You whiner.

Antinatalists want to stop this "pressing" of more laborers.. even if people don't think about their procreation in those terms, they are doing it, so advocacy to get more awareness of this. The parents are voting "YES MORE LABORERS!" (even if unwittingly). The antinatlists are saying, stop. — schopenhauer1

Here's the thing: What's in it for the antinatalists??

What do antinatalists get or hope to get if other people stop producing children?

I did, and the notion that someone who otherwise has no actual power over you could just make something up (completely setting aside whether it's actually made up) and thereby wield something worth being afraid of over you suggests a problem on your end. — Pfhorrest

It's just another thing that people can manipulate others with; as such, it's yet another cause of concern, yet another thing to be prepared for.

A "problem on my end"? Fuck you for that. Perhaps you live somewhere where you get to cast the first stone and thus establish your supremacy.

think they should not only keep all the fences and national guard in Washington, DC. (around the Capitol), but even better, fence off the entire city and then build prison walls around the metro area because this is where all the politicians, the lobbyists, and anybody else who has been destroying our democracy needs to be kept for the next 50 years! — synthesis

See, you don't want people to live up to their full potential! You want to put them into prison for that!

I am afraid that people like you who desire salvation (from the challenges of life) feel that everybody else must change the way they think in order to feel as desperate as you do.

It's leftist religion. "Save me, save me, save me" (and save everybody else because they're going to have to pay for it). — synthesis

*sigh*
*facepalm*

I'm not going to defend things you merely imagine I said or stances you merely imagine I hold.

The fact that you need to resort to such lowly tactics just goes to show that your position has no merit.

You keep whining about big corporations and big government, but you also want people to be free to live up to their full potential.

Guess what? Big corporations and big government are exactly what some people being free to live up to their full potential looks like. It's you who wants the nanny state to protect you from others living up to their full potential.

Does having a strong personal desire for something justify it? What would curb an initial personal desire? What kind of argument would it take? Is there something analogous we can look to here for something that will cause great harm, but can be personally desired and one does not go for it due to this? — schopenhauer1

Here's some anecdotal evidence:

Back in college, I had a classmate who wanted to have a child despite being single (after finishing college and getting a job, of course). This was just around the time when legislation about artificial insemination, sperm donation etc. was being passed here, so the topic was current ; IIRC, there was even a referendum about it. Her argument was that it would be cruel to deny single women at least this pleasure of having a child. (I thought it was absurd for a single woman to want to have a child.)

This was her initial personal desire. From what I gathered, her reasoning was that if she's too plain to get a boyfriend, then at least the state should make it possible for her to get a sperm donor, to at least have a child if she can't have a husband.

What could curb that initial desire of hers? Well, my ranting about her romantic ideas about romance being idiotic and that having a child out of contempt for herself being a useless sacrifice of herself didn't help.
It seems that her desire to have a child, even as a single mother by a sperm donor, was driven by her desire to feel validated as a human being, which was to her the second-best option to having a child by a husband.
I can't think of anything that could change that.

My wagon will always remained hitched to the traditional conception of American freedom. — synthesis

By golly, what are you complaining about then??!

How much socialism do you want? Who doesn't want to live in a country where you are free to live up to your potential?

Socialism is about lowering the bar far enough so everybody is miserable. — synthesis

False dilemma.

Who doesn't want to live in a country where you are free to live up to your potential?

All one needs to do to in order to live in a country where you are free to live up to your potential, is to reconceptualize "free" and "live up to your potential", so that the new concepts match one's reality, whatever that may be.

It's hard to live with a pessimistic outlook on life if one actually has to work for a living. In contrast, pessimism is the luxury that the privileged can afford. Such as those living off trust funds.
— baker

Again, makes no sense. (and I really want to add fuckn before sense. You have to explain this as it is not evident by just you stating this as fact. — schopenhauer1

Have you ever consistently made an effort to have a pessimistic attitude to life, yet were able to dilligently get up every morning and do your work well?

If at the next elections, Americans will vote for Trump or his children (and chances are, they will), you will be one major step closer to the America you want: a dog-eat-dog country in which every man is on his own.

The Donald.

I wonder if this would cause someone to stop and think more when considering procreation and putting more people into the world. — schopenhauer1

No.

But if the trends toward "euthanasia" and wrongful life and wrongful living lawsuits become stronger, then this could create the conditions in which people might become more careful about producing children. Ie. when matters of life and death become something that is acceptable to talk about and to routinely threaten people with, it seems people will be more likely to distance themselves from having children altogether.

On the other hand, another factor that could contribute to this being more careful about producing children is to objectify and commercialize children even further (a trend that is already well underway) and to strenghten the social image of a child as a luxury, a potentially prohibitively expensive luxury, in the same category with fancy sports cars, diamond necklaces, or fur coats.

Is there anything going on in this country now besides fear and dependency? — synthesis

Blondie's third term! He's your savior! Hallelujah!

It's hard to live with a pessimistic outlook on life if one actually has to work for a living. In contrast, pessimism is the luxury that the privileged can afford. Such as those living off trust funds.
— baker

Are you saying antinatalists don't have to work? — schopenhauer1

Read again.
It's hard to live with a pessimistic outlook on life if one actually has to work for a living. In contrast, pessimism is the luxury that the privileged can afford. Such as those living off trust funds.

