Without further ado:
Out of the government, the corporate world, and the media, the government is the most benign.
The average person is a larger problem than members of any "elite" group.
Americans are no dumber or more privileged than anyone in any other first world nation.
Feminism promotes social division and frivolity.
Courting sexual partners is a demonstration of prejudice.
All pleasurable states are nothing more than relief from previous unpleasurable states.
We should do away with money as soon as possible.
No one should have children for any available reason.
The "traditional family" model suffocates and depresses people -- or at least reduces their quality of life significantly.
There is no such thing as a mental disorder.
Anarchism is selfish and myopic.
Democracy is a terrible idea, and certainly did not originate with the emergence of the United States.
Ownership (property, copyright) creates a massive amount of waste while promoting attachment and conflict.
Attachment exacerbates suffering.
It is unlikely that there are other intelligent beings in the universe.
If life exists beyond the Earth, it must be absurdly uncommon.
Hurricanes, flus, earthquakes, school shooters, terrorists, stock market crashes, and debt are not going to get you.
We have replaced god with popular entertainment and the media.
Individualism is socially corrosive.
Capitalization, apostrophes, the multiplicity of punctuation marks, and synonyms should be done away with as soon as possible.
All words should be spelled phonetically.
Most books are a waste of time. The faster that you can glean information, the more efficient you are.
Quoting people is no different from wearing name brand clothing, showing off an expensive car, or increasing the size of your friends list on Facebook.
There should be one human language; any more than this is needlessly redundant.
Civilization will not collapse at any point over the next hundred years. In fact, it has never truly collapsed since its advent some 6-7,000 years ago.
The only state of perfection is nothingness.
Marijuana will probably become the culprit of at least some lung cancer cases over the next hundred years.
Obesity, with few exceptions, is not especially unhealthy -- and is almost never life-threatening.
Loving your partner is the same, in principle, as favoring your race or nation over the others.
Cuddling with a puppy after eating a cow is contradictory behavior at its worst.
All competitive sports are a waste of money, resources, schooling, and brain space; furthermore, they promote social division and animosity.
We should strive to attack all ideas, no matter how good they seem. If we come to favor a particular viewpoint, it should be because, while attacking it, we found that it held up better than the opposing ideas -- which were also attacked.
Fast food is a convenient way to eat in modern society, and is usually better for you than a fatty slab of steak high in calories purchased at a fancy restaurant.
Organic foods are usually worse in quality, less delicious, and more susceptible to rot than other foods.
There is nothing particularly unacceptable about smoking cigarettes.
It is a bad idea to get high or drunk in any capacity, for such activities decrease one's judgment and physical reflexes.
Lyrics, image, philosophy, and politics have nothing to do with music.
Most people are unhappy due to their own poor decision-making skills, but rather than improve or seek guidance, they blame a group for their shortcomings -- usually the government, the corporations, the media, or their families.
We should intelligently (i.e. gradually, while maintaining a balanced ecosystem) spay and neuter all animals on Earth as soon as possible.
The Holocaust was not some brilliant conspiracy to exterminate a race of people, but rather, a poorly planned, feather-fluffing set of events aimed at merely deporting said race.
The United States's involvement in World War II was unjustified; similarly, the American Civil War and American Revolutionary War should have never happened.
We will be ruined by pleasure, meekness, and popular culture long before we are ruined by torture, statism, and Big Brother.
Failing any high school course -- or even most college courses -- will have no impact whatsoever on your economic well-being.
Those members of modern society who claim to believe in a god suffer from cognitive dissonance, and believe far more in television, work, and bar-hopping than that holy book which they have never once opened.
Washing your hands after going to the bathroom accomplishes absolutely nothing.
Charities accomplish nothing other than to generate profit for various entities while, in some circumstances, strengthening societies just enough to allow them to perpetuate their own suffering.
Exploring the planets and moons of our solar system is a tremendous waste of time and resources.
Most people speak in memorized, discrete blocks of thought patterns that are essentially platitudes. Rarely does anyone recite a "belief" from outside of his or her culture -- even if the belief is purported to be anti status quo.
We will not experience a major extinction event as a result of global warming.
Nature lovers are liars, for they despise plague, disease, insects (especially maggots!), suffocating heat, frostbite, intestinal worms, shredded animal carcasses, etc.
Most jobs exist only to help others do their jobs, or to produce more crap that we don't need.
Welfare and utility are not equivalent; consequently, the modern concept of a "job" is flawed.
Sexual orientation and desire for social bonds are largely conditioned.
The less people you know, the happier you'll be. The more wants and desires that have to be accommodated, the more that compromise becomes a necessity, and knowing less people means attending less funerals.
I guess this is the end of me following your blog. Happy trails.
ReplyDeleteCool. Thanks for announcing it! It's always good to make a scene on our way out the door.
