BANNED USER: Repeatedly posting trollish "death to my outgroup"
22122
No bio...
User ID: 1194
Banned by: @Amadan
22122
1yr ago
I think there are limits to free speech. If the free speakers are convincing society that other freedoms should be restricted, in a way which violates property or self ownership rights, then such speach should be shut down because it is dangerous, however, if it convinces people to live differently but leave other people alone, that is fine.
22122
1yr ago
Authoritarians denying rights and non threatening speech being suppressed as threatening are both problems, the best you can do is hope that whoever is in charge of enforcing free speech does not falter either way. I would say its pretty easy to tell whats threatening and whats not, if they are promoting anger and disgust toward people who engage in innocent activities, that is probably a threat, but if they are convincing people that said activities are bad for them and they should stop for their own sake, that is no worry.
22122
1yr ago
A little bit tangential, but I think it is worth mentioning that this sentence is based on some moral rule, or axiom of "self-ownership". I notice it a lot lately, you have some philosophers creating something - like Rawl's veil of ignorance - which is supposedly self-evident and basic. And then there is some implicit belief that whatever society stems from this belief must be good and moral, because the belief is moral by default. Rationalists have the same tick in their axiology where they put "truth" and to large extent "prevent suffering" as something automatic and then designing policies around that. I think it is worth realizing that not all people necessarily share this framework. In fact, there are supposedly limits even for adherents - for instance all countries I am aware of ban selling your own organs for transplantation, which theoretically is part of self-ownership.
Self ownership isn't self evident, but appealing to it can bolster your argument because many people place value on it, otherwise, all morality comes down to opinion anyway. But saying that not all people share this framework is a reason not to structure morality by it seems to be a bit contradictory because it resembles an argument for self ownership where different people have different preferences and it is not fair for society to force people who want to live in a certain way to live by the demands of the dominant culture.
This is a very narrow look at externality. All societies have some social construct and defecting from it can be viewed as subversive and bad. Some people do not have such hyper-individualistic worldview of complete self-ownership and they expect some duties from members of society. Having kids and reproducing/perpetuating society that enabled your existence as may be the expectation, externality in this case is ceasing the link and preventing their kids from having similar experience. You can extend this to other avenues that require multigenerational commitment, even let's say climate change. Why should somebody expect me to do anything about it? I will probably be dead before 2100 when the bad things potentially happen. I have ownership of my body and actions and I refuse to voluntarily cooperate.
If a society places an expectation on its members to have kids and contribute to perpetuating their people, then the question must be asked why some people are defecting from this expectation. Maybe its because they lived a miserable life and don't want their kids to have a similar experience, maybe they don't think its fair to bring kids into the world and then shackle them to all the expectations demanded by their society, maybe they prefer doing other things than caring for children, and spending money on things that are not their children. I think perpetuating society is not an end in itself, what matters more is what the society that your perpetuating is like, and whether it is worth perpetuating, and this is why its important to acknowledge the differences in people and allowing them to live in a way which fulfills their desires the most. Your climate change example isn't exactly comparable because climate change is the cause of negative externalities going uncompensated for.
But wait you say! There's too many people on the planet anyway! So what if we shrink our population for a couple generations anyway? Just accepting this argument on its face for now (I don't actually), you're not actually solving the issue, merely delaying it and hoping in a couple of generations it will resolve itself. Why would this trend reverse? The only way this trend "reverses" is that the sub-populations with extremely high fertility rates (Amish, ultra-orthodox Jews, hyper-tradCaths) basically take over the population (and somehow themselves don't get subjected to the same forces of low fertility). Maybe you're an anti-natalist, a nihilist and you don't really care what the future holds for humanity assuming there is even a future. But you must at least understand that some people might actually care.
This argument misses the point that the only way for a population to compete with those orthodox religious groups is to emulate those groups in the ways that are relevant to boosting birth rates. But those religious groups rely on fear, shame, and the threat of violence to enforce their restrictive rules, and this is unacceptable in a liberal society. The best a liberal ideologue can hope for is that the future is filled with people who reproduce a lot because that is what they truly desire, and not because they are forced to by their religious beliefs, but this hope is naive.
