There are an alarming number of comments here from the past few years from people who seem to believe that I am (was?) Adam Lanza. Well, here you go. Here's your proof that I am, in fact, alive, and therefore, not Adam Lanza.
The timing of the final post is easily explained. The massacre happened, and it made me think about how the media overstates the frequency with which mass shootings occur in our world. Two days after the massacre, I made a blog post voicing my thoughts on the reality of mass shootings versus the media's depiction as something that occurs regularly enough that the average person needs to be constantly looking over their shoulder in fear.
The post was not part of some pre-massacre manifesto, but rather, a direct response to the media's portrayal of massacres in general. Of course it would be posted around the same date as a particular massacre that was highly topical at the time; it was a direct response to it, two days later.
The fact that it was the last post on the blog is a coincidence. There were later posts that I didn't like and subsequently deleted. It was not the actual, last post. I was also unaware that Adam Lanza even knew about antinatalism or Inmendham until two or three years ago.
This blog, as the title implies, was never about antinatalism. It was about analyzing ideas (memes in the original Dawkinsian sense of the word) on an individual basis, not in packages or coupled to "isms" or political parties, philosophical schools, and other groups. It was about taking ideas on a case-by-case basis to avoid groupthink and generalization. It was about taking the most fundamental approach possible to thought, and not about any particular topic. So gun control, resource-based economics, and transhumanism were just as valid as antinatalism as far as topics were concerned.
Ironically, I was pretty bad at following my own processes, and things like antinatalism were end results.
I was 23 when I started this blog. I'm now 38. The amount of time that has passed from the start of the blog until now is not far behind the amount of time between my birth and the start of the blog. That's how long ago I wrote all this stuff. I was barely an adult, more or less still a kid, especially mentally, with no real-world experience.
You can read about my renouncing antinatalism in the comments section of the previous post and my justifications for doing so, if you wish.
I decided to post this because it's a lot easier to find than a buried comment. This will stay at the top forever so that it's the first thing people see when they come here.
I could just delete the whole blog, I guess. Maybe I will do that, in fact. There's nothing but misery here, and as a person who no longer has any interest in perpetuating his own misery while in an Internet echo chamber, it's not exactly like keeping it up does anyone any good.
But then I think, for the < 10 people who stop by here and wonder where I went, there's something disturbing about the idea that some of these people are out there thinking my words were the words of a deranged mass child killer. So I'd rather repudiate that than leave it a mystery.
UPDATE: It has since come to my attention that there were audio recordings of Adam Lanza talking about reading my blog, and being a fan of it. As someone who no longer espouses any of the views posted here, I first want to say that this creeps me out to my core to the point of giving me shivers. It's one thing to be associated with a mass killer because of Internet detectives. It's another to find out that the mass killer was a fan of yours.
I can't even begin to express how messed up that is, especially because I was averaging maybe two or three comments per month back then, and only regularly corresponded with three or so people. This was always just a side outlet for me, and I always assumed that it had no larger cultural significance, because I wasn't catching the attention of something like the YouTube algorithm and generating tens of thousands of views. To know that a world-famous event that made headlines, especially one so disturbing and revolting to the core, could in any way be affiliated with my blog, and worse, inspired by it... I have no words.
Thank god I didn't find out around 2012-14 or near that general period of time, or I don't know if I would have been able to handle it. A lot of time has passed, but it doesn't change how disturbing this is to me.
Think about what you put out into the world carefully, people. You never know what kind of reach you might have. Your actions have consequences. Starting a blog or a YouTube channel isn't a game. I do fully acknowledge that the vast majority of antinatalists are not planning on committing murder, and many are probably great people. I'm not saying that the belief that we should stop having children for the sake of preventing suffering in the universe should be equated with murderous intent and horrific actions.
But for god's sake, think before you press the reply button, because even if you're right -- even if the point you're about to make is valid -- the overall impact that it has might be far worse than being wrong. Be kind to one another and try to step away from the computer screen (or phone screen) whenever you can.
A further update and response to this thread: https://columbinemassacre.forumotion.com/t10096-nobadmemes
I'm apparently unable to register on this forum to reply directly. Someone wanted to know about the sidebar links, particularly the "Say No to Reproduction" blog. This was not Adam's blog. I never had contact with him, or if I did, it was a random comment on my blog, and I would have had no way of knowing it was him back then. To my knowledge, I have never directly communicated with him.
This was just another one of my blogs. There were three: nobadmemes, saynotoreproduction, and leavingsocietybehind (hence the username). The first was to go over the foundational ideals behind the philosophy, and to slowly introduce particulars that flowed from that foundation (with antinatalism being just one particular). The second, saynotoreproduction, was specifically antinatalism-focused. And the third was a bizarre attempt by young 23-year-old me to gather people together to live on a desert island and abandon society (sounds almost as deranged as a mass shooting, I realize in my older age). Both of the other two blogs were deleted due to lack of comments or activity, and because maintaining three instead of one was too much work.
