ilzolende:

ozymandias271:

only people with children have a stake in the future

no one without children has younger friends, a desire for their works to be remembered in the future, or empathy for future humans

this seems very plausible

I am a child and I have a major stake in the future, and when I am 18 I will also expect to be personally affected by the state of my country 60 years from now.

Ban all elderly (65+?) people from voting, as they won’t be around to face the long-term consequences of their decisions? This is equally (read: not very) reasonable. People have actually proposed doing stuff like “make smoking illegal for all people born in [current year] – 17 or later” or “let adults vote on whether all people graduating high school should be ‘drafted’ to do menial tasks like elder care and washing military laundry and whatnot for low pay”, because they would never be negatively impacted by those proposals.

People with children, when voting on policy that only affects young people, can be incredibly patronizing and self-interested. (“I want the government to spy on my kids for me!” “I want my kids to go to jail if they ditch class too much!” “I don’t want my kids to ever be allowed to do things I disapprove of, even when they’re adults!”)

I don’t want to live in the future people approve of for their children to live in, I want to live in the future that its residents want. Read proposals for utopias and you’ll soon see that approval uncoupled from actual desires leads to a society you wouldn’t want to live in.

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Tags:

#yes this #I mostly see this with global warming #’we must Do Something to make 2050 a good place for our children to live!’ #dude I don’t give a fuck about my nonexistent children #I want to make 2050 a good place for my *future selves* to live #you don’t *need* and in fact shouldn’t *try* to rely on selflessness to get me to care about the future #self-interest will get the job done nicely #I’m going to tag this #death tw #under my policy of ‘tag death warnings on things that would have triggered my seven-year-old self’