The overriding fear I've seen is that not enough white children are being born. And as the definition and context of whiteness shifts, this inspires varying degrees of alarm and hatred. A big part of the current Israel/Palestine conflict stems from the demographically older and more infertile Israelis believing they need to cap the younger and more virile Palestinian population by any means necessary (including the current genocide).

So it isn't even that "people stop having children", but the "right" people not having the "correct" kind of children.

we better go full speed ahead on a the most moronically large scale sunk cost calamity that is going to hit us like a brick wall

Sort of the dirty secret about climate change is that its got nothing to do with population size. Enormous amounts of natural resources and carbon emissions are being produced by vanishingly small portions of the population. The whole AI project has been a fossil fuel hog. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan consumed phenomenal volumes of material for the benefit of an infinitesimal sliver of the planet's residents. Reliance on disposable plastics and love of enormous cars has nothing to do with the number of children we've been having.

Anti-natalism is completely divorced from ecological sustainability. In many ways, it is rooted in this delusion that we're all living in these remote rural settings with an infinite frontier to exploit forever. And that mentality emerges most forcefully in places that don't have these dense urban populations.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I love how your second quote literally and purposely leaves off the last part so you can fuel your argument better. Some people don't need to be misinformed, they do it to themselves!

Overpopulation is not "anti-natalism", overpopulation is literally a known and measured problem of biological populations, but some people like to make-believe that it doesn't apply to humans. Cue "but population really is falling (except not really because we keep bringing immigration from places with lower quality of life and then complain when ours continues to be lowered)" when it itself is an indication that we are reaching the limits and yet are still trying to push past them.

As an aside, lol at new labels like "anti-natalism" showing up that stereotype arguments launched against them, it reminds me of how the GQP has adopted their "woke"-ness label just because it gave them a term to band things that had existed for ages under. I'm sure "antinatalism" will serve as well - not blaming you for it, just realized the term was being paraded around and that it will work out just about as well as "woke".

Yes, I'm sure the consequences would be horrible if we stopped, but that's the thing, being already in a shit load of trouble if you pull out is sort of a prerequisite of sunk cost fallacies.