The essence of the class war. by Fremdfirma

Thanks. That says just what I was trying to say about the rich and the poor.

Hence, eugenics. The tricky thing that people don't always get is that eugenics isn't always about killing and limiting population, which is why the Eloi conspiracy is essential to understanding it. It's precisely about *preventing* the ants from ever figuring that out. If you can keep the ants stupid, then that's not a problem. An endless number of moronic ants are allowed. If smart ants reproduce, you have a problem, that's why eugenics targets the intelligent.

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Thursday, March 3, 2011 7:31 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Thanks. That says just what I was trying to say about the rich and the poor.

Hence, eugenics. The tricky thing that people don't always get is that eugenics isn't always about killing and limiting population, which is why the Eloi conspiracy is essential to understanding it. It's precisely about *preventing* the ants from ever figuring that out. If you can keep the ants stupid, then that's not a problem. An endless number of moronic ants are allowed. If smart ants reproduce, you have a problem, that's why eugenics targets the intelligent.

"I don't think that word means what you think it means"

eu·gen·ics

the study of or belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population, especially by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits (positive eugenics).

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Thursday, March 3, 2011 8:04 PM

The people in question are defining positive and negative qualities in a very different way than you would. Ultimately, what they consider the "good genes" are whatever helps them achieve their goals.

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Friday, March 4, 2011 3:38 AM

The essence of the class war.

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
The people in question are defining positive and negative qualities in a very different way than you would. Ultimately, what they consider the "good genes" are whatever helps them achieve their goals.

Byte nailed it.

Eugenics evolved from its inception. What the definition you just posted would classify as "positive eugenics" would now draw fire from relatively few. Communities like Kiryas Joel might fit the bill, but as long as they're not hurting anyone else, who cares?

The people who actually *use* eugenics have very little need of creating a superior numerous species of human, even if this were the original intent of the idea, which its not.

To understand, you need to understand ruling families. If a family does not rule, it cannot enforce eugenics. Eugenics requires a tremendous amount of power to execute.

For economic reasons, the "ruling families" cannot grow because doing so diffuses their extant wealth. If a ruling family grows rapidly, like the Kennedys, it also rapidly diffuses its persistent capital, the economic system on which the ruling class system, and indeed, ultimately our economy, is based.

Ie. Kiryas Joel, even with legal manipulation and an incredible amount of govt. assistance is now made up of a citizenry who is almost exclusively sub-poverty.

Ergo, the result will be that whoever concentrates power will remain in control, or become in control. If a population experiences a marked decline, such as a genocide or extermination, the extant persistent capital will become concentrated, leading to more power per person. Since each person requires some money to live their own life, and will have their own thoughts and agenda, the concentration of power and wealth is very important.

If all the wealth and power is concentrated in a small handful of individuals, those individuals will make all of the decisions, and the others in their network will be beholden to them by some means, but not involved in the decision making process, leading to a social dictatorship of sorts.

Essential to this entire process is a fundamental flaw in the economic model set up around the 2nd millenium BC in ancient Egypt, the system we call "capitalism."

Capitalism is not a free market, the use of money, fiat currency or any of a number of things generally associated with it, and it is not pro-business.

Capitalism is a belief in capital. Capital is any commodity which is sufficiently limited that accumulating more of it gives you a greater share. If something is essentially unlimited in quantity, than possessing more will not give you an increased share.

If capital is not persistent, than there is no way to accumulate more of it. Take a side step for a moment back to ancient Egypt.

Prior to the introduction the gold standard in Egypt, gold was considered decorative "dirt" which was gathered from the Nile and applied to adorn things. Money was wheat. If you grew wheat, you could fill sacks with it. Sacks of wheat could be exchanged for goods and services, and used to hire labor. The Pyramids were built and paid for with wheat.

No one can have a wheat monopoly. There's just too much of it. No one can pass on their wheat from generation to generation, it's just not durable enough. You will not have a wheat king, or a ruling wheat class. Ruling classes dominated religious orders, and their available labor through their following gave them power.

With the introduction of gold, as a currency, which was done by weight, those who believed in the value of gold would exchange it, much like we exchange worthless fiat, and even some strive to accumulate it over their lifetimes, not believing it to be as worthless as it is.

If you happen to control a large amount of gold, you increase your share, because gold is essentially limited. Sure, new gold may be discovered, but each new discovery is dwarfer by the extant gold.

Gold can be passed from generation to generation. It is a persistent form of capital. Limited capital. Over time, families can accumulate a larger and larger share of gold.

Those in the gold economy were gaining power over others by this means. Those in the wheat economy were not. As a result, soon all the dominant power players held gold, whether they had a religion or not. Any religion which did not hold gold was quickly out of power. Anyone holding wheat alone was hopeless.

Thus was ushered in capitalism, based on persistent capital as an inescapable consequence of the competition of multiple economic systems, based on the persistence and limited qualities of persistent capital such as gold.

Since the nature of persistent capital is that it is limited in such a way as to render each new discovery of capital insignificant compared to the extant inherited capital, the total capital, while it may slowly grow, is never going to be in a situation where the new incoming capital outweighs the extant balance of capital in the system.

Once you have such a system, you have ruling families. Those families are going to be making the decisions, because they rule (even if they also suck ;) ) If any of these families rapidly reproduces, they will diffuse their gold unless they disinherit those children. If they do, the disinherited children have no power, and so are not part of the ruling class, as a result, the ruling class is still not growing.

Since the concentration and diffusion of capital and decision making within families is a foregone conclusion of the system, so is what happens to eugenics when it is entered into the system.

Say some family *does* embark on a plan to breed superior humans. This is only at all possible through the intense manipulation of others, since not doing so would quickly diffuse their power. This means they automatically become parasitic, and their new population automatically becomes poor, and they do not add to the ruling class, and push the positive eugenicists towards so called "negative" eugenics, making this the unavoidable outcome of eugenics, on either side, ergo, this is what eugenics is.

Negative eugenics is standard issue genocide article II, particularly sections c-e, and further not yet legislated ideas that continue in that direction. The goal is simple: If your own population of a power ruling family cannot grow past the rate of the growth of limited persistent capital, then you must limit that growth. If the growth of other populations exceeds your own, then they will quickly overthrow you and declare that gold, or land or whatever your capitalism is based on is no longer money, and all of your power is lost. While you may allow this to happen, like the families which allow their power to be diffused, the result is that you will no longer be in power, and so you will not contribute to the way in which halls of power operate.

In this evolving competition, anyone who is removed from the system will have no impact, so those who adhere to the system become more and more galvanized in it, because it they don't, the nature of the system will automatically select them for economic extinction.

Ergo, ruling families are driven towards "negative" eugenics. Or more simply put "eugenics."

Now, once you are a eugenicist, you need to limit the population of others by whatever means available. The more effective the means, the more power you will gain. This leads to an increasingly destructive society which will fight wars, create wars between two or more societies they wish to eliminate, destroy the food producing nature of the environment, poison the water supply, and just generally wreck everything for everyone else.

The only hitch in this plan is that the need to destroy all others is that they represent a threat to the economic system. Dogs do not represent a threat to the economic system. For many centuries, ruling european or white families did not consider blacks to be a threat, because they were convinced that blacks were mentally inferior, and for many ruling families, this belief still holds. Others want to limit the population of blacks. This may seem like they therefore believe blacks are inferior, but actually it is the fear that they are not which drives racist eugenicists.

But back to dogs: Enter the Eloi

Anything which is stupid, or perceived as stupid, is not a threat to the system. If therefore evolutionarily in the interests of eugenics and by extension ruling families, to *increase* the population of the *inferior* if they are either so inferior that they cannot possibly threaten the economic system, or if they believed to be so by all of the ruling parties.

Encouraging the growth of this population does two things:
First, it displaces the "threat" population of those who might overthrow you with your new "non-threat" population.
Second, it adds to your obedient work force of those who will labor for your benefit and not their own. Even if the labor of the stupid is worse less than that of the smart, it is greater than zero, and they do not represent a threat to the power structure.

This means a class of people who are so stupid that they are essentially dogs to society. HG Wells Time Machine predicts a world in which the human race divides so severely in this direction, that it is not just a class, but a whole new species is formed. This creates the final barrier, eliminates the threat that any of the Eloi created will come back to interbreed with the ruling families, and the dominance of the Morlock ruling class is established.

This has been called a number of things, the dumbing down, etc. All sorts of mechanisms are put in place to make the people stupid. Once you have a stupid population, you must keep them occupied, so bring in any endless form of entertainment and employment, and decrease the efficiency of all things to the maximum possible extent to ensure that they are completely occupied all of the time.

Our own population is enslaved by debt to ensure that they work endlessly for fiat, which is granted by those who hold the capital monopoly, so that we can never gain capital, and that we will never have time to think, organize, and revolt against our overlords.

People who accumulate gold think they have outsmarted the system, but they have forgotten the lessons of ancient Egypt: The newly available gold, whether mined or traded, can never make a measurable balance against the extant persistent gold, so such people are doomed to never be able to overthrow the system. However, those who accumulate fiat are accumulating air, because fiat diminishes through inflation, and is limitless in quantity, and hinges on the grant of the issuer, who may at any point disappear, and in many times in history, has. Our federal reserve notes here have only been around of 97 years. That's not long in a 4000 year history of capitalism.

As for eugenics, its evolutionary endpoint at the moment seems clear: Kill the smart, breed the stupid, and keep everyone under control, because if they ever figure out how radically they outnumber the ruling class, they will revolt, and overthrow them, and if they do that, they might usher in some new economic model.

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Friday, March 4, 2011 11:06 PM

Doesn't sound like any defintion of eugenics I have ever come across, which is primarily with strengthening the human gene pool, a subjective and flawed theory. I hear smatterings of eugenics theory being espoused by some conservatives in their arguments against welfare and support for the underpriveledged.

You appear to be speaking about a sociological theory that describes processes for concentration of wealth and power, which I have no issue with agreeing with you, along with a hotchpotch of other ideas that don't appear to make a lot of sense to me.

Quote:
Now, once you are a eugenicist, you need to limit the population of others by whatever means available. The more effective the means, the more power you will gain. This leads to an increasingly destructive society which will fight wars, create wars between two or more societies they wish to eliminate, destroy the food producing nature of the environment, poison the water supply, and just generally wreck everything for everyone else.

This is just describing the bi-product of societies that demand continious growth and demand for resources, rather than attempts to limit population. Despite constant warring, the world population continues to grow exponentially, although not evenly from place to place.

the capitalist system is a short sighted greedy one. it constantly shits in its own backyard in order to obtain wealth and although it is true that the majority of wealth, and particularly power does concentrate in this system, it might also be said that people in western society live like kings on old, in terms of their material goods at least.

