See if you make a ton of money, your kids will be better than the poor people, so you’ve left a better world for your children.
Actual logic and I’ve seen it play out.
Correct. To them “empathy” extending beyond friends and family is a rediculous concept. They also don’t believe that anyone else could actually fall for caring about other people.
If anyone on Lemmy wants a financial answer to this question, which essentially what it boils down to given the society we’re in, I would recommend listening to the latest Weekly Show podcast episode with Jon Stewart interviewing the Nobel Prize winning economist Richard Thaler.
He breaks down this exact mentality in a way that makes a lot of sense.
My very short summary: We hate losing something way more than we enjoy gaining something. That’s why governments prefer subsidies. They are perceived as gaining something, while taxes are perceived as losing something. They also talk about nudges versus shoves. Nudging people toward positive behavior works better, especially if you do it in a way that makes people feel like they have agency. But this makes it difficult to change behavior drastically (a shove), which Stewart argues is required with the challenges we’re facing because of climate change. Thaler replies that with the kind of people we have in power, allowing for drastic change will not yield the kind of change we need nor want.
I think that’s what the conversation boils down to, for all the people who hate watching a long video for what could’ve been some clean text.
for all the people who hate watching a long video for what could’ve been some clean text.
A argument could be made that this statement explains the “why” behind how we have so many people unwilling to understand things better. AI much?
“lets just summarize the broad strokes.”
Dude, this is some random-ass post on social media. People who want the deep cut can do it, people who are mildly interested can read a summary and everybody else just ignores it.
It wasn’t a dig on you. Just an observation on society. You can stand down.
Just like with most things wrong in North America, you can be right more often than not if you just blame Reagan.
It’s the result of hyper individualism fuelled by neoliberal policies that was spearheaded by Reagan, and I probably need to mention Thatcher as well.
Remember “greed is good”? Well this is the result.
Dan Olson’s recent video on a silly meme that DHS posted and is being picked up by right wing crazies all over the world surfaced something that’s been absolutely floating on the top of my mind ever since I saw it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7WqVx9x89s
They show a clip from Werner Herzog’s 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World (full film), where a little penguin starts inexplicably running away from the herd that’s heading to the sea, and running towards some distant mountains instead.
The penguin isn’t just like wandering off to see some sick mountains because it’s never going to get there. There’s no food. There’s no shelter. There’s no security.
The penguin is going to die.
Immediately before the clip in the full documentary, Herzog asks a penguin expert if penguins can go insane.
So, another thing that’s implicit underneath this is the recognition that Trump and his cronies are on a suicide mission. They do not believe in the future. They cannot conceptualize the world surviving the present. And so, theirs is an embrace of pure id, pillaging what future does exist to live out a revenge fantasy for no other reason than because they can. Their only policy is chaos and hatred because, where they’re going, they don’t need policies. The actual mountains, America the Great and its promised flourishing, don’t matter. It can remain a hazy shape on the horizon because no one headed there will live to see it. Their only goal is to take everything else with them on the way out into the ice to die.
Now, maybe that’s just cope on my part. I too am human and need to rationalize the world as it exists [to] grapple with the future, but it would go a long way to explaining why modern right-wing propaganda is so grim and nihilistic, reticent to depict any coherent ideal, even an unrealistic, unobtainable one.
Herzog intended for The Penguin to reflect on humanity. Encounters at the End of the World is an unabashedly anthropomorphic film about the stories that people read into nature in order to say something about ourselves.
And, to that end, the United States Department of Homeland Security has looked at this penguin and said, “Yep, that’s us. We’re doing this for no reason. We have no hope of success. There is no meaning to this. You don’t need to ask us why because you’ve always known why.”
Literally had my dad tell me that people only ever voted for themselves
While I can accept that a lot of people do that, the implication that he doesn’t vote with at least some thought about his children or wife was a little worrying
Similarly, he’s also said that climate change won’t affect us in our lifetime. This might be (somewhat) true for him, but for me?
if you are alive Feb 8, 2026, climate change is already impacting you drastically. saying otherwise requires ignorance. and i mean that in the original sense. not just never being shown the evidence. the willful choice to ignore that which is above and in front of you every single day
What I mean when I say he’s a little correct is that it’s feasible to ignore most of the effects up till now and assume it’ll continue as it is currently
It’s incredibly ignorant and incorrect, but it’s probably not going to get to the point where we all die before he does first
He probably thinks it isn’t real, rather than “it is not affecting me right now, but will probably be unmanageable in 20 years”
Good adult
Most don’t even know how to behave like an adult. Majority of the government behave exactly like children, which makes this situation worse. They rather play pretend adult rather than actually try to be an adult.
