Overpopulation & famine.
I see a lot of people saying that we have enough food world wide to feed everyone and people in places like Africa shouldn't be starving to death.
I don't think we should try and feed the world. If we have enough food production so to feed everyone and end up feeding everyone then the population will continue to grow, and as the population grows we'll need to grow more food to support it. Eventually there will be too many people, there won't be enough resources, and the large population will cause other problems regarding society. Simple jobs are already being replaced meaning more people need to be educated, there is no great boom in the workplace allowing for more common jobs to support an increasing population.
We shouldn't produce food and export it is what I'm saying, and even if a nation only produced food for itself population growth will just continue locally.
We are taking over the world bit by bit and replacing nature with what we believe we need to survive. Species are being killed to extinction by our direct or indirect actions of survival and progress. All of this progress seems to be progress towards an inevitable collapse.
I've recently read the book "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn, it argues that man is above nature, but I don't think we are, for we as the dominant species are only building up to out downfall as a result of being a dominant species. Our actions have consequences but it takes decades if not more for it to be a real problem, but by then it's the next generation's issue, and the new generation causes it's own problems as well.
I don't think we will ever make it off this planet, or even see a way that we will make it a thousand years more ignoring natural distastes or catastrophes.
>>28809195
All things are as they must be. If the meteor didn't wipe out so much life back then, modern day wouldn't be as it is today.
You're just jealous because you'll never get to contribute to "further populating the world" while everyone else does, aren't you anon?
>>28809219
I agree with that, it's why I don't think man is above nature.
Thins are because there is a law to it, there's no other path for things to follow, and no matter the outcome it will play out a certain way. Things are 'right' no matter how they are.
I'm just talking about us as a species and not being exempt from the rules of nature. I think a lot of people see us above the laws of nature because we have laws which uniquely apply to us, and because it's commonplace we overlook them, are accustomed to the life we live that it's unseen by us.
We aren't stable, and the road we're going down currently will lead to our downfall, or at least great population loss.
>>28809220
Holy shit nice meme!
Mind if I repost this on facbook?
Does Ishmael get better later in the book? I stopped reading it because the main human character actually made me extremely angry.. he would constantly emphasize that he does not understand the point the ape is getting at, when to the reader the point was obvious 10 pages ago.. and so it goes on and on regurgitating the same ideas and the dumb fuck main guy just keeps saying he doesn't understand
>>28809258
Perhaps the pursuit of conquering nature will bring humanity to his next evolutionary state. Necessity is the mother of invention after all. Desperate times will call for desperate measures.
>>28809298
It changes pace around half way through the book.
That irritated me as well but the interest of what Ishmael was saying kept me reading.
Read it for your own benefit, put aside the dense character. I think it was written that way to relate to the 'common' man who is reading something philosophical for the first time.
>>28809274
Now now, careful with all the irony there anon. That fine Willy Wonka picture started out here and has gotten so vintage now it's just fine to use it again.
>>28809301
I'm not saying I disagree, I'm just suggesting you read the book, anon.
It deals with it all quite simply. Yes, we seem to manage to pull ourselves of immense shit which we got ourselves into anyway. The next step of human evolution will not matter for we are the dominant life form on this planet. And as the dominant life form we are pushing out other life and setting up our own ways. We are destroying the establish system nature has, eventually that system will collapse, and it will be only on us to sustain life - to sustain ourselves. But we are fragile, and with a greater population there will be more difficulty in reaching this next step of evolution, whatever it might be. we progress in every sector far too fast for the whole world to adjust immediately, and the problems being caused will only come up in the future for we are ignorant of issues till it's staring us in the face or poses a great threat to us. We are always on the brink of saving ourselves and dooming ourselves.
In a side point, I think the next step of human evolution is androids/robots. We are essentially giving birth to a lifeforms, a mechanical one, one far more intelligent to us, and one which doesn't depend on living nature, just resources/energy. Man will become obsolete, but this will be the next incarnation of man, and only this form can be outside of nature for it won't be constrained by life, rather how the universe works. We as a species will go extinct, maybe we will do it, maybe evolution of any form will do it, or even a meteor might do it. I don't know, I'm just firmly under the belief we are very deluded at our core about our place here.
