this might be the saddest and dumbest thing i've ever seen.
there's immigration. when birthrates are too low they'll just open up immigration.
even if there wasn't a simple and straightforward response with historical precedent that hamstrings the sentiment expressed in the op, it's insanely depressing that anyone would ever think to pen the words "i'll kill myself to hurt you!" as anything other than the tragic, diseased ravings of a person abused and neglected by everyone around them.
Fuck yeah. I got fixed a few years after the ACA (Obamacare) was enacted. Prior to the ACA almost no providers covered voluntary sterilization, or there were difficult hoops to jump. Now I make a point to scream to all my ladies in the states, your health insurance is absolutely REQUIRED to provide coverage for female sterilization.
While this is noble of you, it is absolutely harder to get a hysterectomy than a vasectomy. Not because insurance won’t cover it, but because many doctors won’t do it unless you’ve had kids, or a husband’s “permission”, or are older.
Yeah I hear you, I live in the PNW and it still took me three obgyns before a doctor would finally approve. At the time I was a child free never pregnant 22 year old,. The doctor still required that I write a letter stating I understand it's irreversible. Still pretty condescending imo. You aren't wrong, it's hard and depending where you are in the us impossible to access humane women's healthcare.
But you are wrong to assume women seeking sterilizations all get hysterectomies. There are at least a handful of options, I got Essure but I think that it's no longer on the market. I walked out of my appointment, still more of an ordeal for ladies but not necessarily as dramatic as a hysterectomy.
That’s a pretty big decision for a 22 year old. I understand your point about it feeling condescending, but I can’t help but feel like the doctor was doing you a massive favor. It may have been an inconvenience but that’s better than the chance of a lifetime of regret.
A 22 year old is an adult. I should have the ability to make 100% of decisions regarding my body. If a mistake was made it was mine to make. I could get a middle finger tattooed on my face without a note. I can have a whole litter of babies and no one makes me write a letter. So imo you can kindly fuck off.
People have kids at 22. That's a really big permanent decision too that completely changes the trajectory of one's life. If having a kid at 22 is ok, then taking steps to make sure that you don't have one should also be ok. Otherwise that is promoting a double standard.
Or, you know, fight to see the system change hopefully within your lifetime and provide a better future for the generations to come. Because they will come, no matter whether you personally have kids or not. Your procreation choices are entirely up to you.
Yes, you are not responsible that someone else fucked up. That masses of people fucked up. You are not responsible to clean up the mess it caused. But, you know, you can still help.
yes. and to be clear, it’s not eugenics to make that choice yourself. problem starts as soon as it becomes about others though. seen far too many internet conversations go from
“i won’t reproduce” to
“it’s my responsibility not to reproduce” to
“it’s our responsibility not to reproduce” to
“the poor and disabled should be sterilized.”
this post is already getting pretty damn close to step 3 right there. reddit was awful for this so i encourage us to just be aware when stuff like this comes up.
Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior.
Emphasis mine, though seems people rarely get called out for the latter.
Curious about your age and social group. Pretty much everyone I associate with doesn't want to have kids, usually citing the world their children would inherit. These definitely aren't the type of people that support eugenics, in any way. Are you of the belief that we should be increasing the world's population? If so, why?
"Positive" eugenics is also eugenics, i.e. nations that want more (insert racial or ethnic group) and encouraging those groups to reproduce are engaging in eugenics.
The OP isn't about eugenics of any sort. No one was talking about (negative) eugenics either until someone shoehorned it into the conversation.
I think it is intellectually dishonest to mention one type of eugenics while completely ignoring the other type, hence my bringing attention to a topic which has already been broached.
I'll be honest it was a huge question that hung over my wife and I when we were trying to decide whether to have kids or not. But we were in our mid 30s and it was a 'now or never' type situation.
Believe it not there is positives in raising kids. We're definitely not judgemental of people who decide they don't want to. But I love my kids more than I knew it was possible. And we're trying to raise them with an understanding of the world that's a bit broader than the ra-ra pro-capital values we were taught as kids.
Yeah I have no idea why this person is on about. Antinatalism has literally nothing to do with eugenics. It's all about saying "fuck you I'm not going to make more cogs for the machine."
i just have a feeling raising kids will get harder and harder, because the economy is getting worse and more unequal. even factoring out climate change, its expensive to afford even my own survival.
I got more of a, "You can't continue to take advantage of us if we don't have anymore children and kill off your workforce through gained apathy to our future." Kinda vibe.
It helps if you look at it from the perspective of the capitalist class. Workers are a form of free capital. Capitalists don't have to assume any of the burdens involved in creating life, raising a child, acculturating them to social standards that make them suitable workers, etc. They don't even have to pay for the education or training that makes them capable as human capital in various industrial contexts.
All those costs are dumped onto the working classes, not just as parents (usually the woman) who are expected to deliver a baby, nurse the baby, raise the resulting child until they are the age of the majority all without any wages, access to benefits like retirement plans or health insurance, etc. but also onto taxpayers who subsidize the rest of the costs outside of the home such as their schooling and transportation to the schools.
