Because of admin interference with the content https://lemmy.ml/modlog/16033 and disciplinary actions we obviously can’t stay here.
We’ve set up shop on http://lemm.ee/c/collapse [email protected] so please update your subscription if you intend to continue to follow this community.
At some point this community will be mothballed, unless [email protected] wants to continue taking care of it.
Take all your caliper-loving friends with you, Malthusian scum
Interesting, thanks for letting us know
My pleasure. Obviously a community discussing collapse can’t stay in a place which denies overshoot of the ecosystem carrying capacity. The Reese paper doesn’t say a thing about eugenics.
a community discussing collapse can’t stay in a place which denies overshoot of the ecosystem carrying capacity. The Reese paper doesn’t say a thing about eugenics.
Okay then, what do you propose we do if you believe we’ve overshot our carrying capacity?
I don’t believe that we’ve very significantly overshot our global ecosystem carrying capacity. Especially post-fossil. It’s a fact outlined in many numbers in thousands of peer reviewed publications.
As to what we could collectively do: sadly, very little. The overall system has almost no degrees of freedom left. You’re mostly down to personal and community scale choices. Small things.
Not going to continue to discuss that here though.
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Please continue discussing this here, I wanna see your posts get obliterated from orbit again
Not going to continue to discuss that here though.
why because it’s a garbage argument that immediately reveals itself to be bullshit? we could very easily sustain projected populations under a system of more equitable resource distribution and the destruction of the capitalist class
Okay then, what do you propose we do if you believe we’ve overshot our carrying capacity?
You mean what to do to improve the average quality of life?
Anti-colonial, anti-hegemonic action. Which I am always happy to discuss.
Unfortunately it will have to occur in a different space - perhaps on lemm.ee, or perhaps on hexbear (where I’m also an active user).
Managing populations is equally intractable. In many countries, calling for population planning would constitute political suicide. Even the United Nations Population Fund recently ‘decried any expressed concern about population growth as “alarmist”’ (O’Sullivan 2022b); strong advocates of population reduction strategies policies risk being vilified as racist, eco-fascists, eugenicists, anti-human or worse.
Hey look, I spotted the one part where it mentions anything having to do with eugenics.
Thank you for confirming the core point of the paper.
This feels more a personal gripe than an issue with moderation seeing as it’s practically just your submission that got you a slap on the wrist that is making you make everyone else move.
Not that I’m not completely against it but I think I’m failing to see how this is much more than a representation of that bender meme of you leaving and making your own sub.
@eleitl and I have been members of the wider collapse community for quite awhile - since around 2009 for me. I am a member of multiple communities, each many times larger and more active than this one (although I’m particularly fond of the userbase here).
We’ve seen collapse communities prosper and we’ve seen them falter. The tension between users, mods, and admins is nearly a constant. Despite those tensions, more and more people join these spaces every year because they still find value in them. One of the common discussions that triggers these tensions is the Limits to Growth.
That conversation has been going on since '72 and it’s not about to stop. If this is an issue now then it will continue to be one moving forward. Personally I do think it’s something important to discuss (how could it not be?), I know many other Marxists who agree, and I believe that in most cases the community has successfully held these conversations while self-moderating (including the work of the mod team) against ecofascists and right-wing trolling, brigading, etc. Temporal population limits themselves have never been the primary focus of discussion, and as a moderator I would not allow that focus to develop because such myopia is not productive for understanding our holistic situation.
Many of us come from spaces that can generally handle these challenges to our consensus standard. Our much more frequent complaint (on other sites) is admin censorship over the merits of such things as introducing rent-seekers to guillotines. I don’t mean to say that opinion in these spaces are perfect but in my experience, far-right propaganda gets proliferated on more reactionary forums (such as the front page and climate change subreddits which are largely captured). The collapse channels in recent years, on the other hand, are where those talking points are often dunked on and resoundingly refuted. There is really no reason for propagandists to engage in a space where they will be countered with hard facts and numbers - we are the hardest marks of all!
As someone who has been on lemmy longer than most, I love the people here and I am interested in supporting an even better space for discussing collapse in the fediverse. I don’t want anyone to have to feel alone as they deal with a firehose of lies around sustainability, as I had to do for many years. My only real interest here is creating a safe space for people with both empathy and collapse-awareness.
