We’re not talking about eugenics we’re just talking about how much society would be improved if we culled the weak. Nobody is saying anything about eugenics though that would be uncivil

Collapse was fascistic even back in the mid 2010s, should have seen the discord.

Could someone just take over that abandoned com?

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.

And the smell of rot fills the country.

Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

without any is just gonna tend towards which is its own form of collapse

Human society has this cool system called capitalism that generally deliberately wastes anywhere between 10-90% of harvested resources depending on industry. Fossil fuels should already be borderline redundant resources, large scale farming companies frequently have lower yields per square metre and higher soil depletion, somewhere between 50-70% of food doesn’t get eaten, over half of clothes don’t get used more than a couple times (and 10-30% don’t get used ever). Food, clothes, furniture, extremely expensive electronics and even cars get deliberately destroyed in brand-new condition because profits.

Given we’re working at a fraction of the efficiency we currently should be, I struggle to believe “we have too many humans to support” arguments have much basis in facts (instead of more of a basis in just aligning with desired ideology) until we address that first thing.

Instead it’s more “I can’t imagine how society might change to not be enormously wasteful so instead billions should die”.

I heard if we cull just 1% of the population we would have trillions more capital to feed everyone

Eugene Icks?

No… I don’t know a, Eugene Icks.

But have you met my fren, Thomas Malthus?

Incredibly misleading quote of the paper:

Managing populations is equally intractable. In many countries, calling for population planning would constitute political suicide. Even the United Nations Population Fund recently ‘decried any expressed concern about population growth as “alarmist”’ (O’Sullivan 2022b); strong advocates of population reduction strategies policies risk being vilified as racist, eco-fascists, eugenicists, anti-human or worse.

Hey look, I spotted the one part where it mentions anything having to do with eugenics.

That’s not the author discounting a eugenic solution, just admitting that a population cull would be practically impossible. The rest of the paragraph:

Such attitudes and accusations are yet another manifestation of innate reductionist simplicity exacerbated by socially-constructed ideological blinders. Bajaj (2022) argues that the UN’s taunt of population alarmism springs from widespread pro-natalist ideology ‘which results in unrelenting pressures – a globally pervasive form of reproductive coercion – experienced primarily by women’. She further emphasises that that ‘pronatalism is integral to our current growth-based economic system, which relies on constant population growth to supply new consumers continually’. Indeed, corporations in the US [and other countries experiencing ‘peak population’] are sensationalising the idea of an economic ‘baby bust’ that threatens the nation with a paucity of workers, a reduced tax base and the loss of international economic clout. Many governments are responding with incentives to increase national fecundity.

The author urges the initiation of a global depopulation project led by the UN, using what seems to be geopolitics academic jargon for “starve people, start with the poor countries.”

This community is an antrum of eco-fascists. They’re going late.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The whole debate is dumb. Any idea along that lines is a political non-starter. As a species we’ll just let nature implement some form of it against our wishes and intentions. Unfortunately, that implementation will likely be the worst in terms of damage and equity. I fully expect those most guilty to suffer the least. I will definitely starve before Bezos and Musk do. The unfortunates of the global south will probably suffer more before I do which I will admit is inequitable.

I fully expect to hear, “Why did no one warn us that it would be this bad?” in my lifetime. I don’t think the answer that “They did, but everyone chose to ignore it.” will provide any comfort.