DrEvil » 31 Jan 2020 20:55 wrote:chump » Fri Jan 31, 2020 3:31 am wrote:Democracy cannot survive overpopulation.
Human dignity cannot survive it.
Convenience and dignity cannot survive it.
As you put more and more people in the world,
the value of life not only declines, it disappears.
It doesn’t matter if someone dies.
The more people there are, the less one individual matters.
- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov on Influenza:
Influenza? Nice disease.
There was a terrible epidemic in the time of Marcus Aurelius, at which time the Roman Empire was at it’s height. And the Roman Empire was never the same again, so many were killed and so much destruction was done to adjust the human spirit as a result. But, nobody knows exactly what the epidemic was of… Maybe it was a Smallpox epidemic, but nobody knows for sure.
Maybe try not being so dishonest and selective in your quotes. That's the kind of shit anti-vaxxers pull.
Right after he says "Nice disease", which is clearly a joke, he says "it's a dreadful disease, actually".
As for the overpopulation quote, he's not wrong. More people on a planet with limited resources will inevitably lead to conflict, and war and democracy don't play nice with each other. Just look at what the Syrian civil war did to European politics.
Have you ever heard of Demographic Transition Theory? Perhaps like you, I went my whole life thinking that exponential population growth was inevitable and would lead to the inevitable destruction of our planet if societies did not immediately go to extraordinary means to prevent it. But, it turns out that the data shows that all you have do to limit population growth is to confer onto people the "benefits" of industrialization.
There is plenty of room, and we have plenty of resources for everyone alive on the planet today. Looking at the data objectively leads anyone (who is not an elitist) to conclude that overpopulation is not our biggest problem. Hmmmmm. To whose benefit have we all been conditioned to think it is?