5 ms·

Half (as mentioned in article) of soon-to-be parents are not fit for the job, and a significant amount choose to defer the job via abortion or adoption. This be

by jayajay 10y ago

Half (as mentioned in article) of soon-to-be parents are not fit for the job, and a significant amount choose to defer the job via abortion or adoption. This begs the question -- should the state intervene in sexual reproduction? Should more babies be given up to the state to be distributed to people who have earned the job title of "parent"? The amount of kids living in poverty, and/or having incompetent parents is not a trivial fraction. Should it be the duty of a civilization to engineer generations; to save these children? At what point does "a child" become the responsibility/property of everyone, and not just the responsibility/property of the biological parents? These are the hard questions that no one wants to think about.

xg15 10y ago
No.
cowardlydragon 10y ago
Or, perhaps we (the United States) as a society shouldn't be stressing out mothers in the critical first year by shoving them back to work after, what, three months (if you have good bennies)? Or completely drain our social welfare system and establish a demand-starved economy with wealth inequality and a draconian health care system that leaves all families stressed and overworked? Or we can go with your bullshit predetermined social darwinianism.
- jayajay 10y ago
  trigger warning, ideas may be involved that do not agree with conventional liberal attitudes What would you suggest a society of N = 620 people should do if there are 20 infertile women, and the resource state permits that only 600 of them can make it until the next resource drop? Should they let fate determine who the 20 deaths will go to? Or should they be smart? Or is being smart here too emotionally hard for you? At some point, engineering society is the difference between having a society and not having one. There may have been many tribes and villages that perished in history because organisms did not understand how to engineer viable populations (e.g. the difference between sending an old woman to gather berries instead of a younger fertile woman). For example, you would not let someone become "trans" because they don't like being a woman, if your population size is too small. They'll have to suck it up and copulate. As will people who are gay and asexual. There is no room for these modern concepts when the population size is critical. But, this is too emotionally difficult to understand. We have been pampered with "rights" in large N society. We won't understand this until we hit a resource critical stage and we are forced to make harder decisions about our population. If you have been to civil court, you will start to wonder about which humans should stop reproducing first. Parents who beat their children, verbally abuse them, and use drugs will likely be the first to go. At some point, a decision will need to be made and our morals will be redefined to do what is necessary. Until then, you can be happy that you will not live to see such a time. You and I are so damn lucky. Someone someday will be making those decisions, and whoever they are, they deserve our respect, not our dismissal, disapproval, and hostility.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    > trigger warning, ideas may be involved that do not agree with conventional liberal attitudes > Or is being smart here too emotionally hard for you? When you write stuff like this, you are insulting people for no good reason.
    - jayajay 10y ago
      Trigger warning well justified.
  - thesumofall 10y ago
    This has been tried by many regimes and has proven to be disastrous - especially for the children involved. Take a look at this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn
    - jayajay 10y ago
      I'm not talking about "racial purity", I am talking about minimizing the probability of a critical population dwindling to zero. These are very different things. That you would immediately put words into my mouth reflects what is in your heads. Do you guys really think you can avoid population engineering when we reach critical values for the population count, e.g. N = 2, 3, 100, 500, 1000, ... Do you really think that careful consideration of breeding will not be made for critical populations? How can you think that the same rules that govern large N societies or resource-unsaturated societies also apply to societies whose population counts are critical or societies who are oversaturated in resource consumption? It's all fun, games, and comparing everyone you disagree with to Hitler until our lives depend on it. We never know what the future will bring us. Maybe one day, when I'm dead and you guys are lucky enough to survive a nuclear catastrophe, you will actually remember these offensive words. Fuck, have I watched too much televsion!
      - pjc50 10y ago
        N is near 10 billion, which makes reasoning about N=2 kind of irrelevant. > Fuck, have I watched too much televsion! Yes.
- njloof 10y ago
  One of the reasons I'm glad I moved from the States to Canada. It's remarkable how once you get used to the idea of a year of parent leave (partly shareable between mother and father), business adjusts to it like any other constraint.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
twblalock 10y ago
> These are the hard questions that no one wants to think about. People thought about these questions a lot. It was called the eugenics movement, and such ideas were widely accepted by intellectuals, social reformers, and politicians worldwide in the early 20th century. Eugenics laws were widely implemented. There are good reasons such views became unpopular and remain so today. You cannot credibly claim that society has avoided thinking about these questions.
spraak 10y ago
The state should have aborted you, clearly.
- sctb 10y ago
  Personal attacks like this are not OK on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to.
  - spraak 10y ago
    I was playing off their own words. I'm not sincere.
detaro 10y ago
Many countries, including the US, do take children from parents if the state believes the parents to be unable to be parents, often did so more aggressively in the past, and the how and when this is done is a topic under debate. Effects of various ways children are raised are also active areas of scientific study, and often topics of legal proceedings decades later.
pjc50 10y ago
I'm not sure whether you're arguing for the Bolshevik abolition of the family, or the existing under-funded social services system of monitoring, intervention, and in extreme cases removing children from unfit parents.
throwanem 10y ago
> should the state intervene in sexual reproduction? To advance the argument that it should, as you seem here to want to do, you need first to show that the state might plausibly do a better job than individual parents. I eagerly await your attempt to overcome effectively all the recent historical evidence on the subject, from the Chinese one-child policy to the American eugenics movement. Good luck!

