Most people who don't have kids don't think it's wrong not to have kids. — khaled

Even people who have kids rarely see anything wrong in not having kids.

I believe that people who willingly try to not have kids do it for a reason. It’s not always philosophical, political or moral of course. Sometimes they are afraid of being tied, of losing their freedom. But even these fears are sometimes expressed in general philosophical terms, disguised behind philosophy. It’s called rationalizing an irrational fear.

The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference. — Andrew4Handel

I find this a rather sad view of the universe, and boring too. A more interesting approach in my view is to understand the function of suffering, as absolutely essential to staying alive. An animal without a sense of pain would quickly die. Suffering is not really a problem. It’s a solution to a problem.

Are they not there to try to convince others that their personal choice is somehow morally superior? — Pinprick

Don’t we all do that once in a while? Makes for fun discussions... :-)

Ha ha. Sanders doesn’t give a shit about his own look. Good for him. We need more people like him in position of influence.

Well, in my experience, all it takes is meeting a girl who wants kids, and who likes you enough that she wants them with you. That’s the power of nature. Then once you have them you will love them, and they will love you back. Until they become teenagers of course, but that too is the power of nature, pushing them out of the family cell and into the wild.

One needs to trust life a little. As I said, it’s often better than the alternative.

Yes, Isaac put it forth well.

Is having children more that a theoretical possibility for you, Khaled?

There’s no such thing as a harmless alternative, though.

If a couple wants to have a child, and they believe doing so will cause less harm than not doing so, then I have no right to object. — Pinprick

Why of course, it’s not your decision to make. I trust that the AN are not trying to stop other people from conceiving children, and that they are just personally opposed to it for themselves.

Life is often better than the alternative. That's my point and it is indeed a very simple point.
— Olivier5

Key word: Often. What justifies taking the risk? When the alternative is harmless? (supposedly) — khaled

The odds are good enough.

There's no such thing as European philosophy, or African philosophy. This sloppy language is a form of essentialism, an internalisation of racism by philosophy.

The colonized trying to reconstruct a precolonial idealised past is often just using the conceptual tools of the colonizer and turning those tools back onto the colonizer. In this case it's the scapegoat tool: let us sent the white man away in the desert, loaded with the sins of the community, to help rebuild our lost pride.

As I was singing "BORN IN THE USAAAAAAA" at the top of my lungs in the apartment, my wife kindly reminded me that I was born in Toulouse.

So here is an attempted translation of a French ode to my hometown. To straighten things up...


How far is my hometown, how far !
Sometimes inside me come alive
The green waters of the Canal du Midi
And the red bricks of the Minimes

Oh mun païs, oh Toulouse

I walk back the avenue to the school
My schoolbag is stuffed with punches
Here, if you punch, you win
Here, even the grannies love a brall

Oh mun païs, oh Toulouse

A torrent of pebbles rolls in your accent
Your violence boils up even in your violets
We barely treat each other that we treat each other of cunts
There's a storm in the air and yet...

The Saint-Sernin church lights up the evening
A coral flower that the sun waters
Maybe that's why, despite your red and black
Maybe that's why they call you Ville Rose

I see your pavement again, oh my Gascon city
Your sidewalks ripped open on the gas pipes
Is it Spain in you that pushes its horn a little?
Or would there be a jazz bubble in your guts?

Here is the Capitol, I stop my steps there
Tenors with colds trembled under their suction cups
I still hear the echo of daddy's voice
He was my only blues singer back then

Today, your buildings are climbing high
In Blagnac, your planes are more beautiful
If one brings me back to this town
Could I still see my pinch of tiles again?

Oh mun païs, oh Toulouse



Nougaro is our Boss, in Toulouse...

