do we need so many people ?

SocialistProphet-

could we do this? Well, im glad you asked. Now as insensitive as this sounds, i think we should just dropped a whole bunch of neutron bombs on the entire continent of Africa. So that way, all the people are vaporized and the forests are left standing. We can leave the hut-living dudes there. They're pretty cool.

This makes me sick to my stomach!!!!! How can you do that without taking the animals out!!! Fine if you want to have the death of thousands of zebras on your conscience thats your choice. Africa has some really awesome animals, i wish i could say the same about the people but they straight up suck ass. Good idea with the bombs, we can take the animals away and tell the african people we are "renevating" to make the country look more "hip" Then caboom, problem solved.

But Africa does supply some really important items- AIDS, ummm, Aids, lets see.......piercings............and the best of all..... those really cool bead necklaces!!!!!!
 
All this has really nothing to do with racism, although one could be forgiven for thinking so had they only read the posts and not known what was behind them..... being the old-fashioned, doddering grumble-arse that I am, I could've *EASILY* spat the dummy over quite a few things said here, but I can see the necessity to retain the ability *to be able to laugh* when faced with serious matters of this magnitude.... (lest one becomes so incensed that they can no longer contribute positively).....

I don't mind admitting though, that there is a subject that REALLY gets up my nose regardless of the way I look at it - yep, cruelty to animals - if there ever was an 'unforgivable' sin, I think this might be it - humans deserve everything they get because they do it to each other but the animals are innocent..... put me within a hundred yards of a duckshooter or the type of scum that puts kittens in microwaves and I absolutely guarantee they won't be doing it again!

Everything seemed to be fine until *we* got here.....
 
I agree with you completely hilarion that cruelty to animals is by far the single most heinous crime anyone can commit and their isn't a punishment on this earth that suits them, but horrible torture comes close.

Its like I'm a younger more attractive version of you;)
 
Prosperity: the cure for overpopulation

This question pops up about once a week and the same arguments rage all over again. Am I the only person on this whole forum who is familiar with the well-established principle that the absolute best cure for overpopulation is prosperity?

Why do you think that the birth rate in North America and Europe has dropped below replacement level? The only thing that keeps our population growing -- and incidentally, keeps our government's Social Security Ponzi Scheme from imploding -- is immigration!

The same thing is true everywhere. In Third World countries where the per capita GDP has risen from fifty bucks a year to several hundred, the average family size has dropped from twelve to eight. When they start getting into the software business and there's more wealth to trickle down, it drops even further.

The alarmists have already grudgingly revised their predictions. Instead of the world population hitting twelve billion in about sixty years, and then just keep on growing, now they say it's going to peak at ten billion in a hundred years and then start dropping.

You can thank the post-industrial economy for all this. Nations can build an information infrastructure and join the world online community without having to first spend fifty years building factories and cutting down all their forests and polluting their air and water. Heck, they don't even need telephone poles! People in Uruguay and Burma and Estonia can sell their crafts or their farm products directly to buyers in New York or Singapore, without having to go through fourteen middlemen who suck off all the profits.

And when that happens, people suddenly don't feel the need to have such big families. They have economic security that doesn't depend on having lots of children to work in sweatshops or brothels.
 
I'm not an alarmist, I would have been alarmed 2000 years ago, now I'm pissed. The world is already WAY too populated by humans, our numbers need to be drastically decreased, not slowly start to slow down over time. We are used to the way the world is now so we don't see a problem but if you look back to before humans had even evolved(not that long ago evolutionarily speaking) then you see that we have seriously fucked this place up. If I had more power I would wipe out ALOT of people.

Its funny how most would consider that evil and yet I would consider it the only right thing to do and once I did it I would consider my self a saint-like saviour of sorts. I guess it all depends on your perspective.
 
Gigagenocide. Now there's a humble suggestion.

