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World wide Humanitarian crisis

For discussions of events and conditions not necessarily related to Peak Oil.

Re: World wide Humanitarian crisis

Unread postby onlooker » Sat 14 May 2016, 16:33:23

I have a slightly different take on Overpopulation relative to humanitarian crisis. I see an obscenely unequal and unjust world. A world whereby 62 persons own as much wealth as 1/2 the worlds population. Where one fifth get to live in relative comfort and abundance while the other four fifths live in squalor. Ignoring for a moment the issue of sheer numbers of people and how we are very overpopulated, I find the cavalier attitude of seamlessly now transitioning to lifeboat ethics as one further insult to the sense of caring and solidarity among humans. As those more fortunate close the doors on those less fortunate , let us at least concede this further injustice of the trajectory of the human species. After all money is just an extension of the brutal ethos of might makes right.
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Re: World wide Humanitarian crisis

Unread postby Newfie » Sat 14 May 2016, 16:36:07

Ibon,

You know the guy here who stymies me is Cog. I haven't figured him out yet. I like reading his posts because under the trolling BS there is a thoughtful person. Thoughtful in the sense that he has reasoned arguments even if I don't agree with the reasons.

The reason I bring this up is your Carlins comparison. Cog, I believe, would not get it, would not see that there should be some consistency.

And I think a LOT of folks think like Cog. He is a sort of Everyman, a spokesman for the ruling autocracy. I don't know how to address him in such a way as to get through. There is a invisible wall that, to me, defies explanation or logic.

Perhaps Carlin, through humor, could. Although, truth be told, later in life he was not very humorous, if you thought he believed in what he said, and I did. I admired him all the more for it.

........

Look at that, as I was writing Cog jumped in to make my point.
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Re: World wide Humanitarian crisis

Unread postby Newfie » Sat 14 May 2016, 16:39:06

Cog wrote:Because Ibon, humans aren't chickens, or amoebas, or whatever lower species you would wish to categorize us as.

Humans have value. If not to the planet, at least within their own group.


So then, it is OK to eat the fetus of someone outside your group! Lovely!
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Re: World wide Humanitarian crisis

Unread postby onlooker » Sat 14 May 2016, 16:39:50

Cog wrote:Because Ibon, humans aren't chickens, or amoebas, or whatever lower species you would wish to categorize us as.

Humans have value. If not to the planet, at least within their own group.

Cog, I am amazed you and I are agreeing on something. I happen to foremost care about humans above and beyond other species.
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Re: World wide Humanitarian crisis

Unread postby onlooker » Sat 14 May 2016, 18:48:15

Another full fledged humanitarian disaster it seems they are now springing up everywhere. This time Yemen. http://reliefweb.int/report/yemen/fao-y ... 9-may-2016
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Re: World wide Humanitarian crisis

Unread postby Newfie » Sat 14 May 2016, 19:16:13

onlooker wrote:
Cog wrote:Because Ibon, humans aren't chickens, or amoebas, or whatever lower species you would wish to categorize us as.

Humans have value. If not to the planet, at least within their own group.

Cog, I am amazed you and I are agreeing on something. I happen to foremost care about humans above and beyond other species.


Of course you do, your human. That is just reacting to genetic programming

If you think about it, how could humans exist without other species?

I get gut reactions, it's the cerebral considerations that are more interesting.

The genetic reactions got us where we are. Think it through.
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Re: World wide Humanitarian crisis

Unread postby onlooker » Fri 16 Jun 2017, 18:24:34

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... .html?_r=0

Overpopulated and Underfed:
Countries Near a Breaking Point
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Re: World wide Humanitarian crisis

Unread postby Rod_Cloutier » Sat 15 Jul 2017, 17:47:08

I saw this on the internet about how war affects children. This was a fictional program made to challenge people's reaction to waves of immigration, and look at it from a new perspective:

https://youtu.be/Aa3o7vWG93w?t=1s

I felt emotionally overwhelmed during it thinking 'This is here and now', what am I doing about it??
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Re: World wide Humanitarian crisis

Unread postby Tanada » Sat 15 Jul 2017, 22:18:18

Unfortunately the effect of wars are most pronounced on the children and elderly, those who have the hardest time getting out of the way and most vulnerable to harm from poor diet or injuries.

Sadly it has been that way since war was invented and will stay that way so long as war exists. Letting people use this harsh reality of life be a tool of manipulation is not wise. Any time someone tells you 'do it, for the children' you better check the cost to the children already living in your neighborhood/state/country because there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
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Re: World wide Humanitarian crisis

Unread postby Ibon » Sun 16 Jul 2017, 10:22:21

Tanada wrote:Unfortunately the effect of wars are most pronounced on the children and elderly, those who have the hardest time getting out of the way and most vulnerable to harm from poor diet or injuries.

Sadly it has been that way since war was invented and will stay that way so long as war exists. Letting people use this harsh reality of life be a tool of manipulation is not wise. Any time someone tells you 'do it, for the children' you better check the cost to the children already living in your neighborhood/state/country because there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.



Our main predators historically, famine and disease, disproportionately effected the young and the old. Influenza for example. It is not just war.

The greatest killer of young and the aged in today's world is our indifference to the ecological plight of our species. Are you alive and human in 2017? If you answer yes then your indifference makes you complicit, makes you in legal terms guilty of voluntary manslaughter. That is if you are well read and cognizant of the threats.

If you are uneducated and human in 2017 then in legal terms you are guilty of involuntary manslaughter, for your indifference due to ignorance does not excuse your culpability.

How many of you are courageous enough to recognize your indifference as manslaughter?
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Re: World wide Humanitarian crisis

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Sun 16 Jul 2017, 12:02:24

Ibon wrote:-snip-

How many of you are courageous enough to recognize your indifference as manslaughter?


