At the VERY extreme it's people saying stuff like if you have the courage of your convictions -- you still believe outright murder of sapient humans is wrong, but you think sapience shouldn't exist, but you're okay with killing sub-sapient animals -- then we should nuke the Earth
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
I.e. if you think humans existing is *that* bad then VHEMT isn't sufficient After the last human voluntarily dies off, there is now no force preventing something like humans from evolving again by random chance
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
So that last human has not just a moral right but a *duty* to go out by pushing a button and nuking as much of the surface of the Earth as possible to scour it clean, so there will be no sapient cockroach people in another million years who will be hatched only to suffer
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
What I find interesting about the existence of this stuff is at least it shows you where the boundaries are This POV is logically consistent, at least, but even most antinatalists recoil from it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
In fact the way a lot of antinatalists talk about it they demonstrate they do believe in some specific "demon gene" in Homo sapiens specifically that we have no real evidence for "Maybe when we're gone we'll make room for a new species that's better than us"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Anyway if you really, really, REALLY had the courage of your convictions even that nuke is a cowardly way out If you are committed to stopping the existence of life and suffering then you'd try to become as powerful as possible so you could actually guarantee it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Becoming a spacefaring civilization that patrols the universe killing life wherever it can find it before it has the chance to develop sapience A much simpler and more elegant (if less marketable) explanation for a sci-fi conceit like the Reapers
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Anyway I think the interesting debates are not really about the comic book stuff about the far future and nukes and becoming space gods I think the really interesting stuff is extremely relevant to everyday life, so much so we actually can't talk about it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Back in the 1930s it was a fairly widespread and accepted thing among "rational progressives" to be just straight up unconditionally pro-right-to-die P.G. Wodehouse wrote a story joking about this, where a hardcore socialist talks about it so much people think he's suicidal
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
There was some really harsh backlash to this in the postwar era as people fled from "rational progressivism" and its association with eugenics and the Holocaust and religion made a comeback The taboo that encouraging suicide = blood on your hands came back hard
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People fought bitterly about this because people really believed in the Population Bomb and other people were horrified at the idea of "anti-overpopulation policies" subtly finding ways to try to get rid of "excess" people
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
So like I could say "Remember when suicide booths were a thing in the movie Soylent Green?" but the thing is by the time that movie was made in 1973 they *weren't* a thing They were a dystopian strawman you used to attack people who cared too much about overpopulation
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Whereas back in the "good ol' days" of the '30s you could find people like H.G. Wells just straight up actually making the argument that a utopian society of the future would have free painless taxpayer-funded suicide booths you could just sign up for
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