An excellent frankly episode

Why are you so abrasive? I’m mostly agreeing with you and you’re still a dick, simply dismissing or ignoring my points. Read into carrying capacity, go offline, and have however many children you and your partner want so you won’t have time to be online.

I’m curious why you feel so strongly about this, and I’m inclined to agree with you, no authority should decide if and how many children a person can have, but if everyone had eight kids it’d probably be a problem. What would you think if a democracy decided no more than two? How would that sit with you? I believe individuals should have freedom but there should be limits that are collectively agreed on.

First point, I have read a bit and I’m unconvinced. People who want kids are having them, if they weren’t, it’d be all over the mainstream news. Childless people would be suing Dupont or something.

Second point, again, I agree, but there is an environmental carrying capacity and we keep degrading the environment.

Your third point is true, but I was referring to the increasingly uncertain climate future. There may come a year where there just isn’t enough due to an unlucky series of crop failures.

I can’t argue against the fourth point.

I’m sorry I got caught up arguing a very specific point that you just made. You’re already in the raft and I’m trying to fix the ship. Thanks for your help.

Bruh, there are legitimate issues to reproductive health caused by microplastics.

Then where are all the people complaining they can’t have kids even though they want them? People aren’t having kids because they don’t want them.

Also, there isn’t a dichotomy between “being told how many kids you can have” and “having their kids starve”. Those two things are not mutually exclusive, so they don’t have to “take one over the other”. No one has to choose between the two nor should they be forced to choose by any body of authority.

Right, they’re not, but the odds of starving are lower when there are less mouths to feed. I read that pre-agriculture tribes limited their reproduction to live within their means.

Grab the steering wheel? That’s what the article was getting at. People who are prepping have already written society off. Attempts to repair and rectify are not made in earnest, instead smaller scale alternatives are sought with the naive idea that the facists will just ignore you.

Right, but it’s still ‘it’s going to get worse before it gets better’ and if you’re okay and the community you care about is okay, then you may not care if the ship is on a collision course and will sink even though there’s a lot of people that don’t have the means to get off.

I really doubt it’s microplastics. There aren’t a bunch of people complaining of infertility. I would guess it’s socioeconomic.

I don’t think anyone likes the idea of anyone else telling them how many kids they can have, but they’ll probably take that over their kids starving. Probably won’t come to that.

Yeah, I see what you’re saying, but I think my point still holds. I’ll update my analogy. You have some people that’ll jump in your raft with you. So now everyone with access to the raft isn’t as concerned as they should be about the sinking ship?

Most people don’t like the ship anyway. Perhaps the raft can be scaled up so that it’s a ship in itself and everyone who wants to can get on.

Great article. I agree with most of the author’s points. I find doomers very annoying and problematic. Why even argue that position? Why try to convince people to join you wallowing in misery? I think they just want to confirm to themselves that nothing can be done so they can continue doing nothing.

One other question: It’s hard to deny that this problem is hitting the West and Western influenced countries quite hard. What’s it like in China? They’re building for the future and talking about and working on tech that could help everyone. Are people in China largely optimistic?

Which ethnicity’s population are we going to reduce? How will the social mechanisms work to reduce population? Who will hold that authority to dictate things and how will it be enforced?

Interestingly it doesn’t seem like those questions need to be answered, since the birthrate is dropping all by itself for some reason.

It’s the ‘this will get worse before it gets better’ position. That does seem rational and I am tempted to prepare for the worst too. One issue I see with that position is… if you build yourself a little life raft you probably aren’t as concerned as you should be about the sinking ship.