Originally posted by Dr Lou Natic
If I had more power I would wipe out A LOT of people. It's funny how most would consider that evil and yet I would consider it the only right thing to do and once I did it I would consider myself a saint-like saviour of sorts. I guess it all depends on your perspective.
Click to expand...
I'm curious. You put a rational facade on this rather startling idea. How do you apply ethics to it? Who gets to decide who is good enough to be part of your new smaller population and who dies? Or are you just going to sterilize 99% of the population and let it happen by merciful attrition? Will you leave the ethnic groups in their same proportions? Will you make sure that communities have critical mass so they don't start to lose their culture? What about the Indian tribes that are already down to 100 people of whom only two speak the language? Will you let that language die or do you figure the Indians have suffered enough?

As for being a saint or a savior, that's strictly a human value that is conferred upon one by society. I doubt that the society would validate your high opinion of yourself and one definitely does not get to nominate oneself for sainthood.

A lot of animal gene pools are quietly being saved by people like Siegfried and Roy and their Siberian tigers. It's amazing what the private sector can accomplish if it stays below the fucking government's radar. When the human population eventually rolls back down to a billion in another couple of centuries, most of the animals will still be around to repopulate the new open spaces.

A lot of the hysteria you hear about vanishing habitat is just green=red bullshit. The rain forest is simply not vanishing at the rate that the Rain Forest Site says it is. In fact if you take the planet as a whole, the amount of forest land is increasing. Ecotourism really has become a major economic factor in the Third World. Dog breeders are donating Anatolian Guardians to farmers in Africa and Asia to keep the big cats away from their herds without having to kill them. We've turned the corner on a few important issues before we've even managed to stop expanding our own population. Imagine what we can do when that finally happens.

I understand your motivation. But given that you live in the real world and it's unlikely that you'll ever acquire the power to perform your gigagenocide, you might as well appreciate what's really gonna happen.
 
Re: Gigagenocide. Now there's a humble suggestion.

Originally posted by Fraggle Rocker
As for being a saint or a savior, that's strictly a human value that is conferred upon one by society. I doubt that the society would validate your high opinion of yourself and one definitely does not get to nominate oneself for sainthood.
Click to expand...
Obviously I wouldn't expect the society I attacked to officially assign me saint-status. The point I was trying to make is although most would consider it evil I would consider it a sensible and good thing to do. I would assign myself 'saviour-status' on behalf of the earth.... then I would masturbate in front of a mirror;)
What I mean is despite the fact that dead people makes other people sad it really would be a good thing if alot of people died. That seems obvious to me. Sorry.

Who decides who is good enough for the new smaller population? That really doesn't matter, as long as their isn't many of them, I could be one of the ones to go, I don't care. It would be better if the remaining humans were environmentally aware so that history's mistakes weren't made again, so I'd prefer it if it were at least people sort of like me in that regard but I don't have to be involved.

You mentioned the native americans and it is kind of symbolic that they are almost extinct. Being by far the most environmentally aware of all cultures. They could definately stay, well maybe cap a couple of the casino junkies.
This is all hypothetical, I'm not crazy(at least I don't consider myself crazy) I know it will never happen, but I can't ignore the sense it makes.

You mentioned siegfried and roy and anatolian shepherds; that all sounds neat but think about it, why are the big cats going into the farms in the first place? Because its their hunting grounds, their prey is in very short supply because the farms have taken away their environment and thus killed the herbivores.
Maybe it would be better if the farmers did shoot the big cats on sight rather than scare them back into the forest with dogs where they will starve to death.

What do siegfried and roy do?(apart from make love to each other?Sorry, couldn't help it.) Let me guess they introduce more tigers into their natural habitat? Well honestly, thats a little short sighted and naive, its like sticking a broken wheel back onto your car with sticky tape. Nature has a way of evening things out, the reason that tigers numbers are running low is because the environment can't support them. More tigers means more starving tigers. You need to right the route of the problem and that is the farms. There simply can't be that many farms if you want there to be wildlife. You can't pack heaps of animals into a tiny forest, it won't work.

