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ChairMaster posted:Not to mention that the assumption behind the argument is nonsense (that we can properly support more humans to live full and rewarding lives). I didn't say we could right now. I said when and if we can. It's a philosophical/ethical position, not a practical one. ChairMaster posted:Pretending like anyone who says "don't have children" is the same as them saying "make humans go extinct" is one of the most transparent ways to show that you're either not engaging honestly or are living in such a haze of complacency and ignorance that you can't be bothered to think about anything you believe or say. Again, reading things that were not there. I think it's a pretty straightforward position that self awareness is a good thing (PS, we get to define this, because as far as we can tell, nobody else is doing so. And divinity has been quiet in the matter so far.) and insofar as we can support people to live good and happy lives, bringing more minds into existence is just an overall good.
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Dec 2, 2018 00:03
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The Butcher posted:I didn't say we could right now. I said when and if we can. It's a philosophical/ethical position, not a practical one. Then it's a useless position to take in the current circumstances in the real world, why bring it up? Other than trying to derail a conversation about how in the real world having kids is a lovely thing to do. The ethics of living in a fantasy world that does not exist are not really worth bringing up in this or any conversation outside of navel-gazing philosophy discussions. zapplez posted:Don't western people typically have less kids than their parents? We are already on a population decline of citizens in many countries. If it wasnt for immigration the population would be falling in a lot of places. That's not really a western trend, it's what happens in a more comfortable and developed society. When women have access to education, birth control, agency over their own bodies, and opportunities in life outside of producing and raising children for the men they are owned by, they will have less children overall. That's not really relevant to the question of whether or not people should be creating more children to grow up in a world in which they will die young, live very hard, and contribute to it's destruction. ChairMaster fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Dec 2, 2018 |
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Dec 2, 2018 00:07
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My position is simple: if you have the ability to reasonably ameliorate the suffering of a child, and choose not to in favor of having your old child, you are engaging in unethical behavior.zapplez posted:Don't western people typically have less kids than their parents? We are already on a population decline of citizens in many countries. If it wasnt for immigration the population would be falling in a lot of places. I've read the same, though it was a while ago and I don't recall where exactly. I think it was all first world nations that birth rates were falling for. But that doesn't escape the moral imperative of my position, and immigration can not only easily fill that gap, it does it more effectively from an economical perspective. quote:As far as we know, we are the only way for the universe to know and experience itself. Im'a go out on a limb here and say that's a good thing. This also doesn't really address the moral imperative, and I'm tempted to just say 'so what' in response. What intrinsic value does awareness have that we should feel some need to spread it?
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Dec 2, 2018 00:11
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Oh god please don't engage with a philosophical derail they are always completely worthless.
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Dec 2, 2018 00:11
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JawKnee posted:My position is simple: if you have the ability to reasonably ameliorate the suffering of a child, and choose not to in favor of having your old child, you are engaging in unethical behavior Now do people who spend 6 figures on ivf and government funding for such.
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Dec 2, 2018 00:19
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I'm not your monkey, an you're regularly a shithead, so how about you go gently caress yourself
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Dec 2, 2018 00:21
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JawKnee posted:What intrinsic value does awareness have that we should feel some need to spread it? In the absence of any other sort of higher truth, we get to pick the things that are cool and good. Being a thing that gets to know it is a thing, and look at and try to understand all the other things, I think that is a good. If we can't settle on existence being better than non existence as a baseline rule (which again, as the only "people" in the room, we get to define), I suspect the camps are too far separated to really be able to talk about it.
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Dec 2, 2018 00:21
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The Butcher posted:In the absence of any other sort of higher truth, we get to pick the things that are cool and good. agreed on the last point
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Dec 2, 2018 00:21
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The Butcher posted:In the absence of any other sort of higher truth, we get to pick the things that are cool and good. Jesus christ I warned you all about this. D&D should have a philosophy derail thread to send this trash to whenever it happens.
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Dec 2, 2018 00:23
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ChairMaster posted:Jesus christ I warned you all about this. D&D should have a philosophy derail thread to send this trash to whenever it happens. 
