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A recent news piece posted here ("India Man to Sue Parents for Giving Birth to Him") concluded the summary with a statement that while this man's case may seem odd, "there are philosophical grounds in support of anti-natalism." A link to an article by philosopher David Benatar was then provided.

But are there really "philosophical grounds" presented there? Benatar has been making this argument for well over a decade now, making occasional splashes in the media like a New York Times piece by Princeton philosopher Peter Singer in 2010 ("Should This Be the Last Generation?), a New Yorker piece in 2012 ("The Case Against Kids"), and then a sort of New Yorker profile in 2017 ("The Case for Not Being Born"). I say "sort of" profile, because David Benatar is so guarded about his privacy that you can't even find a photo of him online, and he basically only agreed to do the interview if he wouldn't be asked any personal questions. In the past, I suspected him of being a total troll who might have a wife and five kids and was making absurd arguments just for the publicity (and feared that personal information about him would undermine his arguments), but I no longer believe that. (I've seen statements online claiming he actually doesn't have kids.) Now I think he's just a bit nuts. Seriously -- if we don't believe him to be an idiot, I think the most rational conclusion is that he's clinically depressed and has an almost egomaniacal need to spread his illness to others.

So, to see a piece of his posted yet again here uncritically -- and even claiming it has "philosophical grounds" -- makes me a bit confused.

To be sure, there are philosophical arguments against having kids, especially for specific people. And perhaps there are philosophical arguments for reducing the overall population to decrease suffering. There might even be philosophical arguments from an environmental perspective that the earth would be "healthier" in some abstract sense without the species of humans on it. I don't think the latter would constitute moral arguments, since morality is a human creation for humans to judge, and if all humans were to die off, there would be no humans to judge the morality of that situation. Hence the future non-existence of humanity is at best morally neutral from that perspective.

Nevertheless, I can understand such arguments in an abstract case. However, "grounds" for antinatalism implies that Benatar presents at least a good foundation for the case that no one should have kids. Unfortunately, most of his arguments suffer from a curious illogic native to pessimists.

Let me repeat again that I think there are very good arguments for individual people to choose not to have kids, from personal preference or personal circumstances insufficient to provide for children to genetic predispositions for producing offspring who are likely to have serious medical problems. I'm even happy to allow for an individual making the personal choice not to have kids on similar grounds to Benatar's argument: an individual prospective parent may believe that there's too much suffering in the world and thus not want to have kids. (I'm particularly sensitive to the illogic in Benatar's antinatalist stance because I once held that personal belief myself, i.e., that I didn't want to have kids because of the state of the world. I no longer hold that belief, but I think it's a valid choice for any parent to make. It's quite a different thing for Benatar to try to argue for all humanity, however.)

I'll try to concisely summarize the key rationale behind Benatar's argument, because it's where the fundamental flaw lies. Benatar argues the following:

(1) For a human being to suffer is a moral wrong; for a human being to experience happiness/pleasure is a moral good.

(2) However, for potential future human beings not yet born, his calculus changes. For a not-yet-existent human being to potentially suffer in the future is a moral wrong, but for that same human being to experience future pleasure would be morally neutral.

Yes, that's the entirety of his argument. There's a lot of other smoke and mirrors around it, but really it comes down to the fact that he considers bringing a human being into the world with the knowledge it will suffer to be a moral wrong, while any amount of good the human experiences has no moral valence whatsoever. Thus, the moral wrong wins out: therefore, no one should have children. QED.

I'll get to his supposed justification for this rather illogical disparity in a moment, but note that the rest of the smoke and mirrors around his argument is not based in logic. It is just repeated appeals to a pessimist (if not depressed) mindset. To be clear, I'm a realist. I'd never consider myself an optimist. But Benatar gives philosophy a bad name by trying to pretend his arguments are based in rationality, rather than pessimist irrationality that stacks the deck. From the piece linked in the SN article, this is Benatar's position:

Considering matters carefully, it’s obvious that there must be more bad than good. This is because there are empirical asymmetries between the good and bad things. The worst pains, for instance, are worse than the best pleasures are good.

This isn't reason. It's opinion. Yes, Benatar makes valid points that our memories tend to be selective, and we tend to remember good things over the bad. (Hence the many "good ole days" arguments that often are based on a nostalgic past that never existed.) That is a human psychological bias, but weighing the good and the bad for an individual's suffering is up to an individual. Benatar wants to make the decision for everyone, though: whether you realize it or not, your suffering is worse for you than any positive things you have in your life. And if you don't believe that, you're just giving into a sort of delusion.

