Okay, I’m gonna bite the bullet and say it. This is disheartening. I’m not one to clutch pearls, but come on. Would you say this about anyone else? Dogs? Cats? Anything at all? Do you understand how fucked up it is? I just don’t get it. It was the same in Reddit, and it’s fucking same in here. Why do you hate children? You don’t wanna have them, that’s fine. Why would you say these things?
Maybe you’re joking. Even after assuming that you are, this is in poor taste and a fucked up thing to say.
It’s usually the air pressure causing the kid some pain from mild barotrauma / airplane ear. They can’t help it. No amount of good or bad parenting changes the pressure differential in the inner ear.
Do shitty parents and upset children exist? Absolutely.
Yet everyone seems to ignore that maybe, just maybe, that child is being “shitty” despite having good parents.
Maybe the kid has a medical issue causing pain and discomfort and there’s not a damn thing the parent can do except get on that flight to see a specialist.
Maybe she’s fleeing domestic violence and needs to get to family to safe.
Maybe the mother has postpartum depression and unfortunately cannot properly care for her child so she’s seeking help elsewhere.
Fuck maybe the kid has an undiagnosed brain tumour that’s going to kill them. I know people that happened to.
If you go around assuming everyone else who inconveniences you in the slightest is a shit person, you will be a shit person.
So get over yourself. You might have a slightly less comfortable flight while that poor parent might be going through the worst time in their life.
See, here’s the neat thing about things. You get to choose what you do and don’t care about. Empathy should not go so far as to cost. Your baby is not my problem and it’s your responsibility to keep it that way. I have my own, I didn’t take them to public places till they were able to have some self control. Is that always possible? No, but it’s really obvious if you are the type of person who doesn’t even try.
Part of using public transport is that you need to share it with the public, which is why I broadly detest it and cannot comprehend the fuck cars weirdos.
That said when I do use public transport I fully expect noisy children, insufferable karens and the occasional nut job.
Your concept of empathy seems to be severely lacking.
noisy children, insufferable karens and the occasional nut job
but that doesn’t mean I have much empathy for them.
Being loud in public imposes a cost on the people around you. In our society parents with babies are generally allowed to impose such a cost, but so are raving lunatics…
Part of using public transport is that you need to share it with the public, which is why I broadly detest it and cannot comprehend the fuck cars weirdos.
Couldn’t agree more. The anti car movement among young millennials and Gen Z is weird as hell to me. I’ve lived in a large city and taken well designed public transit for years. Compared to living in a small city and driving, it’s awful - so I left. There’s a literal loss of freedom and autonomy that comes with it, and I can’t fathom why the younger crowd wants to live in crowded apartments and post angry screeds to r/fuckcars. I like walking and hiking and biking too! I have no desire to do it in a city, so I have to drive somewhere uncrowded to do it. If public transit served those places, they would be crowded.
If you live in NA, you haven’t lived in a walkable city designed for people over cars. You can find clearer explanations of the rationale from Strong Towns or NotJustBikes.
Your concerns are not unfounded, but they would benefit from some context.
I’m reluctant to litigate something unpopular on the internet for the purpose of collecting downvotes, and I think there’s low probability we’ll agree on the issue, but I’ll explain my rationale:
I lived in NYC. NYC is not exactly designed for walking or bikes, but there’s a strong case to be made that it has become a city in which cars are much less feasible than transit, walking, or biking. The sidewalks are all double-wide. If you order delivery, the delivery guy is on a bike. Nobody I knew owned a car, and none of us would have been able to afford the parking if we had. We walked to get groceries. It has subways, busses, and ferries that run very frequently. The subways run 24/7/365. In terms of density, NYC should be a best-case scenario for public transit.
The fact remains that if you wanted to LEAVE the city and go somewhere green with the ability to get away from people, it was 3x as long by public transit than it would have been by car. Minimum. And those places are far away. It’s a place designed to keep you there. And that’s just my point: I don’t want to feel like a sardine in a city packed with people, I want to get out into nature where I can be the only person for miles around.
Amsterdam is the city I see cited most often as being the model for a /c/fuckcars-approved world, but my basic thesis is that living in a place with 13,670 people per square mile, greatly diminished personal space (densified housing), and greatly diminished personal autonomy (the ability to leave), is approximately my definition of urban hell.
