Why are they called "accidents" then?

because somewhere down the line, somebody fucked up

if you didn't fuck something up, you would never get in any accidents

accidents are only a result of human error
take away human error, no accidents

Do you actually think just because someone is born with a disability they are bound to be miserable?

Regardless of whether or not you're miserable, you still have a disability. And it would be better if you didn't.
As I said earlier, I don't give a fuck about what your own personal opinion on life is.

The anti-natalist argument is simply not to impose it on anyone else. Just because you might have won the lottery, doesn't give you the right to buy someone else a ticket and waste their money. Your happiness does not, and should not, give you the right to impose.

Now, I'm arguing barebones constants without the addition of human variables. Which is, inherently what you argue over. Which, are in reality, illusions and constructs.

They're the only constructs that give any life its meaning. I don't really have much interest in discussing a nihilistic universe where you can literally do anything and nothing will ever matter, because nihilism is just too stupid for me to discuss when we can instead discuss feeling things. You know, the only things that matter, which you've basically conceded.

Take a child. Raise him to kill. Teach him that killing is good. His perception, as a living entity, will give him pleasure to inflict suffering. That perception of his, is his reality. And it is only viewed as inherently evil or bad by us, because of our sense of conformity, like we talked about a while back.

I don't agree, though. While you may be able to find some people who only agree that killing is wrong because everyone else agrees that killing is wrong, I can make the argument that there are also a lot of people who are smart enough to think for themselves, logically, to determine that murder is wrong. And really, murder isn't inherently wrong. If someone's trying to rape your wife, you wouldn't try to kill him?... I think most people would, and I wouldn't fault them for it if they were successful.

Killing is only wrong, in my opinion, if they are innocent. If they don't deserve it. And 99.99% of people don't deserve to be killed. Oh, and you also need consent. Then it becomes assisted suicide, which, as you should know, I am all for.

That's the logical perspective.
Consent and fairness are the most important tenets of all ethics.

You're viewing suffering, as a point. Like it's a start point. When really, there are no points. Destruction, and creation, simply, are.

I'm viewing suffering as a realistic and inevitable part of the human condition. It's not a point, it's a prescription. You WILL endure some shit in your life if you are born. Physical, emotional, mental, what have you. Your loved ones will die, your pets will die, and it happens every day. By the thousands. I know these aren't pleasant thoughts, but if you really sat down and just contemplated the suffering that takes place, you would see that it really is off kilter just how much of it really occurs. Turn on the news and see how many innocent people got killed today. This isn't a world I probably would've personally chosen to live in.

IMaterials were used to create the atomic bomb. Materials, were destroyed, and used, in order to create, the atomic bomb. Which was then dropped on hiroshima, and destroyed it. The suffering of those people, was real. But on a fundamental level, every single atom that was ripped apart by the bomb went back into something. New life. New structures. Elements.

You don't think that's disgusting? Millions died to create more life, so that they can suffer and die, too. It just doesn't end. I find that revolting.

I'm not trying to say that suffering is all sunshine and bunnies. Lets face it. Pain, is pain. But happy, is also happy.

Happiness is shorter than pain and yet still equal. Take a prisoner. Put him in prison, in solitary for a year. Pure misery. One long, agonizing year in solitary.

And then release him. The happiness upon release, the re-experiencing of things he took for granted and missed, while although short, is tremendously powerful. So powerful that one year of solitary, while not being forgotten or washed away, is immidiately put into the background by said prisoner's sheer happiness.

I'd rather just be happy on principle. The fact that we have to endure some loss first before we can feel any happiness doesn't seem like a very good deal to me. Show me an example, besides touching tree bark, that gives us happiness without any strings attached. You're literally ONE step away from referring to life as a "gift" or some shit. The fact is, gifts don't come with any strings attached. You don't buy your friend a gift you don't think they'll enjoy. You wouldn't buy your friend something, and then say, "Here, take this. That'll be $50." It's like, yeah, some gift.

And in order to destroy something, there has to be something to be destroyed in the first place.

Precisely my argument in summation.

In order to destroy something, you have to create something.
Destroying things is a negative. Yet, all that is created will be destroyed.
The best way to avoid that is to create nothing at all.

We're unneeded.

And for most people, the positive feelings coming from that suffering outweigh the suffering that they experienced to feel the positive feeling.

No proof.

The way I see it, we've gotten to a point in human history where scientific advancement has accelerated to orders of magnitude beyond what we were achieving a thousand years ago, and the less than helpful perspectives and traditions of the past are being questioned and abandoned, so we might as well keep going at it, until we get to a point where we've optimized the ratio of suffering to happiness in our society.

