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Reproduction isn't a luxury item. It's a survival need. The only reason that it's viewed as such in western society is because our economic system is all kinds of screwed up. People have been brainwashed to consider survival, as a society, in terms of our economic systems rather than in terms of the actual people.
We outsourced the need for reproduction to the periphery. But we're also a deeply racially anxious nation, such that 1.4B Han Chinese and another 1.4B East Indians fundamentally terrifies us as some kind of threat to... idk, Aristotle and Elvis Western Culture? Like humanity as we know it will be irrevocably changed if we don't live like our grandparents did in the 1950s, with all that that entails.
People have been brainwashed to consider survival, as a society, in terms of our economic systems rather than in terms of the actual people.
The thing that sticks in my brain and keeps me up at night is the idea that I'm going to die without a family, alone and abandoned, in a country that sees me as little more than a wad of cash it can squeeze dry and dispose of.
The elderly in this country are just another kind of commodity - a pass through by which some sales shits running a call center in the San Fernando Valley get enough to cover their mortgage notes. I'd like a group of people around me as I get into my senior years who see me as another human being, and I get the sense that this is going away right alongside health care and education and housing.
Han Chinese
You'll have to forgive people for being cautious when presented with an ethnic supremacist state actively working towards global domination.
I feel like "The Han Chinese are naturally imperialist, taking over the world is in their blood" is the sort of shit I'd hear out of a Bond Villain from the 1960s.
Yea man, that's totally what I said. @@
Letts : You know the person who had the greatest positive impact on the environment on this planet? Genghis Khan, because he massacred forty million people. There was no one to farm the land. Forests grew back. Carbon was dragged out of the atmosphere. And had this monster not existed, there'd be another billion of us today, jostling for space on this dying planet.
Utopia (tv series)
Damn. Not so Utopian after all.
Population growth can go too far, can't it?
Last I checked the world seems to be ending around us one day at a time as we march towards an ever higher global temperature, but if you want to say that's normal and fine and we're gonna be ok in 250 years then overpollution from overconsumption isn't a problem yet.
At what point does the earth become overpopulated? are we already there? if not... what's the magic number?
Uh, we are already past resource tipping points as human beings. This means we use more resources than the Earth is producing in a single year, which also means we cut into the resources that have been generated in other plentiful years (like old growth forests, fish populations, etc). If we efficiently utilized the space we have we could raise the bar for that resource tipping point, but we don't.
So yeah. TL;DR: it's not necessarily that we're overpopulated now but our population size + overconsumption = effective overpopulation.
When I saw in a video that 96% of animals are either human or living for human consumption it was the biggest what the fuck moment of my adult life.
96% of mammals by biomass. Still a what the fuck moment, but a noteworthy difference between that and all animals.
96% of mammals, not animals. So it does not count fish, birds, reptiles, insects and etc...
I mean, it's still a shocking number
PS: ops, someone already replied that... sorry
According to Limits to Growth- 2040
Help me understand please, how is it a survival need? Maybe back in the 1800s when you were working a farm and needed to produce extra pairs of hands to help? Nowadays it seems to me that while it might be nice to have a proper family having children is a financial burden that many can't bear, whether they want to or not
It's a need in that it's programmed into your biology, and most people can't thrive without it. Surveys of middle-aged people find about 1 in 5 are child-free. Out of those, about 1 in 10 are so by choice. That leaves 49 in 50 that either have or wished, but couldn't have, children.
Could you link me to those surveys?
That is not a link to a survey, and more importantly it doesn't even say what you claim.
"One in six women and one in four men have not yet had children by the age of 45. One of the reasons is that women do not want to have children with men of lower status," says the researcher.
"In one generation, the proportion of childless women has increased from 9 to 15 percent among 45-year-old women and from 14 to 25 percent among men of the same age. This is far more than the 5 to 10 percent who state that they do not want to have children."
That ratio seems off? 49 out of 50 people wished they could have children? I highly doubt that. If going by your logic you say that 1/10th of 1/5th of folks are child free not by choice. Say out of 50 people that math equals 1 person per 50 folks regret not being able to have kids.
No. Out of 50 that's 40 who had kids, 9 who didn't and regret it, and just 1 who didn't and are content.
It's a need in that it's programmed into your biology, and most people can't thrive without it.
That's not what survival need means.
That leaves 49 in 50 that either have or wished, but couldn't have, children.
Again, this doesn't make it a survival need.
Survival need for species can be vastly different to that of individuals, like mantis' sexual cannibalism.
Not exactly the best example, since that's not a typical behavior but a result of poor scientific practices. Mantises only take that action when extremely stressed, which is frankly a lesson we should be carefully considering.
Or humans being able to live well past their ability to bear children. It might not make sense for an individual to live that long, but it's better for a species, since it means that you have members that aren't having their own kids, but are capable of helping care for them while the parents do other things.
yeah for us thats purely recreational.
Survival? I'm just waiting to die. I can't afford to live and the world just keeps getting worse. Oh, and the clusterfuck of conditions I'd be passing on? Not something worth cursing another human with.