But shrinking population means a shrinking economy, and the debt will only ever grow. Young people will be saddled with an increasingly unpayable debt given to them by the previous generations. Not having children is basically a free rider problem. You're expecting someone else's kid to care for you and pay of the national debt in the future. Suppose if no one chose to have kids anymore, then who would be left to actually do anything? We'd just be a dystopia of elderly people, Children of Men style. Humanity doomed to die off.
The solution to the debt problem is for the government to not spend in a way that accrues debt. You can internalize the externality by making people either have to save money to fund their retirement, or have kids to provide for them in old age. If everyone stops having kids, there is probably a good reason for that, and having a society full of only elderly people is not their biggest problem.
On to the things that are harder to quantify or definitely prove - I think the drop in fertility rate and the rise of childless and single child families is not social healthy, and is generally bring misery. The direction causality between between the atomisation of society and low fertility rates is uncertain, it's probably a feedback loop with many other related factors at play. We are facing a crisis of meaning and community in the West, and I think this has been driven in large part by the destruction of the family. Young adults may be happy to leave a hedonistic life free of familial responsibility in their youth, but when the reach their 40s and 50s, loneliness will and has hit them hard. It's incredibly short sighted and yes, based on instant gratification. They're the farmer who has eaten their seed corn and has nothing to harvest for the future.
Then wouldn't the solution to this be to spread the message that not having kids causes loneliness later in life. For what its worth, I think people already realize this, that some people are short sighted and end up regretting it is not a good reason to coerce those who do this but don't end up regretting it, its hard to know if a decision will be regretted, and some people like to take the risk. Also, the regret could be mistaken, an elderly person who chose to have few or no kids might believe it would have been better if they had had more, but only because they have changed as a person or do not remember exactly why they made the decision that they did.
It's hard for me to take your suggestion that childlessness is just the result of innate preferences when this is an incredibly recent phenomenon, it hasn't been this way for the entirety of human history up into this point. It also make no sense evolutionarily that our innate biological preferences is to not have children (some people are argued that we are wired to have sex, not raise children, but this still makes little sense to me, because we are a K reproductive strategy species, not an r).
There has been at least one other society in history that has had the same trends, which is roman society. The reason this is a recent phenomenon is because in the past, religious and cultural pressure prevented people from deciding for themselves whether they want sex to bring about babies for them.
Additionally, we live in an age of unprecedented information, ideology and propaganda. I don't believe or one second that say, feminist ideology hasn't had an impact on fertility rates.
Of course it has, but I don't see the problem, if people were convinced by feminist ideology, there is probably a good reason they were.
What do you mean when you say that people are propagandized into an ideology? I find antinatalist views persuasive because I think there is some truth to what they are saying using reason and evidence to come to that conclusion. Propaganda is when you are repeatedly told one side of the story and are ignorant of the other.
Why did this feminist ideology become so pervasive in the first place? I think its because many people see pregnancy, childbirth, and caring for infants as burdensome and unpleasant, while having a career makes you financially independent and wealthier.
You are right about there being a pressure to conform, but its better that people are tolerant of different choices such as becoming a mother early or not doing so, rather than shaming one or the other.
The problem with religious pressure as opposed to secular pressure to conform and not disappoint is that the former is more coercive. Religion prevents certain patterns of behavior by calling them evil and scaring people with eternal consequences in hell for engaging in them. This results in people breaking the norm to be treated with hostility and disgust, that is if they get past the fear of divine punishment in the first place.
Edit: I also fail to see why you think that feminist propaganda is being pushed upon young females and crowding out pronatal messages not only in the west, but also in places like greece, china, and thailand which all have well below replacement birth rates.
22122
1yr ago
If the values of this forum are about free speech and rational constructive discussion, then why is it dominated by conservatives and reactionaries who don't let left wing comments get high rating, does this mean only right wingers value rational political debate or does it mean that left wingers do not like the way they are treated when they comment on here?
Why do comments like these imply that the culture which prioritizes career and the single life over parenthood is evil, by comparing them to Molochian processes like immoral business practices. Preferring childlessness is not necessarily 'anti-family'. Its a bit irritating to me that a place like this which should have people with different outlooks on these topics seems to be in overwhelming agreement about them. Why is the culture giving status for wealth considered "molochian", but not the culture giving status for having a big family. Am I mistaken about what "molochian" means, because this seems to be a case of consensus building.