Which is reasonable, and I'm all for that. But here's the thing--the idea of choosing not to have children is actually becoming a pretty widespread personal decision in the first world. The nations that are reproducing the very most also happen to be the ones that are the biggest shitholes on the planet, and they are reproducing extremely rapidly. In the first world, the average couple is actually not having enough children to sustain the human race. You basically need to have more than one child in order to that, obviously. The people who are imposing the most also happen to be the dumbest and poorest people on the planet.

I'm sure you probably wouldn't like being born in India, or Bangladesh, or some other developing country.

I would argue that there are pleasures that you can derive from things that don't require other, conscious being to suffer. Granted I'm not talking about grand things that will bring solace to the disturbed and abused, but there are small things that you can find pleasure in that don't; at least to my knowledge, require the sacrifice that most pleasures do. Personally, I take some amount of pleasure in feeling the wind blow through my fingers, and touching the bark on trees. I don't know of anyway that either of these activities are; under normal circumstances, liable to cause another creature pain in anyway.

Well, the breeze you enjoy now might be the catalyst to a shipwreck elsewhere, or a hurricane in some other place. The wind is pretty destructive. The US alone endures 1000 tornadoes every year.

Touching the bark on trees is a little bit too niche of an interest--are you sure it's really the feel of the bark on your fingertips that you like, or something else about it? Either way, I could just make the argument from there that we're basically imposing life so that we can... what, feel trees? Is that worth it? Hmm...

What you said earlier, however, is a pretty good point--we can certainly take measures to improve the human condition, but ultimately, I just don't think we really have any grand purpose to fulfill. You say it would be an insult to our ancestors--our ancestors were irrational in the sense that they were all religious nuts who thought we WERE doing something on this planet. That we're REALLY going somewhere. And we're not, in my opinion.

Quote from: A Cheese Potato on April 19, 2015, 09:49:10 PM

I really love verbatim, he is like the angsty version of cleverbot

Why doesn't this have likes?

WHY?

because i don't even get it

So the only feeling with "intrinsic value" is suffering according to you.

Suffering is the root of all meaning. Without it, life would be pointless. That's my argument. You can't present me with anything that would give life any value that isn't rooted in suffering.

"Nothing has any intrinsic value except for suffering." It's pretty close, honestly. And you have yet to prove that your statement is even remotely true. And no, proof from that loser mentor of yours doesn't count cause he's a mentally retarded jackass.

Present me with one other thing that has intrinsic value other than feelings.

That's because they have addictions. Addictions to family, addictions to food, addictions to whatever. It doesn't justify the imposition. Nothing has any intrinsic value except for suffering.

I'm just making a guess clearly (but I guess you couldn't read that part), but there's no doubt that a far higher percentage than 0.000000001% of people are living enjoyable lives but that doesn't seem to be resonating well in your head.

You are yet again proving that you have no idea what you're talking about.

How old are you? Less than 30, I'd guess.

]
I was talking more about the general capacity humans have to be happy. As in, not just me.

I agree that we don't live lives of such high quality that we're in danger of crossing into saccharine territory, but life gives you the opportunity to improve things for others and for yourself. And perhaps I am just an overly optimistic twit, but I do believe humanity is capable of treating itself of its self-destructive tendencies along with the other things that ail us that aren't so self-inflicted.

I said this earlier, but I would just make the simple argument that happiness only comes at the cost of something. No one is ever happy for free, so to speak. Everything is indirectly sadistic in quality. Down to the food you eat. You know how many sentient creatures perish painfully at our hand just to put food on your plate? The hours of boredom and abuse the seamstresses that make your clothes endure? Everything you do has suffering attached to it down the line. I'm not saying you're not allowed to enjoy any of this stuff--if you didn't, it would be a colossal waste of the suffering. I'm just saying that I don't really buy the happiness argument when the suffering demonstrably outweighs any happiness. Unless you're going to try to argue that your food and your clothes are somehow worth all that suffering. You'd be wrong.

It's not delusional. Obviously, it's impossible to give your kid the perfect life.

That's why it can never be okay to give birth to one. To FORCE them into existence. To IMPOSE life on them.
It can only ever be wrong.

If you win the lottery, does that mean buying lottery tickets is a good idea?
FUCK no.

Then on what basis do you assume that people suffer enough for life to not be worth living? You have to have some sort of reference point.

I just FUCKING went over one.

1 in 5 persons have a disability in the US alone.

Those are GODAWFUL odds.

You think they're "pretty good" odds, which makes you an insane lunatic.
But even then, I'm making the basic argument that you need a 100% safety rate, or bust.

If there's ANY CHANCE WHATSOEVER of your kid not having the perfect life, then it's wrong to have the kid.

And if you think that everyone suffers as much as you do, you're an even bigger moron. You're basing all of what you're saying on the false fact that everyone suffers as much as you do.

Nope. It's not about me at all.

Being happy?

Your happiness doesn't justify all the terrors that exist in the world. Not in the slightest. If you think that's a good enough reason to have a kid, you're a moron.