Original post: trump incorrectly claims a country that constantly launches missiles towards neighbors and had the world’s most recent nuclear bomb test is unthreatening and respectful, in part because he likes Kim Jong Un
Top level comment: wow trump has ml user rhetoric
Comment you replied to: yes, ml users hold irrational NK views in the same line as trump’s tweet
You: wHaT aBoUt [USA] SaNcTiOnS??
Nobody was talking about anything related to sanctions, let alone supporting them. You’ve been trying to drop this non sequiter all over the comment section. In your mind, every geopolitical conversation MUST be directed towards pwning the westoids; any opposition to USA hegemony absolves an actor of defects. That is what makes you a tankie.
Hold on, let me ask the 30,000 entire species we directly drive to extinction each year… 🦗
Your argument is “yet you participate in society” but at an even more absurd “yet you are a human” level. Yes… they are a human. But if you look at human civilization through a POSIWID lens, it can’t be anything more than a self-destructive, mass-extinction and biosphere-collapse machine. That is, factually, 99% of the measurable impact of human existence (even if we survive forever and miraculously don’t make earth uninhabitable).
The fact that millions or even billions of people can recognize this isn’t a magical trump card; your metacognition catch-22 doesn’t refute anything about the sound reasoning of the misanthrope world view.
And for the record: I’m not a misanthrope. I more firmly believe that the existence or extinction of any species is entirely neutral. It’s not strictly rational to shed tears over the death of any individual animal or species.
But I can also recognize and embrace my irrational bias as a human. It’s normal to mourn loss, or feel disgust at animal slaughter, or have diminished emotions for people physically remote & abstracted from my daily life, or crave creature comforts, or mistrust strangers… In contrast, subscribing to an ideology like the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement requires forced, rational domination of these impulses. Nobody actually wants to end human civilization in the same way that the average person doesn’t want to starve.
Optimizing for a universal and sustainable human existence isn’t about suppressing every flaw, it’s about focusing our time and energy on the most critical issues. I can still shout and scream about biosphere collapse because every extinct species has irreplaceable potential value. We obviously can’t live without pollinators, but it’s just as important that future generations will never be able to reconstruct the precise species that we evolved to cohabitate with.
Preserving beautiful and complex ecosystems is a necessity because we don’t entirely know what [in]tangible value were losing for our selfish anthropocentric existence, not because any species “deserves” to live.