Ligotti on why pessimists don't kill themselves

do you really

>midwit thread
His logic is completely sound. He's only claimed it's better to not be born, not that suicide is preferable to living. Those are not the same. So to respond with "just kill your self lol" is to be retarded as he never claimed to prefer suicide to his current predicament.

How is never having been born different from the experience of death? If life's sufferings outweigh life's benefits, why continue living?

So like literally every incel?

Yeah, I'm a big Ligotti fan but I don't give a shit about his world view. I just like reading his fiction.

>How is never having been born different from the experience of death?
Because if you were never born in the first place then you would never experience death? Or anything else?

After dying you don't experience anything else as well. Seems to me like a person ends up in the same place you started.

Is this guy actually taken seriously? This is the most hilarious piece of shit drivel I’ve read this week. Please don’t tell me he has a sizable following or influence in any circles.

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i think it is because they expect the world to fuck them. while optimists live like nothing bad can ever happen then there comes a day where their ideals are challenged. they can decide tht this is a momentary thing but each issue stacks on top of one another like shit that hasnt been flushed. one day the shit will touch their ass and they an hero

The meme seems to be duration. Suiciders conflate duration of life with the irrepairable damage of being born.

Pre-birth may be different from post-life.

The amount of suffering required to kill yourself may be greater than the sum of suffering of living out your whole life.
>crackheads are in such a state that makes it easy
Not my problem.

Materialist assumption.

Shitty non-argument. If there's enough suffering/badness to justify choosing not to be born, there's enough suffering/badness to justify choosing not to continue living. The point of time of "being born" is not materially different than the point of time "the present" in terms of avoiding future suffering. Pessimists who don't kill themselves ARE hypocrites, and also stupid because they assign negative value to suffering but fail to assign positive value to joy/pleasure. Even autistic utilitarians manage that much.

I don't know anything about Ligotti but this screenshot, but based on everything I know about him he's a pathetic brainlet.

>to justify choosing not to be born
and how does one choose that exactly

>If there's enough suffering/badness to justify choosing not to be born, there's enough suffering/badness to justify choosing not to continue living.
Killing yourself requires action, not simply a choice.
>avoiding future suffering
Completely beside the point. A distraction that catches brainlets.
>hypocrite
A compliment, not insult.
>he is pathetic
Female-derived status insult

he pretty much wrote about people like you.
for example, life is shit people shouldn't be born. so you say kill yourself.
but its not about killing yourself its about acknowledging that it is shit

>Implying Ligotti is not writing from a materialist position himself

It seems like simple analytical work to prove Ligotti's argument. I mean, promortalism simply does not equal antinatalism.

A pessimist is free to renounce life without going through the arduous step of self-termination, as if it were so simple.

So i get the part about why he doesn’t want to have been born, but where is the part explaining why he continues to live?

Yes. Only 70 years left I am going to enjoy them. That's all there is user, beauty and joy. Ugliness and suffering are just aspects of the same.

Very simply because his opinion on existence buys him no special privilege towards the act of suicide. Its really not hard.

>claim it is better not to exist than to exist
>have the option to stop existing at any time
>chose to exist anyway

Yeah, nah. He's full of shit.

This Ligotti dude writes like a 16 year old dude on /pol/
Is he an established author or exactly that?

It's shit enough for other people not to be born. Oh but it's different for Ligotti, it would require ACTION not to continue living (as if living doesn't require constant action). Boohoo, it's about acknowledging, not taking action... You're an idiot.

Noose, bullet, long fall sudden stop, the options are truly endless.

>Killing yourself requires action, not simply a choice.
Staying alive requires action, not simply a choice. You've presented a distinction without any significance. You're also an idiot.

>A pessimist is free to renounce life without going through the arduous step of self-termination, as if it were so simple.
No, he's not free. He's encouraging others to choose not procreating which could be a strategy to ensure more resources for himself. That he would encourage others not to live, while continuing to live himself, suggests he's arguing in bad faith in order to get an advantage over others. Specifically, advantage over anyone foolish enough to take the words of an obvious hypocrite seriously.

