The Crowd

 "Right now, I want to throw that word 'escape' out the window. In speaking of these stories, these fantasies, I would like to emphasize instead their contribution toward growth and responsibility, small as it may be. Stories can ony be labeled "escapist" if they solve problems by ignoring or destroying them. Mickey Spillane's characters, for instance, in another genre, shoot first so they will not have to ask or answer questions later.

Thoughtful men find many things in our civilized order worth—not escaping—but growing away from: the preconceived notion, prejudice, bias, dogma, of any kind whatever. Through our creative arts, including fantastic literature, we can return to the raw stuff of environment for re-seasoning, for an understanding of the wilderness, the animal, the death which tempts us to solve problems with annihilation. Seeking help from literary sources, we often appear blasphemous and "escapist" to those still in the temple, political gymnasium, or school. Actually, we are only 'standing off for a long clear look at the human situation, preparing to doff old burdens in order to assume the new.

[...]

Man lives by creating and creates by alternating wonder with criticism followed by new states of wonder."

 

Ray Bradbury - 1956 editor's introduction to the fantasy collection The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories

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When did I buy my copy of The October Country? Early teens, early '90s. The '80s paperback version was still on the shelves. It expanded my understanding of the word "horror" beyond slasher flicks and creature features to those more diffuse fears I had been taught to ignore. Fear of being ugly and despised, subverted by your own body, of being trapped and tethered, of loneliness, of the slow grinding passage of time. Hopes lost and the self dissipated. But though Uncle Einar, The Emissary or The Cistern made more of an impact on me, The Crowd maintained a background fascination for making much of so little.

 

"The crowd looked at him and he looked back at them and did not like them at all. There was a vast wrongness to them. He couldn't put his finger on it. They were far worse than this machine-made thing that happened to him now.
The ambulance doors slammed. Through the windows he saw the crowd looking in, looking in. That crowd that always came so fast, so strangely fast, to form a circle, to peer down, to probe, to gawk, to question, to point, to disturb, to spoil the privacy of a man's agony by their frank curiosity."

 

It was only after moving to Chicago that I learned one of the most infuriating terms in the lexicon of mob stupidity: gaper's delay. Highways bottlenecked not by traffic accidents but by moronic hordes slowing their cars to gawp at the wreck. ("Rubberneckers" they also call 'em - cause even if you hung them from the nearest branch like they deserve, they'd bounce up and down endlessly blocking your way.) More infuriating are those who try to excuse such behavior by saying that "they're just people" or "it's only human" because of course they're right. It is human. Normal human behavior. Reiterated behind millions of windshields. An overwhelming, pervasive tribal ape need to participate in the suffering of others.

 

"It was like a great rainstorm, with many drops, heavy and light and medium, touching the earth. He waited a few seconds and listened to their coming and their arrival. Then, weakly, expectantly, he rolled his head up and looked.
The crowd was there.
He could smell their breaths, the mingled odors of many people sucking and sucking on the air a man needs to live by. They crowded and jostled and sucked and sucked all the air up from around his gasping face until he tried to tell them to move back, they were making him live in a vacuum."

 

I had not appreciated, reading The Crowd so young, why it stuck with me, that it is not a story about traffic accidents at all, its events almost irrelevant when compared to the language in which they're described, the dripping disgust at compulsive group participation. This is a night for storytelling, and to most that means dissimulating and externalizing. The stories we tell ourselves keep us safe from deeper horrors. Chief among these the cozy belief that the monster is an alien thing, lurking out there in the dark beyond the safety of our campfire.

 

Except we killed those monsters a thousand, ten thousand years ago. The Nemean Lion's bones have long since rotted away, and the rest of the biosphere is following. A million species which took fifty million years to develop must die, not so that sapience might adventure to the stars or rise above the limitations of flesh, not for great works of art, philosophy and science, but so that billions of sacks of redundant simian flesh can hold hot-dog eating contests and bow for the ten thousandth time at a meteor or an elephant-headed statue or drawl patriotic songs into half-empty bottles of vodka or praise The Party while it grinds them into five-year plans. And any individual who disapproves of this grand nine-billion-fold pinnacle of creation must be silenced, effaced, erased, unmade, made one with the herd or the ground beneath its hooves. Don't you dare tell them they could or should be better.

 

The monster is ever-encroaching normalcy. It is every subhuman degenerate whose personality is the logo on its t-shirt or purse and the slogan on its throw-pillow or baseball cap. Is that not what every fanged and goggle-eyed mask would reveal if dropped, the very necessity for masks, for costumes, for uniforms and business casual attire? To camouflage the shame, the filth, the degeneracy of humanity? Enforced ignorance.

 

"that's the way it's been since time began, when crowds gather. You murder much easier, this way. Your alibi is very simple; you didn't know it was dangerous"

 

And for the proprietors of the apocalypse, a more refined torture: knowing you cannot escape the unknowing. What use is your prepared folder of evidence and reasoned argument when they have brute impact? They will make you one of their own, clean up your ragged frills of analysis and argumentation, smooth out the wrinkles in your brain, make you happy, make you excited at the prospect of the spectacle of the crash. No wonder, no criticism, just the mob and its appetites.

 

And the crash. 

Churn

"if you want our ship to go back to Earth again, you are welcome to take her there yourself. Not me. Not there. If a man is seventy-five years old there now, he becomes officially dead. His heirs inherit, he can't own property, his ration books are canceled - anybody can kill him just for the hell of it. I didn't get these passengers on Earth; they were refugees at Luna City"

[...]

"No man is an island - " Much as we may feel and act as Individuals, our race is - a single organism, always growing and branching - which must be pruned regularly to be healthy. This necessity need not be argued; anyone with eyes can see that any organism which grows without limit always dies in its own poisons. The only rational question is whether pruning is best done before or after birth. Being an incurable sentimentalist I favor the former of these methods - killing makes me queasy, even when it's a case of "He's dead and I'm alive and that's the way I wanted it to be." But this may be a matter of taste. Some shamans think that it is better to be killed in a war, or to die in childbirth, or to starve in misery, than never to have lived at all. They may be right. But I don't have to like it - and I don't. "

Robert A. Heinlein - Time Enough for Love

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"Why don't you sterilize them?"
"Two and one-half billion operations is a lot of operations. Because they breed continuously, the job would never be done."
"I see. Like the marching Chinese!"
"Who the devil are they?"
"It was a - uh - paradox of my time. Somebody figured out that if all the Chinese in the world were to line up four abreast, I think it was, and start marching past a given point, they'd never stop because of the babies that would be born and grow up before they passed the point."
"That's right. Only instead of 'a given point,' make it 'the largest conceivable number of operating rooms that we could build and staff.' There could never be enough."
"Say!" said Barlow. "Those movies about babies - was that your propaganda?"
"It was. It doesn't seem to mean a thing to them. We have abandoned the idea of attempting propaganda contrary to a biological drive."
"So if you work with a biological drive - ?"
"I know of none which is consistent with inhibition of fertility."

