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A SCIENTIFIC SOLUTION
From the same guys who brought you global warming:
Scientists behind guide to quick and painless suicide
This should please Rob George and his fellow anti-lifer Mark Axton:
I cannot possibly take Earth Hour seriously. We have 1500 people a week coming to Melbourne. How many more lights are going to be switched on as a result? I refuse to be more efficient if it is just going to allow us to accommodate more people. Be serious about the environment. Let’s do something about our exploding population. That is the best thing we can do for the environment.
Hit the suicide booth, Mark. We can’t have lights being switched on.
Whats all this about a prize for first comment?
Posted by The_Wizard_of_WOZ on 2008 03 24 at 12:20 PM • permalinkMomentary bragging rights, as far as I can tell.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2008 03 24 at 12:23 PM • permalinkI refuse to be more efficient if it is just going to allow us to accommodate more people. Be serious about the environment. Let’s do something about our exploding population. That is the best thing we can do for the environment.
Renew!
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2008 03 24 at 12:28 PM • permalinkA step in the right direction would be to stop executions by electric chair and go back to hanging. If the rope is made out of hemp, all the better.
Posted by Mystery Meat on 2008 03 24 at 01:25 PM • permalinkIf its the same scientists behind the global warming hoopla, the suicide method will
a) Cost more than the funeral.
b) Make money for the scientists.
c) Kill dozens of other people.
d) Not kill you.Posted by MikeTheLibrarian on 2008 03 24 at 01:44 PM • permalinkLet’s do something about our exploding population.
Thank you, Mr. George, for supporting the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and supporting Israel in dealing with Hamas and Fatah!
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2008 03 24 at 02:42 PM • permalinkYou can understand his despair when Gaia persists with these unkind pranks:
The celebratory edition of the German classic Rund um Köln has been cancelled due to snow conditions today.Posted by SwinishCapitalist on 2008 03 24 at 04:09 PM • permalink“If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”
Prince Philip, reported by Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA), August, 1988. Prince Philip, first President of WWF-UK from its foundation in 1961 to 1982, and President of WWF-International from 1981 to 1996, is now President Emeritus for WWF. He was a founder of the Australian Conservation Foundation and its President from 1971 to 1976.“One human way to reduce the population might be to put something in the water, a virus that would be specific to the human reproductive system and would make a substantial proportion of the population infertile. Perhaps a virus that would knock out the genes that produce certain hormones necessary for conception. A triage approach will be necessary so that scarce medical resources go to those who can contribute most to the long-term viability of the planet. Consequently, many middle-aged-to-elderly people will die uncomfortable deaths. Not every problem is solveable.”
Dr John Reid speaking with Robyn Williams on ABC radio, 10 December, 2006.
See http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2006/1807002.htm for full transcript.“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialised civilisations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
Maurice Strong, Secretary-General of the UN Earth Summit, June 1992.“At present the population of the world is increasing at about 58,000 per diem. War, so far, has had no very great effect on this increase, which continued throughout each of the world wars. War has hitherto been disappointing in this respect but perhaps bacteriological war may prove more effective. If a Black Death could spread throughout the world once in every generation, survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full. The state of affairs might be somewhat unpleasant, but what of it? Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other peoples’.”
Lord Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society, 1953“This is a terrible thing to say. In order to stabilize world populations, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it.”
Jacques Cousteau, co-recipient in 1977 (with Sir Peter Scott) of the International Environmental Prize awarded by the United Nations for outstanding contributions in the field of the environment. Quoted from UNESCO Courier, November 1991.“We, in the green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which killing a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to Asian brothels.”
Carl Amery, Founding member of the German Green Party, quoted in Mensch & Energie, April 1983.“I got the impression that instead of going out to shoot birds, I should go out and shoot the kids who shoot birds.”
Paul Watson, founder of Greenpeace, as quoted by Dixy Lee Ray in her book Trashing the Planet (1990).“Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”
David Brower, first executive director of the Sierra Club; founder of Friends of the Earth; and founder of the Earth Island Institute.“I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”
John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal“We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight.”
David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First![Cannibalism is a] “radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation.”
Dr Lyall Watson, anthropologist, Commissioner for the International Whaling Commission, as quoted in the Financial Times, 15 July 1995.“To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem.”
Dr Lamont Cole, Professor of Ecology, Cornell University, as quoted by Elizabeth Whelan in her book Toxic Terror.“The world has cancer, and that cancer is man.”
Merton Lambert, former spokesman for the Rockefeller Foundation, quoted from Harpeth Journal, Dec. 18, 1962.“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
Ted Turner, media mogul, as quoted in Audubon, November-December 1991.Other frightening quotes from environmentalists here.
“We have too many people. We simply have to encourage birth control” - or words to that effect, from Sting. As the father of six, he should know.
Posted by SwinishCapitalist on 2008 03 24 at 05:15 PM • permalinkThese guys are in the Netherlands, where euthanasia is legal. The Netherlands is a case study in what is wrong with something that superficially sounds like a compassionate policy. After all, who wouldn’t want to help put their dying great-grandmother, riddled with painful cancer, out of her misery, just as she is asking you too? But in reality, once you implement it as law, that idealised scenario is not the focus of hte policy. It becomes a monster:
Dutch doctors now legally kill terminally ill people who ask for it, chronically ill people who ask for it, disabled people who ask for it, and depressed people who ask for it.
...
Euthanasia has also entered the pediatric wards, where eugenic infanticide has become common even though babies cannot ask to be killed. According to a 1997 study published in the British medical journal The Lancet, approximately 8 percent of all Dutch infant deaths result from lethal injections. The babies deemed killable are often disabled and thus are thought not to have a “livable life.” The practice has become so common that 45 percent of neonatologists and 31 percent of pediatricians who responded to Lancet surveys had killed babies.The Dutch mania for euthanasia even has the UN worried. That’s when you know you’ve really gone too far.
