It is very strange to be so afraid of pain you try to prevent other people from ever living by bombing a fertility clinic.
Wow, I had to look that term up and yup, I had no idea there was such a thing.
Not exactly tech related, though it shines a light on the fringe cultural pockets facilitated by the internet - without which might not take form otherwise.
As for the tragedy itself, it may be the author connecting the dots for us but it almost reads like Bartkus reacted to the emotional devastation of Sophie's cold, calculated act of assisted suicide.
One version of the story is of violence in the name of an ideological crusade. The other, a broken heart and a cry for help.
I prefer nihilism. Life is not good or bad, it just exists for no particular reason. Suffering and happiness are just signals in the nervous system, part of the information system that keeps a complex organism operating. There's no "morality" that requires that all life be destroyed, we can carry on living if we please.
what happens when an Efilist meets a Jain?
The manifest sounds like he was a victim of being terminally online. Sad.
It occurs to me that Efilists don't need to do much of anything.
Normies (us) are making parenting more untenable every year.
My parents (and their gen) parented some hours a week.
My kids required 24/7 adulting. Free-ranging was eradicated by
car culture and trespassing culture. Adult-free peer time
- where critical social and personal growth happened -
was replaced with a series adult-curated, adult-populated boxes.
Kids spend their days moving from one box to the next.
Compounding the above is the difficulty/impossibility for a
modern couple to fully support themselves on two typical wages.
Antinatalism [Efilism] is a philosophical view that deems
procreation to be unethical or unjustifiable.
Antinatalists thus argue that humans should abstain from
making children.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AntinatalismTerrorist death cult. One of many who are a threat to all life. Billionaires exploiting oil ravaging the stability of the climate, "child free" virtue signalers (albeit more passively), religious nuts who insist on narrow theocratic orthodoxy, and those who outright harm others for their crazy ideas stochastically in the style of the Unabomber.
Everyone assumed it was some ultra religious nutjob opposed to IVF, and instead it was an anti-natalist, vegan consequentialist redditor.
This guy and his girlfriend(?) were radicalized on Reddit (as per his manifesto).
When will Reddit be held accountable for encouraging violent rhetoric?
No other major social media network gets the free pass Reddit seems to get.
It's not hard to go to, say, r/Politics or AdviceAnimals and find people encouraging political violence.
I hold that these people are deeply mislead at best, not well at worst, as their argument is essentially reducto ad absurdum but taken seriously. It’s as though they’ve encountered a shard of philosophy and hold it as a universal truth.
There’s also a facet of strict benthamite utilitarianism that falls into the trap of accepting reified societal norms as being objective reality - for instance, the core idea that pain and suffering are bad.
On an individual level, I would hold that they are the whetstones that sharpen the soul - through crushing trauma we grow, and find new meaning, and experience “goods” in our existence hitherto unobserved or unappreciated for their nature.
In a societal level, they are an essential facet of empathy, and the ability to build cohesive societies.
There’s a commonality in popular philosophies in that they attempt to provide a universal framework, an imperative system of being - yet they almost inevitably lean on inherited dispositions and concepts with only selective examination of their foundations. This results in a tendency to either say that everything matters, or nothing matters. It’s hard for me to see much of a distinction between much of the large schools of philosophy and religion.
Like with so many things, the truth, if indeed there is such a thing, lies in a murky middle ground, and is in the eye of the beholder.
I suppose baudrillard, to my mind, has come the closest to explaining where we are, without attempting to systemise a way of being.
Anyway. This kind of thing has happened, happens, and will happen, as long as there are humans to have ideas, and language to promulgate them. Fatalistic, perhaps, but manuscripts don’t burn - they just metastasise.
It’s wild how when you expose enough people to utilitarianism some of them become utility monsters. We’ve seen it with effective altruists(the modern ones not Singer’s initial conception), zizians, and I guess now efilists. We really need more modern moral theories which resonate with people. They all have downsides but the speed with which utilitarianism has been reduced to absurd once exposed to the internet is impressive.