Did you pull this statistic out of your ass or is your head stuck up there?

*sigh*

Either way, your statements make no sense.

If you'd read them, they would.

Why would non-privileged people not be able to NOT have children?

Many people need to have children, in order to produce laborers to help them and to provide a measure of security for when they are unable to work.

Further, in order to endure the hardship of the daily grind, one needs to have a measure of optimism, needs to believe that it's all worth it somehow, that it all somehow makes sense.
Many people find this meaning and this optimism in having children: they work hard in order to provide for their children; their children make their hard work seem worthwhile. In contrast, working hard in an effort to pay for one's hedonistic pursuits is seen as empty, worthless, decadent by some (many, if not most?) people.

I was just stating that you need a combination of the three with political arguments. The pure logic of it doesn't seem to usually affect people.

Sure. Why on earth should it??

All parents have played their part, and so all should pay. — Bartricks

Make them.

Lead, follow, or get out of the way, right?

Your reason. Not our reason. — Isaac

He mimicks the style of philosophers. :p

Personally, I haven't found that a desire for fine art follows sexual satisfaction. A cigarette, maybe, but please, no fine art in the bedroom. — Bitter Crank

Jesus. One desire follows another. The selection and order are not universal. After sex, some people want to smoke a cigarette, some want to collect fancy sports cars and others collect garden gnomes, or whatever. The point is, they keep desiring things after they have satisfied one desire.

This latter is also the idea that underlies Maslow's theory; although Maslow posited that the selection and order of desires are universal (which is disputable).

Are you sure the insatiable-and-ever-rising-desire model is valid? Left to our own devices, I think most people would be reasonably satisfied once their broadly-defined basic needs are met.

It's not like people typically become desireless. They just stop desiring the things they already have (now that they've obtained them), and they desire other things. "Things" here means very broadly -- from material things like clothes and food to less material things like a successul career or reputation.

We, though, are NOT left to our own devices. For at least the last 100 years, retailers and manufacturers of all sorts have been using an array of communication methods to entice us into continually desiring more and "better".

And it works precisely because we operate by the insatiable-and-ever-rising-desire model.

The amount of consumption that occurred in most households began to rise sometime in the late 19th / early 20th century. Why, in 1915, was a house with 850 square feet of floor space considered adequate for 2 adults and perhaps 1 child? It was adequate because people didn't buy so much stuff!

You want to argue they were desireless?
That those prudent, modest people of old were helpless in the face of and succombed to the evil ploys of marketing?

They operated out of the desire to improve their lives. This is an insatiable and ever rising desire. It can become realized in many ways: whether in buying a new home, finding new, more attractive sex partners, changing careers, or in working hard to improve one's reputation, and so on.

Billions would be of no use to you in the case of the collapse of the economy, would they? A gun and the skill to use it would reverse the acquisition of even a trillion dollars in heartbeat in the case of a collapsed system. — Isaac

Hence having your own army is part of the billionaire's plan for ultimate safety.
Rich people don't just amass money while living in sheds. They strategically invest in buildings, physical infrastructure, social infrastructure, means of defense etc. etc. that help keep them safe.

Duh. Read my whole post.

Of course, and obviously: our needs and wants are satiable, and are regularly satiated. There are outliers whose only response to desire is MORE. They are both outliers and abnormal. Most of the men I have known like sex and pursue it enthusiastically. What they do not do is spend more and more time obtaining more and more sex. The amount of sex they want (and get) tends to reach a plateau and stay there. Why? Because enough is enough--literally.
/.../
Moderation is actually necessary to maintain pleasure. If one drank only the finest and rarest of whisky in quantity (as much as one could drink) it would no longer be a pleasure. One would be too drunk to care what one was drinking, and one's taste would become jaded. — Bitter Crank

Sure, but this misses the point. The point is that one keeps having desires. Once one desire is satisfied, another one comes up. One satisfies the desire for food, and the desire for sex comes up; satisfying that, the desire for fine art comes up. And so on, so endlessly on. This is where the problem is.

Then it seems like this is pretty much only saying "those that are already happy will be happy, and those that are not will not." That doesn't really offer much guidance. — I don't get it

But was it ever meant to offer guidance?

Are you asking if I envy animals their thoughtless way of life, or people who don't think about procreation in political terms (e.g. creating more laborers who can evaluate their laboring as negative)?

If the latter, I don't envy them. /.../ — schopenhauer1

If you don't envy them, then what do you do? Fear them?

This is more refined in that it is less obvious. It is about our very ability to understand what we are doing as we are doing it, and seeing it as negative, but still knowing we have to do it to survive.

The pronatalists are posing a threat to your survival, doubly so: 1. to your person (which is endangered by pollution, socio-economic collapse, etc. posed by (over)population); 2. to your idea of what life on Earth should be like.

See, if you'd be a true pessimist and a true antinatalist, you'd just chuck the pronatalists and the gloomy prospects for planet Earth in the fuck it bin. But you don't do that. You argue against them on an internetz forum. Because even as a pessimist and an antinatalist, you still want to have a good life, right?