I submit that the population of the Northeast Megalopolis (containing NYC, DC, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore) is the stuff of dystopian hellscapes - FIFTY MILLION PEOPLE - and with an average population density of only 6.4% the density of the Netherlands (in other words, the same as Europe). It’s really hard there to find land in its natural state, which isn’t owned by someone - the best you can do is city parks or the equivalent. And while that’s a matter of personal preference, I see a feverish, unrelenting push by the younger generations, who didn’t grow up with cars-as-personal-freedom like the Boomers/GenX/Xennials did. In the US, young Millennials, gen Z, and beyond have decided that ultradense cities are great and cars are evil. I understand how they got to that conclusion, but to me it just looks like Eco-Austerity derived from urbanization, human overpopulation, and the lack of liberating personal-vehicular-experiences as a late teen and early adult.
Edit: When I was in high school, you could buy a well-used economy car that got 35mpg for $500-1k. Gas was a buck a gallon. Traveling 100+ miles to another state to explore rural areas with <1 person per SQ mile, for $3 in gas, all in a couple of hours was empowering. Being stuck in a manmade urban jungle is confining and I think people who lacked the opportunities I had will never understand.
Hell, I believe so much in personal vehicles and the autonomy they enable, I obtained a pilot’s license – something that is overwhelmingly difficult and expensive to do in overcrowded Europe, but for the time being still remains something you can achieve as a middle-class American in some places. I can go places far away without regard for transit schedules, routes, or finding hordes of people there when I arrive. It’s a very non-European experience, and I prefer it to being just another person in an ocean of continuous human habitation.
Single-family homes vs densified housing is an adjacent topic, and I don’t want to get too sidetracked, but suffice it to say that it was the yardstick of middle-class wealth in postwar America. To have your very own land and space, that was private, green, and notionally yours forever. And now thanks to perpetually ballooning city populations and demand for land in historically-occupied places forever outstripping supply, the younger generations are idolizing what amounts to apartment living. Personally, I couldn’t get away from apartments fast enough once my income allowed it. I still don’t know whether I’ll ever own a house, but if I never share a wall or floor with someone again, it will be too soon. I’m frustrated by this newfound need to do away with the tools of our personal independence, and at some level, I fundamentally can’t understand it. It frustrates me almost daily to run into anti-car, pro-urban zealots online, and I think they’re misguided. They’re all either mega extroverts, or don’t have a clue what they’re missing through lack of personal experience.
You almost wonder if these opinions are a product of very clever propaganda. “You will own nothing and you will be happy”. No personal transportation, no public land, and rent an apartment forever to enrich corporate landlords. Stuck in the city, owning nothing of substance, with limited personal freedom because there are just too many people. Just more consumers for capitalism.
Of course these things do exist but most of the time(at least in my experience) the problems are shitty parents.
For example I had 2 kids crawling under my seat for the whole flight(takeoff and landing included) and the parents just watched something on the phone.
Yet everyone seems to ignore that maybe, just maybe, that child is being “shitty” despite having good parents.
If you’re bringing an infant onto a plane, you’re a shitty parent.
Maybe she’s fleeing domestic violence and needs to get to family to safe.
You don’t need a plane for this
Maybe the kid has a medical issue causing pain and discomfort and there’s not a damn thing the parent can do except get on that flight to see a specialist.
You don’t need a plane for this
Maybe the mother has postpartum depression and unfortunately cannot properly care for her child so she’s seeking help elsewhere.
You don’t need a plane for this
I think you can figure out the pattern for the rest of your points.
As a parent of two boys, i feel that much of the annoyance of no-children-having people is due to parents not putting boundaries for children in place.
Children scream because of attention. It means they are not getting it.
Start walking around with the kid to calm it down. Its your job as a parent. You cannot stay seated and act like “what are you gonna do? They are children ! They scream!”
No. You are a bad parent for letting them just scream.
Having said that, babies sometimes just scream without reason. Perhaps, and I mean this, if you have a baby that is prone to doing this, do not travel in confined spaces, or dine at restaurants until that phase of screaming is over.
You can train dogs and cats to be quiet and sit still. Not all of them will be happy doing it for a long plane ride, but you can do it. Babies on the other hand? Babies don’t give a fuck.
Hungry?
Scream.
Tired?
Scream.
Happy?
Scream.
Mad?
Scream
You can do everything right and the baby will still scream.
See, I have this speculation that early humans were fucking dumb, had no object permanence, couldn’t keep track of their kids, and generally pretended they didn’t exist unless they were being annoying. So their babies had to fucking scream as loud as a firetruck for their parents to not lose them.
That’s the other thing too. The sound of a crying baby will drive anyone who doesn’t have antisocial personality disorder or has been driven deaf by the wonders of childcare completely insane. Why? Because while the sheer volume of a baby’s scream might not be as loud as a barking dog on an objective decibel scale, but when it comes to perceptual decibel levels, babies are loud. Our hearing sensitivity varies based on pitch. The higher the pitch, the more sensitive our ears are. On top of that, our brains are hardwired to have a reaction to a screaming baby, which can manifest itself as irritation, annoyance, frustration, and other negative emotions, because our primitive monkey brains are screeching, “WHY WON’T YOU TAKE CARE OF BABY!?” but we can’t do anything because it’s not our baby.