There is a huge leverage here that the working class does not take by organizing the production of themselves. If we all agreed to not have children and demanded fair compensation for any new production of human capital, society would be much more just and the capitalist class would have less room to exploit us.
i think this is also the reason the far right pushes so hard against contraception and abortion.
also the marxist concept of reserve army of labour: the more imporvished and desperate workers are lining up for shitty jobs to survive, the less then can get away with paying.
It certainly does benefit the right to some extent, but I wouldn't ignore the strategy that the right uses of exploiting Christians, and that's where contraception and abortion come in as issues (stemming from theological convictions).
Not the same person but the answer is non-biological coercion of labor even if that's not the way it's often defined. If one lives in a system where they are compelled to sell their labor to survive so that someone can skim value from their labor this is a form of slavery.
I wonder what you mean by non-biological here, why is that a helpful distinction?
I don't see why we couldn't think of human coercion of other humans isn't "biological" in some sense, so I also don't understand what distinction exactly you are making with "non-biological", but I might just be a bit slow today.
Still, I agree with you that coercion seems central to the idea of slavery.
Ah, it may have been unneeded. What I meant by that is that every living being is compelled to work on some level to survive and I wanted to be clear that I wasn't including that. Like, a lion must hunt for food, a lion is biologically compelled to do this work to survive but this isn't slavery.
To continue with that silly analogy, if some lions coerced other lions to hunt extra and took their extra food, that would be a form of slavery.
ah, I see what you mean - it's an important distinction, and one that I think some existentialists looked at (not necessarily in terms of slavery, per se, but certainly in terms of freedom). Ultimately we can't avoid constraints and in that sense there is always coercion from the environment. However, there is a big difference between those inescapable constraints and the immoral and unjustified hierarchies a tiny minority of humans have successfully imposed on the rest, and pointing that out is definitely worthwhile.
First of all, I think I completely understand where you are coming from. This was the same reaction I had when I heard words like "slave" or "slavery" being thrown around to describe contemporary working conditions.
Coming from a U.S. context where slavery overlaps with racism, it seemed even racially insensitive to me that an office worker would be compared to a slave, which in my mind was an African slave working in a cotton field.
The reality is that working conditions vary considerably in the U.S., so when we speak of the working class we include everyone from the undocumented immigrant who is forced to live in shacks and pick crops without pay or even basic access to sanitary or safe conditions all the way up to cozy financial workers who work in skyscrapers. Something as big as an economic or political system is a difficult thing to analyze and talk about.
But I noticed you did not answer my question. If you're not open to a discussion I understand, at least I have had a chance to put some of my thoughts out there. I just want to offer the opportunity to discuss the topic if you would like to, but no worries either way.
"Slave" like any word has contextual meaning. In this context I'm using it to refer to the workers who find themselves caught in a coercive political-economic system. Other similar words are wage slave, proletariat, or just working class. The point is that there is an involuntary aspect which likens it to slavery in the more narrow sense. (The narrow meaning of slave I have in mind being "someone forced into labor without pay".)
All that said, in the U.S. there are still slaves as defined narrowly as people who are forced to work without pay. Slavery is used in prison systems, for example, and is not uncommon among human trafficking victims and immigrants (e.g. read Tomatoland). If your children are women, indigenous, black, are born or become disabled, or belong to various other minority statuses they are at even greater risk of getting swallowed into those forms of "literal" slavery as well.
Ok. How about you say working class and not fucking “slave” then lol. It’s insulting to compare working at TJ Maxx for 40 hours a week to literal slavery.
Yeah sure, as long as you don’t associate any meaning with the word.
Slavery is people literally kidnapped and forced to work in fields without wages or actual housing. Well, also, it’s kind of just when you make kind of close to minimum wage. Well, actually, it’s when you’re a computer programmer but you wish you got paid more. Who cares. It’s all the same word.
why didn't I say working class instead of slave? I don't think most people have in mind the same meaning of "working class" as I intended, while the term slave immediately communicates the situation and the reasoning of the meme
Sure, my communication could have been more specific, but then it would have been more verbose as well. This is just how we use language, to communicate effectively. I don't want to dismiss your point that being too glib or broad with our language can be offensive to some, but I also think the TJ Maxx worker is closer to that literal slave in the field than you think. To me, solidarity for the working class and cooperation is preferable and pragmatically more likely to achieve political successes than gatekeeping suffering.
I would also lump military service under "coercive". The incentives are significant and can be life changing, but it still leads to people being considered government property at the end of the day
No future workers. No future consumers (including being bent over a barrel for essential goods). No future taxpayers. No future people to fight their wars.
Not "$50K" of equity, an entire lifetime(s) of equity. A child will have a lot more than $50K of impact of their lifetime if we are talking about first world developed nations.
Obviously it can make life easier on the would-be parents as well, but that isn't really the main focus here.
I don’t think you’re really getting the point if the main thing you got hung up on there was “calculating the approximate value of a worker to a CEO during their tenure at a company”
I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything here. Just explaining what the position is. You obviously disagree with it, as does the majority of the population. It is an unpopular position.
Ok. That’s a very fine system if everyone in the country works in a button factory where they just push buttons on a keyboard all day and don’t actually produce anything.
What do you think businesses are… making products for??