I agree that we should not be mocking mothers with lots of kids, but how do you go about celebrating them without implicitly denigrating women with few or no kids as lazy or selfish?
Edit: I guess the answer to my question is that you would celebrate it until you got to a point where both outcomes were more or less normalized within the culture, so that being a prolific mother was respected, but choosing to produce few or no children was understandable and normal.
22122
1yr ago
My point was that this is Molochian on a memetic sense, in that it spreads via culture and is bad for the people living in it. If the culture giving status for having a big family was memetically Molochian, it wouldn't be getting replaced so easily. But I think that it is genetically Molochian, in that as certain people have fewer children they will get replaced by people who have more. I don't think western society being wiped out and replaced by immigrants and/or Amish and/or some cult that explicitly requires all women to birth at least 10 children is a good thing, but is the direction I predict the pendulum going if the anti-family culture goes too far. I actually think that a reasonable balance involving children incentivized but not mandated such that we end up at or slightly above the replacement rate of 2.1 would be a useful anti-body against this outcome.
I think the reason that the culture giving status for having a big family was replaced was because in the past having a big family symbolized high income and good health, because those were the attributes that allowed people to achieve a big family, there was also not the option to not end up with a big family if you had the means because getting married and raising children was seen as a religious duty, and negating or defying the procreative purpose of sex was seen as sinful with all that that implied. Nowadays when people have the freedom to separate sex from baby making, most people do not desire big families and prefer to get married later. I don't think you explained why the culture giving status for career and money is bad for the people living in it, I think that the default conclusion would be that it is better for most of the people living in it than the pro family culture, otherwise how would it have spread the way it has? You would have to explain that it misleads or lies to people and that they would be better off in a pro-family culture.
22122
1yr ago
As for Armenia and Azerbaijan - of course, my sympathies are entirely with Armenia. It's barely a third the size of Azerbaijan with fewer allies and no petro revenues. It's an ancient bastion of Christianity in a part of the world that's been hostile to it for the last thousand years. They've already endured one genocide. But there's very little the West can do here - Armenia is landlocked, has no land corridors to the EU, is a CSTO member, and the EU is in no position to start using energy sanctions on Azerbaijan (the US has more freedom to act, and I'm still holding out hope for Pelosi's visit). I have quite strong feelings about the conflict nonetheless, and if anything, Russia's abject failure to protect its own client state from a genuine case of unwarranted aggression and ethnic cleansing further diminishes my opinion. If there was ever a time Russia could deliver on its promise of upholding Christianity in Asia or of constituting an alternate source of global order, this is it: a small long-suffering Christian nation on Russia's doorstep is under attack from a larger richer Turkic Muslim aggressor, and they have every legal right to intervene, and could do so easily. At the current time, of course, they have the excuse (!) that any potential intervention might provide a distraction from their very important and sincere commitment to several more months of sustained militarised slaughter of Slavs up and down the Dnieper. But what of the 2020 war, when they could have quickly bitchslapped Azerbaijan into accepting the status quo, and proven themselves Armenia's saviour? But no, Putin was greedy and stupid and had no real ideological commitment to helping Armenia, so waited until most of Artsakh had been reconquered by Azerbaijan, then belatedly tried to insert himself as a 'diplomat' (except it turns out, people need to take you seriously for that to work, as we're seeing now). Yet more evidence that Russian civilisation would be a good idea.
Azerbaijan and Turkey consider one another as 'two states, one nation', so naturally Turkey was backing Azerbaijan which is arguably the reason Armenia is losing. Turkey is a decently young country with one of the fastest growing economies in the world, with a GDP per capita of $37k compared to Russia's stagnant economy with GDP per capita of $30k. In short, Russia can not compete with Turkey in West Asia. Also you seem to missing a lot of nuance about the origin of this conflict, basically it started around the time of the dissolution of the USSR, where Armenians living in western azerbaijan wanted their land to become part of the state of armenia while azerbaijan wanted to keep the borders of their national subdivision during USSR. There was a lot of ethnic cleansing on both sides and a lot of people got kicked out of their land. What should have happened was the territory should have been divided along property lines to bring ethnic group holdings into their respective ethnostate as much as possible barring 'islands' within the other's land.
