7 ms·

depopulation agenda for all to see. with eugenics from the back door bolted on: "the fear of large populations of low-quality lives has overshadowed the field o

• theCrowing 4y ago
  I don't get it do you want to be the biggest but only biomass left on the planet just to own the libs?
  • nuc1e0n 4y ago
    That's not your decision to make one way or the other.
    • theCrowing 4y ago
      What? Answer the question in word and meaning if you answer and not your deranged interpretation of it. People are voluntary getting less children in almost every western society.
      • uwagar 4y ago
        with the noble view to save the planet?
        • theCrowing 4y ago
          I bet that's the case for more than you would expect.
          • uwagar 4y ago
            lol.
      • 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
        I'm not "all humans", I'm one. I like being here. You're asking me to decide for others if they should also be here. It's not for me to say. Also- the future isn't necessarily all humans and nothing else.
        • theCrowing 4y ago
          [flagged]
          • 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
            > do you want to be the biggest but only biomass left on the planet just to own the libs? What does this mean? You're asking about the human race right? Or are you literally asking the parent if they want to grow into the fattest sole survivor on the planet? I'm confused by what you're even asking.
            • jemmyw 4y ago
              I know what they meant but your interpretation made me chuckle
      • throwaway744678 4y ago
        Good for them. Not that much for ecological reasons, though. The point of your parent was, I believe, that it's not your place to decide for others.
        • nuc1e0n 4y ago
          exactly
        • theCrowing 4y ago
          [flagged]
          • nuc1e0n 4y ago
            Apparently, three-quarters of Earth's food supply draws on just 12 crops and five livestock species. Is that a good thing? a bad thing? Or, as I believe, not really either good or bad. That situation has been sustained for quite a while already right?
            • pessimizer 4y ago
              > three-quarters of Earth's food supply draws on just 12 crops and five livestock species. All of the biodiversity on the planet is reducing to 12 crops and five livestock species, at least by weight.
              • nuc1e0n 4y ago
                Why do we not choose to broaden the range of species that we cultivate? Are most just another species of rat or weed? Maybe more varieties of carrot are just better. Or just more carrots in general for that matter.
      • nuc1e0n 4y ago
        If it's so wonderful Western nations having fewer kids why are uneducated people from elsewhere being brought in in such numbers?
      • akira2501 4y ago
        > are voluntary getting less children It has been definitively established that this is entirely voluntary? Do you have a source you can cite?
        • uwagar 4y ago
          source is their mouth
• bfgoodrich 4y ago
  Using the "eugenics" angle to argue against people who want a sustainable world (while parroting the agenda of Elon "let's all move to Mars" Musk who believes he is such a superior being he needs to grace the world with 10+ kids) is uproarious when it comes from a camp is viciously against immigration. The US has a population density 1/15th India's. It's high time for a billion Indians to move to the US.
  • DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    REPORTER: The climate crisis. We’ve seen protests all over the globe this month. Mostly led by young people like Gretta Turnburg. Does the public outcry...does that increase the urgency for what you guys are doing here? ELON: Well, I mean I really view what we’re doing here as making life multiplanetary as opposed to escaping, and I think like 99 percent of our resources should be spent making sure the future on Earth is good. But I think at least 1% of our resources should be used to make like multiplanetary and extending consciousness out to other planets. Both for the defensives reason of preserving the light of consciousness into the future as well as the adventure, the excitement - I find it personally more motivating than the defensive argument. REPORTER: So you prefer to be an optimist rather than a pessimist? ELON: I mean I think excitement and adventure and a sense of possibility about the future are incredibly important. Otherwise, why live? ————— I’m getting to the point where I assume that comments like yours are dramatically mischaracterizing Musk. He’s so easy to criticize without ascribing hyperbolic-ly stupid arguments to him.
• thefz 4y ago
  Large population implies low quality existence, at least in a system of finite resources. Multiplication for the sake of it is almost a guarantee to suffering for some.
  • hammock 4y ago
    >Multiplication for the sake of it is almost a guarantee to suffering for some. You ought to know that what you take here as a given is Malthusian and widely disagreed with in nearly every culture across the world
    • throwaway744678 4y ago
      Malthus's theory was indeed proven to be false.