I hope you are right, I really do, but there are alot of things even environmentalists don't understand and it seems to me that this problem is even more serious than the extremists realise.
 
dr. lou, your may just be trying to be humorous but it is...

also a little bit disturbing:

Dr. Lou Said:
"I would assign myself 'saviour-status' on behalf of the earth.... then I would masturbate in front of a mirror"

You should watch the movie Manhunter (the first movie of the Silence of the Lambs "trilogy"), thats sounds like some of the things that the nutcase in the movie did.

Dr. Lou also said:
"You mentioned siegfried and roy and anatolian shepherds; that all sounds neat but think about it, why are the big cats going into the farms in the first place? Because its their hunting grounds, their prey is in very short supply because the farms have taken away their environment and thus killed the herbivores.
Maybe it would be better if the farmers did shoot the big cats on sight rather than scare them back into the forest with dogs where they will starve to death."

Good point.
 
So far, Mother Earth has had to carry the weight of our stupidity.... but she ain't gonna wear *much* more.....

When I found out that international commercial aircraft ROUTINELY 'dump' thousands of gallons of fuel that simply vaporizes into the atmosphere, I was sick to my stomach. If I were in charge of this joint, there would be NO way I would let this sort of thing happen.... but that isn't the worst thing, by far!

What I find *totally* unacceptable is the way we pump countless tons of raw, untreated sewage into nature's waters every day and this subject is not even *entertained* by govt departments.

"Doesn't matter, by the time the shit hits the fan, we'll be dead anyway..."

This type of short term thinking lies at the root of most of our tribulations. The same types of people who say this also say;

"But it's necessary to maintain the economy..."

I'm sorry, but FUCK the economy! When all the fish are dead, all the rivers are poisoned and all trees are devoid of fruit, what are we gonna do ? - eat the money ?!

My earliest recollections were that of looking around, seeing what people were doing and thinking "What the *HELL* are you DOING!!??" - since then, it has only gotten worse.

We need a system badly - a REAL one - not one that encourages the "who cares - it's not MY problem" attitude.

I, for one, would welcome communications from anyone who feels the way I do.... I know in my heart that *anything* can be accomplished if we put our minds to it - and if there is *anything* at all that is worth doing, then surely this must be it.

What shall it profit us to build a mansion if the foundation is weak ? The first thing we need to establish is simply this;

*THAT WHICH WE CAN *ALL* AGREE ON*

I hope to see the above subject as the basis of a new forum.

"In the End, we will find that it was the *approach* that mattered the most"

H-[||]
 
You rock hilarion:cool:
You basically hit the nail on the head with every sentence, I especially liked "fuck the economy", wiser words have never been uttered. And I actually have a "money can not be eaten" american indian poster on the wall of my apartment that is strikingly similar to what you said about poisoned fish and all that. The weird thing is I didn't even buy it, it was just here when I moved in but I agree completely.

Why is it that people who think like you and me and many others weren't around in the say the 40's? Has anyone ever thought of that? Don't say 'they were you just never heard of them', because they really weren't. Ask any old timer, they didn't start showing up until the hippies of the sixties. Not western ones anyway. Could hippies be a natural evolutionary change in the human species' psyche? To assure the survival of earth? It really does seem like it.
I'm telling you, mother nature's got a handle on all this, and all of us, there are too many indications.

Anyway as of what to do.... aah I don't know, I guess i'm useless, its all about trial and error eh earth? Hopefully my kid(note the no s) will be more efficient at environmentalism and mother nature will be that much closer to perfecting the human species.
 
hilarion...

excellent, well put and courageous post. You are right on the money with almost everything here.

