I like both poems too, tbh. I think the Good Bones narrator doesn’t think life is only fucked up misery—she talks about the “delicious” ways she’s shortened her life. I think the Larkin narrator does, but his obsessive focus on the nuclear family unit is...flawed.
-
-
Replying to @schanoes @pinguinus and
I dunno man You don't have to literally be a parent to fuck up the next generation, lots of people do it, and I've personally chosen to not participate in any of it It's why long ago I gave up on the idea of being a teacher
1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @pinguinus and
I agree, but I don’t think Larkin is speaking metaphorically, given his last line. You can choose not to have kids, but you can’t really choose whether or not you play a role in making a society/culture that fucks then up and/or helps them bloom.
1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes -
Replying to @schanoes @arthur_affect and
BAM! Yeah this. Larkin is all those guys I went to university with, super big into postmodernist relativism and the death of meaning, then gliding into management.
1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes -
I mean, you can be glib about this but the world is getting less and less inhabitable. I don't think your young children are gonna thank you for having them when they grow up. Especially if you lie to them.
2 replies 0 retweets 2 likes -
Replying to @iridienne @digiwonk and
Not sure if this is directed at me, but if it is, I’m not being glib? I like being alive, as long as I have my meds, so I don’t think the same is too unlikely for my kids.
2 replies 0 retweets 3 likes -
At 4°C of global warming when infrastructure has completely broken down and nobody can GET meds? Which is, like, maybe 50 years off?
3 replies 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @iridienne @schanoes and
I mean, i genuinely believe at this point that the only long-term hope for the planet is for human beings to die off as quickly as possible, tbh. My hope is in the K-T boundary, where we lost 93% of all species but the Earth recovered.
3 replies 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @iridienne @digiwonk and
Ah, see, that's one of our differences--whereas while I care about other species in a live and let live sort of way, don't care about them enough to wish to see humanity sacrifice gone for them. That's a fair enough difference, I think.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @schanoes @iridienne and
My antinatalism is the philosophical kind (like Benatar and Ligotti's), not the ecological kind Which is in some sense more narrowly focused - the great harm human beings do is not to other animals or "the planet" but to themselves
2 replies 1 retweet 10 likes
And more narrowly, the harm of your existence isn't the harm you do to other people, but *to yourself* But in that sense I think it's actually the big picture way of looking at it The tragedy isn't that people are bad people, that we're not smart enough or kind enough
-
-
Replying to @arthur_affect @schanoes and
The tragedy *is people* "People", as a concept, shouldn't exist Sapient consciousness is an evil in itself, it by nature *is suffering* and can only be resolved by ceasing to be
4 replies 1 retweet 11 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @schanoes and
I wouldn't necessarily go that far but i think human culture cannot be transmitted without epistemic violence, and i'm not sure it's worth it anymore.
0 replies 0 retweets 3 likes
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.