Granted. But to be fair, have people ever really been presented with antinatalist arguments? Only people on philosophy forums and niche groups probably. So it really hasn't been tested either. — schopenhauer1

Apart from the relatively small group of people who have found themselves forced by external circumstances not to have children, antinatalist views are reserved for the privileged who can afford not to have children.

It's hard to live with a pessimistic outlook on life if one actually has to work for a living. In contrast, pessimism is the luxury that the privileged can afford. Such as those living off trust funds.

There's a weird thing where not only does the argument have to be good, but the presentation of the argument must be convincing to really make people do something from it. It is a combination of ethos, pathos, and logos.

I don't think this is weird at all. Why would it be weird?

Do you want to be like religious people who rattle down their doctrine and demand people to just believe it??

So, my question is, how does one live in the face of this knowledge? Is life even worth living in light of this view? Or have I just created a false dilemma, a non-problem? — I don't get it

In Early Buddhism, such an insight is a starting point for the quest for the end of suffering.

And, of course, what if you're an orphan?

Your parents have forced you to live a life. Well, we're all entitled to make them pay to insure us against the various risks we will face while living it. Yes? — Bartricks

And your parents can pass the buck to their parents, and they to theirs, and so on, back to Adam and Eve, or the Primordial Soup.
Where exactly does that get you?

That’s reason to accumulate savings enough to last you a lifetime, sure. But that is still far less that what billionaires accumulate. — Pfhorrest

If you want to be prudent, you need to prepare for everything, including natural catastrophes and the collapse of economy. For this, billions are needed.

Also, who is dictating what to whom? Who wants/opposes the denouncing of all gender? — Pfhorrest

It's fashionable, and it's a way to leverage power.
A few years back, when some young-ish actress (I won't mention her name for fear of revenge) who officially goes as "non-binary" declared herself as such, you know what I felt? Fear. Consternation. Because this was yet another thing that other people can potentially use against me, in the same way that rich people can use their wealth against me, or the way spiritual people can make declarations of attainment to use them against me.

In the end, it's all about power. And in terms of power, anything goes. Beauty, wealth, education, secret club membership, spirituality -- anything with which one can gain some leverage over others. And if one doesn't have beauty or wealth or the traditional means with which to gain power, then one has to invent new means, launch new ideas that can captivate other people's mind for long enough to give one leverage over them. Such as "big and beautiful" or "non-binary".

What was once a stack of 200 resumes, providing a snapshot of 200 applicants we now have a stack of blank paper. How exactly is this a good thing? — Book273

Pshaw!
HR don't concern themselves with that. Why do people fear HR? Because HR has power. So it has always been, so it will always be.

Thing is though that once there’s no way to make money just by owning other people’s stuff and charging them to use it, there’s pretty much no motive to own more than you use yourself anymore, and so no reason to be a supermultibillionaire at all. — Pfhorrest

Of course there is such a reason: safety. Since time immemorial, people have strived to amass wealth in an effort to guarantee as much safety for themselves as possible.

Does anybody see anything on the horizon that might indicate a reversal this incredibly disturbing trend? — synthesis

Blondie's third term.

Circular reasoning is a problem in a range of areas and not just confined to theists. You keep coming back to whether people are troubled or not by their logical fallacies. Sorry, but I can't quite work out the relevance. — Tom Storm

The relevance is that they don't lose sleep over such things, while philosophers do. Now, who's better off?

Most people with circular thinking are not troubled by it. Most people are not troubled by their lack of critical thinking in general.

Then how is lack of critical thinking a problem?

I mean, learn to stand up for yourself. — Banno

Stand up for yourself -- and get hit on the head, with nobody to blame but yourself.

And my question still stands:

Do you envy them their "animalistic", thoughtless, going-through-the-motions way of life? — baker

I'm not disagreeing with you. I just don't see how any argument could change the way both proactive and defensive pronatalists view procreation favorably.
It's not like we could come up with an nifty antinatalist syllogism, and then, boom, people change and stop making new babies.

t's not like they feel troubled by those circularities.
— baker

So what? Wrong is wrong, even if people think it is right. — Tom Storm

My point is that the theists themselves are not troubled by their circular thinking. They can go about their days just fine, and they pretty much rule the world, to boot -- and their circular thinking about God doesn't get in the way of their successful functioning.

Racists are untroubled by their beliefs too. Does this mean we follow their lead?

What if circular thinking isn't as bad as philosophers make it out to be?
Clearly, it's bad for philosophical purposes, but it doesn't seem half as bad for everyday purposes. It would be imprudent to dismiss this.

As I said, you describe a power imbalance. You might do well to change that. — Banno

What do you mean? IRL, power imbalances are the norm in most interactions. One cannot simply pretend they don't exist.

Yay!

So much the worse for them. — Banno

Why? It's not like they feel troubled by those circularities.

You describe a power imbalance in which you are the one asked to make the justification. Flip that around; seek a justification from those who demand you justify yourself. Learn to use Socratic method.

And invite their wrath?! Justify them beating me up (metaphorically or literally)?!