Discredited Malthusian Bullshit Again

I long for the day when this meme would ever, ever end, but since the Marquis de Sade, through the discredited Malthus, through Z(ero)P(opulation)G(rowth), the VHEMT, and wackos like this one (Warning: contains radical feminism and mind-cracking stupidity), it seems we're never going to escape this hysterical overpopulation hoax. Even in our fiction we get it - the original Star Trek once showed an earth that was so full of people they dind't have room to turn around or move about (which really makes no sense when you think about it even for a minute.) Arthur C. Clarke wrote a series of very good short stories in the decade of the 50s, "The Wind From the Sun" and one of the stories was about having discovered the secret for a life prolonged to at least 200 healthy years - the low gravity of the moon. When the excited young scientist wants to tell the world, his mentor points down at the earth from their moon base, and delivers a scathing indictment about the people so crowded down there that they are spilling over the shores into the oceans, clambering for a few free feet of space in which to exist...that if life were to be prolonged, what the hell would happen then?

Well, it's certainly not just fiction to the hysterical ZPGers and thier ilk - not by a longshot. This is one of the latest in a general leftist trend to ban children, and damn rights or choice or anything of the kind.

A bestselling author has called octuplets-mother Nadya Sulamen a 'murderer' and warns of overpopulation saying, "we need to lose 4.4 billion people."

An odd juxtaposition. She is a murderer for giving *birth* to several children, while he claims we need to "lose" 4.4 billion people - who sounds like the murderer to you? Hmm?

“STOP HAVING CHILDREN.” Steven Kotler has declared that responsible adults should stop having children in order to save the planet. Those who are having kids, are being selfish and stealing from the future, the rest of humanity, and “every living thing on the earth,” he wrote. Have too many kids and you should go to jail.

Wow, JAIL? Is that right, jail?? 'Cause I could swear that lefty after lefty has screamed blue murder that the conservatives want to enact "enforced birth" and turn the world into the dystopian vision of "The Handmaid's Tale." That we must, in fact, ensure that women have ABSOLUTE AND FULL CONTROL over their own bodies and their reproduction, period, full stop. The same people claiming women must control their bodies are the ones proposing laws such as these, banning people from having children. The proposals run the gamut; it's horrifying and appalling all the various proposals they manage to come up with; but the end result is the same - in the name of saving the planet and in order to take the act of procreation OUT of private hands and put it into government hands, we will enact draconian laws and usurp bodily sovereignty of every individual in some fashion to bring about what we BELIEVE will help the environment though we have no just rationalization to believe this.

This isn’t a joke. Kotler writes a blog called “The Playing Field” on the Psychology Today Web site. He is a best selling author and an advocate of controlling population growth. His latest solution: a five-year moratorium on having kids.

Huh. It's one of the less draconian proposals I've read. But every time a deSade or a Malthus or an Ehrlich or a ZPG or any organization/crackpot you can name has made these predictions, they have proven spectacularly, stunningly, utterly WRONG. One of the major flaws in their reasoning is the false belief that people are "consumers" when in fact they are "producers." As problems arise, human ingenuity contrives to solve them, and as population has grown we have been able to greatly increase per capita food production, make food and water supplies safer than ever, and conquer disease and unnecessary death more than ever before. I realize people like that aren't HAPPY unless they're predicting the end of the world (and it's all our fault!) but if we dug humanity's grave every time one of these geniuses predicted we had about 5 years left before we all died, we'd be eating Chop Suey in fucking China by now. They're wrong. They've always been wrong. They get wronger as time goes by. Some places are suffering for their fall in birth rates, such as China and their inhuman childbearing policy, and Korea who has experienced a drastic decrease as well. Other places are beginning to feel the pinch, and as the aging of our time age without enough young people to bear their burdens, we really don't know what we're going to see. There is no indication that a massive death toll wiping out more than half of humanity is going to improve any conditions for anyone or anything, anywhere, in any way. It would, in fact, be an unqualified disaster of epic proportions.

I also would love to know exactly how they propose to ever POSSIBLY enforce something like that - in anything beyond an absolutely Hitlerian society, that is. And how will that enforcement be undertaken throughout the rest of the world, in 3rd world hellholes, too? Geniuses, I tell you.