ReplyDeleteThanks for taking my blog off your list also. That'll show me for having a different point of view!
ReplyDeleteI'm keeping your forum on mine.
Well, I think that's too bad. I really would have liked to see you guys track down your fundamental disagreement.
ReplyDeleteI think you misinterpret my withdrawal from your blog as aggressiveness, when it's actually wariness. I'm tired of taking blows from other antinatalist blogs and I am trying to dissociate from those who are my political opponents, so I can keep concentrating on the important issues of antinatalism instead of always fighting and spending a lot of my energy and being very anxious trying to figure out why you guys are doing this and what your agenda is.
ReplyDeleteI just don't want to be involved with this kind of discussion any more. I'm tired of it. I am going to keep talking about antinatalism. Those of you who want to take part in what I have to say, do so, otherwise I just have to dissociate. You guys can keep attacking and ranting against egalitarianism all you want without interference.
Also, the forum is a failure, so it doesn't really matter if you keep the link or not. I am too controversial and just not popular enough to get people to come.
"...being very anxious trying to figure out why you guys are doing this and what your agenda is"
ReplyDeleteDoing what? What am I doing and why do you make it sound like it should stop? Am I forcing something on you? Am I not allowed to put forth ideas?
To answer your question: I'm doing it because it's my point of view. Why does anyone promote any idea, and why are mine, specifically, being outed? Why aren't you making connotations regarding why someone "is doing this" on other blogs? If I shut up and made a bunch of simplistic posts about how not having kids is good, would that make you "rejoin" my "side"?
I don't understand any of this. What are you dissociating from? I do not lead some secret group. I am not interested in censoring myself for the sake of pleasing people -- especially where their interests are so transparently political.
If you really were exhausted from these exchanges, then you'd take a break, think about them some more, and find clarity. Instead, you're publicly announcing your alleged exhaustion: "We like your television show idea, but could you maybe replace the word 'gamble' with 'play'? We don't want the public to get the wrong idea about us, you see."
ReplyDeleteYou're not interested in clarity; you're interested in showing me your dissatisfaction with my blog. The only purpose this could possibly serve is to "win" -- what, exactly, I have no idea.
"All pleasurable states are nothing more than relief from previous unpleasurable states."
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't make any sense. Pleasurable states are triggered by the release of dopamine in the brain, not the cessation of pain. Furthermore, there are entirely different nerves involved in the reception of pain and pleasure. Relief from pain is part of the reason for satisfying desires, but it's not the ONLY reason.
question: don't all of your opinions come from assuming logic works? that we exist within an objective reality?
ReplyDeletei mean it's pretty obvious to any intelligent being that we exist in a universe of limited perceptions and lack the ability to accurately perceive the universe as it actually is, which means that any sort of pure logic is inherently flawed cause nothing is for suresies?
"That doesn't make any sense. Pleasurable states are triggered by the release of dopamine in the brain, not the cessation of pain. Furthermore, there are entirely different nerves involved in the reception of pain and pleasure. Relief from pain is part of the reason for satisfying desires, but it's not the ONLY reason."
ReplyDeleteRelief from pain is not the "reason" for satisfying desires; it is the cause of pleasure. This is an issue of causality rather than justification; in other words, why you enjoy what you enjoy is secondary to how the pleasure was induced. One can subjectively justify one's desires if one wishes -- so long as one does not harm another in the process. The point is merely that you cannot be sentient without experiencing discomfort or deprivation, for those things are why we make decisions in life. Any time that you do anything, it's because your previous state of existence was less preferable, causing you to feel deprived.
The intensity of this deprivation is another matter entirely, of course. If we could somehow design a world free from AIDS and panic attacks but keep stubbed toes, mild hunger, and itching, I'd be all for it.
...but in the meantime, saying "Life needs to continue" is akin to saying "I'm okay with genocides and mass extinction events. Concentration camps and supervolcanic eruptions are obviously a current requirement of the life agenda, but I like sex and food. Screw the third world, the farm animals, and the ninety percent of baby birds that starve to death all across the world!"
ReplyDeleteIt's a statement born of limited perspective, but what would you expect from a species originally designed for living in groups of fifty being trapped in a culture of self-aggrandizing mass media? Anyone who drives a car is unlikely to have any clue regarding what the last billion years on Earth were like.
Follow-up thought:
ReplyDelete1. There is no need for need.
2. If we introduce need into the environment, anyway, then we should at least preclude penalties for the need not being met.
3. If we can't even guarantee 2., then we should guarantee that all of the need is satisfied.
4. If we can't even guarantee 3., then we're doing the following:
5 needs introduced - 3 needs fulfilled = 2 needs unfulfilled
We're creating need out of cultural/genetic obligation, and then failing to fully satisfy it. Why create five hungry children with the foreknowledge that only three will get to eat? In an isolated scenario of this kind, would you really be okay with watching two children starve to death simply because filling the other three's bellies makes them smile? Insanity!