I believe that most people in this system, even the powerful and wealthy, would only have the one aim, that of accumulating more power and wealth. I don't think they give a frak about population, they just see things in terms of markets and resources. some of what you describe may be true, but your theory as to what underpins it does not seem plausable or realistic.

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Friday, March 4, 2011 11:08 PM

moving along

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Saturday, March 5, 2011 3:07 AM

Magon,

FFF doubleposted your last post.

Quote:
Doesn't sound like any defintion of eugenics I have ever come across

Perhaps if one're studying too much theory and not enough reality. Even communism is good in theory ;)

Quote:
eugenics theory being espoused by some conservatives

Not quite, but sometimes you hear this evolutionary economic nonsense:

"The rich are rich because they are more fit to survive. The intelligent would naturally become rich and the stupid would become poor."

I'm sure you've met this rubbish, of course, wealth is overwhelmingly inherited, and IMHO distributed or concentrated as I outlined above. Nonetheless I have heard many rich people say it, both in the media and personally, because it's very comforting to hear. It is self flattering, but also requires them to do nothing.

As for the underpriveledged, I'm the underpriveledged and *I* argue against against support for the underpriveledged. Support never comes without strings, and strings are control. The rich never mean well by the poor.

Re: growth, my theory has nothing to do with resources. I think the concept of limited resources was artificially introduced as a mechanism of social power, like the real limit on gold or land. The limit of resources digs into the concept of control commodity, which I'll post later. At the moment I have a headache.

The need to stunt overall population growth comes from the fact that the ruling classes *own* growth is automatically limited by the economic mechanism innate to their power as I outlined above.

It's not really a radical idea I'm trying to promote here, but a logical argument about where the concept of wealth comes from, and how we got to where we are. It's just something that no one ever talks about, because most people start at the present, and work backward, rather than starting at the beginning and working forward.

Most people who trace backward from now, stop when they reach "money" which I think isn't sufficient. Money is just a fiat, issued by a bank, which like a fiat issuing land ownership is held up by a governing body that stakes its claim based on weaponry, but weapons are not a limited resource. When individual soldiers were more important, it became human labor, as soldiers, which was more limited, but when it becomes all robotic drones, it will be completely unlimited. At the moment, I think that it's safe to say weapons are basically not limited, not in the way gold is. Sure, most of the gold is still under the ground, but the rate at which it comes out is small enough that the increase year to year in gold is never enough to upset the balance. I don't think gold actually plays a very significant role in modern economics, it was just essential to the background of how this limited commodity system evolved.

Quote:
the capitalist system is a short sighted greedy one.

I think this is a common misconception, but I think I get how it comes about. The capitalist system is incredibly long term in its plan, generations, which is why persistent capital is key.

However, the ruling families deliberately encourage short sighted thinking by the next rung down, the ones who represent an actual threat to their dominance, because this short sightedness will prevent them from ammassing enough wealth and power to become a ruling class. Ergo, it's in the interests of long-term capitalists like the Rockefellers to make sure that other growing corporate empires switch to a very short term manner of thinking. The short term plan can also be used by a ruling power to drain the wealth of a growing one.

On obtaining wealth... It's also important to remember that those who accumulate fiat, by itself, are not accumulating true wealth unless they are able to transfer it into a more permanent form, by which I do not mean gold, but something that will hold and grow wealth for generations outside of the fiat system.

Quote:
it might also be said that people in western society live like kings on old, in terms of their material goods at least.

Or that they *are* the kings of old. This is where Pirate News is closer to the truth than people care to admit, while not saying that he is spot on. The wealthy of today are not necessarily the rightful heirs to thrones, or handed that legitimacy by their forebearers, but they are the domineers of that same system, and the wealth they are holding is largely that same wealth. Various manner were used to transfer accumulated wealth from kings to capitalists, and one of the largest of those was war. War requires tremendous expense, and supplying weapons or mercenaries is a way to make money off a king if you can instigate a war. The introduction of credit into that system allows wars to grow well beyond the means of those powers fighting the wars, who can then be supplied with loans, which they will then end up paying interest on for generations, as American is still doing for WWII and every war that came after. Sure, it's possible that a King could simply pay off the war debt, but if the capitalists have enough power to control the instigation of the war, the supplying of military support and the funding of the war, they quite likely have enough power to put policy in place to see that the debt is never paid off fast enough to get rid of the thing. If they do, the capitalists could simply instigate another war.

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I believe that most people in this system, even the powerful and wealthy, would only have the one aim, that of accumulating more power and wealth.

You can believe that, but I think that it's more complicated. They want to continue their own existence. This means that they cannot allow themselves be overthrown by masses of smart ants as Frem illustrated above; and also that they cannot allow other competing ruling powers from displacing them with an increase in wealth and poewr. The drive for more power is not simply a psychological hiccup: If a ruling power allows itself to be displaced, it ends up on the bottom rung, and if they so with, the other ruling powers can kick it off the ladder altogether. Once that is done, they become peasantry.

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I don't think they give a frak about population

Yes, of course not.

Quote:
some of what you describe may be true, but your theory as to what underpins it does not seem plausable or realistic.

I'd appreciate any critique of any areas you think might be weak. I might be wrong, of course, but I suspect I'm at least headed in the right direction.

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Saturday, March 5, 2011 6:21 AM

I said I'd post something on control commodities, so here it is. Sorry if it might need an edit.

Control Commodities

Mechanisms of control are essential our grasshoppers to keep control of us ants. There are psychological propaganda, indoctrination, fear mongering and warmongering tactics, and there's the fiat currency, which like all laws is only as strong as the military or control mechanism backing up the power structure from which it was issued, and while internally can lead to complex manipulations like the Fed Debt manipulation, it also leads to the more sophisticated control mechanisms, like the control commodities.

A control commodity simply put is a commodity which is essential for a society to continue, but is supplied by someone else. Perhaps it's truly essential, or truly unavailable, but chances are it was made essential through some manipulation, or made unavailable by some other manipulation. Simple examples of control commodities are Food, Medical Supplies, Weapons, Housing, etc. and we saw all of these play out in a devastating fashion in both Iraq and Palestine. However, even if something isn't essential to survival, you can create it as a control commodity.

The most obvious historical case of this is oil. The british govt's idea of about a century or so ago was to control the world, or specifically Europe, by converting all energy forms into fossil fuel. This isn't speculation, it's now openly admitted. Sure, oil was a potent energy source, though not the most efficient, but what it really had going for it was that it was in limited supply, and that supply could be controlled militarily, politically and economically, as could its distribution. This is the reason we have diesel ships and not sail, trucks and not trains, etc. Even the space shuttle design was made for maximum fuel consumption. You boost the demand for oil, you increase the power of its control. This is the nature of a control commodity, ergo, it's not all about money. Remember, the people playing this game own their own banks of issue. They could create all the fiat currency they want. That's not what they're after. Of course, for the British per se, this didn't completely work out, as they couldn't maintain control over their own empire, but the idea of oil as a control commodity rapidly spread to anyone else who wanted power.

Control commodity crowd and the military govt. go hand in hand, they are necessary for each other to function. Take someone like T Boone Pickens. If he really had to go up against a million angry hillbillies how long do you think he would last? This is why the ruling classes need govt. Govt. Is absolutely essential to maintain the status quo of wealth. Pickens is doing just what his father did, covertly buying the rights to everyone's land, and then mining the earth into oblivion. If he went into west Texas and said, "Hey, I'm here to take your resources and destroy your land, just sign here," how long would it be until he gets shot? Instead, he can simple buy the govt, or they he, since they both want the resources, which they then want to use to control the populous, without anyone having to go and worry about the locals taking up arms against them.

I picked Pickens because he is one of the new Blue Gold crowd, people who want to monetize the use of water. This is an example of something which is essentially, but not naturally scarce. The idea here is that water can become a control commodity. This is clearly insane, but nonetheless, people are trying. True, we all need water in order to survive, but trillions of gallons of it fall from the sky every day, and 3/4 of the planet is covered in the stuff. But locally, in fresh water supply, if you can get a govt. to grant a fiat of ownership of a fresh water supply, such as an aquifer, or the great lakes, back it up with their military policing system, you can extend that to a monopoly by corrupting, infecting and poisoning all of the water that you don't own, and end up in control of the only clean water, which you can supply it to the people. This is not really about profit of course, it's about control. If those people do something you don't like, you can kill them off in a few days.

Where conspiracy enters into it is that I can see where the Fracking (Hydraulic Fracture Shale Natural Gas Extraction) is an effort to gain control over natural gas as a fossil fuel, but Fracking uses over 1000 chemicals which are added to the water, and then billions of gallons of toxic goop are poured into the local water supply, rendering it utterly toxic. There are many excuses give for doing this such as "these chemicals reduce corrosion, or viscosity or lower the pressure needed, but really, there can be no conceivable predictive ability to know what would happen to any of the traits of water with the addition of more than maybe two or three chemicals. These chemicals will interact, and some will be radically detrimental to others. I'm quite sure that the net effect of this is that the sludge is more corrosive, not less, and the explanation on pressure makes no sense, nothing's stopping them from using higher pressure, but even if it did, you could easily accomplish this with a number of simple relatively non-toxic chemicals. Furthermore, my investigation into the financial balance of the operation shows again and again that Fracking, if viewed as a natural gas industry alone, does not make any money. It must have another purpose. Even if this business *did* end up in the plus column somewhere, that would not be enough to cause it to spread like wildfire across the entire planet.

So, sure, you could call the blue gold theory a conspiracy theory, but it is a natural extension of control commodities, and we know for a fact that Pickens is selling people water, and we also know that Halliburton and Bechtel were engaged in a massive control commodity racket recently with water in Bolivia, and both companies are now heavily involved in Fracking, and with Pickens, so it's not much of a stretch. It's sort of on the lines with "Al Qaeda uses bombs to attack Americans" level of conspiracy theory.

Those in power wish to stay in power, and need control mechanisms to do it. Control commodities can force the people to come crawling on their knees to whoever controls the flow, which is really the end goal... If you're begging for someone else to let you have food or medicine, that person really controls you. Controlling access to food, water, medical supplies etc. can force people to behave in whatever manner you want. Once you have control over a population, you can grow that population, shrink it, put it to work for you on some task, or send it to war. It's not the only means of doing so, but it is certainly one. In particular, you can use it to force them to elect a govt. of your choosing by making the life of the common person so bad as to make them vote for change, if simple manipulation of fiat currency or psychological fearmongering is insufficient to do so.

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Saturday, March 5, 2011 6:37 AM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!

You view yourself as an ant, you are.

And as for eugenics...

It think Capt. Mal is the one who actually nailed it. And in far fewer words.

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

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Saturday, March 5, 2011 10:11 AM

Quote:
I'd appreciate any critique of any areas you think might be weak. I might be wrong, of course, but I suspect I'm at least headed in the right direction.