I think the reason this damn post won't die is because many Americans and citizens of the world are getting fed up and frustrated with their lives, the war, the world and the poor economy. Therefore they are aiming their fury at the problem of overpopulation and undertstandably so. It is a major reason we are in the funk we are in, but I would warn all that there is a danger in thinking it is the only reason we are in the funk we are in. Still, as more and more people pop up on this planet, this are less economic opportunities, more mouths to feed, more unemployment, more competition for jobs since the number of people who need them are going up and the number of jobs are decreasing because of the bad economy, people who had good jobs and were paid well are often replaced by people that can be paid more cheaply and people who are laid off because the co. is not making money now have to cut back on their standard of living and live worse than they did before, which is something they probably do not view as progress as I myself do not. Its all a game. All I can say is change with the times or get steamrolled! Learn computers!
 
DR. Lou...

I think the answer you are looking for is that the sixties were a time when our fine country went from "not exactly what the founding fathers envisioned" to something down right out of control. Do what I do, blame Richard Nixon.
 
I would invite all who hold Love in their hearts to join me in the "Looking for what we can *ALL* agree on" thread.

H-[||]

"For all the universe has come from Love, and unto Love shall it return"
 
Re: hilarion...

Originally posted by fredx
I think the reason this damn post won't die is because many Americans and citizens of the world are getting fed up and frustrated with their lives, the war, the world and the poor economy. Therefore they are aiming their fury at the problem of overpopulation and undertstandably so.
Click to expand...
I guarantee I don't fit into this category and I doubt hilarion does either, maybe, but I doubt it.
I'm not frustrated with the war or the poor economy in the slightest, I couldn't care less, it is inconsequential jargon that distracts us from this subject which is infinitely more important.
The problem would still be there if there was world peace and a perfect economy. In fact, world peace would probably make this problem worse.
I know the type of people you talk about though and they go with whatever issue is trendy, their jaws hurt from saying "no war" so they opt for the more soothing environmental discussion. They don't really understand or care about the situation.
 
Overpopulation

The cure for overpopulation is tax/subsidy policy that discourages people from having large families. For instance, instead of getting tax deductions for every child, one could raise taxes and give everyone a lifelong subsidy that is inversely proportional to how many children one has. To stem population growth overseas, high tarriffs should be levied against those countries who don't don't care about the environment or give anything back to their people. Indeed, in such countries, where the government is too corrupt or weak to tax their citizens, manual labor (which does not so much require the good education that a strong government can provide) is more profitable inasmuch as the workers don't have to compete with countries whose workers have a greater incentive to work on account of their not losing a large percentage of their income on taxes. In poor undertaxed countries, the economies tend to overheat and produce too much population growth.

Population reduction should occur slowly. This ought to be intuitively obvious. For instance, a precedent of killing many people all at once could lead in the future to an attempt that ends up (inadvertently or otherwise) killing all people (along with an unspecified number of animals and plants), as well as allowing a precedent for a murderous corruption that would do extreme mischief to society, likely empowering Saddam-like despots everywhere. I don't mean to imply that there are not many people who if they had complete power might become so evil as to try apocalyptic destruction. It is very important not to let power get into the hands of just a few lest some mass-homicidal apocalyptic disaster happen to the world as happened to the islands of the castaways of the Batavia or the mutineers of the Bounty.

People are not so bad that it wouldn't be an extreme tragedy for humanity to go extinct. The worst part of religion IMO is its association with apocalyptic ideas that could lead to mass killing. I figure The Bible ought to end in Jude (a book with something of an anti-sodomy flavor) and the rest of it (Revelation) was tacked on by some wicked person too stupid to realize that corrupting the hindside of The Bible is a distinct phenomenon from corrupting the hindside of a person.
 
No, I don't buy it...

I hear alot of frustration from alot of you. Maybe our society wants to push us to feel this frustration, so we are blinded by our own rage and anger and we are "desentsitized" to the killing of both the innocent and the guilty that is this war in Iraq, and thereby we are fooled into thinking overpopulation is the cause of all evils and that we should find away to effect some kind of radical depopulation, but I would warn you that its still your choice if you choose to become a Nazi or a Hitler. I am not saying I am some sort of peacenik or idealist, I think that some aspects of current war with Iraq may well be neccessary. What I expressing is that maybe having a callous heart and being a evil narrow-minded Nazi is exactly what they want. You are playing right into their hands with your own ignorance or you are choosing to play along by acting the way many of you are acting on this post, like babies and like the people that let the atrocity of the holocaust happen so many years ago. Mere reacting in a typical and predictable manner is not enough to be political in this day and age. You have to think and feel for yourself.
 