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Dec 2, 2018 00:31
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if you guys wanna see what the world will be like after real climate change just go to any native reserve thats 50km away from a city, 10km if its in the praries
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Dec 2, 2018 00:40
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Commercial scale carbon capture (for fuel, nanofibers, and plastics) is already economically viable and will be implemented on a huge scale in the next fifty years, the same way solar has taken off.
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Dec 2, 2018 00:45
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https://mobile.twitter.com/CUPEOntario/status/1068874502988161025
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Dec 2, 2018 00:49
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Franks Happy Place posted:Commercial scale carbon capture (for fuel, nanofibers, and plastics) is already economically viable and will be implemented on a huge scale in the next fifty years, the same way solar has taken off. Honestly this sounds like it's right up there with "self driving cars will solve traffic congestion"
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Dec 2, 2018 01:07
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It is, carbon capture is hilariously tiny and slow compared to the amount of emissions it has to keep up with. He's not actually serious.
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Dec 2, 2018 01:09
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Elon Musk.
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Dec 2, 2018 01:24
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Clean weed biomass plants will solve climate change don't worry guys.
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Dec 2, 2018 01:30
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Why don't we just ship all the carbon dioxide to mars to terraform it. I'm a genius give me a billion dollars.
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Dec 2, 2018 01:33
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The Butcher posted:Elon Musk. Elongated Muskellunge.
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Dec 2, 2018 01:39
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Franks Happy Place posted:Commercial scale carbon capture (for fuel, nanofibers, and plastics) is already economically viable and will be implemented on a huge scale in the next fifty years, the same way solar has taken off. yeah and we'll all upload into cool transforming robot bodies and I'll get to be a fighter jet and shoot lazer beams out my rear end in a top hat. blockchain.
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Dec 2, 2018 03:59
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zapplez posted:I know Climate Change is real , and really, really loving important. But are the studies really saying that in 10 or 20 years we will have giant changes already and in 50 years its going to be hell on earth? Yes. Let me put it this way, climate change is already, in the year 2018, causing natural disasters larger and more devastating than any we've seen before. Hurricane Harvey last year caused $125 billion of damage in one city. Hurricane Maria, also last year, caused $92 billion of damage in Puerto Rico, killed over 3,000 people, and made a significant amount of the island uninhabitable for anyone who considers the trappings of modern civilization to be essential for leading a good life. Here's a US chart showing that disasters causing at least a billion dollars in damage have been getting much more common over the last four decades. Climate scientists say that climate change is already making hurricanes, to take one example, more frequent, more severe, and more difficult to predict, and those trends will only get worse over time. Those are individual disasters that affect specific places, but they affect us all because even for those of us not directly affected by living in a disaster area or having friends or family who do, we as a society face a choice every time something like this happens: we either choose to spend huge amounts of money rebuilding the devastated area, which is generally socialized cost through things like government spending, or we choose to basically abandon the devastated area as no longer livable. Over time, we either become poorer as a society by constantly rebuilding after extreme weather events, or by losing places that millions of people used to call home, thereby displacing them and destroying any wealth they had tied up in the affected area. But beyond extreme weather events, climate change today, in 2018, is also a significant driver of chronic weather problems, like drought. Here's a handy blog post by a NASA scientist conveniently titled Climate change is already making droughts worse. In North America, this is making farming more difficult and meaning cities are starting to have to look into different, and more expensive, ways of obtaining water, like when El Paso yesterday announced it would become the first major US city to get its drinking water by retreating sewage, because the Rio Grande is drying up due to climate change. But beyond the immediate impacts of making life a little more difficult and expensive, climate-change-induced or -exacerbated droughts are also a major cause of the migrant crisis that's a major cause of the developed world taking a hard right turn into fascism. The Syrian Civil War was in part caused by the most severe drought on record pushing farmers out of the countryside and into cities, where they were unemployed and angry. The Syrian Civil War was subsequently one of the main drivers of irregular migration to Europe, along