Bumping for replies since this isn't a thread obsessing with women and won't get to 400 replies.
>>28809625
What are you saying really. Each country should be self sustainable?
>>28809697
I don't know the answer to the problem.
I'm just trying to raise a discussion on our problems as a species and our way of life. In the book there are two different ways of life. The "Takers" and the "Leavers". We are the takers, the term is self explanatory. The way we act now, the logic we have, the path of progress we follow is not sustainable in the long run. Even if each country only fed itself instead of the world bloating its own problems, it will be divided down to the national level.
One way the book approaches this is by pointing out culture significance. That having different cultures globally which aren't very friendly keep each other in check with its borders, production and even population spread / emigration / immigration. There's a flow of reason, logic and law which we operate on as human beings. We create big cities, those who don't like the big cities move to small towns which end up becoming big cities, our population keeps growing and growing, problems made in previous generations are attempting to be solved. But that's the issue right there, instead of looking at how to fix ourselves as a species so not to be causing problems in the first place, we are only fixing the problems which arise. We won't ever escape our nature heading in this direction. There's no "fix" for all of this, this is what we are and who we are by the nature of the civilizations and societies we establish.
We are trying to take the world and even other worlds as our own, do what we wish with it. As if the world and the universe was made for us to do as we wish with. I'm not trying to preach hippie bullshit here tat we should all be in touch with nature, I'm saying that believing we are above nature but abusing nature for our own sake will only lead to our downfall because we aren't above it. We aren't above the laws which keep life in check, which keeps species from extinction.
Humanitarian aid is responsible for most of today's problems. Remove populations originating from Africa and the Middle East, what are you left with? No wars, no terrorism, much less crime and poverty, much less racial tensions, less religion. Native Indians went extinct and the United States became the best country in the world. Blacks and Muslims received a century of help and they might just make western civilization collapse.
>>28810182
I believe the problems I'm raising ambiguously went way over your head anon. But thank you for the bump, at least someone wants to talk about something besides women ;_;
>>28809195
People forget about how much of the world's food is fed to farm animals. Cows and pigs are being fed too and the require 3x the amount of grain a human consumes.
Yes, technically there's enough food to feed the world but most of it is used for other things.
>>28810225
You say we are the dominate species, there's really nowhere to go but up when you are already at the top. Fly too close to the sun and you will eventually fall.
Let mankind collapse into ruin, really the only options we have is to survive or die. There is no infinite supply of resources. It will run out eventually, so what if over population speeds up this process. Die today or die tomorrow, die we must. If humans are doomed to become extinct there is nothing anyone can do. But I welcome the discussion.
>>28810316
>really the only options we have is to survive or die.
And my point to this is that there's a way to live so we don't come to these being the only two options. Being the way we are we led ourselves to these two options, and now justify our behavior and foolishness with "what must be done must be done", "it's either us or them", it's simply falling into a hole we've dug instead of learning not to dig big holes.
Humanity isn't inherently evil or power hungry. We deluded ourselves with stories and visions then perpetuated our actions with justification of our own greatness and value by placing ourselves above everything simply because we have the capacity to be. But that capacity is the illusion, it just shakes the structure of nature as we climb it, we cannot overcome it, it's false power and greatness.
Humanity's biggest problem is its ego.
>>28809195
people treat the population sustainability like everybody has an equal share or has what they need
you hear people saying every time that the world is nothing close to overpopulated
I think it's far past overpopulated and the resultant human social problems will bring the population back down
>>28809395
The next step completely annihilates the needs of sleep, food, drink, biological urges and a variety of other factors.
The problem for a lot of people is that it's a great unknown, you could call it the "Human Frontier" in that we don't know how things would pan out from that point. For all we know, bodies (as a concept) might as well be just a transitory stage. You take your body for repairs, just like you would a car and eventually you'll have a new one.