Re: No, I don't buy it...

Originally posted by fredx
You have to think and feel for yourself.
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Seriously, you need to take your own advice...

Let me get this straight, if someone doesn't think the war on iraq is that big of a deal they have been brainwashed? Thats funny, I'm 100% sure if you do think its a big deal you've been brainwashed, not by the media or government but a deeply ingrained brainwashing that all of society has been subjected to and it is what society revolves around.

The nature of living organisms is to compete, some social animals help eachother but only members of their immediate group.
The reason this planet is so overrun by humans is because we try to assist every single member of our species and ensure they live long successful lives, this isn't how the world works and thats why there is a problem.

Ever heard the term survival of the fittest? Well humans don't like this idea and decided to change the rules to suit them, this has created an inbalance in nature.
The idea of wishing for world peace and the curing of diseases is very misguided. Whats the long term goal of that? I don't think people like you think about long term goals but I can tell you what the long term product will be: DEATH. Death to everything because there will be too many people.

If people were to live within the laws of nature they would live in clans and compete with all the other clans. This would been killing the opposing clans to ensure we get the best stuff or at least scaring them off. Definately never helping them.

Instead some people want to make one big team known as "humans" and compete with everything else, obviously we have an unfair advantage and this is not going to work.
You have been brainwashed, oddly enough, by the bible. It doesn't matter if you think of yourself as religious or not you are following the unnatural lesson that the bible is offering, that is: help your fellow man, man is superior, all people are great and you should treat them like your brother.

Why did the bible need to say "treat everyone like your brother"? Its because naturally we care for our brother because he is in our clan and our nature makes us take care of our clan to ensure the future of our genes. These new rules instilled into us by the bible is in affect causing us to wage a war on an eco-sytem that was not prepared for such an efficient attack as it never knew it would be subconciously viewed as an enemy in the first place.

You might not believe in the bible but everyone in the western world did for a long time and now it is ingrained into all of society and it will be the downfall of the planet earth.

I don't think for myself? ....... aaaah yeah... right...:rolleyes:
 
I never said you don't think for yourself...

but what are you suggesting here? That we deevolve? You are definitely playing the role of the anti-christian here. Are you saying that we should go back to the law of the jungle and mold our behavior more after animals than we already do? Wouldn't it be more civilised if we could appreciate the good our world has to offer us and at the same time try to effect change and reform to make things better? Radical change usually puts us in a position that was worse than before and as Hannah Arendt states and she hardly ever says anything wrong, "The most radical revolutionary is a conservative the day after the revolution." Taking small steps is the only way I have ever changed things for myself, why wouldn't it also be the same for improving society. Your denying your own feelings of frustration about the way things are. If you were happy, then the death of innocents or returning to a world where we are always worrying about being killed or where we have to adopt a kill-or-be-killed mentality would not seem such an attractive option to you. But then again, you may just have the kind of nature that predisposes you to the thoughts, feelings and ideas you have, so I am not going to tell you that you are wrong. I wouldn't tell you that you were wrong anyway.

Also and here is something thats been eating away at my mind for a few days and since your such a genius maybe you want to deal with it. The "system" is set up in a certain way and everyone gets taught in that way and so they teach others in that way, so what happens cannot technically be called "brainwashing", because "brainwashing" would infer in a way that the person doing it was aware they were doing it. Therefore, society doesn't really brainwash anybody, because the people truly believe that what they are doing is right and just. Still, if you don't buy that, I think the only way to avoid being "brainwashed" is to think for yourself at least sometimes.