I don't see what you describe as eugenics as happening, unless I make it an all encompassing definition that includes 'concentrating power and wealth and economically limiting ones competetition'. I don't personally see that as anything like eugenics, but it exlains your conviction that it is happening, if that is how you describe it. I don't see that there has been attempt to limit the population of wealthy countries, only that people in wealthy countries choose to have less children - children after all, limit ones ability to fully function as a wealth producing economic unit, pesky little terrors need looking after and all, but they are a fabulous market. I digress. westerners have less kids because they like things, is basically how it sits. You may be interested to note that we have been trying to increase our population here in Oz, and the government has offered cash incentives for babies. It works too, people have more kids.

Your explanation for war, environmental damage and other things that impact of the population is that it is a eugenics conspiracy by the wealthy and powerful to limit the competition for wealth and power. My explanation is that those features are a bi product of of a greedy system that wants wealth, particularly resources at any cost, bugger the consequences. Also fallout where resources are increasinly limited. I'd also like to point out that the biggest tolls on lives and environments happen in developing, not developed countries - where your so called Eloi live. so that kind of blows out your theory about targeting competition, not the 'dogs'.

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Saturday, March 5, 2011 10:45 AM

Magon

I could give you and argue for at least a hundred examples, but it wouldn't be an efficient use of time for either of us, so I'll give you one I suspect you'll be willing to accept:

The Israeli blockade on Gaza is allowed a measured amount of food an medical supplied as the bare minimum for the last census population of Gaza to subsist on. This could have continued forever, but it allowed no increase for an increase in the population of Gaza. Ergo, it allowed support for a known number of Gazans, but no new Gazans. It could easily be argued that such a policy had, as one of its aims, to limit the increase in the number of Gazans, a direct violation of the UN convention on genocide, article two, section d, (if not also c) Ironically, a document created and signed by all nations as a reaction to the holocaust.

This semantically outlaws eugenics and genocide in the manner in which war was semantically outlawed, which means that it comes down to semantics. You could call the policy towards Gaza "genocide" if you wanted to, but I draw lines based on how I see the usage most commonly in my reading, and almost everything that was written in the last 10-20 years was online, so the use which appears online, not in books written in the 1920s or 30s, though the definitions are not far changed.

I would say it was "genocide" if the Israelis were actively exterminating the Gazans. For instance, former US president Clinton's campaign against Iraq I would classify as "genocide" and not "eugenics" even though the structure was the same as that of the Israeli blockade, because Clinton deliberately lowered the allowed amount of food and medical supplies to well *below* the number needed to sustain the last census population of Iraq, and by UN estimates, between 500,000-1,000,000 Iraqis starved within 18 months, resulting in a virtually unanimous condemnation of the united states.

By contrast, I would call what George W. Bush did "War" because specific mechanisms were not put into place to limit the growth of the Iraqi population, and it was not a goal* he just outright killed people. You could call it "war of attrition" or "terrorism" but as it had the backing of a Govt, or coalition of same, I would not call it "terrorism."

* neither stated nor affective, as iraqi births continued, the population level was not decimated, rather, the people who were there at the time were killed, 300,000 to 1.5 million

As for what you referred to as "positive eugenics" this idea was largely abandoned by the people who came up with and practiced under the name eugenics, and so I feel as if it's lacking a name.

What exactly do you call the people in Kiryas Joel, (besides Satmars, which is what they call themselves) or the Quiverfull christians? I don't think either of these groups are intentionally breeding "genetically superior humans" I think they're breeding "a numerically superior population." This would have to also be considered different from the was Eugenics is used in the Star Trek episode "Space Seed." By "The Wrath of Khan" Roddenberry himself had IIRC abandoned the word "eugenics" for what Khan's people were doing, breeding superior humans, and resorted to "genetic engineering" which is not accurate either, since they were not synthesizing replicants.

If anyone were creating Roy Batty or Khan Noonien Singh, I think we would need a new name for it, or more over, two new names for it, since it's not the same. GMO Humans? I don't know. We don't have a word for it in common usage I guess because no one is doing it. If they did, I wouldn't have any objection. I'm concerned with people killing people and populations and cultures and the fish and the birds and the trees, the environment and Earth as a whole. Not particularly worried about anyone creating any new life. it could become a problem if it was an all consuming lifeform, but it hasn't been a problem yet.

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Saturday, March 5, 2011 11:38 AM

Pretending, for a moment, that intentions don't matter. Our water is being poisoned, the poor are becoming poorer, the numbers of homeless have risen, poverty raises crimes, conviction raises numbers on death row, and they are shooting people in other lands, if not at home.

If one wanted to confront the people causing the problems, and stop them, and fight for our lives. Do you underestimate just how far your enemy is willing to go, or do you overestimate them?

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Saturday, March 5, 2011 11:44 AM

I can see why eugenics underpins your whole life philosophy, you are basically using it to describe any situation where people behave darstadly to one another.

In violent conflict,fighting a war of attrition is a tactic that can be used by one or both sides. It is, like all war tactics, revolting, but it is not eugenics. If they succeed in wiping out a certain percentage of that population, it does indeed become genocide under the normal defintion of that word.

All human beings subconciously tend to choose mates that will enhance the genetic characteristics of their offspring. That is not eugenics either.

I am not familiar with the groups that you mentioned as practising breeding programs, which does indicate they are not a significant force in our world. I'm sure there are whacky groups that do all sorts of weird things, but it isn't the dominant paradigm of our society.

I still say your theory takes on board a number of factors, and I would agree with you that those factors exist, but your reasoning about the whys is far fetched. ie you are a 1 + 2 = 26 kind of person. Me, I'm a big believe in Occam's Razor.

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Saturday, March 5, 2011 11:46 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
Pretending, for a moment, that intentions don't matter. Our water is being poisoned, the poor are becoming poorer, the numbers of homeless have risen, poverty raises crimes, conviction raises numbers on death row, and they are shooting people in other lands, if not at home.

If one wanted to confront the people causing the problems, and stop them, and fight for our lives. Do you underestimate just how far your enemy is willing to go, or do you overestimate them?

Sad to say that this is not something new, Byte. This is basically the state of humanity and has been pretty much throughout time. The only difference now, is that our numbers increase and our resources diminish.

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Saturday, March 5, 2011 11:50 AM

Quote:
Sad to say that this is not something new, Byte. This is basically the state of humanity and has been pretty much throughout time.

Yes, similar things have happened in history.

Do you intend to do nothing?

Quote:
The only difference now, is that our numbers increase and our resources diminish.

Hmm. I'm not sure that justifies the actions of the deathmongers. In fact, I'm pretty sure it doesn't.

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Saturday, March 5, 2011 11:51 AM

I actually don't want to get into an argument on the minutia of it, just want to explore the mechanisms of power by which the grasshoppers stay in control of the ants.

That said, I just wanted to try to clarify a few points you made here, because I wasn't clear on what you meant.

1. New wealth is dwarfed by old wealth under the capitalist system. Ergo, growing families dilute their own wealth. It isn't that I'm saying "kids cost money" which is an economic manipulation, not a necessity, and is some form of neo-eugenics, IMHO.

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westerners have less kids because they like things, is basically how it sits.

We westerners must be innately acquisitive, and children innately costly?

Actually, I think you have nailed a control mechanism there. We are programmed to want things. There is no reason I should personally have a car. This town has 200 cars, and only 10-20 are driving anywhere at any given time, and well over 99% of the time when they leave here, they are coming back the same day. What you are seeing there is Keynesian consumerism.

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You may be interested to note that we have been trying to increase our population here in Oz, and the government has offered cash incentives for babies. It works too, people have more kids.

What kind of incentives? Here we have an increased welfare allowance that people say is this kind of policy, but it doesn't come close to the cost of raising a child.

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Your explanation for war, environmental damage and other things that impact of the population

I'm largely just unraveling a logical endgame of the base natural of economic power, not promoting a theory.

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a greedy system that wants wealth

Define wealth, also, give me a reason why the system wants it.

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Also fallout where resources are increasinly limited.

I don't actually accept this premise. I think it's been pushed by the media a lot, but resources seem to be in abundance, except that a group of schmucks is constantly destroying them pointlessly, like setting fire to forests or draining the oceans of fish, poisoning the water, etc.

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I'd also like to point out that the biggest tolls on lives and environments happen in developing, not developed countries

Yes, that's because of the IMF and World Bank, what's more commonly known as economic imperialism.

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- where your so called Eloi live. so that kind of blows out your theory about targeting competition, not the 'dogs'.

I fail to see the connection. The Grasshoppers want to limit the power of the ants. Too many ants leads to a revolution. Smart ants leads to a revolution. Eloi is the intentional creation of dumb ants.

The third world is not an Eloi situation (yet), it's one of economic imperialism and resource theft. The US, for example, is much more of an Morlock/Eloi relationship internally than its relationship with anyone else.

This situation right now is really more grasshoppers and ants.

But when it comes to Morlocks and Eloi, the goal is not to limit the population of Eloi, Eloi are bred to be slaves, and they are incapable of overthrowing Morlocks, they represent no threat, in theory, to Morlock power, or so Morlocks believe. It would be before this that eugenics enters into it, and other control mechanisms, not to limit the population of Eloi, but rather of smart ants.

I recent got this quote from a video, and I haven't dug out the source yet, but it's Sir Julian Huxley, first director general of UNESCO (1946-1948), and renowned eugenicist, that the real fear was not revolution, as revolution was easily hijacked, but rather, it was someone with a good idea, a unique idea.

Flik represents such an ant, even if we question his ideas. His individualism threatens the systematic power structure.

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Saturday, March 5, 2011 12:03 PM

I would like to reject out of hand the notion of limited resources. I think we live in an infinite universe, and so far science has been backing me up, much to the chagrin of the neo-creationist big-bangers. The nature of resource limitation theory is relevant to class warfare, in that it is used by the ruling class to explain and rationalize their actions; to create control mechanisms; and to rob the ants or resources. Oh, and I am not a 1+1=26 person, I am a 1+2=12 person ;)

Eugenics doesn't underlie my life philosophy, taoism does, but eugenics is one of a dozen or so mechanisms of power used by grasshoppers to control.

Byte's is right:
Ants without a unique idea might say the same: Ants have always worked for the benefit of grasshoppers, that's just the way it is, and it ain't gonna change.

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Saturday, March 5, 2011 12:22 PM

You can do nothing if you want. In fact, seeing as doing something is very dangerous and very attention getting, I don't blame people for simply trying to lie-low and hide it out.

But I think none of us would be here if we thought nothing was wrong. So I think all of us are here trying to find a way to act against what we each individually see as a threat. My personal belief is that all the threats are related, and it doesn't matter if we divide our forces in this way.

My personal belief also says, even if we fail, we'll still win. The enemy and their ideas are unsustainable. There may be a time when trouble comes knocking on your door, and if or when it does, you'll fight, and you'll know what to do.

