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The parent's comment said something explicitly different. There's a very clear line: >>If you want kids, the only reason you shouldn't have them is if you are

by zhte415 11y ago

The parent's comment said something explicitly different. There's a very clear line: >>If you want kids, the only reason you shouldn't have them is if you aren't up to the task of raising them -- for whatever reason. As I read it, this submission is about paternity leave and associated Zuckerberg/Facebook, not whether people should have children.

stickfigure 11y ago
The parent claims that we need the bottom quartile of earners to have children otherwise we would lose out on socially valuable humans (list of examples provided). This is a variation on the argument raised by anti-abortionists that goes along the lines of "how do you know you're not killing the next Mozart?" or "what if your parents aborted you?" It's drek for two reasons: 1) You can't know what the world would like if person XYZ hadn't been born. It's pure science fiction. Somebody else would probably have invented the iPhone, or figured out relativity, etc. Or they wouldn't have. There's no reasonable argument to be made here. The world would be different in ways that cannot be predicted. 2) It implies that you are withholding from your fellow man by failing to reproduce more more more, because each could be the next potential Jobs, Rowling, etc. I also think it's a little bit ugly to point at the conclusions of difficult lives and say "hey, what a good thing that was!" Maya Angelou wrote beautiful poetry, does that mean we should congratulate slavery and racism? I'd happily live in a world without Jay Z's music if it means kids don't have to grow up in housing projects with single mothers abandoned by their fathers and 12 year olds aren't shooting their brothers over stolen jewelry.
- veidr 11y ago
  You are way out in left field all by yourself. Nobody else here is talking about what you are talking about. It isn't logically connected to what I said. I used the familiar names just because they are familiar, not for any reason of those people being more or less valuable to society. (Sorry if my joke about Larry Ellison made it seem otherwise.) Most of us are familiar enough with those folks' stories that we can surmise that they were happy that their parents didn't follow Turing_Machine's theory, and therefore, that they were born. We could also presume that for most of them at least, the parents were also likely to be glad they had them, too. Thus, the two stakeholders referenced in Turing_Machine's post would probably disagree with him in those cases (and, I am trying to imply, countless thousands of other cases). I certainly did not propose that we should judge whether or not people should breed based on their usefulness to society. That road leads straight to Adolf Hitler. BOOM! I think we can cite Godwin now and close this branch of the thread.

by zhte415 11y ago

stickfigure 11y ago

The parent claims that we need the bottom quartile of earners to have children otherwise we would lose out on socially valuable humans (list of examples provided). This is a variation on the argument raised by anti-abortionists that goes along the lines of "how do you know you're not killing the next Mozart?" or "what if your parents aborted you?" It's drek for two reasons: 1) You can't know what the world would like if person XYZ hadn't been born. It's pure science fiction. Somebody else would probably have invented the iPhone, or figured out relativity, etc. Or they wouldn't have. There's no reasonable argument to be made here. The world would be different in ways that cannot be predicted. 2) It implies that you are withholding from your fellow man by failing to reproduce more more more, because each could be the next potential Jobs, Rowling, etc. I also think it's a little bit ugly to point at the conclusions of difficult lives and say "hey, what a good thing that was!" Maya Angelou wrote beautiful poetry, does that mean we should congratulate slavery and racism? I'd happily live in a world without Jay Z's music if it means kids don't have to grow up in housing projects with single mothers abandoned by their fathers and 12 year olds aren't shooting their brothers over stolen jewelry.

veidr 11y ago
You are way out in left field all by yourself. Nobody else here is talking about what you are talking about. It isn't logically connected to what I said. I used the familiar names just because they are familiar, not for any reason of those people being more or less valuable to society. (Sorry if my joke about Larry Ellison made it seem otherwise.) Most of us are familiar enough with those folks' stories that we can surmise that they were happy that their parents didn't follow Turing_Machine's theory, and therefore, that they were born. We could also presume that for most of them at least, the parents were also likely to be glad they had them, too. Thus, the two stakeholders referenced in Turing_Machine's post would probably disagree with him in those cases (and, I am trying to imply, countless thousands of other cases). I certainly did not propose that we should judge whether or not people should breed based on their usefulness to society. That road leads straight to Adolf Hitler. BOOM! I think we can cite Godwin now and close this branch of the thread.