 

C. M. Kornbluth - The Marching Morons

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"soldiers! for Hynkel!"

The Great Dictator

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(working title: refugeriatrics)

 

If you've looked into getting a dog you've inevitably run into health warnings. Most of the most recognizable breeds (e.g. bulldogs, infamously) have acquired endless slews of congenital defects via a century of extremely narrow inbreeding to purify their appearance for dog shows. Thankfully, while the emphasis used to be solely on "caveat emptor" and possible vet bills, the conversation has shifted a bit from inconveniencing humans to concern for the pets' own quality of life. If what you think would look adorable in your purse is in fact more objectively a twisted, tortured monstrousity riddled with skin, gut, eye and ear infections, a barely trickling vascular system, high risk of cancer and can't even breathe properly for its mashed-in face, then you're not giving it a home, you're fabricating suffering.

On a completely unrelated topic, thirty years ago a college student expressed sympathy toward an Indian colleague for the Latur earthquake which killed ~10,000 people... and was somewhat taken aback by him just nonchalantly scoffing that ten thousand's nothing, they've got plenty more.

 

Well... yeah? They did. They do.

 

I've been noticing an annoying trend in recent years' news articles about governments bemoaning declining birth rates. Whether it's Korea or some small Greek village losing the war against urbanization, or baby boomer senescence in the U.S. and Europe, or even China! of all places, our overlords appear increasingly intent on convincing us we're somehow underpopulated.

 

In the U.S. at least (while few say it openly) by juxtaposing demographics many are implying we need more young to care for the increasingly senescent baby boomers... or in other words throwing more babies at the problem: a new boom to patch up the old one. First off, let's not pretend governments, corporations or anyone who flies in private jets give a shit about the elderly except to bleed them for artificial hips marked up two thousand percent, or that power hierarchies ever do anything, ANYTHING for humanitarian reasons, unless forced by fear of revolt. But more to the point, boomers will die before any babies born now have a chance to nurse them. More on that later.

 

Before I even get to the main stuff, let's point out humanity continues to swell uncontrollably with nine billion expected by next generation. While this predominantly comes from the usual culprits of the simian-termite hives throughout South Asia, South America and Africa, the U.S. itself is rife with Christian sects pushing their hicks to shit out fresh vessels for superstition by the litter, and I doubt any developed country can claim complete freedom from ye olde "go forth and multiply" idiocy.

 

So we need to mention shifting baselines. The few times overpopulation is even discussed, it's from a backdrop of modern life, of skyscrapers, megamarts and jammed highways. Governments talk to genZers as though 8.2 billion utterly redundant brainless apes constitute some manner of normalcy, and something would be lost by their reduction. But for millennials that number was 6 billion. We're talking merely the timespan it took for BadgerBadgerBadger! to be replaced with calling the U.S. vice president "brat" and that to go back out of style. We hit 5 billion when I was in kindergarten, and should the management check its complaints backlog you'll find my sandbox was already far too crowded! That same stage in my parents' lives saw the 3 billion mark, prompting Kornbluth to posit my eventual five as an apocalyptic overshoot. And when we hit 9 and 10 and 11 billion those who desire ever more cannon fodder and scabs will pretend that's normal too, and will continue demanding more slaves.

When we exterminated the last Tasmanian tiger we were 2 billion. Should we adopt that as our normal? Two billion unwashed, starving, illiterate sacks of ape shit riddled with disease. Every step up from there will require resources to be harvested, food to be grown, energy to be expended. Do you want to feed all those two billion and keep the same ecological footprint as the two billion from a century ago? Well, you're gonna need more land for each human proportionally. Better lower your sustainable population estimate by a hundred mil.

Do you want to house them in something other than my great-grandfather's wattle-and-daub cottage? Well, that's a lot of construction, better lower your estimate by another hundred mil.

Oh, I'm sorry, did you want their food to be not just plentiful, but also fresh, clean and safe to eat? That's even more effort per capita, more land use and resource use per capita.

Do you want heating for those homes, or golly gee, maybe even air conditioning?

Do you want to clothe them?

Educate them?

Educate them past basic literacy and arithmetic?

Vaccinate them so they're not crippled by polio and a pox upon ye?

Do you want potable water, a sewage system, trucking away garbage, a washer and dryer, roads to travel on and motorized transportation and two pairs of eyeglasses and aseptic medicine and dental fillings? 'Cause when that last thylacine croaked, most humans had no such things. Hell, many still don't.

Do you want internet access, and a game console, and a pocket computer with GPS and infinite video calls and a closet full of fashions and robotic prostheses if you lose a limb and experts doing maintenance instead of having to re-roof your own home with straw or buy wagon wheels from your cousin? Make-up and hair gel? None of that went into your original 2bil!

Every life-saving scientific discipline that didn't exist a century ago, that requires more technology than pulling teeth with a doorknob, means twenty or thirty million fewer humans you can support at that level. Look around your room right now and drop another ten million from the total world population for every consumer item you see that's made of plastic, rubber, stainless steel or copper wiring. Don't even get me started on anything with a battery!

 

What would be a sustainable population with a decent, comfortable lifestyle? I don't know. I suspect far less than two billion. Less than one. Maybe less than half. You can look up various estimates yourselves. But do remember every mansion and private jet must raze another town off the map, unless that town consists of nothing but mesolithic mud huts.

But of course we're not talking about keeping things livable, not for most of us. Nobody's encouraging overbreeding in order to correct overbreeding. "We need kids to take care of the elderly" is a smokescreen. They want churn. Out with the old, in with the new. Boom boom boom. Fresh corpses to replace the old. Whatever the pains of a senescent population, they are secondary to perpetuating overpopulation into yet more generations upon generations of same. Churn. As for the economy, fears of somehow lacking workers... oh, puh-leeze, workers to work what? More overbuilt minivans to sell to each other, and a new smartphone every year? While splitting the same resources even more ways?

 

At best, such hand-wringing covers up a more valid concern of being unable to defend against invasion either military or invited by one's own government as cheap labor. The world population is still growing. Only a small minority of educated countries show lower birth rates than hellholes like Sudan, and the better will be invaded by numerically overwhelming worse in the near future. This is true. But the better are not at fault for the crimes of the worse. Breeding out of control is still the crime, not failing to match crime for crime.