I recently found out about the Long Now Foundation, glad to see there’s someone saying it out loud. We need to go back to thinking about our descendants in order to make a better humanity! We’ve tried the “more profit now” method for a while now, and I think most people will agree it has proven itself to not be a healthy, sustainable way to manage our lives and planet. I would really love to make a pilgrimage to the 10,000 year clock, seems like an amazing experience… if it wasn’t in the US.
I think the more fundamental issue, and something we often forget to highlight with these tech bro shitstains, is how many of them are wholly convinced that with enough money they can just live forever.
how many of them are wholly convinced that with enough money they can just live forever.
Sometimes i feel like the entire difference between well-adjusted people and the people you describe in your comment comes down to whether their parents exposed them to enough stories growing up.
Did we not all experience the same fables, nursery rhymes and TV shows that cohesively teach you not to crave immortality and endless power? Not to sacrifice friends for wealth? They must’ve been getting early-start skiing lessons or practicing horse riding instead.
I learned how to ski before I was 5 and I think I’m an alright person. Not well adjusted by any means, but I try to be nice to everyone.
Just don’t blame skiing. Horses, probably.
I think some of these people cannot conceptualize a world where they aren’t in it.
So many people seem to completely believe they aren’t going to die someday. I get that it’s scary, but the cognitive dissonance is impressive.
Probably they haven’t grown up.
Well there is a different view on that. Right wing ‘morality’ seems to be ‘I’ve got mine, fuck you’. And they really live by that.
They had lead in gasoline while they were growing up.
And they call themselves Christians.
Combination of looking primarily at your own progeny, not on aggregate, and focusing on your next generation doing relatively better – and of a significant uptick in people without kids. The second is a bit of an extension of that first one really, as its looking at their own situation and saying “Welp, no next generation anyhow, may aswell burn some fossil fuels and enjoy myself while I’m here”.
I have no intention of having kids and I still want to do what I can to build a better world for the next generation…
The presence of outliers doesn’t really change the general point.
Plus, from my pov at least, the choice to have kids isn’t one that’s actually ‘made’ until there’s the realistic opportunity to have kids based on your socio-economic background and expectations – obviously, not withstanding “happy accidents” etc. So if someone is educated / normalised in a north american / western democratic upbringing, with an expectation that you should be able to provide a basic quality of life for kids before having them, and readily available birth control to allow couples to dictate when it happens, then you first need to reach a point of financial freedom before you can make a ‘real’ choice on the subject. That typically comes down to a highly stable middle-class income/life style, which few achieve, and fewer achieve at young ages where historically the ‘choice’ to have kids gets declared.
To use myself as an example to elaborate: when I was young, I didn’t have stability in my employment/income, though I did have one or two partners during that time who would’ve likely been willing to have kids if we had financial security (those two being women who were unemployed/hoping to be stay at home moms, which doesn’t really ‘work’ unless the guy makes serious money – need that dual income if you’re just a middle class earner – my lack of a high enough income to provide a middle class lifestyle for a group of dependents was the reason for one of those breakups even). Later on in life, now that I have more financial security, the women I’ve typically dated aren’t interested in having kids – most have established careers that they don’t want to interrupt, or are divorcees who already have kids. I’m not someone comfortable/capable of dating much outside my age range, so as I near the age it becomes unsafe for women to have kids, that windows basically closes. As a guy, I don’t feel like I’ve ever actually made a “choice” on the subject, as I’ve never been in a position where I could choose yes or no. Anyone who claims to be making a ‘choice’ based on gaps/deficiencies in their situation at that time, I’d argue, aren’t making a choice purely on their desire to have kids or not.
Point of that schpiel in part being that, while I recognise outliers exist (and don’t skew the initial general statement), I’d also wager that a number of people identifying as “choosing not to have kids”, may be making that call not based on their desire to have children/a next generation, but rather on their personal circumstances excluding them from having that choice. It’s a lot like someone saying “I choose not to buy a $10 million car”… you ain’t really making a choice, unless you have $10 million sitting around that you could use on a luxury purchase.
I also think that as people in that category age, they tend to become more cynical towards sustainability and more inclined towards personal comforts. It’s easier to say “I’m eco conscious!” as a 25-30 year old, who’s still got time to ‘make a choice’ on kids, and bike to work/forgo a car etc – than it is to be a 60 year old, where there’s no choice left to make on kids, with arthritis, still tryin to avoid the car and instead use transit to cut emissions for commuting to work / getting groceries etc.
*yeah, not yea or nay. It isn’t a vote.
