Premeditation

"It was considered a natural thing that having children and raising them during the first years of their life should require high qualifications and extensive preparation, in other words, a special course of study; in order to obtain permission to have offspring, a married couple had to pass a kind of examination; at first this seemed incredible to me, but on thinking it over I had to admit that we, of the past, and not they, should be charged with having paradoxical customs: in the old society one was not allowed to build a house or a bridge, treat an illness, perform the simplest administrative function, without specialized education, whereas the matter of utmost responsibility, bearing children, shaping their minds, was left to blind chance and momentary desires, and the community intervened only when mistakes had been made and it was too late to correct them."

Stanislaw Lem - Return from the Stars



I don't bother with the news much, so normally I wouldn't have taken notice of the United Nations' report on how we dun fuck'd up tha planet. Yeah, we know that already you assholes. We're careening from record-setting winter lows to a summer that'll probably boil our faces off. A polar bear just paddled past my window on a catamaran made of 2L Pepsi bottles. So many ice shelves are collapsing that Antarctica is now Ntrctk. Mammoths are looking at us and thinking "glad I didn't live to see that shit" and the Permian's petitioning to have us labelled mass murderers. We know!

What we needed from you nebbishes was a strongly-worded, clear-cut, fire and brimstone ultimatum on the naked ape's self-immolation, not a bunch of vague hand-wringing about low-impact equitable trajectories of integrated transformation diversity mobilization decision making best practices doodlefuddlewaddle please-don't-shoot-the-messenger. We need you spineless, anal-retentive academics and analysts to word it clearly enough that even the drooling rednecks in Alabama can understand: humanity has fucked itself into civilizational collapse. Figuratively and literally.

That of course ties into one of the other big pieces of news here in the U.S., the continuing attack by brain-dead superstitious filth on abortion. Alabama has now all but outlawed it. For those outside the U.S., you can safely equate Alabama with whichever province of your own country ranks as the most backward, primitive, virulently anti-intellectual stretch of culture-less ballast. It routinely ranks dead last in education out of all American states (and among the last in every other measure of personal well-being) so it's hardly surprising that it also routinely tops the charts in religious brainwashing. Thus, based on some or other imbecilic mass delusions about "souls" they've decided to force each other to continue breeding more and more ignorant hillbillies.

And that's a problem. I don't mean just for their own sakes. Screw 'em. If idiot rednecks want to spend their lives changing diapers, that's their business. Or it would be, except that all those redundant, unwanted diaper stuffers will grow up into yet more redundant, unwanted wastes of oxygen, each demanding its own living space, its own greasy triple helpings of food, its own i-phone and minivan. There you have the death of sentience: degenerate cretins spouting caveman superstitions as they drown the world in their filth. Take any of the myriad issues described by the U.N.'s convoluted beating around the now-extinct bush, and not a single one could not be alleviated by a reduction in the sheer bulk of ape flesh on the planet. Crops, cities, plastic waste accumulation, toxic runoff, overfishing, fuel churn, carbon emissions, every problem we've inflicted on the world is multiplied by the number of those inflicting it. Do they still learn multiplication in Alabama or just practice it?

Yet I'll be damned if a word search for "population control" through the IPBES' document returns more than 0 (ZERO) hits. Oh, sure, they allude and hint at it a few times by mentioning demographic shifts and increasing baseline resource demands, but will not dare outright state that Africa's abusing the aid it gets from the developed world in order to breed an even more bloated AIDS-infested swarm which it cannot feed, house, protect, treat or (dare we hope) educate. Or that India has done absolutely nothing to curb the swell of its sickening termite hive of simian superfluity. Or that China, the multi-millennial world leader in both ecological damage and human misery, continues to grow despite decades' worth of hollow assurances to the contrary. And what moral clout could the U.S. leverage against any of them while its own Christian fundamentalist backwaters still demand to force their lower classes to breed beyond their means?

It's commonly touted that if the whole Earth were to live the life of plenty of a Western consumer, we would need several more planets' worth of resources. The solution proposed is always to reduce consumption. A fair point, but how drastic a reduction would ensure sustainability for seven and a half billion naked apes? For nine? For twelve? To live a decent life, fewer of us must live. There is no way around it, and if we do not achieve that goal by peaceful legislation it will inevitably, detestably, be achieved by mass murder and mass starvation, as our species has always done in the past. A positive population growth curve is a declaration of war, against all those whom such replicate swarms must displace in order to secure their lebensraum. Birth is murder. The life you create must kill to exist. We are already a mass extinction. We're long past affording to coddle and bow to the primitive, mindless lower primates capable of no more than conjoining their gonads while expressing bronze-age superstitions in stone-age grunts. Reproduction can no longer be left up to chance and appetite, and the vermin who breed as such must themselves suffer for the undue harm they cause, not be allowed to inflict it upon their more continent fellows.

Reproduction must be taxed, and penalized, and curbed. In large part, this is but one facet of combating those primitive memetic infections endemic to all our societies. Hinduism, Christianity, pretty much any religion in its role as tool of social control invests some degree of effort into managing its populace's reproduction, maximizing work forces and cannon fodder. They can no longer be permitted this interference in what should be a rational, socially conscious set of public policies. The greater issue, the greater hurdle, however, is instinct, overcoming the greatest innate drive of every self-replicating pattern: self-replication. The only recourse is to treat it as any of the countless aggressive, gluttonous, filthy simian habits we defer or abstain from as members of an ersatz civilized society. Don't fling poop; don't fling fetuses.

Birth is murder, an ugly sometimes necessity, and should be legislated as such.