You may all recall the article on ASPO by William Stanton re decreasing population to avoid major die off.

Well he now has a weekly full page submission in our local newspaper.
A lot of people do seem to agree with him

remember
http://www.peakoil.ie/newsletters/588

KevO

any way to see this?

I second that.

Which newspaper is it?

not sure how to.
Its' the weekly Mid Someret Gazette in the UK, if that helps, but he is being taken seriously.......obviously to be give at least a full page on the subject for at least 3 weeks!
Does anyone have his email?
I'll ask him to post on here
KevO

http://www.phxnews.com/fullstory.php?article=22942

But the link died.

More about Posse Comitatus
LA Times (link)

Can't you just scan it in and post it here?

It would come under the fair dealing provisions of the copyright act for discussion and review, I think.

I'm sure the author would like to be in on the killing squads. Maybe he could get to conduct "experiments" like Mengele. Eugenics all the way!

I just haven't got a scanner but I'll see if I can get it scanned and emailed to me and will post it on

Social Darwinism is an insult to Darwin. This guy is a dumb-ass. The ASPO really should be more responsible with it's editorials. Is this common for them? I was under the impression they were more legit.



At least starvation is an honorable death.

Blind belief to darwinism is an insult to biology as well. The real world is more about symbiotic rather than antagonistic relationships.
And most of the petroleum geologists seem to suffer from a cultural/professional bias. Just because we had the unfortunate luck to develop an industrial civilization on fossil fuels that does not mean that it will always be like this. I was wondering why electrical engineers working on hydro plants did not go into such a frenzy when we dammed all the rivers.
A large % of industrial processes done with ff can be delegated to biological processes.

Yes. Or to elaborate, the piece of Darwinian theory that so captures the imaginations of the social Darwinists is just the small mechanism involved in the process of differentiation and selection. It is not incorrect so much as incomplete. Within an overall ecosystem more complex arrangements of cooperation, competition, symbiosis, and mutual dependence all act together to create the abundance and diversity we enjoy.

I have a love for the natural selection piece of the puzzle but for different reasons than the social Darwinists. Which may be why their adoption of the name particularly bothers me. First of all, it is a brilliant explanation of evolutionary change that does not employ a teleological mechanism, as opposed to Lamark. But also it is demonstration of the process of improvement through degradation. It says to me, "Just relax, let it fall apart." Ahhh.

My main thought upon reading this fellow's screed reprinted in ASPO was:
"Are you all, absolutely, out of your minds?!".
I then reread the introduction, and realised that they were not - thank God - endorsing what he said at all. They were reprinting it, with the wish that things never came to such a pass. Indeed.

I do really, really wish they had been more cautious in their manner of reference, even if it was to deny it as an option, as they certainly did. If they were going to quote him at such length however, I do think they ought to have commented more on it. It was sloppy editing and nothing more, and I can only assume that this is an aberration on their part, considering the professional standards and level of quality at their website in general.

As for this man's ideas: much as some perverts gravitate toward situations and professions that place them in contact with children, authoritarian control-freaks seem to graviate towards any cause small enough that they might gain personal influence in it. Much as shocked Romans first discovered they had no law against patricide, because no one had thought it possible, I am not sure we even have the vocabulary to denounce what this man is advocating.

What can we even call this? Xenocide?

As one of those sentimentalist throwbacks destined for this man's gas-chambers, I have no patience to listen to piffle about ad hominem arguments either. You don't get much more ad hominem than tyranny and death-squads.

And am I the only one to notice he seems to be lifting this from science fiction - or is it all science fiction gone mad, bad, and dangerously cultish, like Scientology? I am thinking of: the Depopulationist International from "Nature's End"; the nuclear option in "No Blade of Grass" by John Christopher; or hell, the Eloi and Morlocks from "The Time Machine". And for the kind of comfortable, padded-hell he proposes, check out "We" by Soviet dissident Zegenev, and of course "Brave New World" and "1984". I am sorely disappointed, however, that he did not urge the eating of african and arab babies, which would have provided a nice seg-way between Johnathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and "Soyent Green".

"Social Darwinism" my @$$.

Henry George neatly skewered this Malthusian shibboleth for priveleged elites over a century ago ("Progress and Poverty"), and yet this keeps coming back, like the creature in the horror movie, in different forms and shapes.
For the umpteenth time already:
1) For every one human mouth that comes into the world, there come two human hands with it; a poetic way of saying that humans become more efficient at using resources with the division of labour and specialisation of skills - but you do this with MORE people, not less;
2) Chickens are not an endangered species, for the same reason we are not. This is because, unlike foxes, we actively produce our own damned chickens instead of just poaching them out of the wild. We can even eat their eggs.
3) 80-90% of farm subsidies that make it by the civil servants (they skim 30% right off the top), go to subsidise the petrochemical industry (fuel, feed, fertiliser and vet-meds - the farmer is just the shmuck who gets the smallest cut). Thus, if it becomes prohibitively expensive to deploy petrochemicals, we will employ people. Cuba produces 90% of Havana's vegetables in Havana - the "organiponico" system of management-intensive resource reuse and urban agriculture.
4) Imagination is our inexhaustable, ultimate renewable resource. Human ingenuity and knowledge are not a static-pie, of which we all receive an ever-smaller piece. It is an ever-growing form of energy which ever-increases productivity, all the more so with reference to 1. and 2. above.

Folks, not to worry about Stanton. I think I have him beat hands-down, as follows:

As I've argued in another topic: In order to achieve equilibrium between population and resources, a deliberate kill-off would have to take down population by the same amount as a natural die-off. It is therefore equivalent to a die-off by "other means."

