this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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[–] [email protected] 139 points 4 months ago (9 children)

garbage health care

mass shootings

violent racism

[–] [email protected] 97 points 4 months ago (5 children)

Look at this guy who thinks the USA invented racism and holds a monopoly on it.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 4 months ago

The comic is very America-centric if you look at the problems mentioned in totality.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 4 months ago

In Europe it's just sparkling "let them down in the Mediterranean and/or make sure they stay in their own neighborhoods."

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 4 months ago (5 children)

I mean, the UK has 2 out of 3 of those. And most countries have the violent racism.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 4 months ago (1 children)

RIP Alaska, Hawaii, and Michigan's Upper Peninsula

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago (2 children)

The US is far from the only country with violent racism. In terms of healthcare, the privatization. The Canadian healthcare system is being increasingly enshittified by conservatives up here, too.

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[–] [email protected] 124 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Thats one of the reasons i'm not having kids. I have a decent life by any metric but I had to work my ass off and face a tonne of resistance in my career. It always feels like I'm playing catch up with the cost of everything going up and up to the point where I'm just exhausted and depressed. Like, what is the point of living?! it honestly feels like theres just nothing left to enjoy anymore, everything has been monetized to hell and back. They told us as kids that you can be anything you want when you grow up, the future is bright and if you work hard you will be rewarded and its just not true. I can't do that to another person, these problems are only getting worse with no end in sight.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 4 months ago (2 children)

That's the point? The left get demoralized and the right can't be because they have no morals. Its part of the reason right wingers tend to have a dozen children, it's quite literally biblical drown them in numbers bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Idiocracy is a documentary

[–] [email protected] 60 points 4 months ago (7 children)

It absolutely isnt

President Comacho has a problem, finds the most qualified person to fix it, does so (reluctantly) and then dosen't take credit. This so divorced from reality that it should be concidred high fantasy.

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[–] [email protected] 74 points 4 months ago (2 children)

If I ever decide to have kids then I'm adopting because I can't in good conscience bring a life into this shitty world

[–] [email protected] 40 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Given the glut of unwanted children from our abortion prohibition, we'll be needing a lot of new adoptive parents in the near future.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago (6 children)

Babies get adopted quickly. It's the older children who need homes.

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[–] [email protected] 63 points 4 months ago (2 children)

We didn't start the fire. It was always burning since the world's been turning.

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 4 months ago (5 children)

The catch-22 is that if the people with environmental values don't have kids, those values aren't passed on to the next generation (unless they become teachers or media personalities).

[–] [email protected] 73 points 4 months ago (2 children)

You don’t need to have kids to pass on values. The basic premise of your statement doesn’t hold up.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 months ago (7 children)

Well, like I mentioned you still need some sort of interaction with kids. Or maybe influence their parents enough to have them indirectly pass on those values you imparted on them. But I still think that if the smartest, kindest, most compassionate people among us stop having kids... well then that's not great for that next generation. I've just always felt that giving up one of the primary factors of life, reproduction, seems very defeatist. But on the other hand, if someone genuinely doesn't want children then by all means don't.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I know at least one friend that wants to adopt/foster once they're ready, instead of having biological children.

The justification was similar to what you said, where they want to pass on their values / legacy, but don't care about the genetic side

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

For all those values, even in yourself. There’s no better motivator to make an effort for the future, than having a kid you want the best for. If you don’t have a kid, you’re not passing your environmental values, or you educational values, or all the other values you may have for what makes a better society. Nor do you have any reason to hold to them yourself.

I don’t mean to try to push anyone toward having kids, but if you do want to have kids but give up thinking the world is getting worse, that decision is part of the world getting worse. If you do want kids, there’s all sorts of opportunity to make this a better world for both yourself and them, and longer, and plenty of opportunity to make an actual difference

Just passing along the value of the bidet may be worth it, according to the comic

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago (1 children)

By that rote though everyone that has had children in the past has cared for their future and the future of the social and actual environment they will inherit. We wouldn’t be having this discussion if any semblance of that was true.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

If you don’t have a kid, you’re not passing your environmental values, or you educational values, or all the other values you may have for what makes a better society. Nor do you have any reason to hold to them yourself.