The biggest problem in the modern world (and it's also evidenced countless times in the past) is this outright religious logic to think that somehow nature is above all, while humans keep figuring out how our sphere of life works, how we've been able to harness the capabilities nature lends to us and in some ways we've surpassed a lot of limits people genuinely deem to consistently be unreachable.
First we thought everything orbits the earth, everyone was proven wrong, then humans couldn't fly, once again the limits were proven wrong, we've surpassed the needs of stronger animals to ferry us around, while inventing machines to cover for our weaknesses as a species, we've taken the baby steps to space and have pretty much networked most of our planet to communicate with each other and the limits are broken on an almost daily basis, yet we have a cult consistently telling us that were doomed and our upward mobility can't last, all the while these innovations have all happened from a single explosive growth span in roughly a century.
All the while our "great civilizations" mired themselves around with great philosophies, religion and a variety of ass-backwards developments, we've achieved more progress in living standards, health, reduction of manual labour, automatization, communication... The list is rather large and all have happened in a very short time span.
>>28809195
>>I see a lot of people saying that we have enough food world wide to feed everyone and people in places like Africa shouldn't be starving to death.
We do.
We could feed every person in the world with just the food we throw out everyday.
The problem is more that population keeps growing and the methods we are forced to use to create food are less sustainable all the time (capitalism ho!). We should decrease the world's population to less than a sixth of what it currently is so that we could really go sustainable on all fronts.
Unfortunately, the government is nothing more than a pyramid scheme and they will never do anything to halt the entrance of new bodies on the scam. The world is fucked.
>>28809195
There's 800 million Europeans in all of Europe and 300 million Americans, of which only 170 million are white European. So there's less than a billion white people on earth.
India has over 1 billion people alone, china has over 1.5 billion alone, Pakistan has more people in it's small country than Russia, Nigeria is projected to have over a billion people in less than 100 years.
The problem isn't with the West and white people, it's with everyone else and they should solve their own problems. We should not be sending any aid to any of these countries.
>>28810598
It's funny that no one ever talks about the issues these countries have on the base levels, some of them are not much better than lawless tribal societies with downright savage and brutal customs and ways (especially the african nations and middle-eastern nations), with people whose general smartness is on a level where disputes are much more likely to be resolved with violence.
Just because an exception is born or surfaces every now and then doesn't mean it represents a population on its whole. The west and white countries have problems with violence, anti-societal conduct and war, but we've been slowly moving away from it, inch by inch or atleast our attempts are to slowly clean it up and make our living environment better.
It's a massive logical fallacy to assume that throwing money and infrastructure from western nations are helping resolve these problems, when the most successful nation in Africa largely has started to resolve a variety of it's problems at a sustainable pace, yet it's still plagued by remnants of muslim tribalists.
It all kind of stems from the same root, conquest in the name of a religion and it needs to stop. Until it's stamped out by it's roots by putting everyone who is trying to terrorize people in the name of Islam to curing of lead, it's never going to stop. It's my firm belief that some things are just impossible to resolve without violence and islamic extremism (and islam in general) isn't gonna stop it's conquest until the opposition starts spilling even more blood.
It might sound cruel, but that's the only way forward.
>>28810752
> implying the west needs to do anything to halt Islam
Really, all that needs to be done is to STOP interacting with them at all. Don't accept their immigrants, don't accept their money, don't accept their oil, just cut them off.
They'll kill themselves and without assistance they don't get to reproduce as often. The problem solves itself.
"Brevity is the soul of wit." - Shakespeare
>>28809195
But you are objectively wrong.
Look up "demographic transition"
Basically it's been proven that third world countries have huge birthrates causing overpopulation but if they somehow managed to stabilize their countries the birthrates will also stabilize.
