Thoughts on Malthus
It seems to be making the rounds on the anti status quo - on both ends, left and right, that the WEF is basing its actions on a belief in Malthus - that the human population has exceeded the Earth's capacity to support us and therefore there will be a great dying. This is irrefutably true.
It is a misunderstanding to think that the stages of grief are sequential. We are experiencing both anger and denial now, and beginning the other stages. Expect a massive rise of apocalyptic religion, the demonization of the hot nations' poor, violence against refugees, armed migrations, suicide cults, everything but a serious attempt to do what is necessary to survive, until (if we're lucky) our population is reduced to a sustainable level before the planet becomes totally uninhabitable.
The real problem is not that Klaus Schwab and his World Brotherhood Of Bond Villains is wrong, but that they should not be the survivors. Bringing the world to an end stage capitalist utopia is the worst possible strategy. Capitalism is what has put us on this inevitable path. But it is not "end stage" capitalism, it is the fundamental nature of capitalism, the constant demand to grow and innovate without consideration of ethics or morality or anything but an extreme - exclusive - demand for profit without regard for or even the very concept of consequences.
Capitalist apologists point to the green revolution as a disproof of Malthus - that we can always find a way to increase production to meet any future need. "The answer to all technological problems is more technology". Replace "more" with "better" and this idiotic statement becomes pretty much defensible imo, but those who make the first deny the reason for the second. The "green revolution" did not disprove Malthus, it only delayed Malthus by less than a century, and at a terrible cost. Crop yields did not grow enough to keep pace with population growth, we also plowed more and more land, and used more and more fertilizer, while refusing to admit to the consequences. The production and delivery of fertilizer generates greenhouse gasses. Thus the WEF's war against the Dutch farmers et all is not just hypocritical, it is ineffective, and the WEF and its flunkies know it. To use a less obvious example cow flatulence does not have to be a major creator of greenhouse gasses. Cows are flatulent because they cannot completely digest corn, and corn is the cow feed of choice because it is easy and cheap to produce in sufficient quantity to feed enough cows to supply beef (to fast food restaurants) ultimately it is McDonald's that is responsible for bovine flatulence.
The world - at least as we know it - will end, probably in years rather than decades, and it will be a nasty end. And capitalism will essentially be the cause. If a functionable human society (or societies) survive they will have to contain workable alternatives to capitalism - paths to fulfillment through means other than irresponsible wealth accumulation. I humbly suggest an iron wall limiting personal wealth combined with an unalienable right to live without need for such accumulation.
Comments
I could not agree with you more.
When Nancy Pelosi asserts that the United States of America IS a capitalist nation, as if that is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights, she unwittingly charts a course for global economic collapse. Unfettered capitalism combined with our colonialist efforts to own and rule the entire planet is the scourge of our time.
Left unchecked, it can only get worse.
“ …and when we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine,and understand who God is, and what our own potential is and duties are as human beings.- RFK jr. 8/26/2024
Infinite growth on a finite planet = impossible
And no, "we" can't escape to the stars. If there was ever a chance of that, it has been pissed away in endless wars.
So, either we learn to live within limits, or Nature will limit us - possibly into extinction.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
Bing!
Truer words have never been spoken.
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
Why do you say that?
Stephen Hawking and others insisted it was essential - and for good reason.
Are you saying the natural resources to fuel a space-travel initiative have already been depleted?
I've lived my whole life on the periphery of the scientific community; my father's a scientist, and so are a lot of the people I grew up knowing. I'd think I'd have heard something to that effect.
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
You got it, Moonbat
Hell, we can't even make a serious effort to get back to the Moon, because the resources and know-how have been squandered. (The Chinese are in somewhat better shape, not sure about the Russians, but they don't have interstellar capacity either and aren't likely to.)
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
Sources, please?
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
We blew it in the 1970
when further Moon shots were canceled to concentrate on near-earth orbits, i.e shuttles and the International Space Station. But now we have no shuttles and have to rely on Russia(!) to get US staff to/from the ISS.
There's talk about reviving the push to the Moon, probably out of the same Cold War mind-set that drove the Apollo program in the first place. But the proof, as always, will be in the doing.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
What about the natural resources part?