No, the rich want more poor. Scrap that whole list I rattled off above. In the eyes of those writing the propaganda, you deserve none of that. Churn. What the Trumps and Vaticans of the world want is dirt-farming peasants ready for conscription, is to starve you until you'll do anything for the scraps they throw you, and the best way to do that is to make more of you. Make you split the little you have many more ways, make you gnaw on the same soup bone with more siblings. They want to be able to brush off the deaths of ten thousand of YOU, because they have ten billion of YOU to spare. Nothing serves the rich quite like an abundance of poverty, quite like stupid, desperate hordes which can be easily manipulated against each other in territorial contests. Of course, the threat is more immediate: world war 3 will require cannon fodder. That is your children's only future: to be enslaved and exterminated by the Chinese so the rich can use your efforts and sacrifices to bargain themselves private empires under the new sinocracy.

 

Populations do not naturally self-regulate, but just like our desire for ripe fruit can be hijacked by processed sugar and our kin recognition can be hijacked by uniforms and slogans, mating rituals can be hijacked by their own preliminaries. Kornbluth's future geniuses were of course missing the detail that status is intrinsic to our reproductive drive, since wealth and power serve as guarantee for offspring viability. Therefore it is possible to sidetrack reproduction into a chase for status, as the story's primitive scheister did by enrolling the marching morons in a race for prime real estate, a fancier house. Nesting instinct for the gals, championships for the guys - not that men's opinion matters anyway, the uterine bottleneck being our rate-determining step. Safer ways to defuse those destructive instincts.This is in effect why current developed societies have seen a slight tapering off of birth rates, and that article about Korea spells it out quite clearly (though it's not clear if the authors understood the evo-psych / instinctual implications) by citing youth preferring rampant consumerism to family life. Well, more power to those Korean youths. Chasing boy-bands is idiotic, but still more intellectual a practice than changing diapers.

 

So let's circle back to that quality of life issue, vis-a-vis parenting itself. Why does human reproduction not rate the consideration we now afford that of dogs, of caring for their individual quality of life? Granted, I've met more dogs I like than hu-mons I like... but we're supposed to at least feign humanitarian motivations. What quality of life can you guarantee a child who will go to school with his neighbour's ten children all ganging up on him? What can you guarantee those ten? And, to voice that which none are permitted to voice, what can you give individuals to induce them to commit virtual suicide by procreating, by tying the rest of their lives to raising offspring? We have always assumed (and not unjustifiably) that animals will do anything to reproduce, that our strongest primitive instinct will force us to accept any indignity, any abuse, any punishment in return for being permitted to perform its eternal dictate. And here, at last, we're seeing a bare handful of humans out of the teeming brainless horde capable of at least temporarily deferring this basest impulse, not forced into monastic celibacy but of their own accord.

And they are condemned for it like career criminals.

 

If you want us lowly plebs to breed more, make it compatible with maintaining individual freedom and comfort. But they won't. I find it hilarious to hear our surgeon general paying lip service to improving parents' lives due to the inherent unending demands and stress of family life being detrimental to the whole family. Umm, it's not a bug, it's a feature. The fact you will do anything to promote your offspring makes you more easily manipulated. Being exhausted, and stressed, and obsessed, and broke, infighting and months-long divorce cases, all help make you a more obedient wage slave, all while producing more hopeless wage slaves. That the mere existence of progeny reduces progenitors to reflexively snarling beasts serves the rich and their propagandists far better than a populace with time and energy to devote to scrutiny of their machinations. What personal growth is achieved through producing soldiers for Hynkel? What is learned, what is considered, what is contextualized, above the mental level of a rat cooing over its litter? Spending every waking minute, every day, every year slave to the demands of highly expensive housepets you can't even flush down the toilet. Your life is over. Raising children is a self-destructive enterprise, a subversion of your own existence. Every child born is a parent's life debased to pre-sapient drives. It's easy for the rich to encourage it, since they sure as hell are not spending time raising their own brats. They have twenty nannies, private tutors, private physicians, separate wings of the mansion for every podling spawned.

So they'll keep encouraging it.

Here's a prediction: we'll soon see a surge in propaganda films, books, plays, games, advertisement, what-have-you, about big happy families and the joys of spawning. They will make parenthood and large litters a status symbol again, as it is in more primitive societies. Schmaltzy holiday flicks about big happy clans sharing meals, superheroines punching kaiju trying to eat their babies, coming-of-age stories about siblings banding together, endless reams of human interest stories about the "miracle" of spawning, heroic adulation of hick slatterns shitting out baby after baby as "super"-moms.

And it will work.

Most humans are subhuman. Most humans are vermin and vermin do not outcompete their betters by outperforming but by swarming, by ganging up on you, seven wives for seven brothers, then a generation later forty-nine thieves chopping Ali Baba to pieces for standing in their way. After which they'll tear each other apart too, but that's cold comfort to us earlier victims. That's the game plan. That's always been the game plan, since before we were human, since before we were even monkeys.

 

Churn.

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P.S.: I don't normally do dedications, but this one's for JG, a too-decent man I never had the courage to tell his family was killing him.

Malth-y-nous

"The fiendishness of it all is that part of this mass deception is open and voluntary, letting people think they can draw the line between fiction and fact."

 

Stanislaw Lem - The Futurological Congress

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Scribbling a rant on population had me sidetracked by the observation that it's become quite fashionable to shit on Thomas Malthus as having failed his predictions about mass starvation, unsustainable population size and collapse, along with other such predictions like The Population Bomb. But the core Malthusian warning, that resources are finite yet reproduction infinite, remains all too true. We are rapidly running out of natural resources from water to metals to fish, with garbage piling both land and sea.

 

If the Malthusian collapse has not occured worldwide quite yet, it is not because the concept was disproven but because endless strings of scientific inventions have allowed us to stretch the few resources we have farther, while destroying all other life to be replaced with our noisome breed. We are a mass extinction! We were overpopulated by the time the previous century even started, and advances in medicine, sanitation and food production all around that same time repeatedly amplified the problem over subsequent generations. Wonderful inventions, but each should have come with a spaying campaign.

 

Even the kindest interpretation of our refusal to address overpopulation shows it as infantile magical thinking, a blind belief that with every extra billion apes added to our hellish swarm, yet another sanitary or agricultural revolution will, must, surely cannot fail to yet again and again buy us another decade or two. An utterly unfounded and criminal reliance on the superhuman ability of a very few to constantly pull more rabbits out of fresh hats; even if scientists' ability to discover were infinite, we cannot know there remains any further stock of salvation discoverable! But let the hordes of 30IQ subhuman vermin breed to the horizons, and place the burden of stretching those horizons on the first nerd you see.

"The world will change when you are ready to pronounce this oath: I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine."

Shrug. Humanity deserves to die. Let it die.

