Yeah I’m afraid that the lesson is that Gen Z is not actually the future, they are going to repeat the past. What makes me sad is that they should have been the future but social media made sure that didn’t happen.

but the system is rigged or my vote doesn’t count or genocide joe or some stupid shit

Look at this guy thinking that we can vote our way out of this when we only have two, corporate sponsored, candidates.

Given the glut of unwanted children from our abortion prohibition, we’ll be needing a lot of new adoptive parents in the near future.

I mean it’s clearly a pandemic era comic. The whole no toilet paper thing and deadly viruses.

Was gonna say, wheres the fascism going retro?

Yeah I don’t really get comics like these, or any other form of “[my generation] has it the worst, the world had been destroyed, why should I have kids” that more or less ignores all of history.

For context, I’m gen Z/millennial with a child and planning another with my wife. We’re not rich or living in nice city of whatever, just living in a smaller city in Europe.

Look at this guy who thinks the USA invented racism and holds a monopoly on it.

I mean, the UK has 2 out of 3 of those. And most countries have the violent racism.

When we go down we are taking all of you with us.

r/iam14andthisisdeep

Conservatives are often very insecure people who have never overcome their own childhood trauma or understood why they want children. That trauma and insecurity just gets passed down.

Republicans saying they hate Communism, then doing a Nicolae Ceaușescu speed run.

That’s the point? The left get demoralized and the right can’t be because they have no morals. Its part of the reason right wingers tend to have a dozen children, it’s quite literally biblical drown them in numbers bullshit.

Any society that doesn’t impart those values across the board to its citizens will devolve into shit regardless.

It’s basically just math.

People with zero values are going to fuck like rabbits and people with values aren’t.

If trash family has 5 kids they can’t take care of and a dad that leaves, that’s at least 4 really mad poor kids that are going to blame a lot on somesuch minority for their problems in 18 years.

For all those values, even in yourself. There’s no better motivator to make an effort for the future, than having a kid you want the best for. If you don’t have a kid, you’re not passing your environmental values, or you educational values, or all the other values you may have for what makes a better society. Nor do you have any reason to hold to them yourself.

I don’t mean to try to push anyone toward having kids, but if you do want to have kids but give up thinking the world is getting worse, that decision is part of the world getting worse. If you do want kids, there’s all sorts of opportunity to make this a better world for both yourself and them, and longer, and plenty of opportunity to make an actual difference

Just passing along the value of the bidet may be worth it, according to the comic

It seems like vanishingly few people in the US care about the good of broader humanity anymore. Destroying the environment is fine as long as it creates jobs. Poisoning the water tables forever with fracking is fine as long as it makes cheap gas. Genocide was supported by both parties in the last election. Both parties are waving guns around even as school kids die in ever more frequent mass shootings. Its a race to the bottom and no one cares to change course.

In the past, children were your labor force, health care and pension plan. People had many children so at least some survived into adulthood. There wasn’t much alternative back in the day.

Now children are a net cost. They can’t even take care of you in old age if government pensions or retirement plans don’t pan out because many can barely feed themselves.

So, the best time to have children was roughly before 1900. That’s when things started to change.

That’s the neat part, there isn’t!

But being more serious: I think I can express the feeling of things being particularly worse now in a way that isn’t just recency bias.

Sure, over time technology has improved and that’s generally speaking allowed for better standards of living, at least for the people at the right end of that technology. (Not so great if you’re being conquered because someone shows up with guns for example.) So you could look at the past and say it was worse because materially things like food availability and medicine have become better over time.

But key to this was that all of this was a struggle of humans over nature. To the extent things were bad, there were tangible things we could do to improve.

These days, so many of our problems are self-inflicted and technology and economic development mostly makes them worse. Climate change is the obvious big one, but then there’s stuff like:

• Weapons have become increasingly destructive and centrally usable. A small number of people can cause a lot more damage than they ever could in the past.

• Surveillance technology invades our privacy in a way that’s unprecedented in human history.

• Automation, communications, and transportation technology have made workers less and less powerful and therefore more subject to abuse and artificial poverty. This is one of the more messed up things about capitalism. Technology gets better and rather than getting the benefits of that progress, it actually hurts a lot of people.

• Advances in science and technology, particularly data science, allow the powerful to hyper-optimize the bad things they were always doing or enables them to do things they’ve wanted to do.

• A financialized economy creates economic catastrophes where people go homeless or starve without any actual changes to material conditions. The numbers got screwed up or the investors panicked and now everything sucks for no reason?

• More generally, we can produce enough of the necessities of life for everyone, but capitalism ensures that those necessities won’t make it to people. Capitalism depends on scarcity. If you had a house you wouldn’t need to pay a landlord. If you had food you wouldn’t need to pay food companies. If you had both you wouldn’t need to go work and put up with awful conditions. We’ve solved our most fundamental problems and yet because of the interests of the system and those in power, that progress gets held back.

In the past, even if things were rough now, you could maybe look forward to them improving. Now it feels like the walls are closing in. Unless we actively do something about it, things are going to get worse for most people as more and more wealth accumulates in private hands, as we become subject to increasingly powerful forms of control, and as the powerful destroy the environment we need to live.

Always whatever year you never lived

Don’t forget soldiers. As George Carlin said, “Live babies make dead soldiers.”

I fucking wish