      • trgn 4y ago
        Malthus didn't account for technology. We'll see how far that stretches. Malthus reasoning is rock solid. Exponential population growth puts strain on finite resources. Malthus was a huge influence on Darwin. That premise - the tension between different growth rates of populations and resources - underlies the theory of natural selection, people on this forum will certainly get behind that. But call it Malthusian, and it's suddenly false. It's also wrong to think that Malthus only just predicted doom. He used his model to explain a great deal of sociological phenomena (e.g. infanticide in china, delayed child rearing in wealthier societies, differences in diet between east and west). It's not that Malthus was wrong. It was that he was only mostly correct. People today are nitpicking on the little bits and pieces where he was incomplete. He also wrote this at the start of the industrial revolution. He couldn't have known.
        • hammock 4y ago
          Technology is a pretty big miss. Interesting to note that a lot of ideas contemporary with Malthus were wrong. For example, it was thought that the popular use of contraception would result in people marrying younger, since men would not fear taking a wife early in their career (they could control when and how many children to have, in harmony with whatever economic resources they might have). It turns out that contraception had the opposite effect
• paganel 4y ago
  [flagged]
• anselm 4y ago
  This comment is bound to spark a lot of response - it hits sensitive issues that we 'the masses' may have some worries about. It speaks to a populist conspiracy fear - that there is a "them" that wants to get rid of "us". That conspiracy is not actually proven. Like; it an 'emotional' argument but doesn't actually propose solutions. I'd like to hear more about solutions or actual push back rather than simply push the emotion button over a conspiracy fear. True it is The Economist, which can be suspect in that it tends to reflect something of an agenda of a minority population with a lot of power. I am in fact willing to believe that there is a small group of people who would prefer there to be less people period. But it still doesn't feel unreasonable to examine our morals. I'd prefer to build coherent arguments to oppose the concepts if these are bad concepts. Not just push the emotion button a lot. If a single family has to make decisions about having more babies or not based on budget, then why can't a planet full of people decide how many people should exist period? Why is that "bad" to even think about? And why not 'scan' an unborn child for diseases and terminate in some cases? I don't think it implicitly is 'defacto bad' as the sentence implies. This second comment attempts to tie larger issues of population to more narrow fear based issues around abortion. It's creating a gordian knot. It's not a great argument. Is there a way to make an argument that isn't mashing the emotion button over and over? And that isn't trying to conflate far and near issues together into an unresolvable emotional morass? I do favor a pro-choice stance, but I want to avoid strictly falling down into a pro-choice versus pro-life stance since that is hugely loaded politically with people on the left hugely inflamed at the restriction in women's freedoms, and people on the right ostensibly outraged that every single life is not seen as sacred. As a left leaning person I do think the people on the right are not charitable, and I do think they don't actually care about lives, but rather they are using babies as emotional tools to try manipulate emotions and hold onto power. So I tend to think pro-lifers are manipulative - basically I see them as trying to manipulate me with their rhetoric. But I am willing to acknowledge that it is worth trying to think about this more; a charitable read has to include room for some pro-life arguments that human life is indeed sacred. The problem with the scanning statement however is that it leads us only to an emotional argument - and those are not solvable today. It might be nice to propose an idea or solution, not just (again) hit the emotion button. If we have a mental model of a potential child as having the best possible outcomes, having the most joyous life, contributing the most - then of course it is an utter tragedy to deprive that child of a possible life. But I think our mental model of life should be more like what we actually see in nature; a garden that is riotous and constantly and eagerly grows, and we weed and prune that garden constantly. I'd argue that we are 'helpess gardeners' - we cannot avoid gardening, we cannot avoid stepping in the garden, we can only choose where to step. The solution space I see here that bridges left and right values is to decide who the decision maker is around if a child lives or dies. I'd argue the best decision maker is the person most closely involved and most entangled with that life - basically the mother. I'd pour dollars funding and energy into the people with utereses - rather than into judges and police. Any structural imperialism that deprives the mother of agency and turns them into a baby factory feels cruel to me but also is clearly not valuing the mommas life itself. If people on the left or the right want to fund that mother, educate that mother, argue with that mother - then they should empower the uterus owner as much as they wish - pay for schooling, education, rhetoric - whatever they want to expose them to - but delegate the power of the decision to the uterus owner. People on the right then get a chance to bombard that poor uterus owner with their campaign - but so be it - at least the energy, money and attention are placed in the right spot. This is more diverse, close to the ground, grass roots and reflects more the nature of the world - that decisions should be distributed and local - more ecological. In any world where uterus owners were male this would instantly be the case - we only consider denying women agency because we come from a patriarchy. Probably in fact - if we want to solve far field issues like planetary population concerns, then education is probably the best way in general. The system as a whole can load balance births with locally available resources if it is allowed to do so I believe.