with a series of other conflicts and insecurities along the edges of the Sahara Desert, which are also caused or exacerbated by droughts and desertification either caused or contributed to by climate change. Another major case that's been in the news recently are the "migrant caravans" of Central American migrants to the US, usually attributed to gang violence or poverty--but, as in these other cases, many of the people fleeing poverty or gang violence were impoverished or victimized by food insecurity caused by droughts and crop failures brought about by climate change. These are just two factors that I've briefly discussed, extreme weather events and drought, but I hope I've made my point that already, in 2018, we are being negatively affected by climate change. There are a million other environmental factors beyond extreme weather events and drought that climate change is making worse, more extreme, or more unpredictable. Smarter people than me have written extremely extensive, detailed, and thorough reports for various national governments and international organizations saying what I've just said, and everyone ignores them because we don't want to believe it's true. The fact is that climate change is already making parts of our planet unlivable, to the point that millions of human beings are faced with the choice to either invest enormous amounts of resources continuing to live in unlivable places, or have to leave their homes and relocate. That relocation is already leading to enormous political and military conflict, and contributing to a rise in right-wing authoritarianism in the developed world as migrants leaving their homes try to move to wealthier countries, and we tell them no and militarize our borders. This is already happening. In 10 or 20 years it will be worse in ways we can probably imagine, because they will be look like what we're already living through, only worse. We essentially have no way of knowing what the world will look like 40 or 50 years from now, but given the complete lack of meaningful political action to address these problems internationally due to the collective action problem, the obstinate refusal of countries like Canada to truly accept that carbon fuel cannot be the fuel of the future, and other national problems like the continued election of climate-change-denying conservatives in countries like the US, my educated guess is that the world will be a significantly worse place 40 or 50 years from now. Not because we'll stop inventing technology or smartphones or premium TV or any of the things we as wealthy developed country residents currently enjoy, but because the conditions that allow people around the world to enjoy those kinds of things in peace and security are already being undermined and the problem is accelerating. It won't happen all at once, which is why we're so bad at recognizing these problems coming from climate change. When food gets more expensive we won't even notice because it happens gradually. When the trickle of migrants coming to our borders grows to a flood we will blame it on other factors. When civil wars break out in other countries we will explain it as plucky little democrats fighting against some authoritarian bad guy rather than the result of years of climate-change-induced drought sparking conflict. Our brains are not good at dealing with chronic problems that slowly get worse over time and just make other problems worse instead of killing us directly, so we find other explanations that our short-termism can understand, and a few years later when climate scientists say the problem was caused or exacerbated by climate change we ignore it because we've already forgotten it was a problem in the first place. Climate change is already here and is only getting worse because we aren't doing anything about it. vyelkin fucked around with this message at 06:27 on Dec 2, 2018 |
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Dec 2, 2018 06:23
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The real bad part about climate change is that life in Canada in particular probably isnt going to see much change which is going to prevent people from truly understanding the impact its having. Im honestly worried its going to cause large swathes of our population to swing hard for the authoritarian fences in their attempt to preserve what they have and keep the rest of the suffering world out. If Helsing has convinced me of anything its that FYGM is probably the largest political driving force in our country and that is going to spell trouble 20-50 years down the road as things worsen outside of our little bubble.
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Dec 2, 2018 06:43
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I wouldn't worry too much. The prairies are going to see huge swings in temperature which will push past the tolerance of most crops GMO or otherwise. The stalling of the Gulf Stream will have some profound impact on the weather patterns on the east coast, and I don't even know what's going to happen in the Pacific. And of course all the Canadians living in the Arctic have had a front seat to the dramatic changes already affecting the planet, and have been raising the alarm for some time. There just aren't enough of them and are largely politically disenfranchised. Play around with this if you want to see what could happen. Have fun! Dreylad fucked around with this message at 07:27 on Dec 2, 2018 |
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Dec 2, 2018 07:20
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I didn't say it wouldn't take society wide changes to achieve, just that there are options on the horizon that show promise. It's doable if we get serious and cut emissions in concert. But please, go on sterilizing yourselves. 