22122
1yr ago
the audacity to immigrate to a country and hate the people who built it and let you in...
22122
1yr ago
God is also responsible for making the criminal in such a way that they would be inclined to commit heinous crimes...
22122
1yr ago
Jail is not enough of a deterrent for certain crimes. Most people fear death more than they fear jail. Also executing someone is more humiliating to them than jailing them. Also if you execute them you don't have to pay for the costs of sustaining them in jail.
europeans are themselves a product of race mixing over the past 8000 years. to be vague, west asian ancestry from neolithic anatolians coming in from 8000 years ago and replacing the native european race, mixed with ponticcaspian herder ancestry from 5000 years ago who were mostly derived from preneolithic european ancestry. south europeans have lower proportion of ancestry from those ponticcaspian steppe people which explains the observation that they resemble west asians.
22122
1yr ago
and those traits can be predicted to change substantially because of evolution, race mixing or not, your descendants will look and act less like you as time goes on.
22122
1yr ago
restrictions of women, restrictions on obtaining sex. Women are bad at choosing mates based on what is best for society, and sex is a reward for men.
what is best for society is a question which there is a lot of variance in people's answers to. what sort of men do you think women should be rewarding instead?
22122
1yr ago
yeah, kids in these societies are consuming a lot of entertainment creations from secular societies, having access to the internet. its no surprise islam is losing influence on them.
22122
1yr ago
What does the strip club visit have to do with your point about homeless people, strip clubs don't cause anyone issues that they didn't put themselves into. I dislike the word degeneracy, because it implies that innocent activities are malicious and that the people who do them are bad people, I dont think that sort of slander should be allowed in a forum like this. Its like a leftist calling rightwingers racist and fascist.
Giving a homeless person candy is a legitimate act of charity, I am not sure why your criticising that. Homeless people are chronically hungry, and feeding the poor is helping them, its definitely not harming them. It also makes them feel like other people care about them.
22122
1yr ago
The unprovoked attacks on supposed Christian hypocrisy
He has a point on this though, while jesus "the son of god" talked a lot about feeding the hungry, loving the poor, and stuff along those lines, orthodox christians talk alot about.. gender roles and birth control.
22122
1yr ago
it’s just that conservative communities have recently gotten better at staunching the bleeding from their young men
how so?
this is a tangent but your use of the word degenerate there gained my attention because it is usually used as a descriptor for people who engage in "hedonistic" behaviors, not those who violate property rights. so its a point of evidence for the claim that degenerate is often used as a slur against innocent people (say, strip club visitors).
it does not make sense to me that people are not traumatized by someone around them that is suicidal, yet become traumatized when the suicidal person kills themselves. its like they dont care about the suffering of the suicidal person as long as he is living, but when he kills himself then they are affected. to me its selfish to require someone to continue living miserably when they would rather die.
Every week there are several discussions brought up on this roundup about how low birth rates are a problem and people need to be convinced through propoganda and or religious manipulation or in some other way incentivized to make decisions that contribute to higher birth rates. Its rare that the other side gets argued for, either that higher birth rates would be bad, or that there is nothing wrong with current breeding patterns in our society. It seems to me like low birth rates are a result of people having the freedom, in accordance to their right to self ownership, to limit or delay or prevent the birthing of children, and that the resulting low birth rates are a reflection of the revealed preferences of the population. I also dont see any negative externality to people having less kids, its not like they are indirectly supressing the fertility of others who desire more kids. Which is why Im confused why its such a big deal to people on here and related spaces. Ive heard conspiracies about how culture has been altered by influential people with an antinatalist agenda to make childrearing lower in priority to women than having a career or marrying late, but I think its more likely that you are seeing these messages because a large segment of the population agrees with them because these life styles match their innate preferences. I think as long as society does not shame women who want to be fecund mothers, its a lot better than in the past where women were not allowed to pursue an alternative life plan. In general, I think its better if people have kids because they want to, not because they feel pressured to or forced to. I personally am debating whether I even want to bring children to this world, there is too much suffering and worry.
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