Our current hosts are not entirely comfortable with the prospect of us navigating these complexities skillfully. From our brief discussions in the removed thread, it appears that they think we are already failing to do so. And that is their right as admins! It is certainly possible for low-quality collapse-related discussions to turn into genocidal echo chambers - I see them all the time lately in non-collapse-related forums - and while I trust in the community here, the admins are under no obligation to undertake that risk.
As developers, however, they gave us a graceful solution: Federation allows us to move to an instance that will be more comfortable hosting us. That reduces tensions for everyone. It’s a win for all parties involved as far as I can tell.
I appreciate our admins/devs. I am not particularly concerned about our differences of opinions from my side of things, but I also don’t want to give them headaches or create any more hard feelings - I’d rather just get out of their hair.
If anyone feels they got the short end of the deal, I encourage them to reach out and I will do whatever I can to make amends. I know that is not ideal, but it is what I can offer. I care more for the individual members of the collapse-aware community than I do for all of the clout in the world.
Gosh, what a write up.
But ok. Admins got uncomfortable and told the mods that if they disagree to just move elsewhere and that’s what’s happening.
eleitl does seem to one of the more frequent posters so I do get their cred but their responses leaves a lot to be desired and I’ll be interested to see how people move.
Because it wasn’t that necessary as of the moment. As the argument of population control is one I think not at all worth having for many of reasons, such as, you just can’t do much about it! And it will become reality easy enough if it becomes mandatory and that’s sad enough.
But I guess if we find ourselves truly not welcome here anymore than it seems we would just have to move with you guys.
As the argument of population control is one I think not at all worth having for many of reasons, such as, you just can’t do much about it!
I’ve often argued a similar line. This topic is notorious for bringing out bad-faith posters trying to shape the narrative. Sometimes it seems hardly worth discussing to me as well. Especially among redditors which is what I was used to for many years. But to not be able to discuss it at all is too much for me as a mod, especially when those who would take advantage of us discuss it freely.
And it will become reality easy enough if it becomes mandatory and that’s sad enough.
My concern is that there are still different ways that this can all go down, and that we aren’t charting towards handling the crisis in a wise and humane manner. We’re basically blindly following capitalists into the void. And acting “naively” (following systemic biases) is not moral or ethical in our position. People are already dying of exposure today, in our local communities and around the world. It is the most disadvantaged that suffers most and it will continue to be that way unless something is changed.
But I guess if we find ourselves truly not welcome here anymore than it seems we would just have to move with you guys.
Whatever works best for everyone involved.
We are not making anyone move. I and the rest of the mods but wabooti who is MIA for 8 months have already left. It’s a courtesy notice to the community. Whether wabooti will continue is up to him. I will just stay here long enough for the discussion, if any.
You can of course make your own collapse community (with blackjack and hookers) but perhaps pick an instance where the admins are not overshoot deniers. It seems though you don’t quite understand the significance of that “slap on the wrist”.
No because you didn’t explain it and just said “ew look at this” and it’s one mod log of you having a post removed.
We aren’t you and don’t know/have whatever your perspective is.
So, yeah swinging your hands and shouting follow me! Doesn’t do much if that’s all we got.
deleted by creator
The server returned this error: couldnt_find_community
Refresh the page, then it should show up
Strange. It works for me. Can anyone else reproduce the error?
Hexbear is not federated with lemm.ee for the time being. The relevant thread: https://hexbear.net/post/1712067
You probably aren’t federated with the server since you are on hexbear.
Lemmy is pretty complex.
I checked the modlog. I don’t see anything nefarious or overbearing.
Admins shouldn’t interfere with communities though. If something needs doing, the admins should talk to the moderators rather than take action themselves. It would save so much discontent.
Admins shouldn’t interfere with communities though
Yes they should, when the communities have content that is against instance rules
Admin Removed Post Overshoot: Cognitive obsolescence and the population conundrum [PDF] reason: promotes eugenics
which also got me a 3-day site wide ban for “promoting eugenics” which is no longer showing up since expired.
In general admins can of course remove users and communities for reasonable reasons, but editor decisions on communitity content (even those I don’t feel strong about) are strange.
