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Proactive Human Population Reduction

Oh, and apart from all the peadophiles, rapists and sadists that need to be killed, there is another reason why culling the human population would be a good idea.

In the movie 'Lord of War' I saw a group of people run after somebody who was running away from their refugee camp, and then beat him to death, howling and yelling as they did so.

Then they fell silent and walked away as if nothing happened.

I remembered watching a docu about chimpanzees and how they move silently and as one pack to intercept intruders into their territory.

This chimpanzee pack I watched found a female chimpanzee and child and the pack moved as one, silently. Then they found the female and child and tore them apart.

The chief of the pack then ate the brains and the best bits of meat while the rest begged for scraps.

This made me think (as I watched the people in 'Lord of War' beat that person to death in the manner they did) - these people are behaving like chimpanzees.

Then I thought - we are chimpanzees.

We spend what seems to be more money on war and ways of hurting or destroying eachother and everything we can see than we spend on health, curing diseases or inventing new and helpful things to make our lives better.

It seems that we are always fighting for the same things and making new or rehashed excuses for doing so.

It seems that we are spending 99% of our money on destroying each other.

Is this not a good reason to think that we are no better than chimpanzees in our primitive behaviour and that perhaps we do not deserve to survive in our current state?


:evil:
 
A philosophy based on an action movie and a TV wildlife documentary. Great stuff. :lol:
 
Isn't that what life is all about? Action movies and nature documentaries?
 
Is this not a good reason to think that we are no better than chimpanzees in our primitive behaviour and that perhaps we do not deserve to survive in our current state?
Human beings are animals, like other animals.
People who do not realise this seem to be constantly shocked, outraged and disgusted by the animal nature of mankind.
In what way should or could we possibly be 'better' than chimpanzees?
In what way should or could we possibly 'deserve' anything?
By what universal value judgement? God's?

There is no great moral arbiter in the universe in my opinion.
In what way is the survival, decimation or destruction of the human race 'right' or 'good' or 'proper' in any way?

I *like* art and philosophy and civilisation and mercy and all the stuff we think makes us different from the animals, but there is nothing inherently morally superior about them, we are just a very complex, organised animal society. We are not outside 'nature' and the struggle to transcend our 'primitive' behaviour is a futile attempt to deny our own animal nature. We are not custodians of the world, we're just a bunch of big packs roaming it.

:imo: :heh:
 
If chimpanzees are as 'bad' as us, does that mean we should cull them too?
 
coldelephant said:
We spend what seems to be more money on war and ways of hurting or destroying eachother and everything we can see than we spend on health, curing diseases or inventing new and helpful things to make our lives better.

UK budget for 2006:

Social security: £177bn
Health £96 bn
Education: £73bn
Defence £29bn

Defence is less than 6% of the total, and remember the armed forces do a lot more than just destruction.

http://budget2006.treasury.gov.uk/index ... et_225.pdf
 
UK budget for 2006:

Social security: £177bn
Health £96 bn
Education: £73bn

Have you forgotten who pays for all this? It’s self financed not a gift from the tooth fairy.
 
Plus, as stated above, parts of the world with poor health care and shorter life expectancies also tend to have the highest birth rates.

This would be largely due - though I expect there are other considerations as well - to the fact that infant mortality is so high in those places. Poor families have a large number of offspring in the hope that a few will survive to adulthood.
 
This would be largely due - though I expect there are other considerations as well - to the fact that infant mortality is so high in those places. Poor families have a large number of offspring in the hope that a few will survive to adulthood.

I've read - although I don't have the figures to hand - that the single factor with the greatest impact on family size is the level of education offered to girls and women. In short, if you are concerned about overpopulation, spend a little bit of money on educating females and the problem goes away!
 
Dingo667 said:
What about letting nature take its way? How about living naturally and if ill take it with dignity and accept that this is the way? Someone close recently died of a certain cancer. He didn't involve the doctors and eventually died in his sleep. Man the didgnity in that!

I'm not saying we should lower our hygene standards, after all being tidy or clean is still natural. However keeping people artificially alive, IVF and people thinking they have the right to have 10+ children doesn't help.
I haven't got children and never will because frankly earth is not gonna be a nice place in 50 years to live.
However lets be realistic. During the bubonic plage [yesssssss] almost three quarters of humankind died. About 100 years later we were back on track again, exactly the same amount as before and rising.
It'll take a lot more than just killing humans off. The connection to nature and the realisation that we are part of it has to be brought back. We should stop acting like natures enemy and so desperately fight against it.

So we don't want to die, neither does any animal [hence flight and fight responses] but when their time comes they just accept it. Death for them is part of life because they are part of the whole picture. Humans are stubborn and think too much and make up ethics and morals that are very much against the universe we live in.

Back to work now...