That's key; if you can't prove that (and admittedly, I "fed" it to you, which in hindsight I should not have), I'm going to have to call bullshit on the above. International politics are what they are, but comparatively unimportant.
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
I've lived my life
in the middle of the high tech engineering world as a microprocessor designer. I'm extremely familiar with, and conversant in, the technologies that would be necessary to make electronics live in the rather harsh environment of interplanetary space, outside of Earth's marvelously protective atmosphere and magnetic environment. The only efforts the human race have really made in this area have been to make near-earth satellites hardened enough to monitor whether someone is about to blow us up, or to put into hardware intended to blow somebody else up.
That covers just the electronics. More importantly, we've spent little effort in making the spam in the can survive an interplanetary voyage in that environment. All our efforts there (in health physics) have basically been focused on making sure that the elites and politicians survive somebody else blowing us up. The spam will be most assuredly be well-done when it arrives at its destination....
Our efforts to become spacefaring have always been entirely secondary to our efforts to more efficiently kill ourselves- a happy side effect. Read that twice if needed.
Source: The only thing I ever wanted in my career was to design hardware for spaceflight. I have also refused on principle to work on weapons systems, so my options were nonexistent. SpaceX came along too late for me, but I wouldn't have worked for them anyway- they will launch anything no matter where it comes down, just like Mr. Von Braun. Musk is launching hardware for the NRO, so I regard him as the Krupp for the new millenium.
Maybe Musk and Bezos think that they have the funding to get this to happen for themselves. Bully for them (except for that whole arriving-well-done thing). It would have been useful for the human race, had we put the Manhattan Project-style effort into this instead of nukes, or more likely had we put the entire Steel Age effort into spacefaring (rather than swords and cannons and more efficiently blowing ourselves up). We needed to start this effort long ago, before we tipped the planet into its environmental death-spiral. We squandered the opportunity.
There is no will to do it in the US, even at this very late date: there's too much money to be made in blowing ourselves up. There is no will whatsoever, other than window dressing. As a species we will either blow ourselves up, or starve, but we'll perish here on Earth- with the possible exception of a few well-heeled individuals who will arrive temporarily at their nearby destinations sterile and with a really funny suntan. No smiley.
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
If it's really that bleak...
...why not do something other than lament?
You've dedicated your life to a field that was always about bucking the odds; if you've really given up hope, why not go full terrorist? The War Machine lumbers on, fueled by stolen promise...stop it NOW.
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
Assumes facts
not in evidence. Yes, I've given up hope for the human race. Absolutely. I personally, on the other hand, have a job designing things that don't blow up (I wouldn't make a good terrorist)- and that pays the bills. I have a wife I love, and just bought a drum kit so that I can get back to writing and playing protest songs. And I will survive, for exactly as long as I can- and no longer.
I will maybe implant a pleasant idea in some of the people I play to (and write for) for the remaining moments I'm here. That'll feed my soul. I will focus locally, not globally, primarily for my own sanity. Otherwise, I'll eat, drink and be merry right up until the Powers That Be finally immanentize the eschaton.
Rage all you want, to be sure: you do you, with my absolute blessing. As will I. We all rage in different ways...
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
You are correct. We can't go to other planets
to live, and probably won't ever be able to do so, but not because of money as much as simple physics.
I have a framed set of US 8 cent stamps that depict a man and woman with 2 children. It says Family Planning. We were on the start of being able to allow everyone to limit family size with access to universal birth control. What happened to it? Ronald Reagan, the Roman Catholic Church (including Pope Francis who refused to acknowledge in his environmental statements that overpopulation played any role in climate issues) and a plethora of other groups who made sure that overseas clinics were closed. Now they are closing them here.
So for sure, the planet will shrug us off. But hey, that might make Jesus come sooner!
"Without the right to offend, freedom of speech does not exist." Taslima Nasrin
@TheOtherMaven I'm pretty sure WE will
I'm pretty sure WE will end us. As to when this happens, I recon it's up to a small but significant number of human beings, which I understand could be just 10% of the human race.
It always seems to be that a small group of individuals get kick ass before every major change in the locus of who controls what. I just hope that I finish this life being one of them.
