I have difficulty with it for a few reasons. One, it’s not analogous. Two, creating a child is in no way similar to assembling a gun. Three, creating life is the opposite of taking a life. — NOS4A2

If those are your objections then, yes you would not get the point of the analogy, but then you sort of do in your next sentence, so I won't even address this since you sort of address it there.

But as for your argument, I do agree that if and when those parts come together a person will be affected. At that point we are able to apply ethics and morals to them. — NOS4A2

So if we know the outcome of the gun getting put together, and we know the outcome of the parts of the person coming together, you should understand why you can talk about preventing people from being born.

So is society itself a sort of ideology — schopenhauer1

In a very real sense, society is itself an ideology--the ideology of settled, state-centered society.

I haven't actually read the book, the principle was summarized for me. Against The Grain, by James C. Scott posits that 10 or 12 thousand years ago sedentary agriculture was not an attractive option for successful hunter/gatherers. Rather, hunter/gatherers were coaxed, seduced, or coerced into agriculture by proto-state actors who wanted to harness the energy of people--their capacity to work and to reproduce--for purposes of accumulating power.

Scott explores why we avoided sedentism and plow agriculture, the advantages of mobile subsistence, the unforeseeable disease epidemics arising from crowding plants, animals, and grain, and why all early states are based on millets and cereal grains and unfree labor. He also discusses the “barbarians” who long evaded state control, as a way of understanding continuing tension between states and nonsubject peoples. (from the publisher's summary)

I don't know whether this theory is valid, or not. I wouldn't rule it invalid out of hand. But hunter/gathers avoided sedentarian life for maybe a hundred thousand years. Had they wanted to settle down, surely they could have figured out how. The first states were city-states in the Middle East, generally ruled by a strong-man. The city state was pretty much dependent on its surrounding agricultural hinterland. No grain, no city-state; no city state, no strong-man.

Agriculture wasn't the beginning of society, of course. The hunter-gatherers were/are as much society as the Upper East Siders of Manhattan. But the kind of society which came to dominate much of the world was settled, urban-rural, agriculture-based states.

haven't actually read the book, the principle was summarized for me. Against The Grain, by James C. Scott posits that 10 or 12 thousand years ago sedentary agriculture was not an attractive option for successful hunter/gatherers. Rather, hunter/gatherers were coaxed, seduced, or coerced into agriculture by proto-state actors who wanted to harness the energy of people--their capacity to work and to reproduce--for purposes of accumulating power. — Bitter Crank

Agriculture wasn't the beginning of society, of course. The hunter-gatherers were/are as much society as the Upper East Siders of Manhattan. But the kind of society which came to dominate much of the world was settled, urban-rural, agriculture-based states. — Bitter Crank

Interesting thesis. I see society using birth itself as harnessing the energy of people- their capacity to work and to reproduce. In a way procreating is being complicit in the accumulation of power, if that is what it is. The parents want their children to be enculturated into society. They want their children to (generally) work, consume, do the ways-of-living that they themselves are used to. Kind of like when navies used to "press" hapless victims into working ships.. that is what having a child does. It presses yet another life, creates a new victim, to DEAL WITH an maneuver society, and generally experience suffering of every and all kinds.

So if we know the outcome of the gun getting put together, and we know the outcome of the parts of the person coming together, you should understand why you can talk about preventing people from being born.

Perhaps what I don’t understand is the language being used. I cannot see how deciding not to have children is to prevent them from being born, just like I cannot see how deciding not to assemble a gun is preventing yourself from committing murder.

A person who decides not to have children is not performing an action called “preventing”, and he certainly isn’t performing such an action on any objects called “people”. He is not stopping people from being born as if he was standing in their way or performing abortions. He isn’t preventing their suffering as if feeding them or mending their wounds. The action called “preventing” is performed, and the objects called “people” exist, only in his imagination.

Just like it is impossible to obtain consent from a potential human, it is also impossible to perform any other act towards him and for the same reasons—no such being exists. For this reason it is impossible to act morally towards beings that do not nor will never exist. Instead the antinatalist is imagining beings, imagining their suffering, and directing his moral faculties and moral behavior inwards, ultimately towards himself. So I have trouble seeing the argument as anything more than a sort of affectation.

To be fair to you, you are far more well-read on the arguments than I and you’ve probably heard this all before, but I think the absence of any beings is a problem for many moral arguments for antinatalism. The antinatalist should limit the moral case to protecting the environment or to affecting beings that already exist.

Perhaps what I don’t understand is the language being used. I cannot see how deciding not to have children is to prevent them from being born, just like I cannot see how deciding not to assemble a gun is preventing yourself from committing murder. — NOS4A2

In potentialities, it is proper to think in terms of a few things:
1) what you intend to do as a deliberative agent 2) The means to do it . I used the gun example as, it is not an actual gun yet (just like a human isn't an actual one until certain things happen), because

1) The man intended to use the gun to do something with it 2) He had the means to do it.

This being the case, anywhere in the sequence of the man making the gun to intend to kill the victim can be fair game to "prevent" the outcome from happening. If the man had no intent nor the means, then it would be correct that "prevent" would not really be a necessary part of the language being used, as there is "nothing" to prevent.

Like this case, many people have the intent and means to do create new people who will suffer (in the antinatalist view at least). Educating people that they can prevent future people by not having them is thus perfectly in the realm of sense in terms of how language is used. Even accidental deaths by guns is analogous.

A person who decides not to have children is not performing an action called “preventing”, and he certainly isn’t performing such an action on any objects called “people”. He is not stopping people from being born as if he was standing in their way or performing abortions. He isn’t preventing their suffering as if feeding them or mending their wounds. The action called “preventing” is performed, and the objects called “people” exist, only in his imagination. — NOS4A2

I have addressed this above, as I see this being not a real argument for how we live our lives everyday. We train people for outcomes that don't exist yet everyday. The actual entity doesn't have to exist, just the means by which that entity is produced. Is it a very real possibility of happening? If yes, then indeed we can prevent that possibility. I shouldn't even have to spill this many words to explain this to you.

Just like it is impossible to obtain consent from a potential human, it is also impossible to perform any other act towards him and for the same reasons—no such being exists. For this reason it is impossible to act morally towards beings that do not nor will never exist. Instead the antinatalist is imagining beings, imagining their suffering, and directing his moral faculties and moral behavior inwards, ultimately towards himself. So I have trouble seeing the argument as anything more than a sort of affectation. — NOS4A2

Again, the intent and means, a possibility has a high potential of happening. If that possibility is a new human, then indeed you can talk about performing an act to prevent something that does not exist. For example, if you knew that at the exact time of birth, the baby would be severely harm, would you consider the future child then? You knew this was a very high probability too. I'm sorry but this argument is not great, it's not revealing, it isn't even how we ordinarily think of future outcomes. You want to try to make the antinatalist seem out of touch, like they are fighting windmills or something.

To be fair to you, you are far more well-read on the arguments than I and you’ve probably heard this all before, but I think the absence of any beings is a problem for many moral arguments for antinatalism. The antinatalist should limit the moral case to protecting the environment or to affecting beings that already exist. — NOS4A2

It really isn't a problem at all for moral arguments. To say that something "will exist" if such and such actions take place is not some crazy philosophical notion. Antinatalists are considering that humans can exist if you make the conditions to happen so. Don't make those conditions happen for x, y, z reasons. It's that simple. You can try to stretch the sophistry to make it not that, or to make it crazy, but it's not and we talk in future possibilities and likelihoods all the time.