Billy
He's down by the railroad track
Sitting low in the back seat
Of his Cadillac
Diamond Jackie
She's so intact
And she falls so softly beneath him
Jackie's heels are stacked
Billy's got cleats on his boots
Together they're gonna boogaloo down Broadway
And come back home with the loot
It's midnight in Manhattan
This is no time to get cute
It's a mad dog's promenade
So walk tall, or baby, don't walk at all

Fish lady, fish lady
She baits those tenement walls
She won't take corner boys
Ain't got no money and they're so easy
I said, "Hey baby, won't you take my hand, walk with me down Broadway
Oh mama take my hand, and walk with me down Broadway, yeah
I'm a young man and I talk real loud, yeah baby, walk real proud for you
So shake away your city life
Shake away your street life
Shake away your sin life
And hook up to the train
Oh, hook up to the night train
Hook it up, hook up to the train etc.
But I know that she won't take the train
No, she won't take the train
No, she won't take the train etc.
She's afraid them tracks are gonna slow her down
And when she turns, this boy'll be gone
So long
Sometimes you just gotta walk on, walk on

Hey vibes man, hey jazz man
Oh play me your serenade
Any deeper blue and you're playin' in your grave
Save your notes
Don't spend them on the blues boy
Save your notes
Don't spend them on the darlin' yearlin' sharp boy
Straight for the church note ringin'
Vibes man sting a trash can
Listen to your junk man
Ah, listen to your junk man
He's singin', singin', he's singin', etc.
All dressed up in satin
Walkin' past the alley
Singin', singin’ etc.

No it isn't. Nothing is destroyed here. — khaled

In order to make a human embryo grow blind, you have to destroy something. At a minimum you have to take a huge number of genes and delete them from someone's gamete, knowing full well that the result will be a blind child, who would see perfectly well if you hadn't edited out hundreds of genes from his genome...

I will get it wrong no doubt.

this in itself is a bad situation you are putting someone in. — schopenhauer1

Why is that such a bad situation, may I ask?

Is genetically engineering someone to be blind wrong? If not why? Nobody is technically harmed by the act. So why is it wrong? — khaled

Because it is destroying a major part of why life is worth living, of the beauty of life, for strictly no reason.

The fact that someone was put into the situation of "play the game or kill yourself" is the point. — schopenhauer1

The fact is that nobody was technically 'put' in such position, because to exist is to be in that position, and no one even existed before they were in that position. It's not like you can summon the soul of your future child and ask him whether he wants to exist or not...

The imposition is made. — khaled

Not that I can see. That's an incorrect conception of conception.

What great alternatives you have now imposed on someone! — schopenhauer1

Life is often better than the alternative. That's my point and it is indeed a very simple point.

When the alternative is completely harmless (supposedly). — khaled

That's a big assumption you're making here. You've seen that movie?

The argument would be that it is not ethical to force someone into such a position. Like forcing someone to play a game. — khaled

The comparison is not correct because the someone in question does not exist before conception. Parents give life to their children, their force no one, they give life to one. And if that one rejects the gift, then that's his or her choice.

This said, I understand the position of someone who would rather not bring a child in today's world, why with climate change and all that. "Let's not add to climate change by having children who might in any case end up living a life much worse than ours. There are too many people on earth already." That's an argument I can hear.

But to think that to give life is always inherently morally wrong, in any time and at any place, to me that's courting the kind of (admittedly flippant) response I gave you: if you hate life so much, you're welcome to quit. Will make room for the rest of us.

Antinatalists like their life or hope it will get better. Ok. Now what? — khaled

It follows that they see their own life as inherently good and good to hold on too, like many other people do. And the children of the once antinatalists -- if they ever get conceived and born -- will probably cherish their own life too. And curse it also sometimes, but often enough they will cherish it. And they might even teach their once antinatalist parents a thing or two about the beauty of life...

“It’s fine to hurt them cuz if they don’t like it they can just kill themselves”

Do I need to say more? What does this NOT justify? — khaled

My comment was more general than that: if life becomes unbearable, there's always the suicide option. This is true for antinatalists themselves. Of course it's easier said than done, but it's done all the time.