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edit: the title reference may have been a bit obscure, and hell, I wouldn't have known about Mallt-y-nos either if not for Tom Siddell.

Hearing a bit of hub-bub about the Indian election, I notice all the chatter about religious and economic concerns, corruption, trade, development, etc. still omits politicians' stance on that one tiny detail:

POPULATION CONTROL !!! 

 

 

 

 

 

Four Lights, Two Sexes, Zero Gods

"Sacrifice to the cause

Turn your code into law

Compensate to validate the loss

To take a thief and nail him to a cross"

 

KMFDM - Anarchy

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"In a country where equestrianism is assertion I suppose one must be equestrian..."

H.G. Wells - The Research Magnificent

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"One does not have to be unusually astute to see that when an obscure woman's charges of sexual harassment have the potential to topple the president of the United States, a major redistribution of 'power' has taken place."

Daphne Patai - Heterophobia (1998) (during the Lewinsky scandal) 

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"Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth."

 

George Orwell - The Prevention of Literature

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"You’re bitching about those kids over some friendly fornication - but do you know what I’m worried about?"
"What?"
"Christ was crucified for preaching without a police permit. Think it over."

 

Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

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Last year my inbox treated me to this Kafkaesque little routine courtesy of our overlords at Google:

"Hello,
As you may know, our Community Guidelines (https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy) describe the boundaries for what we allow-- and don't allow-- on Blogger. Your post titled "Pillars of Immersion" was flagged to us for review. This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content; the post is visible at http://werwolfesden.blogspot.com/2016/10/pillars-of-immersion.html. Your blog readers must acknowledge the warning before being able to read the post/blog.
We apply warning messages to posts that contain sensitive content. If you are interested in having the status reviewed, please update the content to adhere to Blogger's Community Guidelines. Once the content is updated, you may republish it"

 

You may notice the obviously bot-generated message neglected to point out my guilt. What exactly was the "sensitive content" which warranted censuring and censoring? You'll find nothing on that page but some fairly milquetoast praise of Pillars of Eternity's graphic design, a cartoon skeleton and a weak offhand joke about young Earth creationism. One can't damn well "adhere" to so slippery a prozess, but then what would be the point of ruling fairly and failing to fabricate criminality? Of course, if you'd like the hypocritical icing on that cake, note Google was at that very time arguing it should not be censored by the countries in which its users reside (to wit: all of the countries) but only by whatever tax shelter it bases its regional mailbox headquarters in - in its case Ireland. Was it Ireland then which objected to my praise of crossbow cranks? Or was it California (where Google seats its main power) which objected to my appreciation for rancid zombies? Heaven knows SoCal of all places would never traffic in tales of living dead...

 

Google (likely by automation) soft-censored a random page based on flagging by what (for all I know) could very well in turn have been another crawler bot programmed to do exactly that: flag random pages. The mere possibility that someone somewhere may have taken umbrage at something is enough to justify a conviction. Pretext is result.

 

"We've come to expect never to be offended. What you say is offensive to me" mocked Richard Dawkins during his 2008 tour for The God Delusion "I'm offended by some things. I'm offended by chewing gum. I'm offended by backwards-pointing baseball hats. But I don't try to get a version of the blasphemy law passed to prevent people chewing gum or reversing their cap. So what if I'm offended? So what if my feelings are hurt? Does that give me the right to prevent others from expressing their opinions?"

 

At the time, he was responding to religious uproar over his insistence on discussing religion like any other topic, refusing irrational faith the moral umbrella it so unjustifiably claims. Three years ago Dawkins was instead rescinded his 1996 award by the American Humanist Association, for daring to discuss other topics like any other topics, refusing other brands of irrationality the moral umbrella they so unjustifiably claim. The self-appointed arbiters of humanism are a bit fuzzier on justifying their own support for racist theories (be honest, if "black identity" had been proposed by David Duke, it would be reviled instead of applauded*) or the frankly supernatural precept that females can outright become males or vice-versa by the thaumaturgy of contemporary cosmetic surgery and hormone shots. No weighing of rational arguments was needed. The unilateral pretext of social activism was enough to do what they wanted all along and strike down a colossus bestriding their all too narrow little world of favor-currying - and by such reflected importance elevate their own increasingly farcical organization's status.

 

Last year, after recovering from his near-fatal stabbing by a Muslim terrorist, Salman Rushdie redirected his warning of the threat on free speech also to the dubiously secular historical, sociopolitical and antiscientific revisionism now running rampant in the United States. Sam Harris, J.K. Rowling, John Cleese, Stephen Fry, etc., our culture is now littered with famous left-wing examples unpersoned by rainbow-headed social activists, convicted on one or more counts of intellectual integrity. Desmond Morris might've been the canary in this particular coal mine come to think of it, raked over the coals by feminists from forty years ago for daring to include women in the human race.

 

In 2021 I called upon Samuel Beckett to elucidate the hollow spectacle of mob rule which had gripped most American cities the previous year, as only a master of the absurd could hope to explain the George Floyd riots' pretense of social "justice" by torching your aunt's Honda Civic and braining random bystanders in the streets - as well as the degenerate dregs of academia who lent that millions-strong Peste a transobscurent lacquer of erudite legitimacy by postmodern fabrications. So in that spirit, let me recommend another absurdist on the topic of our current kulturkampf.

 

Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros could be seen as an extroverted version of Kafka's Metamorphosis, its viewpoint character watching helplessly as his society loses its mind, as his every friend and coworker willingly give themselves over to a bestial transformation. A formerly vibrant intellectual landscape is effaced under a single banner of group identity. Once critical, analytical individual minds are lost in the herd. Sound familiar? Rhinoceros aimed its frustration more narrowly than Godot at the intelligentsia, but the various fascist logicians, apologists and theologians throughout 1930s Europe could themselves not have existed but for widespread support among the rabble looking for a pretext to murder their neighbours. And that is what Women's Studies, African-American Studies, Hollywood's gay mafia and the rest of the now endless dogmatic host of celluloid censors or academic millstones supply, much as phrenology and social "darwinism" did a hundred and fifty years ago, or the apologists for Stalinism or for Nazism. They market that all-important perceived legitimacy, casus belli, the pretext to attack. The contagious hordes of our degenerate Peste and their "daemon swineherd in the twilit grotto" of academic and media circles are in fact forced to endlessly legitimize each other. Who else would?

