ediblemitten said:
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Everyone is entitled to their opinions, and I nor anyone else can or should stop anyone from expressing those opinions... but dude... really? The deaths of millions doesn't disturb you in the least?
No, because I'm a realist.
Big isues are big issues because of the amount of support involved in them, and the genuine belief on all sides. Change isn't going to happen without violence and military force, and the higher the global population, and the bigger the issue, the more people that are going to have to die in order to bring about any change, no matter how positive.
Our trained aversion to violence is such nowadays, where I think a lot of our problems are caused by the simple fact that with enough opposed believers, dialogue is going to accomplish nothing. Not to mention the simple fact that I think our aversion to warfare has contributed signifigantly to global over population, and problems that go beyond the merelty political as a result. Today especially I feel that anything that kills millions is a good thing, not becaus eof any genuine hatred, but because there are just so many bloody people. Truthfully I'd rather see a war than some kind of global, lottery based cull. Like most things this is an issue that people bury their heads in the sand over and hope for a magical solution on.
Right now my overall belief, divorced from politics, is that a global unity is needed. Simply put we've gone from the issue of merely producing enough resources to sustain the population, to the issue of having the, as the untold multitudes of humans are using up things like wood, clean water, metal, and fossil fuels beyond the abillity of the planet to produce more, and our population continues to grow. Our only way to deal with our problem and exist happily is going to be to obtain more resources via space travel, even if we never find aliens or anything we already have the tech to do things like terraform mars, and we know there are mineral resources on other planets in the solar system and within the astroid belt. We can for example bring back tons of iron and such from space to build with if nothing else, and deal with issues like strip mining where we are getting so desperate that we are literally decimating the planetary crust trying to find enough minerals to sustain ourselves.
Space travel and the like being impossible as long as there are multiple human factions due to the paranoia that already limits it, nobody trusts anyone else to not put missles and such into orbit, and there are already issues over things like communications and spy satellites. Someone builds a space ship, everyone else becomes concerned it will have missles or death rays of some sort on it, which increases the odds of others building vehicles that have those things as a counter, leading to a race where all we do is point guns down at the planet surface rather than working on doing what needs to be done.
Now of course, "global unity" does mean "global conquest" and what amounts to genocide by the UN definition by intentionally smashing and subverting all global cultures except for one, which all human survivors will belong to. I think to be honest that some of this will happen without the need for violence, and through the spread of ideas. We already see it happening which is why there are all these "national firewalls" for the declared purpose of cultural perservation. In the end though, we're talking about the untold deaths of billions with people being exterminated simply for not wanting to give up their own cultural and self-rule for a planetary goverment.... but you know, I'l kind of cool with that, because it gets rid of people, and gives us the oppertunity to embrace Zero Population Growth at a level the planet can sustain, while enabling us to work on getting off the planet to obtain more living space if nothing else, as we obtain more living space we can thus expand our population in accordance with tour abillity to produce and sustain the production of resources. I believe in the overall scope of history more people benefit in terms of future generations than wll be lost here and now. We kill 95% of the global population for example, that's a few billion people, but now weigh that against the trillions of people that could exist in the future... something that will never happen if we pretty much exterminate our own species due to overpopulation and depletion right now. In the end I believe my own society and culture has the best chance of creating a global unity even if it will dissolve itself in the process, though in the end I feel everyone feels the same way, and in the end it really doesn't matter who wins, all preferances aside.
In short, if I think this way, looking at things from as a much bigger picture than most people, obviously I'm not going to be terribly appalled by simply getting rid of people. I care more about "why" than the simple act itself. If you want to kill people for your own satisfaction and are finding ways to do it for that reason, that's wrong, on the other hand if you have a bigger purpose in mind that just happens to involve killing a lot of people as part of that objective, that's something else entirely.
See, the differance is I'm a realist and look at the fate of humanity as things are now. If the magical solution people are waiting for ever transpired, I'd be willing to stop any of these ideas and go with that. The thing is we're running out of time, we can't wait for the resources to hit "zero" and lose other options. If Aliens show up and say "hey here is interplanetary technology to spread out your population, we'll take an IOU based on a percentage of any of your later discoveries" (ie a Brin-esque Uplift scenario), that's fine, ditto if fey folk show up and offer us transdimensional magic to colonize other realities or something.... but really, we can't bank on that.
Good and evil DO exist, but most conflicts are ones where it's simply irreconcilable differances or problems. An "us or them" scenario, or simply a matter of getting something done. In many wars, there were no good guys, it was just a war that had to happen given the way things developed. Good and evil are added later when the victors write the history books. There are exceptions, but that is generally how things are.
Look at it this way, all my ranting aside, if your a left winger and support all the enviromental stuff, the plight of the rain forests, the ecological ruin of strip mining, and similar things, try and look at your other beliefs like how there should be no war and we should just let these developing nations progress their technology and increase their standard of living since "they just want a better life". Those resources have to come from somewhere, there isn't enough production to maintain the standard of living for the first world and all of these other nations. Even if the first world was to sacrifice there are so many people globally where there just isn't enough stuff. China is building up it's military because it alone represents roughly a third of the global population... think of the sheer number of people all demanding a share of resources and a better life, with the way we're already gutting the planet to sustain what we have.... this is a simplistic way of pointing out the problem, but it's one of many reasons why I am so dismissive of the left wing in general, it represents an overall philsophy that is nice, but cannot work, and has arguably created a lot of the very same problems we're looking at now. Save a rain forest here, and your starting a war there, because the people gutting that rain forest needed the wood to build houses, or even just to sell to support their developing economy and increase their standard of living, having nothing else of value besides that rain forest. With the granola chomping enviromentalists celebrating, the people there pick up guns and go to war because if they can't use their resources, they need to find a way to improve themselves and obtain resources some other way, and that means taking what someone else has... all expressed motives aside that is what it comes down to.
So basically, when I believe less people is a good thing, as I said above, how can I of all people be judgemental on the act of mass murder in of itself? I'd be a bloody hypocrit, yet when I look at the big picture, I see too many people being one of the key problems facing us and actually holding us back as a species.
What else you might think of me, I'm generally consistant in my beliefs, even when they go into dark places. I might not be entirely comfortable with mass death, especially seeing as my own attitudes mean I'll probbaly die too (if we say kill 19 out of every 20 people the odds of my survival are pretty low... and I don't roll that many natural 20s when I play D&D, much to my annoyance), but at least I can come to grips with it and accept it. I'm also honest enough to avoid lying and saying there are easy and painless ways of dealing with big issues.