That’s why people like to make jokes about dead babies, infant abuse, etc. Because babies are annoying as hell and literally everything they do is designed to make sure we know they’re there at all times.
Edit: AND ONE MORE THING, have you ever wondered how a parent can love their baby when it’s quiet but hate it when it’s awake? Yeah, that’s almost certainly a result of primitive humans trying to take advantage of the fact that the annoying poop demon was finally quiet and wasn’t ear-fucking their monkey brain into guilt-tripping them anymore, so that they could ditch their babies when they were sleeping. So you can probably thank the negligent, sociopathic protohumans for babies being annoying as shit.
I love this theory that early (and current) humans were so incompetently stupid that we evolved to fucking scream all the time just so they don’t walk away and forget us.
Considering how many kids get left in locked cars in the summer, as well as no other species of animal has annoying ass babies I have to canonize this as the Truth.
Consider this as well: if you’re a primitive human and you have to take your baby somewhere, you’re going to be praying to whatever deity(s) you believe are watching over you that your baby understands the severity of the situation and doesn’t start screaming in the middle of the jungle. 'cause if it does, every predator in a 5 mile radius is going to hear your baby screaming and dinner bells will start going off in their heads. Our only major survival traits are our near-infinite stamina (if properly trained) and ability to magically fuse or deform useless objects into something useful. Additionally, the usefulness of both of those traits diminishes with the size of the group as a single human with a spear is far less likely to survive a tiger attack than two humans with spears. To put it another way, your baby will actively alert predators that you’re burdened with its existence and that you could be free food so that you get removed from the gene pool if you’re stupid or unlucky enough to travel alone.
Would you say this about anyone else? Dogs? Cats? Anything at all?
What an odd comparison, given that pets are crated and put in (a warm/pressurized part of) the cargo bay. Is that better then hiding under a seat or the overhead bin? It seems about the same to me.
No i wouldn’t think this about dogs and cats etc. As those are not annoying 24/7. Of course there are dogs and cats that are but the majority is well behaved… unlike Babies
Okay, I’m gonna bite the bullet and say it. This is disheartening. I’m not one to clutch pearls, but come on. Would you say this about anyone else? Dogs? Cats? Anything at all? Do you understand how fucked up it is? I just don’t get it. It was the same in Reddit, and it’s fucking same in here. Why do you hate children? You don’t wanna have them, that’s fine. Why would you say these things?
Maybe you’re joking. Even after assuming that you are, this is in poor taste and a fucked up thing to say.
Gee, you think?
Finish that line, buddy.
I’m not your buddy, pal, and I don’t appreciate the accusation.
I’m not your pal, guy
Im not your guy, amigo
Yeah, I agree with you on that one.
U don’t hate children but what i hate is that one child with shitty parents will ruin the entire flight for everyone else.
It’s usually the air pressure causing the kid some pain from mild barotrauma / airplane ear. They can’t help it. No amount of good or bad parenting changes the pressure differential in the inner ear.
Do shitty parents and upset children exist? Absolutely.
Yet everyone seems to ignore that maybe, just maybe, that child is being “shitty” despite having good parents.
Maybe the kid has a medical issue causing pain and discomfort and there’s not a damn thing the parent can do except get on that flight to see a specialist.
Maybe she’s fleeing domestic violence and needs to get to family to safe.
Maybe the mother has postpartum depression and unfortunately cannot properly care for her child so she’s seeking help elsewhere.
Fuck maybe the kid has an undiagnosed brain tumour that’s going to kill them. I know people that happened to.
If you go around assuming everyone else who inconveniences you in the slightest is a shit person, you will be a shit person.
So get over yourself. You might have a slightly less comfortable flight while that poor parent might be going through the worst time in their life.
See, here’s the neat thing about things. You get to choose what you do and don’t care about. Empathy should not go so far as to cost. Your baby is not my problem and it’s your responsibility to keep it that way. I have my own, I didn’t take them to public places till they were able to have some self control. Is that always possible? No, but it’s really obvious if you are the type of person who doesn’t even try.
Part of using public transport is that you need to share it with the public, which is why I broadly detest it and cannot comprehend the fuck cars weirdos.
That said when I do use public transport I fully expect noisy children, insufferable karens and the occasional nut job.
Your concept of empathy seems to be severely lacking.
I expect
but that doesn’t mean I have much empathy for them.