We may not be able to defeat them now, but the stories we create and write today will be the whispers in the dark, instructing the future and waiting for the inevitable moment when they stumble. I believe this will happen long before the human race goes extinct - whether it's one of the crises that worries us today that spurs us into action, or something new, they will fall.

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Saturday, March 5, 2011 1:54 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
Quote:
Sad to say that this is not something new, Byte. This is basically the state of humanity and has been pretty much throughout time.

Yes, similar things have happened in history.

Do you intend to do nothing?

Quote:
The only difference now, is that our numbers increase and our resources diminish.

Hmm. I'm not sure that justifies the actions of the deathmongers. In fact, I'm pretty sure it doesn't.

Geez Byte, show me where I am condoning any of the actions of deathmongers. I'm pretty insulted that you have said that. And what the frak are YOU doing? Pull your bleeding head in.

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Saturday, March 5, 2011 2:13 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:

Geez Byte, show me where I am condoning any of the actions of deathmongers. I'm pretty insulted that you have said that.

I didn't say you WERE so don't get offended. But what you said suggested something like "it's always been this way, so why bother fighting?"

Yet you're here, which means you're fighting.

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And what the frak are YOU doing?

I'm prepared to die when the time comes. I've been working out a couple of non-violent subversive tactics. I've also been giving to charity for the poor, working on creating a safe haven for the downtrodden, and endlessly discussing tactics and strategies.

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Pull your bleeding head in.

But if I do that, I'll never accomplish anything. This is going to be an effort that will require personal sacrifice on my part.

The world's gone mad and I'm not sure I can live in it anymore. The least I can do is try to help out the next generation, even if all I am to be is a warning, or if I only exist to buy the rest of you a little more time. The good I am to do will be largely post-humous.

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Saturday, March 5, 2011 2:21 PM

DT,

I'm not going to go into most of your post and argue semantics backwards and forwards.

Suffice to say that if you are simply

Quote:
... largely just unraveling a logical endgame of the base natural of economic power, not promoting a theory.

then I have probably a lot fewer points to debate with you. I have assumed, perhaps mistakenly that you have been suggesting that eugenics is the underpinning theory to the current situation, and is part of a universal global conspiracy, which I would disagree with.

I don't agree with your stance of resources being limited, as all resources are finite and the population is increasing.

Quote:

What kind of incentives? Here we have an increased welfare allowance that people say is this kind of policy, but it doesn't come close to the cost of raising a child.

A large baby bonus per child, upon the birth not means tested - around $4000, plus ongoing family tax benefits and breaks for families with children, government funded paid parental leave. The aim and outcome has been to increase the population by lessening the perceived financial strain on parents. These are not welfare payments.

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Saturday, March 5, 2011 3:26 PM

RIONAEIRE

Beir bua agus beannacht

So I've decided to look at it this way. DreamTrove's definition of eugenics in current times does not line up with the definition accepted by most of the people here, he makes valid points about things, but he uses the word eugenics in unconventional ways so how he defines eugenics and how I define eugenics will remain different, I think Meghan's and I define it more similarly to each other, I wouldn't define most of DT's current examples of "eugenics" in America as eugenics, though like Meghan's I haven't heard of those "breeding programs" he mentioned so its possible that they _would fall under the common definition, but most of it doesn't. I guess if he wants to call it eugenics he has the right, we just know that he means something different than we mean, at least in regard to America in the present day.

Byte, I need you to stay around for a good long while because you are my good friend, okay? There are still lots of things you can do here and now and alive to help the world.

"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya

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Saturday, March 5, 2011 6:41 PM

Just trying to illustrate the economic origins of eugenics, logically, not postulating really, just as an outgrowth of capitalism.

Quote:
I don't agree with your stance of resources being limited, as all resources are finite and the population is increasing.

We can choose to destroy nature, but that is not a resource. Early humans numbering an estimated 10s of thousands were able to decimate a rainforest that was once the Sahara. 70% of the Amazon destruction has done by 400 individuals. This is clearly not an issue of population growth.

But these are also not our essential resources.

Energy is not oil. For millennia, people travelled without fuel. People farmed their food. They farm their fish as well. The current estimates I could find everywhere on the currently tilled farmland, its maximum food production, and human consumption, and it was really clear that the earth could support a trillion humans with no difficulty. Our energy supply, solar, wind, is infinite. Even nuclear, is so close to infinite as not to matter. The energy consumption actually needed by humans to live in the 21st century is practically zero. The supply of water is basically infinite. There is no shortage of resources, nor excess of population. It is the mass behavior of people holding power that is, and has always been, the problem. This is a problem even if there are only 40,000 humans on the earth.

Rewinding to a debate on Caral, where I said this was human made disaster, of the sort that is all over the planet: 3,000 people ruled a country of 20,000. Look what they did to their landscape? This is the human story. Now take a satellite look at Japan. Still looking pretty green, and yet it has been one of the most "overpopulated" places on the earth for centuries. It ain't the population, it's the behavior of the people, and a few thousand is enough to destroy the earth if they behave badly, a trillion is not enough if they behave well.

Not to harp on the point, but I think that this fear of depleting resources and overpopulation is a globalist/neocon story that is every bit as much propaganda as their tales of terrorists nuking the planet, being told by the same people for the same reason. We can agree to disagree, but I just want you to think about it.

As for the Australian babies thing, that's curious. I guess Australia has a pretty low population density.

Riona,

Argh

No, it's not the DT definition. It's the very conventional way the word is used by the citizens of Earth. It's in the literature and on the news quite a lot really. The majority of people would agree with me.

The thing is, "Death doesn't sell." That's the fact of it. You can't go out there and say "I want to create massive death for humanity and kill everyone that isn't like me" and get a lot of followers.

So, here's what happened with eugenics:

In the early days, a bunch of wide minded eutopians intentionally misconstrued Nietzsche's notion of "superman" to be genetically different than normal man. Nietzsche was clear on this point: Superman would be trained to be superman, anyone could be superman. But enter the fabians et al and there would be a selective race of supermen.

But this was just a fantasy. Eugenics was already about death. The first eugenics proposals even in the 19th century were all about killing the inferiors. By the 1920s, there were active programs to kill the inferiors. No one was really creating supermen, that was just an advertising slogan. The Germans, sure, gave our rewards for having german babies, like Magon just said the Australians are doing, but that's no different from what the satmars are doing. It's not really eugenics, nothing superior is being created. "Master Race" was an advertising campaign as well. They were not making better Germans, they were the same german race they had always been. No one was claiming otherwise. The real german plan was not to improve germans, but get rid of non-germans.

Same thing here as everywhere.

Everyone is what they do, not what they once said they might do. The Holocaust is the holocaust, it's not a jewish resettlement program, even though that's what they said they were going to do, because it's not what they did. (okay, they resettled a few thousand jews to israel, but largely, it's not what they did.)

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From Wikipedia on Eugenics:

Today it is widely regarded as a brutal movement which inflicted massive human rights violations on millions of people.[9] The "interventions" advocated and practiced by eugenicists involved prominently the identification and classification of individuals and their families, including the poor, mentally ill, blind, deaf, promiscuous women, homosexuals and entire racial groups -- such as the Roma and Jews -- as "degenerate" or "unfit"; the segregation or institutionalisation of such individuals and groups, their sterilization, euthanasia, and in the extreme case of Nazi Germany, their mass extermination.[10]

The practices engaged in by eugenicists involving violations of privacy, attacks on reputation, violations of the right to life, to found a family, to freedom from discrimination are all today classified as violations of human rights. The practice of negative racial aspects of eugenics, after World War II, fell within the definition of the new international crime of genocide, set out in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.[11]

The modern field and term were first formulated by Sir Francis Galton in 1883,[12] drawing on the recent work of his half-cousin Charles Darwin.[13][14] At its peak of popularity eugenics was supported by prominent people, including Winston Churchill, [15] Margaret Sanger,[16][17] Marie Stopes, H. G. Wells, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg, Linus Pauling[18] and Sidney Webb.[19][20][21] Its most infamous proponent and practitioner was, however, Adolf Hitler who praised and incorporated eugenic ideas in Mein Kampf and emulated Eugenic legislation for the sterilization of "defectives" that had been pioneered in the United States.[22]

G. K. Chesterton was an early critic of the philosophy of eugenics, expressing this opinion in his book, Eugenics and Other Evils. Eugenics became an academic discipline at many colleges and universities, and received funding from many sources.[23] Three International Eugenics Conferences presented a global venue for eugenicists with meetings in 1912 in London, and in 1921 and 1932 in New York. Eugenic policies were first implemented in the early 1900s in the United States.[24] Later, in the 1920s and 30s, the eugenic policy of sterilizing certain mental patients was implemented in a variety of other countries, including Belgium,[25] Brazil,[26] Canada,[27] and Sweden,[28] among others. The scientific reputation of eugenics started to decline in the 1930s, a time when Ernst Rüdin used eugenics as a justification for the racial policies of Nazi Germany, and when proponents of eugenics among scientists and thinkers prompted a backlash in the public. Nevertheless, In Sweden the eugenics program continued until 1975.[28]

Since the postwar period, both the public and the scientific communities have associated eugenics with Nazi abuses, such as enforced racial hygiene, human experimentation, and the extermination of "undesired" population groups.

Not a lot of grey there.

The opening line may look positive: (if misguided)

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Eugenics is the "applied science or the biosocial movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population,"

But the manner that they wanted to do this was "removing the undesirable from the gene pool" as eugenicist Margaret Sanger, founder and head of "Planned Parenthood" formerly "The Negro Project" put it (yes, they're evil)

Eugenics today? Yes, it's widely practiced, however, not as blatantly, because it's against international law, and now there is an international criminal court, and if you do the above things, you will go to the Hague.

So, they find clever ways of doing it anyway. Lots of them. Israel in Gaza is basically doing it old school because they know that they're Israel and they are never going to get in trouble for anything. (Not being anti Israel, just admitting reality. Hey, Israel, Leave Gaza alone. Thanks.)

It's worth noting that virtually everyone who subscribes to eugenics also subscribes to "population control" theory, which is an idea that there are too many humans, and that the human race must be returned to its hunter-gatherer population levels, estimated to be between 100 million and 1 billion by various eugenicists. These numbers have not changed nor come to an agreement in the past century. Hence, they intend to kill or let die without being replaced by children at least 6 billion people. It used to be they only wanted to kill 3 billion, but then the population went up. What doesn't occur to these people is that perhaps the reason they can't agree on what the hunter gatherer levels were was that they were constantly growing. Sure, farming may have spiked growth, the end of the ice age, or the introduction of medicine, but we only tap a tiny portion of our farmland for maximum food value, most of it now is producing less food than it was in its natural state. For example, Brazil just came up. With 1/3 of the rainforest cleared, the Amazon is supporting estimates of between 15 to 50 times as many indians on the forest side as it is supporting settlers on the cleared side. Not particularly efficient, I would say.