Posted by daddy dave on 2008 03 24 at 06:21 PM • permalinkWe on the right sometimes taunt those on the left about their ridiculous, anti-people beliefs with requests for them to stop breeding, make themselves disappear, and so forth. The unspoken hope is that such taunts will break their misanthropic reverie and make them see sense. Sadly, as the Dutch have shown, if you let this thinking continue unabated, you end up with the tragi-comic spectacle of a population that doesn’t breed, kills its own (in the most merciful way), and literally- not metaphorically- commits suicide as a society.
Posted by daddy dave on 2008 03 24 at 06:28 PM • permalinkLet’s do something about our exploding population.
Is this Axton chap a muslim by any chance?
Posted by Wimpy Canadian on 2008 03 24 at 07:14 PM • permalink#10 Hey, RebeccaH, can I take you up on that? I really like Australia.
Posted by Wimpy Canadian on 2008 03 24 at 07:17 PM • permalinkPrince Philip, first President of WW-FUK Corrected typo
Posted by Wimpy Canadian on 2008 03 24 at 07:18 PM • permalink#12 RK At last, at last! A chance to exposiate on my favourite philosophy.
Given that humans have enabled inanimate to achieve consciousness, then the planet would most certainly not have survived.
Posted by Wimpy Canadian on 2008 03 24 at 07:23 PM • permalinkDang! Lost all the force through imperfection.
Given that humans have enabled inanimate matter to achieve consciousness, then the planet would most certainly not have survived.
Posted by Wimpy Canadian on 2008 03 24 at 07:25 PM • permalinkSpeaking of Earth Hour, SBS were heavily promoting the event with commercials last night.
So I checked SBS’s program guide to see if they would be broadcasting during Earth Hour or switching off. Funnily enough, they are on the air.
Even funnier, they will be showing Top Gear.
Posted by Art Vandelay on 2008 03 24 at 10:21 PM • permalink#12 RK
Philosophers have been thinking about that for a long time, though I think you state it a bit misleadingly. Of course, if the Earth survives then the Earth survives, the question is whether the Earth without humans has any value. If you think the only thing that gives rocks, trees, etc. value is that they are valued by humans (i.e. that they have only ‘derived’ value whereas humans have inherent value if anything does) then you’d have to say no. The ‘Deep Green’ environmentalists think that, contrariwise, non-sentient, non-human, even inanimate things can have inherent value. And in that case there is a conceivable conflict of goods between the continued existence of non-human things and the continued existence of humans (though that would be an extreme case.)
Obviously, to be a Deep Green you’d have to be able to give some coherent story about how rocks etc. really could have inherent value. In my judgement, no such story has yet been given. The arguments that do get offered are generally only secondary to variations on a ‘simple’ thought experiment, which is the real motivation for the belief. It goes like this. Imagine the universe without people: would it be better or worse if it had rocks, trees, butterflies in it? Stated this way you might think, yes, it’d be nicer if there were rocks, or trees, or butterflies; but this is just expressing your preference if you were there to make the judgement, whereas the experiment says you are not there. Like many philosophical thought experiments it trades upon an impossiblity or an illusion to convince you of its point.
Until someone can tell me why a rock should have inherent value, I will continue to think that the non-sentient natural world can have only derived value.
#24 such philosophical discussions place too little emphasis on continued human survival. They take it for granted. But survival is something we have to fight for. If that means mining, logging, making genetically modified crops, and killing other animals, then that’s what has to be done.
Europe is the epitome of complacency about the status quo, and look at what’s happening there.
Posted by daddy dave on 2008 03 24 at 11:05 PM • permalinkWell, I was really just joking and trying to be clever with a twist on the “tree in the forest” question (which really is a scientific question due to sound requiring a receiver), but the philosophical answers are interesting, Steve and Wimpy. It is a little mind-boggling to me though that the Deep Greens, as you say, think we need to save the earth, but they don’t really want anyone around to enjoy it.
On a practical level, we experience this all the time in the western states, where the east coast big city types like the idea of us having hundreds of thousands of acres of federal lands roaming with wolves and moose, yet they never actually intend to go into that wild country. What are we saving it for, if not to be enjoyed?
#24, Steve, Well the Chinese seem to think rocks have value, well sell them millions of tons every month.
Posted by The_Wizard_of_WOZ on 2008 03 25 at 09:54 AM • permalink#9, #10, Bec, Stealing from Wron and lots of sex?
Damned if that dont sound like a good way to spend a weekend…
Posted by The_Wizard_of_WOZ on 2008 03 25 at 10:28 AM • permalinkAs for stealing from Wronwright, I ask you. Why not?
right…. because he’d never catch us, would he?
And those priceless antiques would be so easy to sell on the black market…
(*hollow laugh*)Posted by daddy dave on 2008 03 25 at 09:47 PM • permalink#9, #30, #31,
I knew I should have held on to those power tools! Gosh darn it all to heck anyway!Posted by formerly Huck Foley on 2008 03 26 at 08:51 AM • permalink#30, Bec, “I wasn’t suggesting myself, mind you.”
You’re 7 months younger than my dad. I wasn’t thinking that either.
Though if you’ve any daughters…
#31, Dave, “he’d never catch us, would he?”
Tsk, tsk. First we steal the TARDIS. The rest takes care of itself…
Posted by The_Wizard_of_WOZ on 2008 03 26 at 10:11 AM • permalink
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Death to the
infidelsforeignerspeople from out of town!Ditto. I personally plan to turn on all my lights, electrical appliances, air con and oven, while simultaneously driving my car around the block at the highest speed first gear will permit.