Confused the US with the entire world again, honest mistake.
Eh, Canada’s about the same too.
When the US had their boot on the neck of the world we are taking you all with us
Yeah, but that doesn’t mean we have the same problems as you.
*Yet
garbage health care
mass shootings
violent racism
Look at this guy who thinks the USA invented racism and holds a monopoly on it.
The comic is very America-centric if you look at the problems mentioned in totality.
In Europe it’s just sparkling “let them down in the Mediterranean and/or make sure they stay in their own neighborhoods.”
I was going to say… I don’t see the UK anywhere on this map
Not the same level of problems with mass shootings in the UK. And whilst I take the point about healthcare it’s a very different kind of issue, and if you get triaged conveniently it can work out for you… Really just depends what you need and how old you are, but at least having a baby and keeping it alive is fairly well covered
I bet they would hold a monopoly on it if they could. Damn I wish they did
I mean, the UK has 2 out of 3 of those. And most countries have the violent racism.
the UK has 2 out of 3 of those
Change “shooting” to “knifing” and its 3 for 3. The UK has a huge hooliganism problem. The country is rife with domestic violence. But no (non-police) guns!
Most countries have less violent racism now than at any other point in history.
That bar you’re bragging about stepping over is subterranean.
Most countries have racism, some have violent racism… and there are some in which terrorist organizations like KKK are freely roaming the streets and are ok for some reason.
Anyway, it feels wierd to speak shit of the USA when there currently are countries actively working on ethnic cleansing.
Yep. You dumbfucks want to talk about “muh racism”? Be Uyghur or Palestinian or STFU. That’s REAL shit.
RIP Alaska, Hawaii, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula
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.
The Canadian healthcare system is being increasingly enshittified
by conservativesup here, tooFTFY
The conservatives are the main ones behind it, and as usual everyone believes it is failing on its own due to ‘free means shit’ and not realizing just how deep conservative shit is being encrusted into it.
When we go down we are taking all of you with us.
Don’t worry we know
r/iam14andthisisdeep
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.
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.
Idiocracy is a documentary
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.
Yeah, Idiocracy has this basic assumption that people are generally acting in good faith, even the ones with more selfish tendencies. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but didn’t someone else get frozen along with the MC and started out with a “fuck you, I’ll take care of myself however I need to” before later pivoting to a “we need to work together to save the world!”
Just like that Batman scene where the boat full of civilians and the boat full of criminals have the trigger for each others’ bombs. In the real world, I’d bet the guard that was handed the trigger on the prisoner boat would have pressed it almost immediately. And if he didn’t, there would have been a riot on the civilian boat to push it rather than a calm vote that decides against it, followed closely by the same thing on the prisoner boat. And many from both boats would have just bailed into the water rather than trust the other boat to not kill them. Joker would have been completely right in his prediction of how things would go. Especially in a city like Gotham. The catch should have been that the boats had their own trigger instead of each others’.
Would you press the button?
Well I’d assume Joker was lying and that each boat actually controlled their own bomb to fuck with the ones who didn’t press the button, because who would believe they didn’t press it? It would cause so much more chaos that way (actually max chaos might be to rig both buttons to blow up the prisoners, though I could also see reasons for him to rig up both to blow up the civilians).
I’m not even sure I’d be on the boat in the first place, though it’s easy to say that in hindsight, knowing how things turn out. I’d probably have made every effort to gtfo of Gotham earlier than that if I could.
But for an answer that doesn’t completely sidestep the question, I don’t know. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma and I know the optimal solution is if both sides trust each other, but I’d also have a hard time trusting both the other prisoner as well as the “guards” (in this case Joker) setting up the whole situation, knowing there’s no reason they need to be honest about the outcomes of each choice. Like even in the movie, Joker was going to just blow up at least one of the boats anyways when neither of them pressed the button.
Best bet would probably be to go for a swim.
What about you?
I’d like to think that I wouldn’t, but I guess you never really know until you’re in the situation. Family would make the equation harder as well, I think I’d be much more willing to trust a stranger with my life rather than the lives of my nieces and nephews.
That’s the only thing preventing it from being categorized as a documentary.
I thought about it and it’s just unfortunate kimbo slice died before he could eventually be president. He could have been the one.
it’s quite literally biblical drown them in numbers bullshit.
Yes, it’s called (disgustingly) the “Quiverfull Movement”
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
Given the glut of unwanted children from our abortion prohibition, we’ll be needing a lot of new adoptive parents in the near future.