You didn't say "All pleasurable states are caused by relief from previous unpleasurable states", you said "All pleasurable states are nothing more than relief from previous unpleasurable states." These are two different statements.
ReplyDeleteSecond, it's clearly possible to experience a pleasurable sensation without experiencing discomfort beforehand.
ReplyDeleteLet's say I'm laying in my bed reading a book, feeling perfectly comfortable, when someone breaks in and thrusts a spoonful of chocolate ice cream into my mouth and I like the taste of it. During the entire time I was laying in bed, was I secretly experiencing a feeling of discomfort from not eating chocolate ice cream that even I didn't know I had?
For the record, I had a similar remark on this, but I accidentally posted it as a comment on the wrong post.
ReplyDelete"One can subjectively justify one's desires if one wishes -- so long as one does not harm another in the process."
ReplyDeleteSo to utilize your metaphor about the constantly-draining pool, it's okay to learn to enjoy constanly filling up and then having fun in your pool, but you shouldn't buy anyone else a house with a pool that drains constantly or steal someone else's water to fill your pool, and you should probably fix things so you don't suffer huge consequences when you don't fill your pool for a few days?
"You didn't say "All pleasurable states are caused by relief from previous unpleasurable states", you said "All pleasurable states are nothing more than relief from previous unpleasurable states." These are two different statements."
ReplyDeleteI'm not so sure that they are. When I said that relief is the cause of pleasure, what I meant was that a two-step process occurs that we can call "relief"; the first step is when the brain realizes that the negative sensation has left, and the second is when the brain releases the pleasure response. This is true regardless of whether you're having an orgasm or you've just been pulled out of the water while drowning. Do we not experience "pleasure" when some horrible feeling is stopped? What is pleasurable about it other than that we have returned to a state of "not uncomfortable"?
To clarify, I'll reword my above statement to:
Relief from pain is not the "reason" for satisfying desires; however, the benefit of being relieved of pain is the cause of desire.
This is a pointless semantics argument, anyway. You are now aware of what the words implied, regardless of the accuracy of the syntax applied. If you wish to refine the wording of a statement, that's fine, but state as much rather than uphold the rewording as an argument against the actual point being made. Pleasure being a product of relief or being the definition of relief is a trivial debate and has nothing to do with the reality of sentience.
"Let's say I'm laying in my bed reading a book, feeling perfectly comfortable, when someone breaks in and thrusts a spoonful of chocolate ice cream into my mouth and I like the taste of it. During the entire time I was laying in bed, was I secretly experiencing a feeling of discomfort from not eating chocolate ice cream that even I didn't know I had?"
ReplyDeleteDiscomfort is relative, as our conscious experiences are continuous rather than discrete. You were not capable of processing the relative advantages of ice cream prior to having it shoved into your mouth, but retroactively, you were able to make the relative comparison and conclude that ice cream = better than not ice cream. Had you been aware of this at the time, then you would have had the initial desire to eat ice cream, and thus would have become disappointed were ice cream unavailable. This is a minor form of negative sensation, but it is negative sensation nevertheless, and therefore must be included in our perception of the fundamental nature of sentience.
Anyway, this thought experiment hardly holds any practical value, given that anyone having something shoved into their mouths is bound to get angry.
"So to utilize your metaphor about the constantly-draining pool, it's okay to learn to enjoy constanly filling up and then having fun in your pool, but you shouldn't buy anyone else a house with a pool that drains constantly or steal someone else's water to fill your pool, and you should probably fix things so you don't suffer huge consequences when you don't fill your pool for a few days?"
ReplyDeleteYes. The metaphor that you're referring to was mostly to illustrate the lack of need for life rather than the lack of good inherent in pleasure/relief.
Okay, thank you for clarifying, that was very enlightening.
ReplyDeleteNo problem. If you'd like to discuss any of this further, perhaps we can have a real Socratic dialogue!
ReplyDeleteWait... Doesn't that mean that if anyone introduces me to a new pleasant sensation, they're actually harming me by creating a need I didn't have before? Although I suppose you could say that some new sensations are new ways to satisfy already-present needs. For instance, if someone taught me to play Solitaire, you could say that I was being given a new way to end and avoid boredom.
ReplyDelete"Although I suppose you could say that some new sensations are new ways to satisfy already-present needs. For instance, if someone taught me to play Solitaire, you could say that I was being given a new way to end and avoid boredom."
ReplyDeleteThat's how I see it, yes. We are born with built-in, genetically driven needs, all varying in intensity and priority. You could argue that a heroin addiction, for instance, is an exception, but I don't think that anyone would claim that their having been introduced to a heroin addiction brought joy into their lives.
