If I could snap my fingers and have people wake up from the capitalist propaganda they’ve been forced their whole lives, I would. Population is not the issue, it’s a deflection.
Comment on New Delhi - during lockdown vs now
SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world 3 weeks agoIf you could just snap your fingers and half the world’s population would disappear would you?
alekwithak@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world 3 weeks ago
Population is definitely an issue there’s no many problem that wouldn’t be instantly solved by going down to a hundred million people.
alekwithak@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
If your only problem is that you want more resources available for yourself, I can see how you’d come to that conclusion, but you’re wrong. It wouldn’t solve the underlying problems, and in fact it would create a whole set of new ones. Modern civilization depends heavily on economies of scale, and your magic finger snap does nothing to change how resources are produced, distributed, or consumed.
You’re also assuming that every human consumes resources at roughly the same rate. They don’t. Not even close. A tiny fraction of humanity consumes vastly more resources than billions of other people. Your finger snap doesn’t address that inequality at all. The same people and systems that concentrate resources now would simply have an even larger pool of resources to hoover up afterward. Then what? Snap your fingers again?
And follow the logic to its conclusion. If reducing humanity to 100 million “solves” problems because fewer people are consuming resources and competing for them, then 1 million should be even better. Five thousand better still. Ultimately, zero humans means zero poverty, zero war, zero homelessness, zero human carbon emissions, and zero human suffering. Problem solved!
Except obviously it isn’t, because eliminating the people who experience a problem is not the same thing as solving the problem for those people.
We don’t have billions of people living in poverty because there simply isn’t enough stuff on Earth to go around. We have enormous disparities in who controls resources and who gets to consume them. Fantasizing about eliminating most of humanity while leaving that system completely intact makes you a stooge for the oligarchs.
SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world 3 weeks ago
But even with these slower rates of growth, our population is already far above the sustainable carrying capacity given by Bradshaw and team’s models.
The gap between their optimum number of 2.5 billion and our current population size of 8.3 billion may help explain the problems with overconsumption our species currently faces.
Earth’s Population Has Surpassed The Planet’s Capacity, Study Suggests
snowdriftissue@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Holy fuck why does Lemmy have so many ecofascists
huppakee@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s not like they are welcome in many other places
ALiteralCabbage@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Resorting to calling people ecofascists feels pretty reductive. As the world currently exists, and under current economic systems, population growth is a pretty huge issue, especially while basically zero effort is being put into reducing carbon emissions globally.
There was an article somewhere in these threatlds that gave a decent summary:
The Earth cannot sustain the future human population, or even today’s, without a major overhaul of socio-cultural practices for using land, water, energy, biodiversity, and other resources
What a lot of people (myself included) struggle with is that the amount and significance of change needed to make an actual difference is huge right now, and it requires a concerted global effort to get anywhere close to halting what feels like an inexorable rise in earth’s temperatures.
Until we can change this then humans might as well be described as a virus and looking at forced population control (in this case of transport etc. under covid) and seeing a measurable improvement in our environment feels cathartic and, honestly, easier to obtain than the global overturning of capital.
snowdriftissue@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Resorting to calling people ecofascists feels pretty reductive.
Goes on do describe their definitionally ecofascist beliefs in detail
ALiteralCabbage@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Define ecofascism then, because its easy to just fuck around and shit on an opinion without providing an alternative.
I’m not saying we need eugenics or a cull., and I’m certainly not blaming the global south for existing in a world that was driven by short sighted rich European capitalists.
What I am saying is:
- Population is a problem provided the status quo doesn’t change
- The status quo just ain’t changing. Not fast enough, anyway.
- In light of this the current state of human existence (and the systems which support it) could be reasonably described as a virus. Exponential growth at the cost of a host? Prove me wrong.
- Solutions? Fucking sea change and a total shift in the way we occupy the planet. We’re not over crowding we’re over producing (and over consuming).
What’s eco-fascist about that, and if you don’t agree, please let me know.
