JackCh
Joined 8 years ago
Karma
1,062
Submissions
397
Member since
Apr 8
Recent submissions
Comment · 8 years ago
The only genocide being proposed in this thread is the mass extermination of mosquitoes.
Comment · 8 years ago
Most people outside of Australia recognize that the Australian shark culls are dumb emotional reactions to a non-problem. Shark culls are an international embarrassment for Australia.
Comment · 8 years ago
It's easy to ignore the destruction of the environment if all you care about is optimizing for the human race at the expense of all other species.
Comment · 8 years ago
> "he advocates mass extinction of human beings"
Far from it, this is not even remotely a possibility. Mosquitoes are not threatening humanity with extinction in any conceivable way. As I stated elsewhere in this thread yesterday, if humanity were actually threatened by mosquitoes, I would support their eradication.
Comment · 8 years ago
Humanity is important but humanity is not currently being threatened. If humanity were actually being threatened I would support the eradication of any species threatening it.
Comment · 8 years ago
Waiting for economic factors to suppress the birth rate is the milquetoast approach I described earlier in this thread that is causing incredible environmental destruction. It's nothing more than an excuse to turn a blind eye to the problem.
Comment · 8 years ago
Asbestos is rock.
Comment · 8 years ago
I think a big part of it is a tendency of tech/engineering sorts to have an allergic reaction against any sort of tradition. Old fashioned is worse than uncool, it's dumb and outs you as an inferior mind to the engineering who is always rational and pragmatic and has no time for tradition.
In other words, it's a social disorder.
Comment · 8 years ago
There are plenty of communities in America that have professional fire departments. Particularly cities where there is actually a tax base to support it. You'll find volunteer fire departments in pretty much any working class town where the manpower is capable and willing but the money is lacking.
Comment · 8 years ago
A truck being small is not incompatible with a truck being a beautiful shade of red polished to a shine. Just look at Japanese firetrucks. They have some very small trucks that look great.
Comment · 8 years ago
Many sharks, plus bycatch, for no rational reason at all. Australian politicians vilify the animals and demand even more be killed. It's wholly irrational, as is your characterization of the sharks "menacing" the beach simply by living in their natural environment. Sharks aren't menacing the beach, the Australian government is menacing the sharks.
> "They're just sharks."
It is this sort of shitty attitude that will only become more prevalent when the eradication of animal species is further normalized.
Comment · 8 years ago
Those mosquitoes aren't invasive anywhere. Eradicating them means killing them wherever they're native as well, which is definitely what many people in this discussion are proposing.
Culling invasive species wherever they are invasive is something I support. But many people want to go a lot further than that.
Comment · 8 years ago
In early 2001 the Taliban banned the growth of poppies and opium export plummeted to near zero.
>The first American narcotics experts to go to Afghanistan under Taliban rule have concluded that the movement's ban on opium-poppy cultivation appears to have wiped out the world's largest crop in less than a year, officials said today. The American findings confirm earlier reports from the United Nations drug control program that Afghanistan, which supplied about three-quarters of the world's opium and most of the heroin reaching Europe, had ended poppy planting in one season.
>But the eradication of poppies has come at a terrible cost to farming families, and experts say it will not be known until the fall planting season begins whether the Taliban can continue to enforce it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/20/world/taliban-s-ban-on-po...
Later that year America invaded and poppy production soon exceeded historic numbers by a significant margin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanista...
Make of this what you will.
Comment · 8 years ago
As I've stated throughout this threat, it isn't just about mosquitoes. Honestly I would not mourn mosquitoes if every last species was exterminated. What concerns me is the social impact of further establishing humanity as the arbitrators of which species get to live and which deserve to be exterminated. It won't stop at mosquitoes; the extermination of mosquitoes will be used to justify even more exterminations in the future.
(Furthermore exterminating a species just so the human population can grow even faster will lead to an incredible amount of additional extinctions due to habitat loss. Humanity is growing fast enough already; we don't need to optimize for this any further.)
Comment · 8 years ago
Half of human deaths isn't very significant considering that despite that the human population is still exploding at an unsustainable rate that will cause incredible environmental destruction if left unchecked. Far from being threatened with extinction, our present course will cause the extinction of countless other forms of life.
And in response to that, you propose that we deliberately drive even more species to extinction for the purpose of making the problem even worse?
> "How many more human lives need to be lost before you think it's OK?"
If they were a threat to the survival of our species, I would sign off on it. Plainly they are not.
How many more species must be exterminated before you decide the planet is safe enough for humanity? When will the Disney Worldification of the planet be sufficient for you? Maybe Disney World levels of safety from wildlife aren't even sufficient for you? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2017/11/03/d...