It makes me want to live about 30 more years than I probably will.
We don't have unfettered capitalism
It's capitalism directed by the wealthy to manage the economy for their benefit, with rules to benefit them enforced by our government. It may be a capitalist nation, but 99% of us aren't rich enough to be capitalists.
Time for me to go
I leave you all with this clip:
https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2022/08/coming-in-about-40-minutes.html
The Duran, Andrei Martyanov and Larry Johnson.
I cannot stomach another smidgen from the Caitlin fan club.
NYCVG
This is a basterdized
capitalist system.
Under true capitalism there would be no banks after the year 2008.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
What makes me most upset...
...they honestly think they're the best and the brightest the world has to offer, or know how to find all the people who are. If that were true, their behavior might actually be justified...
..but they're not, and they don't.
The best and brightest have all been preemptively turned to pulp and spit out before we could even have had our say.
Is this really a Tolkienesque tale of Good VS Evil, or more a Twilight Zone-style tragedy?
"FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MONTRESOR!!!"
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
Julian Assange
NYCVG
The confusion between the concepts
of freedom and unfettered capitalism
is a well developed illusion. Do we all have to
die to prove money is secondary to morality?
Thanks for the essay!
More than that...
...the idea that capitalism was EVER individualistic is a Cold War fabrication; capitalism is, and always was, collectivist.
Another big problem is that it's not JUST the "pro-capitalism" team that reinforces this; Marxists do it, too - in fact, they started it (guess who coined the term "capitalism" to start with?).
I'm inclined to say Marxism is the worst thing ever to happen to "The Left"; the 18th-Century Enlightenment thinkers got it right, and then some 19th-Century eager-beavers (actually starting amid the French Revolution, if I'm not mistaken, with people like Robespierre insisting on the need for a replacement for religion and a generally Christian misapprehension of how morality works) ruined it. We've been stuck, as I keep saying, in an 'Evil yin-yang', an unwinnable ping-pong match between Ludwig von Mises and Pol Pot, ever since.
Cassiodorus keeps talking about "a failure of political imagination", and I think this is the cause of it.
- Daniel Boorstin
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
IMHO...
this analysis is incomplete without discussion of the roll oil has played in the boom and bust cycle we now find ourselves in.
Cheap and plentiful, it's pervasive in our lives. Fuel, manufacturing, food, etc. It was the catalyst that drove the boom of the 20th century. It propelled the exponential growth in the population. Now in the 21st century we seem to have hit the peak.
We are now scrambling to find alternatives. Capitalism can surely be blamed for the delay in that search as the oil industry hustled to hang on to their cash cow while squelching new technologies which has cost us dearly. We could have and should have been much further along than we are now.
Without cheap and plentiful energy the population will dwindle, for the most part because we wont be able to grow food to the extent that we have in the past.
One of the most visible negatives of capitalism
(a term coined by Marx in 1848 btw, in his analysis of the Europe wide revolutions that year)
is the problem that sellers of profitable goods, once they realize their product is obsolete or worse should never have been created in the first place, will form even greater monopolies, which stifle development of replacement goods and coerce the people into believing that the obsolete, dangerous product is necessary.
Ultimately this can be said for agriculture. The people who discovered that by forcing a percentage of the tribe to nothing but food production that percentage can produce far more food than an entire tribe of (part time) hunter gatherers, thus that tribe can create dictators and high priests and generals and soldiers and propagandists and all the other pillars of dystopia. Pandora's Box was full of wheat and corn.
On to Biden since 1973
Squelched new technologies
It should be noted that the first four "horseless carriages" Studebaker marketed were battery electric before the turn of the previous century.
Where would the world be today had we invested in that technology beginning in 1897?
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
A different point of view
Malthus is just a convenience for the Great Reset crowd.
Klaus Schwab just loves him. Never mind that he's been proven wrong again and again and again. What's killing the planet is the capitalist system, not the population.