In short, the whole theory in nonsense, both of them, and they just serve the flaws in the economic model of capitalism as outlined above, in my humble opinion.

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Saturday, March 5, 2011 7:25 PM

Just thought this was curious. The roots on this tree can be seen in just about everything they've done, but not a lot could be seen there that would be positive in creating a new genetic race or species that was superior.

Really no evil mastermind wants to create something smarter than himself, except Tyrell ;) Gotta respect that in a man. But these guys stated right at the open that they were worried about the corruption and degradation of the gene pool by infection with the genes that civilization has allowed to survive that evolution would not have.

But we have strayed from the topic of Grasshoppers and Ants and control mechanisms that are used. Eugenics is just one of many, and like so many hot button issues, it's the one that creates the argument. Can we get back to new and interesting areas of ant control?

How do you convince a bunch of ants to feed grasshoppers in the first place?

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Saturday, March 5, 2011 8:35 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
We can choose to destroy nature, but that is not a resource.

land, water, forests??? kind of basic resources for food production.

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Energy is not oil.
We've become dependant on oil for a variety of things, including energy. That's not to say we can't find other sources, but for the time being we are chronically dependant on it. Without oil and without major changes in how we do things, we are in for a rocky time as oil deposits dry up.

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For millennia, people travelled without fuel.
You'll have a hard time selling that standard of living to people whose idea of deprevation is to forego the lastest IPod app. Nevertheless we probably have to face a change to our current standards, perhaps to not that level. I might add that even prior to fossil fuels being so integral to our economy, people fought over resources such as land, water, spices, furs, et al whatever their economy was dependant on at the time.

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People farmed their food. They farm their fish as well. The current estimates I could find everywhere on the currently tilled farmland, its maximum food production, and human consumption, and it was really clear that the earth could support a trillion humans with no difficulty.

Gosh, trillian isn't even a number where I come from. I find your estimates make your opinions rather unique.

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Our energy supply, solar, wind, is infinite. Even nuclear, is so close to infinite as not to matter.
Solar, wind, nuclear still rely on the availability of other resources, including oil, minerals, land and water, non of which are finite.

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The energy consumption actually needed by humans to live in the 21st century is practically zero. The supply of water is basically infinite.

How is our supply of anything infinite? Water is currently one of the resources that is currently under threat. I live in the most drought prone continent on this planet, so I should know the politicing over this resource that is huge here. One of the reasons that we can not conceivably have a population the size of the US, which is a similar land mass, is because of the lack of both water and arable land. Desalination is reliant on other energy sources.

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There is no shortage of resources, nor excess of population.

It is the mass behavior of people holding power that is, and has always been, the problem. This is a problem even if there are only 40,000 humans on the earth.

Rewinding to a debate on Caral, where I said this was human made disaster, of the sort that is all over the planet: 3,000 people ruled a country of 20,000. Look what they did to their landscape? This is the human story. Now take a satellite look at Japan. Still looking pretty green, and yet it has been one of the most "overpopulated" places on the earth for centuries. It ain't the population, it's the behavior of the people, and a few thousand is enough to destroy the earth if they behave badly, a trillion is not enough if they behave well.

I suggest you read Jared Diamond's 'Collapse'. he says it better than I can and uses multiplies of examples which demonstrate the affect of overpopulating and diminishing resources, including Easter Island, which is basically looking down the lense of where we will all stand if we don't stop consuming at the rate we currently are. And that was over trees - not a resource according to you.

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It's worth noting that virtually everyone who subscribes to eugenics also subscribes to "population control" theory, which is an idea that there are too many humans, and that the human race must be returned to its hunter-gatherer population levels, estimated to be between 100 million and 1 billion by various eugenicists.

I think people who want population control are not advocating killing anyone, just limiting the number of children born ie China's policy of one child.

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Saturday, March 5, 2011 9:29 PM

He said "nature," as in nature itself, which my understanding is DT doesn't think CAN be destroyed.

I think you may be seriously misunderstanding DT if you think he supports deforestation or water pollution.

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I think people who want population control are not advocating killing anyone, just limiting the number of children born ie China's policy of one child.

That's actually a problem in of itself, as not all children survive, which means you're talking large scale removal of genes from the pool. It's hard to believe that any group would be so shortsighted as to cut down the genetic diversity of their own group so much. Genetic diversity protects against increased prevalence of hereditary genetic disorders. There may be more going on here than meets the eye.

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 1:06 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
He said "nature," as in nature itself, which my understanding is DT doesn't think CAN be destroyed.

I think you may be seriously misunderstanding DT if you think he supports deforestation or water pollution.

I think you have a serious problem reading and understanding my posts. I NEVER said such a thing. And I think I'm going to give your responses a miss until you stop being so hostile towards me.

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 3:00 AM

Quote:
land, water, forests??? kind of basic resources for food production.

Plants will grow forever if we plant them, as water will fall from the sky, because it is all recycled in nature, nothing is lost. It's taking from nature what is not ours that is the problem, but there is nothing there that we need to sustain ourselves.

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We've become dependant on oil for a variety of things, including energy.

We could easily do without it. Even if it disappeared tomorrow morning. I would have to buy some solar cells. And an electric car. Or borrow one. No chaos would ensue. People would carpool for a little while, because there are a lot of gas powered cars around, but we're not really short on electric vehicles.

I don't think that this is a lower standard of living, it's an inevitable evolution of science being held back by economic manipulation

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You'll have a hard time selling that standard of living to people whose idea of deprevation is to forego the lastest IPod app.

You could not possibly download every latest app, there's just not enough memory on your iPod. People are pretty selective, but the iPod consumes almost no power at all, it's like a 3 watt device, you could easily run it off a small USB solar panel which are available at your local electronics store. I have one for mine that I got at a arts and craftsy gift shop. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a convenience store item, that's where I got my iPad car charger.

But you have a point about consumerism, I think think, however, people would adjust if we cut off their oil. I personally prefer travel by rail or sail, because I think it's less time consuming. I spend a few minutes getting on or off, and while I'm traveling, I can actually do something else with my time, not true in a car.

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Nevertheless we probably have to face a change to our current standards, perhaps to not that level.

I don't agree with the premise that this is a lower level, but ah well. If you prefer, algae biofuels will shortly replace oil. That's part of why they have this mad dash to rape the earth of oil, because they know the price is headed for zero as soon as we can make our own, which Exxon estimates is about 10 years away.

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I might add that even prior to fossil fuels being so integral to our economy, people fought over resources such as land, water, spices, furs, et al whatever their economy was dependant on at the time.

And there are no Australians or Americans in Iraq?

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Gosh, trillian isn't even a number where I come from.

No, it's not. Trillian is a character in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

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Solar, wind, nuclear still rely on the availability of other resources, including oil, minerals, land and water, non of which are finite.

No matter, they will generate power forever. Ever make a salt water battery? It's pretty easy. The babylonians knew how to do it, and I did it as a kid. You can run things off salt water. There's lots of that about. It's 99% of everything on this rock we call Earth.

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How is our supply of anything infinite? Water is currently one of the resources that is currently under threat.

More propaganda being fed by globalist neocons.

Here's how: Right now, it is raining. If you stop and measure how much it rains.. On my property, each year, 28 million gallons of water fall. That's completely dwarfed by the rivers that runs through it, but even if there were no groundwater at all, there would be no shortage of water.

Okay, this was easy to find. 107 teratons of rain fall on land each year. About a quarter of a percent are used by humans in some way. So, okay, we'd be using 25-30% of the water with no increase in efficiency but that water would still enter the environment, and overwhelmingly, that's the transpiration of crops.

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Desalination is reliant on other energy sources.

You could build one without energy, You have lots of sun. I already designed just such a contraption.

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I suggest you read Jared Diamond's 'Collapse'.

I'll check it out

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Easter Island

is a different story: They destroyed their island making those heads, and then ate each other. There wasn't anything natural about it. It was the ruling classes trying to aggrandize themselves. Captain Cook told this story, as did Thor Heyerdahl. Not a case of resource shortage, just badly behaved humans.

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not a resource according to you.

Oh, I give up.

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I think people who want population control are not advocating killing anyone, just limiting the number of children born ie China's policy of one child.

Yes, that would be eugenics. Kinda in it's purest form. You should check out the UN convention on genocide.

Oh, and Byte's not particularly hostile

Byte, we clearly need to have a fight over something before someone accuses you of being my sockpuppet

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 4:10 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Basically, DT is trying to redefine a word.

DT, just look at the origin of the word, okay? It is pretty clear what "eugenics" means.

Now, you may have an interesting theory of the concentration of capital and the preservation of wealth into fewer and fewer hands (Oh, and BTW? You're not the first to come up with that idea!) but don't hijack another word and jam your theory into it. It doesn't fit, and you wind up defending the equivalent of the "jewishnazicommunisttemplarbritishbohemiangrove conspiracy". You theory is too large for a one simple word, especially a word that meant something else.

ETA: So, having read your rather long post, let me propose a word which BETTER describes what you're trying to say, and will clear up confusion. "Eu" means good. Like "euphoria" or "euthanasia". How about "dys"... bad... dysgenics?

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 4:52 AM

Quote:

Basically, DT is trying to redefine a word.

You can choose to act ignorant and illiterate, like with socialism, you would like it to mean something good, but the rest of us are stuck with what it actually means: to clean the gene pool.

I posted a lot of this above, here's more from Francis Galton, the man who coined the term:

Quote:
That is, with questions bearing on what is termed in Greek, eugenes namely, good in stock, hereditary endowed with noble qualities. This, and the allied words, eugeneia, etc., are equally applicable to men, brutes, and plants. We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea; it is at least a neater word and a more generalized one than viticulture which I once ventured to use.[56]

Add that to the above. Also, that he specifically said the removal of the inferiors was essential to the goal, and that were it not for civilization, nature would have done the job for him. (which I already reposted)

Sure, Galton would also have liked to see births of noble families increase, but this is not economically feasible as I outlined above. He was worried that the masses of commoners would overwhelm the nobility in number, and introduce their inferior genes, causing a "regression towards mediocrity" which he thought would represent a "devolution" of the human species to some earlier less genetically valuable state. Hence essential to the science of eugenics was the suppression of the reproduction of the undesirables, or inferiors, and by the end of the 19th century, that was all that was left of practicing eugenics. Since then nothing has change about the nature of the field. So far, eugenicists have killed 1.2 billion, I'm not sure they've created anything.

again from wikipedia

Quote:
Early proponents of eugenics believed that, through selective breeding, the human species should direct its own evolution. They tended to believe in the genetic superiority of Nordic and Anglo-Saxon peoples; supported strict immigration and anti-miscegenation laws; and supported the forcible sterilization of the poor, disabled and "immoral".[3]

[3] Ordover, Nancy (2003). American eugenics: race, queer anatomy, and the science of nationalism.
Available here, skip to page 137, nice expose on Ms. Sanger. ;)
http://books.google.com/books?id=5qHGELC_h-4C&printsec=frontcover#v=on
epage&q&f=false

Anyway, enough of this threadjack. Back to the topic at hand, which is how grasshoppers control ants.