 

Here's the thing though: the same capacity for reason which criticizes nationalism, corporatism, Christianity or the nuclear family will also criticize matriarchal communes, Islam, overpopulation and political correctness. The same skepticism which let me call bullshit on Wiccans or "compassionate conservatives"** twenty years ago protects me from Scientology and PETA. You can argue about whether Stalin was a communist or a fascist, anti-religious or set himself up as a demigod, but to the tens of millions he murdered, to the hundreds of millions he enslaved, it all ended up the same anyway. Stalin was first and foremost the most ardent Stalinist, and all philosophy he preached to the masses served only as pretext for powermongering. And anyone capable of calling into question his justifications had to go. Rhinoceros is particularly apt to remind us of an immutable early step in the rise of any dictatorship: smash the schools, smash the papers. The free press, universities, academia, the fourth estate, the intelligentsia, call it what you will, but it all serves as an unending font of inconvenient critique which any would-be tyrant must muzzle, leash, curb, neuter or put down for fear it might give the masses the wrong idea - that is to say, any idea. The rich and powerful will do this by any means at their disposal, by any pretext.

Do you not understand this?

THE RICH DON'T CARE!

They don't care which big lie they spout to seize power. You think the multibillionaire investors astroturfing your non-profit organization or gutting universities by turning them over from professors to ever more bloated administrations give a flying fuck about your personal pronouns, about your petty, narcissistic little word games? Or which magic sky-daddy you worship? All they care about is an unthinking workforce willing to be worked to death or marched onto the battlefield as cannon fodder.

If they can't do it by nationalistic fervor, they'll do it by proletarian fervor.

If they can't do it by christianity, they'll do it by hinduism.

If they can't do it by promises of a kingdom of god, they'll do it by woke utopianism.

If they can't do it by antisemitism, they'll do it by pro-semitism.

If they can't do it by white power, they'll do it by black power.

If they can't do it by religious sexual puritanism, they'll do it by feminist sexual puritanism.

It does not matter whether they force you to say that Lazarus rose from the dead or you'll be reincarnated as a cow or biological sex is a social construct or extraterrestrials are playing ping-pong at Roswell or JFK was assassinated by Atlantean Keebler Elves. They need to exterminate thought, instill absolute obedience. Anyone who criticizes nonsense must go, anyone who does not simply jump on the bandwagon, worship the fad, toe the line mindlessly at every opportunity must be deplatformed, censored, exiled. Remember the punchline of Aristides' anecdote is not only that he signed his own ostrakon, but that he was asked to do so by someone who knew nothing about him and only wanted to take a swipe at someone nicknamed "the just".

 

Oh yes, they always have a reason. Europeans in 1800/1900/1930 didn't attack Jews "just because" they woke up one morning with that idea. They had reasons, oh yes, those jews were foreign subversives, they were sapping the vital force of the mother/fatherland, they purveyed immorality and decadence, they drank baby blood, they had a million reasons! With zero analysis. Religious reactionaries aren't beating homosexuals to death just because they're bored and have nothing else to do. Oh, they've always had reasons, those gays were all disease-carrying pederasts, didn't you hear? And besides, God hates fags! Didn't you hear!?! "Why do you always make me hit you" the domestic abuser shouts. "Stop hitting yourself" the schoolyard bully shouts. A woman can't harm a man, she's only turning his patriarchal aggression against him. The designated enemy is always a threat, always blamed for the violence.

And of course "minority" groups only want to censor hate speech. Never mind that any group with the power to dictate both public opinion and intitutional access is not marginalized. They're under threat! You are harming some random narcissistic bitch by denying her an invented honorific like the royal "they"; you are an enemy of the public. Google's guidelines state "we need to curb abuses that threaten our ability to provide this service and the freedom of expression it encourages" got that? Google is THREATENED by the notion that men and women are not identical. Google is THREATENED by da lawd's name taken in vain. Google is THREATENED by cartoon skeletons. Google is THREATENED by old cranks. Google is RANCID about the word threatened. If any bystanders get caught in the algorithmic censorship crossfire, well, those are acceptable losses. Pay no attention to the side-effect of fomenting a culture in which those momentarily in power can now silence any voice of dissent, choreograph the ostracism of any individual at any time for any reason or no reason at all; all it takes is the claim that someone, somewhere, is offended by your existence, and you're gone - so ya'd better keep yer head down, keep yer yap shut, keep yer noggin void of any unsanctioned thoughts.

That automated censorship is even considered an option sounds the death knell of free thought. Any hate speech law is by its nature a thought crime law. It hinges on perceived motivation or the parties' implied relative moral standing, very much in the same vein as blasphemy or lese-majeste. Social activist naivete works on the presumption that you will always control the narrative, that you personally will always stand in judgment of others (being after all perennially "on the right side of history") but you won't. History's wheel has trampled greater rabblerousing powermongers than you (ask the Jacobins, ask the Leninists, ask the Templars and Huguenots) and will not slow its roll no matter how many knights say "ni" or "zee" at it. Having served your purpose in justifying censorship and repression by your hollow sophistry, having built the pyre, you will be of no further use to the rich and will take your place upon it.

 

After all, rhinoceros burn as readily as do monkeys.

 

 

______________________________________

 

* An apocalyptic streak akin to Christian Zionism runs through all modern "minority" identity politics angles in that White Nationalists, White Supremacists and the like seem to love hearing the very targets of their hatred validate their fractionalist worldview and hasten race wars.

 

** In that context, isn't it funny to see the American Humanists adopt the "compassionate" rhetoric in their very subtitle? Smokescreens block vision from both directions, it turns out.

P.S.: Believe it or not, the joke in my title was accidental. I don't even indulge. I do indulge in ST:TNG, but if you didn't get the reference: There. Are. Four. Lights!

The Voyaging Morons' Congress

"In Catholic school

As vicious as Roman rule

I got my knuckles bruised

By a lady in black"

 

Death Cab for Cutie - I Will Follow You into the Dark

________________________________________________________________

 

"So, then, obtaining the right to a child was now a distinction not awarded to just anyone."

Stanislaw Lem - Return from the Stars

________________________________________________________________

"The gun is good! The penis... is evil! The penis shoots seeds"

Zardoz

(a movie which I have never watched, for reasons including but not limited to Sean Connery's crotch)

________________________________________________________________

 

 

Population control is not just a moral and pragmatic imperative. It is inevitable.

 

About half a year ago at the height of the pandemic, I heard someone complain how heavily isolation measures were hitting families' internal dynamics, with children kept home from school every day to drive their progenitors insane. Even heretofore comfortably middle-class parents were suddenly discovering that 2.5 children were two too many. I reacted... perhaps predictably lycanthropic: well, who made them breed in the first place? The rejoinder came more cogent that I'd normally expect: their family size was planned in the context of a wide array of social services, guarantees on which their society unexpectedly defaulted in 2020. These people were born and indoctrinated into a culture encouraging them to follow their mindless, already dominant evolutionary prerogative to drown out their competitors in a tide of redundant progeny, assured they could simply jail their psychopathic little cacodemons for five days a week in communal care.