Being loud in public imposes a cost on the people around you. In our society parents with babies are generally allowed to impose such a cost, but so are raving lunatics…
Couldn’t agree more. The anti car movement among young millennials and Gen Z is weird as hell to me. I’ve lived in a large city and taken well designed public transit for years. Compared to living in a small city and driving, it’s awful - so I left. There’s a literal loss of freedom and autonomy that comes with it, and I can’t fathom why the younger crowd wants to live in crowded apartments and post angry screeds to r/fuckcars. I like walking and hiking and biking too! I have no desire to do it in a city, so I have to drive somewhere uncrowded to do it. If public transit served those places, they would be crowded.
If you live in NA, you haven’t lived in a walkable city designed for people over cars. You can find clearer explanations of the rationale from Strong Towns or NotJustBikes.
Your concerns are not unfounded, but they would benefit from some context.
I’m reluctant to litigate something unpopular on the internet for the purpose of collecting downvotes, and I think there’s low probability we’ll agree on the issue, but I’ll explain my rationale:
I lived in NYC. NYC is not exactly designed for walking or bikes, but there’s a strong case to be made that it has become a city in which cars are much less feasible than transit, walking, or biking. The sidewalks are all double-wide. If you order delivery, the delivery guy is on a bike. Nobody I knew owned a car, and none of us would have been able to afford the parking if we had. We walked to get groceries. It has subways, busses, and ferries that run very frequently. The subways run 24/7/365. In terms of density, NYC should be a best-case scenario for public transit.
The fact remains that if you wanted to LEAVE the city and go somewhere green with the ability to get away from people, it was 3x as long by public transit than it would have been by car. Minimum. And those places are far away. It’s a place designed to keep you there. And that’s just my point: I don’t want to feel like a sardine in a city packed with people, I want to get out into nature where I can be the only person for miles around.
This is probably impossible in the Netherlands, which is 92% urban and has an average population density of 1/2 NYC across the entire country. By comparison, the US is 0.6% as densely populated as the Netherlands.
Amsterdam is the city I see cited most often as being the model for a /c/fuckcars-approved world, but my basic thesis is that living in a place with 13,670 people per square mile, greatly diminished personal space (densified housing), and greatly diminished personal autonomy (the ability to leave), is approximately my definition of urban hell.
I submit that the population of the Northeast Megalopolis (containing NYC, DC, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore) is the stuff of dystopian hellscapes - FIFTY MILLION PEOPLE - and with an average population density of only 6.4% the density of the Netherlands (in other words, the same as Europe). It’s really hard there to find land in its natural state, which isn’t owned by someone - the best you can do is city parks or the equivalent. And while that’s a matter of personal preference, I see a feverish, unrelenting push by the younger generations, who didn’t grow up with cars-as-personal-freedom like the Boomers/GenX/Xennials did. In the US, young Millennials, gen Z, and beyond have decided that ultradense cities are great and cars are evil. I understand how they got to that conclusion, but to me it just looks like Eco-Austerity derived from urbanization, human overpopulation, and the lack of liberating personal-vehicular-experiences as a late teen and early adult.
Edit: When I was in high school, you could buy a well-used economy car that got 35mpg for $500-1k. Gas was a buck a gallon. Traveling 100+ miles to another state to explore rural areas with <1 person per SQ mile, for $3 in gas, all in a couple of hours was empowering. Being stuck in a manmade urban jungle is confining and I think people who lacked the opportunities I had will never understand.
Hell, I believe so much in personal vehicles and the autonomy they enable, I obtained a pilot’s license – something that is overwhelmingly difficult and expensive to do in overcrowded Europe, but for the time being still remains something you can achieve as a middle-class American in some places. I can go places far away without regard for transit schedules, routes, or finding hordes of people there when I arrive. It’s a very non-European experience, and I prefer it to being just another person in an ocean of continuous human habitation.
Single-family homes vs densified housing is an adjacent topic, and I don’t want to get too sidetracked, but suffice it to say that it was the yardstick of middle-class wealth in postwar America. To have your very own land and space, that was private, green, and notionally yours forever. And now thanks to perpetually ballooning city populations and demand for land in historically-occupied places forever outstripping supply, the younger generations are idolizing what amounts to apartment living. Personally, I couldn’t get away from apartments fast enough once my income allowed it. I still don’t know whether I’ll ever own a house, but if I never share a wall or floor with someone again, it will be too soon. I’m frustrated by this newfound need to do away with the tools of our personal independence, and at some level, I fundamentally can’t understand it. It frustrates me almost daily to run into anti-car, pro-urban zealots online, and I think they’re misguided. They’re all either mega extroverts, or don’t have a clue what they’re missing through lack of personal experience.