Babies get adopted quickly. It’s the older children who need homes.
Not foster kids. Foster parents/adoptions are always needing people, even babies. Sometimes the babies have to sleep in the DHR office, because there’s nowhere for them to go.
Talked to a social worker - kids in DHS care sleep in homeless shelters, hospitals, DHS offices. Teen group homes are inherently damaging to them; I’ve never seen a good one.
Foster teens. Short term commitment. They will have severe trauma and can be hard to deal with, but you would be amazed at how they respond if you can genuinely provide love. Love and Logic is fucking magic.
If you can’t foster, you can be a child advocate. Many states have CASA programs. Visit the kid once a month, let them know someone cares, and tell the court what you think is best for them. Even just something like a phone call “hey, kid left something behind at the group home - any way we could get that moved?”
Or even just someone to protect them from the group home. A dozen seriously traumatized kids, with staff paid less than $15/hr on a week of training. A place that provides opportunities for people to be around children, who are already isolated and have limited access to supportive adults… and financial incentives to cover anything up.
I don’t think there’s much hope for the future, but we can focus on the now and helping the children who are already here.
Please elaborate about the magic of love and logic
The big idea is about giving children choice. “Do you want to get out of the bath and brush your teeth now, or do you want to brush your teeth in the bathtub?” “Should we work on math homework or our essay first?” “Would you like to do your homework at the table with me, or would you like to sit in the living room and listen to music while you do it?”
Both choices should be choices you are happy with.
Many traumatized foster kids will react very poorly to just being told to do things. They struggle with a lot of feelings of powerlessness - being moved from place to place with little consideration of what they want, having to follow new rules from strange adults. You have to work around some “pathological demand avoidance” - you have to avoid tripping them into that flight or fight mode. You empower them by providing them with two acceptable options, instead of reminding them that they have no power over their own lives.
They won’t always go along with those two choices, but then the focus is going to be on natural consequences - “you didn’t clean up your room, so I don’t think we have room for a new squishmallow.”
The name of the book is perfect. You start from a place of love - you want this child to grow into a healthy and happy adult, you want to provide them opportunities because you care deeply for them and that informs your actions. You give them rational rules to their behavior - it’s not about control, it’s about teaching them how to function.
Good to know. Thank you for sharing.
Babies get adopted quickly.
Healthy, white babies do. It’s a lot harder for minority kids, preemies, and anyone with congenital health issues (even relatively minor ones)
Ceaușescu’s Romania
Adopt, don’t shop lmao
100% of scientists agree that not-having-kids will solve our climate change crisis in one generation.
Fucking lol
It’ll take more than one…
Well since we can’t count on our leaders to be responsible
You only need the one lol
Think about it… If Gen alpha agrees not to have kids, there will still be a generation after them, raised by Gen Z. A lot of families have a generation gap between parents and their children.
generation (noun): “the living things which share a common ancestry and are alive at (or about) the same time.”
The word does not refer solely to humans. It existed before the habit of neatly labeling people born within an arbitrary range of years. For example, medical researchers will record changes in microbes from generation to generation (without making up names for each generation).
So, if our generation (the people alive today, or any time in the next ~9 months) agreed to not have children then humanity’s climate crisis would be solved. In fact, every human problem would be solved. Think about it.
Are you saying every human alive today belongs to the same generation? That’s not how it works.
I’m not defining terms; I’m repeating how the terms are defined. You can look it up in any dictionary. After that, if you still feel like arguing about it I’m not your opponent. You can contact Mrs. Mirriam-Webster, or Mr. Oxford, etc. Please post the exchange! Maybe the argument, “That’s not how it works,” will convince them.
We didn’t start the fire. It was always burning since the world’s been turning.
Yeah I don’t really get comics like these, or any other form of “[my generation] has it the worst, the world had been destroyed, why should I have kids” that more or less ignores all of history.
For context, I’m gen Z/millennial with a child and planning another with my wife. We’re not rich or living in nice city of whatever, just living in a smaller city in Europe.
Oh thank god one person on this threat who is not opposed to children or straight out antinatalist
Why is the whole world on fire? These are all mostly American problems.
A) keep electing far-right leaders and they won’t be B) global warming
Yeah feeling this, I’m a little tired of one country projecting it issues on the entire world.
That sentence can be interpreted in a number of ways and all are correct sadly.
I know Australia is American lite sometimes, but we also have most of these issues. Shit is going bad in a lot of places is my understanding.
