[Cog]

Let me repeat....

ECONOMIC GROWTH IS GENOCIDE ON A MASS SCALE.

Everyone is squirming trying not to look in the eye at the truth of what you are saying; Cog in the US, Hans in Germany, Mohammed in Egypt, Joao in Brazil, Pedro in Mexico, Li in China, Mr. Patel in India, all of them squirm uncomfortably trying to hold to their ideologies and cultural and religious beliefs when confronted with the hard cold truth of these words Newfie.

Nobody will be spared. At least not their children.

Get ready for some serious confrontations with those ideological truths you hold so dear.

I do not avoid anything. Within the hallowed halls of this board, the destruction of billions of lives is discussed in a calm and cool manner. I get all that. People don't like ideologies that contradict what they want to see as a preferred manner of living.

What I am trying to get across to you folks is this. I am prepared to accept the reality that resource constraints might well result in the death of billions. Very likely I will be one of those who die. But until that point, that resource constraints or our human nature makes that happen, I am unwilling to engage in genocide or to have genocide committed against me.

So, if those of your ilk comes into power and wish to execute your plan to make the planet and human's place within it, subject to some sort of death cult thinking, then count me out. You will have to kill me to do that. Which one of you wants to pull the trigger on me or my family? Or are such distasteful things handled by someone else?

[Newfie]

Speaking for myself and my beliefs alone, you have no fear of this group coming to get you. IS? Maybe.

In Nature there are only events and consequences. These are the things that will hurt you. This is what you need to prep for.

And although you may not appreciate it, I am very much of the same belief system as you. We simply understand the threats to that system differently my friend.

Going back to the Guidestones admonition to keep humanity to below 500,000,000. I'd not NOT read that as saying there should be some mass genocide. I read that as saying there will be a mass die off taking human population to well below 500 million and that we should not allow it to again go above that number. But that's just my personal interpretation.

[davep]

Everyone is squirming trying not to look in the eye at the truth of what you are saying

Not quite everyone. Some of us are proposing alternative money systems that don't depend on economic growth for mere survival. We're going to have to change at some point anyway as we live in a finite world, so why not push for it while it'll still be relatively painless (I have no scale to measure the relative pain here, but things are still relatively comfortable out there).

Maybe a dedicated thread to alternative money systems that don't need economic growth would be useful.

[Newfie]

And potentially interesting, although those topics often quickly go over my head.

Are you thinking bit coins or barter or???

I understood money up to the point where it was an abstraction of some tangible value. Such as five coins for ten sheep. After that it lost me.

[davep]

Going back to the Guidestones admonition to keep humanity to below 500,000,000. I'd not NOT read that as saying there should be some mass genocide. I read that as saying there will be a mass die off taking human population to well below 500 million and that we should not allow it to again go above that number. But that's just my personal interpretation.

I don't believe we need a population of 500,000,000. And saying that it will come from die-off becomes self-fulfilling as we would do nothing to help mitigate the situation if we're fatalist about it. It becomes a passive acceptance of die-off and doesn't help instigate the changes we need such as sustainable agricultural practices, reforming the economic system etc. And in the meantime, the elite continue to get richer.

[davep]

And potentially interesting, although those topics often quickly go over my head.

Are you thinking bit coins or barter or???

Equity/Sovereign Money. Currently money is created as credit by private banks (for over 90% of all broad money) and destroyed when that credit is paid back. So whenever banks restrict money credit it immediately has a huge impact on overall money supply as money disappears as loans are paid back. Equity systems, on the other hand, only allow banks to hold 100 reserves of existing money (there is a transition process whereby debt is transferred to equity, which increases money supply as bank reserve requirements are increased, avoiding inflation and getting rid of the national debt). A very small percentage of new money is created each year. I've written about it elsewhere here, e.g. http://peakoil.com/forums/the-death-of-money-the-coming-collapse-of-the-international-t71722.html#p1263586

[Ibon]

So, if those of your ilk comes into power and wish to execute your plan to make the planet and human's place within it, subject to some sort of death cult thinking, then count me out. You will have to kill me to do that. Which one of you wants to pull the trigger on me or my family? Or are such distasteful things handled by someone else?