Nouvellalia@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah, overpopulation is really easy to handle and doesn’t require violence. Give kids a genuine education that they can continue into adulthood, and access to birth control and reproductive healthcare, and bam, population growth is fixed.
The population problem is intentionally caused by the epstein class, so they can have abundant, desperate, cheap labor.
Doomsider@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah, you definitely don’t know what that word means.
Also, try telling the civilization of Easter Island overpopulation isn’t a problem. Did you know the Middle East used to be a forest?
No ecofascists here, but I am starting to suspect someone is an ecotard.
Doomsider@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Where in the fuck do you get ecofascism from!? Do you even know what the word means.
"Ecofascism is a political ideology that blends environmental protection with extreme racism, white supremacy, and violence against marginalized groups. "
snowdriftissue@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
How about you do the bare minimum reading and take a look at the wikipedia page for ecofascism instead of presenting me with a dictionary definition of the word, which only highlights your obvious ignorance on this topic, and then get back to me when you’re done.
Doomsider@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You are so fucking wrong it isn’t funny. Please tell me your made up definition as you act like an ecotardburger.
cloudshouter@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Straight half? No. A select 3% a year for five years? Maybe. If you’ve seen any of the realistic critiques of the Thanos snap you know that doesn’t go well. Trimming down the fascists, oligarchs, nationalist, theocrats, tech barons, and similar greed and hate mongers should be enough without crashing everything.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
Well resource consumption wouldn’t go down THAT much. Outside of private jets and the like, most shit is still consumed by people.
Making it all illegal works, killing the people who make it possible for us does not because new ones will spring up.
cloudshouter@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Disrupt their established power networks and put the fear of gods in the survivors would go a long way.
GolfFoxtrotLima@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Yeah, Same here honestly. I wish
PP_BOY_@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Without a second thought
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I would probably get botox for my chin first and then think about it.
Squizzy@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Id just have the wealthiest die 5 billion times
yermaw@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
We could just behave, we dont need to kill half of everyone.
DarkFuture@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I was on Thanos’ side the entire time.
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I felt like this watching Black Panther. The “bad” guy wanted to give Wakanda’s weapons to the oppressed and downtrodden people of the world, and I was like “yeah, sounds good.”
Railcar8095@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
*Starts dancing flamenco
Sanctus@anarchist.nexus 3 weeks ago
If I could snap my fingers and all the world’s billionaires disappear I would, or oil refineries. Not people though. Humans aren’t the virus.
jlow@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
Snap for all the cars to disappear!
SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world 3 weeks ago
Getting rid of half the population or half the refineries would accomplish the same thing right?
Seleni@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The problem is mathematically it just doesn’t work. Humans are too good at reproducing. We’d be back in force before too long.
No, the only way is more death note style, taking out billionaires and some of their bootlicking buddies, and those who put profit over the planet’s health. It’s perfectly possible for the rest of us to patch things up—we almost did it with the ozone—until guess who decided they wanted to throw money around to force us to stop.
huppakee@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think we humans have grown to a population size where anyone’s profit hurting the planets health should be stopped. We need to take protecting the planet’s (in some ways fragile) ecosystem as serious as we take protecting children against abuse for example. Future generations will have to learn or we will find out together what fucking around gets us.
huppakee@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
If the half of the population includes the part that owns cars perhaps, but the carbon footprint of a person varries greatly. In general the more money someone has the higher the burden they are on the climate.
SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world 3 weeks ago
Oil is used in the production and transportation of food.
Also fertilizer.
And the plastic that keeps the medical system running.
Sanctus@anarchist.nexus 3 weeks ago
Idk, I feel like targeting living beings is different than targeting structures, even though I know a sudden lack of refined oil would lead to death. I’m just convinced they’ll never stop until their own heat deaths.
SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world 3 weeks ago
Just the collapse of the medical system alone due to the missing plastics would kill millions.
kettuli@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They don’t refine oil for people to consume it, they refine oil to generate shareholder value.
SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world 3 weeks ago
Do they just dump it in a big hole and profit?