Not really. Most of Europe is just fine. We in the UK have elected a labor government for the first time in several elections as the conservatives severely fucked up multiple times. Far right wing sentiment is on the rise in several countries, but that doesn’t make them the majority, so they aren’t winning elections anywhere but locally. Mostly the far right are just taking votes from the moderate right.
In the same breath, we now have climate scientists saying that remaining below 1.5° this century is all but a pipedream, right wing leaders surging in Italy, Germany, France, Hungary, and other EU countries stoking socially regressive rhetoric, and the AMOC could fail as soon as 2026, plunging Europe temperatures by 10° and causing a new annual storm front akin to Florida right above France and Germany. I am less than optimistic for Europe’s future as a whole, as crises drive further nationalism and right wing populism. In future, with european crops struggling under these worse conditions and with the UK currently reliant on imports for 60% its food, the worst is likely yet to come for us.
So nothing has really happened yet then? While that all sounds alarming it’s all theoretical at best. We as a species have already made large inroads on pollution and climate change. Even China is building huge wind and solar farms. It’s now more profitable to invest in renewables than fossil fuels. It seems to me the main people holding us back are the USA who for some reason seem to be going backwards.
You tend to find that as people struggle more it’s far left wing politics that appeals to the working class just as much as the far right. Hence things like the recent labor victory. Last I heard in France the far right party was beaten by a coalition on the left. I don’t really know what’s happening in Germany, but I imagine it’s much the same. Both extremes of politics get amplified in times of struggle. It’s probably why the Democrats failed in America, because they are too moderate and too centrist.
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).
You don’t need to have kids to pass on values. The basic premise of your statement doesn’t hold up.
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.
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
This is the answer. The problem is the huge expense to adopt at least in the US. Money that could make a better life for the child being adopted is taken by the state.
We need to streamline adoption while still vetting the potential parents as unlikely to be abusive.
Yeah this has always pissed me off with my non-parent friends. You really think you have that much influence on random kids you have fleeting interactions with? Unless you’re a teacher or in some other position where it’s your job to interact with kids, your opinions aren’t getting passed down to anyone.
Your opinions get passed on whenever you open your mouth, like the dumbass opinion you gave just now. What’s the big fucking deal with influencing kids, anyway? If you aren’t hanging out with any kids, you can influence other adults.
Or is it appealing because you believe that kids are so easy to influence that they’ll just believe any dumb shit that plops out of your mouth? If you give your opinions to adults, then they might disagree and even push back on you. Oh, shit! That isn’t as much fun as brainwash—er, I mean, passing on your enlightened opinions to easily-molded young people!
You’re sure influencing me right now, lemme tell ya.
They could always get more involved with their community. They don’t have to be a parent or have some specialized education to be a coach or volunteer at a youth center.
My scoutmaster did more to instill honesty, leadership ability, and respect for community in me than my mom or absent father ever did.
Now in my career I take mentoring new hires more seriously than anything other than general safety. My company hires a lot of young men with no direction and shitty childhoods. It’s not as good as getting to them when they’re young, but when I’m their only friend 200 or 800 miles from home I get the privilege to impart some important ideas and philosophies.
Scoutmaster is a job that works with kids, so I agree with you there. And mentoring is important too. But these things are less important than the impact you make as a parent. For most people the family is the anchor.
We don’t need more people. We already have too many.
lol fucking obliterated
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
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.
There are plenty of reasons to think this true, and plenty of reasons the world is getting better over time. Maybe not the next four years, and maybe not for everyone, but there are so many stays at global and national levels that have trended up for decades and continue to do so.
And before someone single-minded chimes in about Gaza. War and atrocity has always been an ugly part of our history and also has trended downward over the last several decades. Just the fact that we can get so worked up about ending atrocities somewhere else in the world that doesn’t affect us, is a great sign for the future
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.
I would add that the sentiment is also wrong in the other direction. I’ve personally encountered multiple parents and grandparents who hit me with the “well it won’t affect me, I’ll be long gone” reasoning regarding climate change.
So yeah. What a stupid and offensively self centered thing to say. If you personally didn’t give a shit about other people before, that’s actually a character flaw, not a rite of passage you complete by roping children into this mess
I don’t need to have a child to care about passing down a habitable planet to the next generation.
How often do children adopt their parents’ values?
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.
It seems like vanishingly few people in the US care about the good of broader humanity anymore. Destroying the environment is fine as long as it creates jobs. Poisoning the water tables forever with fracking is fine as long as it makes cheap gas. Genocide was supported by both parties in the last election. Both parties are waving guns around even as school kids die in ever more frequent mass shootings. Its a race to the bottom and no one cares to change course.