But this is all window dressing. To get back to Benatar's asymmetry: the crux of his argument that for anyone to have a child is morally wrong, you have to grant his assumption that knowingly having a child that may suffer is wrong, but knowingly having a child that will experience positive emotions is morally neutral. When pushed on this, Benatar falls back on some weird concept that the calculus should be different for non-existent beings compared to living humans. There's never any good justification for this.

The problem is that this differentiation rests on a confusion between reasoning about actualities and reasoning about probabilities. I agree with Benatar that if we know the possible outcomes of our actions, and if we know that a particular action will result in great suffering, perhaps we have a moral obligation to avoid that action. The problem is that we don't generally know all of the future. Do we let our children play outside? Well, if we do, perhaps a child experiences a particular photon of ultraviolet light that causes a mutation that will eventually result in malignant skin cancer and death in a few decades. But if we don't, perhaps the child is dissuaded that day against physical activity and ultimately will develop an obesity problem with no exercise and will die early. This is the Benatar way of looking at the world -- anything and everything will ultimately cause suffering. Forget enjoying the sun or playing with friends: you will all suffer, and that's all that matters.

But surely if it is a moral evil to do something that will cause suffering, it must be a more good to do something that will cause happiness. And Benatar grudgingly admits this, but only for real people who exist in the world. For non-existent possible babies, only the potential suffering matters.

To be clear, I am absolutely NOT arguing that anyone has a moral duty to procreate, nor would they incur a moral duty to do so even if they knew a child would experience great happiness in life. So it's illogical to then suggest for that no one should procreate simply because of the possibility of suffering. (Of course, to Benatar, it's not about any possibilities: he's stacked the deck to conclude that everyone is always suffering horribly on-balance in their lives, and they are merely delusional if they think otherwise.) Again, I'm happy to agree with Benatar in individual cases: maybe a couple who knows they will very likely have a child with a severe congenital defect that will lead to a life of great suffering has a good reason not to have kids. But there's no reason other than illogical pessimism to claim this must apply to all humans.

Furthermore, if we accept Benatar's premise, then we should argue that no one should ever take any action, because at some point it will produce suffering for someone. And that suffering can apparently never be negated by any potential good our actions might do.

Which is, of course, absurd. But this is Benatar's argument: we all are continuously contributing to future suffering of humans to various degrees. (He says that repeatedly in his writings.) If taken to its logical conclusion, Benatar should have committed suicide the moment he came to this conclusion to prevent the further suffering he is causing humans by existing. Anyone who agrees with him should also immediately commit suicide, if you were to follow logic and reason. One might even make an argument that we should painlessly murder all other humans who might be suffering (which is apparently everyone). Benatar does stop short of calling for that, on reasonable grounds that basically it would be interfering with other's rights to make decisions for their own lives. Apparently others are allowed to choose to live (even in deluded suffering), but they are not allowed to legitimately believe their happiness outweighs their suffering. To Benatar, they are merely deluded.

The only reason he offers for not committing suicide himself or advocating it for all others who buy his argument is because supposedly "death is bad." Seriously. That's it. Read the links I put up there, and you'll see no real fleshing out beyond that. He even goes to the absurd degree of arguing that humans shouldn't have any more children because it will result in a 100% death rate, and death is bad.

There seems to be no religious element in Benatar's reasoning, so it seems absurd to conclude that death is worse than nonexistence. Death is simply nonexistence, unless one believes in an afterlife or whatever. So once again Benatar wallows in illogic: we must accept that nonexistence is better than existence for all future humans, but the nonexistence of death is somehow "bad" and worse than that.

Huh?

Well, it's actually pretty clear why Benatar makes this piece of illogical argument. Because if he advocated suicide for everyone (let alone possible genocide of the poor and suffering), his arguments would be universally condemned and portrayed as a Jim Jones-style lunatic. So, he's forced into this weird netherworld of argumentation where nonexistence is morally neutral, except when it is caused by death, which is somehow "bad" in some nebulous way.

To conclude, I'll happily agree with Benatar that there's a lot of suffering in the world. I'll happily agree that some potential parents may make a personal decision not to have children for all sorts of reasons, including Benatar's position. But it's one thing to make a case that parents should seriously consider the potential downsides of having kids; it's quite another to argue that it would be a moral good for the human race to go extinct because for anyone to ever have a child is a moral evil.

And again, I'm not even saying the further existence of humanity is a moral good. I'm not arguing that anyone should be persuaded to have children. But Benatar seems to have gained the support of lots of people who apparently don't think logically about what his argument actually rests on. I truly do not understand why he is still alive, if he were rational and truly believed his argument. (His only justification is based on "death is bad" and some weird analogies -- he seriously says it's like going to a bad play... if you had known it would be bad, you might not have gone at all, but once you're there, are you really gonna stand up and leave in the middle?)