I'm not asking them to kill themselves, I'm telling them to.

why would anyone take action when it doesn't matter why waste my energy on offing myself . im not agreeing or disagreeing. i dont know about ligotti. but it sounds like he was somewhat of a nihilist

Lingotti pussies out here, just as much every other anti-natalist.

>why would anyone take action when it doesn't matter why waste my energy on offing myself
Ligotti's pessimists literally do argue that it matters. They say non-existence is better. Bawww but muh energy, why k-k-kill myself, I don't need to... You're either an idiot or a coward, your choice.

>Fear of death?
Fear of what? Pain? Non-existence? Conscience annihilation?
If it's better to not have been born then why the botter to return to the void?

are you reading or are you just arguing to be correct?

You do understand to refute Ligotti you would have to prove pre-birth = post-death, right?

see I don't make the assumption that death is equal to birth so I'm perfectly justified in my beliefs. I will not substantiate an existence where there wasn't one, nor will I end one where there is.

>Staying alive requires action
No it doesn't. I can stay alive in my bed all day. When I'm hungry I am driven to eat. Not eating requires effort. I love eating.
>Noose, bullet, long fall sudden stop, the options are truly endless.
Vulgar depictions of the suffering of choosing to die. Most of the suffering is found not in the act.
>He's encouraging others to choose not procreating which could be a strategy to ensure more resources for himself.
True.

Does Ligotti believe in an afterlife?

I doubt it. I know he probably realizes beginning and ending a life are two separate states not deserving of one overarching standard, though.

Are YOU reading? You made a critical error in understanding the text being discussed. I'm ANGRY. That's different from motivated reasoning, but I seriously doubt you're intelligent enough to understand what I'm talking about.

Not true at all, feel free to bust out the formal logic to prove your point but you can't, because you're wrong.

An anti-natalist ideology, if universally adopted, would end the existence of the species, thus violating your stated position. It is precisely this internal inconsistency in the pessimist position that suggests hypocrisy designed to gain advantage over others.

I see you there. Your post is too imbecilic to merit a response, but I do see you there.

>my philosophy is about being a pussy, but like, existentially.

> I know he probably realizes beginning and ending a life are two separate states not deserving of one overarching standard, though
How did he reach that conclusion? In what ways can pre-birth differ from post-life if there is no afterlife?

No you don’t understand - if he thinks all life is meaningless suffering, he should kill himself so that he doesn’t subtract resources from those of us who don’t live that way.

>bust out the formal logic
You think you can solve this with formal logic? The point is its an existential question that rests on god-knows-what sorts of physical and metaphysical possibilities.

I'm saying no one can answer it. There are unknowable* unknowns and pre-birth/post-death are two examples.
*speaking from a living frame of reference

>In what ways can pre-birth differ from post-life if there is no afterlife?
Prove there's no afterlife and that's an argument worth having.

youre taking things too seriously. as i have said i dont know much about ligotti. and i actually just learned what an anti natalist was. so excuse my ignorance. you dont have to be a dick.

You made a point about refutation that is incorrect, which you would see if you understood formal logic at even an Aristotelian level. Go back to philosophy 101 and this time actually pay attention to the lectures on formal logic.

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Don't worry about me, you say you can prove the nature of those states with formal logic? I really want to see this.

No I don’t. That’s the equivalence Ligotti wants his interlocutor to rest on, because it’s patently absurd. The reality is that a human community is better off without such miserable wretches who view the continuation of their mortal existence - a project in which we all, whether we recognize this fact or not, are mutually supporting one another - as a violence done upon them. If they really think that way they are a danger to myself and the health of my community. Their ideology might be convincing to the softer minded of my tribe, and I might find myself surrounded by demoralized pessimists lacking the will to do anything but write books about their misery. So, it is a defensive mechanism for me to demand suicide of the pessimist. Besides the fact that it follows naturally from the substance of his self-reported experience, which is another point for my case which he has failed to repudiate in OP’s excerpt, as we’ve all pointed out.