Stashing offspring in institutions (while always an option for the wealthy to dispose of the spare in "an heir and a spare") seems to have been popularized beyond limited monastic / military use by the British obsession with boarding schools. Sure, sure, you may not think of it that way, but public schools over the past century have acquired more and more of the functions of child jails, from fluff in curricula to justify extra hours to the proliferation of extracurricular activities. Sports clubs, drama clubs, sportsier clubs, music clubs, sportsiest clubs, religious clubs, clobbering clubs, anything, whatever it takes to ensure those hordes of disgusting, superfluous larval vandals don't see the light of day from September to June. The implied (false) promise is that you should breed as much as you can and we'll raise your kids for you.

 

In fact, the amount of encouragement states provide toward procreation makes an interesting observation: for all that no politician will ever utter the phrase "population control" the hunger of the rich for always more cannon fodder, always more wage slaves to lord it over, always more bipedal dogs to eat dogs, ensures that most societies do exercise population control... in the wrong direction!

So, with a billion of us soon to be vaccinated against the (current) pandemic and everyone presumably eager to resume bodily contact, let's reminisce about three Science Fiction tales speculating on the topic of population bombs.

 

Major spoiler alert for all three.

 

 

1) The Palliative

"Ours is simply a world in which more than twenty billion people live. [...] it is out of a deep sense of compassion and for the highest humanitarian reasons that this chemical hoax has been perpetrated"

The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem (1971) opens with a scientific conference on overpopulation in which all arguments lead to concluding the end of the world. The narrator finds himself drugged and hallucinating, thereby experiencing one of the proposed solutions to controlling the masses firsthand. Placed in suspended animation, he awakes in a future built around a fully mature science of chemical mind control. After delving its deep dark secrets, seeing sequential layers of narcotic haze are covering up a reality of abject poverty, sickness and overcrowding, he once again wakes up in the present day to discover it was all a chemically-induced hallucination after all.

If this sounds like a Philip K. Dick plot, Lem turns out to have been a fan, which Dick in his customary paranoia interpreted as a COMMIE PLOT OMGWTFBBQ!!!

Though it slightly drags its build-up and rushes its climax, the book retains more than enough punch by its sequential unveiling of just how far denial of reality can drag a society. It supports my oft-repeated point that telepathy negates science as the solution to every problem becomes not solving it but making everyone think it's been solved. When introducing Lem's Return from the Stars I likened it to the softest, Brave New World sort of dystopia while counting The Futurological Congress as his version of a mid-severity, Fahrenheit-451 variety. This may seem odd, as the ending reveals standards of living to have dropped to 1984 levels... but they did so from neglect, greed and myopia, not active malice. Though obligated to point out the plot hole of absent libido-depressing mind control chemicals, I can almost accept the villain's claim that past a certain point, once the species' creative capacity was so terminally outpaced by its procreative capacity, little remained possible but to cushion its gradual collapse into itself. Like Bradbury's prophetic view of our futurepresent, Lem's is an Apocalypse bought and sold by market forces and the mindless glut of mass appeal.

2) The Surgical

"while you and your kind were being prudent and foresighted and not having children, the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers were shiftlessly and shortsightedly having children - breeding, breeding. My God, how they bred!"

The Marching Morons by C. M. Kornbluth (1951) likely the most influential (if not directly famous) of these three examples, centers on dysgenics. A 20th-century scheister gets frozen by electricity (yes) and awakens to a monstrous population boom of common imbeciles mitigated by a desperately outnumbered minority of intelligent humans. With sterilization impossible for the sheer bulk of ape flesh which also makes warfare too risky (five hundred million tons of rotting flesh) the geniuses of the future, too honest for their own good, need the help of our common con-man to convince the human vermin of the world to exterminate themselves of their own accord. Inspired by Hitler's public relations campaigns for concentration camps, our hero sets up a program of fake rockets to "Venus" meant to lift five billion sub-humans out of the atmopshere where they won't stink up the joint. As a last measure, the future ubermenschen shove him into one as well, and the story ends with him hoist, quite literally, by his own petard.

 

Several points:

 

- The image of a compulsively dishonest real-estate speculator making absurd promises to hordes of degenerate rabble applauding the brilliance of such plans rang painfully true in the 2016 U.S. election, and has by no means lost relevance with the "other" party in power. "Defund the police" - how's that for a three-word rabblerousing slogan?

- Also, in 1951, with the world population closing on 3 billion, Kornbluth's vision of a future swarmed by 5 billion vermin might have seemed apocalyptic. We're now closing in on 8. Eight billion subhuman apes incapable of thought, of creativity, of reason, of anything to elevate them above the existential experience of rats, capable in fact of little beyond murderously producing more voracious, murderous walking redundancies.

 

- Impractical warfare, while necessary to set up the catchier plot point of rockets to "Venus" comes across as too forced. The five billion corpses wouldn't all rot at once. China's upcoming attempt to coin a new term, exclusive speciecide, shows how easy it is to prioritize the Tibetans or Mongolians, then Hong Kong and the Uighurs, then Taiwan and Korea and Vietnam, then Japan and Indonesia, then Europe and Africa and gradually the remnants of non-Han humanity. Just a few dozen million rotting corpses at a time. Perfectly manageable.

 

- Kornbluth's most memorable point however (and one glossed over by works he inspired like Idiocracy) is that dysgenics and overpopulation go hand in hand. The more primitive a mind, the less it can extend beyond its instincts, the more easily it is driven to self-destruction in ensuring numeric supremacy for its gametes, the more easily it swallows the precepts of moral and racial purity and other big lies. Conversely, the more human life is cheapened by overpopulation, the more the rich can employ sheer numbers of wage slaves and cannon fodder in place of innovation or careful planning, the more that infernal coalition of rabble and rabblerousers can afford to exterminate the superior intellects they so fear and despise. 

 

 

3) The Preventive

"there is no rational, equitable, scientific, technological, or human answer to the dilemma of a population increasing in an insane geometric progression. It admits to answering only with miracles - loaves and fishes, manna from heaven, and the like. Twice I failed as ecological engineer. Now I propose to succeed as the god that S’uthlam requires. Should I approach the problem as human a third time, I would assuredly fail a third time, and then your difficulties would be resolved by gods crueler than myself, by the four mammal-riders of ancient legend who are known as pestilence, famine, war, and death. Therefore, I must set aside my humanity, and act as god."

Tuf Voyaging by George R.R. Martin (1986) is a book I've mentioned in passing once before. Though I'd hoped the success of Boobs and Dragons would revive attention for some of his older, better works, I'm not hearing much chatter to that effect. Tuf's draconian problem-solving (think Stannis Baratheon) especially in Manna from Heaven which closes his short story collection, might have something to do with that.

