The appropriateness and direction of any criticism depends on the scope of the currently employed perspective.
Assuming (safely) we’re not going to fix everything that’s wrong with society tomorrow, it’s dumb to have kids you can’t afford. That doesn’t change just because there are other more important reasons that breeding is a bad idea, or that eugenics is a thing and folks like yourself are apt to make slippery-slope arguments.
BTW, that was @YetiLives daring to criticise reproduction in the face of financial hardship - I was just backing him up, so there’s that too.
One last thought for you to consider and then I’m dropping this.
There is a huge, inescapable connection between income and race. Therefore any discussion about trying to get poor people to have fewer children is essentially a discussion about trying to get people of color to have fewer children.
That’s why the South instituted a poll tax during the Jim Crow era. It’s why voter ID laws disproportionally disenfranchise minority communities. It’s why the City of Chicago’s strict parking ticket policies disproportionately impact black neighborhoods. Even when the intent isn’t racist, the effect is.
Add that to the long, ugly history of the eugenics movement and hopefully you can understand why the “people shouldn’t breed unless they can afford it” line of discussion raises a shitload of red flags. Human reproduction must NEVER be relegated to a luxury for the elite.
Uh yes, yes it is.
I’m just going to leave this here, because it always bears repeating…
That depends on the scale of your perspective.
Sure, that outlandish hypothetical would be unspeakably wrong on a vast scale, but there are larger scales again to consider.
If it’s only the elite who get to breed, then you’re talking about population turning rapidly negative. Given the unarguable fact that the viability of the biosphere outweighs human rights, that would be a net positive. Regardless of how much you care about human rights, or rather in fact because you have to consider the rights of future generations for hundreds of thousands of years or more, to be born at all.
People like to ignore the fact that we’re responsible for killing the planet. When you stop to think about it, that’s actually a pretty big deal.
The biggest.
Speaking of outlandish hypotheticals, consider Hugo Drax, the Bond villain. Crazy Nazi wants to kill everyone on the planet except for a couple of thousand Aryans.
Let’s say he wasn’t a racist moron, and knew something about genetics. So he’s got at least 20,000 peeps and maximum diversity. Kills everyone else.
So here’s a guy that to almost every one of his contemporaries, is the greatest villain who ever lived, by orders of magnitude, while to the far vaster number of people to come, and to the entire biosphere which has no voice to speak with, is the greatest hero to ever walk the earth.
It’s not a simple matter.
Remember, we’re vermin. If something were to change that fact, that would be worth quite a high price.
ETA: Surely the question of whether anyone - anyone - chooses to procreate invokes the question of global population. If it doesn’t necessarily follow, there’s something pretty broken about us.
The problem, as I see it, is that discussions about the viability of high population levels tend to leave out any recognition of the reality that we’re rapidly poisoning the whole place in multiple really bad ways that aren’t conceivably reversible, and wiping out species and ecosystems at an unprecedented rate. Or at the most, there’s some recognition of that stuff, bit it’s handwaved. It’s underpants gnomes logic:
We’re choking everything in our own shit
???
Everything’s fine.
It’s past time for a whole host of vast reforms to our way of life in order to look anything like intelligent and responsible as a species. There are a handful of token gestures in that direction, but it’s too little, too late.
If something big doesn’t stop us in our tracks pretty soon, everything’s. completely. fucked.
Your stance of biosphere above all also justifies the Holocaust and any other genocide someone would want to commit, as long as they used sustainable methods.
Kimmo, I agree with your hypothesis that human population is wrecking the planet, but seriously disagree with your methods. As has been pointed out, attempts to dictate zero or negative population growth have not worked, even in authoritarian regimes. On the other hand, among populations with better relative income equality and higher standard-of-living among even the poorest of citizens, low or even negative population growth has been achieved without trying.
There’s no need to figure out how to solve the problem. The answer is in front of us, it’s just unpopular.
like most trade jobs you start young, out of highschool or even while in highschool. you start at the lowest rung with the worst of the jobs, and you work your way up. you learn the specifics of the equipment, using them, fixing them, whatever’s available and you like best at the time.
it’s like a software job. you find your niche and grow into it.
the problem with coal - unlike say fortran programming - is that there aren’t enough similar jobs in the states anymore. if that’s your life: what do you do?
sure, there are plenty of desk jobs in coal mining, but there’s plenty more where you are active, working with tools. and that’s appealing to lots of folks. it’s where their ability, interest, culture, and training all align.
and those jobs have vanished to countries where companies are allowed to pay workers less and treat them more terribly.
id be all for bro-presidente’s tariffs if they were based on working conditions and workers rights. it’s a slow path but that’s the only way out of this mess that is blue collar jobs.
These aren’t my methods; they’re just hypotheticals I’m using to point out the scale of the crime to be addressed - if it can be stopped, using any means necessary is justified, before the next species dies… whoops, too late, another one bites the dust as we speak.
There’s no need to figure out how to solve the problem. The answer is in front of us, it’s just unpopular.
Solving the problem isn’t a thing that is happening. Nothing that looks like solving the problem is happening.
Yes? And? Do you have a more appropriate priority for the biosphere than utmost? We don’t even know if it isn’t the only life in the universe.
Why do so many people consider the terribleness of a truth to count against it as truth? Reasoning fail.
And yet I don’t think you actually believe that it is true because you aren’t taking substantially less extreme steps like not using electronics. If it is such an all consuming problem how do you justify your presence here?
The problem doesn’t disappear if I do. An individual amounts to a rounding error. Counseling others to kill themselves would likely be more effective, but still useless.
Actually…
There’s this thing called hypocrisy that all of us do, all of the time.
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