Guys…
Take a deep breath
Be thankful for what you have
Be compassionate for others sharing the same experiences
You will feel better.
It is that simple.
Take a deep breath
Oh shit, my asthmas acting up from all the pollution.
Be thankful for what you have
I just used my last inhaler, and I won’t get another one for a month.
Be compassionate for others sharing the same experiences
They died.
You will feel better.
It didn’t work.
I don’t feel better.
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
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.
Well. Fuck.
Yeah this is what frustrates me when people complain about illegal immigration. Those places are now experiencing food shortages and will just get worse. Where do you think people will go when there is no food in their own country. Do you think they will just let their children starve? Do you really think a physical wall will stop them from trying to feed their children?
Would you put your child through all that, plus force them to wage slave their whole life to pay their landed lord? All for a hit of dopamine and serotonin?
Consider loading up a crack pipe instead and save some needless suffering.
Is that directed at me, or at other people reading this comment chain?
And why are you telling people to smoke crack? You are promoting suffering by doing this, and that is illogical and mean spirited when the rest of your comment is talking about reducing suffering by not procreating.
Are you arguing in bad faith here, or have you just not thought this through properly?
putting aside the innumerable issues with the stance “it is fundamentally immoral to have children”, sweet mother of mercy the solution is not life-ruining addictive substances
Please consider adoption as an alternative if you are in a stable situation and want children.
My SO and I have both decided that we definitely don’t want kids but would discuss the subject if any one of us seriously considered it for one reason or another. What we agreed on, though, is to look for adoption rather than biological children. We both have stuff we’d rather not pass along, firstly, and secondly, there’s so many children that don’t have any family. It’s sorta like “adopt don’t shop”, if you will.
You don’t even have to be in a stable situation to be a Big Brother/Sister at your local Boys and Girls club or a court advocate/CASA for a child. Volunteer at a school district. Children recognize how fucked everything is, and on the whole they are suffering. We need kind and loving adults to show up for them - to teach them art and read them stories to show them the parts of living that can hopefully make it worth it.
or wood chipper
Just get a vasectomy honestly. You can keep nutting inside afterwards. Deal?
i’ll take two
deleted by creator
Speak for yourself I’ve got a vasectomy
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.
Generational-wise, we are having less children then the previous. That’s the point of the comic.
That’s because people are actually more educated than ever at least in part thanks to the internet. In most places the standard of living has actually gone up, in some cases quite drastically. So people are more comfortable. A lot of the doomerism stuff doesn’t take into account any of the awful stuff that happened in the past, and most are only focused on the USA which is having weird problems at the moment. In most of the world the material wealth of the average person has gone up, not down.
The deeper tragedy is in the meme as a whole. There has been so much power, control, and hope sucked away from us… and they try to replace it with panic (usually to buy a product or lie). I would like to believe that the situation is not hopeless, and that we are not powerless…
Its bad, I get it. But lets go back to 1968 when baby boomers who would give birth to the millennial generation was born. Vietnam, political assassinations , race riots, anarchist bombings. Throw in watergate and stagflation. The world has always been burning.
The difference is climate change. The better you understand it, the less likely you are to want to have children.
No, climate change was not a concern for them back then.
Climate change was known and covered up by oil companies since the 1930s.
Cool, super irrelevant to the greater point though. It was not known to the people, so the people had hope.
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
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.
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?
That they could have been so much better without Zuckerberg, Savage, Peterson, etc.
Exactly. They’re turning young men into the generation that will force American women into burqas. Or at least support / help with the move.
but the system is rigged or my vote doesn’t count or genocide joe or some stupid shit
Look at this guy thinking that we can vote our way out of this when we only have two, corporate sponsored, candidates.
So says the headline, but the entire article focuses on males and how much they love that he did shit like Rogan. I’m not saying young women can’t also be idiots or angry at the present state of things, but they didn’t completely forget that the right sees them as procreation slaves.
Well yeah, young men bought into all the incelfluencer crap they were being fed. Probably a good thing since young women by and large are flocking the opposite way and absolutely don’t want to fuck conservatives.
If you read the linked article in my post Trump made inroads with young women too.
I mean, they did vote for change… just not the change we were hoping for, I guess. Things will most likely change for the worse now.
That said, real good change wasn’t really on the ballot either.
You can be damned sure the crazy fundamentalists are gonna have a shit ton of kids. And some of those will vote.
Yeah, and they’ll die in the water wars too.