The series begins with Haviland Tuf acquiring a biological warfare spaceship and needing it repaired. To pay for said repairs, he indebts himself to Malthus-Spelled-Backwards, a planet increasingly unable to feed the constantly growing population it is unable to curb due to a religious prerogative to go forth and multiply... and multiply, and multiply, and multiply, and multiply, and -

He "solves" their problem by increasing their food production. Repeated returns to the planet for further payments find that every time, the S'uthlamese have taken the extra food and used it to extra-extra-copulate, bringing themselves time and again to the brink of mass starvation. By the end their military build-up hints they've arrived at the inevitable conclusion of every overpopulated society: let's forcibly under-populate some other place and split the difference!

Tuf gives them one final gift: a miraculous fast-growing plant yielding absurd amounts of food, thriving under nearly any conditions... and whose commensal microflora will sterlize 99.9% of humans.

 

Science Fiction can place in the realm of palatable, dramatic speculation ideas otherwise too uncomfortable or distant from our daily concerns for honest discussion. Population control will happen.

1) No matter if you can "mascon" your way to willful ignorance for a century (as we already have) you will eventually find your streets choked with humans playing the role of automatons.

2) Dysgenics and overpopulation are conceptual twins. The most basic function of life is reproduction at the expense of other reproducers. The more degenerate, the more basic your populace, the more its actions revolve around that single unanalyzed drive of murderous genomic replication.

3) Population control is inevitable. If it is not undertaken consciously, rationally and deliberately, it will occur naturally, by the time-honored expedients of starvation, epidemics and genocide. In the face of uncontrolled reproduction, any compensating scientific advances can only buy diminishing amounts of time.

 

 

Birth is murder. Life kills to live, supplanting other life. Quoth the giant talking stone head filled with guns: "Go forth... and kill!" A rising population is a de facto declaration of war against one's neighbours, because those extra humans will inevitably demand their lebensraum. The rich hoard and spend human lives like any other currency. If you see them investing in superfluous reserves of population, it's only so they can out-bid each other by lavish expenditure of same in bouts for supremacy. The marching morons and their populist drummers will always prove willing to control the population - of other populations.

Now, in keeping with this theme, I feel inclined to overpopulate this post by a fourth example of three:

4) The Endemic

"This is the year when the computer tells us that the planet is full at last; the goal is achieved; all the striving of evolution crowned."

2430 A.D. by Isaac Asimov (1970) is a short story about the date when the mass of human flesh replaces all other land biomass. On the entire planet exists naught but human cities and oceans filled with a rapidly-reproducing plankton slurry to feed humanity and recycle its waste. That is all... except for one oddball who keeps a few non-human animals as pets, preventing his species from achieving the perfection of totality. In the end, he is convinced to give in to the "enlightenment" of the majority.

And kills himself.

"Over the vast continental buildings some five trillion human beings placidly slept; some two trillion human beings placidly ate; half a trillion carefully made love. Other trillions talked without heat, or tended the computers quietly, or ran the vehicles, or studied the machinery, or organized the microfilm libraries, or amused their fellows. Trillions went to sleep; trillions woke up; and the routine never varied."

 

The Malthusian nightmare is generally presented in terms of inevitable collapse. Yet success makes an even more horrifying scenario, in which the human disease is never treated but metastasizes into a uniform post-plasm, a fully evolved but terminally primitive totality having eliminated all possibilities beyond self-reproduction.

 

What's your end-game?

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.

Farmville, Bidonville, Marsville

Now I know we're all excited by the Curiosity rover sniffing fossilized ET farts on Mars. Maybe. Possibly. It's providing a minor boost to Surviving Mars' already minor popularity and if there ever were a profitable time for Hollywood to invest in a few dozen mind-rapingly terrible Red Mars adaptations, now's that time. But let us remember that the problem with interplanetary exploration has never been the interplanetary part. It's the would-be explorers.

That would be you, dear reader.

We could probably all be living to 120 years or more in clean, safe comfort and adventuring out as we please if it weren't for the all-too-many "all" and we could probably be dancing around in the Kuiper Belt if we wanted to. We don't want to. We'd rather make up idiotic fairy tales about supernatural saviors while we build mansions and hovels upon hovels and mansions and clutter this exhausted old planet with our disgusting, moronic progeny. Religion, social status, control, until we outgrow these any true scientific growth is meaningless fluff, pearls thrown before seven and a half billion degenerate swine.

Spaceships, if they come, won't look anything like the clean, sleek, purposeful, polite, egalitarian Enterprise.
They will look like this:

Because you billions upon billions of redundant filthy apes are not interstellar explorers. You're brainless, instinct-driven, superstitious, murderous, backstabbing vermin, and you breed accordingly.

International Inflation Day

Once upon a time, in an introductory  anthropology class, we watched a documentary in which a Peruvian man said he's thankful to the Americans who came to study the ruins near his village, for bringing plumbing and a grade school education with them. He foresaw a better future for his five children.

Today is international children's day in... well, you know, some international places. International places with children. Granted, lots of places vary this date - oh, by the way, Thailand? You're doing it wrong. So wrong.

Anyhoo, today much of the world is celebrating those wondrous little bundles of smells, because as a species with already insanely high parental investment compared to most of the animal kingdom, we're obviously not obsessed enough already with the fruit of our loins. So allow me to celebrate this feast of spawning with a link.

Hooo-eee, lookit dem numbers fly!

Seven and a half billion of us filthy overgrown monkeys running around, and most of them so fucking stupid, uneducated or just beaten over the head that they still think fairies up in the clouds will solve all their problems. Stop breeding already! Ya wanna celebrate children? Stop shitting out so many of the damn things that they have to fight over scraps all their lives against the screaming hordes of other superfluous naked apes. Despite the impression left by the popular computer game series by that name, civilization is not a numbers game.

The population around 1600 C.E. was around five to six hundred million. That world of Copernicus,  Galileo, Shakespeare and Newton consisted of one-fourteenth today's human mass, only a tiny educated sliver of which managed to produce any thought worth expressing. The Athens of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Alexander the Great numbered around one hundred to one hundred and forty thousand, a population a bit smaller than that of... ida know, let's say Provo, Utah or Melitopol, Ukraine or Ijebu-Ode, Nigeria. I eagerly await the inevitable rise of the great schools of Provo, Melitopol and Ijebu-Ode - and make it snappy, 'cause we could sure use a few more Aristotles right about now.

Breeding is not progress. Quite the opposite. You've likely  heard the insipid propagandistic catchphrase "Children are our country's greatest resource" - true, and this is a resource bought and sold like any other. For anyone but the rich, anyone except the puppet-masters who maintain a stranglehold on all natural resources (and/or as the old Marxist catchphrase holds it, the means of production) the only currency we have to trade with are our body/mind combo package, our ability as individuals. The rich must capture or purchase our cooperation, and they are always eager to devaluate it.