If niggers in Africa are fed and don't need to worry about food they won't reproduce as much anymore. They won't need 10 (5 of which will die during childhood) offsprings to take care of the family
>>28810818
Russia and USA have largely been the only countries that have legitimately atleast tried the "shock & awe" in the countries they've been deploying weapons and troops to, but considering the psyche of people on the ground, it's a very arduous task. You're facing people who are pretty much desensitized to wanton carnage and killing, while we send after them youngsters who barely begin to grasp at the horrors those people are capable of, in such cases the amount of aerial ordnance and shelling done in the middle-east is a much smarter move, people cry about collateral and civilian targets, but Russia and USA are smart in the regard that even if all sorts of treaties and conventions bind them, there is much more to be gained by downright obliterating regions to both reduce the infrastructure available to violent hooligans and deterring further problems in the region. Russia's involvement in the situation in Syria was met with huge outcry in the west due to civilian and "insurgent" targets (Read: People who are still stirring up shit born out of the Arab Spring situation), while it's downright silly that regions that are under Al Assad's rule atleast have a resemblance to civilized societies, while everything else outside those regions can pretty much be confirmed to be something straight out of a Mad Max movie, in such cases, people obviously attempt to go to the safe areas, but at the same time it seems West is more than comfy with accomodating "Syrians", when in truth the large majority of these "migrants" are demoralized Isis / troublemakers who are looking to bail out, because Russias involvement almost entirely started to stamp out a lot of nests in Syrian soil.
It's not a fucking coincidence that the large majority of these "refugees" are young, fit men. Were literally taking in people into Europe who shit their pants after the real ordnance started rolling and it's retarded.
>>28811217
A generation or two it was typical of even 1st world families to have around five children. This wasn't as a result of poverty, but rather a boom in production and jobs available. Even a nation bursting at its seams with progress will lead to population growth. There is no avoiding it on either side. The population has always been increasing around the world, and even if Africa could stabilize it would continue to grow, as the whole world is. It's a real problem, and we're only somewhat indirectly addressing it by taking steps to colonize Mars to continue our campaign of superiority and master over nature. I've worded my OP poorly, the thread was meant to focus more on the faults of society and way of living and just overpopulation.
>>28811242
different anon here. Please teach me your ways of knowledge.
>>28811348
Have a few friends who have made unbiased reportage in Syria, the situation outside of capital areas is all sorts of fucked, but at the same time it's almost comically hilarious how the West sees the "insurgents" as some noble brave citizen group that's fighting for "Freedom", all the while the vast majority of them are armed looters, highway men, paramilitaries and all sorts of other hoodlums. These people might fight ISIS, they also might fight the NDF (which is literally the only coherent group resembling a MILITARY in the entire country), but they are just as likely to pull shit like squatting and invicting people from their homes and shooting them on the streets like in Rabia village and how does the West respond?
News coverage of "FSA" was removed from the premises with a joint strike by Russia and NDF troops, incidentally the operation leveled most of the town but on the other hand the amount of fire-arms, drugs and variety of other sketchy shit (like sex slaves and mass graves) are coincidentally blurred out of public narrative in the West and generally these things can be coined into a singular entity of "ISIS DID IT!"
The USA mostly doesn't intervene as FSA:s goal of destabilizing Assad's reign works better on their interests, so it's likely that USA mostly does a spotty job at cleaning up after the FSA:s mess. ISIS works as a convinient scapegoat for all the stuff FSA pulls, all the while the destabilization keeps on occuring as long as FSA is the kind of entity it is, on another hand it's similar to giving out printed licenses to every single thug with an itchy trigger-finger to "join a cause", when it's largely been shown that the goverment forces have largely been trying to fight two fronts in a war where the lines between these two forces is awfully thin.
What west calls FSA, might as well be called "ISIS Lite"
>>28811967
The insight is much appreciated, anon.
Do you have any sites which can keep me objectively informed about the events of the world?
/pol/ has nice links a lot of the time regarding this mess, but I'm just searching for more.
>>28812070
Check the UN Peacekeeping reports every now and then, the Security Council Report and entire speeches to the council, which generally aren't something that leak too much into the public (it's not like most UN conferences even have media coverage in the first place) and pay special attention to the generally more muffled side of the participants. The syrian goverment has had quite a bit of downright excellent statements from their spokesperson and a lot of them have either been largely ignored,or otherwise vetoed out due to few countries mistrust (largely Saudi-Arabia, US and their close allies).
