Here you will find a most enlightening video and discussion. If ever I had any doubts as to which side in the pronatal/antinatal debate occupies the moral high ground, the host of this blog has allayed them now, and forever. She has articulated the most fundamental of pro-birther motivation and sentiment I've probably ever read. I'm still gasping for air. Thanks to Chip for the heads up, as well as to The Plague Doctor for the link back to this page. And of course to both of them for standing up...
FeministX said...
"Do you think your baby -- the one who suffers nothing in his present state of nothingness -- will escape this fate after he is summoned into existence?"
WTF do I care? I want them because they are cute. Selfish caprice is all I have in this 80 yr demise to the final solution which befalls us all.
"What the fuck do I care?" Referring here to the unavoidable fate of her future children i.e. death (along with the concurrent suffering that always tags along, one can only suppose). Here it is, my friends, out from behind the justifications- which were always completely self-serving, anyway. 'I will do what I wish to do, no matter the cost borne by the object of my wish fulfillment.' What really hurts is that I did the same thing once upon a time. That truth is like a piece of shrapnel buried in my neck that only stings when I look in a certain direction; a direction I am bound to look in almost constantly these days. My only solaces are that I stopped at two, and that chances are looking pretty good these days that my children won't be following in my reprehensible footsteps (fingers tightly crossed).
Again, thanks to FeministX for her honesty.
UPDATE:
A not atypical rejoinder from the other end of the table-
Huh said...
Chip and Plague,
It is my sincere wish that your mothers had grabbed you by the heels when you were 5 years old, swung your heads into a brick wall, and thus caused your worthless brains to spill out on the floor.
People like you don't deserve to live, and should be murdered.
After all, you'd have no right to complain given how, according to you, you'd be better off not existing.
The rivers are full of crocodile nasties
and He who made kittens put snakes in the grass.
He's a lover of life but a player of pawns ---
yes, the King on His sunset lies waiting for dawn
to light up His Jungle
as play is resumed.
The monkeys seem willing to strike up the tune.
Bungle in the Jungle, Jethro Tull
22 comments:
I used the same argument in my essay attacking antinatalism. If you want I can email you a copy.
Thanks, TGGP. That would be great. Maybe I could post it and run some commentary your way.
Great post
There's really no answer to those who justify procreation on purely egoistic grounds. The best you can do is to point up common inconsistencies (the same argument can be invoked to justify any violative whim, from shoplifting to rape) and appeal to a sense of decency.
Wow.
Thanks for the link.
I don't know whether to laugh or to cry. It is becoming harder for me to tell the difference between laughing and crying these days. They seem to blend together into the same shuddering motion.
My initial impression after reading the comments there is that the hatred towards antinatalists is becoming more naked, and the antinatalists are becoming less concerned about presenting their arguments in a palatable way.
I want to say "I welcome this turn of events", but I don't know if that is true. I can be fairly labeled as an antinatalist, but I am becoming frightened to talk about it in public anymore. I get the sense that many people see antinatalist arguments as an attack on the very core of their vitality, and their reaction is not something that could be described as pleasant by any commonly understood meaning of the word.
I appreciate the courage you show by putting these arguments out into the world. I feel a need to do so as well, because it is an expression of myself, but the cost has become so bad that I pretty much just want to disappear. My life sucks enough as it is.
But I can't disappear, because I have already made an appearance, so it is already too late, which mirrors the horror of having been born. What people seem to have a hard time understanding is that even suicide is not a solution to the problem of birth. My answer to the question "why don't you kill yourself" would be "I was already born, it is too late".
Check out another blog from the HBD-sphere, OneSTDV, where, like Chris Langan, they are concerned with low fertility among the High IQ population.
In this post on abortion I found my good friend "Huh" a.k.a. "Statsaholic", uttering such gems as:
"One of the things I like about Religion is that it implants the idea into people that they could be punished [...]" and "We could really use more cautious evil people [...]
Things are getting really surreal over at the FemX comment thread. Just when I thought my jaw couldn't drop any lower, I find out that there is no bottom.
Shoplifting and rape are much less socially acceptable than having children. I eat animals because they're delicious and I don't care.
TGGP,
Louie C.K. is one of my favorite comedians (second only to Andy Blitz), but his joke is just a joke. Obviously, the reason people are concerned specifically with dolphins is that there is considerable evidence that dolphins are more intelligent and emotionally responsive than other forms of marine life. If new evidence showed that certain animals -- delicious ones that we are accustomed to eating -- were capable of human-like feats of reasoning and/or empathy, yet the practice of factory-farming, slaughtering, and consuming such animals remained "socially acceptable," would deliciousness still dictate? or would you feel compelled to revisit your habits in light of the fact that the beings you are consuming share traits of higher consciousness with human beings?
"Again, thanks to FeministX for her honesty."
Anytime.
" If new evidence showed that certain animals -- delicious ones that we are accustomed to eating -- were capable of human-like feats of reasoning and/or empathy, yet the practice of factory-farming, slaughtering, and consuming such animals remained "socially acceptable," would deliciousness still dictate? or would you feel compelled to revisit your habits in light of the fact that the beings you are consuming share traits of higher consciousness with human beings?
"
I'd eat a human baby before an adult dolphin or ape.
FeministX,
Well, if we set aside species-centric sentiment and provide that there are no grieving parties to consider, it probably makes more ethical sense to eat a baby. In terms of cognitive development, it takes human infants a while to catch up. One of those trade-offs for having an big head.
I got no problem with the "Alive" scenario. I'm not into seafood, so I would probably prefer human to dolphin. I believe that meat-eating animals tend to taste worse, and humans eat more meat, so ape might beat human there as well.
I'm entering this debate late, and reading the thread on Feminist X's site made my head spin, but I feel compelled to remark that huh's violent fantasies reminded me of the appalling 'eternal torture for those who don't think about the universe the same way that I do' fantasies of monotheists.
You'd think that thought crime was moida! But violent punishment for simply failing to agree occurs throughout history... I suppose we should feel thankful that he's limited himself to fantasy thus far...
Right out of the bible, Ann...
Psalm 137
8 O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us-
9 he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.
I'd like to think that if the Bible were ever translated properly it would be less weird and cruel and primitive, but linguistic experience tells me this is barely a hope...
TGGP wrote:
"Shoplifting and rape are much less socially acceptable than having children. I eat animals because they're delicious and I don't care."
You are ruining my potential enjoyment of the delicious Chick-fil-A sandwich I was going to eat. I will probably eat it anyway. The chicken on the box of fries looked so happy.
What I mean to say is that, yes, I eat flesh and enjoy it. The fact that I enjoy it is very troubling, though.
One of the fucked up things about having been born is that I have to feed myself with the remains of dead things to continue living. It is not so much the fact that they have to die that bothers me, rather the fact that they were brought into existence for the purpose of being my meal.
Bungle in the Jungle Jethro Tull.
Death-row skull.
Full.
At this point I wonder if people don't get the antinatalist argument, or if they are pretending not to. Just to fuck with my head, maybe. Maybe both.
I think reading Huh's comments marks the exact moment that I cracked. The image of life that comes to mind is a broken vase with an endless amount of water being poured into it, the water spilling out of the cracks that its overabundance makes.
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