Poor people are constantly being told they shouldn’t expect to have flatscreen TVs or internet access or own property or attend college or even get access to decent healthcare.
It’s a pretty low blow to shame them for something as fundamental as “human reproduction.”
Whenever I try to tell people that VHS was never as good as it should have been they dismiss me as just another Beta male.
Sometimes the retraining isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
http://beltmag.com/appalachia-coding-bootcamps/
Regardless of the quality or ethics of the retraining “bootcamps,” it’s kind of optimistic to expect many people to be able to pick up a new trade - particularly an engineering-adjacent sort of trade like computer programming - in less than a couple of years.
How long does it take to learn how to be a coal miner? (Not snark, genuinely curious)
Stephen Colbert once said in an interview that he had many right wing Colbert Report viewers who didn’t get the satire. To many of them, he was a like-minded reporter who was making fun of left-wing guests. 
This hits on “picking winners and losers” and subsidies, something the GOP is rabidly against when wind and solar are mentioned. “Remember the Solyndra!”
Yet, somehow, oil and gas, mature technologies developed by companies with hundreds of billions of capitalization still, somehow, require subsidies and tax breaks.
Gee, whodathunk intentionally dumbing down the masses until they can be counted on to vote against their interests every time would eventually come around to biting the nation in the arse.
Why? I don’t have kids, partly because I’m poor. Is ignoring whether you can afford it somehow beyond criticism?
Anyway, all the breeders are ignoring that we’re the one true vermin, so there’s that. We should have a moratorium on this self-indulgent nonsense until we can put the brakes on mass extinction, IMO
“Poor people choosing to have children” isn’t the problem fucking up the planet.
Once again, rich people causing problems and poor people catching shit for it.
“Rewinding America since 2016.”
You just don’t get to make that judgement. The state should never get involved in human reproduction, at least in terms of telling people if they can have families. Period. It’s aiuthoritarian. If you want to have fewer children and a smaller population in a way that isn’t authoritarian, the way to go about that is to ensure that women have full equal rights/protections under the law, you have comprehensive sex ed, and easy or even free access to birth control. That’s literally all you have to do, which is a way to reduce birth rates without infringing on people’s rights.
The point is that that is your life, yeah? You don’t get to make decisions that personal for others. Society shouldn’t do that either. Again, you want lower birthrates, you free women, you support comprehensive sex ed, and you make access to birth control easy.
It’s very easy to look at someone else and moralize about their “choices”, but not everyone has the same back ground or opportunities that you or I have. The “poor need to stop breeding” has been a eugenics/white/elitist argument for quite a long time. There is no need to replicate it. It doesn’t actually do anything to eleveate environmental or economic concerns - it just acts as a means of some people being able to feel morally superior to people with less resources.
This. Know one thing the children of poor people hardly ever do? Charter private jets so they can travel halfway around the world to kill elephants for fun. Yet somehow no one ever seems to fault Trump for having five children because he can “afford” to.
Let’s leave aside the fact that we’re the one true vermin for a moment.
If you’re poor like me, starting a family should be a daunting prospect; if you’re not able to save money, how do you expect to handle the significant extra expense? Okay, reproduction is a basic human right; it’s not for me or anyone else to make that decision for others on that basis. But like free speech, exercising your rights isn’t a free pass against criticism. How about when you have the second, third, fourth kid you can’t provide for? Surely at some point you cross a line where most people figure you’ve gone too far; what about the welfare and prospects of your existing offspring?
Okay, so there’s that. Now, there’s poor, and there’s poor. If you’re poor in the third world, it’s a different equation; it actually makes sense to keep popping them out for a bit - fuck-all divided by whatever is still fuck-all, and kids are more of an asset, and become so earlier. If you’re poor in the first world, your kids generally don’t start earning their keep before age ten or whatever, and as part of western society you’re kind of locked in to this unsustainable mess of capitalist consumerism.
Which brings me to the vermin part. Hey, it’s great that we can feed and water everyone if only we could figure out how to be less collectively brutal and idiotic. That’s wonderful. But it’s mostly beside the point, because we have to go a lot further than that before we can dust off our hands. The main problem is that when you zoom out, our way of life basically consists of turning the biosphere into poisonous garbage as quickly as possible.
In all this talk of lifting the third world out of poverty, I almost never hear anyone mentioning how much that will accelerate the process of us all drowning everything in our own shit. And as populations increase, I don’t see much in the way of whole new cities being built to take the pressure off the groaning infrastructure of our current cities. Instead, they get increasingly choked with inefficiency as we all sit almost stationary in our cars, rubbing elbows with all the other forsaken plebs in a zero-sum race to the bottom.
If you only had one person, that isn’t worth much. That’s not a species or a culture; it’s one peep going insane from boredom and dying alone. Community is a huge aspect of human identity; once you have a functioning society, then we have value. Add more societies, and it gets richer still. But sooner or later, you reach a point where the equation starts to shift, and adding more people starts to devalue everyone’s individual existence, on balance. Where that point is pretty much depends on the amount of efficiency, sustainability and fairness baked into our operating systems, and as far as I can see, this whole aspect is largely ignored when population is discussed.
TL;DR: get back to me when we can say we’re not vermin.
Get back to me when the sight of a rich person who had the audacity to reproduce is enough to prompt a discussion about “human vermin destroying the planet through continued breeding.”
Hi, checking in since ever, as according to me, that’s worse than poor first-worlders breeding, because according to my logic (and apparently almost noone else’s), whether you can afford it pales in comparison to whether the planet can afford it.
Vermin, I said. On the basis of our unsustainable behaviour, of which the richest are most guilty.
At what point do you start to consider the holistic perspective and say we need to start restricting our rights in favour of actually being responsible? Or is that just completely off the table, because absolutist reasons?
And yet you still decided to chime in to say “what’s wrong with shaming poor people for having children they can’t afford?” when it’s clearly rich people who are the ones most responsible for destroying the planet.
There have been many movements throughout history predicated on the idea that too many of the “wrong” people were having children. None have ended well.
