Asklemmy

Now you had a long response to this and I’m not going to argue that your experiences are wrong. We have different experiences though, and we have different conclusions about them.

Fair enough. I will say that the novelty or whether things haven't always been in decline doesn't denote that therefore, having children doesn't inherently contribute to worsening the climate crisis. It does. Faith that things will somehow be resolved by future generations and not by the present one is a lazy, kick the can down the road approach that I am obviously very critical of.

It’s not easy to adopt. The poorer you are, the harder it is. When you look into the process of adoption closer than “I want a kid”, there are some serious systemic issues that crop up. I’m not arguing that it’s not worth adopting, just that an ethical person considering adoption might end up working within the foster system instead. If that gives you an idea of how fucked the adoption industry is, that’s kinda what I was going for.

This is a very fair argument in which I am in general agreement with. I would also point out that the decision to therefore "have my own genetic kids" is not the right approach because, again, having children inevitably contributes to worsening the climate crisis.

I would also question the tactical usefulness of antinatalism when it’s a strategy embraced by the bourgeoisie to extract more out of the downhill trend. There’s no need to pay people enough to support a family when it’s a completely legitimate choice not to reproduce (never mind that people who don’t have enough money to support a family never get to exercise that choice).

If the group destroying the future is making short term money on people not having kids, who’s really being helped by not having kids?

There's no incentive to pay people enough whether they have kids or not. There are no laws incentivizing nor disincentivizing employers to pay their employees more based off of them having children.

The people in power are incentivized to encourage the general populous to have children for many reasons, but one of them is simply that, like your job and other obligations, having children forces you to divide your concerns away from protests and other forms of activism, as I mentioned earlier. You've criticized that my argument that the assumption that change can only happen with more immediate action ("faster"), more time spent, and with undivided attention (ie "can't do two things") is plainly false.

I'd argue that while beneficial societal change does happen slowly over time due to long uphill battles by protesters, that this change would have been more dramatic and rapid had people had had less obligations to keeping the bourgeoisie wealthy and with a fresh supply of future workers, and therefore had more time to devote to protests and activism. But I'll concede this is a hypothetical.

If our goal is the emancipation of the working class, how does embracing the destruction specifically of that class by giving up on reproducing that class move us toward that emancipation?

Well, to be fair, the original argument I was making was that the point of not having children was to leave the Earth itself better off than when we came to be on it regardless of whether we go extinct or not.

The decision to not have children in this context is an act of defiance, a breaking of a malicious cycle of contributing to a global society that has over generations come to the conclusion that modern comforts, societal hierarchy, and inherited cultures, are more important than ensuring the longevity of the human race and the majority of life on Earth as we currently know it.

The only ones who ultimately benefit from this endless cycle are those who have figured out how to exploit the majority of people and resources around them to their whim. The decision to not have children isn't a decision to somehow deprive the powerful of anything, other than future participants in their game.

The amount of labor involved in social reproduction is significant, but has literally never stopped people from participating in collective action in the past. I can’t help but look at your argument that people can’t work to change society if they have to do family labor as absurd and ahistorical.

My argument is that the change a person can make is proportional to the time they can devote to it. Protests that are most effective are literally the ones that occur where people have nothing but time. They walk out of their jobs, they refuse to work, and yeah, they take time away from their families to do so. All I'm saying is that if you have no children you're obliged to take care of, you have more time and energy to devote to the cause, and can thereby make for a more effective societal movement.

I mean, look at the panthers, their most significant program was feeding children.

Good example, and I won't argue it. As mentioned previously, my take that these movements would have been more effective had they had more time had they not had children is a hypothetical that I strongly believe to be true, but has no historical basis because the majority of people end up having children.

That said, I'll concede that having children of your own often inspires those who would otherwise not have participated in social activism to do so. I would contest that you can achieve more by fighting for the children of others than by dividing your attention between raising your children and fighting for their future.

I gotta take a moment and respond directly to your personal attack that I lead a very privileged life. I’m not gonna get into the poverty Olympics or dox myself, but you don’t know me or anything about my life.

Fair enough. You're right and it was mean spirited and wrong of me to do so. I'll not make excuses and simply apologize for doing so. I got overly heated up in making my argument, and should have never made it about you personally. I apologize.