Please start a thread on how to cope with this lack and structural suffering you speak of. — Posty McPostface
Start a community that sees life in this way. — schopenhauer1
In many places people have children so that there is someone to help you and especially to take care of you when you are old. If you don't have a family and those children to take care of you when you aren't able to work anymore, you will be at worst a hungry beggar on the streets.parents are consenting that, yes, they like society and feel it is their right to continue it forward with a new person to experience that society and continue the existence of that society. Hence, it is a political act, if not overtly. — schopenhauer1
Yes, but how ought are community ought look like? — Posty McPostface
The first act was you being born. — schopenhauer1
It would be a local contingent, like that of community activists, meetup groups, online groups, things like that. — schopenhauer1
Seems like my point also works in the affluent US example, not just in the Third World.Having children who live near by (especially daughters) is strongly correlated with quality of aged life. Isolated people usually die sooner, and more often of neglect. Without sufficient wealth to pay for assisted living facilities, one's future can be bleak, if one isn't healthy in one's old age. And it doesn't take all that much to shift from hail and hardy (or is it hearty?) to frail and failing. One bad fall on the ice can be the critical event. — Bitter Crank
Our being born wasn't our acts -- it was much more our mothers' acts. Had you been in charge, you would have started out by holding your breath, thus sparing yourself this whole dreary business. We had absolutely nothing to do with our conceptions, either. Nor did we have anything to do with the long line of predecessors, going back 3 or 4 billion years. — Bitter Crank
Is eating a political act? When I eat food to nourish my body and end my hunger, am I voting YES! for my continued embodiment? — Inyenzi
I think it's more mindless than that (i.e. I'm hungry, I eat, and by consequence my embodiment sustains), and it's the same mindlessness with reproduction. This type of rational, deliberate sort of reproduction you describe where people sit down with their partners and decide to bring a child into the world would be very rare if not non-existent. For the vast majority of the planet, (to put it very crudely), people fuck and then babies happen, and by consequence the human species and it's suffering proliferates itself. — Inyenzi
Is rabbit reproduction a political act? — Inyenzi
But even in the case of the rational, deliberate parents to be, their motivations for having the child are far more likely to be related to some sort of end or aim of their own, than for the sake of the non-existent yet-to-be (can you even do something for the sake of a nothing?). For example: because of pressure from parents, because it's what's expected of you once you cohabit or marry, because you think it will strengthen your marriage, because you think babies are cute and want one, because you want something to depend on you, because you have a drive to nurture and want to satisfy that drive, because all your friends are having children and you feel left out, because you don't want to be old and alone with nobody to care for you, because you feel it's an essential part of being a woman, etc. Ends and aims like these are what hide in the background, being the true motivators for the 'rational parents' reproduction, who then retrospectively claim he/she brought the child into the world for it's own sake, to share in the "gift of life", or some other nonsense. — Inyenzi
In other words, politics is hand-in-hand with existential statements about life, the community, and human destiny, even if people don’t recognize it as such. — schopenhauer1
It is the ultimate "yay" to life/society. — schopenhauer1
Would you have movie nights, pot luck meals, board game and card parties, sing-alongs, dances...? What anti-fertility holidays would you celebrate--Artemis, Athena, and Hestia? Mary was ever virgin but she did reproduce -- though with suspiciously unorthodox methods. Christmas? Jesus didn't reproduce, as far as we know. Dionysius would be a good male god -- I don't think he reproduced, but he did like a wild party (he is also know under the name of Bacchus, he with wine and grapes.) He had a rather unorthodox birth, too -- his mother Semele was zapped while he was in utero, so Zeus sewed up the baby Dionysius in his thigh to finish developing. (Don't try it at home.) — Bitter Crank
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