You see, most people see life as a good thing per se and hence they see death as a bad thing. But to those who disagree, and who see life as full of harm, to them death ought to look pretty good. And yet you don't see many antinatalist suicide notes... Why is that? I suspect because quite a few antinatalists are like the rest of us: they either like their own life enough not to quit it yet, or hope it's gonna get better.

Not very deep, but it feels so good!

"My child will do this comparison you are speaking of and wish for a different state of affairs" — khaled

If and when life becomes a curse, there's a very simple and radical solution to it: death.

Go easy on us. We've heard only primal screams coming out of the White House for the past four years... That may be too long a list of rational, creative and potentially useful policy decisions for many of us to process at this stage.

didn't say it was a shoe in, I'm saying it's not Biden that won the election. Other people did it for him. It's the Squad chosing not to make waves, Bernie endorsing and community organisers getting out the vote, Trump being a moronic idiot, etc. — Benkei

You mean it was a collective effort? You bet.

America had to pull it back together. The choice was between democracy, however imperfect, and neofascism. The Squad chose their side a long time ago, and so did Bernie.

Biden did shit except show up and not stumble. It's people like Stacey Abrams that won this election for him. — Benkei

A lot of folks have showed up and stumbled, though. It’s quite facile and shallow now to say that it was a shoe-in, after he won, or that this or that person helped more than he did. Abrams too wanted Trump gone, and she did what she thought was necessary to achieve this.

Washington resembles East Germany. — NOS4A2

This was always the case. What has changed is the rise of domestic terrorism.

he doesn't even need to try in order to get approval from those who would support him in the first place, or even more broadly, those who opposed Trump. — SophistiCat

You’re early in your criticism. Give him a chance. I’m a European Bernite, never been a fan of Biden, but I broke in tears yesterday realizing that the Trump nightmare was over. Biden did that: he beat Trump. That’s already something to be grateful for.

CNN are laying it on a bit thick. He's not the Pope, guys. — Baden

It must be the relief of having a president who is not an evil, self-obsessed cretin. At last.

The reason this thread is here is to stop the proliferation of Trump threads that would otherwise spread across the forum like a cancer. — StreetlightX

:up: Better quarantine the politically diseased to one thread only.

Me too! It's a sort of hidden protest song about the violence in the system and despair. The only tender verses are: He had a little girl in Saigon / I got a picture of him in her arms.

About the Galileo-Urban VIII relationship, this is from the Italian Wikipedia entry on Urban VIII:




Maffeo Barberini, when he was a cardinal, had taken Galilei's defense when the disputes on the various hypotheses of floating phenomena began in Florence . Therefore, when he was elected pope (in 1623), Galileo was led to hope in a benevolent attitude of the new pontiff towards him and his studies.

At the end of 1623 Galilei published a volume entitled Il Saggiatore , with a dedication to the new Pontiff. In this work the scientist, dealing with the motion of comets and other celestial bodies, indirectly confirmed the validity of the Copernican theory. He also argued that knowledge always progresses, without ever settling on dogmatic positions. In other words, man has the right and duty to broaden his knowledge without ever having the claim to arrive at absolute truth. This position, according to the scientist, was in no way contrary to the Faith.

Galilei's work was positively evaluated by Urban VIII. The Pope officially received the scientist in Rome in April 1624 and encouraged him to resume his studies on the comparison between the two systems, provided that the comparison was made only on a mathematical basis. This was to be understood in the sense that a mathematical certainty, that is abstract, had nothing to do with the certainties of the real world. Even with this limitation, the Church of Rome seemed to have softened its position on the new theory.

On 21 February 1632, fresh off the press, the scientific and non-scientific community had in their hands the last work of Galilei, Dialogue on the two greatest systems of the world (the Ptolemaic and the Copernican one), in which the validity of the heliocentric system was definitively upheld.

The hostile reactions were not long in coming. In the summer of the same year, Urban VIII expressed all his resentment because one of his theses had been treated, according to him, clumsily and exposed to ridicule. Furthermore, in the text, there was more than one reference to the pontiff as defender of the most backward positions. Finally the work ended with the affirmation that it was possible to dissertate on the constitution of the world, as long as we never seek the truth. This conclusion [...] infuriated the Pontiff.