We need to start distributing resources more effectively, not culling people. The majority of the human population consumes very little.
When people talk about overpopulation they always want to get rid of people other than the ones in their own home country, strangely. When the advocates for such policies are in first world nations that consume considerably more than the people they want to get rid of.
Let me ask you this: if you believe the earth has exceeded its carrying capacity, wouldn’t your conclusion be to start getting rid of people or halting their reproduction? That’s textbook eugenics…
Seriously. I don’t really enjoy people that decide the world is so fucked that the only option is to end specific populations.
The entire population of the planet could fit in a space similar in size to Rhode Island and be fed by a chunk of land as large as New York but math can be used to make all kinds of statements that are only useful in theory.
We have who we have and logistics need to be figured out for including them not shoveling them off to the pasture. However we can still educate people that quickly raising the population further is a dangerous game but population growth is happening in nations that aren’t taking the resources.
We need to start distributing resources more effectively, not culling people.
This is exactly what I argue and the removed study supports it as well.
Let me ask you this: if you believe the earth has exceeded its carrying capacity, wouldn’t your conclusion be to start getting rid of people or halting their reproduction? That’s textbook eugenics…
No. First you look at where the strains are. When you see that people with exceptional privilege in developed countries create disproportionate strain, and that the capitalists support the increased reproduction of that group - even without their consent. You would then seek to divert resources from the over-privileged group to reduce their disproportionate strain, and a proven way to reduce resource demands among them is to prioritize family planning measures and bodily autonomy in the hegemonic states. This reproductive care is, of course, only one piece of the puzzle that is deconstructing colonialism and emissions inequity.
The removed study gives a nod to this by acknowledging that otherwise viable solutions are not politically viable. The consequences of the politically viable (Business-As-Usual) solutions is at least as much of a humanitarian nightmare. And yet, the limits exist. What does this propose in between the lines? That politically nonviable solutions (such as degrowth in developed nations) need to be re-examined. That we’re between a rock and a hard place, and that the default trajectory does lead to ecofascist solutions.
Requesting a reduction of resource demands even if it means the lowered reproduction of the most privileged socioeconomic classes is no more eugenics than creating an inhospitable planet and accepting the consequential deaths of the billions of people who are not able to support themselves under such conditions. Plenty of studies demonstrate that humans are able to naturally adapt their reproductive rates based on their environments, and other studies show that this is happening right now in over-developed states where people manage to retain reproductive agency. What is disastrous for us as a collective whole is how capital circumvents our natural tendencies in order to augment industrial productivity and the retention of the control of power structures within a select ethnonationalist ingroup.
A different but related issue at present is that reproductive rates are driven through the roof by capitalists looking to exploit weakly organized labor, which is why birthrates are unnaturally high in developing nations exploited by foreign corporations. However, the reality is that the inflated populations in developing countries are still less destructive than the declining (not including immigration) populations of the developed nations. Which then brings us back to more equitable distribution of resources and the natural balance of reproductive adaptations that would follow.
This entire discussion is an essential facet of the conversation on historical materialism.
Billions must die
Billionaires*
Have you tried not being a eugenicist?
Its strange to me that so many people in here talking about eugenics when neither eleitl nor the paper posted had anything to do with eugenics. This place is a dimwitted mob of barely literates arguing with imaginary ideological enemies. actually i probably shouldn’t use the word “arguing” since that requires something like a chain of claims-reasoning-evidence etc…
Have you stopped beating your wife yet?
Yeah, i killed her because I thought her skull had a funny shape
I’m amazed at how many people can not imagine a world past capitalism. How stubborn must you be to push eugenics before revolution
I’m fine with the revolution, but it does very little when dealing with preventing the collapse from the overshoot of the carrying capacity of the global ecosystem. Read the fine paper, your attitude is in line with what it describes.
What if i told you the “carrying capacity of the global ecosystem” is very much not set in stone and it’s a very deliberate tactic to make it seem like it is?
I would agree. With Capitalist Realism as well. I’ve argued both many times.
Than maybe the problem is not too many people being alive.
Right.
So maybe sharing stuff that implies that it’s in any way a problem is indeed eugenics and is right to be deleted.
