilla.

“You never know. I mean, what if my baby cures cancer?” —Someone paraphrased to me one time

Most of your ancestors are dead. And even among the living ones I'd argue that the majority don't really care. Never the less, who cares if they do.

When one species growing prevents others from doing the same there is a problem in that ecosystem. For example too many wolves in an area can cause a reduction in prey which is also bad for the wolves. We're just smart enough to see what we're doing is harmful to the world around us and we can do things to limit our damage.

Humans have not only sat on that couch; we've slept on it, puked on it, taken a dump on it, taken it outside and set fire to it.

I find a lot of people can kind of fall down from this path, into anti-natalism, and then malthusianism, and then ultimately eco-fascism and eugenics, through what I like to call the "idiocracy deduction". Name pending. The sort of idea that, if stupid people are the only one having kids, only stupid people will promulgate, and then we'll all be stupid. Substitute stupid, for whatever political ideological group you don't really like (or even minority group), bam, shit's wacked. So, logically, stupid people, or, my political opposition, or, people I don't like/who can't be trusted to have kids, shouldn't be allowed to have them. After all, you know, it's more ecologically conscientious to not have kids, so we should just kind of force everyone to not have kids. A lot of this is also going to come down to like, third world countries tending to have higher birth rates because of higher infant mortality, and also tending to have higher emissions, and those two are connected because ???. It's sort of the inverse of christian conservatives who want to force every white anglo saxon protestant into having 70 billion kids, and then do things like ban abortion on those grounds.

I think there's also this like, really stupid idea that if we have more people, somehow those people will not have any jobs, based on some naturalistic concern. This is stupid. It's less that we've surpassed the planet's carrying capacity, and more that we all are just fucking morons who live in an 18th century economic hellsystem. That's the core of why mathusianism doesn't work, because there is no "hard" carrying capacity to the planet. People in ancient times had to occupy much larger portions of land in order to support themselves, because their crops were not selectively bred to maximize their calories, and because of diseases and shit, which is part of why agriculture sucked back in the day compared to hunter-gathering, (even though in practice the two aren't really that different, hunter-gatherers just move around more and thus have access to that larger space which they need to "grow their crops"). In any case, you'd have to build some argument that we've entered a period of natural technological stagnation, which is pretty fucking hard to do because you have to thoroughly discount any conceivable future technologies that might help, and you have to discredit the amount of blame resting on the current economic system.

So, yeah, I dunno. I find the whole dealio kind of dumb and stupid. Seems like an overcorrection, kind of like those hardcore atheists that were everywhere in the 2000's and 2010's, and you could tell they'd all grown up being raised by radical fundamentalist christian parents or whatever, or just that christians are fucking annoying (big if true), and then have kind of a limited perspective, even just on all religions, because of that, on top of not really being politically different enough from those christians, if you actually boiled it all down. Everyone's a neoliberal, at the end of the day, everyone's buying in to the same premises and arguments, even when they disagree on some issue, and then they all fail to see the bigger picture and just kind of end up splintering themselves into more and more radical extremist positions.

Actually you can stop reading here (if you even read all of that, good luck), but I kind of wonder if that's just like, an inevitable facet of late stage capitalism. It sort of seems to me like the ideological version of spam, which I tend to think of a lot as an analogy for capitalism "maximizing efficiency". Spam is nonsense, nobody wants to read it, and yet, it will inevitably eat up all the bandwidth if left unchecked, because those with the most economic resources want to cut out all other avenues of communication, and, "make efficient use of the bandwidth". The fact that everyone eventually becomes kind of radicalized and pushed into these nonsensical extremist positions, totally lacking nuance, the fact that, you know, people slip into fascism, it seems kind of along the same lines. People get pushed to what the maximum extent of their political ideology will allow, through some mechanism, despite liberalism kind of inherently being a modest and compromising ideology at heart, one that becomes incoherent if you actually push it to any logical extremes. I dunno if there's anything there, about how people's conceptions of things gets shaped by like, the larger economic system at work.

Then how will said kids survive without the environment, or are you okay with them suffering and dying later.

if the environment is fucked so are you and your kids

Worth it to try and get at least one kid out of that nightmare system. If it's that bad to adopt, imagine how bad it is to be completely at its mercy.

Who is being murdered?

Meat is murder!

An ancestor is usually someone who came before a grandparent, they're likely to have multiple descendants from different families.

Nah. I'm good. My vagina is in tact and I don't end up bear homicidal every day.

True, until one of them screams about something that doesn't matter and you have to will yourself not to strangle them.

I grew up in a family with eighteen kids. If having such a huge family is good for anything, it's that I don't have the romantic veneer that most people do when it comes to childrearing.

I know exactly how expensive and hard it is, and just how much it sucks.

You cannot rationally explain why it's fulfilling to have kids.

That's certainly true.