I took out frustrations on you and directly charged you with enabling deaths and the general ongoing state of the world.

It is good that I am strong enough and knowledgeable enough to know that your accusation was false and that I did not hold any responsibility for causing death. I appreciate you taking the time to explain and clarify to clear the air here. There is a HUGE and heavily denied pool of unprocessed anger/fear and other such emotions beneath the surface of humanity and events such as COVID bring them to the surface. We need to do this consciously or we will collectively kill each other - this is not an exaggeration.. We are only just seeing the tip of the iceberg! Road rage and even the genocides we have seen are MILD examples of what is possible unless we heal, balance and evolve.

I told you that you should be ashamed of yourself, which I believed at the time, however, looking back on that day it is I who is ashamed, for giving in to what felt good, instead of what is constructive.

There's nothing wrong with aiming for what feels good, but the question should be why you define that it feels good to try to cause someone else anguish - especially without dealing with facts. In any case, I hold nothing against you. I have been researching vaccine science for nearly 15 years and received death threats just for sharing scientific peer reviewed studies that contradict the mainstream narrative, years before COVID.. So really, nothing in text can bother me much.

First of all, VHEMT's goals and antinatalism in general are legitimate and harmless personal views to espouse.

I appreciate the idea that humanity is out of balance and needs to heal, balance and evolve. However, that is not what this group is promoting, voluntary death of parental lineage is mass suicide of the essence involved. I know there will be a massive amount of mental gymnastics to try to frame this in another way, so I won't go into huge detail here. As some of the higher consciousness life forms on this planet it is not impressive to simply say 'we are too dumb to resolve our problems, let's just give up'. Further, if people legitimately view humans as such a problem, why are they still alive? Why are they forcing themselves on the planet and animals? Isn't their every breath a sacriligious insult to other life forms?

I think anything that imprints children with the idea that their existence is not sacred and is actually basically evil, is far from harmless.

If anyone declines to invest in Hive because of one witness's personal views on having children, my stake doesn't want their money and I hope yours doesn't either.

I would be unlikely to know unless I knew them individually. However, as someone who helps fundraising efforts professionally, I can assure you that any such issue can reduce project success. This isn't my fault, it's just the reality of social differences and common psychological outlooks. It's always important for projects to have consistent optics and trying to promote Hive as a forward thinking, evolutionary step for humans online is somewhat at odds with declaring that human experiment a failure and that we shouldn't bother at all. Consistency matters at scale.

witnesses are not the "Hive team."

That may be true, but what is real and what is perceived are often misaligned. The average person is not a great researcher and doesn't have time to do deep dives into everything they look at. If we look around at who is high profile enough on Hive to stand a chance of being classed as 'Hive's Team', the top witnesses will be in the list - mainly because there isn't really a promoted team.

On a platform where we claim to value, above all, freedom of expression and a rejection of censorship (though none of us quite seem to agree what censorship is), are you celebrating self-censorship?

It's quite clear to me that some people here absolutely reject free speech, but setting that aside - no I am not celebrating censorship. I am a witness and I assure you I don't self censor. However, I can also assure you that most of the top witnesses do self censor. I know this from my conversations with them in private. So, they are just being prudent to keep their votes. This is all evidence of a low level of engagement within the voting process and a low level of information in the process too.. Big votes are cast on not much information. It only takes one post from me that triggers someone's sore nerves and they will stop voting for me. This is why many top witnesses post literally nothing imo. It's also why several 'prolific posters' on Hive tried to claim that the 'truth' movement has done nothing for Hive and tried to justify censorship based on this - yet the only truly successful projects on Hive are actually run by 'truthers' who are trying to counter the downvotes on my profile. The fact that people don't even know the intents of the big project operators on Hive is also evidence of the low tolerance for diversity of thought among significant percentages of the population. This failure to respect differing views as possibly being valuable is part of the reason why witnesses (and people in general) self censor.

I generally want to see more self-expression from our public figures, not less. Tight-lipped, double-speaking politicians are boring.

Great. To my mind, that kind of attitude would walk it's talk by stopping auto downvoting all of my posts - whether I talk about love, health or chocolate. Your actions are not aligned with your intent here.