It would require significant investment, but it wouldn't need replacing in 25 years — counterpunch

Yes, it would need replacing. Everything does after a while. Geothermic energy has been tried in places, and if it was some kind of magic bullet, I think we'd know already.

Born down in a dead man's town
And the first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that's been beat too much
'Til you spend half your life just to cover it up

Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.

Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man

Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.

Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says, "Son, if it was up to me"
I go down to see the V.A. man
He said, "Son, don't you understand?"

Had a brother at Khe Sahn fighting off the Viet Cong
They're still there, he's all gone
He had a little girl in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms

Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I'm ten years burning down the road
I've got nowhere to run and nowhere to go

Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I'm a long time daddy in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I'm a cool rocking daddy in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
I'm a long gone daddy in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
I was...

I have plans. I know what needs to be done and how to do it. But I don't have funds. I've communicated my ideas to a few people who say they're interested in this area, but I get nothing back. — counterpunch

You're not the only one with plans, sweetheart... But consider that, whatever the technology you use, putting CO2 out of the atmosphere will probably cost us more energy than it would cost us not to pump it in the atmosphere in the first place. We are not capable of the latter, and we will most probably never afford the former. These ideas of sucking out CO2 from the air make no economic/energetic sense. Not pumping CO2 INTO the atmosphere is what we need to do. Hence taxing carbon emissions is a good idea.

That's pretty good actually, as far as these things go.


I'm not the man you think I am
I'm not that kind of guy
Beneath this sleek exterior
There's less than meets the eye

I'm just what you've been looking for
Your wildest dream come true
I'm not the man you think I am
But I'm the man for you

I'm on important business
I'm late for my premiere
I'm doing you a favor
Just by being here

Surely you can buy a drink
For someone so renowned
I'm not the man you think I am
But I'm the man you've found

I'm burning with indifference
I'm sleeping with desire
I'm selling snow to eskimos
I'm preaching to the choir

My past is catching up to me
My chips are coming due
I'm not the man you think I am
But I'm the man for you

it was wide open for the Church to embrace Galileo — counterpunch

The irony is that the book that triggered Galileo's second trial -- the Dialogue Concerning the Two Main World Systems -- was written at the request of no other than pope Urban VIII aka Maffeo Barberini, a Florentine humanist and a friend of Galileo (who was from Pise and worked in nearby Florence much). Galileo had publicly stayed out on heliocentrism since his first trial circa 1615. The new pope asked him to present the two systems comparatively in a neutral manner, so Galileo tried to do that but apparently the resulting book was quite slanted in favor of heliocentrism. Maybe Galileo saw his revenge at hand and mocked his past prosecutors a bit too much...

The Jesuits hated it and used it against Urban VIII whom they branded as weak against heretics and Protestants. Geopolitics weren't too good for the Church, thirty years war and all... Urban VIII had to deny any association with Galileo and agreed to a trial, although he commuted the ultimate prison sentence for his ex friend into house arrest.

It begins with massive, base load clean energy from the molten interior of the earth. — counterpunch

You have a plan, huh? Any funders yet?

climate catastrophe is not inevitable. It's a matter of the technologies we employ. — counterpunch

I'm not speaking technologically. Technologically we can send people live on Ganymede.

I'm talking of what is possible politically, in practice, given limited means and time. Realistically speaking, the world needs to turn around tomorrow. This is not going to happen, full stop. Hence we're screwed.

My hope is the smartest will survive. Some societies are smarter collectively than others. In my view the center-left ones.

We are technologically advanced, but ideologically, we haven't moved an inch since Galileo was being shown the tools of torture and asked if he might like to reconsider his earlier answer.

My point entirely. Galileo did well BTW. He was wise to live, unlike Bruno. Descartes had his own manuscript almost ready about the superiority of the solar centric system, and he wisely decided to shut up. He did not print it, seeing the risks taken by Galileo.