...

Why does it have to be my kid for me to care?

Like actually. Are you seriously saying being a parent somehow intrinsically makes someone a better, more caring, and impactful, person? Or that parenthood is the only way to achieve true conviction? That's literally not how any of this works.

Not bringing children into the world in no way prevents you from caring about making the world a better place, and acting to make it so. And doing the things that make the world better doesn't functionally require having a kid. All it takes is some basic fucking decency.

Which is something people already have, but get taken away by the grind of survival or material success. That is maybe why you have this fucked up idea that people get it by having a kid, but in reality that's just a huge life event that wakes some people up enough to take a look around and start caring again.

And passing good things on doesn't require having descendants. If you've ever changed someones mind on something for the better, you've successfully passed on "values you may have for what makes a better society". The person whose mind you changed doesn't even need to be younger than you, thought doesn't procreate through fucking genetics.

Plenty of parents are made no more profound than they were before by the act of procreating, and will conently continue to do nothing to improve the world. There are parents who will protect their own to the detriment of everyone else.

Kids though, if raised by caring parents, care from the start, but then have that heart crushed by society until they too have a kid of their own.

But in there is way for everyone to care, all the time.

The whole idea that it's ok not to care about and deal with bad stuff unless you personally are somehow impacted is the whole reason we're in this mess, and it's perpetuated by people being forced to live in a constant scramble of stress and consumerism.

Not by people not having children.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago

Any society that doesn't impart those values across the board to its citizens will devolve into shit regardless.

It's basically just math.

People with zero values are going to fuck like rabbits and people with values aren't.

If trash family has 5 kids they can't take care of and a dad that leaves, that's at least 4 really mad poor kids that are going to blame a lot on somesuch minority for their problems in 18 years.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 4 months ago (8 children)

DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN REPEAT DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN

THIS MESSAGE IS FOR ALL RESIDENTS OF PLANET EARTH

NO ONE NEEDS YOU TO BIRTH THEM

ABORT. ABORT. ABORT.

WE HAVE ENOUGH PEOPLE, THE PLANET IS BURNING, THEY WILL NOT LEAD GOOD LIVES. IT'S NOT WORTH IT. PULL OUT BEFORE YOU NUT HOLY CHRIST PLEASE DO NOT HAVE KIDS

[–] [email protected] 36 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (5 children)

This is mostly copied over from my recent comments elsewhere, but it is very relevant here too.

By 2030 we are going to be 40% over capacity on fresh water resources globally. and 40% of arable land has already been depleted, and 95% will be by 2050.

And that's just water and food.

Once arctic ice sheet coverage gets below 1,000,000 square kilometres, the planet will be absorbing more heat than it reflects and this is called a Blue Ocean Event.

The BOE will trigger the Clathrate Gun which will cause seabeds to rapidly realease fuck tons of methane, cooking the earth in it's own atmosphere.

2024 Arctic sea ice likely reached its annual minimum extent of 4.28 million square kilometers.

Greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing and fuelled by climate change, the world's oceans have broken temperature records every single day over the past year.

So it's basically a race between whether the drought and famine kill us all first, or the BOE setting off the Clathrate Gun will.

Either way, it is unlikely the human race survives the century. Creating more people to suffer in this dying world, is stupid and cruel and is only going to speed up our demise.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago

Well. Fuck.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Please consider adoption as an alternative if you are in a stable situation and want children.

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[–] RootAccess 40 points 4 months ago (9 children)

100% of scientists agree that not-having-kids will solve our climate change crisis in one generation.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

What is the acceptable level of tragedy to impart upon a non-consenting progeny? I vote for zero

[–] [email protected] 30 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (8 children)

You'd have to be immortal, first. Most kids are gonna live to see their own parents pass.

Tragedy is a part of life.

It's easily avoidable tragedy, unaddressed by those who could do something about it, that's the problem.

Even worse, there's potentially extinction level tragedy happening right now, going unaddressed by those who can do something about it.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Confused the US with the entire world again, honest mistake.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (9 children)

At this point I think the GOP are just taunting people who won't bring kids into this. Jokes on them though, if theyre having kids from some sort obligation and not to love and properly nurture them it's just bad news for everyone involved. Have fun with all that trauma.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Where do you think we get new Republicans from?