You are actually touching on one of the most difficult issues to resolve. A major conundrum and this really reveals how much human overshoot checkmates us due to our ethics and morals. Just as a side note, this is probably even more difficult for those on the political left with all their favorite pet entitlements who will claim that health care is a right not a privilege along with all the other egalitarian ideals they hold so dear. So this conundrum is interesting because it knows no political ideology, it supersedes and actually dissolves the party polarity which is a hint of why this really is a major force we will have to contend with as time moves forward.

Any suggestion of regulation to deal with constraints coming whether it would mean something as mild as gas rationing or setting carbon limits on individual consumption etc. would require a strong authoritarian government whose mandates would appear to be a major impingement on personal freedoms. Will things get so bad that this will happen one day? Perhaps.

I am actually more interested Cog to hear back from you if you agree or not about my comment that our American forefathers, lovers of the constitution, lovers of personal liberty and freedom. as recently as say the 1950's , had an overiding sense of the commons in regards to their sense of civic duty. We don't see that any more these days and actually your average joe six pack driving down the road in his F350 truck with a gun rack has today most likely been educated by consumer hedonism and would probably claim this very civic duty we recently lost as being some form of communism. That is how far we have come to distorting things. How far the libertarian self interest has taken us. Do you get what I am saying here?

We may become more respectful of the commons once again some day due the forces of human overshoot. The very consequences that will strain our society may one day give rise to a new chapter of civic duty to help hold together the commons. This is not communism or loss of personal freedom by the way. Its just you and your neighbor putting up sand bags to keep your town from flooding....

[Ibon]

Let's get back to the question of killing people.

Last year the Honduran children were coming across the border illegally and many here in the US were proposing to send them back to violence and poverty, surely many died that could have been saved. We all remember that well. But for most folks these are some other countries problem.

Now lets remember the great depression when road blocks were set up in California and violent malitia mobs would prevent the Okies and other displaced prairie folks from migrating to California. These were our own fellow Americans that suffered such indignity.

Now let's jump forward. WE have Cog as an old man, his son, comfortable in Illinois, a moderately populated state that would easily be self sufficient in food production with all those deep black prairie soils. But times have changed. Climate refugees by the millions from Miami, Houston, New Orleans, Beloxi, Charleston, New York, Boston, Newark, are on the move as rising sea levels have forced them to migrate inland. This happens during a 10 year drought where that corn and soy in Illinois has suffered 5 years of failed harvest. The silos are empty.

What happens? How do we balance our civic duty to help our fellow american climate refugees against our personal self interest to preserve and protect the sustainability of our communities and town against an invasion of hungry "outsiders"

These may one day represent the kinds of tensions that will force us to make those hard decisions that will accelerate the death of our fellow human beings.

If that day comes you will be complicit in killing others by putting up once again those road blocks.

Things can jump from brown Honduran children to your own fellow citizens in a few short decades.

The degree to which we sacrifice for the commons will help mitigate such tragedies. It will be everyone's civic duty.

Don't you think we will do this willingly to prevent such death?

I believe we will up until a certain point. It really depends on that food supply and how constrained it can get. When it comes close to starvation all bets are off.

[Newfie]

Dave,

Do you seriously that even with the reforms you speak of Earth could sustain 7.5 billion to 10 billion souls?

Second, do you seriously believe there is any chance of these reforms being implemented?

As to the money explanation.....thanks. But I just don't get it. Perhaps I'm just too concrete, all that abstraction looses me. It becomes just a game of Monopoly, the rules are not based on physical cause and effect, they are arbitrary and variable.