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Dec 2, 2018 09:55
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vyelkin posted::effortpost: Thanks for the detailed post
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Dec 2, 2018 10:19
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When I was a kid we were supposed to be living in Soylent Green by 2022. Movie specifically name drops the ‘greenhouse effect’ as part of the problem. So the fact that we're still at least 20 years away from is a tremendous victory in my book.  
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Dec 2, 2018 11:06
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The planet is not cooking itself because you had a third kid or because of overpopulation generally, the guys cranking the thermostat are the CEOs of the world's most powerful corporations and the politicians they own. Overpopulation is the same right-wing bugaboo it has been for the last 250 years.
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Dec 2, 2018 14:40
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This is really well said. In the context of this thread any semi-realistic climate change mitigation effort dedicated to keeping global temperatures to 2C-ish temperature rise by 2100 requires rapid decarbonization to begin immediately. As developing countries have limited capability to reduce emissions, it's really up to developed nations to do the bulk of early decarbonizing. Canada especially can and should be doing a lot more given its high emissions and relative wealth. We should be committing to at least 5% annual emission reductions (ie largely decarbonize in 20 years). In particular the oilsands are the obvious low hanging fruit here, their outsized emissions, lack of (non-govt) investment and relatively low-productivity makes it clear they have no real future. It should be a no-brainer to shutter them, and would single-handedly reduce Canada's per-capita emissions to France/Sweden levels. Their continued operation is strong evidence contemporary Canadians aren't taking climate change seriously. The necessary implication is that for Canadians to take climate change seriously the Albertan economy must be decimated. This should be the NDP slogan next election. Always good for reference: 
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Dec 2, 2018 14:52
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DynamicSloth posted:The planet is not cooking itself because you had a third kid or because of overpopulation generally, the guys cranking the thermostat are the CEOs of the world's most powerful corporations and the politicians they own. Overpopulation is the same right-wing bugaboo it has been for the last 250 years. Not having kids is not a plan to stop climate change, it's a plan to save your hypothetical child the misery of having to spend their entire life, however long or short it may be, in a world steadily deteriorating from climate change, and to save yourself the grief of watching the person or people you love most in the world have to live a significantly worse life than you did. It's mitigation, not prevention.
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Dec 2, 2018 15:14
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vyelkin posted:Not having kids is not a plan to stop climate change, it's a plan to save your hypothetical child the misery of having to spend their entire life, however long or short it may be, in a world steadily deteriorating from climate change, and to save yourself the grief of watching the person or people you love most in the world have to live a significantly worse life than you did. It's mitigation, not prevention. Turns out empty cynicism isn't a great way to fight climate change either. Stop confusing people that climate change is their fault for following their basic biological drives, instead of the specific fault of specific corporations and politicians who are wilfully ignoring scientific consensus so they can enrich themselves. We need to name and shame the actual guilty parties, it may be too late to save the planet but at least we can work up a list for trials at the Hague. DynamicSloth fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Dec 2, 2018 |
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Dec 2, 2018 15:23
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DynamicSloth posted:Turns out empty cynicism isn't a great way to fight climate change either. I'm still pretty sure this hypothetical child born next year would strongly prefer living their life, regardless of what happens with the environment over the next 100 years, than not getting a chance at life at all. Even people born today in "terrible" conditions, like the poorest of the poor or the young and disabled (or both) almost all prefer getting a chance at life and don't wish they were never born.
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Dec 2, 2018 15:33
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As a fun Canadian anecdote about climate change I just got back from Calgary and Edmonton and everyone I talked to liked to complain to the Ontarian about "goddamn ndp" and "you people pay too much tax" and "we need oil here" and then in the same conversation turn around and tell me how bad the weather/farming is getting and how the province doesn't have enough money. But surely these concerns are all completely unrelated. edit: they also put up an ad at the grey cup about how it's a myth that pipelines break or that they don't create jobs ghosthorse fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Dec 2, 2018 |
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Dec 2, 2018 16:29
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zapplez posted:I'm still pretty sure this hypothetical child born next year would strongly prefer living their life, regardless of what happens with the environment over the next 100 years, than not getting a chance at life at all. This is dumb even for your gimmick.
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Dec 2, 2018 16:33
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ocrumsprug posted:This is dumb even for your gimmick. This entire thread is being really loving dumb right now.