If you want to let nature take its course, that's fine with me. The problem with this is, that only thoughtful people are liable to think this way. So are smart people leaving dumb people to inherit the Earth by not breeding and whatnot? Something to think about!
 
As you can see from the thread by EMPS YPFYU and so if all those who have a gripe with mom and dad don’t have kids……………………………
 
Back to the original post, I've not read all of the replies to this, but to me it seems like someone taking a controversial what-if scenario and the media removing any irony of it. It's quite insulting to the scientific world that the press actually believe a room of scientists would actually applaud and cheer if someone was actually advocating a painful death to 90% of the population.

It reminds me a bit of the Hitchcock film Rope, in which a college professor, played by James Stewart, rants on to anyone who's listening about how he believes murder is a good thing and valuable part of human life. He is, of course, horrified when his students actually listen to him and bump someone off.

As for population, well my personal opinion is whilever there's people in Western Europe and America having nine or ten kids, what's the chance of ever getting the message across to the Third World?
 
almond13 said:
2) The population of the UK is less now than it was in 1950 and this they tell me is due to reasonable living conditions. The very poor have large families for economic reasons.

All the research I have done shows the above statement to be incorrect.

Just google: population uk 1950

Population today is about 11.5 million higher than it was in 1951. An increase of approx 20%.

Also all the headcounts throughout WWII showed a slow but steady increase. This is caused by the human drive to breed at times of crisis which was demonstrated in recent years by unusual worldwide birth increases approx 9 months after 9/11 and 9 months after the 2004 boxing day tsunami (radio 4 mentioned this a few weeks back).
 
Or to put it another way.

If we all lived like Americans, we would need two additional planet Earths to produce resources and absorb wastes ... and good planets are hard to find!

Some depressing stuff

Perhaps the West need to make sure that their overall consumption comes down.
 
escargot1 said:
A philosophy based on an action movie and a TV wildlife documentary. Great stuff. :lol:

Inspired by :lol:

Besides, it is only a part of humanity that wants to fight all of the time.

Why not just kill all of them and the peadophiles and rapists etc?

Then the rest of us poor tax paying sheeples can live in peace. ;)
 
_Lizard23_ said:
Is this not a good reason to think that we are no better than chimpanzees in our primitive behaviour and that perhaps we do not deserve to survive in our current state?
Human beings are animals, like other animals.
People who do not realise this seem to be constantly shocked, outraged and disgusted by the animal nature of mankind.
In what way should or could we possibly be 'better' than chimpanzees?
In what way should or could we possibly 'deserve' anything?
By what universal value judgement? God's?

There is no great moral arbiter in the universe in my opinion.
In what way is the survival, decimation or destruction of the human race 'right' or 'good' or 'proper' in any way?

I *like* art and philosophy and civilisation and mercy and all the stuff we think makes us different from the animals, but there is nothing inherently morally superior about them, we are just a very complex, organised animal society. We are not outside 'nature' and the struggle to transcend our 'primitive' behaviour is a futile attempt to deny our own animal nature. We are not custodians of the world, we're just a bunch of big packs roaming it.

:imo: :heh:


I agree with part of that - we are indeed very large packs of animals which breed like rabbits (or bacteria as the case may be).

We have animal behaviours - but we distinguish ourselves from animals because of our self awareness ("I think therefore I am), and because we realise that we do have the ability to behave in a sensible, peaceful, wonderful way.

We could create our own utopia by simply not fighting and living in balance with nature, thus ensuring our survival and a better quality of life for all (well, in theory at least).

Who is to judge if we should live or die? Us.

Who is to judge if we deserve our imaginary utopia made real by our efforts? Us.

Who is our divine influence, our deity, our god? Us.

We have the ability to put things right in our biosphere (good word that, although it probably - like the rest of this post - makes me look like a hippie).

We can control our destiny - no chimpanzee can do that to the extent that we can also control the destiny of the entire planet.

All of these things makes us different from the rest of the animal kingdom IMO.
 
wembley8 said:
coldelephant said:
We spend what seems to be more money on war and ways of hurting or destroying eachother and everything we can see than we spend on health, curing diseases or inventing new and helpful things to make our lives better.

UK budget for 2006:

Social security: £177bn
Health £96 bn
Education: £73bn
Defence £29bn

Defence is less than 6% of the total, and remember the armed forces do a lot more than just destruction.

http://budget2006.treasury.gov.uk/index ... et_225.pdf

Took the following quote from a link that Lupinwick posted in the "US still sizing Iran up?" thread;

Global military expenditure and arms trade is also the largest spending in the world at 900 billion dollars, annually.


http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/ArmsTrade.asp

If that is true, then so what about the UK budget? It just backs up the notion that whilst the US military spends with wild abandon and has all the money to buy the best and make classified investments, that the UK military cannot even afford to buy it's infantary the standard issue desert boots for war in Iraq.