You almost wonder if these opinions are a product of very clever propaganda. “You will own nothing and you will be happy”. No personal transportation, no public land, and rent an apartment forever to enrich corporate landlords. Stuck in the city, owning nothing of substance, with limited personal freedom because there are just too many people. Just more consumers for capitalism.
Of course these things do exist but most of the time(at least in my experience) the problems are shitty parents.
For example I had 2 kids crawling under my seat for the whole flight(takeoff and landing included) and the parents just watched something on the phone.
If you’re bringing an infant onto a plane, you’re a shitty parent.
You don’t need a plane for this
You don’t need a plane for this
You don’t need a plane for this
I think you can figure out the pattern for the rest of your points.
As a parent of two boys, i feel that much of the annoyance of no-children-having people is due to parents not putting boundaries for children in place.
Children scream because of attention. It means they are not getting it.
Start walking around with the kid to calm it down. Its your job as a parent. You cannot stay seated and act like “what are you gonna do? They are children ! They scream!”
No. You are a bad parent for letting them just scream.
Having said that, babies sometimes just scream without reason. Perhaps, and I mean this, if you have a baby that is prone to doing this, do not travel in confined spaces, or dine at restaurants until that phase of screaming is over.
You can train dogs and cats to be quiet and sit still. Not all of them will be happy doing it for a long plane ride, but you can do it. Babies on the other hand? Babies don’t give a fuck.
Hungry?
Scream.
Tired?
Scream.
Happy?
Scream.
Mad?
Scream
You can do everything right and the baby will still scream.
See, I have this speculation that early humans were fucking dumb, had no object permanence, couldn’t keep track of their kids, and generally pretended they didn’t exist unless they were being annoying. So their babies had to fucking scream as loud as a firetruck for their parents to not lose them.
That’s the other thing too. The sound of a crying baby will drive anyone who doesn’t have antisocial personality disorder or has been driven deaf by the wonders of childcare completely insane. Why? Because while the sheer volume of a baby’s scream might not be as loud as a barking dog on an objective decibel scale, but when it comes to perceptual decibel levels, babies are loud. Our hearing sensitivity varies based on pitch. The higher the pitch, the more sensitive our ears are. On top of that, our brains are hardwired to have a reaction to a screaming baby, which can manifest itself as irritation, annoyance, frustration, and other negative emotions, because our primitive monkey brains are screeching, “WHY WON’T YOU TAKE CARE OF BABY!?” but we can’t do anything because it’s not our baby.
That’s why people like to make jokes about dead babies, infant abuse, etc. Because babies are annoying as hell and literally everything they do is designed to make sure we know they’re there at all times.
Edit: AND ONE MORE THING, have you ever wondered how a parent can love their baby when it’s quiet but hate it when it’s awake? Yeah, that’s almost certainly a result of primitive humans trying to take advantage of the fact that the annoying poop demon was finally quiet and wasn’t ear-fucking their monkey brain into guilt-tripping them anymore, so that they could ditch their babies when they were sleeping. So you can probably thank the negligent, sociopathic protohumans for babies being annoying as shit.
I love this theory that early (and current) humans were so incompetently stupid that we evolved to fucking scream all the time just so they don’t walk away and forget us.
Considering how many kids get left in locked cars in the summer, as well as no other species of animal has annoying ass babies I have to canonize this as the Truth.
Consider this as well: if you’re a primitive human and you have to take your baby somewhere, you’re going to be praying to whatever deity(s) you believe are watching over you that your baby understands the severity of the situation and doesn’t start screaming in the middle of the jungle. 'cause if it does, every predator in a 5 mile radius is going to hear your baby screaming and dinner bells will start going off in their heads. Our only major survival traits are our near-infinite stamina (if properly trained) and ability to magically fuse or deform useless objects into something useful. Additionally, the usefulness of both of those traits diminishes with the size of the group as a single human with a spear is far less likely to survive a tiger attack than two humans with spears. To put it another way, your baby will actively alert predators that you’re burdened with its existence and that you could be free food so that you get removed from the gene pool if you’re stupid or unlucky enough to travel alone.
Babies evolved to cry all the time because their parents had this habit of making the species that just looked at the baby in a weird way go extinct.
What an odd comparison, given that pets are crated and put in (a warm/pressurized part of) the cargo bay. Is that better then hiding under a seat or the overhead bin? It seems about the same to me.
No i wouldn’t think this about dogs and cats etc. As those are not annoying 24/7. Of course there are dogs and cats that are but the majority is well behaved… unlike Babies
Good. Making Anthony Jeselnik proud.