Other than that, finding unbiased Western sources needs a bit of digging, another way is to simply try to dig up testimonials on what is available on the internet. Word travels fast in a world of social media and internet.
It isn't to say that the situation in Syria is as black and white as it seems. There's a lot of animosity in both groups, but the biggest issue is the fact that the FSA is a very loose organization and there's a lot of groups in the country that are genuinely what could just be called vigilantes or freelancers, there was that one Fahid dude who my friend talked about who visited Al-Rastan who annually does "spring cleaning", who genuinely hunted looters in the area, because the so called "FSA" forces in the area are nothing short of people on Hilux trucks with uniforms, extorting people for money and valuables.
there's this theory that says that there aren't any over developed species out in the universe because they all reach a certain point where they end up wiping themselves out. Can't remember what the theory was called but it makes sense
>>28809195
>1st world educated countries having 2 children per couple on average if not a bit below
>OVERPOPULATION WILL COME AND END US
lol okay, youll get famine in India and Indonesia but the rest of the world is fine
>>28812500
I've been giving that a bit of thought recently.
We only have our own history to look towards, our own evolution. We are the first intelligent species which can shape the world to our liking, shape it to our needs and demands.
We are the dominant species on this planet in the manner we believe e have the power over it, but there is no successor to us, no other species we know of that are even close to our intelligence.
Let's say we don't make it, due to our own faults and fumbles we nuke ourselves into the ground, or do irreparable damage to the ozone layer and the average world temperature rises to a degree where we can't live, produce enough food or even breathe, or something slams into earth because instead of building technology to leave this place and thrive, or defend it we have been fighting among ourselves. We will simply be wiped out and no lessons learned. If life arises again there's a probability that it will go through the same process.
We are at the inception of civilization in the timeline of life. We have only one single chance at this, to make it as a species and we're seeing big fucking warning signs in nature and in us that we can destroy it all. We are extremely fragile and on the cusp of extinction at every single moment. A lifetime is almost not even a measurement in the long run, but in the past 100 years we did so much to push our limits of survival and danger.
Ancient civilizations died and thrived, we were the ones who made it. Imagine if the ancient American / South Americans civilizations continued to build and develop and we encountered them on the same level of technology, or even more advanced as a society. If we weren't so power hungry and 'evil' we'd compare ways of life, build for a better future, but that's not the case. Each year we're learning by trial with fire. It seems more likely we will doom ourselves than save ourselves, and that process is inevitable and only simple life flourishes.
>>28812659
>Only simple life flourishes
I feel that anon, humans, with their intelligence, are still limited by nature, the animalistic nature to be selfish and take as much resources as possible to ensure survival of your genes and you genes alone. Since we have no predators, and this intelligence, we grow, we breed, we take over and consume with such ease without any care for our surroundings. We are mere animals. leave a Rabbit to its devices and it'll breed and suffocate the land, it doesn't know what it's doing. Leave a foxes there and give no place for the rabbits to hide then they breed and drive the rabbits to extinction, they don't know what they have done. We're supposed to be the smart animals, but we are no better than a fox or a rabbit. At least if we were more simple minded, we wouldn't have any technology to stomp the planet with, we may even not have the ability to become robots, that would be nice
>>28809195
>I don't think we will ever make it off this planet, or even see a way that we will make it a thousand years more ignoring natural distastes or catastrophes.
Over population for the consumption of resources probably isn't that big of a worry. A lot of the time those problems are driven from economic factors. It's insane to not try to have space exploration and research as a critical primary function of the species.
>>28812907
Read the book in the OP, Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
It's really worth reading and deals with a lot of the themes in this thread, anon.
>>28809195
Don't worry OP, weather is heavily tied to political/interpersonal conflict. Just wait for an even hotter year and watch the fireworks (read: wars) fly somewhere.
