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Comment by seszett | Hacker News Reader

> Smokers do, actually, ask in most cases.

I take it you didn't live through the era of unrestricted tobacco smoking then. Smokers absolutely do not ask whether they can smoke unless they know they really shouldn't, but hope they'll be allowed to anyway.

Aside from that, it is obviously ridiculous to compare disease (which is rarely something one gets willingly, and cannot be stopped at will) with smoking (a wilful decision, and something that can be stopped at will).

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I'm sorry that you may have encountered smokers who didn't ask your permission. But I have never encountered a parent who asked my permission before their child coughed in my face. I'm comparing the thoughtless spreading of diseases with the, relatively, under the circumstances, thoughtful manner in which most smokers exhale their poison. And, relative to the immediate toxicity of the poisons in question, there's no doubt that the parents of children should be asking permission.

How far removed from real life must you be to complain that parents aren't asking you for permission before... allowing their children to be sick? Allowing their sick children to cough?

Disease is an unavoidable fact of human life and children are a necessary piece of society, but tobacco is entirely unneeded.

I'm just saying that it's hardly more of a burden on society for someone to burn some dry leaves than for someone to create a new human or several of them, with all the burden that places on our ecosystem and our society. Having children is a wildly antisocial and narcissistic act in the modern world. It's hilarious and ironic that the people who defend it are the same ones who care whether I smoke a cigarette from time to time, or who whinge about global warming. The worst thing you can possibly do to the planet is to have a child. It outweighs every personal measure you might take against carbon emissions, tenfold, for reasons that are too obvious to explain. Yet this, and the imposition of said children on me, is somehow justifiable whereas my having a cigarette on an airplane would be unimaginable. I think the modern word for the perspective of parents who believe they have a natural right to take up more resources than their own bodies require, solely because they did something any animal can do - ie. reproduced - is "privilege".

This line of reasoning troubles me. Calling swaths of people narcissistic and antisocial isn’t productive and comes off as really hateful and bitter. IDK. Maybe hacker news isn’t a healthy place for me to be. Perhaps I need to take a break from the Internet.

I think it's important to point out that I didn't "call" any swath of people anything; I flipped the accusation of engaging in antisocial behavior that's routinely leveled at childless, hedonistic smokers on its head, and made the counter-argument that our impact is relatively small compared to people who willingly have children. That is definitely an unpopular view, and I'm proud to state it. You can totally consider it unproductive and debate it on the merits. As to the feelings my point of view engenders, 1. my comments don't really matter and you are free to ignore them; 2. you're free to discuss or debate them; 3. you don't need to take them personally, because I'm just one person with my own opinion. As unpopular as it is. You can't expect everyone to only write things you love and agree with, especially those who aren't directly responding to you or didn't know you existed until moments ago. I'm sorry if my thoughts hurt your feelings.

[edit] Taking a break from the internet is never a bad idea, though. I could probably use one myself. I could use another trip. I do wish the alternative to staying home wasn't getting on a plane with everyone else's children... only slightly kidding.

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