So all that bullshit just to argue the pessimist should suicide because you want him to? This puts Ligotti on more solid footing than I thought he had.

I forgive you, but I will not stop being a dick. There are snakes in this thread. Anti-natalists spread this ideology of misery and convince good people not to have children, making the lives of good people worse, robbing their potential children of existence, and ensuring for themselves more resources and ultimately political control. There are hundreds of thousands of women who were convinced that having children was a bad thing during their fertile years, and only as menopause approached did they change their minds and discover that it was too late to have children. I know one such woman personally and it's devastating, and it hurts all the more because I tried to convince her back when she still had a chance, but she chose not to listen to me and instead to listen to anti-natalists.

Existence is NOT only suffering. That's a load of horseshit, and anyone who tries to convince other people of that deserves to be beaten.

>t. arguing in good faith

>you want him to
Thick headed aren’t you? My logic elapses yours because it’s grounded in human collective life, not the abstract formal accountancy of sufferings and pleasures.
It’s not only that I “want” him to. I demand he do it, as a defense to my community and for consistency with his own beliefs.

Hold on, what's the ethnicity of this liggoti character?

>Thick headed aren’t you?
I suppose so. Be careful or you might display some kind of personal agenda.

This argument reminds me of Hegel’s apt response to the phrenologists, that if they think the Spirit is reducible to a bone we should bash their skulls in to complete the experiment and see what happens to spirit when it’s all busted up.

I can't prove there is no afterlife. If we assume there is an afterlife, then there are 2 options. (1) our soul, or ego, or what have you leaves the material realm but persists in some space not currently understood by people, which means pre-birth is necessarily different from post-death or (2) reincarnation, where pre-birth=post-death anyhow. If we assumed the other option, that there is no afterlife, how can we reach the conclusion that pre-birth differs from post-death?

He is Italian and polish. So chances are high he has jew in him.

Pessimists are among the most intellectually uninteresting sourpusses ever. Been this way for hundreds of years. I guess those who are interesting don't have the same image and identity, and aren't understood as pessimists. Pessimism is then just dribbling weak rationalisations for their personal feelings.

'Better to never have been born' is perfectly correct if you agree with the premises and don't bother to examine for complexity, just as Ligotti is perfectly correct here in line with it (although contrary to what the vast majority of his fellows feel). The problem is, it is obvious that their antinatalism and pessimism did not come about through finding a little logic puzzle thoroughly convincing. If it were just so hard-hitting and logical, they wouldn't neglect fleshing it out and encountering problems. It is also obvious here Ligotti is using the infantile ad hoc logic puzzle to cop out.

>how can we reach the conclusion that pre-birth differs from post-death?
We of course cannot. This bolsters the argument that birth and death, however treated, should probably not be evaluated on equal footing.

This allows things like lamenting birth while delaying death.

How is "I don't think people should have babies and I don't want to kill myself" a logic puzzle?

I essentially did so at . Ligotti's argument in the OP screenshot isn't about the superiority of non-existence over existence per se, it's about the hypocrisy of people who espouse that belief yet do not kill themselves (he is arguing that such people are not hypocrites, and more generally that one does not follow from the other). He is wrong, of course, because the argument that non-existence is superior rests on the potential for future suffering, which is independent of the point of time of the subject (ie, pre-birth or the present). For either point of time, there's a potential for future suffering, and IF the conclusion is valid (that non-existence is superior to existence), then the subject in the present MUST kill himself to avoid future suffering, or he is acting illogically and choosing to suffer in the future. Another alternative is that the pessimist who chooses to live doesn't really believe what he espouses to others, and is acting in bad faith to get other people to choose not to have children so that he or his own children can have access to more resources that would otherwise go to the children of other people.

It's one of the most despicable things a person can do. For that reason, any pessimist who refuses suicide should be beaten for their attempt to deprive others in such an underhanded method.

The resource strategy argument was funny at first, but now its coming across a little paranoid.

dying hurts