There was a lot of hoo-hah about that in the papers not long ago.
 
Who is to judge if we should live or die? Us.
I'm not sure if that isn't a bit arrogant tbh - like I say, the universe is going to go pop some day they reckon, and there's a million and one things completely beyond our control that could wipe us out in a cosmic eye blink.
We have the ability to put things right in our biosphere
My main problem with this is that we have a tendency to try and fix stuff based on what seem to be great ideas at the time but which are in fact merely intellectual fashions which often turn out to have been actually bloody silly ideas as anyone who has lived in a late sixties/early seventies concrete council estate ghetto, seen the inside of Rosslyn Chapel, got hooked on heroin or swallowed radium to cure impotence will doubtless tell you - again it just smacks of human arrogance to me ... 'yes! we can save the world! we can prevent global warming and increase biodiversity!!! ..... oh bugger, looks like all the carbon needs to leave the ground and go into the atmosphere and there be mass extinction events every few billenia or the whole planet becomes unviable to life .... ooops ... sorrry about that .....'
 
_Lizard23_ said:
My main problem with this is that we have a tendency to try and fix stuff based on what seem to be great ideas at the time but which are in fact merely intellectual fashions which often turn out to have been actually bloody silly ideas as anyone who has lived in a late sixties/early seventies concrete council estate ghetto, seen the inside of Rosslyn Chapel, got hooked on heroin or swallowed radium to cure impotence will doubtless tell you - again it just smacks of human arrogance to me ... 'yes! we can save the world! we can prevent global warming and increase biodiversity!!! ..... oh bugger, looks like all the carbon needs to leave the ground and go into the atmosphere and there be mass extinction events every few billenia or the whole planet becomes unviable to life .... ooops ... sorrry about that .....'


Good point there - don't fix it if it ain't broke (it might be), and let sleeping dogs lie (we might not have done) and let nature run it's course (diversion ahead, roadworks).

I agree that we might be better off leaving the planet to look after itself and maybe mass extinctions happen for a reason, so that dinosaurs can be replaced by mammals and mammals can be replaced by whatever else.

Thing is, I don't think we want to be replaced, yet.

The other thing is I hate concrete jungles and council grey blocks of flats, they are ugly - and certainly not anything to do with the natural course of things.

The only biodiversity they encourage is various types of humans who of course make it stink of pee and put chewing gum and cigarette butts and McDonalds packaging all over it.

Euurch.
 
coldelephant said:
Global military expenditure and arms trade is also the largest spending in the world at 900 billion dollars, annually.


http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/ArmsTrade.asp

If that is true.

It's not. US defence spending is about $400bn a year; health spending is about $2 trillion, ie five times as much. Health is a way bigger industry than defence globally - as you can see, the US along spends more on health than the whole world does on arms.

http://www.webmd.com/content/article/117/112504
 
Getting back to the start of the thread lots of stuff right here:

http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/04/forrest_mims_cr.html

And Pianka's website:

http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/eric.html

What nobody wants to hear, but everyone needs to know

Eric R. Pianka

I have two grandchildren and I want them to inherit a stable Earth. But I fear for them. Humans have overpopulated the Earth and in the process have created an ideal nutritional substrate on which bacteria and viruses (microbes) will grow and prosper. We are behaving like bacteria growing on an agar plate, flourishing until natural limits are reached or until another microbe colonizes and takes over, using them as their resource. In addition to our extremely high population density, we are social and mobile, exactly the conditions that favor growth and spread of pathogenic (disease-causing) microbes. I believe it is only a matter of time until microbes once again assert control over our population, since we are unwilling to control it ourselves. This idea has been espoused by ecologists for at least four decades and is nothing new. People just don't want to hear it.

So he's warning about the possibility of ecological disaster, as opposed to advocating.

But hey, let's not allow facts to get in the way of a good fun witch hunt! Right those with even numbers, wave the falming torches, those with odd numbers grab your agricultural inmplements and shake them up and down in a vaguely threatening manner while going "Grr!"
On the count of three: 1 - 2 -...
 
Prof. Summy says, in part:
I attended the presentation given by Dr. Eric Pianka at the recent TAS meeting in Beaumont. ... My overall impression of Dr. Pianka’s presentation was a “doomsday” message that life on earth is about to end, and the sooner the human population crashes the better. I hope he was joking or being sarcastic when he stated that a pandemic of ebola virus would be great for the earth – no sane person would really believe that. ...
Forrest Mims did not misrepresent anything regarding the presentation. I heard these statements myself, and would be willing to bet that most of the audience attending the presentation got the same impression that I did. ...
So again we have an eyewitness to Prof. Pianka's March 3, 2006 lecture who confirms the accuracy of Forrest Mims's account of that lecture.
http://www.geocities.com/tetrahedronome ... -mims.html
http://www.sas.org/tcs/weeklyIssues_200 ... index.html

Let's hear both sides of the story.
There are many such eyewitnesses on this site and amazingly this was the first one that came up on Google.
Anyone who thinks this guy is going to admit to his crimes is living in cloud cuckoo land. At the time I first saw this there were prognostications that he would be sacked. It seems that he and his employers have decided to go the whitewash route.
 