[davep]

Dave,

Do you seriously that even with the reforms you speak of Earth could sustain 7.5 billion to 10 billion souls?

Second, do you seriously believe there is any chance of these reforms being implemented?

As to the money explanation.....thanks. But I just don't get it. Perhaps I'm just too concrete, all that abstraction looses me. It becomes just a game of Monopoly, the rules are not based on physical cause and effect, they are arbitrary and variable.

I don't know if those reforms will sustain our current or projected population. However, I do know that not making those reforms (or similar) will inevitably bring more pain.

They are arbitrary, but they're the rules we've had foist upon us. Any chance of making a relatively orderly transition to a steady-state or shrinking economy must involve the removal of a system that requires growth to stand still (amongst many other things).

[Newfie]

Thanks,

I take you points as valid. I just don't want to plan on either thing happening. If it does, great.

[Tanada]

I started this topic for a simple reason. Recently I have been reading Star's Reach by Greer,
john-michael-greer-star-reach-t71613.html
and it got me to thinking about the next 500 years and how or if the people alive then might react to the Georgia Guidestones. They are assembled at the top of a hill and there is no chance at all that sea level rise will reach them until weathering wears them away over the next 100,000 years or so, like Mount Rushmore things made of Granite are made to last.

Having taken classes in widely ranging fields and being a history minded person I know that many many different cultures have existed in the past, and if globalism falls apart I expect many many more diverse cultures to exist in the future as well. Well over half of the cultures that have existed practiced both slavery and castration of some men and boys, it was actually quite common in Italy from 1600-1850 and was common in the Ottoman Empire all through the middle east and east Asia.

Sometimes it was done as punishment, sometimes for silly reasons like maintaining soprano voices for Opera and sometimes as a requirement for holding a responsible position in the government Bureaucracy. Thinking that humans will not venture into the practice in the future is a very hopeful thought, from one point of view.

However even today there is Slavery practiced all over the world including the women forced into sex slavery in the USA. Sorry if you find the real world offensive, but your sense of offense is based on a very narrow cultural context of late 20th Century American values not the broad Anthropological context of human history.

[Cog]

We used something called the Hoffman Castrator on the farm. It was a two handled clamp that we put on either side of the bull's balls and when you clamped it down it crushed the blood vessels to the balls. Sort of like a branch trimmer but with blunt edges. If you were careful you never cut the skin of the ball sack and the balls fell off in a few weeks. The bulls didn't like it a great deal so you had to pin them up against the barn so they didn't move around a lot.

Thanks for a trip down memory lane.

I wonder if castrating your own kids would end you up in pound-me-in-ass prison. It should for those of you pyschopaths thinking about it.

[onlooker]

Tanada and Ibon make certain points which to me are the most interesting in attempting to divine a possible or probable future for human kind. It is the dichotomy of the barbaric and brutal with the gentle-spiritual-enlightened. Some would argue that our nature is to be brutish and can attest to this by showcasing the history of humanity. They would also argue that even in the relatively recent times when the planet has been civilized and blessed with abundance mankind still engages in barbaric behaviors. That is true, but I do think we have evolved and their is a segment of the population that one can find in all countries who are spiritual and pacifist in their nature. In our civilized world resides many who are virtuous in their nature and who would be the type of persons that can create a community with as the Guidestones refer too would value love, truth and beauty along with compassion and justice. This then would be a possible future human society borne from the common experiences of suffering, tumult and deprivation.

[Newfie]

Naw, the brutes will eat 'em.

[Ibon]

Naw, the brutes will eat 'em.

And then they will eat each other which will leave behind a few pockets of high altruistic low testosterone tribes that will fulfill Onlookers vision.

[Newfie]

Ah, the eternal optimist!

We will never know, so I'll let it rest.

[Ibon]

Naw, the brutes will eat 'em.

Barbarism would seem to have a role in the ebb and flow of civilizations.

[Newfie]

More the ebb than flow I suspect.