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 5:19 AM

Sig

ETA:

Eugenia was already a word in Greek. Sure, it means "good genes" hence "clean the gene pool."

Dysgenics was also coined by Galton as the non-breeding tendency of the elite, which applies, but is economically described above.

Otherwise, I would agree with you.

However, I don't like to apply words or labels, because then it is *me* making the definition which you often accuse me of, but I do not do. I use words as the people who use them do.

When I say "globalist" I mean those who call themselves globalists. It's not *my* vision of what the world should look like, or what a unified world, even, would look like, it's theirs.

When I say "socialist" I mean those who call themselves socialists. It's not my view of cooperative society, or a good society, it's theirs.

So, when I say "eugenics" I mean what eugenicists said and did. It's a word, their word, not mine. If I insert my own word, than it is my word, my theory, etc. I'm not interest in making thing up or postulating theories here, I'm interested in understanding what actually exists. It's not a fantasy world, it's an objective study of reality.

Many things have classical roots that *sound* positive, that's because the people making them up *wanted* them to sound good. That's why we have "Philanthropy." I oppose philanthropists. That doesn't mean I'm misanthropic, it means I oppose those who call themselves philanthropists. I think they're meddling in the affairs of others. Maybe they "love humanity" but their actions are disruptive and at times destructive, but they're not my least favorite meddlers, so I generally don't bother with them.

Notice that the ruling classes also taint their enemies with weighted language: "Misanthropes" are always anarchists like Frem. Why is opposing govt. "hating humanity"?

So, yes, you could try to redefine the language, but then you become the sole advocate of that world view, and you put yourself wide open for the sort of attack you just tried on me.

And, if I had done this "redefinition" such an attack would have worked. And if I can be shot down by SignyM, no offense, I can certainly be shot down by Mr. Rockefeller and co.

So, I use the language that everyone uses themselves.

Quote:
"euthanasia".

This one always bothered me: "Good death"?

dysgenics also has the ring to it of being miscegenation, or perhaps the overgrowth of weak gene pools.

What I would like to say is that control over the reproduction of the species is not something that should be handed to a ruling elite. Read the last thing I quoted from wiki on eugenics, and you see the problem with the overarching concept.

Because, really, let's face it: Humans are tribal animals. If a eugenics program is run from Israel, than Jewish genes are "good genes" and Palestinian genes are "bad genes" and if it's run from Nazi Germany than Jewish genes are "bad genes" and German genes are "good genes."

You can see where this logic is just leading us into a new form of global warfare, or, it already has. No one was sitting over in the Eugenics Chair at Oxford, England, thinking "We really should mix the british blood with east indians for their voices, and also west africans, also, we want that west african atheletism, and the russian flexibility. Perhaps the chinese and japanese are smarter than us, we could crossbreed with them.... No, they weren't. They were thinking Superior=English.upperclass specifically.

The fact is, at the moment, this idea, whatever you want to call it, is still alive. Right now, "philathropist" "charities" in Africa are trying to see that Africans don't have more babies. Yet africa produces enough food for roughly 7 billion people. (yes, there are famines, that's political and economic: Africa sells most of its food, and much of what is farmed is non-edible, coffee etc. instead of essential nutrients, or cotton for fabrics, coca for drugs, etc. etc.)

But consider this in a non-zero manner, not that I'm a non-zero fan:
http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/10/how-to-avoid-bad-bargain-dont-threate
n.php

Point being: It's not a competition. Why does it matter how many Africans there are? It doesn't logically follow that because there are more africans, there are fewer Europeans. The European population collapse, which I'll freely admit, is a problem, is not a problem caused by Africans or Arabs, it's caused by Europeans, enacting their own stupid Eugenics ideas on their own lower classes.

And sure, you could go all Pirate-Newsy and say that it's outside manipulation, but the Europeans came up with this idea themselves, and they are doing it to themselves, they just need to expand their monkeysphere and see all Europeans as Europeans, and not as grasshoppers and ants.

But really, enough eugenics. There's a lot more going on with this class warfare thing: There's policy manipulation, psychological manipulation, it's far from a dead topic.

I tried to watch the movie last night, but it wasn't on the watch instantly list on Netflix, so I'm going to have to get the actual DVD which will take a few days.

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 5:32 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

The point being that "eugenics" means to clean the gene pool of the feeble-minded, genetically diseased, or otherwise inferior to improve the strength, intelligence, and/or health of the subject population. It does NOT mean to promote inferiority, disease or feeble-mindedness in the subject population to ensure continuing control by the elite.

The "mechanism" is not even always death.

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 7:05 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:
Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
He said "nature," as in nature itself, which my understanding is DT doesn't think CAN be destroyed.

I think you may be seriously misunderstanding DT if you think he supports deforestation or water pollution.

I think you have a serious problem reading and understanding my posts. I NEVER said such a thing. And I think I'm going to give your responses a miss until you stop being so hostile towards me.

Hostile? I was commenting. You said DT doesn't see trees as a resource, which means you misunderstood him. Hostile is when I'm told to "pull my bleeding head in." Which loses some translation between Australian and American, but I can get the general idea.

This isn't even my fight. So I'll happily walk away here. But again, for the record, I said nothing about you condoning deathmongers. In fact, your being here is a strong indication that you DON'T. However, I will apologize for the misunderstanding.

I think this argument may be getting too heated, you're feeling like you're being tag-teamed or beat up. My sympathies. I will withdraw.

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 8:28 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
The point being that "eugenics" means to clean the gene pool of the feeble-minded, genetically diseased, or otherwise inferior to improve the strength, intelligence, and/or health of the subject population. It does NOT mean to promote inferiority, disease or feeble-mindedness in the subject population to ensure continuing control by the elite.

The "mechanism" is not even always death.

Not disagreeing with that at all. "Eloi conspiracy" is not eugenics. I would agree that it is "dysgenics" but that the two do serve a mutual god, and that god is capitalism.

And yes, the mechanism of eugenics is very often not death, or even sterilization.

If you can convince the people that they are a genetic liability and therefore should not reproduce, simply by psychological warfare, or you limit their ability to do so by economics, then you achieve the end of eugenics

If we can agree that Eloi conspiracy is itself "dysgenics" then, yes, it still plays a part in the Grasshopper/Ant scenario. Dumb and feeble Ants will not be able to overthrow the Grasshoppers.

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 8:31 AM

Byte,

stick around, we can return to topic. Sig is feeling tag-teamed, but it's not because of this thread, it's because of her own thread and our collective lack of faith in govt. regulation.

If that thread were to cross into this thread, such regulation would fall on the reliance on grasshoppers to solve all ant problems, another thing you might be able to see a certain lack of faith in on the part of the ant population.

ETA:

Re: trees as a resource, not as such. Nature is not a resource except under a most twisted system. Humans can plant tress and grow them an endless number of times because they are made of carbon and water which recycle in the environment endlessly. It's the assault on the natural forests which cannot be sustained. The growing of trees for timber can be sustained indefinitely by an infinite population if you accept that by the time the planet's population reaches a trillion we will have already moved on to other worlds. At maximum growth rates, that's about 500 years away, at the historical mean, assuming the random ups and downs, we have probably closer to 10,000 before we reach that number. Technologically, we're less than 500 years away from that, imho.

My real expectation is that our first colonies will be made from terraforming the moons of jupiter. We'll build Earthlike atmosphere's from gas taken from the outer layers of the gas giant. Moving that much material would be a major event, otoh, we recently saw a chunk the size of the whole Earth displaced by a ten mile rock.

There's a light problem, but at the radiation of jupiter and you're up to about 7%, I think we can adjust, some light filtering, etc.

Anyway, Back to topic.

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 9:31 AM

CANTTAKESKY

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
The point being that "eugenics" means to clean the gene pool of the feeble-minded, genetically diseased, or otherwise inferior to improve the strength, intelligence, and/or health of the subject population.

I believe the "eugenics" DT keeps talking about means "selective breeding."

Some of the supposed actors may truly believe a more genetically docile population is an improvement, and thus may truly believe they are practicing eugenics.

The precise term doesn't matter. The idea that there may be powerful actors with a selective breeding agenda for societies still stands, regardless of the word we use to describe it.

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 9:38 AM

CANTTAKESKY

DT,

If I may advance a dispute that eugenics might the correct term here. The reason is, I don't think TPTB that want these genetic characteristics are thinking in terms of "good" genes, as in what is good for the world. It is not the case, as you say, of Jewish people thinking Jewish genes are good, and Nazis thinking Aryan genes are good.

In my view, it looks more like they are thinking of genes that lead to easy management, docility, etc. They are looking at "useful" genes, not necessarily useful to society, but useful to THEM.

I think who the genes are actually good for (the owners or the creatures themeselves) distinguishes "eugenics" from "selective breeding."

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 11:16 AM

CTS

Welcome to the bloodbath

Okay, a few things: Eugenics, as it is commonly used, is tactics to limit the populations of "undesirables" much more than it is to create a "new race", but let me abstract this discussion from the term for the moment so we can separate out a few different behaviors of population manipulation:

I'm going to coin some new temporary terms to define each specific behavior

1. Genetic Constructionism: The selective breeding of a pure race of perceived superior genes. I think early eugenicists had this in mind, and maybe the Israelis still do, since they seem to look very little into any claims of jewishness from a German or Russian, but throw a lot of skepticism towards any claims of jewishness from an African. But overall, I think in most of eugenics, this idea has pretty much died out.

2. Genetic Upgrading: This would be selecting superior traits and trying to create something through selective breeding which is not the maintenance of a race or its dominance, or the purifying of it, but the creation of a new race of people superior to those that currently exist. This was talked about in early eugenics, but I don't know that it was ever tried, and I don't think it's being practiced today.

3. Genetic Destructionism: The destruction of a target gene pool from the overall population. I think orginally, the target here was lower classes and races, and more recently it has been redirected towards those more apt to rebel. This is the stuff which I think is most of eugenics today, some of it falls under the UN convention on genocide, or maybe all of it does by extension, but usually now it is more subtle, being psychological or economic manipulation to lower the birth rate, etc.

4. Genetic Downgrading: The taking of a population and deliberately manipulating its destiny to create a more docile workforce. The desirable goals here on the part of the eugenicists would be a stupid and complacent, passive workforce, not capable of understanding their predicament, but capable of understanding their job. This is essentially what ant colonies do with workers. I think this is headed towards a creation of Eloi, and I think it is definitely in full swing.