It's not. US defence spending is about $400bn a year; health spending is about $2 trillion, ie five times as much. Health is a way bigger industry than defence globally - as you can see, the US along spends more on health than the whole world does on arms.

Global spending is $800 billion upward, the figures themselves are meaningless until viewed as a percentage of GDP. The US can spend vast amonts on military might - because it can afford to.

North America spent 3 per cent of its GDP on military funding, whilst in the Middle East this figure was 6.3 per cent.

An average of US$22 billion a year is spent on arms by countries of the Middle East, Latin America and Africa, arms which are mainly supplied by the G8 countries, including the USA and UK. This sum would allow those same countries to meet the Millennium Development Goals of achieving universal primary education (around US$10 billion per year) as well as the targets for reducing infant and maternal mortality (estimated to be around US$12 billion a year). But even a modest shift of spending from military to humanitarian goals could both save lives and also help people escape from poverty and begin to build economic sustainability.

http://www.greenworld.org.uk/news/51

I've come across figures for North Korea which part defence spending at 25% of GDP (estimated).
 
almond13 said:
Let's hear both sides of the story.
There are many such eyewitnesses on this site and amazingly this was the first one that came up on Google.
Anyone who thinks this guy is going to admit to his crimes is living in cloud cuckoo land. At the time I first saw this there were prognostications that he would be sacked. It seems that he and his employers have decided to go the whitewash route.

The problem is that one side of the story seems to be in the Creationist camp, and thus probably has some interest in grinding axes ;) Misterwibble's post above sums up what Pianka seems to be saying IMHO - that is, that he's not advocating mass culling though the use of ebola, but that he thinks that it's possible that the human population could fall prey to some nasty disease that Nature cooks up.
 
lupinwick said:
Global spending is $800 billion upward, the figures themselves are meaningless until viewed as a percentage of GDP.

The initial calim was the humans spend more on defence than health (etc).

Since the entire planet only spends $800 bn on defence and the US alone spends almost $2 trillion on health, doesn't this prove the case?
 
wembley8 said:
lupinwick said:
Global spending is $800 billion upward, the figures themselves are meaningless until viewed as a percentage of GDP.

The initial calim was the humans spend more on defence than health (etc).

Since the entire planet only spends $800 bn on defence and the US alone spends almost $2 trillion on health, doesn't this prove the case?


I suppose it does (swallows pride, eats hat, fumbles with oven hot humble pie , drops it on floor and sucks fingers irritibley)
 
Jerry_B my very good friend.
There are half a dozen witnesses on this site that say they were there and heard him say it. I notice that at least one of the witnesses is a Pianka supporter. I saw a web site in April with it on and some one who was there said he said it.
What exactly is the creationist camp and can you give me the names of the people on the website who are members of the creationist conspiracy?
http://www.geocities.com/tetrahedronome ... -mims.html
Is the above website part of the creationist campaign to destroy Pianka?
Is James Redford who wrote the article a creationist?
Is Yahoo part of this conspiracy?
If Pianka threw his arms up and said it’s a fair cop would you still not believe it?
 
The wikipedia article mentioned by Timble a few pages back highlights the Creationist figures involved in opposition to Pianka. I personally haven't said that there's any sort of conspiracy. As for Pianka, he has already explained himself, as far as I can tell.
 
almond13 said:
Jerry_B my very good friend.
There are half a dozen witnesses on this site that say they were there and heard him say it. I notice that at least one of the witnesses is a Pianka supporter. I saw a web site in April with it on and some one who was there said he said it.
What exactly is the creationist camp and can you give me the names of the people on the website who are members of the creationist conspiracy?
http://www.geocities.com/tetrahedronome ... -mims.html
Is the above website part of the creationist campaign to destroy Pianka?
Is James Redford who wrote the article a creationist?
Is Yahoo part of this conspiracy?
If Pianka threw his arms up and said it’s a fair cop would you still not believe it?

Mimms has an agenda, this isn't a conspiracy, it's an arguement about the interpretation of Pianka's statement for which there is no apparently definitive source on either side.

Who is James Redford? We don't know his agenda, if any, since we don't know who he is.

He obviously didn't see the talk himself, so like all of us here he's working from what's on the internet and in the press. Making him no more authorative than you, or me.
 
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