Finally, if you look at the total picture of the world it will become apparent that people do kill other people to survive although it may be more indirect than lion eats gazelle, more subtle or if not it may be done behind a veneer of justifications and reasonings. Hell, we are all implicated if you think about it. We want those new sneakers for only $100 bucks, good well than some woman in China will have to work herself to the bone for countless hours for pennies until she is out of life.

My point is that we can't get too negative about things. Sure you can probably see the laws of the jungle operating outside your front door, but that doesn't mean that you have to take part in being uncivil and that doesn't mean that you can't show your goodness by trying help other people and your community to be a better place.

What you are talking about is the major problem with the "Nationalistic" Arab countries and why our troops are dying senseless deaths right now. Many Arabs are blinded by a tradition of tribalism that says you should only care for your family and not care for the good of the community or about anyone else (This insight was set forth by a journalist who commented on the same pattern of ignorance and tribalism in the Phillipines, I forgot her name). In my opinion, this is why they always end up with the leaders they get and if you read Plato you will understand this, i.e. the tyrannical man gets the tyrannical government.

But I have given you more of my wisdom than you actually deserve, so that will be all for now.
 
Are you saying molding our behaviour more after animals would be bad? Bad for what cause? The comfort of individual humans? Well I agree with you, it would be devastating to our comfort levels but I'm not selfish enough to assume the comfort of people is the top priority of the planet earth.
Wouldn't it be more civilised? Don't you see? CIVILISED is the problem.

I'm not suggesting anything, I'm just pointing out that this is what has happened and is happening. You can say
"yeah you're right, society will be the end of the planet but I don't care we might as well live it up, who cares about the future? I'll be dead anyway"
and thats fine, you have a right to that opinion, but you can't ignore that the planet would be running alot more smoothly like it should be if we never became "civilised" and if we didn't inflate our population by helping others.

You don't like this because it seems nasty, the idea of people killing eachother and not helping people they don't know but nature is nasty, do you know anything about a lions lifestyle? Animals don't have these lifestyles because they like pain or like killing, they have evolved this way to ensure the success and future of their species and more specifically, THEIR gene line. Nature is coldy logical. Inadequate organisms die.

By that I mean inadequate individuals more than inadequate species. People have changed this, the way we work, an "inadequate species" is one we can use. All the species of today are unbelievably adequate and efficient compared to their ancestors because the nature of evolution is to try and perfect, but we can render these perfect creatures extinct easily because they haven't evolved with us as their natural predators. So we often put an end to what nature has been perfecting for millions of years just because we could really use their carcasses in our unnatural society. We have changed the course of evolution, no longer does nature select its employees, we do, and we have fired some really skilled workers that spent millions of years in "university" perfecting those skills.

Honestly this upsets me a whole lot more than the death of a couple of iraqis, innocent or not, they couldn't possibly be as innocent as a non-human species.

In the end its a matter of perspectives I guess, and no one is "right" here. You are upset by people suffering, I am upset by people "progressing"(destroying earth).

The kill or be killed mentality is not attractive to me, I'm not thinking about me, we are the only animals that "disagree" with nature so if you ask me we have no right to be here fucking it up. We can't survive for very long on this planet if we aren't following its rules, those rules are there for a reason, to maintain the eco-system(the eco-system is what the planet is by the way, I know all we've know since we've been born is civilisation but that doesn't mean its the way of the world or it works).

Our actions DESTROY the eco-system, it would be bad enough if we didn't help it but we actually destroy it, EVERY other species helps it immensely, a whole lot more than is outwardly obvious. And then it would be of little condolence if we showed the animals the respect they deserve for keeping us alive but we do the opposite, we think of them as lesser lifeforms and treat them as such.

People like to say we aren't animals, they're right no we aren't, we are some horrible disease inflicted upon the animals. That also has an ego-problem, we make cancer look like a bouquette of roses.
The only time we are displaying our admirable qualities is when we ARE killing eachother in my opinion.

Yes I'm angry fredx, because I can see the affect humans have had on the beautiful planet earth, that would anger and sadden anyone who truely understood how amazing earth really is.
 
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