5: Genetic Reductionism: The process of reducing the overall population of the planet, selectively removing the perceived most undesirable elements in the largest numbers if possible, but with the overall goal of a much lower global population. I think this is also in wide use today, and there are many ways to go about it, through war, ecodestruction, or various forms of population growth manipulation like the one child policy in China. It's worth noting that since the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, the EU and its proponents have effectively instituted the same policy towards Eastern Europe.

6: Genetic extermination: The complete removal of genetic groups by part or by whole through the most effective means necessary, such as spreading disease, promoting warfare between target factions (perhaps India/Pakistan?), or outright slaughter by cutting off all food and medical supplies as Clinton did in the 1990s in Iraq, Or outright extermination of the populous by promoting door to door warfare, with govt. assistance like Yugoslavia and Rwanda, death camps like Cambodia or Poland, or armed military mass execution of the civilian population like El Salvador or Guatemala.

If we use "dysgenics" to describe the "Genetic Downgrading" offshoot, or what I call the Eloi conspiracy, that would be creating a new docile race. That would serve the aims of TPTB.

Genetic Destructionism would get rid of the old human labor force that was more prone to rebel.

As for the use of the word eugenics, it was by no means my choice. It is widely used everywhere. Pirate News was the first person to bring it up here, but it's throughout the wikipedia entries and everything you will find online, and it is one of the topics currently up for debate for inclusion into the Texas curriculum that got so much fire a few months back. Texas conservatives arguing that the curriculum had a liberal bias suggested adding a number of counterpoint issues, one of them being eugenics, which they were anti- of course, but they meant the same thing by the term as I do, as everyone who uses it in a contemporary manner does.

It's the same problem we have when it comes to the use of other ideas, like socialism. We can't just look at these ideas starry eyed as untested theories as if we were living at the end of the 19th century; as if the whole 20th century had never happened.

What people did with the idea became what the idea meant. You have a hundred genocidal dictatorships under the name socialism, and then you have to wonder about anyone who would put "socialist" in their name. I mean, you wouldn't put "Stalinist, Maoist, Nazi or Khmer Rouge" in your name... right? But how it happens is just this same way: People look at the theories of the late 19th century in the absence of the reality of the 20th century. It would be like talking about the French Enlightenment as if there had never been a French Revolution or a Reign of Terror.

People can accept this on things which are universally condemned like Fascism, no one looks at Fascism in the absence of what it became. Very few people look at Communism this way.

But the term "eugenics" as I said before, enables me to draw a line between between what I would term "genocide" which would be anything that fit into category 6 above, and "eugenics," which I would apply to 3, 4, and 5, though 5 would also fall under what I would term "population control" which is still eugenics, and still evil.

Where I'd draw the line is that I wouldn't term 1 and 2 as eugenics if anyone were to actually do them, and the reason for this is the same reason that they do not fit the UN Convention on Genocide, which #s 3-6 all do. That reason being that your desire to help your own population in cases 1 and 2 might be odd, but it isn't hurting anybody else.

This goes back to the idea of non-zero sum games which is not a concept I'm fond of, but does illustrate the point. How many Germans there are, or how good the genetics of the German population are has no direct effect on the rest of the world in the very same manner that I illustrated earlier on the number of Africans there are. What does it matter how many Africans there are? The continent produces lots of food and is virtually uninhabited compared with most of the rest of the planet. I'm more concerned internally that some African groups are exterminating others, or that some agencies with the backing of our usual suspects of international financial criminal elites, the IMF and World Bank, are destroying the environment of Africa, but strictly speaking, the number of Africans is not a threat to anyone. There are still more people in India than in Africa, and even discounting deserts, just do a size comparison.

Oh, and on that note, CTS, I don't think the Germans really wanted to promote Aryan blood. Germans themselves are not Aryans, but Indians and Gypsies are, as are several groups in the middle, such as Afghans, Iranians and Pakistanis. Basically, anyone in the middle east who isn't an Arab or a Jew. (aside from a few remote tribes)

Rather, like the Swastika, Aryan was a selling point for the Nazis, something they stole from the occultists like the Theosophical Society and the Thule Society, which don't really have that much to do with National Socialism, despite what many a loony conspiracy might claim.

It was a pretty simple ploy. The Germans looked at the map and noticed that the British Empire contained India, which had 500 million people. They knew that if Britain was able to draw on that population to fill the ranks of its army during the war, there was absolutely no chance for Germany. So, they hatched a plan to try to steal India, by endorsing the claim by fringe cultists that Germans were descended from Indians. There are fringe cults everywhere claiming absurd things all the time, this one was picked because it served a purpose. But it's very clear that the Nazis didn't actually *believe* this, because if they did, they would not have exterminated the Gypsies. They were perfectly well aware that the Gypsies were Aryans, just as they knew that they themselves were not Aryans, the theory had been widely debunked in German academia before the beginning of WWI.

But as a wedge, it was effective. Germany did not succeed in gaining India as an ally, but they were able to render it ineffectual as a British ally. With the swastika on the german flag, and the word "Aryan Nation" it was hard to get an Indian population who called themselves Aryan and held the swastika as a holy symbol to raise up in arms to defeat this menace just because their British overlord told them too.

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 12:04 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
Quote:
Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:
Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
He said "nature," as in nature itself, which my understanding is DT doesn't think CAN be destroyed.

I think you may be seriously misunderstanding DT if you think he supports deforestation or water pollution.

I think you have a serious problem reading and understanding my posts. I NEVER said such a thing. And I think I'm going to give your responses a miss until you stop being so hostile towards me.

Hostile? I was commenting. You said DT doesn't see trees as a resource, which means you misunderstood him.

DT and I were having a discussion around the limited or not nature of resources. we disagree, but I NEVER said or insinuated that he supports deforestation or pollution. You jumped to that conclusion.

re our previous conversation.

Quote:
Do you intend to do nothing?

Hmm. I'm not sure that justifies the actions of the deathmongers. In fact, I'm pretty sure it doesn't.

Sounds pretty hostile to me. I never said I was on the side of any deathmongers, intended to do nothing. I was pointing out the patterns of human history.

BTW pull your head in is another way of saying'stop being hostile'

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 12:17 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
Basically, DT is trying to redefine a word.

DT, just look at the origin of the word, okay? It is pretty clear what "eugenics" means.

Now, you may have an interesting theory of the concentration of capital and the preservation of wealth into fewer and fewer hands (Oh, and BTW? You're not the first to come up with that idea!) but don't hijack another word and jam your theory into it. It doesn't fit, and you wind up defending the equivalent of the "jewishnazicommunisttemplarbritishbohemiangrove conspiracy". You theory is too large for a one simple word, especially a word that meant something else.

ETA: So, having read your rather long post, let me propose a word which BETTER describes what you're trying to say, and will clear up confusion. "Eu" means good. Like "euphoria" or "euthanasia". How about "dys"... bad... dysgenics?

Yup.

DT, re easter island. This is some of what Jared Diamond has to say. I note for the record that I often provide sources to any theories that I discuss, whereas you do not.

Pollen records show that destruction of Easter's forests was well under way by the year 800, just a few centuries after the start of human settlement. Then charcoal from wood fires came to fill the sediment cores, while pollen of palms and other trees and woody shrubs decreased or disappeared, and pollen of the grasses that replaced the forest became more abundant. Not long after 1400 the palm finally became extinct, not only as a result of being chopped down but also because the now ubiquitous rats prevented its regeneration: of the dozens of preserved palm nuts discovered in caves on Easter, all had been chewed by rats and could no longer germinate. While the hauhau tree did not become extinct in Polynesian times, its numbers declined drastically until there weren't enough left to make ropes from. By the time Heyerdahl visited Easter, only a single, nearly dead toromiro tree remained on the island, and even that lone survivor has now disappeared. (Fortunately, the toromiro still grows in botanical gardens elsewhere.)

The fifteenth century marked the end not only for Easter's palm but for the forest itself. Its doom had been approaching as people cleared land to plant gardens; as they felled trees to build canoes, to transport and erect statues, and to burn; as rats devoured seeds; and probably as the native birds died out that had pollinated the trees' flowers and dispersed their fruit. The overall picture is among the most extreme examples of forest destruction anywhere in the world: the whole forest gone, and most of its tree species extinct.

The destruction of the island's animals was as extreme as that of the forest: without exception, every species of native land bird became extinct. Even shellfish were overexploited, until people had to settle for small sea snails instead of larger cowries. Porpoise bones disappeared abruptly from garbage heaps around 1500; no one could harpoon porpoises anymore, since the trees used for constructing the big seagoing canoes no longer existed. The colonies of more than half of the seabird species breeding on Easter or on its offshore islets were wiped out.

In place of these meat supplies, the Easter Islanders intensified their production of chickens, which had been only an occasional food item. They also turned to the largest remaining meat source available: humans, whose bones became common in late Easter Island garbage heaps. Oral traditions of the islanders are rife with cannibalism; the most inflammatory taunt that could be snarled at an enemy was "The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth." With no wood available to cook these new goodies, the islanders resorted to sugarcane scraps, grass, and sedges to fuel their fires.

All these strands of evidence can be wound into a coherent narrative of a society's decline and fall. The first Polynesian colonists found themselves on an island with fertile soil, abundant food, bountiful building materials, ample lebensraum, and all the prerequisites for comfortable living. They prospered and multiplied.

After a few centuries, they began erecting stone statues on platforms, like the ones their Polynesian forebears had carved. With passing years, the statues and platforms became larger and larger, and the statues began sporting ten-ton red crowns-probably in an escalating spiral of one-upmanship, as rival clans tried to surpass each other with shows of wealth and power. (In the same way, successive Egyptian pharaohs built ever-larger pyramids. Today Hollywood movie moguls near my home in Los Angeles are displaying their wealth and power by building ever more ostentatious mansions. Tycoon Marvin Davis topped previous moguls with plans for a 50,000-square-foot house, so now Aaron Spelling has topped Davis with a 56,000-square-foot house. All that those buildings lack to make the message explicit are ten-ton red crowns.) On Easter, as in modern America, society was held together by a complex political system to redistribute locally available resources and to integrate the economies of different areas.

Eventually Easter's growing population was cutting the forest more rapidly than the forest was regenerating. The people used the land for gardens and the wood for fuel, canoes, and houses-and, of course, for lugging statues. As forest disappeared, the islanders ran out of timber and rope to transport and erect their statues. Life became more uncomfortable-springs and streams dried up, and wood was no longer available for fires.

People also found it harder to fill their stomachs, as land birds, large sea snails, and many seabirds disappeared. Because timber for building seagoing canoes vanished, fish catches declined and porpoises disappeared from the table. Crop yields also declined, since deforestation allowed the soil to be eroded by rain and wind, dried by the sun, and its nutrients to be leeched from it. Intensified chicken production and cannibalism replaced only part of all those lost foods. Preserved statuettes with sunken cheeks and visible ribs suggest that people were starving.