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Generational trauma. It's all just generational trauma.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 4 months ago (5 children)

Craziest thing about this graphic is that it leaves so many major issues off while also covering so much horseshit.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 months ago (9 children)

When in human history was ever a good time to have children?

Is there an objective "this was the best year/decade/century"?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That’s the neat part, there isn’t!

But being more serious: I think I can express the feeling of things being particularly worse now in a way that isn’t just recency bias.

Sure, over time technology has improved and that’s generally speaking allowed for better standards of living, at least for the people at the right end of that technology. (Not so great if you’re being conquered because someone shows up with guns for example.) So you could look at the past and say it was worse because materially things like food availability and medicine have become better over time.

But key to this was that all of this was a struggle of humans over nature. To the extent things were bad, there were tangible things we could do to improve.

These days, so many of our problems are self-inflicted and technology and economic development mostly makes them worse. Climate change is the obvious big one, but then there’s stuff like:

  • Weapons have become increasingly destructive and centrally usable. A small number of people can cause a lot more damage than they ever could in the past.

  • Surveillance technology invades our privacy in a way that’s unprecedented in human history.

  • Automation, communications, and transportation technology have made workers less and less powerful and therefore more subject to abuse and artificial poverty. This is one of the more messed up things about capitalism. Technology gets better and rather than getting the benefits of that progress, it actually hurts a lot of people.

  • Advances in science and technology, particularly data science, allow the powerful to hyper-optimize the bad things they were always doing or enables them to do things they’ve wanted to do.

  • A financialized economy creates economic catastrophes where people go homeless or starve without any actual changes to material conditions. The numbers got screwed up or the investors panicked and now everything sucks for no reason?

  • More generally, we can produce enough of the necessities of life for everyone, but capitalism ensures that those necessities won’t make it to people. Capitalism depends on scarcity. If you had a house you wouldn’t need to pay a landlord. If you had food you wouldn’t need to pay food companies. If you had both you wouldn’t need to go work and put up with awful conditions. We’ve solved our most fundamental problems and yet because of the interests of the system and those in power, that progress gets held back.

In the past, even if things were rough now, you could maybe look forward to them improving. Now it feels like the walls are closing in. Unless we actively do something about it, things are going to get worse for most people as more and more wealth accumulates in private hands, as we become subject to increasingly powerful forms of control, and as the powerful destroy the environment we need to live.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Why do you think the politicians that are accelerating inequality are the same politicians that are trying to outlaw abortion?

They want babies because they need more workers to distribute inequality and produce more wealth for the shareholders. Foster kids are less likely to go to college, so they’re perfect fuel for the machine.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago (14 children)

lol, yes Millennials and Gen Z are trying so much harder to fix the situation by voting for change… ohhh wait

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/yes-trump-improved-young-men-drew-young-women-rcna179019

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah I’m afraid that the lesson is that Gen Z is not actually the future, they are going to repeat the past. What makes me sad is that they should have been the future but social media made sure that didn’t happen.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Did social media make sure that didn't happen, or did the fact that virtually every generation ultimately repeats the mistakes of the one before it ensure that didn't happen?

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago (6 children)

Why is the whole world on fire? These are all mostly American problems.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago (1 children)

A) keep electing far-right leaders and they won't be B) global warming

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (6 children)

I'm Gen X, but cusp with Millennial. I said at 15 or 16 I'd never have kids & stuck with it. I'm more resolute than ever & feel like I would have massive guilt if I had caved. I felt the world was too fucked up back in the 90s. I wonder how my younger self would deal with the world today.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You can be damned sure the crazy fundamentalists are gonna have a shit ton of kids. And some of those will vote.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (3 children)

A shitty life situation has never stopped anybody from having kids. Quite the opposite, the less educated a society and the lower the prospect of comfort, the more kids people have. Poor and miserable people fuck for fun and don't care about proper contraceptives, resulting in more kids. Further more, people believe that the more kids you'll have, the more likely it is that one of them is going to end up rich and successfull.

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