An abundance of humans cheapens the individual human. The more of you there are, the less one unit of "you" buys. If you're one in a million, there are now seven and a half thousand of "you" interchangeably disposable for your boss to fire, for bankers to bankrupt on a whim, for generals to use as cannon fodder. That is your children's fate: disposability inherent in the eyes of their own brothers and sisters, the power elite's abuse nascent in an overcrowded womb. A world of more dogs to eat more dogs. Just like in the Civilization games, it's the millennial, domineering, megalomaniacal puppet masters who benefit from the ever-thicker glut of bricks in the wall.

You want to help struggling third-world countries? Send them condoms, not food. Popularize tubal ligations and make sure abortion clinics always outnumber orphanages.

Back when we watched that documentary with the inane social "scientist" propaganda, I was the only one to raise my hand and ask "yeah, a school's good, and plumbing's good, but is anyone handing out condoms?" The man had five kids. Will his five have five each of their own? Will those twenty-five fighting for one twenty-fifth the share of whatever life a dusty Andean plateau can offer be twenty-five times as eager to accept the interference of rich foreigners in exchange for a few scraps of condescending "humanitarian aid?"

'Hoods

Greetings, citizens.
I come before you today to speak of a dire plague afflicting our people. I speak of a disease which has run rampant through every human society since the dawn of time, turning the lives of individuals to helpless suffering and toil. It affects nearly the entire population, is incurable except by the most drastic, unethical and illegal measures and infects its victims for decades at a time, destroying what little ability for self-determination they may possess in the prime of their lives. It sentences sufferers to spend almost all of their time, energy and material resources addressing the manifold and grievous symptoms of their malady. It affects the young more than the old, the poor more than the rich, females slightly more than males and its incidence sadly has been correlated with certain ethnic and religious groups. It is even, to some extent, transmissible!

I speak, of course, of parenthood.

Stop Breeding!

Apparently, some judge finally got tired of getting mugged by hobo coke-hounds on the way to work and decided the solution, shockingly enough, is to stop breeding crackhead hobos. Bravo.

Let's take it from the top, people. Population control is one of the strongest and most widespread political taboos. Every discussion of dwindling resources, crime rates, wars, exploitation and in general apes stepping on each others' toes tends to somersault right over the fact that there are just too damn many toes to step on. Breeding per se need not be criminalized outright, but there are a variety of economic pressures which could be used to limit spawning. In general, any form of financial aid should be limited to one or at most two children per parent. Eligibility for government employment should be limited to parents of no more than two children and no company which employs large-litter breeders should be eligible for subsidies.
Also, as harsh as it sounds, end government care of unwanted infants. If the parents cannot care for them, they will die horrible deaths. Offer unwanted or unwarranted babies up for adoption at first, but if no individual is interested in adopting the infant within a certain time-frame, say a couple of months, its care should revert to the parents, in every legally-binding sense. No more government-supported foster homes full of Oliver Twists waiting for their ship to come in. Every penalty for neglect, abuse, child endangerment, etc. that you can pile on the idiots who bred when they can't care for children should still be enforced, and quickly. The only ways out of caring for your own children should be suicide or infanticide and execution.
Even for the first two children, government aid should be refused for any child born to parents which were under twenty-five or thirty years of age. An extra five years on our generation time would do wonders to forestall that Malthusian storm cloud on the horizon.
Cease trade with any nation which does not implement population control measures.

Don't get me wrong, i'm well aware that nothing will be done. This particular judge's decision will be overturned. No greater such measures will be permitted. This is because human misery is the greatest asset of the media-mastered corporate state's power structure. Slave labor and cannon fodder in abundance both form and grease the cogs of our society. You always need a surplus of desperate souls to break strikes, to enlist for military brainwashing, to turn to crime so that you can terrorize them with the threat of torture and execution in prisons. There must be enough poor children that their proper education can be presented as financially impossible, so that there can be enough brainwashed adults to keep voting for wars, churches or youth sports leagues and against education. Most importantly, the glut of ape-meat littering the streets must be thick enough to force it to cannibalize itself. "Divide and conquer" is still the greatest tool of social control. Keep the rich out of sight, out of reach of the poor, and the poor will simply turn on each other as the only available targets. This season's first-tier games shall pit against one another: the Irish vs. Italians, the Blacks vs. the Latinos, the Chinese vs. the Russians, the hicks against the queers. As more refined entertainment, we'll throw in a "Jews vs. neo-Nazis" tennis match.
Somehow we never get to the championship match of rich vs. poor anymore.

Don't even get me started on religious indoctrination's role in maintaining the unwanted pregnancy rate. Politics and religion make all-too-familiar bedfellows.

Yes, i am being heartless. I am in many ways an idealist, and idealists are prone to draconian measures. I would let generations of unwanted babies die of neglect, i would see the crime rate skyrocket and executions increase during my time, i would accept the risk of getting murdered for the twenty dollars in my pocket by some desperate result of my removal of support for large families, all so that we don't reach the predictable ten-fold increase in such an outcome another couple of generations from now. My ideal is intellectual development.

It strikes me as utterly thoughtless that it's libertarians and human rights groups which are protesting that judge's decision. I can only assume they are puppets of some conservative think-tank or they simply have no grasp of the concept of freedom. Liberty must be restricted when it begins to restrict others' liberties. We live within the limits of thermodynamics. Everything we create, all our effort, is by hook or crook divided among us. If i ever have children, my first and second children should not have to compete with your fifth through twelfth. We should not have to split resources seven billion ways when one billion would do. Before you start trumpeting the right to breed, the mindless instinctive urge to hump, worry about the right to live in safety, to learn to grow as an individual and to possibly even create new works of art or science. Where does the right to think fit into an overpopulated society?

You know what, forget the quality of life of the children for a moment and worry about the quality of life of the parents. What chance for a meaningful life does an individual with half a dozen children have. Parenthood itself, all that mucking about with dirty diapers, property damage, food, shelter and toys, is the most debilitating condition short of outright maiming that we inflict on ourselves. How free are you when your boss can afford to be a slavedriver because your screaming brats serve as constant leverage against you? How free is a twenty-two year old parent of a newborn to continue advancing intellectually, to reach that level of personal identity at which the urge to procreate no longer controls him?
We should all have a right to live free, dignified lives. We should not have the right to spawn litters of screaming, hungry animals which will by their simple existence restrict others' lives.

You'll be beaten down soon enough, Judge O'Connor, as i'm certain you knew when you made your verdict. Until then, as one quixotic head-case to another, thank you.