With the disappearance of food surpluses, Easter Island could no longer feed the chiefs, bureaucrats, and priests who had kept a complex society running. Surviving islanders described to early European visitors how local chaos replaced centralized government and a warrior class took over from the hereditary chiefs. The stone points of spears and daggers, made by the warriors during their heyday in the 1600s and 1700s, still litter the ground of Easter today. By around 1700, the population began to crash toward between one-quarter and one-tenth of its former number. People took to living in caves for protection against their enemies. Around 1770 rival clans started to topple each other's statues, breaking the heads off. By 1864 the last statue had been thrown down and desecrated.

Basically, Diamond describes a society which has run to the end of the its resources, through over population and over use. All trees, land birds, most land animals, and sea stocks were depleted or disappeared completely. The resulting cannabilism, war and chaos resulted from the depletion of resources.

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 12:31 PM

Quote:
Sounds pretty hostile to me. I never said I was on the side of any deathmongers, intended to do nothing. I was pointing out the patterns of human history.

Neither did I. I was challenging you. I fully expected you to say, "Of course not!" and list off a whole bunch of stuff that you ARE doing.

I've said numerous times that this wasn't what I meant, I distinctly have constantly said, even before your first post about this that I KNOW you're fighting against them because you're HERE.

Quote:
BTW pull your head in is another way of saying'stop being hostile'

I wouldn't know. Look, clearly I epic failed at trying to cheer you up and reassuring you that what's happened in the past doesn't have to happen again and we still have a chance against them. I offer you the same offer I made to Sig to steer clear of you and leave you alone. For a while I thought I might still be able to work things out with the two of you but that's obviously not the case.

So I'm going, I've already apologized, I am leaving this thread, I am not going to bother you in the future, and I am going.

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 2:13 PM

Quote:
I note for the record that I often provide sources to any theories that I discuss, whereas you do not.

Yeah, I tend to have no idea where I got information. Read it somewhere. Could be wrong.

Quote:
Pollen records show that destruction of Easter's forests was well under way by the year 800,

Melanesian empire days. There was a lot of that. It was in places very destructive. There have been a number of those, like the huari.

Rats are pretty inefficient scavengers of nuts, I would suspect more that something they did changed soil conditions so that it was too dry or poisonous for anything to grow, or something they were heard ate everything that grew up. I'm a little surprised they had rats, actually. They're not native IIRC to pacific islands, they had to bring them over on ships, which the brits often did, I don't know about the melanesians. This is all interesting, I'm not sure why we're here, unless it's a parallel of the grasshopper:ant relations on easter island.

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All these strands of evidence can be wound into a coherent narrative of a society's decline and fall. The first Polynesian colonists found themselves on an island with fertile soil, abundant food, bountiful building materials, ample lebensraum, and all the prerequisites for comfortable living. They prospered and multiplied.

Oh, that's where you were going. It doesn't connect though: The Japanese landed on Honshu, but nothing really terrible happened to the island.
OTOH, the Maori landed on New Zealand, and even though the land was truly huge, in a few short centuries, they completely devastated it, even though there weren't that many Maori.

The aborigines had a long time to destroy Australia, but they did quite a job of it. Europe, OTOH, has been inhabited for about the same amount of time, and is not a desert. Different cultures behave differently, and some are very destructive. This modern one that's cropped up globally is a real world wrecker, and needs to be stopped. But it does not have anything really to do with the numbers of the population. Most prehistoric civilizations that turned forest into desert had much smaller populations than today's rainforest hunter gatherer populations. There may be as many as 50 million people in the Congo forest, and 100 million in the amazon, but that's not what's doing the damage. It's 400 assholes from Texas.

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After a few centuries, they began erecting stone statues on platforms, like the ones their Polynesian forebears had carved. With passing years, the statues and platforms became larger and larger, and the statues began sporting ten-ton red crowns-probably in an escalating spiral of one-upmanship

I'd heard about this. Also, I'd heard that over time, the gods became more bird-like, because birds had the power to leave the island, which was now divine.

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In the same way, successive Egyptian pharaohs built ever-larger pyramids

Pyramids are actually a strange story. It was a giant public works project, largely the planning of one man. The goal was to create a desert beacon, like a lighthouse. But if you mean the tombs at Saqqara...

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On Easter, as in modern America, society was held together by a complex political system to redistribute locally available resources and to integrate the economies of different areas.

I thought you were driving towards the idea that inequality of wealth led to the exploitation of the environment,. ?

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Eventually Easter's growing population was cutting the forest more rapidly than the forest was regenerating.

This is obviously easy for them to do even if there are just a few of them, it has nothing to do with population growth. This part is very weak.
Historically, destruction of forests has been done by a small number of people over a very short span of time that is often at a specific point in history, like with New Zealand or England. Or the US. And now, Brazil.

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The people used the land for gardens and the wood for fuel, canoes, and houses-and, of course, for lugging statues. As forest disappeared, the islanders ran out of timber and rope to transport and erect their statues. Life became more uncomfortable-springs and streams dried up, and wood was no longer available for fires.

Fires for what? Cooking each other? The average winter (july) temperature is 68F. 18C. Sorry, lots of these epic stories have individual holes, probably all of them do.

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With the disappearance of food surpluses, Easter Island could no longer feed the chiefs, bureaucrats, and priests who had kept a complex society running.

I think you mean "kept it ruining" they should have killed these guys long ago.

Surely we have a report from Cook, who was there in the 1770s.

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Basically, Diamond describes a society which has run to the end of the its resources, through over population and over use.

This is conjecture of the cause of collapse of a society that was poorly managed. Many other societies which were not completely isolated like this collapsed in a similar manner, and many that were so isolated did not. Hawaii, for example.

The notion of resources here implied is fallacious. The melanesians knew how to farm. They were capable of growing their own food. I might postulate out of nowhere that this was a driving element of deforestation, but I think that wholesale eco destruction was a poor management issue.

You can watch this in action in central asia and africa, as very small bands of cattle herders destroy one piece of land after another, and in centuries, create vast deserts.

Meanwhile, meet the most densely populated land on earth. It has been occupied by humans for 10,000 years, the world's oldest civilization, and the center of the density of 1.3 billion people:

http://china-tourist-attractions.net/China_Attractions.asp?id=188

People farming,

for 10,000 years

http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-14374027/stock-photo-tourist-boats-at-
the-canal-suzhou-jiangsu-province-china.html
It's the area around Shanghai, a metropolitan region with a population larger than that of Russia.

Like Japan, it's still looking pretty green. Not to say there haven't been disasters in China, many people, many cultures, but with an average population density even in the rural areas of 2000 people per square mile, it still looks, well, kinda normal.

Peaceful even.

ETA: In Shanghai itself

Not too far away, in the city center, a population of 20 million inside the city limits

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 2:24 PM

DT, I hardly know where the start your logic is so flawed. You base the premise that resources are infinite based on the fact that the universe if infinite? That may be so, but the earth's resources are not. That is the point.

Additionally, nothing can be produced from nothing. Everything, be it plants through to solar energy requires ongoing resources to be produced. Otherwise it would be magic. Water is not finite. There exists a certain amount of water and a certain level of rainfall. Land is a finite resource, even if you reclaim more of it. There has never been a time in history where we haven't used resources. It just isn't possible.

There is plenty of evidence to demonstrate that how population density impacts on resources use, including desertification, erosion of land through agriculture, deforestation, diminishing fish stocks, mass extinctions of animals. Not to mention the effect of pollution, the other end of the equation from what we use being our waste products, human, industrial,animal, chemical..... and the impact that has on our natural resources.

Now I get that some behaviour change will improve things, if we could invest in more renewable energy sources, and phase out those that rely on fossil fuels, move to more environmentally sustainable farming practices, change our behaviour re the rampant consumerism, we'd probably all be a lot better off and facing less of the crisis than we are today. But boy that behaviour change is hard to bring about, especially given the raging debates on environmental matters, climate change, let alone trying to get people to buy less shit. Every move in this country to attempt any change has been met with a backlash, from industries and corporations, through to people who fog the issues with obscure ideological objections, through to consumers horrified that something might impact on their spending capacity even in the short term. It depresses the fuck out of me, I can tell you.

Personally, i think big changes are only possible when people are forced to make them, and that is usually not a pretty place to be, and by the time that happens there may be no going back to a reasonable place. Somethings once gone, won't be brought back. I think the major ways that change will be forced on us will be by war or armed conflict, and we already see the series of oil wars in the middle east as an example. Pandemics will be another big one, along with economic collapse. We've seen the rumblings of these in recent years as well.

Your idea of a trillon? (a billion billion) people living happily together in sort of agrarian paradise is a bit of a utopian stretch. Apart from the resources issue, there is the social aspect of how we live together. Dunbar's number theory assesses that our brain prevents us from managing social groupings of around 150 before groups splinter and turn against one another, and that 150 would need to have a pretty solid social structure to manage that number. What this means is that we are not really evolved to manage big society, something which you can see in large urban complexes. When people talk about society breakdown, they are generally referring to what happens in cities. Even if we managed to live in smaller groups, we'd have to manage the inevitable conflict between groups because that is how we function. The idea that we'd all be farming our little permaculture plots should to shoulder with so many others is kind of contrary to human social behaviour.

If you have any sources to demonstrate or back up any of your arguments, I'd really like to see them. Or is this your idea alone?

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 2:31 PM

More pictures of the Earth, in its most densely populated areas.

NY, roughly the population of Australia, in its most densly populated area, that little corner down by the city: (I drive through all of this on my way to the city, I recognize all of these places on sight, I've been there many times. It all looks like this.)

If I turn around, I'm looking at a city of 7 million.

NY has 1/10 the population density of the area around shanghai, a density it only reaches in the city itself.

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 2:32 PM

Overpopulation is just a rationalization the grasshoppers use to reduce the ant population because it's getting too large for them to manage. The habitable portion of Australia looks to be about 40 times the size of New York, given that you're mostly arid or semi-arid, ie, uninhabitable. That means with a population of 7 billion, you'd look like the area around Shanghai. With about 3/4 billion, you'd look like here.

Back to topic.

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 2:37 PM

http://www.apheda.org.au/projects/philippines/news/images/Page1_Image_
Scores_of_people_survive_by_collecting_rubbish_for_recycling_reduced.JPG

China has some of the worst soil erosion in the world/

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 2:39 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Overpopulation is just a rationalization the grasshoppers use to reduce the ant population because it's getting too large for them to manage.

Back to topic.

Run out of puff with your logic and reduced to making silly and insulting claims. Where is your evidence?

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Sunday, March 6, 2011 2:47 PM