genocide is not rational...its barberic[/quote]Vault101 said:90%?...a good thing?Therumancer said:snip
its not just about me or my loved ones...its the fact I find killing inocent people a rather awful concept..anyway, HOW would you make people regress tehcnologically and to what extent?
anyway...I think capitalism "works" (in that it gives us all thease amazing advancments) because fundamentlaly we are selfish, it harnesses that selfishness and chanels it into somthing productive
EDIT: [quote/]Of course a lot of people don't really want to look at things that rationally,
I wouldn't make people regress technologically. I actually disagreed with that point.
The issue is simply overpopulation, too many people, and for them all to have high standards of living that they would be happy with would require too much space and resources. We're already depleting the resources faster than the planet can replentish them, and the global population is shrinking.
You kill 90% of the people off, and then stabilize the population there, at least until we have the technology to colonize other planets and spread out our population, and then everyone has a decent amount of living space, and there are enough resources for everyone to maintain an adequete standard of living.
Reducing the population also allows us to use more, and better, technology. Right now there are issues with things like medical technology, genetic engineering, and things like that in part because people living healthier and longer lives is a bad idea when we already have too many people, the ones we have living longer simply increases the number of people around as attrition from death simply becomes slower.
It's rational because it happens to be the best thing for the species as a whole, pure logic. The repugnance you, and others, feel is an emotional reaction, as it is a terrible thing for that many sentinent beings, many of whom did nothing wrong but exist, being snuffed out.
To my way of thinking, people were warned about this generations ago. Zero population growth, or population reduction. We chose not to do so, and the population increased as did medical sence, with people remaining alive longer and more capably. We've already gotten into the problem of generations being "Skipped" as far as societal contribution (Generation X is the "lost generation" for a reason) due to their father's generation being unwilling to step down and able to work longer in the same jobs from medical technology, in addition to the other problems.
In the end if you really think about it, a huge number of the world's problems simply come down to the bottom line of there being too many bloody people.
Ideally when the world population was decimated after WW II we should have taken efforts as a species to prevent the resulting "baby boom" and kept the population at post-war figures. We blew that oppertunity, we need for another massive population reduction to happen, but to learn from our mistakes and to control the population numbers.
I will also say (before someone else mentions it) that aside from resources there are issues with simple living space. A lot of liberals like to point to the deserts, arctic tundra, etc... and say "look at all that space" but understand that contentment is part of this, as is the issue with resources. Those are NOT nice places to live and take more resources invested to sustain people when resources are depleting. Even if we somehow DID manage to put people out there, the people there wouldn't exactly be happy, and that kind of discontent is a lot of what breeds conflict. See, the idea being that if you reduce the population by 90% everyone can thus live comfortable, have a decent personal living space, and the creature comforts to be comfortable. Nobody would wind up sharing a single room apartment with three other families and taking turns sleeping "hot bed" on the floor matresses due to space being at a premium. That kind of thing is what leads to anger and resentment. Right now China's been talking about invading other nations internally when it's military has built up far enough simply for living space, and honestly if you lived in the hell
of the majority of their population you might be thinking the same damn thing. I think part of the problem with those who disagree with me, is that they don't entirely see the big picture, it's easy to dismiss a point like this when your sitting comfortably at a desk, tapping at a computer, in the first world. Your happy an comfortable, so why do you want to see billions of people die? I think most Americans comfortable enough to get on The Internet labour under an emotional delusion of everyone having it like they do, even if they rationally know otherwise. When your personally happy and content it's easy to dismiss needing to do anything unpleasant... and really I think that's part of why the US has been failing (beyond this discussion) we've fallen into comfortable decadence and self-delusion.