I'm cognizant of the threats of global warming, resource depletion, ocean pollution, air pollution, topsoil erosion, etc. etc. I am not so much indifferent as unable to affect the underlying cause.

I believe all are symptoms of human overshoot, except the warming which is 99% natural and possibly 1% man-made. All of these things would either not be problems (because the ecosystem absorbs the damage without harm) or at most very manageable problems, if only we had a sustainable world population of one billion or less.

I'm NOT ready to accept the guilt of manslaughter because my wife and I in fact DID have one child and she tried to have one but was gifted with twins. We have the values needed to live in a sustainable world, as do most forum members, including especially YOU, Ibon.

I just cannot accept the charge of manslaughter because of 1.4 billion Chinese souls, or 1.3 billion Indians. I am ready to acknowledge that the 3rd most populated country, the USA, is overpopulated at 325 million.

Here is what I think we should do. We should set a maximum population number, mandated by law. Then we should set a much lower optimal population number as a target. Then we should manage both births and immigration to achieve those numbers.

We could talk endlessly about the details of that management, but that would be off topic. The important thing is to recognize that human overshoot is the root cause of every problem we have, and to manage our numbers.

So, Ibon, I plead NOT GUILTY to manslaughter. Anybody with more than two children would then be GUILTY.
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Re: World wide Humanitarian crisis

Unread postby onlooker » Sun 16 Jul 2017, 22:43:59

I recognize my complicity by being a member of the human species. Beyond that I plead innocence because of absence of malice and because I have no children
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Re: World wide Humanitarian crisis

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Tue 18 Jul 2017, 08:21:57

I notice that nobody even pushed back at my identification of your individual reproductive rate as the best indicator of your true beliefs about eliminating the root cause of all the assorted environmental issues.

I know it's a hard pill to swallow. My kid waited a couple of decades past the average age of parenthood before having her twins, and my grandchildren are my main source of happyness since retiring.

Here's another pill for you. Given that we are overpopulated and it's getting worse, we have to close our borders. We already have a situation in the USA where we would have a shrinking population less immigration. If you accept immigrants from places where they are still reproducing at unsustainable rates, your country is still damaged and dying from too many people, the dieback to a sustainable population never occurs.

So here's the pill: Donald Trump's policies about limiting immigration are correct and necessary. Any of you who support the Democrat's ideal of open borders are actually advocating the further destruction of the environment in our country. Of course, the Democrat's don't practice what they preach, their policies of open borders, welfare, education, and diversity have the actual effect of repressing minority groups and concentrating them in crime-ridden and polluted inner-city areas, while our population increases steadily and things get incrementally worse. These Democrat ideals are the cause of our deteriorating environment and the loss of our quality of life.

Now swallow the pill.
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Re: World wide Humanitarian crisis

Unread postby Ibon » Tue 18 Jul 2017, 10:32:05

The truth is that we as individuals are all tied into this complex social matrix and it is not easy to isolate ones own culpability. I really am suggesting that collectively we are committing manslaughter.

As KJ mentioned having less children has a huge impact but this does not stand in isolation to the myriad of factors that influence personal choice.

For example if you are a celibate priest who never had a single child but spent your life towing the catholic line of preaching that any form of birth control is a sin and against god's will then who is more culpable, the priest or a member of his flock who had 8 children?

In terms of manslaughter I would say that culpability is simply to what degree you are complicit with the status quo and to what degree you passively accept being a passenger on a train that will one day soon crash into a wall.

You have your morning coffee, chime in with a few noble words here on this site or the activist site of your choice, then you close your digital device and go about your normal daily routine. So you spend 23 hours a day supporting the underpinnings of the status quo and 1 hour a day in elegant prose about our soon to be appointment with the consequences of human overshoot. This does nothing to resolve the issue. Here are some more fun examples of comparing culpability. Feel free to add your own to this list.

Who is more culpable. The professor who renounced his position and became a hermit in the woods or the climate change scientist flying on airplanes all over the planet to attend conferences that have no teeth?

Who is more culpable, the meth addict in Youngstown Ohio who is rotting in his dilapidated house or the silicon valley executive who flies his family of 5 down to Mount Totumas to watch birds?

And so who is more culpable, the pathologist who splices a gene of air born influenza and combines this with an ebola virus to create an easily transmittable virulent new pathogen that he then reproduces and sends around the world in Fedex packages or a scientist working for the Gates Foundation to cure malaria?
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Re: World wide Humanitarian crisis

Unread postby Ibon » Tue 18 Jul 2017, 10:41:35

onlooker wrote:I recognize my complicity by being a member of the human species. Beyond that I plead innocence because of absence of malice and because I have no children


Think of the priest Onlooker, absent of malice and celibate. In his love for his religion he believes that every child is a gift of god and abortion or birth control is something morally repugnant.

Compassion without the sword of wisdom can be deadly.

Think of that scientist dedicating his life to fight malaria, motivated by an absence of malice to rid the suffering of millions of this deadly disease. His colleague down the street is an agronomist who just put the final touches on a genetically modified grain that increases yields of corn and wheat grown in hot semi arid desert environments. This agronomist also free of malice to help humanity fight starvation.

So both this grain and this malaria vaccination gets exported to Sub Saharan Africa. In 20 years 8 millions lives have been saved and those 8 million have now become 40 million.

This is the result of compassion free of malice.

These are also actions that put human interest before the interest of our fellow flora and fauna. How many millions of acres of native habitat were destroyed to support these additional 40 million humans. How many lions and elephants sacrificed?

This is what happens when you say human life is more important than other life forms.

There is no malice intended in my comments to you Onlooker :)
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