Generally speaking, the baser desires -- the desire to not be bored, the desire to explore, the desire for novelty, the desire for mental stimulation -- are so broad in definition that just about anything could satisfy them, contingent on one's cultural vantage point. Anything more obviously separate from these "built-in" desires is usually unwanted and frowned upon. Wonder why...
Follow-up thought:
ReplyDeleteIn a simulated environment with "hard" suffering thresholds, people would probably enjoy heroin and other addictions -- especially if they possessed the capability to switch off the desire whenever another desire (e.g. the desire for novelty) presented itself. I see nothing wrong with this; I just don't think it accomplishes anything. That doesn't mean that it necessarily must not exist.
By the way, how do you sync up the proposition that it's wrong to bring people into existence because no consent can be given with the proposition that the "you" who exists in the future is a different person than the "you" who exists now? Aren't you constantly bringing people into existence simply by continuing to live?
ReplyDeleteThe difference is that I would have to create suffering in order to end my future selves. Refraining from reproducing does not cause anyone to experience any degree of suffering -- at least nothing beyond a fairly paltry amount when weighed against the lifetime of suffering prevented.
ReplyDeleteIn the scenario of reproduction, preventing my future selves from coming into existence would be analogous to a potential mother coming to the realization that having children is wrong, and then committing suicide: even if a great amount of suffering were prevented in such a scenario, there would be other ways of doing it without causing the amount of suffering endured during the suicide process. My life may get worse in the future, but I am currently presented with two options -- to suffer as I currently do or to suffer even more by contemplating suicide and then actually going through with it.
Again, this is about relative advantage, opportunity cost, and decision-making. Surely you must understand that being miserable all the time, constantly thinking about death, and then, say, slitting your wrists or taking a bunch of pills is far more horrible than what the average sentient being experiences. Why put yourself through it?
On the other hand, having never existed at all not only prevents future suffering, it doesn't require suffering in order to get to that point.
Incidentally, I am presently marveling at how no one likes to make assertions of their own, even in a post encouraging the use of the Socratic method, and instead just bombards me with a bunch of questions.
ReplyDeleteYou probably noticed that people have only responded to one point here. My issues with this post are:
ReplyDelete1. I don't like that a lot of the points you bring up here seem like things you believe, but don't want to risk seeming smart by saying you believe it, so you present it as a list of controversial ideas without putting your weight behind it. For example, your antinatalist points, or your ideas that good feelings are just the absence of bad feelings.
2. Most of your points seem to be things you thought of while walking around town and thinking about problems you can find with the things people say. You don't seem to follow this post: http://nobadmemes.blogspot.com/2011/08/pragmatic-approach-to-ideas.html If you really want to create your own philosophy from nothing, try to make a cohesive system that you can fit all your critical thoughts into.
This is a pretty rough criticism because I was directed towards your blog by the forum that gave you that big viewer spike recently and I haven't read that much of your blog.
1. I don't like that a lot of the points you bring up here seem like things you believe, but don't want to risk seeming smart by saying you believe it, so you present it as a list of controversial ideas without putting your weight behind it. For example, your antinatalist points, or your ideas that good feelings are just the absence of bad feelings.
ReplyDeleteI don't understand the risk involved in "seeming smart." Care to elaborate?
I didn't put my weight behind this post because it was intended to be a fun, oversimplified way of getting people to talk and challenge their preconceptions. The experiment obviously failed, but that doesn't detract from the then-necessity of the experiment. I could have also included points about ice cream or video games that are not commonly held, because the end goal would have been the same -- to deconstruct and analyze the process of memetic selection as it is conducted on an "individual" basis by my peers. When I prioritize, I place process before both value and goals.
2. Most of your points seem to be things you thought of while walking around town and thinking about problems you can find with the things people say. You don't seem to follow this post: http://nobadmemes.blogspot.com/2011/08/pragmatic-approach-to-ideas.html If you really want to create your own philosophy from nothing, try to make a cohesive system that you can fit all your critical thoughts into.
Can you demonstrate how this post does not follow the guidelines laid out in the one that you linked to (perhaps by making a counterargument against one of the above points)?
I agree that this post is scattered. That was intentional. These points are not meant to exemplify my "memotype"; that's what this post is for. If you're looking for an overarching system, reference that link instead.
This post (the one that we're commenting on here) is an example of ideological exercise/practice -- practice that never got off the ground, unfortunately, but it was worth a shot. One can hardly call a group of musicians sitting around playing random melodies for a few seconds at a time a tight concert, because it's practice -- not a concert. When the scale of those who understand the nature of process, that which governs material reality, and how to apply logic to the processes of living action greatly increases and we're actually able to get the world's attention, only then will scattered exercises like this become obsolete.