On a recent trip to Mexico, I sat in the central square in Guanajuato watching a lively scene of children at play. Adorable as they were, I couldn't help but notice how many of them had pregnant mothers with two or more children already in tow. Scenes like this bring to mind the question of whether we have not only reached but already gone over a tipping point.Bzzzt! TIPPING POINT! Bzzzt! MEXICO. Dark-skinned Catholics.
As humans, we have evolved as social creatures, and have a need to belong. And to belong, we want to be seen as "normal," as society defines it. These needs are reflected in our reproductive choices. Over generations, social and cultural conditioning has so strongly influenced us to believe that the human species is wired to want children. Our social evolution has bred staunch reproductive conformity, which did serve society at one time, but at 7+ billion and counting no longer does.Bzzzt! SOCIAL CONSTRUCT JARGON! Got it backwards, Comrade. The need to reproduce is NOT culturally conditioned. It's automatic in every single living thing. What's culturally conditioned is the pathological desire to kill babies, developed extremely recently in a few extremely rich extremely secular countries. In these countries the birth rate is already way below replacement rates. Except for the religious and dark-skinned minorities, who have not picked up your genocidal message.
We have an obligation to leave future generations as healthy a planet as possible. And the most powerful thing we can do to this end is reduce our reproduction.Bzzzt! PLANET! What you mean WE, white woman? WE have already reduced our reproduction. Don't you really mean THEY? Dark-skinned tradition-following strongly-religious THEY? Of course you do. You're following in the bloody trail of Margaret Sanger, Margaret Mead, and Rachel Carson. What Comrade Carroll means is quite simple. She means I HATE PEOPLE!!!! AND I ESPECIALLY HATE DARKIES AND RELIGIOUS PEOPLE!!!!! KILL ALL PEOPLE!!!! KILL RELIGIOUS PEOPLE FIRST!!!!!! THEN KILL DARKIES!!!!!! THEN KILL EVERYONE WHO DISAGREES WITH MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!! THEN KILL EVERYONE EXCEPT MEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!! I WANT IT ALL!!!! I WANT IT ALL!!!! ALL MINE! ALL MINE! ALL MINE! ALL MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!! Or, taking out the infantile screechiness and reducing it to classic Darwin, she means "I want MY subspecies to be the only one occupying this niche." Aha! That's normal after all. There are two ways to dominate a niche: you can reproduce massively and crowd out the other types, or you can kill off the other types. Comrade Carroll's white rich Gaian subspecies has stopped reproducing; it has "personal journeyed" itself into stasis. So it must kill off the other types.
The current icon shows Polistra using a Personal Equation Machine.