Life is not a play, though, though in this case it does sound like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. The only rational way to excuse his refusal to commit suicide in the face of the argument he presents is to conclude he suffers from a sort of megalomania that he must spread his pessimist ideas and convince others that his irrational arguments are true.

I am committed to reason, and therefore I can't stand for such ideas promoted here without challenge.

[bzipitidoo:] Then there's all the ruckus over Global Warming. An awful lot of people would rather suck up Big Oil propaganda than listen to climate scientists. Why? For most of them, there's no gain in adhering to climate change denial, but they stick to it anyway, and have no scruples against using 3rd degree methods to suppress and silence climate science, stuff such as cutting funding and threatening their jobs and even their freedom.

here

[PartTimeZombie:] The problem is that "your team" is wrong about climate change, and are being manipulated by people who directly gain from fossil fuels, but at least your team get to win right?

Stupid way to run a country if you ask me.

here

[khallow:]“And yet the environmental guys are way outspending the other side. Somethings not quite right with the narrative.”

[AC:] Addressing this separately. To me this makes sense.

The companies get to hide behind “nothing is wrong” and that is cheap compared to the independent attempts to show that there is something going wrong in the environment.

here

[AC:]You do realize that if it is true that big oil hid the negative effects of their and related industries concerning global warming that it is a huge savings?

A contrary viewpoint:

[AthanasiusKircher:] Other industries manage to employ paid scientists to "shill" for them all the time. Big pharma, food additives and nutritional research -- we all know that where ambiguous data CAN be exploited, industry can and has often hired researchers or financed research to help support its position. (And to be fair, I think many research scientists in these industry positions actually believe in the work they do.)

With the pockets of Big Oil and dozens of other related industries that would suffer from increased pro-environmental regulation to combat climate change, where is this army of paid scientists? And don't argue that it has something to do with tenure requirements or whatever, because Big Pharma, the big chemical companies, and the Food Industry has no problem finding scientists with graduate degrees whom they can EMPLOY and finance directly to publish research. If the data is really that open to interpretation, it should be easy to employ a bunch of debunking scientists. (And they probably wouldn't even lost a lot of money doing so, since they could probably charge huge speaking fees on the conservative circuit for these people.)

That's always the most confusing aspect of those who claim a massive conspiracy -- every other industry manages to find a significant number of scientists to shill for them when needed, despite the fact that such scientists are often bucking the research funded by non-industry groups and the government. Yet for some weird reason, it's claimed here on this issue that exactly the opposite happens: industry with big pockets is powerless to recruit an army of shills, and instead all the scientists are jockeying for the much smaller pockets of NSF money. If this is so easy for the government to do, how come it's so hard for them to achieve similar levels of consensus around problematic drugs or chemicals or food additives or whatever?

To all those people who think there's a massive, well-funded (that is, well-funded for an industry that has trillions of dollars in revenue!) Big Oil/fossil fuel campaign to sabotage humanity's efforts to combat climate change, I have this simple challenge. There's plenty of analysis of the few groups that allegedly support climate denialism and such.

Now, do the same for the pro-mitigation side. Include the big non profits like Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund, government/intergovernment agencies like the UK's MET, NASA's GISS, and the IPCC, and the many businesses that support pro-mitigation. Use the same metric for each side. Who spends more on propaganda?

Protip: if you get that climate denialists are spending within an order of magnitude of the other side, then you're missing something big.

Reducing drug costs feature prominently in Trump's State of the Union Address.

However, his much-touted NAFTA re-write would grant an additional ten years of patent protection to pharmaceutical patents. That means generic medications will take ten more years to come to market and allows pharmaceutical companies to charge monopoly prices for ten years longer.

That will not result in cheaper medications.

Stronger Drug Patents in New NAFTA To Cost U.S. Manufacturing Workers Jobs

Why some people are worried about drug patent protections in the new NAFTA

The odds of Nancy Pelosi becoming President of the United States seem to be increasing every day.

Eh, what the hell, it worked in Brazil...

Brexit is the gift that keeps on taking, and we haven't even left (the EU) yet. That happens at midnight on 29th March.

The thorny issue of the Irish border has yet to be solved as this Channel 4 News report explains despite Nigel Farage's blatant stupid signalling on Irish TV.

This was in a week where Gerard Batten, UKIP leader, formally wrote to the Queen asking her to suspend Parliament (i.e. British sovereign democracy) to prevent Remainer MPs sabotaging Brexit. It is worth noting that the last time a monarch interfered with Parliament England became a Republic.

Meanwhile in Sunderland, which overwhelmingly voted Leave, the local Nissan car factory will not be making the new X-Trail model due to Brexit uncertainty.