Die-off is the definitional proof of the unfitness of a society to survive in a given ecosystem: a historic and cumulative track record of lack of capability to make effective decisions regarding population and resource issues. If the past, present, and prospective (competing) leaders have been incapable of preventing die-off, this is a demonstration of their own unfitness; and therefore, their unfitness to make any further decisions regarding population and resource issues, including the decisions attendant to a policy of kill-off.

Therefore those who promote kill-off are a) conceding that their society itself is unfit to manage its population/resource issues, and b) conceding that they themselves are unfit to lead. Point (b) entails that their proposed solution is an unfit one, and thereby destroys the case for a kill-off.

In other words, the arguement for kill-off suffers from Godelian incompleteness (the solution has not been possible from within the system, up to the point of destruction of the system) and is therefore self-defeating.

I could develop this into an essay, "Refutation of Stanton," to submit to ASPO. Feedback definitely welcome.

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Aflurry, say more about "the process of improvement through degradation." Are you talking about something like Prigogene's dissipative structures? Or something else?

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Re. "no words to describe" what Stanton is advocating: yes we do, it's called Naziism. The man is a Nazi. Or if he is playing Devil's Advocate, he is doing so most dangerously, and is therefore a fool.

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Egoldstein, welcome aboard, excellent first post! (What part of the world are you located in?)

However, Henry George's arguement, as you state it, necessarily requires that humans produce more net resources than they consume. This, as somone else pointed out (EnergySpin?), is equivalent to over-unity performance, which is not possible within a closed system.

Unless you assume that the source of human imagination is outside the system, which would imply a dualist-interactionist model of human consciousness.

Short version of complicated arguement:

Solar energy indirectly powers the human brain, but can at most obtain a performance of unity minus conversion losses. If the efficiency of humans as dissipative structures (converting resource entropy-flows into useful form) exceeds the level of "unity minus conversion losses," even after accounting for stored resource capital (oil, uranium, forests, minerals, etc.), this implies an additional input from outside the system, i.e. that imagination -or whatever you want to call it- partakes of an input from outside the system.

"Input from outside the system," in the case of the human organism, is by definition the "dualistic" component of dualist-interactionism.

I think gg3 you are making a confusion between physical entropy (i.e. the second law) and logical entropy (i.e. the one in probability structures appearing in information theory). The solar power can power a philosopher OR a fat McMansionite/suburbanite. Keeping the energy input stable and assuming that the two people will have similar (sendentary lifestyles) there is no reason to assume that the physical entropy directly created by the two people is going to be so different to acount for the difference in the logicalentropy of them as information processing systems. If we knew how the physical properties of the human nervous system gave rise to its information processing capabilities, and if we could ground the latter firmly to the former then we could use the two different kinds of entropy interchangeably.
Analogy: your computer. It can play a DVD movie of white noise OR be used to solve equations. Same physical entropy characteristics on both cases, but the "logical" entropy is different. Thermodynamic arguments cannot be used to limit imagination as long as adequate food is supplied to let the mind wonder freely. But thermodynamic limits do not allow a human to become an over-unity device i.e. directly contribute more energy than he or she has received. It is only when the fallacy of mixing logical+physical entropy is made that people can make assertions: "oh he contributes more than he gets, he is a burden/gift to society". In energetic terms we are all loosy investments. Just add that to your letter counteracting Stanton. He speaks of contribution to society as a merit function to determine who will live/die because there is not enough energy to go around. But if your society is energy-limited and you want to find a way to allocate the scarce resource, then the best utility function to use is an energy based function. But all humans are energy loosers, there is no way to measure who is more of an energy looser than the other (especially in situations of a human in steady state) hence your best bet would be to kill all the humans and the replace them with photovoltaics/wind/nuclear which will pay back your energy investment many times over
Hence one cannot use energetic criteria to decide who will live and who will die and thus other non-physical/thermodynamical criteria have to be used. Let's see: the "tards", "niggers", "jews", "gay/lesbian", "asian", "muslim", "human right proponents" are good , traditional heuristics that we can rely on to cull this heard. I do not think that W Stanton is playing Devil's advocate. His book about the Human Population and his recent article in Population Review are full of (?deliberate) errors on energy content calculations (when they are made) which are used to set an arbitrary population level. The problem with this "pseudo-scientific" approach i.e. conclusions reached on the basis of inaccurate or falsified data is that it is almost always associated with "hidden" agendas. In essence he decided a priori on a number he liked and then twisted the reality to fit with it. Same thing with the "eugenics" movement: if science says they are inferior, why should they be left around? True science never answers preference questions ... it is like a mathematics trying to answer whether functional analysis or calculus is a superior tool. Total BS

Foo, we got an infestation of cornucopians!

The arrogance about "the unlimited human imagination" is itself a product of a comfortable, oil based society.

First of all, we aren't using our chance to change to a sustainable situation while we have it. We are squandering it. When there is chaos and shortages we woin't be able to make a smooth techno-fix (even if it was possible to do so now).

Second, proposing a kill-off doesn't mean that Stanton himself is inadequate, it means that the human global collective made a mistake, for example, in providing modern medicine and industrial agriculture to the masses in Asia and Africa and helping them grow their populations.

We were too nice, too charitable, and let the world use our technology to grow itself to 7 billion. It's horrible, there's too many people, too much overcrowding, and too much immigration. Spend a few hours in New York City and you'll be praying for mushroom clouds on the horizing.