Never let your morals prevent you from doing the right thing.--Salvor Hardin, Foundation, by Isaac Asimov
I disagree. I don't think it will matter what economic system
we are living under or with, if we continue to make too many people for this planet, THAT is what will kill us all off..."Several studies have shown that family planning and gender empowerment strategies, if implemented globally, would reduce annual GHG emissions. A 2017 study showed that voluntarily lowering fertility rates through strategies such as improved healthcare, education, and economic opportunity for women and girls would result in a 35% reduction in emissions by 2100. Project Drawdown notes that improving the health and education of women and girls globally would better equip them for the climate crisis with the side effect of saving 85 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent due to slowing population growth."
From.....https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_sustainabili....
"Without the right to offend, freedom of speech does not exist." Taslima Nasrin
Yes, there are limits...
But if capitalism is the cause of overpopulation, perhaps you can explain the mechanism by which it is causing the highest birthrates in the world to be here:
1.Niger - 6.8
2.Somalia - 6.0
3.Congo (Dem. Rep.) - 5.8 (tie)
4.Mali - 5.8 (tie)
5.Chad - 5.6
6.Angola - 5.4
7.Burundi - 5.3 (tie)
8.Nigeria - 5.3 (tie)
9.Gambia - 5.2
10.Burkina Faso - 5.1
or the lowest birthrates to be here:
1. South Korea - .9
2.Puerto Rico (U.S. territory) - 1.0
3.Hong Kong (China SAR) - 1.1 (tie)
4.Malta - 1.1 (tie)
5.Singapore - 1.1 (tie)
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fertility-rate
Or how it is causing the US, Western Europe, former Soviet bloc and pretty much all of NE Asia birthrates to be running at well below replacement levels?
Every Man a King
December 11, 1935
I took my Mom to the
capitol building in Baton Rouge so she could see the bullet holes left by long's assassination. My family revered him.
I need to go again, just to revive my anti-capitalist attitude.
Thanks for posting his speech!
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
Huey Long...
certainly had his flaws, but overall very impressive. He was free with the 'N-word', called the
poor whites hicks, but enjoyed huge support among them as people understood that he understood and sympathized with their situation.
His assassination was pretty convenient for FDR as Long was gearing up to run against him in 1936 - most people don't recognize that a lot of the relief-type New Deal programs attributed to Roosevelt were implemented in response to the popularity of what Long was promoting and his attacks on Roosevelt as a wealthy elitist unconcerned and out of touch with ordinary people.
True fun factoid: Black Panther leader Huey Newton was so named because his father was a big fan of Huey Newton.
This 1995 movie is a bit hard to come by, but one of John Goodman's best ever roles playing 'The Kingfish' (also w/ Anne Heche):
Kingfish: A Story of Huey P. Long
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113550/
Now, that's a righteous rant
Thank you for reminding us of Huey Long. It's been such a long time since equality has been reached.
refutably untrue
a canard as old as greed.
To frame the problem as too many mouths, too many lives?
Ridiculous. but where have we heard that before?
All the food that goes to waste, like every other resource lost to greed's intent.
Water.
It aint the populace.
Im sorry if that is hard to understand.
but it is refutably untrue.
When and where was it refuted?
.
I must have slept through it.
I only know that colony collapse is irrefutably true for all other species that suffer the myriad triggers and effects of grotesque overpopulation.
Food has little to do with the demise of complex systems and species. There are great and subtle forces, environmentally and internally, neurological and psychological — that descend into chaos or or are forgotten when a species surrenders to entropy and apathy. Overpopulation is unhealthy and ultimately terminal, even after the population numbers shrink enough to erase the mistake. The condition starts at the edges and infects the core, softly, like a dream.
IMAGINE if you woke up the day after a US Presidential Election and headlines around the the world blared, "The Majority of Americans Refused to Vote in US Presidential Election! What Does this Mean?"
overpopulation?
a leading cause of extinction, Im sure. I mention food resources because I see some of that picture regularly. What I didnt mention was the classroom experience oh so many decades ago, where they laid bare the reality that contradicts the overpopulation horseshit. Despite geographic and trade distinctions between various areas, when you look at actual population densities in smaller regions, you realize that is not our particular problem, at all. Assuming you dont live in a civilized country somewhere and already know this.
Based on the rest of your remarks, I suppose not. Thanks for helping me reunderstand complex systems, social evolution and extinction. I had it all wrong, it seems.