And, of course, there are plans to evacuate the Queen "if Brexit turns ugly."

Why would Brexit possibly turn ugly when there will be no downsides. only upsides?

We need to return the government back to our regular multimillionaire democrats! They'll fight for the working man, not the businessman! Amirite??

Things I've noticed happen in the general vicinity of my posts:

- Fundie nutjobs reduced to curling up in a little ball, plugging their ears, and spewing either contentless religious copypasta (Freeman) or barely-coherent amateur apologia (Bot).
- The Shitey Uzzard degenerating into mudslinging and pretending (badly) not to care when defeated in arguments...every single one of them.
- Insecure manchildren accusing me of being a transsexual (some random AC) on one hand, and on the other, an actual transwoman accusing me of being a TERF (Kurenai).
- Creeps like VLM, KHallow, JMorris, Entropy, and all their kind simply giving the hell up and abandoning ship when faced with a proper down-smacking for their fallacious sociopathy.

When you have people on the fringes everywhere angry with you, each of them accusing you of the precise opposite on the spectrum they hate, you must be doing something right. In all my time here, I've never gone in for trolling, deception, or shitposting. I've always stood for what's right, and took the fight to those who would try to spread their noetic poisons, fighting it everywhere it appears for the sake of anyone unfortunate enough to encounter it, knowing full well the originators of such poison are by their own choice irredeemable, certainly so in this lifetime.

And my approach drives them nuttier than squirrel vomit.

Well boo fucking hoo. When someone on here tells me I'm bitchy or angry, I just laugh, because what they really mean is "you're making me uncomfortable by exposing my bullshit in such direct, uncompromising, profanity-laced ways." It's pretty obvious the accusations of being a transsexual come from sheltered, misogynist little manchildren who can't handle actual women speaking the plain, unvarnished truth to them, because they have so little truck with the opposite sex they've never seen it in the real world before. No, this insult to their manly honor cannot stand! ONLY another man could POSSIBLY have the balls, literal balls, to stand up to them! (And of course the kind of person who'd make this argument lumps MtFs under the heading of "man." I don't, though I do draw an important distinction between transwomen and cisgender women because, frankly, they are never going to know what it is to have a period or risk being pregnant).

Time to put on your big-boy undies and join the adult world! The toughest people I know are all women, including my own mother and some of the nurses at work. I'm a marshmallow compared to them.

And I don't regret anything, as painful as it's been sometimes. Am I a "nice girl?" No, and haven't been for several years, and you know what? It's better this way. "Nice girls" get used and taken advantage of and thrown away and never have their needs met. "Nice girls" are the permanent victims of tone trolling by people too frightened or too weak to deal with them as the full human beings they are. In this place, at this time, as this site sinks further and further into RWNJ decay, all it means is I'll fight all the harder.

What I hope this does is encourage the people on here who still seek the light to defend it. Hit back. We're seeing on a number of scales, from the President's capitulation on his stupid bullshit shutdown right down to the examples at the head of this post, that the sociopaths are like any bully: weak, cowardly, amoral types who don't expect and can't handle sustained, principled pushback. Part of it is that evil simply can't comprehend good, but mostly it comes down to how bullies work and have always worked. Anyone who wants to join me in fighting the good fight, please do: we've seen that it works.

Gillette has been invaded by the enemy.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=koPmuEyP3a0

Just watch it.

Then switch to this razor instead of Gillette:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PKHIDRA/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_BzxsCbEV973QD

(Disclaimer: This post is not sponsored)

The OPEN Government Data act recently became law.

The OPEN Government Data Act will ensure that the federal government releases valuable data sets, follows best practices in data management, and commits to making data available to the public in a non-proprietary and electronic format.

https://www.datainnovation.org/2019/01/open-government-data-act-signed-into-law-establishes-u-s-as-leader-in-open-data/

https://9to5mac.com/2019/01/15/open-government-data-act/

Murders at the hand of extremists were up 35% in 2018, with right-wing extremists responsible for more deaths than any other year in more than two decades, the Anti-Defamation League reported Wednesday.

The ADL’s Center on Extremism tracked 50 extremism-related murders last year, according to the new edition of its Murder and Extremism Report. All of them were conducted by right-wing extremists (one perpetrator also had alleged ties to Islamist extremism). That number made 2018 the deadliest year for right-wing extremists since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, which killed 171.

Among the murders tracked in the ADL’s analysis were the mass shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17; Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha Synagogue in Pittsburgh, which killed 11; and a Waffle House in Nashville. All of the suspects in those cases had expressed support online for far-right ideologies.

Right-Wing Extremist Murders Surged In 2018: ADL