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Dec 2, 2018 16:45
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ocrumsprug posted:This is dumb even for your gimmick. How? What did they say that offends you so much? That life is worth living?
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Dec 2, 2018 17:13
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Cracking out the tiredest pro-life chestnut in response to anything. "Your hypothetical children would rather live" is the dumbest argument in any possible context.
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Dec 2, 2018 17:20
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James Baud posted:That's because it's all about them, not the children, really. There is a lot wrong with this post. You present two totally crazy and not terribly plausible scenarios - complete decarbonization or worldwide nuclear war - and try to argue that as long as your prediction is between these two cartoonish extremes it therefore counts as reasonable and middle of the road. It completely ignores that there's a wide range of plausible outcomes between those extremes that you're just pretending are all equivalent. I shouldn't have to explain to you why even in a case where the material reality of climate change is unstoppable the way we adjust our society to deal with climate change is within our power and will have serious implications for the future quality of our lives and the lives of subsequent generations. But what really strikes me is your total lack of any sense of political implications beyond a glib acceptance (with an unmistakable tone of sadistic smugness that you're not nearly clever enough to disguise). You really think that something approximating a middle class liberal and pluralistic social order based on widely shared prosperity can survive in the nightmare world you're describing? You think the Canadian government is going to start regularly drone striking migrant ships without turning its weapons on the domestic population? You think the wealth, freedom and safety of a country with that kind of government won't degenerate into a corrupt and dysfunctional authoritarian nightmare? You think such a situation with be relatively "fine"? This really is 'end of history' none-sense on steroids. The fact you think a government that blows up ships of migrants is going to give a flying gently caress about expensive infrastructure projects designed to keep life livable for the average or even middle class Canadian is genuinely insane especially coming from a poster who clearly thinks they are data-driven and wonkish. You think a fascist police state is going to build you a water deslinization plant? I sure hope your family has some deep pockets.
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Dec 2, 2018 18:43
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Vintersorg posted:How? What did they say that offends you so much? Tell me about how abortion is wrong because children would rather be born. Also tell me about how it's unethical for a woman to not be constantly pregnant, because even one egg being wasted in menstruation is tantamount to murder, as is the logical endpoint of such an argument. The real issue with his posting is that he's like a libertarian teenager frantically searching for any logical way out for the stupid garbage he believes and will resort to even the flimsiest nonsense before finally giving up, wasting everyone's time in the process. Once again, digging in to normalcy bias does not make you a more mentally healthy person than people who have done the actual research regarding a topic you don't like to hear about. Franks Happy Place posted:I didn't say it wouldn't take society wide changes to achieve, just that there are options on the horizon that show promise. It's doable if we get serious and cut emissions in concert. This kind of thinking requires an absurd amount of ignorance of the actual scale of the problem even ignoring the political realities of the situation. It is the height of dishonesty to pretend that all we need to do is "get serious and cut emissions" to prevent the catastrophic effects of climate change, and pretending like it will be politically feasible to do even that at any point in the near future is childish naivety at best.
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Dec 2, 2018 19:23
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infernal machines posted:Cracking out the tiredest pro-life chestnut in response to anything. "Your hypothetical children would rather live" is the dumbest argument in any possible context. Lets not bring up abortion in the CanPol thread. (Unless some dumb CPC backbencher is trying to bring it up, then lets discuss how loving ridiculous they are) But we are specifically talking about "our future kids would have bad enough lives we shouldn't even have kids" and I think thats probably not a fair argument. Didnt parents in the 80s think we might be bringing kids into a nuclear war? Didnt parents in the 60s think hippies were going to rule the world ? etc etc Just specifically to you, aren't you happy you parents took the risk of a crappier future and still had you?
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Dec 2, 2018 19:25
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You're the one bringing up abortion in the CanPol thread by using a pro-life argument that isn't even honest when pro-lifers use it, dude. And we are not talking about the risk of a worse future as if there was some realistic chance that it would not be worse, it is already decided. Future generations will have it worse than we do. Full stop.
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Dec 2, 2018 19:26
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