by jayajay 10y ago

xg15 10y ago

No.

cowardlydragon 10y ago

Or, perhaps we (the United States) as a society shouldn't be stressing out mothers in the critical first year by shoving them back to work after, what, three months (if you have good bennies)? Or completely drain our social welfare system and establish a demand-starved economy with wealth inequality and a draconian health care system that leaves all families stressed and overworked? Or we can go with your bullshit predetermined social darwinianism.

jayajay 10y ago
trigger warning, ideas may be involved that do not agree with conventional liberal attitudes What would you suggest a society of N = 620 people should do if there are 20 infertile women, and the resource state permits that only 600 of them can make it until the next resource drop? Should they let fate determine who the 20 deaths will go to? Or should they be smart? Or is being smart here too emotionally hard for you? At some point, engineering society is the difference between having a society and not having one. There may have been many tribes and villages that perished in history because organisms did not understand how to engineer viable populations (e.g. the difference between sending an old woman to gather berries instead of a younger fertile woman). For example, you would not let someone become "trans" because they don't like being a woman, if your population size is too small. They'll have to suck it up and copulate. As will people who are gay and asexual. There is no room for these modern concepts when the population size is critical. But, this is too emotionally difficult to understand. We have been pampered with "rights" in large N society. We won't understand this until we hit a resource critical stage and we are forced to make harder decisions about our population. If you have been to civil court, you will start to wonder about which humans should stop reproducing first. Parents who beat their children, verbally abuse them, and use drugs will likely be the first to go. At some point, a decision will need to be made and our morals will be redefined to do what is necessary. Until then, you can be happy that you will not live to see such a time. You and I are so damn lucky. Someone someday will be making those decisions, and whoever they are, they deserve our respect, not our dismissal, disapproval, and hostility.
- twblalock 10y ago
  > trigger warning, ideas may be involved that do not agree with conventional liberal attitudes > Or is being smart here too emotionally hard for you? When you write stuff like this, you are insulting people for no good reason.
  - jayajay 10y ago
    Trigger warning well justified.
- thesumofall 10y ago
  This has been tried by many regimes and has proven to be disastrous - especially for the children involved. Take a look at this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn
  - jayajay 10y ago
    I'm not talking about "racial purity", I am talking about minimizing the probability of a critical population dwindling to zero. These are very different things. That you would immediately put words into my mouth reflects what is in your heads. Do you guys really think you can avoid population engineering when we reach critical values for the population count, e.g. N = 2, 3, 100, 500, 1000, ... Do you really think that careful consideration of breeding will not be made for critical populations? How can you think that the same rules that govern large N societies or resource-unsaturated societies also apply to societies whose population counts are critical or societies who are oversaturated in resource consumption? It's all fun, games, and comparing everyone you disagree with to Hitler until our lives depend on it. We never know what the future will bring us. Maybe one day, when I'm dead and you guys are lucky enough to survive a nuclear catastrophe, you will actually remember these offensive words. Fuck, have I watched too much televsion!
    - pjc50 10y ago
      N is near 10 billion, which makes reasoning about N=2 kind of irrelevant. > Fuck, have I watched too much televsion! Yes.
njloof 10y ago
One of the reasons I'm glad I moved from the States to Canada. It's remarkable how once you get used to the idea of a year of parent leave (partly shareable between mother and father), business adjusts to it like any other constraint.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

twblalock 10y ago

> These are the hard questions that no one wants to think about. People thought about these questions a lot. It was called the eugenics movement, and such ideas were widely accepted by intellectuals, social reformers, and politicians worldwide in the early 20th century. Eugenics laws were widely implemented. There are good reasons such views became unpopular and remain so today. You cannot credibly claim that society has avoided thinking about these questions.

spraak 10y ago

The state should have aborted you, clearly.

sctb 10y ago
Personal attacks like this are not OK on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to.
- spraak 10y ago
  I was playing off their own words. I'm not sincere.

detaro 10y ago

Many countries, including the US, do take children from parents if the state believes the parents to be unable to be parents, often did so more aggressively in the past, and the how and when this is done is a topic under debate. Effects of various ways children are raised are also active areas of scientific study, and often topics of legal proceedings decades later.

pjc50 10y ago

I'm not sure whether you're arguing for the Bolshevik abolition of the family, or the existing under-funded social services system of monitoring, intervention, and in extreme cases removing children from unfit parents.

throwanem 10y ago

> should the state intervene in sexual reproduction? To advance the argument that it should, as you seem here to want to do, you need first to show that the state might plausibly do a better job than individual parents. I eagerly await your attempt to overcome effectively all the recent historical evidence on the subject, from the Chinese one-child policy to the American eugenics movement. Good luck!